The Spider's House (49 page)

In the mouth of any but the most profound man the words: “All men are created equal” were an abomination, a clear invitation to destroy the hierarchies of Nature. But even his
closest friends, when he suggested this to them as one of the reasons why the world became worse each successive year, smiled and said: “You know, John, you should be careful. One of these days you’re going to grow into a real crank.” The lie had been too firmly planted in their minds for them to be able to question it. Besides, he had no compulsion to save the world, he told himself, lying back to see only the sky. He merely wanted to save himself. That was more than enough work for one lifetime.

The morning wind had come up from the east behind him; it carried off the faint thumps of the drums down there, so that he heard only the light whistling sound it made in the thorn bushes as it passed. He fell gradually into a mindless reverie, a vegetative state in which the balance between the heat of the sun and the cool of the wind on his skin became his entire consciousness. His last clear thought was that there would be many more mornings somewhere on the earth for him to lie thus, spread out under the sky, considering these meaningless problems.

CHAPTER 29

For a long time Polly Burroughs had been banging along the rough roadbed of her dreams, vaguely aware that something was wrong, but without the power to know that she was only desperately uncomfortable, her body twisted there in one tortured position after another, all of them dictated by the bumpy contours of the matting beneath her. And little by little, painfully, through a world of dust and Arabic words, her mind began to climb up from the place where it lay. Eventually a loud burst of laughter from the
qaouaji’s
corner roused her, and she sat up suddenly, feeling as though every muscle in her body were
about to snap in two. A few boys looked at her with curiosity; she refrained from stretching, which was what she desired more than anything. Foregoing that voluptuous pleasure made her sorry for herself; it would have been so satisfying. However, she did push forth her arms, wriggling her fingers, and yawn discreetly, and even this was agreeable enough to remind her that she had scored a victory.

It was almost like a dream now, that short interval between two sleeps when she had been so wide awake. The boy had come into the tent with his friend, had had the audacity to wake her, and in her anger she had seen him in his true light, clearly. Clearly, that is to say, in that for the first time she had understood just what he signified to Stenham. (What the boy meant to himself she did not assume the possibility of knowing, nor was she interested.) She sat there, momentarily incapacitated by fury, and stared at him. A boy with smooth, weather-tanned skin, huge eyes and black hair, and with the basic assurance of a man but not by any means the manner of one. A complete young barbarian, she thought, the antithesis of that for which she could have admiration. Looking at him she felt she knew what the people of antiquity had been like. Thirty centuries or more were effaced, and there he was, the alert and predatory sub-human, further from what she believed man should be like than the naked savage, because the savage was tractable, while this creature, wearing the armor of his own rigid barbaric culture, consciously defied progress. And that was what Stenham saw, too; to him the boy was a perfect symbol of human backwardness, and excited his praise precisely because he was “pure”: there was no room in his personality for anything that mankind had not already fully developed long ago. To him he was a consolation, a living proof that today’s triumph was not yet total; he personified Stenham’s infantile hope that time might still be halted and man sent back to his origins.

The other youth crouched near by, gnawing on a stick, surveying her with a calm and detached air of amusement.

“What is it?” she said evenly to Amar, quite forgetting that he could not understand her.

“He wants to say good-bye to you,” the other explained.

(He’s not going to get away that easily, her mind remarked, but by “he” she meant Stenham.)

“Mohammed,” she said, “tu ne veux pas faire quelque chose pour moi?”

He sat up straight.

“I wonder if you’d go down and buy me a pack of Casa Sport?”

She opened her handbag and took out some change. He was on his feet, his head bending forward so it would not rub against the blanket above. He took the money and went out. She waited half a minute to be sure he had really gone. Then she turned to Amar and without hesitation handed him all the banknotes that were in her purse. They were neatly folded.

