Notorious

by Roberta Lowing

  I play my torch over the walls. The back wall is pitted rock, shifting like deep sea under moonlight. There are glints of grey; tin maybe. Last week’s satellite photos showed new mining to the south, in the blood-stained sands of the Western Sahara.

  The rock is cool to the touch, a relief from the gritty heat upstairs. Down here, you could fool yourself you could beat the desert. That you would win. The torch light ripples over the rubbed floor stones, catching odd marks; writings in French and English. I stare at the hopeful postcards. Brave little sign-posts: Pierre was here; Silvana was here. I have no sympathy for them.

  I kneel on the cool floor and lift the cot away from the wall. There is something scratched in French in the corner:

  Je suis Rimbaud, l’ange déchu de Paris.

  Je suis allé dans le desért sacré.

  Maintenant, je suis un autre.

  She’s likely to do the opposite of what her father wants, I told Mitch right from the start. Of what we want. Out of spite. Out of revenge.

  The mother, of course, was committed years ago.

  I stare at the rock. My watch beeps again. By now I should have finished the first interrogation. Should know where I stand.

  I think of the man who said to her, ‘The light from the moon spills into your shoulder.’ A less haggard man. A man proud of his strength, his ability to catch her in his arms and raise her above his head, up to the moon. A man who could make her laugh. A happy man.

  It was probably on the surveillance tapes. Somewhere, waiting to be found.

  Stupid man.

  The cell is airless, the only sound a rustle: a small black beetle picks its way painstakingly along the side of the wall, lifting its long thin legs as though there was an art to walking. An art to walking. Ridiculous. I lift my foot. The beetle stops under the sudden increase in gloom. I lower my heel, wanting to grind, to smash.

  ‘No!’ says the nun by my side. The beetle lurches forward, turns as though it wants to run into the wall – she wants to climb inside a pebble – and disappears.

  ‘Tunnels,’ says Sister Antony. ‘They make tunnels between the stones.’ She bows her head. Her lips move. I tug at my tie. I am surprised to find that I am breathing heavily. I can see how emotions become muted in the desert. Nearly nothing is worth the physical toll.

  The nun kisses her crucifix. Her hands are like the stone floor: a smooth, deep brown, crisscrossed with lines, a blue vein travelling like a river through this country with no boundaries.

  I tighten my tie. A country with no boundaries. Ridiculous.

  I ask for a translation of the French scratched into the corner.

  She says, ‘I am Rimbaud, the fallen angel of Paris. I went into the sacred desert. Now, I am another.’

  ‘The Administrator said that he came to the desert to die.’

  She smiles, her mouth turns downwards. ‘Monsieur Laforche was born in Paris, the metropolis of red roses. The desert frightens him.’

  I make an encouraging noise, nod thoughtfully.

  ‘He sustained him in a desert land,’ she says, ‘in a howling wilderness waste. He shielded him, cared for him, guarded him as the apple of His eye. Deuteronomy.’ Her voice is no longer like dried twigs. ‘Rimbaud did not come here to destroy his body but to transform it.’ Her words ring out like bells. I swear I hear an echo. ‘Like Jesus, he wandered in the desert, and when he came out of the desert, he built a community.’

  I stare at her. ‘Did Rimbaud begin a church here?’

  She withdraws her hands into her wide sleeves. ‘He saved Abu N’af.’ Her hands move beneath the material. ‘When the Church would have closed us.’

  I recall the report. Once Abu N’af was crowded, with waiting lists of two years. It was a retreat which imitated those of the Italians who, in the 1970s, opened their convents and monasteries to the newly distressed as well as the faithful, as long as they paid. But in these days of terrorism, the Moroccan desert and Rimbaud weren’t the drawcards they used to be.

  ‘You need another poet,’ I say to her.

  THE FIRST EVENING

  I open my eyes on darkness as smothering as a cowl, with black wind in my mouth and sand under my cheek on the pillow. I think I hear a helicopter, Mitch arriving. But it must be the upper shutters clicking like bones against the wall. My watch says 3 am.

