The Spider's House (44 page)

“There’s only one place for you to go, and that’s the Ville Nouvelle here in Fez. There are hotels.”

“Well,
that
I
refuse
to do. After all, the whole point of being here is to be where the natives are.”

He was about to tell her not to be childish, but he decided not to. “Then come with me,” he said, smiling and shrugging. “I’m going to be where natives are.”

“All right, damn it, I will!” she exclaimed. “And it had better be good.”

CHAPTER 27

Almost from the outset she found herself in a better humor. Perhaps it was the fact that upon leaving the city the bus had begun at once to climb, threading its way back and forth across the southern slope of Djebel Zalagh, and the air was growing increasingly fresher. Or perhaps it was purely emotional: the bus without glass in its windows, the excited chatter of the people in their mountain clothing, and the relief she felt that no policeman or soldier had prevented their departure at the last moment before the crazy old vehicle finally had moved out of the shabby side street in the Ville Nouvelle.

They had used her taxi only to transport their luggage to a sad little hotel where they had engaged one desperate room, piled it all in, and locked the door. The proprietress, sour-faced but not really unpleasant, had demanded to see their passports, and upon examining them had insisted Stenham pay her three days in advance.

The passengers were almost all country folk from the mountains to the south who had gone to Fez solely because the road passed through and they had to change buses there. They were beautiful people, clean and with radiant faces, and she wondered vaguely if it were possible that they had heard nothing about the disturbances. She would have asked Stenham his opinion if he had been sitting near enough to her, but although they were occupying the same bench, they were separated from each other by three women, he near the left end of the bench and she at the extreme right, beside the glassless window.

And Amar, mysterious youth, had brought along a friend—or, rather, an enemy, she would have sworn, judging from his expression when the other had accosted him on the sidewalk beside the bus. She had happened to be near the scene, and was
positive she had noticed a grimace of distaste or even some stronger emotion when Amar had turned to see who had tapped on his shoulder. Why then had he presently sought out Stenham and asked his permission to invite the newcomer to accompany them on the journey? She did not know, but she was not averse to his presence: he was well brought up, polite, a good deal cleaner than Amar (whose clothes were in a shocking state), and he spoke French fluently. The two boys had managed to get a small strip of seat together in the back of the bus; the last time she had looked around they had appeared to be conversing amiably.

The late afternoon light illumined the countryside. It was a characteristic of Moroccan mountain roads that they very seldom passed through a village; the villages could be seen, cowering against the flanks of distant side-hills, or standing like crest-feathers at the tops of cliffs, or spread out sparsely along the sinuous ridges of lesser mountains, always with a valley lying between the road and them. In spite of the heat the air was pungent with the scent of mountain plants, and its utter dryness, after the vapors of the ubiquitous river-waters of Fez, was a tonic in the nostrils. Whenever the bus passed through a wooded spot, the frantic shriek of the cicadas came in from both sides of the road. A curve, a bank of pink clay, the swaying and rattling of the chassis, the ceaseless sound of the heated motor laboring in second, a green-gray cactus at the edge of the abyss ahead, a curve, a hundred miles of granite mountaintops against the enamel sky, the explosive shifting of gears and the altered sound and speed that came after it, the sleepy sobbing of a baby somewhere behind her in the bus, a curve, a savage ravine below, with the twilight already welling up from its depths. And on a slope beside her, still glowing in the calm late sunlight, a grove of ancient olive trees, their great twisted trunks as if frozen in the attitudes of some forgotten ceremonial dance. She remembered what Stenham had told her before they had started out: that they would be going through a region where the cult of Pan was still alive, its rites still observed with flutes and drums and masks. She had neither believed nor disbelieved
it; at the time it had sounded merely like a rather improbable statistic. But now as she looked, it seemed for no good reason entirely credible. The wild land lent itself to such extravagances.

What she found astonishing about these people was the impression of cleanliness they gave her. It was not only their bodies and clothing that seemed clean (the interior of the bus smelled like laundry drying in the sun); it was as much the expressions on their faces, the aura of their collective spirit; they made her think of the purity of mountain streams, untouched regions. She determined not to discuss any of her reactions with Stenham, because he would make analytical remarks which, false or correct, would only end by infuriating her.

Yesterday afternoon in the café, for instance, he had said: “The intellect is the soul’s pimp.” She had not wanted to know what he meant, but of course he had gone on and explained that the intellect was constantly seducing the soul with knowledge, when all the soul needed was its own wisdom. The only way to enjoy this excursion, she decided, was to refuse to discuss anything at all with him, and not even to comment on what was before their eyes, save perhaps to exclaim now and then if an exclamation seemed in order. She knew that such a plan would prove at least partially unenforceable, but if she persevered, she thought, it was just conceivable that he might become aware of what she was doing and follow suit.

They stopped at a spring for water. The sudden lack of motion and the silence broken only by occasional murmurs (for most of the voyagers had long ago fallen asleep) made her feel faintly nauseated; she longed for the bus to start again. A few people wanted to get down, but the driver, who had stayed at the wheel while his assistant filled the radiator, objected. Stenham leaned forward, looked across the three white bundles who slept between him and her, said: “It’s a relief to be up here, isn’t it?”

