Notorious (6 page)
I close the diary.
The Sister grips the base of her cross.
‘You recognise that, don’t you?’ I say to Sister Antony. ‘From her ramblings.’
‘Is she Anna?’ says the Sister. She lifts the cross and holds it at me – to keep me at bay – and says, ‘Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.’
I see myself as she must see me, leaning over the woman in the bed. I am a black cloak, an anti-presence. The woman’s head is always turned away, her neck always exposed.
‘You let people down,’ I say to the woman. ‘They trusted you. It was important what you were doing. It mattered. You ran out on them – ’
Before I can stop, the word slips out. The unsayable word. It hangs in the air, gaudy with flies. The force of it, the way I meant it, was like a slap. I see myself advancing inexorably from behind, enveloping her, holding her down, biting her shoulders, her back, her buttocks, leaving bloody teeth marks. Being the man we both always thought I was.
I am already falling back exhausted from the weight of the word when I say it.
‘Whore.’
Time passes. A shudder runs through her body but she doesn’t open her eyes. She slowly raises her hand and gives a small but definite flick of her fingers, the Italian gesture of contempt, her nails catching the light as though she has handfuls of stars. She flicks again, her arm shakes and drops. She lies still, palm upwards.
The Sister is at my side, gripping my arm. ‘Enough.’
I back away. ‘She’s not – is she breathing?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve killed her.’
I would have fallen if Sister Antony hadn’t held me up. I shout and my voice is louder than the banging shutters, ‘Oh Jesus Christ, I didn’t mean to – ’
I pick up the briefcase and throw it with all my might against the wall. ‘Why did you let me?’
The Sister slides the sheet from the woman’s legs. There, on the inner right thigh, above the curve of the calf and the knee-cap showing ivory, is a small patch of light and dark.
At first I think it is a tattoo, a decorative pattern in the Arabic style, heavily inked swirls and lines. But there are strange verticals of light running through it like a bad photocopy. The Sister brings the lamp closer. The lines sharpen. It is a photograph. A black and white photograph developed directly onto her skin.
The shutters are banging furiously.
The moon sits brooding in the window frame.
I look closer and closer and see that the photo is of a man.
A man’s face.
My face.
I
wake into
l’heure bleue
: the blue hour, the French call it, the moments between darkness and day, night and redemption.
Even deep in the earth, in Rimbaud’s cell, there is the sense of gloom lightening.
I am naked beneath the rough blanket. I grope for my briefcase. The diary and gun are inside. I take out a new shirt, still in its wrapper, and clean underwear. Someone has removed yesterday’s shirt and underwear and left a folded robe on the end of the cot. I stare at it dubiously. Laforche wears a suit. To be less dressed than Laforche seems to be a sign of weakness. I wonder who has taken my underwear. I don’t like the thought of someone washing my underwear and make a note to find out where it has gone.
My organiser pings, the screen glows green. A reminder to write up my notes from yesterday’s interrogation. The failed interrogation. I slump on the cot. In another day, Mitch and his thugs would arrive. If I didn’t have some answers for them, they would go to work on her – the woman – and if they didn’t get what they wanted, they would go to work on me. I have an image of my body being ground down into sand. Grated.
I suppose it doesn’t have to be the right answers. Any answer that sounds plausible will do.
I haul myself up, put on my clean shirt, my trousers, my tie, my jacket. I am unassailable in my clothes. My hair is cropped short: no chance of the wind messing with that.
I take a deep breath, pick up my briefcase and prepare to face the day.
I find Laforche in the courtyard. He is dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt and tie and dark trousers. I note the absence of a jacket. He holds a small cup of very black coffee and a silver plate heaped with grapes and mango and thin slices of ham and cheese.
He stares at a tufty plant nudging the archway to the office.
‘So, American,’ he says. ‘Did you sleep?’
I nod and adjust my sunglasses to hide my puffy eyes.
He offers me a bunch of grapes. There is a small smile on his lips. ‘You didn’t hear the drums from the mountains?’
‘No.’
‘Or the howls of the wolves?’
I spit out a pip. ‘There are no wolves in this part of the world, Laforche.’
‘Only the human kind.’
‘I didn’t hear them either.’
‘Then you must have slept well.’ He raises a forefinger. ‘We should see the desert before it gets too hot.’
