The Married Man

by Edmund White

  “Go?” Julien asked, blinking. He’d been smiling into the garden and looking at his uneaten omelette as though he were a mild-mannered child to whom the gruff natives had offered an inscrutable toy. “Where are we going?”

  The German said, “I don’t have a car but you do. I thought we could all take the dirt road up into the mountains to Ali’s village. They’ll make us mint tea, which for them is a great luxury, and you can meet Ali who you’ll see has lost his looks and become fat as a you-nook.”

  Oh, Austin thought. As a eunuch. What a drool-making temptation….

  They drove a few miles out of town into the foothills where the gravel road gave out and there were just two continuing ruts in the mud. After another mile Austin decided they couldn’t continue because the bottom of the car was scraping against the turf.

  Julien said, “Go on! Go on! I want to see the village.”

  “No, we can’t,” Austin said. “We’re scraping the bottom of the car. We’ll destroy the motor. We’ll be stuck here. Our insurance won’t cover the repairs—it will so clearly have been our fault.”

  Julien, who was sitting beside him, said, “Oh, I’m so disappointed, you have no sense of adventure. I wanted to go there.”

  Something about the way he said it made Austin think he was referring to the foothills of death. No, that was a fancy way of putting a simpler intuition, that Julien was expecting something to happen to him up there that now would never happen.

  Julien left them and went walking across the valley. Somewhere, out of sight, over the next hill possibly, several men were hammering something and all talking at once. “What are they doing?” Austin asked.

  “Building a house,” the guide said, though how he knew exactly Austin wondered.

  The sound was peculiarly close and present, irregular but frequent blows of hammers on something hollow-sounding, perhaps stakes being driven into the earth after all.

  A soft breeze was blowing and tossing and gathering the folds of Julien’s white robes as he walked. The ground up here was stony and barren, the color of sand though the pebbles and rocks would need another ten thousand years to be ground down to grains that fine. Green trees, wind-trained and full as giant bushes, were dotting the tan hills all the way down to the distant, verdant valley. There were no clouds in the sky except along the horizon; at first Austin wondered if they might be snow-covered mountains, but then they drifted slightly.

  The guide stood apart, as if afraid of disturbing them with proximity. He suddenly hunkered down in a crouch, with his back to them, and looked off to the valley. Hermann stood near Austin, kicking a pebble with his right foot. Austin looked at Julien, whose white caftan was glowing with the suffused daylight and was floating in the shifting but constantly flowing breeze. Austin took three pictures as Julien walked back toward them. Austin thought, Julien’s such a romantic boy, he’s probably communing with nature in preparation for his death.

  And then he thought: That’s exactly what he’s doing, it’s not a pose, it’s a reality. He’s communing with nature in preparation for his death.

  Chapter Twenty

  The next day they left their hotel in Taroudant at ten in the morning, retraced their path in the car past the Berber Palace and drove for four hours on to the oasis town of Ouazarzate. As soon as they drove into town the streets were broader, the buildings more luxurious—this was a tourist town with a big Club Med compound somewhere, even if it was off-season and there were few Europeans to be seen.

  They checked into their hotel, a brand-new collection of low pavilions, air-conditioned and smelling of just-opened packing cases and overheated electrical circuits. A series of linked inner courtyards led them to the pool and a scattering of guests at tables shaded by parasols. Julien and Austin ordered lunch by the pool.

  All morning Julien had been peeved with Austin because yesterday Austin had permitted Hermann to come along to the Berber village in the mountains. “That German was so fat he weighed down the car. You and your American compulsion to be nice to every stranger. You spoiled our trip and you—well, you have plenty of time in front of you to waste but I don’t.”

