The Spider's House (24 page)

While they ate the
bastela,
over which Mme Veyron continued to enthuse (and it was very good; the pastry was flaky and the little pieces of steamed pigeon-breast were perfectly cooked), Moss held forth upon the deviousness of the native mind, as illustrated by his previous anecdote. Then the question of wine arose. Moss wanted more rosé, but of a different brand; Kenzie thought some white would be better. “You don’t
drink
wine with
bastela
,” objected Stenham.

“What nonsense!” Moss snapped. He clapped his hands, and this time the waiter came running. “
Une bouteille de Targui rosé
,” he told him. “You’ll see,” he assured Mme Veyron. “It goes perfectly.” To Stenham he remarked: “You have a rather unpleasant puritanical strain.”

“Say puristic. I just can’t see wine with Arab food.”

“Really?” said Mme Veyron with the interest of one being told a fact not generally known. Moss ignored her.

“No, I say puritanical, because I mean that. I’ve observed you, my dear man, over a period of time, and I’ve come to the conclusion that you simply don’t want to see anyone enjoy himself. You don’t even like to see people eat well. You’re happiest when the food is tasteless and insufficient. I’ve watched you, my boy. Whenever we happen to get a really miserable little meal your spirits soar. Disgusting trait.”

“You’re so wrong,” Stenham said, attempting to give his voice the proper ring of sincerity. However, he was troubled. There was at least an element of truth in what Moss said, but it was not that simple; a reason came in between. It had to do with a sense of security. He could not feel at ease with gourmets and hedonists; they were a hostile species.

“Why
don’t
you ever drink?” Kenzie asked him gently.

“Because it makes me sick. Can you think of a better reason?”

“I don’t believe it,” Moss said flatly.

Stenham was annoyed with himself; he felt it was his fault that the conversation had taken this inquisitorial turn. It seemed to him that if he had been going to answer such a question at all, he should have taken a more belligerent and irrational tack, and not exposed himself this way in front of her. It was as though he had shown them his biceps and they had said: “You need the exercise.” For years people had been asking him this same question, and he considered it a private matter, one which could not possibly interest anyone but himself. “You don’t drink! Not even wine? Why not?”

“Don’t get me started on it,” he said, raising his voice slightly. “Let’s say that for me it’s what we Americans call a low-grade kick. You understand that?” He was looking only at Moss.

“Oh, quite! And may I ask what you consider a high-grade kick?”

“There are plenty of those,” he replied imperturbably.

His tone may have nettled Moss, for he pressed on. “Such as—?”

“You’re on the carpet, Mr. Stenham,” said Mme Veyron.

Stenham pushed away his plate; he had finished anyway, but he liked the dramatic gesture as an accompaniment to the words
he was going to say. A sudden gust of wind from the south swept through the garden, bringing with it the smell of the damp river valley below. A corner of the tablecloth flapped up and covered the serving dishes. Kenzie lifted it and dropped it back where it belonged.

“Such as keeping these very things private. After all, one’s thoughts belong to oneself. They haven’t yet invented a machine to make the human mind transparent.”

“We’re not discussing thoughts,” said Moss with exasperation. “You’re more English than the English, my dear John. I find it most difficult to understand you. You have all the worst faults of the English, and from what I can see, very few of the virtues we’ve been led to expect from Americans. Sometimes I feel you’re lying. I can’t believe you really are an American at all.”

Stenham looked at her. “Won’t you vouch for me?”

“Of course,” she said smiling, “but I’ll bet you’re from New England.”

“What do you mean,
but?
Of course I’m a New Englander. I’m American
and
a New Englander. Like a Frenchman I met once in a jungle town in Nicaragua. He had the only hotel there. ‘Are you French, monsieur?’ I asked him. And he answered: ‘
Monsieur, Je suis même Gascon
.’ I’m
even
a Gascon, and I like to keep the state of my finances private. And my politics and religion. They’re all high-grade kicks as far as I’m concerned. But only if they’re kept private.”

