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“Elena could completely transform her look. And it might be a way to arrive at the garden early so she’s not being tracked. The Mouassine Hammam has been women-only since the fifteen hundreds. A man wouldn’t be allowed to enter.” A smile slid across Red’s face, “And then there’s the wonderful experience of a hammam that isn’t about spa treatments but the opportunity to be in a comfortable women’s space. Hammams are part of a cool economic eco-structure.”
“How’s that?” Nomad asked.
“Morocco can be insanely hot, a hundred degrees, with no air conditioning available. Nobody wants to cook in their houses in the heat and make it unbearable, right? So, it all works symbiotically. It starts with the men who work a wood-burning oven.”
Nomad nodded.
“The oven heats the floors and walls of the hammam so people who are naked and wet while getting clean are warm and comfy.”
“I’m following.”
“A woman makes her bread dough for the day and prepares atangia—a tangia is an earthen vase-shaped cooking vessel—which she packs with beef, garlic, oil, and preserved lemons, and she takes the tangia and her dough to the oven guy. The man with the wood-burning oven bakes the bread. Then he rakes the ashes out and piles them around the tangia, where the beef slowly cooks all day. Fresh and clean from the hammam, the woman gets her bread and meat and goes home. Her house is cool, and the guy with the oven earns his pay in three ways.”
“And they’re getting cleaned at the bathhouse because their houses have limited running water like in your hotel in Lebanon?”
“Some have no water at all. In the Medina, they can get their water from the public fountain by filling jugs.”
“We have water at our place,” Nomad reassured her.
“Good to hear.” She leaned back to look into the side mirror, then turned back to Nomad.
“What’s it like to go to the hammam?” he asked.
“Men go, too.”
Nomad sent her a one-sided smile. “Yeah, I’ve heard my mom talking about it. I’m not letting someone scrub me like I’m a child.”
Red pulled her brows together. “Ego can’t handle it?”
“Nope, gotta draw the line somewhere.” He entered the crazy driving of a six-lane roundabout with bumper-to-bumper traffic trying to get to the street they wanted.
“Well, it’s one of my favorite experiences because it normalizes the human body.”
Nomad kept his eyes on the traffic flow. Morocco had a reputation for traffic accidents, and he thought they’d had enough of that the night of the ball. “Go on.”
“You remove your clothes and put them in the locker.”
“What will Elena do with her ring?”
“Good question. Probably keep it on. The married women wear their wedding rings. So you walk into the cleaning area naked, and an attendant takes you to her section of the floor where you lie down. These attendants are usually grandmotherly types with big bellies with their breasts draped over the top. They’re usually dressed in briefs, and that’s all. And just sobeautiful. When I’m there, and I look at these women with their lives etched into their faces with creases and wrinkles, I think someone should be painting them, capturing the glory of these women.”
“You lay on the ground?” Nomad was trying to picture this, and he was thinking about a car wash with vehicles parked in a row for the owners to vacuum them out. That couldn’t be right.
“Marble,” Red qualified. “Heated by the fire guy. It’s comfortable. The attendant rubs you with black soap. This sets for five minutes and loosens all the dead skin cells. Not to gross you out, but it’s pretty wild. They take a special mitt and scrub, and as they scrub, the skin comes off in rolls of white. And when you think that’s done, there’s more and more. I feel very snake-shedding-my-skin-like when I do this. They scrub until you are pink from the friction. The women are working hard, their breasts swinging like pendulums, as they rub up and down the woman’s limbs. A fabulously different cultural experience. Absolutely magnificent. One of my favorite things in this world is the public hammams. The care one receives is almost spiritual, you know? No, you don’t know. Well, I could take it or leave it in the spa hammams. I get clean. It’s just not the same experience. But that’s not the end of it.”
Nomad chuckled, charmed by her enthusiasm.
“Then they coat you with clay infused with herbs, and you sit in another room. The clay draws out impurities. After that, they rinse you off by throwing bowls of warm water onyou. And the funniest part is when the women stand with their heels together and do apliéso the attendant can swing the bowl, sending the water up to clean a lady’s nether regions.”
“Huh.”
“A surprising sensation, I grant you that. Yes, a hammam is one of life’s great good things.”
“Sounds like you want to go and hang out with Elena tomorrow,” Nomad said.
“You know, I just might. So that’s the end of it? These two women are going to the hammam in advance of the Secret Garden exchange?” Red reached up and scratched the nape of her neck. “Where’s the Parisian’s husband going to be? What else did they say?”
“I have nothing on the husband’s plans,” Nomad said. “And as to the other, nothing read as important. But you know how passing information goes. You hide it in the stories.” He exited the traffic circle. “Another ten minutes ‘til we get to the wall.”