  That evening they went out as the light was dying. Storks, pure white except where their tails and bellies were black, settled on their unkempt nests wedged between two chimneys. The two men headed to the casbah, a fortress in mud tattooed with hen tracks dug into the adobe around blind windows above smooth troweled walls. The casbah was honeycombed with boutiques, all closed tight because it was the next-to-last night of Ramadan and soon the festivities would be beginning. Two shops, however, had stayed open. Julien bought a silver hash pipe, slender and incised with Tuareg spiral symbols of eternity, and a thick silver bracelet. Austin became nervous because two middle-aged Arabs in dark brown wool robes seemed to be shadowing them.

  “Let’s go back to the hotel,” Austin whispered. “These men make me nervous and I have too much money on me.”

  The following day they drove south through the Valley of the Draa. After the town of Agdz they passed through the oases of Tam-nougatt, Tinsouline and Tissergate. A river that sometimes was just three meters wide and at others sank into the sand and seeped its way through, only to reemerge as a trickle half a kilometer further along, irrigated the fields and a line of slender palms. Inside the fortified casbahs, villagers lived on the floors above the stables. Here the windows were slits just wide enough to poke a rifle through. In the background rose black lava mountains, the range called Jbel Sarhro, lunar and plantless. Not a single bush or blade of grass grew on the heavily fissured, rocky soil. It made a strangely out-of-scale contrast to the wood gates and mud crenelations of the casbahs and the luxurious palms lining the stream. Was this the desert?

  In the strong steady sunlight women, unveiled but hooded, moved in their cobalt-blue or black robes; they were all walking somewhere. No men were to be seen, although near the town of Tissergate two little boys were selling freshly picked dates in baskets of woven palm fronds. Austin stopped to buy a basket; Julien complained about the bees it attracted and, after they’d eaten two or three, they threw it out the window. Julien said he was disappointed by the Valley, which had looked so much better in photos. “But that’s probably just my mood,” he said.

  Zagora, an ugly modern town, was squeezed into the crook of the elbow of the Draa. The sole beauty of the oasis was in its agriculture—the soaring date palms protecting the almond and lemon trees from the sun and they, in turn, shading the plots of wheat and barley.

  They checked into their modern hotel, which seemed to have no other guests. Julien tottered around the pool, then crept to their room, supported by Austin. He fell asleep instantly. A feeling of dread came over Austin as he sat in the dark and looked at this bony shadow on the bed, breathing in a labored way but scarcely moving. Austin thought he’d been foolish to bring Julien to such a remote place. What was going to happen to them?

  After an hour or two had drifted by, Julien awakened and said he was hungry, if too weak to go to the dining room. Austin ordered some chicken and cooked peas from room service, but when the waiter, looking wide-eyed and frightened, wheeled the table in, Julien was dozing again. Austin dismissed the waiter. He turned on all the lights, even those overhead, and tuned in the television, which had only one channel, showing the inevitable king sitting cross-legged in the mosque.

  At last Julien sat up on the edge of the bed and looked at the food with no interest. He tried to eat a few forkfuls but kept dozing off. He crumpled back onto the bed and slept.

  Austin, sitting in the blue, shifting glow of the television, thought things were getting out of hand. They were far from everyone they knew, and the steps needed to undo their trip this far into the desert would require at least two or three days. They couldn’t just rush to the nearest airport and fly home to Paris. No, they’d have to drive slowly back to Ouazarzate then a whole day through the mountains to Marrakesh before they could
find a plane to France. Maybe Marrakesh was even farther.

  Julien acted much, much weaker, but he had no fever. What was happening to him? Driving in a sealed car down a highway in warm but not hot weather seemed a diverting but not tiring activity, but who was he, Austin, to judge, cushioned as he was with his seven hundred T-cells, fifty extra pounds and rosy cheeks, fore and aft?

  Julien awoke after an hour and waved his hand impatiently at the table of cold food, which Austin pushed out into the hall. Then Julien wanted to take a bath. His body was all feet, knees and shoulders, with dry boards for bones connecting them. The skin was hanging loosely and yellow. The knees were nodes that bulked far larger than the thighs or calves. The head was huge and heavy, hard to maintain upright, like a painted papier-mâché carnival head worn by a frail child, a head with just one expression.