  I feel woolly-minded; the familiar pain grinds below my ribs. It is like the shame I used to feel about my addiction to alcohol. When I was drinking, all I thought about was drinking. It is hunger but it is not.

  I see freckles. There is only one person who ever took the pain away . . .

  I am in the room she slept in: Rimbaud’s room. I turn on my torch, pull on my trousers. I am halfway to the door when I remember my briefcase and my shirt. I put on my shirt, take the briefcase.

  The steps are smooth and cool under my feet. My bare feet, I realise as I step into the courtyard. The air is swollen with pine nuts and diesel oil and warm musk. A breeze slaps my face. It reminds me of Sicily. But seeing her, I say to myself, would remind me of Sicily.

  The lion stares at me black-eyed under the swollen and bruised moon. I need my shoes. Only the thought that I will be quieter without sends me on.

  I switch off the torch. There is enough light to see by. I am still not accustomed to how low the moon rides here. A yearning for home shakes me: wattle on the breeze, jacaranda trees dripping purple on the stone, the southerly buster at dusk chasing the heat away. The high moon.

  The door to the sick bay is ajar. I slip into the darkness and feel my way along the wall, past the sideboard, walking my fingers over the gravelled metal surfaces of the hurricane lamps to the first window. I ease the shutters apart, latch them back.

  Slowly dissolving verticals of moonlight fall over the black desert, trailing breaths of cloud, tendrils which reach down to the dark ground. Then I see that it is the ground reaching to the sky. The sand is rising: the moonlight catches the glitter of a thousand fragments in the slowly turning dust spirals; the echoes of a thousand sounds are held in the heart of every spiral. A thousand faces are out there, breathing.

  The room takes on a hushed, waiting quality. I feel as though I have walked into an absence of sound, where I won’t be able to speak, no-one will be able to speak. I sway. I am falling through all known points of contact, falling through a void. With sheer force of will, I make myself walk towards the bed. At the back of my mind, a voice says, Stupid man.

  The woman lies under the mosquito net. She is an effigy; the welts blue in this light. I unlock the briefcase, the sound as loud as rifle fire. I take out the gun and put it beside the briefcase, on the floor.

  The net comes up like foaming sea. I know it is made of some rough thread, camel hair or hemp. But it shimmers around the woman. She moves like the tide as the net comes up. She is diaphanous.

  I throw the net back, reach out and run my fingers through her hair. I feel grit, tiny pieces of coral, metal flecks. A small triangular object, flint maybe, the tip of an arrowhead or a hook. Old weapons, old seas.

  Her breathing is steady.

  I bend over her, put my cheek on the pillow, feel my eyelashes an eyelash away from hers, smell the lotion on her skin: a flat antiseptic smell and some scent known only to this part of the world.

  Her breath catches, her eyelashes lift.

  I straighten. Her eyes are deep water.

  I say her name.

  She raises her right hand and traces in the air. The light streams between her parted fingers.

  ‘Is that a sign?’ I say. ‘A map?’

  She ignores me, keeps tracing. ‘We must talk,’ I say loudly. ‘Before Mitch gets here.’

  Her hand is trembling, slowing. Her lips are moving; I catch the murmur of a strangely familiar song. It reminds me of the moon behind black branches. I can’t place it. I dismiss it. It is not relevant.

  I say, ‘If you don’t help me, you’re against me.’ There is a shifting of shadow behind me. But I ignore it, b
end down, grope for the briefcase, the gun.

  ‘Fuck you then,’ I say.

  The Sister comes up beside me in a pool of yellow light, catches my arm.

  ‘She’s dying,’ says the Sister.

  ‘She knows who I am.’ I say to the woman in the bed, ‘You know me.’

  Her hand stops.

  ‘No,’ she says in that swollen voice. ‘I don’t know you.’

  ‘You can’t lie about this. It’s recorded. You worked for us.’

  Her hand resumes its slow tracings.

  ‘Stop that.’ I grab her hand. Her fingers are still, quiescent, like water, slipping away from me as I release her. I feel burned.

  The Sister says, ‘Go now.’

  ‘She’s lying. Don’t you understand? The whole family is rotten.’

  The Sister shakes her head.

