The Spider's House (20 page)

Now he stood here awhile, listening and looking at the men around him. They were ordinary people: small shopkeepers, artisans and their apprentices, all of them carried away by the excitement of the moment. The students marching in the Talâa were carrying portraits of the former Sultan; they were bound to meet the police when they got to Bou Jeloud, if not before, and there would be a fight. But that was what they wanted. They were unarmed, and they knew the French would attack. Each one secretly hoped to become a martyr; it would be almost as glorious as death on the battlefield. Amar wanted to see their faces and admire them, but being shut off from them he could feel only an abstract sympathy which was easily replaced by impatience. Soon he fought his way out of the crowd and returned the way
lie had come. It was possible that further up the hill he could double back to the Talâa above the head of the procession and catch it there. But each alley he chose was equally crowded, and he had to keep turning around and continuing upward on the parallel thoroughfare. When he got to Ed Douh he took a way that not everyone knew about, going down a flight of steps, across a public latrine, and out the other side, along a passage so narrow that if two people were to meet each other, one had to stand flat against the wall while the other squeezed through. The sun was very strong now, and the mud had dried almost completely. Down in here the stench was terrible; he hurried along, trying to breathe as seldom as possible until he arrived at the Talâa a little below the house of Si Ahmed Kabbaj. The cortege had not yet arrived, no police were in sight, and people were lined up along the sides of the thoroughfare or dashing excitedly from one side to the other. Amar knew where he wanted to go: it was a café one flight up, above a grocery store, a little way inside the Bou Jeloud gate.

The place was full, everyone was talking very loud, and there was not a single place to sit. Disappointed, he resigned himself to staying in the back room. If something happened outside, he could always run through and watch from one of the windows.

Even in the inner room there was not much choice in the way of places to sit. He found a table in the corner furthest from the main room; two men were already seated there playing dominoes, probably because all the cards and chess sets were in use, but there was space on the bench for another. When the boy came by, Amar ordered half a bread and a salad of tomatoes and turnips.

The conversation around the café, although it never touched on the situation of the day, was louder and more animated than it would have been normally. A sizable group of men stood at each window that gave on the street, merely waiting. When Amar’s food came, he murmured “
Bismil’lah
” and ate it ravenously, sopping up the almost liquid salad with small pieces of bread. Then he sat awhile quietly, prey to a growing impatience; it spread from his chest upward and downward, so that
he drummed with his fingers on the bench and the table, and jiggled his feet. The domino players looked up from their game now and then, and stared at him, saying nothing. Even if they had spoken he would not have minded. The day was important and glorious; he felt that much with a conviction which increased every moment. Whether it presaged joy or misery was unimportant; it was different from all other days, and by virtue of that fact alone, it deserved to be lived differently.

Then suddenly he made an important decision: to leave here and have tea at the Café Berkane, which was just outside the walls, beyond the bus stop. Benani had warned him to stay inside the walls today, but after all, Benani was not his father. He called the boy, complained about the food, refused to pay, then did pay, joked awhile with the proprietor, and left smiling. It was excessively hot in the open square, and there was still no sign of the demonstration. Slowly he walked up to the big gate and passed under its main arch, out into the world of motors and exhaust fumes. He had never seen so many policemen; they were lined up all around the outer square, against the walls, along the waiting room for the buses, in front of the Pharmacie de la Victoire, and as far up the road as he could see—many more than there had been the year the Sultan had come on a visit. This was very fine, and he was delighted that he had taken the courageous step of coming outside the Medina. They were all enemies, of course—he did not lose sight of that fact—but they looked admirably impressive in their uniforms, massed this way around the periphery of the square, and they had various models of guns with them which he had not seen before. It was decidedly worth seeing.

