The Spider's House

by Paul Bowles

  Today, without the customary hubbub, and without the usual unceasing noise of the radio (for the electricity had not yet been turned back on), the room in the rear seemed less a refuge than a small dungeon. He could hear the chugging sound of the buses’ idling motors out in the square. He ordered his tea. While he was waiting, a boy came through the café carrying a huge tray of pastries, and stuck his head in the door. For some reason, perhaps because the boy looked vaguely like the friend who had ridden past that day on his bicycle and given him a ride, or perhaps because a man had just walked through the outer room whom he had often seen in cafés selling small amounts of kif clandestinely, Amar found himself thinking of the day he had determined to run away. Each time he reviewed that incident in his mind, he was conscious of a still active desire to avenge himself. At the same time he knew that he would never lift a finger against Mustapha, any more than Mustapha himself had done against him. It had to be done some other way. Allah had decreed that Mustapha should be born first. Therefore it was Mustapha’s duty vis-à-vis his brother to compensate for that superiority with extra kindnesses. Mustapha had never understood that; on the contrary, he had used his position tyrannically, always to extort further offerings. Injustice could be redeemed only by successful retaliation. He stood up and peered around the doorway into the next room: the kif seller was talking in a corner by the window. The man had to be extremely careful in establishing the identity of his customers, or he could fall into the hands of an agent for the police. It was well known that the French had suppressed the sale of kif in the hope of getting the Moslems into the habit of drinking spirits; the revenue for the government would be enormous. The fact that the religion of the Moslems expressly forbade alcohol was naturally of no interest to them: they always befriended those who broke the laws of Islam and punished those who followed them.

  At this moment something strange happened: a man and a woman, both Nazarenes, came across the footbridge and went into the first room. An instant later they appeared in the second room, staring about shamelessly for a table at which to sit. For a moment they seemed to have found one that pleased them, then the woman said something and the man walked over to the doorway where Amar stood and peered inside the small room. It was when he looked out the window and saw the pool that he seemed to be deciding to install the woman in the inner room. Amar sat down quickly at his table, for fear they might choose that one to sit at. The qaouaji arrived with his tea. As he was leaving, the man called to him in Arabic, and ordered two teas and two cabrhozels. Now Amar looked closely at the man, decided he was not French, and felt the wave of hatred that had been on its way recede, leaving a residue of disappointment and indifference tinged with curiosity. When after a moment he realized that the man and the woman were both aware of his scrutiny, he turned quickly away and stared out at the pool, sipping his tea slowly. A little later he looked back at them. They were talking together in low voices and smiling at each other. The woman was obviously a prostitute of the lowest order, because her arms and shoulders were completely uncovered, and the dress she wore had been cut shockingly low in the neck. As if to confirm Amar’s verdict, she presently took from her handbag a small case containing cigarettes, and put one in her mouth, waiting for the man to light it for her. Amar was astounded at her brazenness. Even the French women in the Ville Nouvelle did not go to quite such extremes in their lewd dress and behavior. And even the most disreputable prostitute would have taken the care to keep herself from being so badly burned by the sun. This woman had obviously come from working in the fields: she was completely brown from having been out in the open for a very long time. Yet here she was, wearing gold bracelets. His intuition now told him that he had made a mistake in his evaluation of her. She was probably not from the fields at all, but had had some misfortune which had obliged her to walk for many days in the sun’s glare, and now she was ashamed, and wanted to hide herself from the crowd until she should be white again, which was why she had sought out the empty back room in which to sit. If this were the case, she would not be pleased to catch him staring at her. He sipped his tea assiduously and looked out the window. Soon he rose again and glanced through the doorway into the corner where the kif seller had been. The man had sat down, evidently on the invitation of a client, and was having a glass of tea. Amar walked over and spoke to him. The man nodded, handed him a little paper packet. Amar paid him, returned to his seat, and resumed his surreptitious examination of the two tourists. (Not being French, they fell perforce into that category.) What peculiar people they were. he reflected; the most foreign of all the foreigners he had seen. Their clothing was unusual, their faces were different, they laughed almost constantly, yet they did not seem to be drunk, and the most unaccountable detail to Amar was the fact that although, judging by all the small external signs by which one can judge such things, these two were interested in each other, the man never once seized even the woman’s hand, never leaned toward her to touch her or smell her, nor did she, in spite of her otherwise lax conduct, once lower her eyes, find it impossible to meet his gaze. She merely sat there, as though she were unconscious of the difference in their sex. At the same time Amar divined an intensity in the air, as it were, between the two, a factor that for him weighed more heavily than their outward demeanor, which, after all, could have been entirely simulated. He had watched a good many French couples together, and while their definition of accepted public deportment included certain excesses which were unthinkable with Moslems, the two over-all patterns did not differ radically; French behavior contained no glaring disparities. But he found this couple basically incomprehensible.