  Austin, no longer afraid to hover, stood in the bathroom and watched Julien unbend, apparently from a great height, into the water. Immersed, he looked so frail tears came to Austin’s eyes.

  Julien cupped water with his translucent hands, and dribbled it over his shoulders; the scar from his shunt was still visible and the hair hadn’t grown back yet where it had been shaved from his chest.

  When he wanted to stand to get out he couldn’t. Austin tried to pull him up with a powerful tug, but Julien said, “You’re hurting me.” Austin took off his own clothes, bent over the tub and lifted Julien in his arms, but at one moment he almost dropped this long, skinny thing and his own back felt as if he were about to slip a disk. He laid him, dripping and nerveless, on the bed and dried him off although even the softest strokes hurt him.

  “We have to go back to Paris, Julien. You’re not well enough to go on.”

  “But, Petit, don’t be a coward,” Julien said. “I want to go to Erfoud and then back to Fès. You’ve got to let me see Fès, that’s where I did my student work, preparing for my thesis on the hammam. I’ve been waiting for five years to show you Fès. And this is my last chance.”

  Austin slept beside Julien in the empty, modern hotel that was peculiarly silent except for its throbbing air-conditioners. In the morning Austin asked the desk clerk if they should head back to Ouazarzate before crossing over to Erfoud, or whether there was a shorter route. The clerk explained that the direct route, describing a triangle, was far shorter though the road wasn’t always in the best condition. Julien was eager to see the desert. They stocked up on several bottles of water.

  The road, far from being just sketchy, simply disappeared from time to time; they thundered their way across arid, rock-strewn wastes, their wheels spinning up pebbles that clattered against the chassis and showered out behind them. They’d rise to the top of a hill, then sight a hamlet of seven houses or a lone house of just one room, built in cement, colored blue, two sheep staggering across the desolate landscape in front of it, as surprised to find themselves there as Austin was. With a frantic eye he monitored the gas and water gauge, the temperature—and the vital signs of his passenger.

  After two hours they came to a village and stopped for lunch. A man with a white beard indicated a restaurant; his gesture was so negligent, even scornful, that Austin assumed he took no responsibility for the cuisine. Austin called and clapped and at last a shy man in a dirty white turban, smelling of lanolin, came sleepily blinking out into the sunlight. He was persuaded to help Austin escort Julien up the ten stairs to the open-air balcony that was above the dust level. Julien was smiling sweetly but he seemed in a daze, as if the poet had got it all wrong and flesh became wood and fingers leaves not instantaneously but slowly, very slowly, and under the stern supervision of an unblinking sun.

  Julien wanted a Coke but the bubbles burned his throat. He looked benignly out over the passersby just below, stirring up clouds of dust every time they took a step. He picked up a slice of orange and sucked on it, but he whispered, “It’s bitter,” and put it aside.

  By evening they’d crossed the desert and arrived at Erfoud, an oasis of just five thousand people but looking surprisingly modern with its electric lights, cafés and freshly painted houses and stores. Their hotel was brand new.

  But when Austin went to help Julien out of the car, Julien burst into tears and pissed through his robes in a copious yellow soak. “What are you doing!” Austin exclaimed like an angry father—he could hear the harsh voice of his own father. “They’ll never let us in if you’re going to do that!”

  Julien’s voice was so feeble that Austin had to crouch down to hear him. “I can’t help it. I’ve lost control.”

  Austin found one of his own dirty shirts and mopped Julien dry as best he could. “Well, let’s go check in, then we’ll worry about the bags.”

  Julien’s knees were buckling as they walked the twenty feet to the lobby, which was air-conditioned and empty, lit by outsized copper lanterns made of thick gobs of colored glass—the “native” note that was played off against the freshly upholstered chairs and the glassy white and black marble floors, which a uniformed man was polishing with an electric chrome machine.

  The desk clerk asked rudely, “What’s wrong with him?”

