‘I have good news. We do have that room available for the entire period you desire. The other good news is that it is the best room in the house – a mini-suite with a balcony that faces the Atlantic. The price is seven hundred dirhams per night.’
Paul’s face fell. Immediately the adding machine in my brain was whirring away: 700 dirhams was about $80, double the price Paul told me he had negotiated.
‘But the room I booked cost three-fifty,’ Paul said.
‘You have no record of this offer, do you?’ Monsieur Picard said. ‘As we too have no record of this reservation and are trying to accommodate you . . .’
‘I booked a room for a month at three hundred and fifty dirhams,’ Paul said, angry, stressed.
‘Monsieur, if there is no proof, all we have is words. And words—’
‘What are you, a fucking philosopher?’ Paul hissed.
I put a stabilising hand on my husband’s left forearm.
‘He didn’t mean that,’ I told Monsieur Picard. ‘We are both exhausted and—’
‘I did fucking mean that. This guy is playing with us.’
Monsieur Picard smiled thinly.
‘You act as if you are doing me a service by staying here. By all means find another hotel – and one of this quality and cleanliness that can offer you a suite of this size for a month. The door is there. Bonne chance.’
He turned and started heading up the stairs.
‘Could we see the suite, please?’ I shouted after him.
‘As you wish.’
I started following him upstairs. Paul lingered by the reception desk, fuming, sullen.
‘You coming up?’ I asked.
‘Looks like you’re the one in charge now.’
‘Fine.’
I continued up the stairs. As we reached the first landing Monsieur Picard turned to me and said:
‘Your husband does not seem to be a happy man.’
‘And what business is that of yours?’ I asked.
The sharpness of my tone startled him.
‘I meant no offence,’ he said.
‘Yes, you did.’
The upstairs corridors were narrow, but reasonably well painted, with ceramic blue tiles surrounding the door frames. We walked up a set of stairs barely wide enough to accommodate a modest-sized person.
‘Splendid isolation,’ Picard said as we reached a wooden door carved with lattices. He opened it.
‘Après vous, madame.’
I walked inside. Picard turned on a light on a side table. My first thought was: Oh God, this is small. We were in a narrow sitting area with carved wooden tables, a heavily brocaded red sofa and a small armchair. The entire area couldn’t have been more than around ten square feet. Tiny slits of light from the blue wooden shutters caught the dust in the air. Sensing my disappointment, Picard said:
‘It gets better.’
He opened a connecting door and we were now in a high-vaulted room, augmented by wooden beams, the centrepiece of which was a king-sized bed with huge round cushions propping up the carved wooden headboard, upholstered in faded red velvet. Everything here was heavy dark wood and maroon: the bedspread, the large desk with a matching carved chair, the large chest of drawers, the sultan-like armchair with a matching footrest. Stone walls. The bathroom was acceptable and clean, with a shower stall enhanced by an intricate painted design. I turned on the knobs and discovered there was reasonable water pressure. When I returned to the bedroom area I was taken aback. Picard had opened all the shutters, allowing light to flood in. This darkened enclave was suddenly awash with crystalline sun. I followed onto the balcony; out into a day that was still white hot, incandescent.
The balcony itself wasn’t substantial, perhaps ten feet long by three feet wide, but its prospect was ravishing. Turn right and you peered directly over the walled fortress that was Essaouira. The absolute wild originality of the place – its medieval bunkers, its spindly laneways, its visual and human density – was laid out in front of me with a near-cartographic clarity from this haughty outlook.
Then, when you turned left, the entire spread of the Atlantic enveloped the eye.
Is there anything more balming than the sight of water? Especially this body of water, linking us to home?
There were two folded deck chairs on the balcony and a small table. I quickly envisaged Paul here, his sketchbooks and pencils and charcoals spread out in front of him, engaged with the sky, the sea, the jagged rooftops, the strange scenic concoction laid out directly beneath us. I would be in the next chair, hunched over a French grammar book, fresh from a language lesson I’d had that morning, working my way through the complexities of the subjunctive case.
