The Spider's House (15 page)

The friend also had drifted here, and now stood next to Amar.
“Hada el bourdel,”
he shouted to him; Amar nodded sagely. The platform had been erected at the entrance of what he supposed must be a very expensive traveling brothel, and presently he was much astonished to see several Jewish women among those buying entrance tickets.

Now he moved ahead, to a kind of shed in front of which three mechanical dolls jiggled on a high pedestal. They were as large as children and wore real clothes. To Amar there was something indefinably obscene in the idea of putting good wool, cotton and leather on these dead, jittering objects; it outraged his sense of decorum. He stood watching their spasmodic movements, feeling a mixture of repugnance and indignation. One figure was playing a violin and opening and shutting a very wide mouth. A second banged together a pair of tin cymbals soundlessly, its senseless head turning from side to side atop its elongated neck. The third swayed back and forth from the hips as it pushed and pulled on a miniature accordion. The shifting light made their hesitant movements more plausible, at the same time removing them wholly from the world of reality and making them somehow believable inhabitants of another world that was all too possible, a pitiless world whose silence would be this crackling inferno of noise, and whose noon and midnight would shine with the same shadowless glare.
“Le Musée des Marionettes
!” cried an Arab boy at the door.
“Dix francs, messieurs! Dix francs, mesdames! Juj d’rial! Juj d’rial! Juj d’riall”

After a prolonged inner debate on the seemliness of his being observed entering such a place, since almost all the people who were going in and coming out were country folk and Berbers, he decided that not too much opprobrium would attach to his buying a ticket and going in. The museum consisted of a U-shaped
corridor with a row of glass exhibit-cases along the inner wall. It was brightly lighted, and crowded with Moslem women in various stages of mirthful hysteria. Why they found the exhibits funny to such a degree he could only guess; to him they were only mildly amusing. All of them were crudely caricatured scenes of life among Moslems: a schoolmaster, ruler in hand, presiding over a class of small boys, a fellah plowing, a drunk being ordered out of a bar. (This last he considered a gross insult to his people.) The scenes which delighted the women so much that they could scarcely move away from them were those showing Moslem females. One was a domestic drama, in which the wife sat with a mirror in one hand and a whip in the other; her husband was on his knees scrubbing the floor. Back and forth twitched the woman’s head: she would raise the mirror and gaze into it, and then she would turn to the man and deliver a blow with the whip. At that instant without fail there would be a renewed scream of laughter from the white bundles clustered in front of the glass. The other scene was the interior of a bus, where a man sat next to a woman in a
djellaba
. Here she would lower one side of her veil, disclosing a hideous face, and replace it just as the man’s head swung around toward her. It was a less complicated game than the other, but being highly improper it evoked equal merriment on the part of the feminine spectators. Amar stood for a while watching, and thought: “This is the way the Nazarenes corrupt our women, by teaching them how whores behave.” He wanted to say it aloud, but the prospect of having so many women turn and stare at him intimidated him, and he strode out into the street with as intense an expression of disgust on his face as he could muster.

“… latombolatombo
…” cried the young man of the lottery. Now he held an alarm clock in his hand, now a great, fat doll dressed in pink satin, whose eyes, Amar noted with interest, opened and shut when she was bent forward or backward. “Like a cow’s eyes,” he thought, and he wondered what made them work, even as he was conscious of hating the idea that he should be interested at all in such childish nonsense. They would forbid things like this, he was certain, when the Moslems took
power. By what right did the French assume that such absurdities would amuse the Moroccans? The fact that they
were
amused by them was beside the point; they would have to change. He could imagine the French coming here from the Ville Nouvelle, not to look at the exhibits, but to be entertained by watching the Moslems look at them. Is it my fault, Mohammed Lalami had said, if the people of Morocco are donkeys? There he was right.

