“Excuse me, Artifo. Have you been in my room?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“Who brought the wood, do you know?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was Fátima. Have you run out? I’ll bring some more.”
“No, thank you. It’s not that. Someone opened the window — it wasn’t you?”
“No, sir.”
“Who might have opened it?”
Artifo shrugged his shoulders, as if to ask why anyone would be worried about an open window.
“The owl has escaped,” he said. “Have you seen it?”
“No. Wasn’t it in its cage?”
“I left it out of its cage.”
“Ah. Why did you leave it out?”
“Because. . Forget it.” He turned around, holding his anger.
XLI
“Don’t forget we’re in Morocco,” said Mrs. Sebti, setting the salad platter within reach of her hostess. “Didn’t you know the law here forbids and punishes relations between men and women if they’re not married?”
“Only between men and women, eh?” said Mme. Choiseul, looking at Adil es-Sebti, the Moroccan husband.
Meanwhile Adil was telling Julie:
“Of course, but just like the sardine paste, the olive oil came from here. In Cádiz it was poured into amphorae made there and was shipped that way to Rome. The maquila was invented a long time ago, my dear friend. .”
From the ocean the sound of a motorboat rose up. They all heard it.
“Smugglers,” said Adil.
They sat awhile listening — the sound moved away from the coast — then returned to their conversations.
“You’re Muslim, aren’t you?” said Julie to Mrs. Sebti.
“It’s automatic, if you marry a Moroccan.”
“But it’s a bit absurd,” said Mme. Choiseul. “They don’t believe in anyone converting, unless for some reason it’s convenient for them. As in this case: in order to appropriate the enemy’s wife.” She smiled. “Clan mentality. Pardon me, Adil, but that’s how I see it.”
“What are the Colombian women like?” asked Mrs. Sebti, to include him in the conversation.
He was thinking of the owl.
“Excuse me?”
“Are the Colombian women terribly Catholic,” she smiled ambiguously, “or are they emancipated?”
“There are all kinds,” he answered.
“Like here.”
“Maybe. Maybe here they’re more traditional.”
“Are they like the Spanish?”
“And what is that supposed to mean?” Mme. Choiseul interrupted.
“So open,” smiled Adil.
“I couldn’t tell you,” he said. “I don’t know Spanish women very well.” He turned to Julie and said, “The owl is gone. The window was open, but I was sure I shut it.”
Mme. Choiseul was saying to Adiclass="underline"
“I agree, perhaps they aren’t any happier. Still, it seems to me that it’s worth trying.” Then she turned toward him to say, “The owl? Really?” She thought a moment. “You’re not missing anything else? Money, jewelry?”
“No. Nothing.”
“Artifo’s grandson. .” Mme. Choiseul decided not to continue; the others were still talking about the emancipation of the Moroccan people. Then: “I saw him prowling around your room. Let’s ask Artifo about it later.”
“No, no,” Adil was saying. “They should put all undocumented blacks in jail. They’re a real problem.”
Julie was furious.
“You may know about sardines and olive oil,” she said, “but your opinions on other matters won’t get you very far in Europe or anywhere else in the civilized world.”
“I don’t plan to change countries,” said Adil, smiling a bit bitterly, “nor religions, so what you’re saying is not a problem for me.”
Mrs. Sebti looked at her husband with disapproval.
“I think I want to go get some sleep. Shall we go?” she said to him.
Mme. Choiseul walked them to the door, while Julie, who seemed nervous, cleared off some glasses and took them into the kitchen. She returned with several bottles of beer on a tray.
“Have one?” she asked, and he stretched out his hand to take a bottle. “Christine’s asking Artifo about Hamsa, his grandson. It seems he’s the one who took the owl.”
Mme. Choiseul returned, her face showing satisfaction. She sat down near the fire and poured herself half a glass of beer.
“I think the mystery is solved,” she said.
XLII
They went on foot, following Artifo on the road between the high walls of the Saudi palaces, spiked with sharpened metal points and broken bottle shards, while the wind hummed along the electrical wires. The last wall ended abruptly in an avalanche of garbage that fell down the hillside toward the sea among a thin grove of cedars. They could hear the sea, aniline blue, crashing on the shore. Two crows and, farther down, two poor women wearing black kerchiefs and turquoise and tangerine-colored djellabas rummaged purposefully through the dump.
