Such moderation however was no longer in keeping with the expansionist ideas of the French to which, of course, the Italians and Spanish must then respond. It was oil. But we were not told that at that time.
Under the influence of Islam, moderation, in any European sense, tends to disappear and one’s perspectives change, as they change in the desert. Rosie von Bek’s lovemaking grew in intensity as it diminished in duration—our pleasure, heightened by ‘the white maiden’, became so tuned to the few moments we could discover together during the day or night that it became like nothing I had experienced before. I lived each twenty-three hours and forty minutes for perhaps twenty minutes of the most exquisite passion. I began to demand more and more secrets of her adventures with El Hadj T’hami, of his harems full of slaves, more than fifty per cent of them French or Spanish, and two of them English or Irish, she was not sure. She described orgies and profound singularities of feeling, of subtle and irresistible cruelties. This further heightened my sensibilities, restored my masculinity, and made me forget the cold touch of God and Her deadly pleasures, deflected the cool breath of Death upon the back of my neck, even though I had every reason to be terrified of discovery. Perhaps I, too, could only feel my power at times of crisis. But it is preposterous to link such pleasures with the humiliation performed upon me by Grishenko and witnessed by Brodmann. I never felt the flagellant’s call to piety. The thought of the Pasha’s punishments brought no delicious quickening of the senses to me, merely appalled dismay.
She introduced me to nothing new. She told me he had made her call him by an Arab word. I asked her to use the word. It was familiar to me. She complained that he spent much time upon the feet. They were used, she supposed, to rather more calluses, even on their youngest girls. Some nights, she said, she had gone completely numb above the knees but was in an agony of unfulfilled sensuality below. It made her, she said, feel sick. The balance was too peculiar. She had not found the pierced girls strange, she said. They were rather beautiful and proud of their ornament, even those with the locks. She described, I said to her, the commonplace diversions of any barbarian king. Did she still find them stimulating?
‘In less boring company,’ she replied. Her flattery was delicious. She proclaimed my superiority over the master whose power I shared, for whom I spoke. She had become convinced of my fame as an actor and I was again of infinite interest to her. Yet she did not commiserate with me over my problems with The Hawk. In her first test-flight I had managed to pull the plane off the makeshift runway barely high enough to miss the single-storey houses of suburban Marrakech and, clearing the majority of the trees in the adjoining palmery, tried to ease her up towards the distant peaks of the Atlas. But the stick was useless. She wheeled and came about, almost under her own volition, dragged by a heavy engine towards the cars and pavilions of the Pasha and his entourage, barely passing over the contracting heads of his drivers and his horsemen and landing nose-first in a clump of soft red earth. The propeller snapped and flew off, one piece upon the heels of the other, towards the scattering onlookers, cut guy ropes and brought the Pasha’s pavilion collapsing to the ground before shearing through the wind-shield of his Rolls-Royce and burying themselves in the upholstery of the passenger seats; my wheels snapped off their axles and spun through groves of young palms, huts and sun-frames. They came to rest in a canal which, blocked, began to overflow, the water pouring along unseasonal courses to make marshy the Pasha’s camp-ground so that the Glaoui and all his favourites, trapped beneath the heavy soaking wool of the Berber tents, floundered now in mud, while the engine, detached from its struts, turned over and over, still pouring black smoke until it burst into flames about a yard from the Pasha’s surviving Mercedes and blew it to pieces just as I flung myself from wreckage flooded with gasoline, and stumbled into the Pasha. We bent against the sudden heat as The Hawk began to blaze and he stared with some incredulity upon the ruins of his favourite cars, his flagships. I understood his dismay. I reached out a friendly hand to him, in equal comradeship, to share this misfortune, as we people of the desert do. But he was unusually cool to me. He drew away, clearing his throat loudly.
