The Spider's House (53 page)

“Come, come,” the voice said sharply. “You can’t just fall asleep like that.”

Moulay Ali had risen, and was standing above him. “Get up, and come with me,” he said. With a flashlight in one hand he led him down the stairs through the hot little room, to the back gallery, where a man lying on a mat in front of the door grunted and sat up as Moulay Ali stepped over him, saying softly:
“Yah, Aziz.”
They picked their way along the uneven floor.

Another door was opened; the inquisitive beam of the flashlight played briefly around its walls. There was the mattress. “I think that will take you through to morning,” said Moulay Ali.
“Incha’Allah
,” Amar replied. Then he thanked Moulay Ali with what sense and force he had left, and let himself drop onto the mattress. “ ’
Lah imsik bekhir
,” said Moulay Ali as he closed the door. The crickets were singing outside the window.

CHAPTER 32

There are mornings when, from the first ray of light seized upon by the eye, and the first simple sounds that get inside the head,
the heart is convinced that it is existing in rhythm to a kind of unheard music, familiar but forgotten because long ago it was interrupted and only now has suddenly resumed playing. The silent melodies pass through the fabric of the consciousness like the wind through the meshes of a net, without moving it, but at the same time unmistakably there, all around it. For one who has never lived such a morning, its advent can be a paralyzing experience.

Amar awoke, heard the cackling of geese against a soft background of bird song, listened for a moment to the unfamiliar sounds about the house—the closing of a door, words exchanged between servants and the noises they made in their work—and without even bothering to open his eyes, sank into a melancholy but comfortable state of nostalgia for his childhood, that other lifetime finished so long ago at Kherib Jerad. He remembered little events that he had not thought of since the day they had happened, and one big event: the time he had got into a fight with Smaïl, his only friend among the boys of the place, who instead of hitting him had all at once sunk his teeth in the back of Amar’s neck and refused to open his jaws until the men had come and beaten him. He still had the marks of those sharp white teeth; if the barber shaved his neck a little too high they were visible. And that night a delegation of the elders of the village had come with lanterns and torches to see his father, to apologize, and, which was much more important to them, to try and exact a word of forgiveness from Amar, for if Amar refused, everything would go badly for them until they brought an offering to the young Cherif who had been wronged by one of their number. And Amar did refuse, being still in a good deal of pain, so that the next day they came again with a beautiful white sheep which they gave his father in order that their crops and homes might be spared the displeasure of Allah. His father had been unhappy about it. “Why wouldn’t you forgive Smaïl?” he asked him. “I hate him,” Amar had replied heatedly, and there was no more to be said about it.

He remembered the river and the coves between its high clay banks where he had played; and the fine clothes he always
had worn on the bus trip to Kherib Jerad, for in those days there had been money, and his mother had spent a great deal of it keeping Amar in capes and trousers and vests and slippers made for him by the best tailors and cobblers in Fez. He remembered, and he listened to the birds singing near by and farther away, and it seemed to him that the sweet sadness he felt would never stop as long as he lived, because it was he; he had ceased being himself by having been cut off from his home. Now he was no one, lying on a mattress nowhere, and there was no reason to do anything more than simply continue to be that no one. Occasionally he slept for a moment, dipping softly downward, so that the horizon of being disappeared; then he came up again. It was like floating on a gentle ocean, following the will of the waves.

At one point, toward mid-morning, the door opened quietly and Moulay Ali looked in at him, on his way to his office in the tower, but it happened to be a moment when he slumbered; Moulay Ali shut the door and left him alone. Again when it was nearly noon he returned, and seeing him still lying there, decided to awaken him. Unceremoniously he shook him by the shoulder and told him it was very late; then he went and called Mahmoud, who came and led him, still more asleep than otherwise, to a room where there was a pail of cold water and a cake of soap. By the time he had washed thoroughly he was wide awake. When he re-emerged onto the gallery Mahmoud was just arriving with a huge copper tray which he set on its legs outside the bathroom door. “Eat here,” said Mahmoud. “It’s cooler.”