The Café Berkane, a fairly new establishment, had made use of a long, narrow strip of land between the ramparts of the Casbah Bou Jeloud and one of the branches of the river. The entrance to the building was reached by going across a small wooden footbridge, but there were generally tables on the outer side of the stream as well, scattered here and there under the delicate vertical fronds of the pepper trees. Today, however, the tables had not been put out, and the space usually given
over to them was empty save for a few policemen who had been stationed there out of the glare, glad to be even in the thin, powdery shade that was half sunlight. Amar expected them to stop him as he approached the little bridge and perhaps search him again, or forbid him to enter, as if he were crossing a frontier, but they seemed not even to notice him.

The interior here, in contrast to the place he had just left, was almost deserted, and the few clients who occupied tables, if they spoke at all, conversed quietly, almost in whispers. This was most unusual; Amar quickly decided it was because they realized that they were outside the walls, and consequently felt less sure of themselves with regard to what this strange day might bring forth. Then, of course, there was the fact that those who sat near the windows and door had a clear and sobering view of the policemen standing out there in the sun. There were several rooms in the Café Berkane, all but one of which had windows on the front, directly over the water; if you spat or dropped a cigarette butt out, it landed in the river and was rapidly rushed downstream. The other room, a small afterthought tacked on to the back of the building, had an entirely different atmosphere: instead of facing north it faced south and east, and its view consisted of a section of the massive rampart walls and a square basin of still water—nothing more. The water in the pool was not deep—perhaps a meter—nor was it stagnant, since it was connected with the stream by a channel which went under the café. The owner had meant to plant bamboo and iris around its edge and to have water lilies floating on its surface; it had seemed such an excellent idea at the time he had built the café that he had been willing to spend the money for the cement to make the basin. Once he had opened the establishment, however, he had forgotten his original intention, and now the edges of the pool were ragged with masses of dying weeds, encouraged by the proximity of water but weighted down with the constantly descending dust from the nearby square. The small back room was the one Amar preferred, because it was the quietest, and the still water seemed to him more desirable and rare than the moving stream: in Fez rushing water was no novelty.

He knew just which table he wanted. It was behind the door, beside the window, all by itself. Often when he was not working he had come here and sat an entire afternoon, lulled by the din and music from the other rooms into a stage of vague ecstasy, while he contemplated the small sheet of water outside the window. It was that happy frame of mind into which his people could project themselves so easily—the mere absence of immediate unpleasant preoccupation could start it off, and a landscape which included the sea, a river, a fountain, or anything that occupied the eye without engaging the mind, was of use in sustaining it. It was the world behind the world, where reflection precludes the necessity for action, and the calm which all things seek in death appears briefly in the guise of contentment, the spirit at last persuaded that the still waters of perfection are reachable. The details of market life and the personal financial considerations that shoot like rockets across the dark heavens of this inner cosmos serve merely to give it scale and to emphasize its vastness, in no wise troubling its supreme tranquillity.

He passed through the first two rooms of the café, and into the small back one, where he was relieved to see that the table he wanted was unoccupied. In fact, there was no one in the room at all, which made him decide that he would stay only long enough to drink one tea, and then move to a more populous spot in another room. This was a small ceremony that he was inventing, for his feeling about the day demanded the observance of some sort of ritual. When he paid for the tea, he would change the twenty-rial piece he had found that morning in the street. It would be a most acceptable way in the eye of Allah, he thought, to use the money.

Today, without the customary hubbub, and without the usual unceasing noise of the radio (for the electricity had not yet been turned back on), the room in the rear seemed less a refuge than a small dungeon. He could hear the chugging sound of the buses’ idling motors out in the square. He ordered his tea. While he was waiting, a boy came through the café carrying a huge tray of pastries, and stuck his head in the door. For some reason, perhaps because the boy looked vaguely like the friend who had
ridden past that day on his bicycle and given him a ride, or perhaps because a man had just walked through the outer room whom he had often seen in cafés selling small amounts of kif clandestinely, Amar found himself thinking of the day he had determined to run away. Each time he reviewed that incident in his mind, he was conscious of a still active desire to avenge himself. At the same time he knew that he would never lift a finger against Mustapha, any more than Mustapha himself had done against him. It had to be done some other way. Allah had decreed that Mustapha should be born first. Therefore it was Mustapha’s duty vis-à-vis his brother to compensate for that superiority with extra kindnesses. Mustapha had never understood that; on the contrary, he had used his position tyrannically, always to extort further offerings. Injustice could be redeemed only by successful retaliation. He stood up and peered around the doorway into the next room: the kif seller was talking in a corner by the window. The man had to be extremely careful in establishing the identity of his customers, or he could fall into the hands of an agent for the police. It was well known that the French had suppressed the sale of kif in the hope of getting the Moslems into the habit of drinking spirits; the revenue for the government would be enormous. The fact that the religion of the Moslems expressly forbade alcohol was naturally of no interest to them: they always befriended those who broke the laws of Islam and punished those who followed them.