  I say, ‘You know I’m right. Otherwise you would have called for help.’

  I see the three of us, caught in the pool of light.

  The woman in the bed says, ‘My mother has someone else’s body.’

  The Sister looks down at her.

  ‘The chauffeur took me back to the Manse,’ says the woman. ‘The Mausoleum, my brother called it.’

  ‘Wait,’ I say. ‘I know that.’ The Sister tenses as I open the briefcase and take out the diary. I move closer to the hurricane lamp and undo the red silk ribbon, turn the pages.

  The woman watches me, unblinking. I hold a handful of pages in front of her. ‘You recognise this, don’t you?’

  ‘No,’ she says and turns her face away.

  ‘Yes.’ I select a page and read it out, skimming. ‘August 19. The chauffeur takes me home to the Manse . . . My mother said the black wrought-iron draped around the house was black lace but my brother called it iron spider webs.’

  The woman closes her eyes.

  ‘This is your family,’ I say, turning pages. ‘Usually I make allowances for my mother . . . for duty’s sake, for the sake that I really don’t care. But today . . . I overhear the nurse . . . We found the blood in Anna’s room.’

  The woman doesn’t move. I skip down, raise my voice, ‘This is what you wrote about your mother: Misery is making her sag, despite all the plastic surgery. I’m sick of you kids, she says. Kid, I say. There’s only one of us left now.’

  I close the diary.

  The Sister grips the base of her cross.

  ‘You recognise that, don’t you?’ I say to Sister Antony. ‘From her ramblings.’

  ‘Is she Anna?’ says the Sister. She lifts the cross and holds it at me – to keep me at bay – and says, ‘Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.’

  I see myself as she must see me, leaning over the woman in the bed. I am a black cloak, an anti-presence. The woman’s head is always turned away, her neck always exposed.

  ‘You let people down,’ I say to the woman. ‘They trusted you. It was important what you were doing. It mattered. You ran out on them – ’

  Before I can stop, the word slips out. The unsayable word. It hangs in the air, gaudy with flies. The force of it, the way I meant it, was like a slap. I see myself advancing inexorably from behind, enveloping her, holding her down, biting her shoulders, her back, her buttocks, leaving bloody teeth marks. Being the man we both always thought I was.

  I am already falling back exhausted from the weight of the word when I say it.

  ‘Whore.’

  Time passes. A shudder runs through her body but she doesn’t open her eyes. She slowly raises her hand and gives a small but definite flick of her fingers, the Italian gesture of contempt, her nails catching the light as though she has handfuls of stars. She flicks again, her arm shakes and drops. She lies still, palm upwards.

  The Sister is at my side, gripping my arm. ‘Enough.’

  I back away. ‘She’s not – is she breathing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve killed her.’

  I would have fallen if Sister Antony hadn’t held me up. I shout and my voice is louder than the banging shutters, ‘Oh Jesus Christ, I didn’t mean to – ’

  I pick up the briefcase and throw it with all my might against the wall. ‘Why did you let me?’

  The Sister slides the sheet from the woman’s legs. There, on the inner right thigh, above the curve of the calf and the knee-cap showing ivory, is a small patch of light and dark.

  At first I think it is a tattoo, a decorative pattern in the Arabic style, heavily inked swirls and lines. But there are strange verticals of light running through it like a bad photocopy. The Sister brings the lamp closer. The lines sharpen. It is a photograph. A black and white photograph developed directly onto her skin.

  The shutters are banging furiously.

  The moon sits brooding in the window frame.

  I look closer and closer and see that the photo is of a man.

  A man’s face.

  My face.

  THE SECOND MORNING

  I wake into l’heure bleue: the blue hour, the French call it, the moments between darkness and day, night and redemption.

  Even deep in the earth, in Rimbaud’s cell, there is the sense of gloom lightening.

  I am naked beneath the rough blanket. I grope for my briefcase. The diary and gun are inside. I take out a new shirt, still in its wrapper, and clean underwear. Someone has removed yesterday’s shirt and underwear and left a folded robe on the end of the cot. I stare at it dubiously. Laforche wears a suit. To be less dressed than Laforche seems to be a sign of weakness. I wonder who has taken my underwear. I don’t like the thought of someone washing my underwear and make a note to find out where it has gone.