While Amar was eating his breakfast Moulay Ali came along the gallery. He looked weary and unhappy. “Good morning. How did you awaken?” he inquired, and without waiting for a reply he walked on toward his office. At the door he turned and said: “I may have news for you later.” Then Mahmoud came by to see if Amar had finished; since he had not, he stood looking down at him, watching him eat. “You can’t go out of the house, you know,” he told him suddenly. This information was not a surprise to Amar, nor did it interest him. There was nothing he wanted to do outside, in any case, no one to see, nowhere to go—
only the olive trees, the hot sunlight and the cicadas shrilling. He was quite content to sit in the house and bask in the listlessness that the day had brought.

Apparently Mahmoud sensed the apathy in which he was submerged, for when he lifted the tray to carry it away he said: “Come,” and led him to the big room where he had sat with the boys the other day. Now it was in even greater disorder, with newspapers lying open on the cushions, unemptied ashtrays here and there in the middle of the floor, and in a corner a small table holding a disemboweled radio, its parts spread out in confusion around its empty case. On one couch there were several copies of an Egyptian illustrated review. He sat down and began to thumb through them; in each one there were some pictures of Morocco. French policemen pointed to a long table laden with pistols and daggers, wounded Moslems were helped along a street by their countrymen, a child wandered in the ruins of a bombed-out building, five Moslems lay in the twisted postures of death in a Casablanca street, the traffic going by at only a step from their bodies, while a French soldier delicately indicated them for the photographer with the tip of his boot. It was hard to understand why these publications should be so strictly prohibited, when they had exactly the same photographs in them as the French magazines that were on sale outside the shops of the Ville Nouvelle. But then, was there any way of comprehending the laws made by the French, save to assume that they all had been made with the same express purpose, that of confusing, harassing, insulting and torturing the Moslems? On other pages there were pictures of Egyptian soldiers in smart uniforms driving tanks, inspecting machine guns, demonstrating to students the technique of throwing hand grenades, watching army maneuvers in the desert, and marching through the magnificent streets of Cairo in their khaki shorts. Everyone looked happy and healthy; the women and girls waved from the windows of the apartment houses. He turned back to the pictures of Morocco and studied them, taking a masochistic pleasure in remarking the contrast between the scenes of wreckage and death and the platoons of triumphant young soldiers.

He looked around the room; it seemed to him the very essence of the sadness and remoteness of Morocco.
Maghreb-al-Aqsa,
that was the name of his country—the Farthest West. Exactly, the extremity, the limit of Islam, beyond which there was nothing but the empty sea. Those who lived in Morocco could only look on with wistfulness and envy at the glorious events which were transfiguring the other Moslem nations. Their country was like a vast prison whose inmates had almost relinquished all hope of freedom, and yet Amar’s father had known it when it was the richest and most beautiful land in all Islam. And even Amar could remember the pears and peaches that had grown in the orchards outside the walls of Fez near Bab Sidi bou Jida before the French had diverted the flow of water to their own lands and left the trees to wither and perish in the summer heat.

The room smelled strongly of kerosene: someone had been careless in filling the lamps. He got up and wandered about listlessly. Yes, the room was Morocco itself; there was not even any way of seeing out, because the windows were all high above the level of anyone’s head. He walked to the door and stood listening to the long sound of the bees, wondering vaguely whether, if a man were to smash their nests and be stung, their poison would be powerful enough to kill him.

Presently Moulay Ali appeared in the doorway coming from the back gallery, and seeing Amar, approached and took him by the arm. “You shouldn’t have come here,” he told him. “I can’t let you go, and you’ll get very tired of being shut up here.” He led him back into the room and closed the door. “But the world’s very bad this day, very bad.” From his pocket he took Amar’s handkerchief with the money in it, the packet of notes the Nazarene lady had given him, and the little paper of kif he had bought for Mustapha at the Café Berkane. This last he dropped into Amar’s hand quickly and with great distaste. “What are you doing with that filth?” he demanded. “I thought you were a
derri
with some sense.”

Amar, who had forgotten the existence of the tiny bundle, was horrified to see it lying there in his own hand. “That’s not mine,” he exclaimed, looking down at it.

“It was in your pocket.”

“I mean, it’s for my brother. I got it for him.”

“If you loved your brother you wouldn’t put chains on his legs, would you?”

Amar had no answer. Moulay Ali had just put into clear words what he had only vaguely hoped: that the kif might indeed be a chain to bind Mustapha. If he pretended innocence he would seem abysmally stupid in the eyes of Moulay Ali; if he did not, he would probably think him incredibly wicked. Moulay Ali stood looking at him expectantly.