Thereafter, I was forced to address my employer through Hadj Idder or some other third party, and it was clear I was at least for a while in disfavour. I believed he was debating the justice of blaming me for the catastrophe. He must eventually remember how I had warned him of the potential consequences of using an unsuitable engine in so finely tuned a machine as mine and I had also, he would recall as his temper subsided, taken the risk of flying the plane myself and only by a fluke not been killed. I watched the film. Mr Mix had recorded the whole event and was happy to let me watch it, although the Pasha had forbidden anyone but himself and his chosen guests access to the projector. I told him it was very useful. From it the Pasha would learn how the old engine, not my design, had created the problem. Once the new engines came through from Casablanca, then we could begin to fly in earnest. After all, The Hawk had proven herself an elegant machine. It was only the borrowed second-hand engine that had failed. I heard with some dismay through Rosie von Bek that El Glaoui’s only ungrowled reference to me was a joke that I had been nicknamed not ‘The Hawk’ by the Bedouin, but ‘The Parrot’. This was the Pasha at his most childish. Yuhattit, yuqallim, yehudim, as the poem went. It is not as simple as that. So he thought I was better at squawking than flying. For some reason this information goaded me to even more intense sexual demands, much to her glazed relish. But when she had gone, I felt wounded. I had served the Pasha loyally. He had delighted in my catalogue, with its coloured pictures. He had boasted of our factory. No visitor to Marrakech had left the city without at least one prospectus for the new aviation company. I had not shamed him with this minor set-back. It was hardly a failure, but an experiment. We had merely been impatient. I had, I admitted to myself, been unduly optimistic in my eagerness to provide myself with a means of escaping the Pasha’s employ. Thus, in one of my letters to him, I explained how we would be praised by history for our efforts, how our early frustrations would be likened to the struggle of the great prophets or the problems overcome by Wilbur and Orville Wright before their Flyer ever found the skies above Kitty Hawk. I took comfort in the fact that I still had my house and servants. Even a car, albeit a rather battered Peugeot, was still at my disposal. It was clear that my employer had not yet determined how to treat me. I consoled myself that, if he let me go, I had enough cash to live in Rome for some good while without undue anxiety. Only the still unmentioned movie reels kept me here. Rosie, I knew, would go with me. I had spent my time in Marrakech profitably.
One sign of my disfavour was the withdrawing of the Jews from my table. Only my young fan, M. Josef, dared the Pasha’s disapproval. Passionately he warned me to make good my losses and leave the city. This was typical greedy pessimism and caution. The aeroplane company was still a more than viable concern and I knew the Pasha to be a man of vision. He would recover from his disappointment in due course and continue the project. How could our master possibly advertise an air force and then not provide one, I asked. These are large decisions, the Jew said. Thereafter he became a little more cautious of me. Later he refused even to nod at me in the street. I realise now how the Jews were already plotting against me with my old nemesis. Mr Mix, sharing my anxieties no doubt, became more friendly, but he also showed too little faith in my abilities and instincts. He proposed we discreetly purchase tickets from the military authorities at the railway depot. We should make for Tangier and leave Morocco while we were ahead. It felt a little churlish to point out that I was scarcely ahead! I would be ahead when a new Hawk sprang into our city’s perfect sky. I would be ahead when the world’s newsreels and papers bannered my name, when Sikorski, Sopwith and Grumman were relegated to explanatory footnotes in the History of Aviation. I would be ahead when Il Duce welcomed me back to Rome, birthplace and capital of the New European Order, and showed me the factories he had built to manufacture my planes
.
How could I have anticipated the small-mindedness of the Berber? His willingness to bend his ear to any whispered calumny? I might have made T’hami the most honoured leader in Muslim Africa, respected by every European power, by America and the Orient. His Maghrib would have formed a true and lasting bastion against Bolshevism. His legions would have flown to battle as they had ridden all those centuries before in the service of the Moorish Emirs. Yet now their eyes would be directed not upon the Peninsula Christians but upon the waiting world of their fellow Muslims: men desperate for a sense of purpose, for noble leadership. Europe would not have demanded they be Christian, merely that they be Muslim gentlemen, like Saladin in The Talisman. When chivalry recognises chivalry there is rarely anything but agreement.
To a degree this anxiety did heighten my sense of danger and I longed to break the bonds of my indiscretion. Yet through missing the occasional appointment, through being on the knife-point of discovery several times, we only provided further piquancy to her lusts and, consequently, I was drawn into fascinated compliance with her insatiable and unsentimental sexual adventurings.
The suburban world sees the world of the sexual voyager as one of unrelenting sweats and groans, of bodies forever pumping and wriggling, of oddly marked buttocks, of mouths agape and eyes rolled back, of miscellaneous objets sportifs, but they imagine the world of pornography, not our world of erotic exploration. Our world provided as much conversation and irony, as much self-knowledge, as much concerned kindness and good humour as any human intercourse, for without it our couplings would be no more than congress between beast and beast. There would be no interest in it, no frisson. There would be only confirmation of previous experience and no true experiment. Sex is not merely a series of techniques whereby the woman learns to please her man. There is sharing. There is love. Even in Hell.