  When he had finished his tea, he decided to go outside and walk around the pool, but the small door had not been opened for a long time, and the bolt was rusty. This occupied him for a while, until he had succeeded in hammering it back with a stone which lay in the corner near by, perhaps kept there for that purpose. Then he opened the door, breaking all the spiderwebs, and stepped out. The sun was painfully hot in the airless space here between the café and the high city wall, and the pool was a malignant mirror magnifying its white light. He knelt down to feel the water: it also was hot. A dragonfly had skimmed too close to the surface and wet its wings; it made desperate contortions in its struggle to rise from the water. He watched it for a moment with interest, then, feeling sorry that it was about to die, he rolled his trouser-legs up as high as he could and lowered himself into the pool. It was rather deeper than he had imagined; the water came up to his thighs. The floor felt slippery and unpleasant on the soles of his feet, but he waded out, put his hand under the dragonfly and lifted it up. Then he stood there in the water looking at it and grinning, because its two enormous eyes seemed to be returning his stare. Perhaps it was thanking him. “How great are the works of Allah,” he whispered. When the hot sunlight had dried its wings, it moved them a few times, and suddenly flew off into the air toward the ramparts. Amar climbed out of the pool, rolled his trouser-legs down, and wrung them out. Then he sat by the edge of the pool in the sun letting them dry. It seemed to him that in the distance, coming up over the roofs out of the dusty city, he could distinguish the clamor of human voices. But it was far away, and it sounded a little like the wind blowing through a crack in the door. If the procession came through Bab Bou Jeloud he wanted to be in the outer room to watch, and if there were a fight, a few of the French police were bound to be knocked down; that was what he wanted to see. It was always the Moslems who were pushed about, beaten and killed, even, as had happened today before his eyes, when it was Moslems who did the beating and killing. For a moment he felt a belated surge of sympathy for the two mokhaznia back in the alley near the lawyers’ booths. Perhaps they had not known when they accepted their jobs with the French that they would be required to inform against their own people, and when they discovered it, it was already too late, they knew too much for the French to let them go free, and they were caught fast.

  But in that case, he argued, it was th
eir duty, even under pain of death, to refuse to carry out orders. How much more heroic it would have been for them to die as martyrs at the hands of the French than to be shot down shamefully like animals, their bodies cursed and spat upon by their brothers! He knew that a Moslem who died on the battlefield went directly to Paradise, without waiting for judgment, but he was not well documented on the fate of traitors. However, it seemed logical that they should be consigned straightway to the jurisdiction of Satan. He shuddered inwardly at the thought of what awaited anyone who landed in Hell. It was not the idea of the suffering that seemed fearful, but the certainty of its eternal continuation, no matter how repentant the victim might be. Suppose a man’s heart changed, and he longed for Allah with all his might. The pain would lie, not in being forever roasted on a spit like a mechoui of lamb, or in being torn limb from limb the way the friends of freedom said the French had done to the Moslems at Oued Zem, but in the knowledge that never under any conditions could he be vouchsafed the presence of Allah. Death is nothing, he told himself, looking between his almost closed eyelids at the blinding sun reflected in the pool; the fortunate man is the one who can make of his death a glorious event that people will not forget. It occurred to him that perhaps that was why Mohammed Lalami had been so smug yesterday: he might already have known that his brother was going to be executed by the French. Some day, he thought, Mohammed would lie in wait for him and catch him unawares, and he would have a real fight on his hands. It might be a good idea, if ever he should catch sight of Mohammed, to go up to him and offer him his hand in apology. Probably Mohammed would not accept, but it might soften his heart and prepare the ground for a future reconciliation.

  The sounds of shouting and singing were coming louder, and his trousers were nearly dry. He got up and went inside.

  BOOK 3

  THE HOUR OF THE SWALLOWS

  To my way of thinking, there is nothing more delightful than to be a stranger. And so I mingle with human beings, because they are not of my kind, and precisely in order to be a stranger among them.

  —SONG OF THE SWALLOW: THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS

  CHAPTER 15

  Mornings, Stenham and Moss were in the habit of sending little notes to one another via the servants. Since his apartment gave on the garden, Moss would hand his missives to old Mokhtar, the man who swept the walks and tended the flowers outside his door; Mokhtar would go up to the main lobby and pass them to Abdelmjid, who had charge of vacuum-cleaning the rugs of the public rooms. The year before, it had been Abdelmjid himself who would climb up into the tower and deliver the envelopes at Stenham’s door, but recently he had married Rhaissa, a jolly black girl whose mother had been a slave in the house of á former pacha, and since she cleaned the three rooms of the tower every day, it was now she who came and knocked at his door when there was a note that had been sent up from Room Fourteen for him.

  The heart’s desire of every modern Moroccan girl is to have her incisors and canines capped with gold. Originally Rhaissa’s teeth had been healthy enough, but when her mother had found a husband for her, she had naturally taken her to have the necessary embellishments installed in her daughter’s mouth before the marriage. The work had been done by a native specialist in the Medina, and ever since, poor Rhaissa had suffered a great deal. Each day she insisted on showing Stenham her inflamed gums; in her opinion the dentist had worked an evil spell on her during the treatment because her mother had demurred at paying the price he had asked. But now, out of her own earnings, she had paid every franc herself, and still she had pain. Stenham came to dread her morning invasion of his quiet; he had bought her a packet of sodium perborate, and she was using it regularly, first having emptied the powder from the pharmacist’s envelope into a special paper covered with magic symbols she had got from a fqih. She thought it was doing some good, but she intended to go back to the fqih soon and get another paper with a different set of symbols.