At this moment something strange happened: a man and a woman, both Nazarenes, came across the footbridge and went into the first room. An instant later they appeared in the second room, staring about shamelessly for a table at which to sit. For a moment they seemed to have found one that pleased them, then the woman said something and the man walked over to the doorway where Amar stood and peered inside the small room. It was when he looked out the window and saw the pool that he seemed to be deciding to install the woman in the inner room. Amar sat down quickly at his table, for fear they might choose that one to sit at. The
qaouaji
arrived with his tea. As he was leaving, the man called to him in Arabic, and ordered two teas
and two
cabrhozels
. Now Amar looked closely at the man, decided he was not French, and felt the wave of hatred that had been on its way recede, leaving a residue of disappointment and indifference tinged with curiosity. When after a moment he realized that the man and the woman were both aware of his scrutiny, he turned quickly away and stared out at the pool, sipping his tea slowly. A little later he looked back at them. They were talking together in low voices and smiling at each other. The woman was obviously a prostitute of the lowest order, because her arms and shoulders were completely uncovered, and the dress she wore had been cut shockingly low in the neck. As if to confirm Amar’s verdict, she presently took from her handbag a small case containing cigarettes, and put one in her mouth, waiting for the man to light it for her. Amar was astounded at her brazenness. Even the French women in the Ville Nouvelle did not go to quite such extremes in their lewd dress and behavior. And even the most disreputable prostitute would have taken the care to keep herself from being so badly burned by the sun. This woman had obviously come from working in the fields: she was completely brown from having been out in the open for a very long time. Yet here she was, wearing gold bracelets. His intuition now told him that he had made a mistake in his evaluation of her. She was probably not from the fields at all, but had had some misfortune which had obliged her to walk for many days in the sun’s glare, and now she was ashamed, and wanted to hide herself from the crowd until she should be white again, which was why she had sought out the empty back room in which to sit. If this were the case, she would not be pleased to catch him staring at her. He sipped his tea assiduously and looked out the window. Soon he rose again and glanced through the doorway into the corner where the kif seller had been. The man had sat down, evidently on the invitation of a client, and was having a glass of tea. Amar walked over and spoke to him. The man nodded, handed him a little paper packet. Amar paid him, returned to his seat, and resumed his surreptitious examination of the two tourists. (Not being French, they fell perforce into that category.) What peculiar people they were.
he reflected; the most foreign of all the foreigners he had seen. Their clothing was unusual, their faces were different, they laughed almost constantly, yet they did not seem to be drunk, and the most unaccountable detail to Amar was the fact that although, judging by all the small external signs by which one can judge such things, these two were interested in each other, the man never once seized even the woman’s hand, never leaned toward her to touch her or smell her, nor did she, in spite of her otherwise lax conduct, once lower her eyes, find it impossible to meet his gaze. She merely sat there, as though she were unconscious of the difference in their sex. At the same time Amar divined an intensity in the air, as it were, between the two, a factor that for him weighed more heavily than their outward demeanor, which, after all, could have been entirely simulated. He had watched a good many French couples together, and while their definition of accepted public deportment included certain excesses which were unthinkable with Moslems, the two over-all patterns did not differ radically; French behavior contained no glaring disparities. But he found this couple basically incomprehensible.