He winked at Richard. “See? What’s the bloody point of bringing them?”
Richard smoked more slowly than the others, with that measured self-restraint that he had learned from his Moroccan lovers. He had fewer than Dally, but he chose men who could teach him things. They had taught him how to sleep properly, how to lie on one’s side, how to eat with one hand, how to be in repose, how to smoke without becoming excited. How to be slow.
He didn’t become stoned; he merely allowed himself to slow to the speed of treacle dripping off a spoon. The girls laughed and rolled. The lord lit up with impotent desires that sparkled inside him and went up in smoke. This was how newcomers to the land were. They couldn’t quite adjust. Richard, on the other hand, knew how to smell the wind coming off the valley, how to appreciate the taste of the local lemons. He was rarely excited nowadays, or thrown off balance because this, after all, was the life he wanted, and he consumed it drop by drop, like a liqueur. He frequently felt that he was the only white man of his acquaintance who was able to do this. Even Dally had not mastered it. His busy American nature obstructed the way, clouding his spontaneity with all kinds of wooden preconceptions that made him hesitant and flat. He couldn’t quite get it.
Richard looked over at him now, taking in his full Mick Jaggery lips and his pointed babouches dangling on the ends of his long white feet. He was like a mechanical toy dog watching butterflies fly past its nose. “That’s life,” the toy dog would think in perplexity, raising a little metal paw to try and catch it, “but what is it?”
SOME TIME AFTER MIDNIGHT, JO FOUND THE POOL EMPTY. She was drunk enough to take off her clothes and wander to one of the corner ladders and stand there in the moonlight naked. The moon danced as a dinner-plate-size counterimage on the water’s surface, not even undulating, intensifying by its presence the depth of the shadows lurking around the pool. She hoped someone was looking. She turned herself this way and that and laughed and let it come on if it wanted. So much the better. The heat had come down. The skies were so clear that the whole hillside was shocked into visibility. Cacti beyond the walls shone like tin; the rock formations offered a thousand ancient details. The air was warm, soothing, still, and the palms murmured as a breeze sifted through them, then stilled themselves in preparation for the next murmur. A martini glass stood on the edge of the pool, an olive still stuck inside it, and sticky forks lay on abandoned china plates set down by the feet of deck chairs, their prongs caked with crumbs of carrot cake and melted icing. Towels lay about in what had once been pools of water. From the ditches on the far side of the wall came the shrill of the frogs the hosts might well have placed there for effect. Who knew what here was artificial and what was indigenous? She lowered herself into the water, which was so warm it was almost distasteful.
The tiles were cornflower blue, with a Roman-style whale depicted on the bottom. When you swam over it, you saw that the whale was entwined with a boy. She glided over this kitsch mosaic scene and flipped onto her back, letting her breasts break water. First the silence of underwater, then the open sounds of the night and the relaxation of the optic nerves. A cicada started up from a hole in the wall and there were echoes coming over the stone slopes. Reverberations of hooves and falling stones, ghosts about, and the party and its hum. She counted her heartbeats for a minute. At the center of the pool, she rotated slowly. A cluster of stars—Aquila?—glowed down on her and she thought of her abandoned work, her books long dead, in the process of being forgotten by the world’s feckless children. Every career has a few moments of visibility followed by a long, painful subsidence into total anonymity. The strange thing was that, on some level, she didn’t mind as much as she had expected to mind. In her writing, she couldn’t think of anything else to say, and that proved she didn’t need to say anything anymore. It was therefore time to go silent. And in some ways that was a relief. She no longer enjoyed it anyway, and going silent had its own pleasure. If it was a failure, it was a small plop of a stone dropping into the great ocean: a very small sound indeed. Perhaps thousands of years from now, some unhappy child of the future would pick up a copy of Balthazar’s Nighttime in a cobwebbed digital library and rescue her from her oblivion. But then again, what a stupid, surreal idea that was. No one would be reading in fifty years’ time, let alone a thousand. Everyone knew that. The children of the future would be empty-headed clowns. No one in the future would need her, any more than anyone in the present did. But not to be needed was as pleasurable as being needed.
