"What a wonderful place to write about Tangier."
Townes looked at him. "Yes," he said sorrowfully, "there is a novel down there. I've thought about it a lot-" He turned away and grinned.
They shook hands, then Robin walked down Townes' driveway to the street. With the tattered copy of St. Augustine stuck in the back pocket of his jeans, he wandered down from the Mountain to the medina, the smells, the crowd.
The Socco Chico, jammed with tourists, seemed especially intense that night. Hot, sweaty bodies scantily attired-they blurred before Robin's eyes. Pimples, bruises, vaccination scars-impossible to keep them straight. It's the carnival of summer, he thought, an endless moist parade, all strut and rub and furious scramble to insure oneself a delirious night.
The Socco, which he'd always loved for its overheated sense of life, turned sour for him suddenly as he sat in Cafe Centrale. How many of these bodies, he asked himself, do I really want to touch? How much of this collective genitalia do I care anymore to fondle and grasp? The same of dope and drink, the intoxicants that prefaced all encounters. How much more hashish am I prepared to smoke?
He felt strange becoming so morose, particularly in the Socco, which was his circus, his TV. The whores in their high cork shoes, the hustlers in their clinging jeans-for ten years they'd been his clowns, and their antics his release. Perhaps, he thought, my trouble is I've tasted everything here too long.
Riding for a fall-what kind of shit was that?
Townes was a voyeur who sat up on the Mountain watching people play. Still what he'd said was interesting-his point about letting go. Patrick Wax had said the same thing at the picnic, that he lacked the instinct to go in for the kill. Were they right? Was that his trouble? Would things be better for him if he began to use his column like a knife?
He was so confused by then, and so sick of the Socco, that he left his table abruptly and dragged himself through the teeming streets. People clutched at him as he passed, urged him to sit with them, tell stories, score sex or dope, but he pushed them away and in a surly mood entered the Oriental and climbed its rotting stairs.
He thought of his room, in summer, as a hotbox, a place suitable for punishment in a Japanese prisoner-of-war-camp film. Even with the windows open he feared suffocation. He stood in the middle listening to the medina sounds-Arab songs blasting from a hundred radios, the crying of a thousand babies, the screams of ten thousand cats in heat. Barking dogs, children fighting in the courtyards-all the sounds of the quarter, echoing, rebounding off the walls, seemed to roll in upon him in a great, pained, undulating wail.
He stripped off his clothes and threw them on the floor. His body too was sweaty-tomorrow he'd have to go to the beach and bathe. Then, naked, he began to pace about, giving abrupt little kicks to his shabby belongings, his broken phonograph, his piles of clippings, his teapot, his old photographs-all the junk that documented a decade. He'd throw the whole lot of it out one day, live in an empty room with nothing but a sweater and a comb. He'd order the barber to chop off his curls, then return to North America and find himself a job. Perhaps he'd work as a maintenance man on the Alaska pipeline, live with the hardhats in frigid dormitory rooms. He'd work on the tundra wastes, eat flapjacks for breakfast, moosemeat steaks at night, and then, punished by hard labor and the boring company of narrow-minded men, he would find solace in weariness and deep, undisturbed, earned sleep.
"Oh-shit," he whimpered, kicking at his discarded jeans.
"Shit again!" This time he yelped with pain. He'd stubbed his toe on something hard. It was that damn book that Townes had given him. He picked it out of his pants and flung it at his bed. Then he went to the sink, opened the faucets, stood on one foot like an ostrich, and nursed his swelling toe. When it felt a little better he limped back to the bed, and there he found Townes' note.
Dear Robin: Because I know you're lazy, and hate to read serious things, I've devised a little game to get you started on this book. Turn to the third part of these Confessions and you'll see I've marked some lines. (I've also changed a word or two, just to smooth things out.) All you have to do is read what I've marked, leaving out what's in between. You'll get the point pretty fast, I think. Yrs, M.T.
Well, he thought, that was considerate of Townes, to go to so much trouble. He turned to Part Three and followed his instructions. What he read came out like this:
I went to Carthage, where I found myself in the midst of a hissing cauldron. I muddied the stream of friendship with the filth of lewdness and clouded its clear waters with hell's black river of lust. And yet, in spite of this rank depravity, I was vain enough to have ambitions of cutting a fine figure in the world.
I was caught up in the coils of trouble, for I was lashed with the cruel, fiery rods of jealousy, suspicion, anger, and quarrels. I enjoyed fables and fictions, which could only graze the skin, but where the fingers scratch, the skin becomes inflamed. It swells and festers with hideous pus. And the same happened to me. I exhausted myself in depravity, in the pursuit of an unholy curiosity. I sank to the bottom-most depths of skepticism and the mockery of devil worship.
I was at the top of the school of rhetoric. I was pleased with my superior status and swollen with my conceit. But I behaved far more quietly than the "wreckers," a title of ferocious devilry which the fashionable set chose for themselves. I kept company with them, and there were times when I found their friendship a pleasure, but I always had a horror of what they did when they lived up to their name. "Wreckers" was a fit name for them, for they were already adrift and total wrecks themselves. The mockery and trickery which they loved to practice on others was a secret snare of the devil, by which they were mocked and tricked themselves.
These were the companions with whom I studied the art of eloquence at that impressionable age. I fell in with a set of sensualists, men with glib tongues who ranted and raved. Yet the dishes they set before me were still loaded with dazzling fantasies, illusions with which the eye deceives the mind. I knew nothing of this at the time. I was quite unconscious of it, quite blind to it, although it stared me in the face.
For nearly nine years were yet to come during which I wallowed deep in the mire and the darkness of delusion. Often I tried to lift myself, only to plunge the deeper.
Well, he thought, this is heady stuff. The connections to himself, Tangier, his column, the Socco, and the Mountain crowd did not escape him; in fact, he was fascinated. And thinking these Confessions might yield up some secret about his destiny, he opened the book at its beginning and read on and on. Not until hours later, when he'd finished the confessional part and had come to St. Augustine's conversion, did he droop his head, extinguish the bare bulb above his bed, close his eyes, and begin to dream of boys in woolen shorts.
The next morning he was surprised to find himself elated, even though it was Thursday and his column was due at noon. He bounded out of bed, attempted a set of vigorous calisthenics, then panting and wet stood by his window and breathed deeply the rank medina air. He didn't bother to dress but walked nude to his table to give his Olivetti its weekly blowing off. He choked on the dust but stood his ground, disgusted, for there were ants climbing all over the keys of the machine. He squashed them with his forefinger, one at a time, then wiped off their remains on the wall. Finally, when everything was clean, the table crumbed and cleared of chocolate bar tinfoil bits, odds and ends of unfinished poems, and rinds of cheese, he sat down, still naked, willed himself to work, scratched at his ankles, and with flashing fingers began to type: