by Paul Bowles
Fiction should always stay clear of political considerations. Even when I saw that the book that I had begun was taking a direction which would inevitably lead it into a region where politics could not be avoided, I still imagined that with sufficient dexterity I should be able to avert contact with the subject. But in situations where everyone is under great emotional stress, indifference is unthinkable; at such times all opinions are construed as political ones. To be apolitical is tantamount to having assumed a political stance, but one which pleases no one.
Thus, whether I liked it or not, when I had finished, I found that I had written a “political” book which deplored the attitudes of both the French and the Moroccans. Much later Allal el Fassi, “the father of Moroccan nationalism,” read it and expressed his personal approval. Even coming so late, this was satisfying.
Each novel seems to impose its own particular working regime. The Sheltering Sky and Let It Come Down were written during travels, whenever the spirit moved and the physical surroundings were conducive to writing. The Spider’s House, on the other hand, from the outset demanded a rigorous schedule. I began writing it in Tangier in the summer of 1954, setting the alarm for six each morning. I managed to average two pages a day. When winter came I sailed for Sri Lanka. There I adopted the same ritual; early tea was brought in at six o’clock, and I set to work, still meeting my quota of two daily pages. By the middle of March, in spite of visits to distant temples and nights spent watching devil-dances, the book was finished, and sent off from Weligama to Random House.
The tale is neither autobiographical nor factual, nor is it a roman á clef. Only the setting is objective; the rest is invented. The focal point of the action is the old Hôtel Palais Jamaï, before it was modernized. I called it the Mérinides Palace because one had to pass the tombs of the Mérinide kings on the way to the hotel. There is now an actual Hôtel des Mérinides, built in the sixties on the cliff alongside the tombs.
The city is still there. It is no longer the intellectual and cultural center of North Africa; it is merely one more city beset by the insoluble problems of the Third World. Not all the ravages caused by our merciless age are tangible ones. The subtler forms of destruction, those involving only the human spirit, are the most to be dreaded.
Paul Bowles
December 1981
PROLOGUE
It was just about midnight when Stenham left Si Jaffar’s door. “I don’t need anyone to come with me,” he had said, smiling falsely to belie the sound of his voice, for he was afraid he had seemed annoyed or been abrupt, and Si Jaffar, after all, was only exercising his rights as a host in sending this person along with him.
“Really, I don’t need anybody.” For he wanted to go back alone, even with all the lights in the city off. The evening had been endless, and he felt like running the risk of taking the wrong turnings and getting temporarily lost; if he were accompanied, the long walk would be almost like a continuation of sitting in Si Jaffar’s salon.
But in any case, it was too late now. All the male members of the household had come to the door, even stood out in the wet alley, insisting that the man go with him. Their adieux were always lengthy and elaborate, as if he were leaving for the other side of the world rather than the opposite end of the Medina, and he consciously liked that, because it was a part of what he thought life in a medieval city should be like. However, it was unprecedented for them to force upon him the presence of a protector, and he felt there was no justification for it.
The man strode ahead of him in the darkness. Where’d they get him from? he thought, seeing again the tall bearded Berber in tattered mountain garb as he had looked when he had first caught sight of him in the dim light of Si Jaffar’s patio. Then he recalled the fluttering and whispering that had gone on at one end of the room about an hour and a half earlier. Whenever these family discussions arose in Stenham’s presence, Si Jaffar made a great effort to divert his attention from them by embarking on a story. The story usually began promisingly enough, Si Jaffar smiling, beaming through his two pairs of spectacles, but with his attention clearly fixed on the sound of voices in the corner. Slowly, as the whispered conversation over there subsided, his words would come more haltingly, and his eyes would dart from side to side as his smile became paralyzed and meaningless. The tale would never be completed. Suddenly, “Ahah!” he would cry triumphantly, apropos of nothing at all. Then he would clap his hands for snuff, or orange-flower water, or chips of sandalwood to throw onto the brazier, look still more pleased, and perhaps whack Stenham’s knee playfully. A similar comedy had been played this evening about half past ten. As he thought it over now, Stenham decided that the occasion for it had been the family’s sudden decision to provide him with someone to accompany him back to the hotel. Now he remembered that after the discussion Abdeltif, the eldest son, had disappeared for at least half an hour; that must have been when the guide had been fetched.
The man had been crouching in the dark patio entrance just inside the door when they had gone out. It was embarrassing, because he knew Si Jaffar was not a well-to-do man, and while a little service like this was not abnormally expensive, still, it had to be paid for; Si Jaffar had made that clear. “Don’t give this man anything,” he had said in French. “I have already seen to that.”
“But I don’t need him,” Stenham had protested. “I know the way. Think of all the times I’ve gone back alone.” Si Jaffar’s four sons, his cousin and his son-in-law had all murmured: “No, no, no,” together, and the old man had patted his arm affectionately. “It’s better,” he said, with one of his curiously formal little bows. There was no use in objecting. The man would stay with him until he had delivered him over to the watchman at the hotel, and then he would disappear into the night, go back to whatever dark corner he had come from, and Stenham would not see him again.