Career? That was a strong word. She looked down at her blancmange breasts, quivering under their film of water and to what end? It would be better if someone were observing her right now, not letting them go to waste. But there it was. One ages out of view, in an enforced privacy. Guiltily, she thought about David then, but she couldn’t keep it up. He still hadn’t answered five calls on his cell. Instead her mind drifted back to the party, to the beautiful girls. Was she really less beautiful than they, less unhinged by the present moment?
“I can’t be the librarian every single second,” she thought archly. “Not every single second of every hour.”
She got out of the pool and sat drying next to the martini glass while Dally’s pet doves made their noises in the trees. She began to enjoy her new solitude. At length, she re-dressed and walked back toward the main house. A pinwheel firework turned on one of the lawns that the staff had to water night and day, spluttering with green sparks. She went to one of the open bars and asked for a Cuba libre. The music had started up again and the guests were drifting toward the dining room, where the candelabra had been lit, the dark green candles clustered together in waxy sheaves. It was a very late dinner, but no one seemed to mind. Boys in pirate dress wandered about asking people if they would like to join the table and ushering them in if they said yes.
It was here she met Day again. He had a head covered with bay leaves and little yellow flowers, and she thought he looked like a Greek celebrant, which was obviously the idea. They smiled and she thought: He’s a little less attractive than the last time.
“You don’t look like a pirate,” she said at once.
“Pirates never do,” he said. “I’m going into dinner as Dionysius. None of these illiterates even knows who I am.”
“I am not an illiterate.”
“Then I have an audience of one. The pirate costume looked bad on me anyway. I looked like Johnny Depp.”
“I would think that’d be better than Dionysius.”
“I look weird in an eye patch. Sort of twitchy.”
She let him charm her.
“You aren’t the god of wine. You’re someone from a toga party.”
“We’re at a toga party, aren’t we?”
They stood by the French windows leading into the dining room, and the creamy light of the dining room fell onto their cheeks. Her hair was still wet and she felt like a child about to go into a cupcake party. Day was wearing a long djellaba with elaborate brocade and his face was open wide, very pink, as if the blood inside it were circulating at twice the normal speed. His eyes opened wide as well, with their mineral green quality, and they laughed as loudly as his mouth, just as his mouth laughed as silently as his eyes. A trick of some kind. She wondered how old he was. About the same as David, or a little younger, critically so, even? The difference that five years make in your forties.
“I’m starving,” he said. “After you. I’ve been dancing with some goats. At least I think they were goats. Perhaps they weren’t goats. But I think they had four legs.”
They went into the sweet air of the dining room, where the sugar ship now held a mound of almonds. Richard rose and tapped a wine glass.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “I have never seen such a crowd of piratical ruffians. Grab your sabers. Our chef, Monsieur Ben, has created a new pastry stuffed with sardines. It’s sensational. Afterward, you can loot as much as you want. In fact, I encourage you. Vous êtes ici pour looter. Just don’t steal my oil paintings.
If you please, darlings, not those. Just take a cigar. They’re free.”
Thirteen
S THE TOYOTA ROLLED DOWN THE HILL TOWARD THE road, the tall Kebbash who had opened the door for him leaned forward and asked David in perfect French, almost unaccented, and with a distinct politeness, if he would like a cigarette for the road. The old man, he said gaily, always insisted on driving and, by God, he could not be dissuaded from this sad duty, though it was unendurable for all concerned. David reluctantly accepted the cigarette, though he disapproved of the habit, naturally. But now, he reasoned, it would help him get through the hours. He therefore took the crumpled Gitane without a word and let the man, Anouar, light it for him. Their eyes met and they did not duel. Anouar seemed quite courteous and intelligent. There was something boyish and calm in his manner and voice, a lilt and a skip and a small murderous humor. He talked with his head on his side, like a large inquisitive parrot. “Your wife,” he said sincerely, “is very pretty. I will one day have a gazelle like that, God willing.” But would He be willing?