‘Not bad, is it?’ Picard said, his voice more diplomatic since I’d tackled him a few minutes earlier.
‘It will do.’
I stepped back inside. Never negotiate a price when facing a peerless view. Picard joined me.
‘I saw the email that my husband received from you,’ I said.
‘He never received anything directly from me.’
‘From your reservations person then.’
‘Madame, we have no record—’
‘But I saw it. I know that you agreed a price of three hundred and fifty dirhams for a room with a balcony and a sea view.’
‘It was not this suite. And as this suite is the only room we have left—’
‘Be smart here.’
‘You think I am stupid?’ he asked, the tone shifting back into superciliousness.
‘I’m beginning to think that I should contact the person running my accounting firm back in the States and get her to find the email and send it over. Then I can find the local tourism authority and report you for price gouging.’
‘Now I must ask you to leave.’
‘A pity. Not a bad room – and you could have had us here for a month. But your call, sir.’
With that I turned and headed for the door. When I was halfway out he said:
‘I can accept six hundred per day.’
Without looking back at him I said: ‘Four hundred.’
‘Five fifty.’
‘Five hundred – breakfast and laundry included.’
‘You expect us to wash your clothes every day?’
‘Twice a week. We have little in the way of clothes.’
Silence. His thumb was rubbing up against his forefinger, always a surefire sign of anxiety.
‘And you will be here for the entire month?’ he asked.
‘I can show you our return tickets.’
‘For this price I will need payment in full in advance.’
Now it was my turn to feel as if the tables had turned a bit. But looking around the suite, the hard radiant blue of that North African sky clarifying everything, I decided that a decision was in order. Throw in breakfast and laundry and the reduction of 200 dirhams per night, and I had saved us $1,000 overall. I also sensed that Picard would be relatively civilised from this moment on.
‘All right, sir,’ I said. ‘You have a deal . . . but I want written confirmation of our agreed price before I hand over my credit card.’
A small, tight pursing of his lips.
‘Très bien, madame.’
‘By the way, you wouldn’t know anybody who might want to give me a daily French lesson? I’ve decided I’d like to improve my fluency in your language.’
‘I’m certain I can find someone.’
We filed back downstairs. Picard went behind the desk. On a piece of hotel stationary he scribbled the length of our stay and the 500-dirhams-per-night rate. Signing it he handed it to me. I turned over my Visa card, and watched him process the agreed payment. Business done, we shook hands. Then I found Paul, sitting at a table near the hotel entrance, sipping mint tea, staring out at the alley beyond the picture window.
‘Can you please have our bags sent upstairs?’ I asked Picard.
‘Très bien, madame.’
He signalled to the man at the front d
esk to take up our luggage.
Paul was now on his feet, incredulous.
‘Don’t tell me we’re staying,’ he said.
‘Come see the suite.’
Then I turned and headed back upstairs. After a moment Paul was right behind me. We reached the next floor, then walked down the narrow corridor and up the final set of tiny stairs. When we reached the suite I walked straight through the two rooms and out onto the balcony. Standing outside, the sun full frontal on my face, the blue contours of the rooftops mirroring the bleached azure of the sky, the choppy waters of the Atlantic luminous with reflected light, I wanted to marvel at this exceptional vista. Marvel that I was here on the eastern lip of North Africa, high above a medieval enclave, about to spend a full month immersed in such an alien, but (I could tell already) strangely compelling corner of this planet. What a privilege to escape the humdrum and be here. I owed all this to the man in the other room; a man with whom I so wanted things to go right.
I felt Paul’s hands on my shoulders.
‘This view is wondrous,’ he whispered.
‘And the suite?’
‘Couldn’t be better.’
‘So you’re staying?’
He spun me around and kissed me deeply. Feeling his body so close to mine, his hands sliding up my T-shirt and caressing my back, his penis thickening against my thigh, I had a strong charge of desire; of wanting to obliterate the fatigue, the anger, the doubt, through the wonder of losing myself in him.
