The Rocks

by Peter Nichols

  “Bongo Bar,” said Rolf, with immense satisfaction. “The best seafood in the whole of fucking Morocco, man. Fresh from the Atlantic.”

  He parked in a sandy, poorly defined parking space strewn with smaller cars. They got out, squinting in the intense glare of sand and sea.

  Rolf stopped before the entrance to the bar, blocking the way. He faced the sea. “Only a Syltsman—or a Phoenician—can tell you why Essaouira is here since prehistoric times. The town is already old before the Roman Empire. Why do you think?”

  “I give up,” said Luc, who was thirsty.

  “Protection, man,” said Rolf. He swept his hands toward the long isthmus north of the town that ended in a stone quay projecting far into the Atlantic. “Here there are always the northerly winds. They make the big waves out there.” He turned to face them and held up a finger. “Except when the winds come from the south.” Like a conjuror, he moved his finger portentously across their line of sight, so they dutifully followed it, until it pointed to a small brown island almost a mile offshore. “And there is the island of Mogador, to stop the seas from the south. So you have the best anchorage and the oldest African town on the Atlantic coast.”

  “Fantastic,” said Luc. “Let’s get a drink.” He took Aegina’s arm and they walked past Rolf into the Bongo Bar.

  At the table, Rolf continued his lecture: “The Phoenicians, man, they came here. The greatest traders in the world. They sail out of the Mediterranean three thousand years ago, they meet the wind in the north so they sail south to Essaouira. They stop right here. And they sail south again because they can’t go back against the wind to the north. They sail on and on and on, until one day they look back and they see the sun coming up not on the left and moving to the right, what they see all their lives, but now it comes up on right, and north of where they are, and it moves to the left. Now they don’t know where the fuck they are, man, so they keep going, always keeping the land in sight so they don’t lose the world. And then the sun moves again from the left to the right, and they arrive back in Carthage, and they think they have gone around the world. But really they have gone all the way around Africa.”

  “They had the Suez Canal back then?” said Luc.

  “Fuck, man, the Phoenicians didn’t need the fucking Suez Canal.”

  A Moroccan approached their table. Rolf rose and embraced him. “Mustafa! Mon vieux!” he said. He seemed to cherish an epoch of warm memories. The man, middle-aged, short, dressed like a waiter in a white shirt and black trousers, allowed himself to be hugged and obligingly gave a tepid impression of acknowledging an acquaintanceship.

  “Poisson! Merluza, atún, calamars frites! Le meilleur!” said Rolf.

  Mustafa lifted his chin, made a noise with his tongue on the roof of his mouth. “Poisson finis. Brochette d’agneau. Bifteck. Couscous.”

  “No fish?” said Rolf.

  Mustafa made the noise with his tongue and his gaze slid away toward the back of the bar where a Moroccan man was whiningly berating a Moroccan woman. “Brochette d’agneau, bifteck, couscous,” he repeated, looking back at Rolf.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Rolf told his companions. “It is the best in Essaouira.” He looked across at a table of badly sunburned Dutch tourists who were yakking away in their strange tongue which sounded to Luc like fluent English spoken with a speech impediment, rendering utterances indecipherable except to those, like family members, long accustomed to making sense of them. “Good, ja?” said Rolf.

  “Ja, ja,” said the Dutch table. “Goed, goed.”

  • • •

  At five, as they stood up from the greasy ruin of their table, Rolf said, “So we stay for the night, okay? It’s too late to drive back now.”

  “Absolutely not,” said Aegina. “We’ve got to go back to Marrakech.”

  “Oh, man, it’s too far. I don’t want to drive. I need a siesta.”

  “No, Rolf!” said Minka. “I don’t stay here in Essaouira for the night! Everything is in the room at the Mamounia. We must go back.”

  “Rolf,” said Luc. “You said lunch, it was great, nice beach. But we’re here on business. We have to get back. I’ll be happy to drive.”

  “I drive, man.”