There is a spiral staircase inside the far turret. We climb up past the second level and come out on a broad flat walkway which I realise is the roof of the arcade below.
Laforche leans against the chest-high wall on the outer edge. There are gaps in the red bricks for the archers. At this hour, in the coolest part of the day, the Kabir Massif is metallic blue. The wind has dropped – it is not even a whisper – but it will rise through the morning, says Laforche, from a caress to a high-pitched whistle, like the echo of a falcon’s scream as it falls through the clouds from the mountaintop.
I say, ‘Have you ever heard a falcon falling from a mountaintop?’
‘A little imagination goes a long way in the desert.’
I pass the binoculars to Laforche. ‘I have never seen it like this.’ He says, half to himself, ‘I am stationed at the wound. Beings who are nothing come to be nothing here.’
Beyond the Asylum, he says, there is nothing. The desert stretches east, mile upon red mile. He looks at the white hole of sun. ‘That is what she came out of. She looked like a mirage. It was a . . . ’ The word hangs in the air.
He says, ‘How did she come across the sacred empty, a white woman on foot? The only other white person who has done so and lived is Rimbaud.’
I point back to the Massif. ‘There must be water?’
He hesitates. ‘None that has been found. The Massif is solid rock, impenetrable.’
I scan the horizon. ‘So the Asylum is the only watered spot until Kabir proper. Very handy for visitors from Algeria who wish to slip into Casablanca quietly and avoid the port and road checkpoints.’
‘You’re thinking of the Groupe Salafiste, Algerian Pour Le Combat, those killing gangs,’ says Laforche smoothly. ‘But it is too far to reach here on foot. They would have to carry water. That means camels or trucks. Which your hi-technological satellites would be sure to find.’
‘Satellites can only see what they are pointed at. A group of men on foot might pass undetected, travelling by night, buried in the sand by day.’
Laforche shrugs. ‘You are not the only one who wants information.’
I am alert. ‘Meaning?’
‘My government graciously allows you Americans to question the woman first. But after that – well, our police are interested.’
‘This is a civil matter,’ I say. ‘Private lootings by the woman’s father. Trafficking of goods and other cargo.’
‘Other cargo?’ says Laforche.
‘It is not military, Laforche. There is no question of a security risk to Morocco.’
‘Really? We shall see.’
The sun is high over the horizon, the cracked face of the moon is slipping away. Up on the roof, the heat wraps around the body like a cloak.
Laforche says, ‘A walled city is worse in summer. It becomes Rimbaud’s city of black roses.’
‘Your English is very good,’ I say. ‘Better on some occasions than others.’
‘It’s the Arabic way,’ he says. ‘I know how much that infuriates you Americans.’ He spits out a grape seed. We watch it land in a minute puff of dust on the red earth. He says, ‘You sit in your offices on Hafid Street. Or the Hilton on Haussman. Anywhere there is air-conditioning. And a mini-bar behind the wood panelling in the bedroom bureau.’ He smiles. ‘The CIA quarter. We all know it.’
I pretend to rub dust off my cuff. It is no pretence. There is dust on my cuff. Even though there is no wind that I can detect.
I ask Laforche what else is on the second level.
‘The patients’ rooms, you already know,’ he says. ‘The dry goods storeroom, the recreation rooms. Then, on what you Americans call the ground floor, my office, the infirmary, the winter kitchen, showers, laundry, generator and mechanics’ workshop. Below ground are the nuns’ cells, the summer kitchen, the well and water storage, the pantries. We only get supplies once a week at most.’
Ahead of us, the stone turret rears. This stone is a different red to the rest of the Asylum.
‘Built in 1890, when Rimbaud came to stay,’ says Laforche. ‘Built for him, they say.’
Rimbaud came up the coast of the Western Sahara and Morocco, Laforche tells me. Riding with the caravans of the North West Africa Company. They said he travelled with a dog, a cat, a chimpanzee and a hyena. This was after his years of teaching, his time in the circus, the time spent working for a coffee company. He was older; it was nearly twenty years since he had written his last poems. He was running guns by that time and hunting. He traded the leather and ostrich feathers for tea, sugar, cloth. Being a Frenchman, he had to be careful. Tensions were running high. The Spanish were trying to take over the caravan routes, fighting bitterly with the French whenever they found them. Forts were being built all along the coast: Cap Juby was half finished, Villa Cisneros was being constructed. The soldiers were hot, restless, bored. They would frequently leave their forts and go on hunting parties; hunting for enemies.