The streets were completely without passers-by. It would have been quite possible to go most of the way along somewhat more frequented thoroughfares, he reflected, but obviously his companion preferred the empty ones. He took out his little dynamo flashlight and began to squeeze it, turning the dim ray downward to the ground at the man’s feet. The insect-like whirring it made caused him to turn around, a look of surprise on his face.
“Light,” said Stenham.
The man grunted. “Too much noise,” he objected.
He smiled and let the light die down. How these people love games, he thought. This one’s playing cops and robbers now; they’re always either stalking or being stalked. “The Oriental passion for complications, the involved line, Arabesques,” Moss had assured him, but he was not sure it was that. It could just as easily be a deep sense of guilt. He had suggested this, but Moss had scoffed.
The muddy streets led down, down. There was not a foot of level ground. He had to move forward stiff-ankled, with the weight all on the balls of his feet. The city was asleep. There was profound silence, broken only by the scuffing sound he made as he walked. The man, barefooted, advanced noiselessly. From time to time, when the way led not through inner passages but into the open, a solitary drop of rain fell heavily out of the sky, as if a great invisible piece of wet cloth were hanging only a few feet above the earth. Everything was invisible, the mud of the street, the walls, the sky. Stenham squeezed the flashlight suddenly, and had a rapidly fading view of the man moving ahead of him in his brown djellaba, and of his giant shadow thrown against the beams that formed the ceiling of the street. The man grunted again in protest.
Stenham smiled: unaccountable behavior on the part of Moslems amused him, and he always forgave it, because, as he said, no non-Moslem knows enough about the Moslem mind to dare find fault with it. “They’re far, far away from us,” he would say. “We haven’t an inkling of the things that motivate them.” There was a certain amount of hypocrisy in this attitude of his; the truth was that he hoped principally to convince others of the existence of this almost unbridgeable gulf. The mere fact that he could then even begin to hint at
the beliefs and purposes that lay on the far side made him feel more sure in his own attempts at analyzing them and gave him a small sense of superiority to which he felt he was entitled, in return for having withstood the rigors of Morocco for so many years. This pretending to know something that others could not know, it was a little indulgence he allowed himself, a bonus for seniority. Secretly he was convinced that the Moroccans were much like any other people, that the differences were largely those of ritual and gesture, that even the fine curtain of magic through which they observed life was not a complex thing, and did not give their perceptions any profundity. It delighted him that this anonymous, barefoot Berber should want to guide him through the darkest, least frequented tunnels of the city; the reason for the man’s desire for secrecy did not matter. These were a feline, nocturnal people. It was no accident that Fez was a city without dogs. “I wonder if Moss has noticed that,” he thought.
Now and then he had the distinct impression that they were traversing a street or an open space that he knew perfectly well, but if that were so, the angle at which they had met it was unexpected, so that the familiar walls (if indeed they were familiar walls) were dwarfed or distorted in the one swiftly fading beam of light that he played on them. He began to suspect that the power plant had suffered a major collapse: the electricity was almost certainly still cut off, because it would be practically impossible to go so far without coming upon at least one street light. However, he was used to moving around the city in the darkness. He knew a good many ways across it in each direction, and he could have found his way blindfolded along several of these routes. Indeed, wandering through the Medina at night was very much like being blindfolded; one let one’s ears and nose do most of the work. He knew just how each section of a familiar way sounded when he walked it alone at night. There were two things to listen for: his feet and the sound of the water behind the walls. The footsteps had an infinite variety of sound, depending on the hardness of the earth, the width of the passageway, the height and configuration of the walls. On the Lemtiyine walk there was one place between the tannery and a small mosque where the echo was astounding: taut, metallic reverberations that shuddered between the walls like musical pistol shots. There were places where his footfalls were almost silent, places where the sound was strong, single and compact, died straightway, or where, as he advanced along the deserted galleries, each succeeding step produced a sound of an imperceptibly higher pitch, so that his passage was like a finely graded ascending scale, until all at once a jutting wall or a sudden tunnel dispersed the pattern and began another section in the long nocturne which in turn would slowly disclose its own design. And the water was the same, following its countless courses behind the partitions of earth and stone. Seldom visible but nearly always present, it rushed beneath the sloping alleyways, here gurgled, here merely dripped, here beyond the wall of a garden splashed or dribbled in the form of a fountain, here fell with a high hollow noise into an invisible cistern, here all at once was unabashedly a branch of the river roaring over the rocks (so that sometimes the cold vapor rising was carried over the wall by the wind and wet his face), here by the bakery had been dammed and was almost still, a place where the rats swam.
The two simultaneous sound-tracks of footsteps and water he had experienced so often that it seemed to him he must know each portion by heart. But now it was all different, and he realized that what he knew was only one line, one certain sequence whose parts became unrecognizable once they were presented out of their accustomed context. He knew, for instance, that in order to be as near the main branch of the river as they were now, at some point they had had to cross the street leading from the Karouine Mosque to the Zaouia of Si Ahmed Tidjani, but it was impossible for him to know when that had been; he had recognized nothing.