  They walked out to the big Peugeot and got in. Rolf drove north again toward the town. He slowed suddenly and turned into the forecourt of the Hotel Mogador, a new, unattractive building unenlivened by a repeating motif of ogee arches in the ground-floor doorways.

  “I take a shit, man,” said Rolf.

  He stopped the car suddenly at a slant in front of the entrance and got out. Three squint-smiling bellboys of indeterminate age emerged from the cool shade of the lobby.

  “Caca,” said Rolf, waving them away, walking into the hotel.

  Twenty minutes later, Minka came back out to the car.

  “I’m sorry. He’s in a room. He’s not coming out. He says he doesn’t feel well. I’m really, really sorry! I don’t want to be here.”

  Inside—a white Ali Baba ambience with daggers and fake Berber rifles on the walls—Luc asked the concierge when the next bus departed for Marrakech.

  “Six heures du matin.”

  “C’est tout? Il n’y en a plus ce soir?”

  “Ah, non.” Smile, tone, and body language of well-exercised sympathy crossed with immutable fact. “There are only two buses per day for Marrakech. Six and fifteen hours.”

  • • •

  Aegina got up, staggering heavy-footed into the bathroom, and Luc came fully awake when he realized she was vomiting. Short barks, like powerful hiccups, soon followed by longer convulsions wrenched out of her like torture. They had both felt unwell when they went to bed and there had been only comforting cuddling.

  Luc went into the bathroom and knelt behind her and put his hands lightly on her shoulders and her hips. Her long hair was falling around her face into the toilet bowl and he pulled it back as she retched with spasms that arched her back like a cat doing the same thing.

  Then he stood quickly and lurched to the sink and spewed into it the viscous remains of the Bongo Bar lamb and couscous he’d eaten at lunch. Aegina, he now recalled, had only eaten salad.

  When Luc finished, he ran the taps. Aegina lay curled up on the tile floor, her T-shirt soaked, face pale and glistening with sweat, eyes closed.

  “Let me get you back into bed,” Luc said, trying to help her up.

  “No,” she breathed. Then she quickly rose and pulled down her underpants, sat on the toilet and leaned forward across her knees and a gusher of liquid burst into the bowl beneath her.

  “Sweetheart,” said Luc. He knelt beside her. She still lay with her forehead on her forearms crossed over her knees. Luc put his arm across her back.

  “You too?” she said hoarsely.

  “Yeah. But I had the lamb.”

  “You had salad too. It was the salad.”

  “Can you get up from there now?”

  “No.”

  Luc’s bowels flopped inside him and his anus puckered with a burning sensation. He moved in a quick crouch to the bath and sat on his thighs with his bum over the edge and shat explosively into the tub. When he felt he could move, he reached for the tap and turned on the cold water. He threw cupped palms of cool water between his buttocks, and then he sloshed the water around the tub to clean it.

  “Do you want to come back to bed?” he asked Aegina, who lay limply across her knees.

  “No,” she said. She reached for the toilet paper, flushed the toilet, and then lay down on the floor again.

  Luc put a towel down beside her. “Lie on this.”

  He tried to move her onto the towel, but she said, “I can’t.” He rinsed a smaller towel under the cold tap in the sink and wrung it out. He sat down beside Aegina and wiped the clammy sweat off her body and then picked up the larger towel and draped it over her
. He ran his hand back and forth over the towel.

  “Aegina,” Luc said.

  “Unh . . .”

  “I love you so much.”

  “Oh, sure,” she said, her voice small and coming from beneath her. “Especially like this.”

  “Like this most of all.”

  Her hand moved across the wet tile and found Luc’s foot and closed around it. Her fingers were cold. Luc put his hand over hers.

  Nine

  He opened his eyes. The sun was up on the other side of the shutters. At some point in the night they had made it back to the bed and remained there. He looked at Aegina. Her dark hair across her face, olive complexion turned sallow. She appeared comatose. He lay down. He listened to Aegina’s slow, deep breathing.

  He couldn’t sleep. He got up and went into the bathroom and closed the door. He rinsed in the shower. She was still asleep when he came back into the room. He pulled on his jeans, a T-shirt, sneakers. He went to the door, looked back at Aegina, and left the room.

  • • •

  She was walking in the hard sand close to the water, djellaba billowing around her. She waved. They walked toward each other.

  Minka hugged him closely as if meeting an old friend. “Where is Aegina? She is sick too?” she asked.

  “Yes. Both of us. You?”

  “Not me, thank God, but Rolf, aieeccch, both ends all night. Disgusting. I couldn’t breathe. I had to get out. You are okay now?”

  “Better anyway.”

  “Aegina?”

  “She’s sleeping.”

  “I’m so sorry! Rolf is a pig, making us all stay here. But he did get very sick.” Minka turned to the clean sea. “It’s beautiful, no? The edge of Africa.”

  The sea was bright beneath the sun, solid blue north and south.

  “The sea is, yes,” said Luc. “The beach is too big.”

  “Oh, I love it. But it’s amazing, there is nobody on the beach now. Maybe they all got sick.” She laughed, arching backward. “Shall we swim?”

  “You go ahead. I don’t have a towel or anything.”

  “Doesn’t matter!”

  “I just took a shower.”

  “Oh, come on, it’s perfect. You will dry quickly. Look at the sea. Come on!” She began pulling him toward the water.

  “No, you go. I’ll just sit here.”

  “Och! No adventure!”

  She pulled off her djellaba and threw it over his head. She was naked, of course. She ran into the waves. He watched her diving in and out of the waves like a seal. She ran back out of the water, ran fast toward him, and hugged him tightly—“Please, I’m cold!”—until he was completely wet.

  “Now you have to come in!” She pulled at his shirt, lifting it up. Then she pulled at his Levi’s.

  “Okay, okay! I’ll do it,” Luc said. But she didn’t stop, she was pulling at his jeans, and he couldn’t help getting most of an erection. Then she pulled him, running into the sea.

  In the water, she swam away from him into the sun in an effortless freestyle stroke. He followed slowly. She lay on her back and floated. She rose and fell and undulated like a long supple frond on the slight swell as the water rolled over her strawberry nipples and the sun caught the thatch of copper curls below her belly.

  Luc got out first. He walked up to the dry sand and sat down hugging his knees.

  Minka walked slowly out of the waves. She threw her head back, hair flying up scattering bright beads of water in the light. She smiled at him as she approached. “You are so slim. Rolf is like a bear. It looks good, the way you are.” She lay down full-length on the sand next to him. She stretched, throwing her arms above her head, taking deep breaths. “My God, after that hotel room.”

  The water beaded across her body. Her skin had the lightest blush of pearl beneath the yellow sand that clung to her toes and thighs. Her nipples puckered and stood up. A wide but not dense swath of dark wet ringlets clustered below her hollow stomach, which rose and fell with her breathing.

  She opened an eye and squinted up at him. “Oh, lie down in the sun. It feels so good.”

  He stretched out, keeping one knee, the nearest to her, raised. He closed his eyes.

  “Feels good, no?” said Minka.

  “Yes,” said Luc, feeling the salt water evaporate with a sensation of tightening across his skin.

  Minka lifted her head, twisted her shoulders into him, stretched her legs away, and laid her head, heavy, already warm through the damp hair, on his stomach. She turned her head until her cheek lay on the warm skin of his belly and she looked up into his face.

  She rolled on her side until her other cheek lay on his belly. She put a cool hand around his cock which was straining from his groin like a dachshund on a leash.

  “No, don’t,” he said. But remained still.

  Minka raised her head and lowered it over him. Bands of hot and cool.

  “Please stop,” said Luc. He looked up at the small clouds passing slowly high above them. They had formed over the ocean and were gliding now into Africa. How insignificant he and Minka were, tiny, fretful, heedless animals far below. He raised his hand to pull her away but his hand found her waist and then moved up over the rise of her hip and across her buttock. “Stop,” he said quietly. “Stop . . .”

  She paused. “You want me to stop?”

  “I love Aegina,” he said to the clouds.

