The Spider's House (5 page)

Slowly the distant figures moved up the hillside. They would
probably keep going all night, and arrive home only sometime after dawn. He knew well enough how the country people lived; he had spent long months on his father’s farm at Kherib Jerad, before they had had to sell it, and each year they had gone to collect the family’s share of the crops. In his case the amused disdain that the city dweller feels for the peasant was tempered with respect. While a townsman was announcing his intentions at great length, a peasant would simply go ahead, without saying a word, and do what he had to do.

Still standing there, looking out over the great expanse of bare sunlit land, his eyes following the little figures that crawled up the face of the slope, he considered the extent of his misfortune. If only his older brother had not happened to turn his head at a given, precise moment three nights earlier in an alley of Moulay Abdallah, Amar could now have been swimming in the river, or playing soccer outside Bab Fteuh, or merely sitting quietly on the roof making tunes on his flute, without the weight of dread inside him. But Mustapha had turned his head, seen him there in that forbidden place among the painted women. And the next day he had approached him, demanding twenty rial. Amar had no money—and no means of obtaining any. He promised Mustapha that he would pay him little by little, as he got hold of small amounts, but Mustapha, being bright as well as merciless, had a plan and was not interested in the future. He did not intend to inform upon Amar; that went without saying. Their father would have been angrier with the informer than with the betrayed. That morning Mustapha had said to Amar: “Have you got the money?” and when Amar had shaken his head: “I’ll be at Hamadi’s café at sunset. Bring it or look out for your father when you go home.”

He did not have the money; he would not go to the café and listen to further threats. He would go straight home and receive the beating so that it would become a thing of the past, rather than of the future. Behind him he heard the warning bell of a bicycle, and he turned to recognize a boy he knew. The boy stopped and he got on, sitting sidewise in front of the rider. Around the curves they coasted, one way and the other, with
the sun-filled valley and Djebel Zalagh first on the left, then on the right.

“How are the brakes?” Amar asked. He was thinking that it might be pleasanter to be catapulted into a ditch or down the hillside than to be delivered safely to the gate of his quarter. Whatever he was going to be punished for might be forgiven when he got out of the hospital.

“The brakes are good,” the boy replied. “What’s the matter? Are you afraid?”

Amar laughed scornfully. They crossed the bridge and the ground became level. The boy began to pedal. As they approached the uphill stretch from the river valley to the Taza road intersection, the work got to be too arduous. Amar jumped off, said good-bye, and took a cross-cut through a grove of pomegranate trees. He had never owned a bicycle; it was not an object the son of an impoverished
fqih
could ever hope to have. Money came only to those who bought and sold. The boys whose fathers owned shops could own bicycles; Amar could only rent one now and then, because the people whom his father treated with his holy words and incantations generally had only coppers to spare, and when an occasional rich man consulted him and attempted to give him a larger sum in payment, Si Driss was adamant in his refusal.

“When your money comes from Allah,” his father would tell him, “you do not buy machines and other Nazarene follies. You buy bread, and you give thanks to Him for being able to do that.” And Amar would answer: “
Hamdoul’lah.”

At a café just inside Bab Fteuh he stopped and watched a card game for a few minutes. Then he walked miserably home. His mother, who let him in, looked meaningfully at him, and he saw his father standing in the courtyard by the well. There was no sign of Mustapha.

CHAPTER 2

“Come upstairs,” said his father, leading the way up the narrow flight of broken steps. He went into the smaller of the two rooms and switched on the light. “Sit on the mattress,” he commanded, pointing at a corner of the room. Amar obeyed. Everything within him was trembling; he could not have told whether it was with eagerness or terror, any more than he could have known whether it was a consuming hatred or an overpowering love that he felt for the elderly man who towered above him, his eyes fiery with anger. Slowly his father unwound his long turban, revealing his shaven skull, and while he did this he spoke.

“This time you have committed an unpardonable sin,” he said, fixing Amar with his terrible eyes. The pointed white beard looked strange with no turban above to balance it. “Only Hell lies before a boy like you. All the money in the house, that was to buy bread for your father and your family. Take off your
djellaba
.” Amar removed the garment, and the old man snatched it from him, looking inside the hood as he did so. “Take off your
serrouelle.”
Amar unfastened his belt and stepped out of his trousers, holding one hand in front of him to cover his nakedness. His father felt through the pockets, found them empty save for the broken penknife Amar always carried with him.