“It’s marvelous!” she agreed, startled by the unnaturally heartfelt enthusiasm in her own voice. Her ears sang, and she was a little giddy from the altitude. But now she knew, as the door slammed shut and the comforting sound and motion resumed,
why
it was a relief. It was not only the pure air and the slowly increasing coolness; much more than those things it was being away from the vaguely sinister sense of expectancy and apprehension with which she had been living for the past two days. Those two days had been endless. The city had been there, right under her eyes the whole time, and she had been able to stand in her window and examine it roof by roof, but it might as well have been invisible, like a snake hidden in the bushes, waiting. At the moment she felt she never wanted to see Fez again. However, it was extremely important to keep
that
from Stenham: if he guessed how she felt he would make capital of it, taunt her with her inability to accept the physical concomitants of the social change she advocated. “Ah!” he would say triumphantly, “at last you’re beginning to understand what it means, this business of destroying faith.” And she would only become querulous and invent a series of bad-tempered rejoinders, instead of telling him simply that even though every detail of the transition were hateful to her, she would still wish it wholeheartedly because it meant life, whereas if the metamorphosis failed to take place, there were only decay and death ahead. So she would be very careful about it, and if she could not keep him from noting an added glint of health in her eyes which had not been there before (for he was observant), she would tell him that Fez had been damper than she had realized, because now upon having left it her sinus pains had completely vanished.

At first she dozed, as if exploring that first ledge of nonbeing; then she slipped and fell into the chasm of sleep. The early night came, blue and not dark under the clear sky. The bus had turned on to a side road and was navigating the edge of a precipice. Only the driver and his helper could appreciate the skill that was required to keep its shuddering old carcass upright, out of the ditch on the one side and yet at a safe number of inches from the brink on the other. Far ahead and below, Stenham caught sight of a pair of headlights rounding a curve, and he thought: There’s going to be trouble when that car gets here; one of us will have to back up. But the other car never arrived,
and he realized that it was moving ahead of them, another bus filled with pilgrims, very likely.

When they had come to the bottom of the descent they crossed a rushing stream, and set off in another direction over a plain. Here it was warmer, and they raised clouds of dust, some of which came up between the floorboards and set people to sneezing. Then once again they began to climb, this time on a trail which was so bad that several sleeping forms rolled off their seats. Lee had awakened and was holding on to the bench ahead for support. He caught her eye and grinned. She shook her head, but she did not look unhappy. The score or so of men traveling on the top of the bus began to pound violently on the metal roof. At first he thought that someone might have bounced off, but presently he heard them singing, and the banging resolved itself into a rhythm. The mad climb with its incredible jolting and swaying lasted for nearly an hour. Then what looked like a city of pink lights came into view ahead. A moment later the bus drew to a halt. The city was several thousand tentlike shelters improvised of sheets and blankets that had been stretched between the trunks of a vast olive grove covering the slopes of two hills, and against each square of cloth the flames that flickered inside threw shadows. That much they saw while they were still in their seats. In the confusion of getting down (for each passenger had innumerable bundles of food and cooking utensils, and there were loose babies and live fowls scattered about among the bundles) they forgot about it, and it was only an hour or so later, when they had climbed up out of the hollow where the trucks and buses were ranged, and sat, all four of them, on a log watching the moon rise, that Stenham commented on the strange aspect of the place.

“It’s wonderful,” she answered in a low voice, hoping to keep him from saying more. He appeared to have understood, for he began to talk to the two boys, leaving her to think her thoughts. Of course it was wonderful, with the shadows and the flames and the great circles of men, hundreds of them, dancing arm in arm, and the orchestras of drums like giant engines pulsing. But it was wonderful only as a spectacle, since it meant nothing.

That was what she must remember, she told herself, because she felt that the place represented an undefinable but very real danger. It meant nothing, never could mean anything, to Polly Burroughs. For that to happen, she would have to go back, back, she did not know how many thousands of years, but back far enough for it to denote some sort of truth. If she possessed any sort of religion at all, it consisted in remaining faithful to her convictions, and one of the basic beliefs upon which her life rested was the certainty that no one must ever go back. All living things were in process of evolution, a concept which to her meant but one thing: an unfolding, an endless journey from the undifferentiated toward the precise, from the simple toward the complex, and in the final analysis from the darkness toward the light. What she was looking down upon here tonight, the immense theatre full of human beings still unformed and unconscious, bathed in sweat, stamping and shrieking, falling into the dust and writhing and twitching and panting, all belonged unmistakably to the darkness, and therefore it had to be wholly outside her and she outside it. There could be no temporizing or mediation. It was down there, spread out before her, a segment of the original night, and she was up here observing it, actively conscious of who she was, and very intent on remaining that person, determined to let nothing occur that might cause her, even for an instant, to forget her identity.

As time passed, she could feel Stenham growing restless, but it had not occurred to her that he might be hungry until he suddenly rose and announced that he was going down to see what sort of food was on sale at the stands. “Anything special you want?” he asked her. She replied that she was not very hungry. “I’ll bring back something.
Nimchiou?
Shall we go?” he said, turning to Amar, who jumped to his feet.

When she and the other youth were alone, she asked him his name. “Mohammed,” he answered, flattered by her question, but particularly because she had said
vous
to him instead of
tu.
“And have you known Amar for a long time?” “
Oui
,” he said vaguely, as if the subject were of no possible interest. They were silent for a while. Then he asked her where her husband had
gone; she burst into laughter and immediately felt a wave of disapproval emanate from him. Bending toward him, she saw his stern young face in the moonlight; swiftly she grew very serious, and committed the even graver error of telling him that Stenham was just a friend. “A very old friend,” she added, hoping that this might in some way save her from worse opprobrium. Apparently it was not a mitigating circumstance in his eyes, for he merely grunted, and soon burst out indignantly: “You shouldn’t have come here with him if he’s not your husband. Where is your husband?”

“He’s dead,” she told him, not being sure of the Moslem attitude toward divorce.

“How long ago did he die?” he wanted to hear. Now she began to improvise wildly. He had been killed in the War, leaving her with three children. (She did know that they approved of a woman’s bearing as many children as possible.) This was not well received, either; he obviously thought she should be with them, and not consorting with a strange man. “This is a holy place, you know,” he informed her; his words were a reproach and a warning. “
Ah
, oui,
je sais
,” she agreed feebly.