Susan Buckland: Here's looking at you, Hassan

COMMENT


Hassan pounced the moment we stepped off the ship's gangplank on to the wharf at Casablanca. "Hassan at your service," he grinned through nicotine-stained teeth. "Casablanca big place, sometimes dangerous, my taxi for you at very, very good price."

His enthusiastic English shot out like a machine gun. Hassan didn't look like a taxi driver who would take rejection easily.

But my friends and I had our own action plan. A very, very good price to drive us to the edge of the city was all we wanted. From there we would wander off by ourselves to the kasbah, the Medina and the Hassan XI mosque with its gleaming dome.

Hassan the taxi driver raised and furrowed his eyebrows in furious succession. Foreign visitors could enter the mosque only at certain times of the day. He knew the times. At the kasbah we would pay too much in the shops if we didn't know the right ones to enter. As for the Medina, the Mafia stalked the old city. Pickpockets would take our money.

"Not safe alone," insisted Hassan. "My personal service is $20 less than bus tour. And much more I can show you." He held open the doors of his battered taxi. His confident grin had reached his ears.

A compromise was reached. For $30 less than the bus tour Hassan would drive to our chosen destinations and return at each appointed hour. Manly pride was momentarily dented but soon forgotten as he drove into Casablanca, pointing out landmarks in his rat-a-tat speech: the Jewish quarter and Place Mohammed V, the French-flavoured colonial and art deco architecture.

The deal that he would leave us to wander at leisure came unstuck at the kasbah. Fired with purpose he made a beeline for an Aladdin's cave brimming with shiny trinkets and arts and crafts. "The best prices here," he emphasised as he urged us in.

How to escape for an hour or two into the intriguing maze of alleys where houses and shops occupy what once would have been the fortified residence of a feudal lord?

And to escape without hurting Hassan's service-oriented feelings?

I slipped quietly into another Aladdin's cave. The vendor was a Berber. He was above paying kickbacks to taxi drivers, he explained with obvious pride.

We spoke of the actor Humphrey Bogart in his trench coat, collar upturned, hands in pockets, waiting under an arch for the one he was to meet in the kasbah. He implied that Bogart would have been just as dramatically cast inside the old Medina, where Casablanca's poorest go about their daily lives, threading their way through market stalls piled high with wares.

A man festooned with fake Rolex watches approached me outside the Medina. Inside, my friends and I kept an eye out for Mafiosi.

Two hours later, emerging reluctantly from the vitality of the old Medina, we reported back to Hassan. Nary a pocket was picked, or a threatening word heard. People seemed friendly in a shy way.

If he was surprised, Hassan didn't show it as he raced us off to the mighty mosque built for Hassan XI in 1993, and from that extraordinary edifice of marble and mosaics to the uppercrust area of town, where those who had made it lived in luxurious contrast to the far greater number who hadn't.

Then it was time to return to the gangplank of the MSC Lirica. On arrival a man approached the taxi shaking his fists angrily and pointing to his watch.

"My boss, said Hassan. "I'm late." Our trio leapt to his defence. "We will recommend Hassan to our friends back home."

A metamorphosis overtook fists, wrath and language. "I am so very, very 'appy when my distinguished visitors are 'appy," he oozed.

We tipped Hassan and climbed the gangplank, hoping he kept most of the fare. Hassan's boss seemed the closest we got to a Mafioso in Casablanca.