Here's a Mariete story. This was a few months after she arrived at the university.   One afternoon we went off to Moulay Yaacoub.  Mariete wanted to visit the mineral baths but by the time we arrived the upper pool had closed.  The lower pool is for men only.  I had no interest in going alone.  The pool is filthy and foul smelling. You want to talk about the ‘culture of despair' in this country?  Go see the grimace on that sour little ticket-taker, a wall-eyed face hanging above a blue table.  Pay the 15 dihrams and wind your way down the slippery dank passageway.  Look at the figures in the shadows, smell the stench of rot and sulphur, and something else, something old and putrid.  Fear is what that is and below that more fear and below that, doubt.  That's the real geology in this country.   The place runs on phosphates and fear.

And so you wonder, why would anyone come here to live?  What kind of person would find this nurturing? I'll tell you what kind:  somebody longing to be kissed, if only on the cheeks by complete strangers, and even if you can smell the distrust on those lips. Or else somebody fascinated by sallow-colored cites, the excited old eyes of Goums, a few Koranic mantras and that quaint and heroic gesture of goodwill, the hand over heart. 

Mariete was addicted to all that, she loved the despair, but what she needed most was a safe place to ply her dramas, and of course, a disposable male companion willing to sing an opera for his supper. A slender gaunt man would do, with no hair in the ears, no blue veins on the nose please, someone who could drink the Absolut straight without a lippy snarl, a gentleman with lemon scented cologne and blue blazer who could cross his legs in the Sofitel bar, presenting an expensive English shoe, and make up stories about himself or people at the next table and otherwise convey the safety and pleasure of the past.

Anyway, down through the dank and the dark and then you come to the pool, which has a glass roof like a greenhouse. It's filled with the white light you'd get from a Victorian palette.  How romantic you think, how optimistic.

But then look at what's going on: steam pouring off the water; amputees and cripples hopping around like frogs; old men without their jalabas, thin as clothing pins, arms spread, hanging between their sons like the crucified just taken down.  Everyone is yelling as they wander around in the piss-yellow water.  Along the pool's edge voyeurs laugh and sneer, particularly if you look Western.  I'm told they spy for the local imam. 

It's the hell realms at noon.  Not to mention those craven-eyed young men with their slim hips, swaying through the water like electric eels, glancing down to see what you have under the surface, examining you with agony and desperation.  Look at the eyes of Delacroix's horses and you'll know what I mean.  

Mariete loved to hear about the men's pool — the women's pool is nothing like it.  “Tell me more,” she was always saying.  “What do they look like? What were they doing in the shadows? ”

What people do in the shadows, I would tell her. But this time I wasn't up to being a raconteur of the underworld so we continued on down the steep steps through the center of town to a café where you sit on the terrace under a pine tree and watch people below in the gorge. They're all the health disturbed, crossing the bridge to the Thermal Hospital.

“We could go there,” I said.

Mariete leaned back, closed her eyes and opened her mouth as though waiting to be kissed.   A young woman, sitting at the next table, her face tightly bound in a scarf, glanced at Mariete and turned away. 

“We could,” said Mariete. “But remember you need to reserve ahead. Anyway, you have to get back, no?”

In the August trickle running through the gorge Berber women washed their clothes.  Directly across from us, two hundred yards away, on the other side of the gorge, a donkey collapsed on the trail. Some boys got it up and going again.

“We need more healing,” I said.

I was thinking of the time she and I went for a massage by that iron-fingered woman from Senegal.  She took us to this little room, all spic and span, with the buckets of hot and cold water, the sponges, the black soap.  The two of us lay side by side, naked — I'd never seen Mariete like that — and here's this Senegalese woman with a man's hands, knowing just how to reach into your body and pull you out like a snake from its skin.

“Yes, more healing,” Mariete said and glanced over her shoulder at the young woman in the scarf.  She always assumed people were listening to her conversations.

 “Have I told you about the psychic healer I went to in Montreal?” she went on. “Now she was the real thing. ”

Mariete's lifelong search was for healers and mystics. She suffers acute aches and rheumatisms.  All her joints are raw, her back is out of line, her extremities are cold.  She's tried every regimen— once she went on a six-week wine and cheese diet in Poland.  “My body is my prison,” she would say.

“No, you didn't tell me,” I replied and she was off and running. 

What Mariete wants, wanted above all was to tell you her stories:  how she was born in a prisoner of war camp after the war, the daughter of a Nazi functionary in Latvia; how the family moved to a Boston suburb; how she lived in poverty; how her mother suffered from undiagnosed mental illnesses; how her older sister suffered from extreme beauty.  How her old brother committed suicide; how she herself fell through the world until finally she hit San Francisco in one of those summers of love, met a guy, married, had a couple of kids —smart kids, she was always quick to name their universities. 

Smart kids, city houses and country houses, a decade in France growing grapes.  Her husband worked for one of the big investment banks, but even a villa in Dordogne couldn't lure him away from the promise of a new merger.  Eventually, she fled but not quite to the point of divorce. 

Every few months her husband would appear.  I met him once briefly.  He was much different than she described, less serious than I had imagined but I came away thinking he really loved her.  She didn't return it. Sometimes I wondered if she didn't just string him along for what he could give her, which included a Mercedes roadster.  Imagine that in the Middle Atlas Mountains. How absurd she looked parked at the souk with the top down, in between trucks without hoods, busses without doors, holding her little plastic bags of vegetables and chicken parts.   But by then, toward the end of the second year, she was angry and resentful, she could have cared less what anyone thought.