All six men were smoking by the time the car bumped its way onto the road, which was plunged in porous darkness and empty of traffic. They tore along it at a clip nearing eighty miles an hour, the wheels whining loudly, the windows vibrating as the nuts and screws shook. The engine shuddered. To David, the road suddenly looked like something intimately known. The white box-shaped guardhouses standing next to ditches and the straggling thorn trees were burned into his recent memory. Only the slopes of loose rocks looked higher than they had, less regular, and between them the groovelike ravines where the darkness seemed to collect like a fluid. It was now heavy in some way, this landscape, ominously saturated with its own inner gravity. Bones, marrow, but no skin, no external sheen.
Abdellah drove with his foot rammed into the accelerator and nothing else. He looked at the road and never at David. The men said nothing except when the cigarettes were lit. Only Anouar leaned forward to say a few things close to David’s ear.
“We are driving straight through. We will stop in Erfoud to see some people and have a drink. And a nap.”
Before long they passed into the outskirts of Errachidia. The city rectilinear, with wide avenues thronged with thousands of male students, and a soft light covering it, turning everything a dark gold. They shot over a bridge spanning a surprising river, the waters lit up by rows of lamps, and then rumbled along the flat, hard boulevards of what had once been a French military town. The buildings were uniformly white and so were the robes and hats of the innumerable students. There was still something of the desert barracks about the place, the departed Foreign Legion, and in the great spaces between the apartment blocks, one could see—or sense—the flat line of the desert that was close enough to smell. There was no trash, and no animals—perhaps the seasonal heat had burned them away—and the young men thronged there in small clusters seemed scrubbed and neat, without animality themselves. It was an optical illusion. The outside never knows anything.
They stopped at a street corner to buy Cokes and sandwiches. David got out to stretch his legs. The air was so hot that his face winced despite his own determination not to betray any discomfort in front of his “captors.” It was a struggle. Sand bit into his nostrils. Anouar asked him if he wanted to pee and he shook his head. It was impossible to tell what time it was, and through some vague superstition, he didn’t want to glance at his watch. Instead he watched Abdellah kneel by the wheels of the Toyota and inspect the tires. Under the orange lamps, he looked more youthful, more lithely menacing. He clucked and said nothing to anyone, and his filthy shoes, David noted, had small cheap gold chains on them. The other men, moreover, seemed awkward around Abdellah, as if the embarrassment caused by his bereavement could not be lightened by the usual bonhomie. They did what he asked, and they did it quickly.
ON THE FAR SIDE OF ERRACHIDIA, THE ROAD NARROWED and sand drifted across it; low mud walls sometimes hemmed it in, and behind the walls rose the dark cool of palmeries tossing in the wind. Men with agonized blank faces trudged by the roadside with gaggles of goats, and their eyes flashed like cats’ as they looked up into the headlights and didn’t blink.
David watched the faces of the Kebbash in the rearview mirror. They were chewing dates now, passing around a piece of sticky paper, though not to him. Perhaps they assumed that it would be offensive to his tastes. The pace slowed as the road became smaller and more cracked, and the father at some point reached down and switched on the car radio. The men sighed, affected by a burst of religious music. David struggled to keep awake, exhausted emotionally by the evening’s events, and his hand gripped the shattered metal window handle. He reflected that none of the other men had been introduced to him, or their names divulged. It suggested that now names didn’t matter much, because he was not an ordinary guest. Crammed together uncomfortably, they stoically endured the ride until one of them leaned down and picked up something heavy and metallic, and from the corner of his eye he sensed the presence of an old rifle. But it was not directed toward him. It was raised against the outside environment, which seemed to make them anxious as the palm groves thickened and the desert plains made themselves felt on either side of a road that relentlessly narrowed and became more suffocating. They were, he said, nearing Erfoud, inside the Tafilalet, the largest oasis in North Africa. From here came the royal family of Morocco.
David finally did glance at his watch. It was almost midnight. His mind was shrieking silently, and his sweaty hand let go of the handle. Abdellah huffed.
