The Fortune Teller
Marrakesh, Morocco 1997 In the Jemaa El Fnaa
Swarms of people fill the square of Jemaa El Fnaa, unless it is siesta time or prayer time on Fridays. Snake charmers sit in groups banging their drums and poking at their snakes to make them get up on their haunches, if snakes actually have haunches. Dentists, with pliers at the ready, sit proudly by a mountain of yellowed teeth that they have snatched from the jaws of the unfortunate. Medicine men display dead animals and potions made from who knows what: a civilized form of voodoo. And the fortune tellers have their books of numbers that they examine while they mumble an incantation.
A friend of mine and I had our fortunes told by a ‘holy man’ in a small village in the desert. She was keen on fortune telling. Not me, but I was eager to go as long as I could bring my camera. We were taken to a small room above the souk of Rissani where the holy man and his familiar lived. Well, he wasn’t really a familiar, he was an old man. But the word ‘works’ and I just remembered it.
We sat on the floor in front of the holy man who dug into his stack of books for the one that applied to women past their prime. It was yellowed, thin and tattered (appropriate except for the ‘thin’ part). He flipped the pages back and forth, scratching down numbers in a distracted way while muttering to himself. Finally he looked up and began to reveal what he had discovered. I don’t remember mine. For me it was mumbo-jumbo and I’d lost interest after I was told that no photos were allowed. My friend listened politely and did her best to glean some meaning from his pronouncements. When our guide asked us what we thought, I was not very nice. I said it was hokum, but my friend said it was worth while, that the man had given her some good insight. Needless to say, I was not the guide’s favorite after that.
Moroccans believe in potions and spells. Our guide’s business had fallen on hard times and he had consulted this same ‘holy man’. He was told that a woman had cast a spell on him, paid to do so by a competitor who was jealous of his success. I tried to point out that it was the economy and he just needed to keep doing his best. I had a hard time getting him to halfway believe me. It’s always easier to think our failures are someone else’s fault.