  “I want to help the poor girl,” he told Moss, “but I can’t go on looking into that red crocodile mouth every damned time she comes in to make the bed.”

  It was one of those mornings when the city steamed quietly under the strong sun. A haze of wood smoke and mist hung above the flat terraces, enclosing and unifying the sounds that rose from below, until when they reached his window they were as monotonous and soporific as the uninterrupted humming of bees. Between ten and eleven o’clock in such weather the city sounds always took on this strange character. He wondered if perhaps it had to do with the direction of the wind, since the one recognizable noise was that of a distant sawmill somewhere over toward Bab Sidi bou Jida. A few sluggish flies would sail into the room and go to sleep on the tile floor in the sun. During this hour or so, Stenham would abandon his work and, putting two chairs together face to face in front of the windows, would Stretch out voluptuously in the hot sunlight, from time to time raising himself to scribble a few words in a notebook he kept lying beside him. He had to be sure to lock the door first, to prevent Rhaissa from bursting in on him and finding him naked; she had not completely mastered the difficult task of remembering to knock before turning the door handle.

  Today however she did knock, and he struggled up and into his bathrobe, muttering: “Who the hell?” Any disturbance before lunch, other than the arrival of his breakfast tray, infuriated him. He flung the door open and Rhaissa tendered him the note she held in her hand. He thanked her gruffly, saw that she was eager to discuss the state of her gums, and shut the door in her face.

  The note, from Moss, read: “What a beautiful day! Hugh has promised to join me for lunch at the Zitoun. Bastela has been ordered. Will you come too? May I expect you here in my room at half past twelve? My new model is a monster!!! Affly., Alain.”

  He lay down again in the sun, but found it impossible to go on inventing details in his description of the court of the Sultan Moulay Ismail. Soon he sprang up, shaved and dressed, and went down to Moss’s room, hoping to catch him in the act of painting. But the model, an extremely gnarled old man, was just shuffling across the patio when he arrived, and Moss was cleaning his brushes. “This is most unusual,” he said. “You’ve come early. You’ll have to wait while I change. There’s a new Economist on the table behind you; it just came this morning. Why don’t you take it out into the garden with you? Or do you think you’d find it too dull after the incredible excesses of your creative imagination?”

  Stenham snorted; he was tired of having to react to Moss’s banter. “Excesses?” he said, picking up the magazine and stepping back out into the sunlight. “Excesses?” Down here there were sparrows twittering, and the air was strong with the scent of datura blossoms. Moss was bright; he knew fairly well where to stick the needles, but now the spots that had been tender were leathery, and Stenham, when he reacted at all, did so only out of courtesy and laziness. It made conversation easier, for Moss would simply have gone on, poking about, looking for other vulnerable points in his friend’s character which so far he had not exploited.

  He liked Moss because he was an enigma, and he was certain Moss enjoyed playing the magician, the mystery man with a thousand unexpected eccentricities up his sleeve. “I’m a simple businessman,” Moss would declare piteously, “and I don’t understand this mad jungle that seems to be the natural habitat of all you Americans.” … “Don’t take anything for granted when you talk to me. I must have everything explained. Your American ethical system is so utterly fantastic that my simple brain is quite at a loss trying to contemplate it.”

  But other times he would forget himself and complain: “After all, the English are really too much. One can’t live in that constipated fashion forever. The world is a very lovely place. Have you ever been to Bangkok? I rather think you’d approve. Delectable people.” … “The only thing that makes life worth living is the possibility of experiencing now and then a perfect moment. And perhaps even more than that, it’s having the ability to recall such moments in their totality, to contemplate them like jewels. Do you
understand?”

  Stenham would bait him, saying very seriously: “No, I don’t think I do. I’m afraid perfection doesn’t interest me. It’s always the exception; it’s outside everything, outside reality. I don’t see life that way.”

  “I know,” Moss would say. “You see life from the most unattractive vantage-point you can find.”

  Stenham had long ago seen through the simple businessman pose; Moss had even confided on one occasion that he was writing a book, but without going further to say what kind of book it was going to be. And once from London, enclosed along with a rather pointless letter whose purpose was patently that of making the enclosure seem an afterthought, he had sent him a sheaf of short lyric poems, not very original but sufficiently well fashioned to convince Stenham that their author was by no means new to the muse. “He’s as guilty as I am,” Stenham liked to remind himself.

  The sun down here in the garden was hot; the moist black earth exuded a sweetness, the heavy and disturbing odor of spring. Old Mokhtar came along the walk, his spent babouches scuffing the mosaics beneath. His turban always gave the impression of being about to come unwound. Not that it mattered how presentable he looked; ill health and overwork had drained all character from his soft, small face, and the turban, firmly or loosely wound, could do nothing for his woebegone appearance. Stenham always felt vaguely uneasy in his presence: the gentle vanquished expression he wore awoke a distant sense of guilt.