The Spider's House (57 page)

Beyond the small park with the iron bandstand was the beginning
of the street that led to the hotel where he had gone with the Nazarene man and woman. He did not know how he was going to get to see the man (nor did it even occur to him that he might not yet be back from Sidi Bou Chta, or that he might already be gone); he knew only that he had to see him, to set things straight between them, to hear him talk a while in his halting but learned Arabic, saying things that he knew would in some way comfort him in his unhappiness.

He went around the end of the park instead of crossing it: often there were policemen in there walking along its paths. At the end of the long avenue on his right a few cars were parked, but no person was in the street; it was like a flat stretch of stony desert shimmering in the sunlight. Before he got to the hotel a truck laden with cuttings of rusty tin drove slowly past. A blond Frenchman at the wheel stared at him curiously and yawned. The gray façade of the hotel looked as if it had been boarded up and vacated a long time ago. Its six windows with their closed shutters were like eyes asleep. In a loud voice he said:
“Bismil’lah rahman er rahim,”
and pulled the bell.

The woman who answered the door had seen him before, the day he had come with the two tourists and had helped them in with their luggage, but now she did not appear to recognize him. Her face was like a stone as she asked him in French what he wanted. A few paces behind her stood a large red-faced man who stared over her shoulder at him threateningly. When she found Amar did not speak French, she was about to shut the door; then suddenly something in her face changed, and although her expression remained unfriendly, he knew she had remembered him. She said something to the man, and called in a shrill voice: “Fatima!” A Moslem girl appeared, dragging a broom behind her, and said to him: “What is it?” The Frenchwoman seemed already to have known his answer, for she said nothing, and walked over to where some keys hung in a row against the wall. She examined them, exchanged a few words with the man, and spoke to the girl, who said to Amar: “Wait awhile,” and shut the door. He walked to the curb and sat down. His knees were trembling.

After not too long a time he heard the door open behind him. Quickly he stood up, but the long walk in the sun and his stomach with no food in it had made him dizzy. He saw his friend in the doorway, his arm raised in a gesture of welcome; then a cloud came swiftly across the sun and the street shot into its dark shadow. He leaned against one of the small dead trees to keep from falling. From a distance he heard the Frenchwoman calling abusive words—whether at him or at the tourist, he did not know. But then the Nazarene was at his side, leading him into the cool shade of the hotel, and although he felt very weak and ill, he was happy. Nothing mattered, nothing terrible could happen to him when he was in this man’s care.

The man eased him into a chair and in no time had wrapped a cold wet towel around his head. “
Rhir egless
,” he said to him. “Just sit still.” Amar did, breathing heavily. The room held the sweet smell of flowers that the woman had always had on her clothing. When he finally opened his eyes and sat up a little straighter, he expected to see her, but she was not in the room. The man was sitting on the bed near by, smoking a cigarette. When he saw that Amar’s eyes were open, he smiled. “How are you?” he said.

Before Amar could answer, there was a knock at the door. It was the girl called Fatima, bringing a tray. She set it on the table, went out. The man poured him a cup of coffee with milk, and handed him a plate with two rolls and some butter on it. As Amar ate and drank and looked around the dim room with its closed shutters, the man wandered back and forth, eventually coming to stand near him. Then Amar told him his story. The man listened, but he seemed restless and distraught, and twice he glanced at his watch. Amar went on until he had come to the end of his story. “And thanks to Allah you were here,” he added fervently. “Now everything is well.”

The man looked at him curiously and said: “And you? What can I do for you?”

“Nothing,” said Amar, smiling. “I’m happy now.”

The man got up and walked to the window as if he were about
to open it, then changed his mind and went to the other. There was a crack in the shutter through which he peered briefly.

“You’re lucky the police didn’t see you here in the Ville Nouvelle today,” he said suddenly. “Any Moslem in the street goes to jail. There’s been big trouble.”

“Worse than before?”

“Worse.” The man went to the door. “Just a minute,” he told him. “I’ll be right back.” He went out. Amar sat still for an instant. Then he stepped to the bed and carefully examined the pillow cases. Even in the half-light they were visible, the smears of red paint that whores and Nazarene women used on their lips, and the flower smell came up in a heavy invisible cloud from the bed. He went back and sat down.

The man opened the door, came in. It was only now that Amar saw the luggage stacked by the door.

“Well, I’m glad you came,” said the man.

“I’m glad too.”

“If you hadn’t come now I wouldn’t have seen you again. We’re going to Casablanca.”

It was all right, because the man was still there in front of him, and Amar could not really believe that having found him he would lose him so soon. If Allah had seen fit to bring them together once again, it was not so that they might talk for five minutes and then say good-bye. A car door slammed outside in the quiet street. “Here’s the taxi,” said the man nervously, without even going to peek through the shutter. “Amar, I hate to ask you again, but how about helping us once more with our luggage? This is the last time.”

Amar jumped up. Whatever the man asked him to do, he would feel the same happiness in obeying; of that he was sure.

As he carried the valises downstairs one by one, the Frenchwoman and the big man stared out at him through a little window from where they sat in their room, observing a hostile silence. When all the luggage had been packed into the car, and Amar, a bit dizzy again from the exertion, stood on the curb with the man, the woman appeared in the doorway, looking
prettier than Amar had ever seen her look, and walked toward them. She smiled at Amar and began to go through a pantomime of looking up and down the street fearfully, then pointed at him. Grinning back at her, he indicated that he was not afraid.

