“I don’t suppose you’d have a little weed at your pension?”
XXXIII
Attup let them in with professional discretion.
“Excuse the mess,” he said, before opening the door of his room.
The sheets were twisted up and some books lay scattered on the floor around the bed — travel guides and novels. A Moroccan ashtray full of loose tobacco and cigarette butts. Some soiled newspapers and magazines spread out at the foot of the radiator, where the owl sat. The air smelled damp.
“And this?”
A naked bulb, his reading lamp, was stuck to the wall with a piece of insulating tape.
“My own design. You can sit on the bed.”
“Yes, there’s nowhere else.”
Now the two of them were on the bed, face to face, she with her head propped on one hand. He was emptying a cigarette. He reached out his arm to dump the tobacco in the ashtray, and took his nabula of kif from under the mattress. He untied it and began to fill the cigarette.
“And that?” she said, pointing to the pouch—“is that your own design too?”
“No, no. It’s traditional.”
He stood up to dump the ashtray in a wastebasket and came back to sit on the bed. He wet the cigarette with saliva and lit it.
XXXIV
While the kif cigarette burned down, moving back and forth between their mouths, tracing arabesques of blue smoke in the trapped air, he imagined that he was spreading cream on Julie’s thigh, massaging it in with both hands.
“Oh, God,” she was saying.
He was kissing her buttocks, passing his tongue over the dangerous places. He slid up her spine to her neck, biting a thick lock of her hair.
“Oh, I’m soaked.”
The nipples of her smooth white breasts were curiously inverted; they grew inward; on squeezing them between his lips they emerged for a moment then sank back in the milky flesh like the retracting horns of a snail.
“It was healthy when I bought it, I’m sure of it.”
“Forget it — what can you do?” she said, looking at the owl. “But it’s not good here — in this room, with this humidity. It doesn’t look healthy.”
“Yes. It would be better in the mountains.”
“Why don’t you give it to me?”
“If you like.”
“I’m not sure.” She passed him the cigarette, and he put it out in the ashtray. “Maybe you can come with it.”
“You think?”
“I’m sure.” She looked at her watch. “But now I’d better go. Christine might worry. See you tomorrow?”
“I hope so.”
“I’ll come to look for you.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
A quick kiss on the mouth, no saliva.
“Au revoir, beauté,” Julie said to the owl.
“See you tomorrow,” he said.
Once alone in the room, he tore off a sheet of paper from the block he kept in his suitcase and began to write a letter home asking for money. Later in the night he had a typical dream of guilt: Swimming in a river, he saw people walking on the water, though he had to struggle hard just to stay afloat.
XXXV
Not Julie but Mme. Choiseul came to look for him the next morning. Attup led her up to his room.
“Julie’s gone with Fátima to the public bath for a massage,” Mme. Choiseul explained. “She asked me to pick you up. Would you like to spend a few days with us?”
They walked down toward the Avenida de España, where she had parked the car. He put his suitcase in the seat behind her and placed the owl’s cage on top of it.
“In Morocco, people don’t like to get to the bottom of things. No one wants to talk about something that seems wrong to us,” said the voice of Nadia Yassin, the daughter of the fundamentalist leader imprisoned in Slá, who was being interviewed by Radio Medi-1.
“Let’s be clear,” said the interviewer. “What you people want is revolution.”
“No,” said the young woman. “But we do want radical change. And we don’t just want to change things; we want to change mankind.”
“What do you think?” asked Mme. Choiseul, turning off the radio.
“She’s not stupid.”
“She sounds like a French high-school student.”
They drove on in silence, getting farther away from the center of Tangier, heading toward the Zoco de los Bueyes. They went down California and kept on toward Monte Viejo on Vasco da Gama.
The little Pekingese met them at the front door.
“Follow me. I’ll show you your bedroom. I hope you like it.” She smiled.
The bedroom was in the lowest part of the garden, a little cottage in Moorish style, flanked by Roman cypresses. Inside, it was generously carpeted; cushions of various sizes and colors were piled on the bed. In one corner, a small fireplace waited to be lit. Through an arched window one could see, in the distance, the hump of Mount M’Jimet, dotted with little cubical houses.
“What do you think?”
“It’s wonderful.”
Mme. Choiseul set the cage down on a small inlaid table near the window. The owl was listening attentively, now with one ear, now the other, to what was going on around it.
“This is the life,” he said to himself when he was alone, lying on the bed with his hands crossed behind his head. Beyond the window mullion and the cypresses, hundreds of starlings and sparrows were crying and streaking the blue-gold of afternoon.
“It can’t last,” he thought.
XXXVI
Julie, with her small prow-like face, walked beside him on the white sand beach, which faded in the distance to the south of Ras Achakar. There lay the ruins of Cotta, she said, where, for centuries, the Romans had pressed olives for oil and seasoned sardines and tuna.
“This is where they cut off the heads, entrails, fins, and tails, which they used to make fish paste,” Julie explained. “The floor was built of perfectly hewn flagstones — there are still some fragments.” She wanted to continue the excavations that Princess Rúspoli had started in the 1950s and that the Moroccan government had forced her to abandon after Independence.
They had walked past a large heap of stones, each one numbered (by order of the deceased princess, Julie said) like pieces of a huge jigsaw puzzle, which one day would all fit together to rebuild the Roman baths. Over the sea hung a hazy castle of dust, its colors mixing and changing hue in the western sun.
“Maybe I’ll come back next year,” Julie said. “But I’d need a permit from His Cherifian Majesty, and I don’t think I’ll get it, unless Christine talks to somebody in Rabat. At any rate, next week I’m going to start a course in Maghrebi Arabic. Without the language, I don’t think I can accomplish much.”
“I envy you.” He took her hand.
Julie gave him a solemn smile.
“Your wife—,” she said then, without looking at him, “doesn’t it bother you to cheat on her?”
“Yes, but I don’t have any choice.”
“That’s hard for me to understand.”
In the past, a phrase from Chamfort had worked for him:
“Laura,” he said, “is the kind of woman it’s impossible not to cheat on.”
“What does that mean?” Julie asked, somewhat offended.
“That she’s the kind of woman it’s impossible to leave.” He smiled.
“Oh, I see,” said Julie in a low voice. Then, between her teeth: “Imbécile.”
She stopped, turning on her heels.