“Of course, he doesn’t understand anything,” she thought, as she saw his eyes become even larger, opening wide at the sight of the money in his hand. And even as she started to sketch the gestures of explanation he was trying to give it back to her. “Boom,” she whispered in his ear. “
Révolver, pistolet
.” She did not know whether he understood or not; she glanced around the tent. So far, no one was looking at them. She directed his attention to her right hand in her lap, and carefully raising it to the level of her face, crooked her index finger and shut her left eye, sighting with the other along an imaginary barrel. Then she pulled the trigger and pointed swiftly to the bills he held.

“Thank God,” she thought: he did understand. She could tell that by the new expression on his face. She frowned and looked worried, indicating that he must quickly hide the money. He slipped it into his pocket. All was well.

When Mohammed returned, she was lying back, her arms folded behind her head, staring vacantly upward. To be civil, she talked awhile with him, and then the two boys rose to take their leave. When Amar shook hands with her, she looked meaningfully at him, as if to warn him against displaying any sign of gratitude, and merely said: “
Bonne chance
,” as she released his hand. They went out, and she lay back, wondering why she
felt that she had accomplished a particularly difficult piece of work.

Suddenly she smiled ruefully. Until now, she had had the firm intention of returning to Fez in the first vehicle that moved out of Sidi Bou Chta. That way she would not have to see Stenham again, unless he happened to come back and catch her in the act of leaving. But now it occurred to her that she had not finished with him. It was absurd, but unthinkingly she had made seeing him again a necessity. She had no money, and it was not likely that any bus-driver could be persuaded to take her to the city for nothing, merely because she gave him the address of the little hotel where she had left her luggage. The situation was more than absurd, she told herself; it was abject. “What the hell could have been in my subconscious?” she asked herself with astonishment and indignation.

She sent the
qaouaji’s
assistant out for some skewers of lamb, and paid for them with her last coins. Then, feeling tired again, she stretched out and promptly fell asleep.

All that had surely been several hours ago. Now she sat blinking, staring out through the flap of the tent at the trunks of the olive trees in the hot light of what must be mid-afternoon. She glanced at her watch. “Ten past three,” she murmured with a qualm of uneasiness. The drums still continued; they had not stopped once since she had got out of the bus the night before.

And the faces in the tent were new; she did not recognize any of them. With relief she saw that the
qaouaji
had not changed. She beckoned him over and asked him if Stenham had returned and gone out again, but his French was so rudimentary that it took a good deal of gesturing to get him to say that he had not seen the Nazarene gentleman all day. She thanked him and began to feel a little apprehensive.

She lay back, thinking that maybe she could lose herself in sleep once again: it was such a convenient way of making time pass. But there seemed to be no possibility of it, and she realized that she wanted to go outside and walk about. Her muscles ached, she felt nervous; to lie still any longer would be agony.

The dry, dust-laden air smelled of the horses and donkeys that stood among the tents, and the sun shining on the millions of tiny silvery olive leaves made her long for a drink of cool water. Down below, half-hidden by the curtain of white dust they were raising as they stamped, the dancers still moved mechanically, and the watchers still crowded around them. She turned and climbed upward in the direction of the open country.

It was easy to walk up here in the sunlight, and it had been so difficult in the dark. She went much further than she had gone the night before, until the trees had all been left behind and there were only wiry, stunted bushes and great rocks. She felt better: the muscular pains were nearly gone now, and the pure air had washed away her uneasiness. She leaned against a big boulder, first scrutinizing it for scorpions, and looked across the valley at the hill opposite. A tiny, lone figure was making its way slowly downward across the curved tawny expanse of countryside. A shepherd? She strained her eyes to sight the goats or sheep, but there were none.

She watched it awhile, and all at once she decided that it was Stenham: no Moroccan would wander so far alone. She stood a long time staring across the valley as the figure came lower and lower, finally leaving the sunlight and entering into the shadow thrown by the heights behind her. She could not be certain that it was actually Stenham, nor, she told herself, did she care in the least, but still, she was almost sure it was he, and she felt a pang of eagerness at the prospect of breaking her triumphant news, of announcing to him the manner and extent of his defeat. She took her time in going back down to the café, dallying where she wished, stopping to snap off the leaves from plants, sometimes leaping from rock to rock, and, when she got within sight of the outer tents, even sitting down to smoke a cigarette.

When she reached the café, she looked in and found he had not yet returned. She decided to walk among the trees to a place from which she could see the entrance, so that when he went in he would not find her; that would give her an immediate moral advantage. Over toward the left she went, through the wood smoke and dust, and stood like a conspirator, leaning against a
tree, watching around its trunk for his arrival. People came out of the tents and stared at her with surprise and distrust, but not, as far as she could tell, with hostility. It seemed to her that he was very long in coming; he must have stopped to watch the dancing. But suddenly she saw him trudging up the hill toward the café. When he had gone in, she began to walk.

This morning she had been surly and uncommunicative, and she felt she must go on with it, take it up where she had left off. At the same time, such behavior did not suit her present purpose. She entered the tent.

He was sitting in the corner, looking rather glum, she thought. When he saw her his face brightened.

“Hello,” she said without expression, “I was outside.”

“How are you?” he asked, looking up at her, and then he moved over so she could sit down.

“All right,” she said noncommittally; too obvious a show of truculence might stifle the conversation altogether. He held out a pack of cigarettes to her; she shook her head.

“I was afraid you might have gone,” he said uncertainly.

“I intended to. But I was so sleepy. Besides,” she added, as if it were an afterthought, “I haven’t a penny. You’ll have to lend me some money, I’m afraid. I gave all mine to Amar to buy a pistol with.”

“You did what?” he said, as if she had been speaking a language he scarcely understood.

“I simply gave him all the money in my purse, and told him to go and buy a gun. And the important thing is, he took it. What he does with it’s immaterial.” She was about to add: “So there’s your purity,” but then suddenly she was no longer sure of the extent of her own intelligence. Everything she had said sounded absurd; she had done it all wrong. She closed her mouth and waited.

He had passed his hand over his eyes as though to shield them from too bright a light, and now he held it there loosely. There was no decipherable expression on his face. When he finally spoke, he said slowly: “Let me get this straight.” Then he continued to sit without speaking. Finally his hand came down,
and looking away from her, he said: “I don’t think I understand, Lee. It’s too complicated for me.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said gaily. “You’re just
making
it complicated. If you had even a grain of poetry in you, you’d understand. The boy wanted action. At his age he has to have it. This is the crucial point of his whole life. He’d never have forgiven himself later if he’d sat around moping now. Can’t you see that?”

Stenham looked at her, but not as though he were listening to her. The mask of preoccupation he wore contrasted strangely with his violence in suddenly crying: “Leave all that!” Now he turned to face her. “I’m not thinking of him. He’s gone. One little life, another little life. What’s the difference?” (She studied his face briefly, and found that she was unable to tell whether this last was irony or whether he was speaking sincerely. Now he seemed to be waiting for her to answer, but she said nothing.) “What I don’t understand is you.” He stopped, hesitated. “As a matter of fact, I do understand it. I just want to hear you say it in your own words. What did you think you were doing? What in the name of God would make you decide to do a thing like that?”

She was disappointed: where was the rage? “It’s
something
to make a person happy,” she began tentatively.

“Agh!” His voice was harsh. “There’s a four-letter word for that. You guess which one and tell me. It’d mean more coming from your lips. You could give it its money’s worth.”

She had been lighting a cigarette to cover her nervousness, and she had discovered that her hand was trembling. Of course, she told herself, he would show his anger in this icy, abstract fashion. She had been foolish to expect a normal, simple quarrel.

“Your venom isn’t really insulting, you know,” she told him. “It has no focus. If you want to be really nasty, at least you’ve got to be conscious of the other person.”