The Spider's House (31 page)

It would certainly be rude to call and ask whether under the circumstances he ought still to come, for although he knew the family well enough to be aware that they would never admit the existence of any political situation, he had no idea on which side their sympathies lay. On several occasions in the house he had met officers in the French army with their wives, and the atmosphere had been one of complete cordiality. Furthermore, two of Si Jaffar’s sons worked as functionaries with the French administration; the chances were pretty good, he thought, that the family was pro-French. And yet, every one of them had at some time or another voiced the strongest criticism of the French. He
had used to join in, but lately he had thought it wiser merely to laugh and let them do the excoriating. If they were indeed on the side of the French, his own police dossier must have grown by leaps and bounds as a result of the evenings he had spent with them, for they would have had no choice but to report everything. There was no way of collaborating halfway with the French; if you were with them you had their complete protection, at least until such time as they decided you were no longer useful, and if you were not with them you were against them. To telephone Si Jaffar and say to him: “I wondered if you still wanted me to come, in view of what is going on at the moment,” would have yielded no result at all, for he would have claimed absolute ignorance. Besides, just what was going on? Stenham himself did not know. The man in the antique store had been very kind to tender him his cryptic warning (he had not thought him capable of such a disinterested gesture), but he was going to disregard it, all the same. When he had finished his lunch he would go out the gate and down into the Medina on a little inspection tour of his own.

But the long meal and the heavy heat, and perhaps the silence of the dining-room, had their effect, and when he had eaten his fruit he rose and went upstairs to stretch out on the bed for a few minutes. First he drew the curtains so that the room was protected from the afternoon’s yellow glare. A few flies buzzed in circles over the table; he directed a short blast at them from an aerosol bomb and took off his shoes and trousers. Then he lay down. The air was clogged with heat, and the gloom in the room was so deep that he could not see the painted arabesques on the beams of the high ceiling above his head. Somewhere off in the mountains, down in the Middle Atlas, there was the triumphant rolling of thunder, muted and gentle at this great distance. The sound came at regular intervals, enfolding him in its softness. Nothing lay between him and sleep.

And there he was suddenly, a century later, sitting up, blinking at a hostile unreal room invaded by lavender emptiness. The thunder crashed again in the garden, and he swung himself out of bed and ran to the windows. The rain was just arriving, angry
and violent, and the city glowed in an unnatural twilight. It was quarter past five. He went back to the bed and lay down, reaching over his head for the bell. The sound of its ringing in the maids’ room on the floor below was covered by the storm, but it had rung, for a moment later there was a loud knocking at the door.

“Trhol!”
he shouted.

Rhaissa’s head appeared, her eyes looking very white in the dimness. Surely she was eager to discuss the weather, but he was still paralyzed by sleep. “Bring me my tea, please,” he told her, and she closed the door.

A moment later there was another knock. He thought he must have dozed again, for it was always at least a quarter of an hour before the tea arrived.
“Trhol!”
he cried, and then, since there was no response, he said it louder. The door opened, and a man stepped in. Stenham snapped on the light and saw Moss, his suit irregularly splashed with water, his cane under his arm.

“Come in, come in,” he told him.

“I don’t disturb you?”

“Not at all. I’m just about to have tea. I’ll have her bring an extra cup.”

“No, no. I must go down and change. I’m quite wet. I shan’t even sit down. I merely wanted to report to you. It’s been an incredible day. Details later.” He wiped his forehead, blew his nose. “Hugh’s in his room, so at least I accomplished my mission. I must say my opinion of the French has altered somewhat since this morning. Shall I see you at dinner?”

“Yes,” Stenham said. “If the hotel’s still standing, and hasn’t been washed down into the river. Listen.” He held up a finger: the rain roared. Moss smiled and went out.

Before Rhaissa brought the tea, the rain stopped with dramatic suddenness. It was now dark. He opened the windows, heard the water still clamoring in the drainpipes and spattering from the trees onto the terrace. But the air was quiet and chill. He stood awhile leaning out, listening and taking deep breaths.