“He says we’ll go to the hotel,” Anouar translated from the backseat. “No one can drive across to Alnif in the dark.”
What he added in French was “On regrette.” But what did they regret?
“What hotel are we going to?” David asked pitifully.
“It’s the hotel where the fossil dealers go. The Hotel Tafilalet.”
They passed along streets of rose-brown houses with yellow and turquoise shutters, blue grilles, and white crenellations along the roofs. Erfoud sat in its winds and dust, obstinate and sunken, and it was not even yet the sleeping hours. In the hot season, night was precious, a time in which to be alive and do one’s business. Horse-drawn carts clattered around them piled with alfalfa and mint, lightbulbs exploded into life out of the dark, out of the arcades of a market where the flies had died down. The sidewalks were long piles of rubble behind which people sat on mats, staring at the traffic like people who are expecting a downfall of volcanic ash that will bury them for centuries. There were the same fossil shops he had seen in Midelt. The same gaunt men with trays of shark teeth and lumps of crinoids, the same boys running alongside the cars shouting “Dents de baleines!”
THE HOTEL TAFILALET STOOD ON ONE OF ERFOUD’S MAIN streets, of which there were two. It was done in the Arabian Nights style, green and blue, with kitschy mihrabs, columns, and alcoves that made its lobby seem denser and more majestic than it actually was. It looked like a smoker’s den in a private club, with water pipes set up next to the tables and forms cradled inside cushioned benches.
Around the pool, a few outdoor tables were set with sheltered candles, and here knots of men sat with their beers and smokes trying to find some relief from the scorching winds that rippled the water. The Kebbash parked the Toyota in the hotel lot and left two of the men to guard it; Abdellah strode through the lobby as if it were his living room, as if his physical shabbiness didn’t matter there, and David came behind him, egged on by Anouar. They passed a bar next to the pool, its stone surface encrusted with ammonites. A few aghast-looking Europeans sat there, not knowing what to do, since it was too hot even to go in the pool, and their blue eyes watched the group shuffle into the garden and settle at a table where they ordered cold sodas for themselves, then in a comical pantomime settled David at a table all by himself.
“They will bring you a cold soda,” Anouar explained. “There is a room upstairs where you can sleep. We get up again at five. I will come for you.”
/> “But why am I by myself?”
“It is more fitting, that’s all. Surely you understand?”
He did understand; in fact, he preferred it. His exhaustion overcame him and he slumped onto the table, his eyes ready to close. He gulped down the 7-Up in its glass of crushed ice, then tried to steady his nerves. The pool was surrounded by tall palms planted on the far side of the walls, and their bushy heads tossed in the gusts. The light was brown with flying sand, like the inside of an old fish tank. The grit didn’t seem to bother the locals, who obviously came here to network and trade. Mostly fossil dealers, he imagined, they floated about from table to table with elaborate gestures of friendship and small trays of polished ammonites. Did they, too, believe that these creatures were small demons who had fallen from the skies long ago? As they bowed at each table, they touched their chests with one hand and adopted a pleading tone. To David, they were especially pleading.
“Monsieur, Monsieur, des très beaux ammonites de Hmor Lagdad! Des purs, des rares! Regardez, et pour vous, Monsieur, un prix étonnant, ridicule!”
As they pressed desperately upon him, the Kebbash looked over with great amusement. The manager of the hotel had come out to greet them quickly, and the Erfoud dealers also passed by to shake their hands. The men from Tafal’aalt were key suppliers.
David shooed the sellers away irritably. He called Jo on his cell but there was no signal. He cursed under his breath and considered asking the manager if there was e-mail at the hotel. But when the manager came over, David had nothing to say. Suave and multilingual in the Moroccan way, the manager preempted him in impeccable, singsong English.
“Do not believe those sellers,” he laughed, gesturing toward virtually everyone there. “They are all liars. But if you would like to support their families, it is a good thing to do. One fossil feeds a child for a month.”
“I wouldn’t know what to buy,” David said bluntly.
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