By the time they got to the crowded main street of the suburb that was Dradeb, they had reached an agreement on all the main points of finance; the Jilali remained an uncertain factor, but Thami was optimistic. «I’ll tell him seven hundred fifty and then we can go up to one thousand if we have to,» he said, figuring on a fifty percent split (which might not be so easy to get, he reflected, considering that with his five thousand pesetas the Jilali was not immediately in need of money.)
The cab drew up to the curb and stopped in front of a grocery store. Thami leaped out, disappeared down one of the twilit alleys, was back to make inquiries at the shop, and hurried ahead up the main street. The driver got out and walked in the other direction.
Left alone in the taxi, oblivious of the inquisitive stares of passers-by, Dyar relaxed voluptuously, savoring the first small delights of triumph. It was already a very pleasant thing to have Thami rushing around out there, intent on helping him.
Then he remembered the message the boy at the hotel had given him. He took it out of his pocket and snapped on the overhead light. «Llame Vd. Al 28–01,» it said, and he knew that was Daisy de Valverde’s number. The brief case in his hand, he got out and stepped into the grocery store. By now it was fairly dark in the street, and there was only one candle in here to add to the failing blue daylight that still came through the door. A placid Soussi sat behind the counter, his eyes almost closed. Dyar saw the telephone on a crate behind the broken Coca-Cola cooler. It was a dial phone: he was thankful for that. He had to strike a match to see the numbers.
Surprisingly, Daisy herself answered. «You villain,» she said. «You just got my message? I called hours ago. Can you come to dinner? All very informal, all very private, I might even add. Luis is in Casa. I’m in bed. Not really ill. Only sciatica. Just you and I, and I should love it if you could come. About seven? So we can talk? It’ll be wonderful to see you, darling».
He laid the money for the call on the counter; the Soussi nodded his head once. When he got to the taxi, the driver was back at the wheel, opening a pack of cigarettes. He got in, slammed the door, and sat waiting. It seemed a perfect solution to the problem of dinner; it would keep him completely out of the streets, out of the town.
Presently he saw Thami coming along toward the cab. He had someone with him. He came up, opened the door and leaned in. «I found him,» he announced, pleased with the financial arrangements he had just completed, on the way from the Jilali’s house.
«Fine. Now we go to your house,» said Dyar. «Stick him in front and let’s go».
The Jilali’s name was Zaki; he was a man of thirty-five (which meant that he looked fifty), unkempt in his attire and very much in need of a shave, so that to Dyar his appearance suggested an extra in a pirate film.
«Does he understand any English?» he asked Thami.
«That man? Ha! He doesn’t even understand Spanish!» Thami sounded triumphant. «Verdad, amigo?» he called to the one in front.
«Chnou?» said the Jilali, not turning around.
The street where Thami lived became increasingly bumpy and full of puddles whose depth it was impossible to judge; the driver suddenly stopped the car and announced that he would proceed no further. There ensued an argument which promised to be lengthy. Dyar got out and surveyed the street with distaste. The houses were ramshackle, some with second stories still in construction, and their front doors gave directly on to the muddy lane, no room having been left for a future laying of sidewalks. Impatiently he called to Thami. «Have him wait here, then. Hurry up!» The driver however, after locking the car, insisted on accompanying them. «He says we owe him sixty-five pesetas already,» confided Thami. Dyar grunted.
Thami entered first, to get his wife out of the way, while the others waited outside in the dark.
«You stay here,» Dyar said to the driver, who appeared satisfied once he had seen which house they were going to enter.
Soon Thami came to the door and motioned them in, leading the way through the unlit patio into a narrow room where a radio was playing. The mattress along the wall was covered with cheap green and yellow brocade; above it hung a group of large gilt-framed photographs of men wearing gandouras and fezzes. Three alarm clocks, all ticking, sat atop a hanging cupboard at the end of the room, but each one showed a different hour. Ranging along a lower shelf beneath them was a succession of dusty but unused paper cups which had been placed with care so as to alternate with as many small red figurines of plaster, representing Santa Claus; below and to both sides, the wall was papered with several dozen colored brochures, all identical, each bearing the photograph of an enormous toothbrush with a brilliant blue plastic handle. «DENTOLINE, LA BROSSE A DENTS PAR EXCELLENCE,» they said, over and over. The radio on the floor in the corner was turned up to its full volume; Om Kalsoum sang a tortured lament, and behind her voice an orchestra sputtered and wailed.
«Sit down!» shouted Thami to Dyar. He knelt and reduced the force of the music a little. As Dyar stepped over to the mattress, the electric light bulb which swung at the end of a long cord from the center of the ceiling struck him on the forehead. «Sorry,» he said, as the light waved crazily back and forth. The Jilali had removed his shoes at the door and was already seated at one end of the mattress, his legs tucked under him, swaying a bit from side to side with the music.
Dyar called across to Thami: «Hey! Cut off the funeral! Would you mind? We’ve got a lot to talk about, and not much time».
Out of the silence that followed came the sound of the baby screaming in the next room. Dyar began to talk.
XVII
What did it mean, reflected Daisy, to be what your friends called a forceful woman? Although they intended to mean it as such, they did not manage to make it a flattering epithet; she knew that. It was adverse criticism. If you said a woman was forceful, you meant that she got what she wanted in too direct a manner, that she was not enough of a woman, that she was unsubtle, pushing. It was almost as much of an insult as to say that a man had a weak character. Yet her closest friends were in the habit of using the word openly to describe her; «even to my face,» she thought, with mingled resentment and satisfaction. It was as if, in accepting the contemporary fallacy that women should have the same aims and capacities as men, they assumed that any quality which was a virtue in a man was equally desirable in a woman. But when she heard the word «forceful» being used in connection with herself, even though she knew it was perfectly true and not intended as derogation, she immediately felt like some rather ungraceful predatory animal, and the sensation did not please her. There were very concrete disadvantages attached to being classified that way: in any situation where it would be natural to expect an expression of concern for her well-being on the part of the males in the group, it was always the other women about whom they fretted. The general opinion, often uttered aloud, was that Daisy could take care of herself. And how many other husbands went off and left their wives for five or six days, alone in the house with the servants? It was not that she minded being alone — on the contrary, it was rather a rest for her, since she never entertained when Luis was away. But the fact that he took it so much as a matter of course that she would not mind — for some reason this nettled her, although she could not have found a logical explanation for her annoyance. «I suppose one can’t have one’s cake and eat it too,» she would say to herself at least once during each of his absences. If you had spent your childhood astride a horse, riding with your four brothers around the fifty thousand acres of an estancia, it was natural that you should become the sort of woman she had become, and you could hardly expect men to feel protective toward you. As a matter of fact, it was often quite the reverse: she sometimes found her male friends looking to her for moral support, and she always gave it unhesitatingly even though she was aware as she did so that at each moment she was moving farther from the privileged position modern woman is expected to occupy vis-a-vis her male acquaintances.