So I pulled him closer. And reached down and felt him grow even harder as my hand covered his crotch. Looking briefly over his shoulder to ensure that the door was closed and our bags now in the room, I walked him backwards to the bed. The two of us fell on top of it. And then we were pulling off each other’s clothes. I was already so wet, so in need of him, that I pulled him immediately inside me. I threw my legs around him to take him even deeper. My desire was immediate, all encompassing, and I came twice within moments. That only seemed to embolden Paul even more; his thrusts became deeper, slower, bringing me again to the edge of a certain crazed abyss, over which I tumbled again, every nerve ending electrified. I could feel, as always, the slow, relentless build-up within Paul of his own release – and how, like the extraordinary lover that he was, he held back the moment of climax, wanting us to remain fused, deranged, hungry for each other. When the build-up became unbearable, and his moans grew louder, I could feel his loins tensing wildly and his penis within me becoming even more rigid, more penetrating. Suddenly he burst forth, letting out a cry followed by shudders, and I whispered: ‘Love of my life, love of my life,’ feeling that to be the truth right now. Hoping against hope that, this time, a baby would come of it all.
Paul rolled off me. After over thirty hours of travel – and all the inherent tension accompanying that long, difficult journey – a siesta was desperately needed. So I reached down and pulled the white sheet over us, the ceiling fan circling overhead at a speed reasonable enough to generate a bit of chilled air against the heat. Putting my arms around my already passed-out husband, I shut my eyes.
Then it was pitch dark. Drifting back into consciousness I had absolutely no idea where I was for several strange moments, the clip-clip rotor movement of the ceiling fan overhead intermingling with a voice of incantation from a loudspeaker. I opened my eyes. The windows were still open, no curtains pulled against the stars shining with astonishing clarity in the night sky. And then that voice started again – a loudspeaker crackle, then ‘Allahhhhhhhhhhhhh’, the last ‘h’ held as a long intoned note, wafting through the darkness. Reality began to reassemble itself. Morocco. Essaouira. The hotel. The suite where we would be spending the next month. My husband, now curled up in a corner of the bed, still closed down and unconscious. And me holding the dial of my watch close to my face and discovering from the glowing hour and minute hands that we had been asleep for almost twelve hours. I had an urgent need to pee. I got to my feet, my balance just a little askew after such a deep sleep. The fan overhead kept up its percussive rattle as my bare feet touched the cool stone of the floor. The middle of the Moroccan night was temperate; an antidote to the immense heat through which we had travelled yesterday. I reached the bathroom, tiled in a shade of ultramarine that called to mind the sky above, the Essaouira rooftops below. The ceramic floor was also an intriguing blue and white, and like everything else about the suite it was clean. Monsieur Picard might be a bit of an oily customer, but there was something raffishly stylish about his hotel.
I was feeling very awake. Twelve hours of sleep does that. Having last washed almost two days ago in Buffalo I was also rank. I dug out my toiletries and made a beeline for the shower. There was proper hot water and it remained hot throughout the twenty minutes I stayed under its spray. When I got out, wrapping my hair in a towel and using the other spare towel around my body, I caught sight of myself in the mirror and shuddered. Not because I looked wretched and aged and beaten up by life. All that sleep had actually restored some vitality to a face that had been capped with dark, exhausted rings. What the mirror told me this morning was: I too am fighting the inevitable forward momentum of time.
When finding yourself grappling with uncertainties, there is only one solution: organise. I opened my bag and got dressed: loose linen pants, a blue linen shirt. Then I opened the wardrobe and spent the next fifteen minutes hanging up and arranging all my clothes before turning to Paul’s bag. I hesitated for a moment, but I knew how grateful he was whenever I took charge of the domestic details of our lives, so I unzipped it. I found chaos. Shirts, underwear, jeans, socks, pairs of shorts all in an unwashed, beyond disordered state. Dumping them into the room’s wicker laundry basket I put on a pair of sandals. Then, hoisting the basket, I let myself out and down the two flights of darkened stairs to the reception. A different man was asleep behind the counter: thin, brown teeth, dressed in a djellaba, mid-forties, a lit cigarette still fuming away between two fingers, his mouth open wide. I put the wicker basket down beside him and reached for a notepad and pen on the counter to write a note, asking him to get our clothes washed. But suddenly he mumbled something in his sleep, then snapped awake, squinting at me.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ I whispered. Then, pointing to the basket, I said: ‘Linge.’