He found himself being pushed from behind toward the long counter where the prizes were displayed. There were sets of shining aluminum cooking utensils, tablecloths and mantillas draped over the counter, umbrellas hanging by their crooks, fountain pens arranged by the score in designs on sheets of painted cardboard, table lamps with red bulbs in them, flashing on and off, along with all the other lights, and even a small radio, which the young man now and then announced would be given as a special prize to anyone who picked the winning number three times in succession. This detail was lost on Amar, who was thinking that it would be a wonderful thing for a man to have his own radio right in the room with him. So far he had seen them only in cafés. “For thirty francs,” the young man was crying, “you can have this magnificent apparatus.” That much Amar did understand, and at the risk of being laughed at by the onlookers (for one never knew quite what was happening in the world of the Nazarenes) he worked his way ahead to the edge of the counter and held out thirty francs. Of course, it was wrong; he saw that immediately in the expression on the young man’s face. “Only one number at a time!” he shouted to the crowd, as though they all had made the same mistake. “Only ten francs!” He took one coin from Amar’s hand.
“Messieurs-dames!
This time it will be Monte Carlo! Players will choose their own numbers! Only five players! One more?” Someone at the far end of the counter raised his hand; a girl working at that end took his coin. “
Les numéros
?” The players called their choices.

The only number Amar was certain of pronouncing correctly was
dix
. He said the word clearly; the young man seemed satisfied,
turned and spun the disk that was affixed to the wall, moving the microphone so that it picked up the clicking sound made by the metal flange as it hit the large pins that marked the numbers. The clicking slowed down, the wheel stopped, and Amar saw with more terror than satisfaction that the indicator was without a doubt directly over a thin yellow slice of the disk which bore the number ten. “
Numéro dix!”
shouted the young man without emotion. The girl at the other end reached out nonchalantly and took up a strange-looking object which she tossed to the announcer. The Christians and Jews, and doubtless some of the Moslems watching, recognized it as a rag doll which was meant to be a comic representation of a French sailor. It had a pot-belly and a hideous painted face, but its uniform and headgear had been made with an eye to detail. The young man held it up so everyone could admire it; then he handed it to Amar.

For Amar this was a minor crisis: he did not want to accept the thing, but he knew it was the only possible procedure. If he refused it, there would be roars of laughter from the onlookers, the loudest and most derisive of whom would be the Moslems. He reached up, seized the doll by its neck, and without paying any attention to the young man’s question as to whether or not he wanted to take another number, burrowed through the crowd until he reached its outer edges. He stood still for a moment in a comparatively deserted space outside the entrance to the school. The problem was to find a sheet of paper in which to wrap his prize; he could not very well walk through the streets carrying it this way. It would be worth the money, he decided, to buy a newspaper; that would certainly be the quickest way to hide it.

There were usually two or three newsboys on the other side of the
place
, in front of the large café where the bus drivers got their quick glasses of coffee or wine. As he was making his way around the periphery of the square under the trees, all the lights and loudspeakers went off. For a second there was complete silence and darkness, as if a giant breath from above, extinguishing the light with one puff, had also blown everyone away. Then on all sides a great sound rose up—the sound a thousand or more people make when they all say: “Ahhh!” at once. Even when that
sound had died down, everything was different from what it had been a minute before; it was like being in another city. Now Amar saw that it was not really dark. Through the leaves of the trees overhead the stars were very bright, and here and there at the far side of the square was a food stall lighted by the single spurting flame of a carbide lamp. When he had got across to the other side he stood still, listening through the vast babble for the high voice of a newsboy crying:
Laa Viigiiie!,
but the sound did not come. In the breeze that blew by his face he was conscious of the heavy smell of wet earth and the smoke of burning oil from ten thousand kitchens behind the walls of the nearby Mellah. Suddenly he was extremely hungry. He determined to go home now, taking the first bus that left for Bab Bou Jeloud. It would not do to arrive back home too late, in any case: they might suspect that he had not been to work.