“The world’s not going in that direction,” said Moss dryly. “You should be flexible, and prepare for what’s coming.” He had finished peeling an orange and now, splitting it into sections, he began to eat it. “You’re preposterous,” he added, but without conviction, as if he were thinking of something which might or might not be connected with the conversation.

“I know just what Mr. Stenham means,” announced Mme Veyron, rising suddenly. “Excuse me a second. I’m going to my room for a minute. I’ll be right back. I don’t want to miss any of this.”

They stood up, holding their napkins in their hands. “It’s all over,” said Stenham meaningfully. “You won’t miss anything.”

Moss shook his head slowly back and forth. “I dislike to see anyone so ill equipped for the future. The difference between us, my boy, is that I believe in the future.” (That and God knows how many million dollars, thought Stenham.) “One of these days the future will be here, and you won’t be ready for it”

Mme Veyron returned to the table; she had put on a little white canvas hat with a crush brim. “I’m a little afraid of this sun,” she explained. “It’s awfully treacherous, and I’ve had some horrible experiences.”

“Sunburn can be pretty bad,” Stenham agreed.

“No, I can take any amount of it on my skin. But I get sunstroke so easily. It wasn’t so bad when I had Georges with me—my husband—but when I left him and began batting around alone, it wasn’t funny. It’s frightening to be all alone and have a fever and be delirious, and know there’s not a living soul within a thousand miles who gives a damn whether you live or die. And I nearly did die last year in Cyprus. The doctor I called in gave me aspirins, one after the other, and when they didn’t seem to have any effect he went off to consult an old woman, and I found out later she was the local witch.”

“But at least you came out of it all right,” Stenham said.

“It looks like it.” She smiled. “Anyway, her treatment was all done over her own fire in her own hut somewhere on the edge of town. I never even laid eyes on her.”

Kenzie was laughing, a little too enthusiastically, Stenham thought. “Priceless!” he exclaimed. An instant later he rose, saying to her: “Would you like to see the inside of the tea-house? It’s quite attractive. Order coffee, will you, Alain?” The two moved off, she stooping every few steps to examine a flower or a leaf.

Stenham arranged his chair so that he could lie far back in it, staring into the blue afternoon sky. “
Basteld’s
an indigestible dish,” he said heavily. The inevitable languor that followed on the heels of such a noonday meal was announcing itself. He was not sleepy, but he felt an utter disinclination to move or think. In his mind’s eye he began to see vignettes of distant parts of
the town: arched stone bridges over the foaming river, herons wading in shallow places among the reeds and cane, the little villages that the very poor had recently built at the bottoms of the ancient quarries—you could stand at the top and look down vertically upon their houses made in building-block patterns; the people were not so impoverished that their terraces could not be spread with orange and magenta rugs being aired, and women sat in tiny courtyards that were pools of shade, out of the venomous sun, thumping on their drums of clay. Now he saw the entrances to the vast caves in the further quarries, hidden by the wild fig trees that had grown up; inside the huge rooms and long corridors it was cool, and the greenish light came down through deep shafts, filtered by the vegetation that choked their openings. The silence of centuries was in here; no one ever entered but an occasional outlaw who did not fear the
djenoun
that inhabited such places. It was all these strange and lonely spots outside the walls, where the city-dwellers unanimously advised him not to walk, that he loved. Yet their beauty existed for him only to the degree that he was conscious of their outsideness, or that he could conjure up the sensation of compactness which the idea of the Medina gave him. It was the knowledge that the swarming city lay below, shut in by its high ramparts, which made wandering over the hills and along the edges of the cliffs so delectable. They are there, of it, he would think, and I am here, of nothing, free.

Soon Kenzie and Mme Veyron came out of the tea-house, chatting affably. The waiter appeared with coffee (although Stenham could not have told when Moss had ordered it), and the general conversation was resumed feebly, with isolated remarks and distraught if polite rejoinders. It was dying because everyone wanted nothing better than merely to sit in silence. But of course silence was unthinkable, and so they talked.