But this is her cycle:  she finds herself alone and inevitably feels betrayed.  But the betrayal is never clear and never resolved.  Then one day she disappears.

If she was uneven she was also endearing, and she had a loyal little following.  When she liked you she was your crowd and confetti.  She would loan you money,  arrange your birthday party.  She owned an apartment in Paris and once sent my wife to it, all expenses paid.  But when she didn't like you, even for the slightest reason, or if she sensed a betrayal coming, she'd pick up the dislike in her tweaser-like fingers and magnify it to the grotesque.  You never wanted to be at the other end of that tongue or that knifey, condescending smile.

She lived in a one-bedroom apartment with a perfect view of the volcano.  And that's how I'll always remember her, sitting on her straw love seat, below the kitschy mirror she bought in Midelt, across from the dim watercolors she found in Valencia; surrounded by her books, including the textbooks she used to teach Ricardo's theory of Comparative Advantage.  (England and Portugal both produce wine and wool but it's to the comparative advantage of both if England specializes in wool and Portugal, wine).  Mariete loved Ricardo's mathematical proof and always found something new to say about it.   There she'd be in the late afternoon, with her third glass of Medaillon cabernet and over her shoulder the sun pouring into the volcano.

She was nearly 60 when I knew her but if you're imagining a leather-skinned matron with a dour expression and a double roll of tummy, that wasn't her.  No, Mariete was trim, tall and fit, you'd have  thought she was 40.  Blonde, wide blue eyes; mischievous, little boy lips. 

She was also obsessed with body language and would analyze people by the way they moved or sat.  Which was interesting because one night, leaning against a huge pillow on her love seat, her legs open as though she were mounting a horse, she began telling me about her dulce vita nights in Florence and the time she did eight men altogether.  

What was that like, I asked. 

She ran her hand through her hair and picked lint off her knee. “I met these two men in the hotel bar and they invited me back to their apartment, and suddenly there were all these other men.  Friends, I suppose.  They were very funny and we were laughing and then they started undressing me, and tickling me at the same time, and finally I just let them.”

She sipped her wine and looked away.  “It was wonderful, it was….” 

This was a story from her permanent collection told on condition you reply with some equally intimate story.  I did.  Another story from the permanent collection was about the time she woke up in the hospital after childbirth, all alone, her baby pink less and dead. Get it out of here was all she could think.

Then there was the lover she met while teaching in Dakar. He hoped she would get him out of the country.  Then one night she got tired of the job or him or both and in the middle of the term, literally in the middle of the night, she packed her suitcase and left  the country.  She didn't care about the money.

She liked to draw men to her, get them to pursue her, tantalize and tease, get them stiff and then at the last moment, she would pull away.   Or else she would idealize men, make them into her ‘new best friend', and claim them.  But eventually they drifted away, or they wouldn't respond to her intensity and she would feel betrayed. 

“No one is  loyal,” she would say.

But one story she told was the headwaters for all the others.  It was about an affair she had with her uncle when she was 17.  He lived in a wealthy section of Riga.  The affair lasted ten years.  She insisted the sex was not particularly enjoyable; nevertheless, he dominated her with his imagination as well as his lust.  She described it all great detail, what he did and how and the room itself — a high ornate ceiling, long blood red drapes, elaborate iron bars at the windows.  On his desk stood a little bust of Stalin, and on the walls, life sized crucifies from all the churches he'd turned into government offices or rubble.

Her uncle also hated Jews and would goose step around his bedroom saying how you couldn't burn enough of them.  Meanwhile, Mariete lay under the bearskins waiting.  In awe and fear.  Then he would stop, lay her out on pillows, spread her legs and eat her like a man starved years ago and has been making up for it ever since.

He was, she said,  ‘overripe' — from the swelling head of his cock to his obsession with women and the dainty powers of his office.  Once, he tried to seduce Mariete's sister, the beautiful one.  She was getting out of a car one day and he said to her, “You are so beautiful, I should make love to you.” He wasn't kidding.

When Mariete heard that she went insane and told her aunt what a lecher her husband was, how he'd had all these women.  She named names but of course she didn't mention herself.

The sky was gray matte; a vague heat lingered in the air. The waiter brought another pot of mint tea.  It was too late to go to the thermal hospital and it was a long drive back to the university.  I was ready to go but Mariete had to finish the story about the faith healer.

“She told me amazing things about myself, about meeting my husband and my mother's death, all these things she couldn't have known.   The next day I came back and she wanted to pray over me, but she said that first I had to confess all my sins.  ‘What's rheumatism got to do with my sins?' I said.  Right? ‘Anyway, I'm a good person, I haven't committed any sins.'  And I hadn't. ‘Well, I can't do anything then,' said the healer.  ‘But I haven't done anything,' I said.  ‘I don't have anything to apologize for.'  ‘Oh,' she said, you know in this very melodramatic voice, ‘then you will burn in hell.'”

“ ‘You'll burn in hell,' ” Mariete repeated, mocking the deep voice of the healer.  She sniffed her tea, mint hanging like a bat's nest in her glass.   “I'm not a bad person,” she said definitively, but then looked at me, brow furrowing, lips waiting to be kissed.   “You don't think I am, do you?”