“Gone! All of it!” shouted the old man.

Amar said nothing.

“Where is it? Where is it?” The voice rose higher at each syllable. Amar merely looked into his father’s eyes, his mouth open. There were a hundred things to say; there was nothing to say. He felt as if he had been turned to stone.

With astonishing force the old man pushed him down onto
the mattress, and ripping the belt from the trousers, began to flail him with the buckle end. To protect his face, Amar threw himself over upon his belly, his hands cupped across the back of his head. The hard blows came down upon his knuckles, his shoulders, his back, his buttocks, his legs.

“I hope I kill you!” his father screamed. “You’d be better dead!”

I hope he does, Amar thought. He felt the lashes from a great distance. It was as if a voice were saying to him: “This is pain,” and he were agreeing, but he was not convinced. The old man said no more, putting all his energy into the blows. Behind the swish of the belt in the air and the sound of the buckle hitting his flesh Amar heard a cat on the terrace above, calling: “Rao … rao … rao …,” the cries of children, and a radio somewhere playing an old record of Farid al Atrache. He could smell the
tajine
his mother was cooking down in the courtyard: cinnamon and onions. The blows kept coming. All at once he felt he must breathe; he had not yet drawn breath since he had been thrown upon the mattress. He sighed deeply and found himself vomiting. He raised his head, tried to move, and the pain forced him back down. Still the rhythmical beating continued, whether with less intensity or more he could not tell. His face slid about in the mess beneath it; behind his eyelids he had a vision. He was running down the Boulevard Poëymirau in the Ville Nouvelle with a sword in his hand. As he passed each shop the plate glass of the show window shattered of its own accord. The French women screamed; the men stood paralyzed. Here and there he struck at a man, severing his head, and a fountain of bright blood shot up out of the truncated neck. A hot wave of fierce delight surged through him. Suddenly he realized that all the women were naked. With dexterous upward thrusts of his blade he opened their bodies; with downward thrusts he removed their breasts. Not one must be left intact.

The beating had stopped. His father had gone out of the room. The radio was still playing the same piece, and he heard his parents talking below. He lay completely still. For a moment
he thought perhaps he was really dead. Then he heard his mother enter the room.
“Ouildi, ouildi,”
she said, and her two hands began to touch him softly, rubbing oil over his skin. He had not cried out once during the beating, but now he found himself sobbing fiercely. To be able to stop, he imagined his father above his mother, looking on. The ruse worked, and he lay there quietly, submitting to the strong, gentle hands.

He was sick the next day, and the following. As he lay in his little room on the roof, his mother came many times with oil and rubbed his bruises. He was dizzy with fever and miserable with pain, and he had no desire for food, other than the soup and hot tea she brought him from time to time. The third day he sat up and played his
lirah
, the reed flute he had made. That day his mother let Diki bou Bnara, his pet rooster, out of his crate, and the magnificent bird wandered in and out of the room, strutting about, scratching and listening to Amar’s songs in his praise. But the third day at sunset, when Diki bou Bnara had been chased back into his cage and the muezzins had finished calling the
maghreb
, Amar heard his father’s footsteps approaching as they mounted the stairway to the roof. He quickly turned over to face the wall, pretending to be asleep. Then his father was in the room, speaking.

“Ya ouildi! Ya Amar!”

Amar did not move, but his heart beat fast and his breathing was difficult. The mattress moved as his father sat down by Amar’s feet.

“Amar!”

Amar stirred, rubbed his eyes.

“I want to talk with you. But first I want to be sure that you have no hatred. I am very unhappy with what you have done. Your mother and your brother and your sister have not had enough food these last days. That is nothing. That’s not why I want to talk with you. You must listen. Have you any hatred in your heart for me?”

Amar sat up. “No, Father,” he said quietly.

The old man was silent for a moment. Diki bou Bnara suddenly crowed.

“I want to make you understand.
Bel haq, fel louwil….
First, you have to know that I understand. Perhaps you think that because I am old I know nothing about the world, how the world has changed.”

Amar murmured a protest, but his father continued.

