Da Vinci revisted

Days of trekking in the valleys and passes of the High Atlas. And how best to deal with the sore muscles of our walk and the grime of our dusty, sweaty skin? Up the winding passageways of the Berber village where we are staying, squeezing past the crowded donkeys delivering varied supplies and taking up the width of the passageway, past the boys playing soccer with a plastic water bottle, step over the fresh piles of donkey shit from the recent traffic, past the three smirking teenage girls in the doorway with their long colorful robes and their shiny Samsung phones, into the choking haze of smoke from a wood-burning water heater and (cough) we are here - the village hammam.


The tired, mild-mannered ancient in the corner of the entranceway smiles sweetly, listens as our local guide explains our needs, and dispatches a nearby street urchin to fetch a woman. Avril shall go first. I wait outside - first finding a shit-free piece of roadway (the sweet, mild-mannered old man finds me a soft sack of something to sit on) until the wafting smoke of the hammam boilers drives me coughing to a nearby alley where I watch men mix and hand trowel concrete for a second floor of a house, then snuggle into some sacks of dry sand recently sifted in the river bed below the town, gaze at Mount Toubkal rising above me to 4200 meters, and doze off. A soft hand upon me. A soft voice. Avril has emerged, feeling radiant - it's my turn.


Hassan, our guide, has decided to have a hammam with me, so we enter, get handed an assortment of buckets, tubs and tars I don't understand, and go to the first room to get out of clothes and into our hammam suits (which in my case is the bathing suit I've been traveling with but have had no opportunity to use). Hassan fills buckets with hot water, sloshes down the inside floor, orders me to lie down on the tile, and pours the buckets of water over my front. Roll over! Buckets of hot water down my back and head. And then It enters - the sweet, mild mannered old man, stripped to the waist, teeth flashing and eyes ablaze, now transformed to the Madman of Moroccan Massage. Grabbing fistfuls of the strange tar he soaps me down and rubs every bit of exposed skin with this foaming abrasive of ground olive pits. Roll over! Now it's my kneecaps and forehead that are ground to foaming memory. Buckets of hot water hit me. Roll over. More buckets of hot water. Then the real exfoliation begins. Donning a mitt that the Moroccan Moors must have copied from memories of the torturers of the Inquisition, he proceeds to uncover the archaeology of my epidermis, not satisfied until he has unearthed enough detritus of the ages to lay bare the Avi Dolgin of 1988. Roll over. More buckets of hot water. I lie whimpering and gasping on the warm tile floor, unaware that the best is yet ahead.


He's upon me again, grasping at my neck and leg muscles with talons of steel. Maul. Haul. Each area falls prey to this medley of muscular madness. Then two heavy blows to the back! I think that's pillow talk for "roll over!" As I rotate my pulped cadaver on the tiles, I see Hassan watching in mirth. Or is it Berber schadenfreude? But no time for thought or evasive action. My right arm is being brought farther to my left side than I had thought possible. My leg is being verticalized beyond anything I've experienced. But I'm no fool - I've watched old World Wrestling Federation bouts on TV - and we soon evolve the vocabulary - two slaps on the floor with an available free hand means the limits of pain have been reached. Fortunately the Madman of Moroccan Massage is not evil - merely determined. Determined, I believe, to demonstrate that all of Da Vinci's anatomical drawings of human musculature and mobility fail in their lack of consideration of what the human body, in extremis, is actually capable of. Determined, I believe, to land himself a good job at Guantanamo or with ISIL. But these thoughts are cut short as he seats himself on my back, somehow wraps his legs around my arms and shoulders, grasps my chin in his cupped hands, and then proceeds to roll his entire body backward to my heels thereby peeling my pathetic body off the warm tiles and backward into a spiral that has both hammam water pipes and my previous life flashing in unison before my eyes.


Suddenly, another bucket of hot water splashes over me and he's gone! And there I am, face down on the warm tile, babbling miserably to myself, all the dirt and skin of 20 years gone - along with any courage and self-protective wisdom gained in the same time. Gone. All gone.


Gotta do this again.