“We don’t get on very well,” Amar finally murmured.

But now Moulay Ali’s face was rapidly changing. “You mean,” he said incredulously, “that he likes kif and you give it to him to ruin his health and weaken his mind, so he’ll never be worth anything? Is that it?”

Amar admitted miserably that such had been his intention. Since he had told Moulay Ali the truth about everything else, he might as well tell it here too. “But he’s already not worth anything,” he added by way of explanation, “and besides I didn’t give it to him.”

Moulay Ali whistled, a long low sound. “Well, my friend, you’re just a young Satan. That’s all I can say. Satan a hundred percent. But here’s your money. Otherwise I may forget it.”

As he was about to go out, he spun around and raised his forefinger threateningly. “And don’t buy a gun with it,
smatsi?
Unless you want to spend the rest of your life in Aït Baza.” Seeing Amar’s forlorn expression, he turned all the way around. “Some friends will probably be coming tonight, if they don’t get killed or arrested first, and they’ll sing you a song. Do you know the one about Aicha bent Aïssa?”

“No,” said Amar, for whom the prospect of arrivals gave the day a sudden slight glow.

“It’s a very important song for you to hear.” Moulay Ali went out and shut the door.

Somewhat later an unkempt-looking boy brought in a tray of fruit and bread and honey, grinned at Amar, and went away again. Amar ate without appetite. “Ed
dounia mamzianache,”

Moulay Ali had said—the world was very bad today. It could scarcely be worse than yesterday, he told himself, yet forebodings of gloom filled his mind, and he was afraid. After he had eaten, he removed all the newspapers and magazines from the most comfortable mattress, and curled up there, staring for a long time at the blue sky through the window opposite, and finally closing his eyes. He stayed there all afternoon, sunk in a melancholy whose only antidote was the occasional memory of Moulay Ali’s promise that the evening would bring company and there would be someone to talk to.

And at the end of the afternoon, as the light faded from the squares of sky above, and life ebbed from the airless room, his sadness grew, became a physical pain in his heart and throat, and he felt that nothing could ever mitigate it—not whole days of weeping, and not even death. One day, years ago, when he and his father had been walking in the Zekak al Hajar where the beggars sat chanting, holding up their stumps of arms and displaying their disfigured bodies, his father had said to him: “When a man dies and is buried, he is finished with this world, and his friends give thanks that he has had the good luck to escape. But when a man crawls in the street without friends, without clothes, without a mat to lie on, without a piece of bread, alive but not really alive, dead but not even dead, that is Allah’s most terrible punishment this side of the fires of Jehennam. Look, so you will understand why charity is one of the five duties.” They had stopped walking and Amar had looked, but really only with fascinated repulsion at a man whose lips had grown out into an enormous purplish pouch as big as his whole head, and he had thought in his childish brain what a strange being Allah must be, to play such odd tricks on people.

Now he remembered what his father had said. This misery was what would soon be happening to him and to everyone else, but there would not be between them even the bond forged by suffering which made the beggars help one another to get through the streets (the ones with twisted legs creeping ahead like sick dogs, leading the blind ones), because each one would hate and fear his fellow, and no one would know which
were the spies and which were not, for the simple reason that any one of them, given the appropriate inducement, or subjected to the proper torture, was capable of betraying the others.

For a while the objects in the room remained visible, held together by the lingering light, then the texture of things disintegrated, turned to ash, darkened, and finally dropped into total obscurity. Amar lay still, devoured by self-pity. To be a prisoner in a lonely house in the country was bad enough for anyone used to the Medina and its crowds, but to be left alone in the darkness without even the possibility of making a light, that was really too much. But now he heard footsteps approaching along the gallery, and an instant later someone opened the door. A flashlight played across the mattresses, picking him out where he lay. There was an exclamation of surprise from Moulay Ali. “Are you asleep in there?” he cried. Amar said very clearly that he was not. “But what are you doing in the dark? Where’s Mahmoud? Hasn’t he brought a lamp?” Amar, for whose wounded ego this solicitousness was balm, replied that he had not seen Mahmoud for several hours—not since his breakfast, to be exact.