There is the sharing of power. And this is heaven. There is the equality of forces, the mutual education of the senses. The other condition is called in Prague and elsewhere ‘erotomania’, when even food and security are forgotten by those caught in its grip. The madness has driven many a man and woman to their death, especially in such circumstances as ours. Loti himself recounts the tale of how he stole a woman from the Sultan’s harem and how she paid, nonetheless, the ultimate price for her perfidy.
In France they recognise this disease, just as they recognise schizophrenia or megalomania, and of course it most often arises in divorce and murder cases, where it is sympathetically taken into account. This is one difference between the Q’ranic and the Napoleonic Codes especially puzzling to a cuckolded Musselman. As a believer in rationalism I continued to place faith in the Pasha’s fundamental sense of fair play. I believed he awaited only the arrival of the aero-engines before sending for me.
I had already written a number of apologies and explanations to my employer via Hadj Idder. These had cost me rather more in gratuities to the vizier than I was any longer receiving from my own petitioners. I was greatly surprised, long after my vigil had begun, to find Mr Mix also offering the vizier ‘message envelopes’ and expressing gushing interest in his fellow negro’s goodwill. Mr Mix no longer had his film camera. He had been shooting, he said, a special-interest scene over in the dungeons—a kind of artistic light and shade study, old and new Marrakech, he said. He had not meant any harm, but the Pasha’s Special Guard had come upon him and grown suspicious. They had confiscated his equipment and impounded most of his films. He was now in the process, like myself, of attempting to restore himself in the Pasha’s good offices. Thereafter we spent many hours together in the ante-room, yet I found him strangely unforthcoming about his own problems.
‘I ain’t complaining, Max, except the bastard has me in a double-bind. I can’t pay off my debt without that camera! We got to catch that train, Max. You can get us out. After all, I made you famous.’ He seemed more than a little alarmed when I told him I was not leaving without my films, but appeared reconciled to this profound, if unpalatable, justice, only adding darkly, ‘Remember, Max. Every day you wait on him makes T’hami more aware of his power over you. Every day gets you in deeper.’
How he had come by the fine modern camera and the elegant suits he had worn upon his arrival at the Pasha’s court (and still wore) he would not say. I guessed that he had won the heart of some Westernised Moroccan heiress or of some equally wealthy sheikh from whom his camera had been a parting gift. But Mix would not be drawn. He had that deceptively innocent and flattering habit of asking you always about yourself, always diverting attention from his own activities and thoughts. I think he was genuinely interested in what I had to teach him, but my efforts to learn from him, perhaps, were not equally encouraged.
Amiable as he was, any former intimacy that had existed between us was only occasionally evident. I have since known other naïfs with a similar uncalled-for defeatism, a lack of faith in their own outstanding abilities. Sometimes I thought no amount of encouraging back-patting, of reassurances as to the many opportunities open in the race world to a negro of his intelligence and natural breeding, would cheer him up.
About his film-making he had an honest sense of vocation. He had undoubted gifts in that direction. I tried to reassure him. I spoke once more of the lucrative market in America and this time he listened more thoughtfully. He told me he would consider my idea. We used English. All the other petitioners in the ante-rooms used French, Arabic or Berber, yet while we shared their uncertainties and enjoyed a common misery, they showed all that friendliness, and a generosity of spirit which is one of the great wonders of the Moroccan soul. I had never felt closer to these people. It is another trait, of course, they share with the British, this approval of failure as conferring some kind of moral superiority upon the failed.
Meanwhile, Rosie von Bek had begun to show signs of nervousness and her sexual demands, though quite as urgent, had a rather ritualistic quality at times. More than once she told me how T’hami would not let her leave, that he had insisted on guards going with her to Tangier, that her passport had been held by means of a bureaucratic error which the Pasha insisted he was doing everything to correct. Everything was impounded. Moreover she had begun to object to certain sexual ideas which, she had already told him, had not found any great popularity in the West since the days of Caligula. She said this admonition had stopped him temporarily until he had made her explain who Caligula had been, whereupon the Thane of Tafouelt had grinned and told her that he could see the similarity but, Allah be praised, he had no discontented Praetorians to cut short God’s purpose for him. As a result, he now had some nervous homosexual in his library, translating Gibbon into French while another limp-wristed half-caste found an innovative means of making some sense of the lives of the Caesars in the local dialect. She was not entirely joking when she told me El Glaoui was looking speculatively at his favourite horse these days. ‘I pity,’ she said, ‘his closer relatives.’ She thanked God that she had had the sense to keep quiet about the Decameron. So far she had been able to dissuade him from The Thousand and One Days of Sodom by assuring him that de Sade had not been a real Marquis.
Jerusalem Commands Page 60