  My organiser pings, the screen glows green. A reminder to write up my notes from yesterday’s interrogation. The failed interrogation. I slump on the cot. In another day, Mitch and his thugs would arrive. If I didn’t have some answers for them, they would go to work on her – the woman – and if they didn’t get what they wanted, they would go to work on me. I have an image of my body being ground down into sand. Grated.

  I suppose it doesn’t have to be the right answers. Any answer that sounds plausible will do.

  I haul myself up, put on my clean shirt, my trousers, my tie, my jacket. I am unassailable in my clothes. My hair is cropped short: no chance of the wind messing with that.

  I take a deep breath, pick up my briefcase and prepare to face the day.

  I find Laforche in the courtyard. He is dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt and tie and dark trousers. I note the absence of a jacket. He holds a small cup of very black coffee and a silver plate heaped with grapes and mango and thin slices of ham and cheese.

  He stares at a tufty plant nudging the archway to the office.

  ‘So, American,’ he says. ‘Did you sleep?’

  I nod and adjust my sunglasses to hide my puffy eyes.

  He offers me a bunch of grapes. There is a small smile on his lips. ‘You didn’t hear the drums from the mountains?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or the howls of the wolves?’

  I spit out a pip. ‘There are no wolves in this part of the world, Laforche.’

  ‘Only the human kind.’

  ‘I didn’t hear them either.’

  ‘Then you must have slept well.’ He raises a forefinger. ‘We should see the desert before it gets too hot.’

  There is a spiral staircase inside the far turret. We climb up past the second level and come out on a broad flat walkway which I realise is the roof of the arcade below.

  Laforche leans against the chest-high wall on the outer edge. There are gaps in the red bricks for the archers. At this hour, in the coolest part of the day, the Kabir Massif is metallic blue. The wind has dropped – it is not even a whisper – but it will rise through the morning, says Laforche, from a caress to a high-pitched whistle, like the echo of a falcon’s scream as it falls through the clouds from the mountaintop.

  I say, ‘Have you ever heard a falcon falling from a mountaintop?’

 
‘A little imagination goes a long way in the desert.’

  I pass the binoculars to Laforche. ‘I have never seen it like this.’ He says, half to himself, ‘I am stationed at the wound. Beings who are nothing come to be nothing here.’

  Beyond the Asylum, he says, there is nothing. The desert stretches east, mile upon red mile. He looks at the white hole of sun. ‘That is what she came out of. She looked like a mirage. It was a . . . ’ The word hangs in the air.

  He says, ‘How did she come across the sacred empty, a white woman on foot? The only other white person who has done so and lived is Rimbaud.’

  I point back to the Massif. ‘There must be water?’

  He hesitates. ‘None that has been found. The Massif is solid rock, impenetrable.’

  I scan the horizon. ‘So the Asylum is the only watered spot until Kabir proper. Very handy for visitors from Algeria who wish to slip into Casablanca quietly and avoid the port and road checkpoints.’

  ‘You’re thinking of the Groupe Salafiste, Algerian Pour Le Combat, those killing gangs,’ says Laforche smoothly. ‘But it is too far to reach here on foot. They would have to carry water. That means camels or trucks. Which your hi-technological satellites would be sure to find.’

  ‘Satellites can only see what they are pointed at. A group of men on foot might pass undetected, travelling by night, buried in the sand by day.’

  Laforche shrugs. ‘You are not the only one who wants information.’

  I am alert. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘My government graciously allows you Americans to question the woman first. But after that – well, our police are interested.’

  ‘This is a civil matter,’ I say. ‘Private lootings by the woman’s father. Trafficking of goods and other cargo.’

  ‘Other cargo?’ says Laforche.

  ‘It is not military, Laforche. There is no question of a security risk to Morocco.’

  ‘Really? We shall see.’

  The sun is high over the horizon, the cracked face of the moon is slipping away. Up on the roof, the heat wraps around the body like a cloak.