Suddenly he realized where they were: in a narrow street that ran the length of a slight eminence above the river, just below the mass of walls that formed the Fondouk el Yihoudi. It was far out of their way, not on any conceivable route between Si Jaffar’s house and the hotel. “Why have we come out here?” he asked with indignation. The man was unnecessarily abrupt in his reply, Stenham thought. “Walk and be quiet.”
“But they always are,” he reminded himself; he would never be able to take for granted their curious mixture of elaborate circumspection and brutal bluntness, and he almost laughed aloud at the memory of how the ridiculous words had sounded five seconds ago: Rhir zid o skout. And in another few minutes they had circumnavigated the Fondouk el Yihoudi and were going through a wet garden under banana trees; the heavy tattered leaves showered cold drops as they brushed against them. “Si Jaffar has outdone himself this time.” He decided to telephone him tomorrow and make a good story of it. Zid o skout It would be a hilarious slogan over the tea glasses for the next fortnight, one in which the whole family could share.
It was a freakish summer night; a chill almost like that of early spring paralyzed the air. A vast thick cloud had rolled down across the Djebel Zalagh and formed a ceiling low over the city, enclosing it in one great room whose motionless air smelled only of raw, wet earth. As they went silently back into the streets higher up the hill, an owl screamed once from somewhere above their heads.
When they had arrived at the hotel’s outer gate, Stenham pushed the button that rang a bell down in the interior of the hotel in some little room near the office where the watchman stayed. For a moment he thought: It won’t ring; the power’s off tonight. But then he remembered that the hotel had its own electric system. It was usually a good five minutes before the light came on in the courtyard, and then another two or three before the watchman got to the gate. Tonight the light came on immediately. Stenham stepped close to the high doors and peered through the crack between them. The watchman was at the far end of the courtyard talking to someone. “Ah, oui,” he heard him say. A European in the court at this hour, he thought with some curiosity, trying to see more. The watchman was approaching. Like a guilty child, Stenham stepped quickly back and put his hands in his pockets, looking nonchalantly toward the side wall. Then he realized that his guide had disappeared. There was no sound of retreating footsteps; he was merely gone. The heavy bolt of the gate was drawn back and the watchman stood there in his khaki duster and white turban, the customary anxious expression on his face.
“Bon soir, M’sio Stonamm,” he said. Sometimes he spoke in Arabic, sometimes in French; it was impossible to know which he would choose for a given occasion. Stenham greeted him, looking across the courtyard to see who was there with him. He saw no one. The same two cars stood there: the hotel’s station wagon and an old Citroen that belonged to the manager, but which he never used. “You came quickly tonight,” he said.
“Oui, M’sio Stonamm.”
“You were outside, near the gate, perhaps?”
The watchman hesitated. “Non, m’sio.”
He abandoned it rather than become exasperated with the man, which he knew he would do if he went on. A lie is not a lie; it is only a formula, a substitute, a long way around, a polite manner of saying: None of your business.
He had his key in his pocket, and so he went directly up the back way to his room, a little ashamed of himself for having started to pry. But when he stood in his room in the tower, looking out over the invisible city spread below, he found that he could justify his inquisitiveness. It was not merely the watchman’s patent lie which had prodded him; much more than that was the fact of its having come directly on the heels of the Berber’s strange behavior: the unnecessary detour, the gruff injunctions to silence, the inexplicable disappearance before he had had a chance to hand him the thirty francs he had ready to give him. Not only that, he decided, going further back to Si Jaffar. The whole family had so solemnly insisted that he be accompanied on his way home to the hotel. That too seemed to be a part of the conspiracy. “They’re all crazy tonight,” he told himself with satisfaction. He refused to tie all these things together by attributing them to the tension that was i
n the city. Ever since that day a year ago when the French, more irresponsible than usual, had deposed the Sultan, the tension had been there, and he had known it was there. But it was a political thing, and politics exist only on paper; certainly the politics of 1954 had no true connection with the mysterious medieval city he knew and loved. It would have been too simple to make a logical relationship between what his brain knew and what his eyes saw; he found it more fun to play this little game with himself.
Each night when Stenham had locked his door, the watchman climbed up the steep stairs into the tower of the ancien palais and snapped off the lights in the corridors, one by one. When he had gone back down, and the final sounds of his passage had died away, there was only the profound silence of the night, disturbed, if a wind blew, by the rustle of the poplars in the garden. Tonight, when the slow footsteps approached up the staircase, instead of the familiar click of the switch on the wall outside the door, there was a slight hesitation, and then a soft knock. Stenham had taken off his tie, but he was still fully dressed. Frowning, he opened the door. The watchman smiled apologetically at him—certainly not out of compunction for the lie in the courtyard, he commented, seeing that wistful, vanquished face. In the five seasons he had spent here at the hotel Stenham had never seen this man wear another expression. If the world went on he would grow old and die, night watchman at the Mérinides Palace, no other possibility having suggested itself to him. This time he spoke in Arabic. “Smatsi. M’sio Moss has sent me. He wants to know if you’ll go to see him.”
“Now?” said Stenham incredulously.
“Now. Yes.” He laughed deprecatingly, with infinite gentleness, as if he meant to imply that his understanding of the world was vast indeed.