Later, while he was drinking the tea, he again remembered his appointment at Si Jaffar’s. There was no remedy for it; he
would merely put on an old suit and splash through the mud to the house. By taking a series of short-cuts that he had worked out over the years, he could arrive in about a half hour. He gulped down the last of the tea, dressed quickly, put his flashlight in his hip pocket, and telephoned Moss.

It took a long time to get him, and when he answered, his voice sounded gruff.
“Oui? Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?”
he demanded.

“Have I waked you up?” Stenham began.

“No, John, but I’m dripping water all over the rug. I was in the bath.”

Stenham apologized, explained why he would not be at dinner. Moss hesitated before saying: “John? I’m not sure I’d go if I were you. I don’t think it’s wise at this point.”

“I’ve got to go,” said Stenham flatly. “Get back into your tub and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

The streets were deserted. He walked at the side, keeping against the walls to avoid the brooks that ran down the middle. As he approached the river there was much more water; he was forced eventually to turn back and take a higher point at which to cross. Had he kept to his original course, he would have been in rushing water up to his knees by the time he had got to the bottom. The few men who passed were too much occupied with the business of walking to pay him any attention.

It was a difficult climb up the steep streets of the Zekak er Roumane; the mud was as bad as the water, and he kept sliding back. Behind the wet walls of the dwellings and from the terraces above, cocks were crowing senselessly, and small bats swooped in the air around the infrequent street lights. When he came out into the Talâa he found it almost as unpopulated as the side streets: the stalls were boarded up, and it was only now and then he passed a lone man sitting silently beside a donkey or a load of charcoal or a roll of matting. Even the beggars who usually crouched by the fountain below the turn-off to Si Jaffar’s alley were gone tonight. He glanced at his watch and saw that it was almost eight o’clock. If only it were eleven, he thought, and he were on his way back to the hotel, the ordeal behind him. These endless evenings at Si Jaffar’s were excruciating; he
dreaded them with almost the intensity most people dread an appointment with the dentist. The conversation was of necessity highly superficial, and it went without saying that nothing which was said had even a trace of sincerity; if a truth happened to be uttered, it was a matter of sheer accident. Sometimes he tried to get the family on the subject of native customs, but even here on various occasions he had discovered them in the act of lying to him, purposely misinforming him, doubtless in order to enjoy a good laugh at his expense after he had gone. All the members of the family were most amiable, however, even if their friendliness was expressed in an arbitrary and usually ceremonious manner, and he felt that it did him good to tax his patience by sitting among them and learning to chat and joke with them on their level. Had anyone asked him why he thought it beneficial to make this strenuous effort regularly, his answer would have been that theory without practice was worthless. Si Jaffar and his family were typical middle-class Moroccans who had offered him the unusual honor of throwing their home open to him. (He had even met the wife, the daughters, unveiled, the aunts and the grandmother, an ancient lady who crawled everywhere through the house on her hands and knees.) It seemed to him that he could scarcely afford to miss any opportunity of seeing them.

Moss had once said to him: “For you Moslems can do no wrong,” and Stenham had laughed sourly, agreed, and reflected that if that were so, neither could they do any right. They did what they did; he found it all touching and wholly ridiculous. The only ones he judged, and therefore hated, were those who showed an inclination to ally themselves with the course of Western thought. Those renegades who prated of education and progress, who had forsaken the concept of a static world to embrace that of a dynamic one—he would gladly have seen them all quietly executed, so that the power of Islam might continue without danger of interruption. If Si Jaffar and his sons had sold their services to the French, that still did not invalidate their purity in his eyes, so long as they continued to live the way they lived: sitting on the floor, eating with their fingers, cooking and
sleeping first in one room, then in another, or in the vast patio with its fountains, or on the roof, leading the existence of nomads inside the beautiful shell which was the house. If he had felt that they were capable of discarding their utter preoccupation with the present, in order to consider the time not yet arrived, he would straightway have lost interest in them and condemned them as corrupt. To please him the Moslems had to tread a narrow path; no deviation was tolerated. In conversation with them he never lost an opportunity to revile Christianity and its concomitants. It was the greatest pleasure for him when they looked at one another with wonder and said, shaking their heads: “This one understands the world. Here is a Nazarene who sees the evil in his own people.” A question which often came up at this point in such discussions was: “And have you never wanted to become a Moslem?” This embarrassed him profoundly, for it seemed to him that he was less equipped to embrace their faith than any other faith: it demanded a humility and submission that he could not conceive himself as feeling. He admired it in them, but he could never accept it for himself. Discipline for the sake of discipline, mindless and joyous obedience to arbitrary laws, that was an element of their religion which, praiseworthy though it might be, he knew was not for him. It was too late; even his ancestors of several centuries ago would have said it was too late. Who was wrong and who was right he did not know or care, but he knew he could not be a Moslem.