Again he stood on the back platform, as the bus rolled through the dark Mellah. There was more light crossing Fez-Djedid, perhaps because the proprietors of the cafés and shops had had time to bring out candles, oil lamps and tin cans filled with carbide. A good many legionnaires got off at Bab Dekakène, to pass the evening in the
quartier réservé
of Moulay Abdallah.

When the bus got to Bou Jeloud, he waited until everyone had left the vehicle, and then stepped inside the dimly illumined interior. There on a seat was what he was looking for—a newspaper. Quickly he snatched it up, before the driver should see it. He was still wrapping the doll as he walked under the great arch of the gate. Emerging on the other side, he was unpleasantly startled to collide with a figure that had stepped in front of him, its arm raised to halt him. He recognized a
mokhazni
in uniform.

“What’s that?” The
mokhazni
pulled the bundle out of Amar’s hands and ripped the paper off. The doll fell limply forward against his arm; he held it out and fixed the beam of his flashlight on it. Then he shook it and squeezed it between his fingers systematically, all over its body. Finally with a grunt he tossed it to Amar, who, fumbling in the darkness, dropped it.
“Cirf halak,”
said the
mokhazni
, as though it were Amar who had done the
bothering. “Get out of here.” And he returned to the shadows where he had been waiting.

“Son of a dog,” Amar said between his teeth, but so softly, he knew, that his words were covered by the sound of the voices of passers-by. He had heard of other people’s having similar experiences recently, but the world in which he moved was so circumscribed, even geographically, that he had never until now come in contact with the new vigilance that was being exercised. He turned left into the covered
souks
of the Talâa el Kebira, now holding the doll by its feet, and so intent upon giving a semblance of variety to the string of curses he was muttering under his breath that he was not immediately conscious of the person walking beside him. Suddenly he turned his head, and in the flickering light from one of the meat stalls saw the older brother of Mokhtar Benani, a boy he often played with on the soccer field.

“Ah,
sidi, labès? Chkhbarek
?” he said, embarrassed, hoping first that the boy had not heard his private tirade, and next that he would not look down and see the absurd thing he was carrying. At the same time, his intuition told him that there was an element of strangeness, if not in the fashion of this salutation, in its very fact. There was no possible reason for the older Benani, whose first name he did not even know, to be stopping at this moment in the Talâa el Kebira to speak with Amar. Until now they had never exchanged a word; on various occasions this boy had come to the soccer field to fetch his younger brother, there often had been an argument involved in the fetching, and Amar remembered the older brother because he had never lost his temper or raised his voice during the discussions. Now that he heard that voice again, he marveled fleetingly. It had a rich, burnished quality which made it not quite like any other voice he had ever heard, and its mellifluousness was heightened by the fact that the boy used a large complement of Egyptian words in his phrases and pronounced the “
qaf
” perfectly. This last feat Amar considered wholly remarkable in itself; like most Fassiyine he was incapable of pronouncing the letter.

Amar was neither analytical nor articulate, but he generally knew exactly why he was following a particular course of behavior. If he had been asked at this moment why he did not utter a simple “ ‘
Lah imsik bekhir”
and go on his way, he would have replied that Benani’s voice was something pleasant in the world, and that he enjoyed listening to it. On his side, Benani may have been dimly conscious of this, for he seemed disposed to talk at some length, making discreet inquiries as to Amar’s health and that of his family, as well as to his work and his general state of mind. “And the world,” he said, at several junctures in the conversation. Amar was quite aware that he was referring to the political situation in Morocco, but he had no intention of showing that awareness here, nor, he imagined, did the other expect him to.

“Where are you going?” Benani finally inquired, shifting his position and glancing downward at Amar’s hand, which he was holding as far behind him as he could.

“Home.” Amar also turned imperceptibly, trying to keep the doll behind him in the dark.

“Why don’t you eat with us? I’m meeting a few
drari
in the Nejjarine, and we’re going to eat somewhere.”

Amar ignored the question for the moment. “And Mokhtar?” he said. “Where’s Mokhtar? Will he be there?”