Interesting things would be happening in the not-too-distant future, Kenzie promised. Although Casablanca was the present theatre of activity, Fez was the fountainhead of resistance to French rule, and the government was nearly ready to crack down on the rebellious elements there. But it would be extremely
serious because it would mean mass arrests on a gigantic scale. The concentration camps were being enlarged at the moment, to have everything in readiness for the day. This was all being recounted for Mme Veyron’s benefit, but it was not eliciting the response which it should have; from time to time she said: “Oh,” or “I see,” or “My God!” and that was all. And Stenham thought sadly: “He enjoys all this. He wants to see trouble.” For Kenzie was making it very clear that he sided wholly with the Moroccans. Stenham, for his part, could find no such simple satisfaction. There was no possible way, he felt, of telling who was right, since logically both sides were wrong. The only people with whom he could sympathize were those who remained outside the struggle: the Berber peasants, who merely wanted to continue with the life to which they were accustomed, and whose opinion counted for nothing. They were doomed to suffer no matter who won the battle for power, since power in the last analysis meant disposal of the fruits of their labor. He could not listen to Kenzie’s excited recounting of arms discoveries by the police in the homes of wealthy citizens of the Medina, or of what the followers of Si Mohammed Sefrioui were rumored to be plotting in some stinking cell of the Medersa Sahrij at that very moment, because it was all of no importance. The great medieval city had been taken by force and strategy innumerable times; it would be taken again some day, the difference being, he feared, that on that day it would cease for all time being what it was. A few bombs would transform its delicate hand-molded walls into piles of white dust; it would no longer be the enchanted labyrinth sheltered from time, where as he wandered mindlessly, what his eyes saw told him that he had at last found the way back. When this city fell, the past would be finished. The thousand-year gap would be bridged in a split second, as the first bomb thundered; from that instant until the later date when the transformed metropolis lay shining with its boulevards and garages, everything would have happened mechanically. The suffering, the defeat or victory, the years of reconstruction—none of it would have had any meaning, it would have come about all by itself, and on
a certain day someone would realize for the first time that the ancient city had been dead since the moment the first bomb had gone off.

Moreover, no one would care. Perhaps one could say it was already dead in one sense, for most of those who lived in it, (and certainly the younger ones without exception) hated it, and desired nothing more than to tear it down and build something more in accordance with what they considered present-day needs. It looked too impossibly different from any city they had ever seen in the cinema, it was more exaggeratedly ancient and decrepit than the other towns of Morocco. They were ashamed of its alleys and tunnels and mud and straw, they complained of the damp, the dirt and the disease. They wanted to blast the walls that closed it in, and run wide avenues out through the olive groves that surrounded it, and along the avenues they wanted to run bus lines and build huge apartment houses. Fortunately the French, having declared the entire city a
monument historique
, had made their aims temporarily unattainable. The plans for every new construction had to be submitted to the Beaux Arts; if there was any departure from the traditional style it could not be built.

“One thing you must give the French credit for,” he was fond of saying, “is that they’ve at least managed to preserve Fez intact.”

But often he felt there was a possibility that this was true only architecturally, that the life and joy had gone out of the place a long time ago, that it was a city hopelessly sick.

Suddenly Mme Veyron stood up. “I’m sorry, gentlemen,” she said, stifling a yawn. “This has been very nice, but I’m simply overcome with sleep. I’ve got to lie down and have a little siesta.”

Kenzie was disappointed. “I’d hoped to take you to the gardens later,” he said. They were strolling toward the gate.

“Why don’t you give me a ring about five-thirty from your hotel? Would there still be time?”

“It would be a good deal quicker if I called by here for you then.”

She assumed an expression of dubiousness, but not before Stenham had caught a flash of resentment in her eyes.

“Well,” she said slowly, “you may have to wait awhile for me to get myself ready.”

He would do some waiting, too, thought Stenham; she’d see to that. Then he decided to try his hand. “Why don’t you all have tea tomorrow with me? We can go to some out-of-the-way little café.”

They had climbed the steps and were standing in front of the entrance door. Kenzie stood to one side with the waiter, paying the check.

“I think it would be wonderful. Let’s,” she said.

CHAPTER 17