They passed a ravine and a large house with a broken well wheel, where the view opened gloriously onto the steep green slopes leading to the nipple of rock that was Cape Spartel.
They were walking now along an old cobblestone road across a clover pasture spattered with goat and sheep dung. Coming to a stone hut, painted blue and surrounded with brambles on which clothes were hung to dry, Artifo stopped and shouted someone’s name. There was no answer.
They climbed a path carved in the rock, toward the ruins of the Perdicaris mansion, then turned onto a downward trail. On a small flat horseshoe of rock they found the shepherd’s stone hut, its canvas roof blackened with tar and iron sulfate.
Neither Hamsa nor the sheep were there.
“He won’t be long,” said Artifo.
They sat down on the grass looking at the sea, which crashed against the piled rocks fifty meters below the cliff from which they had fallen.
Before long they heard the sound of hooves on stones. From between two crags came the herd of sheep. The first of them stopped a moment to look with curious, benevolent eyes at the strangers; then, pushed on by those who came behind, they trotted toward the stone and thorn corral.
“Derrrrr!” shouted Hamsa, who appeared at the rear.
When all the sheep were inside, he shut the door of the corral and counted them. Without hurrying, he went to greet his grandfather.
Artifo spoke to him in Maghrebi.
“Can you ask him if he took the owl?” he interrupted. Artifo looked annoyed and shook his head.
“Wait, wait.”
Soon Artifo began to interrogate the boy, who seemed indifferent. He heard Mme. Choiseul’s name pronounced, and finally Hamsa nodded his head. He looked out for a few seconds at the layer of fog that covered the Spanish coast, and then, in a tone quite different from that he had been using, began to explain. When he had finished talking, Artifo returned to the foreigners and said gravely:
“Yes, he has the owl.”
“All right,” he replied, without anger, “where is it?”
Another exchange in Maghrebi. Then Hamsa went to open the little door of the hut, lifting the cloth with his staff so that the visitors did not have to bend down too far to pass inside.
When his eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness, he saw the owl on its stake, its head folded on its chest. He turned toward Artifo, who seemed relieved.
“Did he tell you why he took it?” he asked.
The owl raised its head and looked around.
Hamsa made more explanations to his grandfather. The latter interpreted, addressing Julie instead of looking at him.
“He didn’t know it belonged to anyone,” he said. “He saw it in the window and since it was hurt, he thought it had stopped there for shelter, and he caught it.”
“And the cage?” he said. “Didn’t he see the cage?”
“He says he didn’t.”
“What did he plan to do with it?”
“Heal it and then let it go.”
“Can’t he sell it?”
Now Artifo looked at him.
“Owls aren’t worth anything.”
He’s lying, he thought. But what would he want with an owl?
“Really?”
“They’re not worth much,” Artifo corrected himself. “The children catch them sometimes to sell to an old woman or a Jew who’ll use them for witchcraft.”
He looked at Julie.
“What do you think?”
The shepherd put on an innocent face. He was obviously a simpleton, but it looked as if he meant well.
“If he thinks he can cure it,” Julie said, “why not leave it here so he can try?”
He didn’t think Hamsa was capable of curing it. Still, “Yes,” he said. “Why not?”
He turned to Artifo.
“I’ll leave it here.”
In parting, Julie gave her hand to Hamsa and he followed her example and then crouched in front of the owl and touched its head softly to say goodbye. The owl shook its head.
He came out of the hut behind Julie. The day was at its brightest, the sky was streaked with cirrus clouds from horizon to horizon. They began to walk, breathing the blue, lustrous air. Julie took his arm with affectionate authority.
“I think you did the right thing.”
“I suppose,” he said doubtfully.
Artifo came out of the hut hurriedly and caught up with them.
“Monsieur,” he said, “my grandson asks if you can spare a little money to buy meat for the bird.”
He snorted, but with a smile of indulgence. He took out a twenty-dirham bill from his pants pocket and gave it to Artifo, who returned hastily to the hut.
Julie took his arm again and they walked uphill without waiting for the old Moroccan.
“Did I already tell you,” Julie was saying, “that the nine thousand lions the Romans sacrificed at the dedication of the Colosseum were all Moroccan? They sent them over from Volúbilis. They managed to wipe them all out in less than two centuries.”
When they reached the high point of the road, he stopped and looked west, where the sea opened. With some sadness, he felt he might be seeing the place for the last time.