The man’s watery eyes began to come into focus. He glanced at the clock on the wall. It was now four-twenty-eight.
‘Maintenant?’ he asked. ‘On est au beau milieu de la nuit.’
Before I could tell him the laundry could wait he disappeared through a back doorway, returning a few minutes later with a shy young girl – I guessed she was around fourteen – in a simple gingham dress, her hair covered by a headscarf. She looked half-awake.
‘There was no need to have gotten her now,’ I said.
He just shrugged, then spoke in rapid-fire Arabic to the young girl while pointing to the basket. She answered back, her voice hesitant, demure. The man asked me:
‘Laver et repasser?’
‘Yes, yes,’ I said. ‘And I need them this morning.’
More Arabic to the little girl. Again she looked shy about speaking in front of these two adults – especially one who was so far outside her language. Nonetheless she answered him back. The man turned to me and said:
‘You will have to wait for the sun to dry your clothes.’
‘I can’t argue with that,’ I said, smiling at the young girl. She smiled back.
‘Shukran,’ I said, Arabic for ‘thank you’ and just one of a small handful of words I knew in that language. I pressed a 50-dirham note in her hand; an apology for her being woken so early.
‘Afwan,’ she replied, all smiles. You’re welcome.
And she disappeared with the laundry basket.
‘I have one last favour to ask,’ I said to the man. ‘Since all my husband’s clothes are being washed, do you have a robe or something he could wear?’
‘Une djellaba pour votre mari?’
‘Oui, oui.’
‘Attendez là.’ Then he disappeared through the door behind him.
At that precise moment, that voice began to incant again over the loudspeaker. Allahhhhhhhhhhhhh. The ‘h’ was held so long and in such a haunting, mellifluous way that I felt compelled to step outside and see if I could find where it was coming from.
Leaving the blue carved archway of the hotel I looked down the back alleyway, which was unpaved, narrow enough for one vehicle but little else. The amplified voice started chanting again. I moved away from the doorway. Just ten or so paces from the hotel and I was enshrouded in darkness: hostile doorways, shuttered shops, tiny laneways filtering off this constricted street. I knew I shouldn’t be here. It was like falling into a blackened maze. But the voice kept beckoning me forward, inviting me deeper into the shadows, making me fearless.
Then I saw the cat. Hanging off a wall directly in front of me as if she had been glued onto its crumbling stone surface. So emaciated, so grubby, so spooked. Had something truly terrifying thrown her against that wall? She was clinging to it, perpendicularly paralysed. Catching sight of her threw me. The impossibility of her position – as if all four paws had been hammered into the wall – was so unnerving that I felt as if an ice-cold hand had been placed on one of my bare shoulders.
Then an ice-cold hand was placed on one of my shoulders.
I found myself surrounded by three men. They had come out of nowhere. A guy in his fifties with a grizzled half-shaven face, three teeth, wild eyes. A plump kid – he couldn’t have been more than eighteen – wearing a T-shirt that failed to cover his hairy stomach, his face oleaginous, his eyes darting up and down my body, a goofy smile on his lips. The hand belonged to a hunched young man, sallow skinned, his countenance glassy, disturbed. The touch of his fingers made me jump. I shrugged him off, spun around, saw him gazing at me with loon-like eyes. The plump kid whispered: ‘Bonjour, madame,’ the grizzled old guy puffed on a stub of a cigarette, a half-smile on his face. Immediately the hand reattached itself to my shoulder. Immediately I shrugged it off again.
The Heat of Betrayal Page 5