  “Of course you do,” said Minka. “She’s adorable. I love her too.” She sat up, looked around briefly, straddled Luc, and lowered herself onto him.

  Ten

  The cow was ambling slowly across the right lane as the Renault barreled around the corner.

  “Jesus!” Luc pulled hard away from the cow, into the left lane.

  The cow saw the car, paused, registered alarm with a toss of its head, and broke into a gallop continuing the way it had been going, into the left lane.

  “Shit!” Luc’s arms crossed as he swerved back for the right lane being vacated by the cow. But the cow, seeing the car change course a second time, abruptly made a hoof-skidding turn, bolted back in the direction of where it had once felt safe, and the Renault’s left headlight and front fender impaled themselves on the animal’s long right horn. The car shuddered to a stop.

  “Fuck!” Luc shouted—because it expressed everything he was feeling up to that moment—and then also because the wheel had instantly become rigid in his hands in a way that told him they wouldn’t be driving away from this. He looked over at Aegina, but she was already climbing out the door crying, “Oh my God, my God! The poor thing!”

  “Don’t touch it!” Luc yelled at her, getting out of the car, moving to intercept her. “It might hurt you.”

  “No, she won’t. Poor thing!”

  “It’s a he—he’s got a horn.”

  “Look!” She pointed fiercely.

  He saw the udder, swaying heavily beneath the animal. The cow stood in the middle of the road, quivering, head down, a little above grazing height. The right horn had sheared off neatly at its base above the cow’s brow. Not a drop of blood. Apparently the animal was no more than dazed.

  Luc looked at the Renault. The front fender was smashed inward and down over the left front wheel. Yellow headlight glass glinted in the road.

  A shout—a single-syllable wordless utterance, not outrage or reprimand, nothing more than an exclamation of sadness—came from the side of the road. A man with a straw hat, who looked like a scarecrow, was walking toward them. Other cows stood off the road near him. He kept his eyes on the cow as he came toward them.

  “Excusez-moi, monsieur. . . .” said Luc. “There was nothing I could do. The cow was in the middle of the road. I tried to avoid it. . . .”

  The cowherd muttered pained, wordless noises—“Ehhhh . . . ohhhh . . .”—that sounded sadder and sadder. Not a hint of rec
rimination aimed at the car or its occupants. Only sadness. “Ohh-ohh . . . ehhh-eh-eh . . .”

  The cow ambled away, back toward the right side of the road where it had come from, toward its brethren creatures, who stood looking vacantly at the scene of the accident.

  The cowherd looked at the Renault. He stepped toward it and pulled at something—the cow’s horn, its base protruding from the crumpled housing of the headlight. He pulled it out—now an uncertain keratinous artifact, somewhere between a tusk and a small antler—and looked at it mournfully.

  “I’m sorry,” Luc began again. The man, no bigger than a boy, of rawhide-wizened middle age, looked up at him, looked down at the horn, turned, and walked slowly after the cow.

  “Are you all right?” Luc asked Aegina.

  “Yes,” she said, “but that poor thing . . .”

  “Well, the poor cow’s already eating. Look.” The creature, with its lone asymmetrical horn, had reached a small dusty bush at the side of the road and its lips were curling around what passed for small leaves. Luc turned back to the car. “The cow’s fine. We’re the ones who’re completely fucked.”

  He approached the car and tentatively tried to pull the crumpled fender up off the wheel, to little effect. He sat in the driver’s seat and tried to turn the wheel. “The wheel won’t turn.”

  “Shall we try to get it off the road?” said Aegina.

  Luc tried the engine, which started immediately. With the front wheels locked, the car could only move in a circle, but aiming off the road. It made a grinding noise from somewhere near the front axle. Luc kept going until the car sat on the dirt shoulder, and then turned off the engine. “That’s it.”

  “Don’t you think we can fix it?”

  “Well, even if we could, it would probably cost more than the car’s worth. And take forever. We’ve got to leave it.”

  “Right,” said Aegina. She opened the side rear door and pulled out the large suitcase full of shirts and her own and Luc’s small duffel bags. “Do you think we should hitchhike?”