“I know you think that. All boys do. And now the world has changed more than ever before. Everything is new. Everything is bad. We’re suffering more than we’ve ever suffered. And it is written that we must suffer still more. All that is nothing. Like the wind. You think I have never been to Dar Debibagh, never seen how the French have their life. But what if I tell you I have, many times? What if I say I have seen their cafés and their shops, and walked in their streets, ridden in their buses, the same as you?”

Amar was astonished. He had taken it for granted that since the arrival of the French soldiers many years ago, his father had never gone outside the walls of the Medina, save to the country or to the Mellah to buy ingredients for his medicines which only certain Jews sold. Ever since he could remember, the schedule of his father’s life had been the same, had consisted of the five trips a day he made to the mosque, together with the hours he spent in conversation at the shops of friends en route to and from the mosque. Outside of that there was nothing, save the administering of his services when they were required. It was surprising to hear him say he had been to the French town. Amar doubted it: if he had been there, why had he never mentioned it until now?

“I want you to know that I have been there many times. I have seen their Christian filth and shame. It can never be for us. I swear they’re worse than Jews. No, I swear by Allah they’re lower than the godless Jews of the Mellah! And so if I speak against them it’s not because of what men like Si Kaddour and that carrion Abdeltif and the other Wattanine have told me. What they say may be the truth, but their reason for saying it is
a lie, because it is
politique
. You know what
politique
is? It is the French word for a lie.
Kdoub! Politique!
When you hear the French say: our
politique
, you know they mean: our lies. And when you hear the Moslems, the Friends of Independence, say: our
politique
, you know they mean:
our
lies. All lies are sins. And so, which displeases Allah more, a lie told by a Nazarene, who doesn’t know the true faith from the false, or a lie told by a Moslem, who does?”

Now Amar thought he saw where his father’s words were leading. He was warning him against associating with certain of his friends, with whom he sometimes played soccer or went to the cinema, and who were known to be members of the Istiqlal. His father was afraid Amar would be put in prison like Abdallah Tazi and his cousin, who had shouted: “A
bas les Français!
” in the Café de la Renaissance one night. How wrong he was, Amar thought with a tinge of bitterness. There was not even the remotest chance of such a thing. That possibility had been ruled out for him from the beginning because he spoke no French and could neither read nor write. He knew nothing, not even how to sign his own name in Arabic. Maybe he’ll stop talking now and go downstairs, he thought.

“Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

“I understand,” Amar replied, twisting the sheet between his toes. He felt better; he would have liked to go out and walk a bit, but he knew that if he got up he would no longer feel like going out. Through the iron grillwork of the window he could see the flat rooftops of a distant corner of the city, with a square of darkening sky above.

“It is worse for a Moslem to lie,” resumed his father. “And who among all the Moslems commits the greatest sin if he lies or steals? A Cherif. And thanks to Allah you are a Cherif….”

“Hamdoul’lah
,” murmured Amar, obediently but with feel ing. “Thanks to Allah.”

“Not only
Hamdoul’lah, Hamdoul’lah!
No! You must become a man and
be
a Cherif. The Cherif lives for his people. I Would rather see you dead than growing to be like the carrion you talk with in the street. Dead! Do you understand?” The old
man’s voice rose. “There will be no more Moslems unless every young Cherif obeys the laws of Allah.”

He went on in this vein. Amar understood and silently agreed, but at the same time he could not keep himself from thinking: “He doesn’t know what the world is like today.” The thought that his own conception of the world was so different from his father’s was like a protecting wall around his entire being. When his father went out into the street he had only the mosque, the Koran, the other old men in his mind. It was the immutable world of law, the written word, unchanging beneficence, but it was in some way wrinkled and dried up. Whereas when Amar stepped out the door there was the whole vast earth waiting, the live, mysterious earth, that belonged to him in a way it could belong to no one else, and where anything at all might happen. The smell of the morning breeze moving in across the walls from the olive groves, the sound of the river falling over the rocks as it rushed in its canyons through the heart of the city, the moving shadows of the trees on the white dust beneath, when he sat at midday in their shelter—such things had a particular message for him that they could not have for anyone else, least of all his father. The world where the old man lived, he imagined, must look something like a picture in one of those newspapers that were smuggled in from Egypt: gray, smudged, meaningless save as an accompaniment to the written text.