‘Everyone hates the French,’ I say.
‘Yes, in Africa we were like the Americans are now, everywhere,’ says Laforche. ‘When the air routes to South America were opening up, and the Germans were competing, they would give the locals Mauser rifles to shoot at French planes.’
We are a nation of solitaries, says Laforche. Of travellers. The French are made so that nothing contents us. Not standing still is a form of survival. Writers, con-men. André Gide, Pierre Loti. Men who travel dressed as women like Michel Vieuchange. Women who travel dressed as men like Isabelle Eberhardt. Restless spirits.
‘Suicides,’ I say.
‘People who cross the frontiers are always fools and madmen. They are drawn to the desert. The desert is the shape of their death. It is the death they carry inside them. One addiction among many others. To sex, to kif and other drugs. To the dice.’ Here, he pauses. ‘They could turn back at any time but they never do. They go on towards the mirages. Towards death, to cheat death. Rimbaud said that he wrote to outwit the evil clock of time.’
‘Did he?’
‘No,’ says Laforche. ‘He got an ulcer in the leg which turned to gangrene. He was carried to Marseilles in agony. His body eaten from within, trying to find a way back.’
‘Back home?’
‘Back to peace of mind. To poetry. To feeling. Because he had become fire shut up in stone.’
Below, a nun dawdles across the courtyard, followed by three women in robes and hoods. They carry platters covered by muslin cloths. The smell of hot chocolate and bread drifts up. The women talk, peer into the dry pond, pull up a thistle.
They see me and make signs in the air. One spits. They say nothing yet there is an aura of furious words around them, like grasshoppers swarming.
‘They think you are American,’ says Laforche. ‘The Asylum had a certain reputation during the Algerian uprisings. It was used by the French military. Sometimes the CIA. They needed a discreet place.’
‘Torture,’ I say.
‘Yes. And not just for foreigners. The locals were sent here, too.’
It is 6.30 am. I have been here for twenty hours and accomplished nothing. I have a moment of anger so intense that I feel dizzy. I grasp the stone wall. It would be fatal to be too direct. Laforche is obviously the kind of man who likes to fence, who has nothing else in the world but time to talk.
I want to shout, A woman’s life is at stake. The effort of not shouting takes as much energy as doing it. I lean heavily on my hands, slow my breathing, pretend to look at the Massif. Sand grates under the sweat on my neck. If he says the wrong thing, I tell myself, I am going to punch him.
Dirty tattered chickens are moving across the cracked courtyard. From here I see the faded mosaic of a lion on the bottom of the empty fountain, coloured in weak yellow and traced in chipped black.
Laforche says, ‘Animals have always been our others, no matter what the Church instructs. In battle, wherever you saw lions rampant on silk parasols, you saw a king.’ He gestures at the courtyard. ‘Once this was a garden with fabled greenery, an oasis in the desert. Did you know that a garden appears in nine hundred of the one thousand and one stories of the Arabian Nights?’
He looks at the dry plain, his eyes half closed. ‘They say there were oceans filled with fish. Then savannas with animals. The gardens of Abu N’af ran in terraces all the way down to a vast lake. Orchards to the horizon, with the finest apricots and dates and oranges.’
‘Fresh water?’
‘Fresh water.’
We are silent, awed by the richness of the image. Near the shadows of the chicken, I see paws moving under the dirt.
‘In the desert,’ says Laforche, ‘there is no greater wealth than water and flowers. Loss of the oasis is banishment from the garden paradise. Homelessness.’
‘But this isn’t home.’ I rub my neck. ‘It’s dust.’
He turns quickly, the fastest I have seen him move. ‘It is an entire country underground. Everything in the desert buries itself to survive: animals, plants, people.’ He puts down his coffee. ‘We have always buried our art: relics and statues, the locations passed down from father to son. We buried libraries in the sand. Any person could pick up a handful of sand and feel knowledge trickling through their fingers. There were families who, even though they had nothing, walked with the arrogance of those who were rich in treasure.’