“Can I take you anywhere?” the man asked him. “We’re going out the Meknès road. I don’t suppose that will help you much—”

“Yes!” said Amar.

“It will?” said the man, surprised. “
Mezziane
. Get in front.” Amar took the seat beside the driver, who was a Jew from the Mellah.

The woman was already sitting in the back, and the man got in beside her. When they had driven out to the end of the Avenue de France, the man said: “Do you want to get out here?”

“No!” said Amar.

They went on, past the service station and down the long road leading to the highway. The high eucalyptus trees went by quickly, one after the other, and in each one the insects were screaming the same tone. The man and the woman were silent. In the mirror before him, a little higher than his eyes, Amar could see the man’s fingers caressing the woman’s hand, lying inert in her lap.

As they approached the highway, the man leaned forward and told the driver to stop. Amar sat quite still. It was stifling in the car now that no breeze came in through the windows. The man touched his shoulder. “E
l hassil, b’slemah, Amar
,” he said, holding his hand in front of Amar’s face. Amar reached up slowly, grasped it, and turning his head around, looked at the man fixedly. In his head he formed the words: “
Incha’Allah rahman er rahim.”

“I want to go to Meknès,” he said in a low voice.

“No, no, no!” cried the man, laughing jovially and pumping Amar’s hand up and down. “No, Amar, that won’t do. Even here it’s a long way for you to walk back, you know.”

“Back to where?” said Amar evenly, neither shifting his gaze
from the man’s eyes nor letting go of his hand, which the man moved up and down again violently, trying to withdraw it. His face was changing: he was embarrassed, annoyed, growing angry. “Good-bye, Amar,” he said firmly. “I can’t take you to Meknès. There’s no time.” If he had said, “I won’t take you with me,” Amar would have understood.

Without the motor going, the one endless rasping note of the cicadas overhead was very loud.

“My mother’s there,” murmured Amar, scarcely knowing what he said.

The woman, who seemed not to understand anything, smiled at him, raised her arms, pretending to aim a gun, and cried: “Boom! Bam!” She shifted her position and was behind an imaginary machine-gun. “Dat-tat-tat-tat-tat!” she said very quickly. When she had finished, she pointed her forefinger at Amar. The man nudged her, raising an eyebrow at the back of the driver’s head. Then he said something to the driver, who reached in front of Amar and opened the door for him, looking at him expectantly.

Amar let go of the man’s hand and stepped into the road, his head lowered. He saw his sandals sinking slightly into the hot sticky tar, and he heard the door slam beside him.

“B’slemah!
“ called the man, but Amar could not look up at him.

“B’slemah
!” echoed the woman. Still he could not raise his head. The motor started up.

“Amar!” the man cried.

The car moved ahead uncertainly, then it gathered speed. He knew they were looking out the rear window, waving to him, but he stood still, seeing only his feet in their sandals, and the black tar beside them. The driver turned into the highway, shifted gears.

Amar was running after the car. It was still there, ahead of him, going further away and faster. He could never catch it, but he ran because there was nothing else to do. And as he ran, his sandals made a terrible flapping noise on the hard surface of the highway, and he kicked them off, and ran silently and with freedorn.

Now for a moment he had the exultant feeling of flying along the road behind the car. It would surely stop. He could see the two heads in the window’s rectangle, and it seemed to him that they were looking back.

The car had reached a curve in the road; it passed out of sight. He ran on. When he got to the curve the road was empty.

—Taprobane, Weligama
16/iii/55

About the Author

PAUL BOWLES
was born in 1910 and studied mu-ron Copland before moving to th his wife, Jane. His first novel,
The Sheltering Sky
, was a bestseller in the 1950s and was made into a film by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1990. Bowles’s prolific career included many musical compositions, novels, collections of short stories, and books of travel, poetry, and translations.

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BOOKS BY PAUL BOWLES

NOVELS

The Sheltering Sky

Let It Come Down

The Spider’s House

Up Above the World

NOVELLA

Too Far from Home

SHORT STORIES

The Delicate Prey

A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard

The Time of Friendship

Pages from Cold Point and Other Stories

Things Gone and Things Still Here

A Distant Episode Midnight Mass and Other Stories

Call at Corazón and Other Stories

Collected Stories, 1939–1976

Unwelcome Words

A Thousand Days for Mokhtar

The Stories of Paul Bowles

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Without Stopping

Days: A Tangier Diary

LETTERS

In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles (edited by Jeffrey Miller)

POETRY

Two Poems Scenes

The Thicket of Spring

Next to Nothing: Collected Poems, 1926–1977

NONFICTION, TRAVEL, ESSAYS, MISCELLANEOUS

Yallah!
(written by Paul Bowles, photographs by Peter W. Haeberlin)
Their Heads Are Green and

Their Hands Are Blue

Points in Time: Tales from Morocco

Paul Bowles: Photographs (edited by Simon Bischoff)

P
AUL
B
OWLES (1965) BY
L
E
G
AUNT

Copyright

THE SPIDER’S HOUSE
. Copyright © 1955 by Paul Bowles. Preface copyright © 1982 by Paul Bowles. Introduction copyright © 2003 by Francine Prose.

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