Still, it seemed to him that it was this very fact which made contact with them so desirable and therapeutic. Certainly it was this which lent the obsessive character to his preoccupation with them. They embodied the mystery of man at peace with himself, satisfied with his solution of the problem of life; their complacence came from asking no questions, accepting existence as it arrived to their senses fresh each morning, seeking to understand no more than that which was directly useful for the day’s simple living, and trusting implicitly in the ultimate and absolute inevitability of all things, including the behavior of men. And this satisfaction they felt in life was to him the
mystery, the dark, precious and unforgivable stain which blotted out comprehension of them, and touched everything they touched, making their simplest action as fascinating as a serpent’s eye. He knew that the attempt to fathom the mystery was an endless task, because the further one advanced into their world, the more conscious one became that it was necessary to change oneself fundamentally in order to know them. For it was not enough to understand them; one had to be able to think as they thought, to feel as they felt, and without effort. It was a lifetime’s work, and one of which he was aware he would some day suddenly tire. However, he considered it the first step in establishing an awareness of people; when he had told Moss that, Moss had exploded in laughter.

“Morally you’re still a totalitarian.” Sometimes it seemed impossible that Moss had been serious in confronting him with such an accusation; surely he had said it out of pure perverseness, knowing it was the antithesis of what was true about him. But if that were so certain, why then did the idea stick there, embedded like a burr in his mind? He tried to think back, to recall whether one day he might have used an inconsidered word which could have led Moss to misunderstand later remarks, but of course it was useless; he could remember no such occurrence. “Maybe I am,” he said to himself once again, listening to his footsteps echo in the covered passageway. If it was “totalitarian” to estimate the worth of an individual according to what he produced, or to evaluate any segment of humanity using as a scale its culture, then Moss was right. There was no other criterion to use in determining the right of an organism to exist (and in the end any judgment one passed on another human being was reducible to the consideration of that right). If, for instance, he deplored the violence that resulted in the daily bombings and shootings in the streets of Casablanca, it obviously was not because he felt pity for the victims, who, however pathetic, were still anonymous, but because he knew that each sanguinary incident, by awakening the political consciousness of the survivors, brought the moribund culture nearer to its end. Now he recalled an occasion when they had been talking about war, and
he had said: “People can be replaced, but not works of art.” Moss had been indignant, called him selfish and inhuman. Perhaps it was a few careless phrases such as this that Moss had stored in his memory and used as a springboard for making his accusation. He would bring up the subject again at the right moment. This was the door to Si Jaffar’s house. Seizing the knocker, he banged the iron ring against the wood, twice.

The youngest son had led him into the patio where the orange trees still let fall drops of rain onto the mosaic beneath. There he stood for a minute or two, alone by the central fountain, waiting for Si Jaffar. The wrought-iron balustrade around the basin was hung with cleaning rags. Some were even looped around the lower branches of one of the trees. From somewhere in the house there came the insistent pounding of a pestle in a mortar: one of the women was grinding spices. When Si Jaffar appeared, he was wearing striped pajamas, a loosely wound turban was around his head, and he was wringing his hands and smiling his eternal smile.