  Austin said, “Oh, him? He’s fine. He just had some serious surgery and has decided to recuperate here in Morocco. But give us a room on the ground floor.” Austin put a tone of matter-of-fact authority in his voice, because he could feel the clerk was still making up his mind whether to admit them. He probably didn’t want someone to die in the hotel—maybe he was superstitious, or maybe he was afraid a death would be bad for business. Or perhaps he just feared the paperwork.

  “We have our coupon for the room,” Austin said and handed over a piece of paper. This hotel belonged to the same chain as their last three and Austin had paid for them all in advance. The clerk looked at the paper dubiously and at last tossed a tasseled key down on the counter and sauntered away. Perhaps he was tense because today was the last day of Ramadan.

  Their room, which was at the far end of an inner courtyard, stank of backed-up sewage. As soon as they were in it and the baggage had been brought to them, Austin undressed Julien and washed him slowly, tenderly. They were both smiling. “I’m sorry I shouted at you,” Austin said. “I was just afraid they might not let us into the hotel if we looked, uh, problematic … and then where would we have gone?”

  “If they can throw us out then we should go back to France. I don’t want to be at their mercy.” Julien was speaking so softly that Austin bent over him and pressed his ear close to his mouth.

  “I’m afraid that an ordinary plane won’t accept us now,” Austin said. “You know they won’t take people who are obviously ill. But we have traveler’s insurance and they guarantee they’ll repatriate us, even if they have to hire a private plane. The only problem is that they mustn’t suspect you were already critically ill when you came to Morocco. If they see all your medicines they’ll be able to say that anyone traveling with so many pills had no right to leave home in the first place.”

  “I think I can simplify them,” Julien said. “Bring me the sack.”

  Julien made two piles in his bed but he kept dozing off. He forced himself awake again and again; he applied himself to the problem with urgency. “You can put half of my medicines in your bag; I’ll keep the rest. But I’m throwing a lot of the ballast overboard.”

  Austin called the insurance people in Paris and explained the situation to a sympathetic young man who kept saying, “Of course, I understand, no problem.” After an hour he phoned back to say they’d need the opinion of a doctor, someone who’d sign an affidavit attesting to the gravity of Julien’s condition.

  Julien said, angrily, “Once you paid hundreds of dollars extra to fly back from Spain to Paris a day early because you had opera tickets that night with Henry McVay, but now you’re so cheap—”

  Austin nearly wept, he felt so misjudged, but then he said to himself, He can’t help it. He can’t help what he’s saying and doing. He’s ver
y ill, he’s bitter, his personality has been distorted by all he’s suffered—and by the morphine.

  “My back hurts so much,” Julien said. He’d been looking at his Koran, but now he put it aside.

  Austin rubbed him as delicately as he could but he still felt he was leaving bruises and injuring internal organs. When Julien dozed off, he perfumed the room with the attar of roses they’d bought from the little girl in the High Atlas mountains, but still the odor of backed-up sewage was omnipresent. Just outside their window was the desert—not rocks or scrub brush this time, but the real desert of windswept sand dunes, sculpted into sharply defined crests and shadowy valleys, the whole thrown into dramatic relief by the setting sun, which cast slopes on the right into tawny warmth and on the left into cold purple darkness. The curves of the crests and the long ridged wind lines traveling up to them displayed an abstract anatomical beauty, as if they were molds cast from the bodies of athletes.

  The young man in Paris called back to say that if they could get to Marrakesh and find a doctor who’d certify the gravity of Julien’s illness, the company would arrange for a private plane. Austin remembered that Marie-France had once offered to pay their medical bills, no matter how extraordinary, but he felt far from Paris. And he felt incapable of phoning her.

  The next day they drove along the paved two-lane highway that led back to Ouazarzate and from there up through the mountains to Marrakesh. Ramadan was over at last and their road took them through one village after another where laughing men were dancing in the streets. The effect of pushing through the crowds in a car was similar to brushing through high reeds in a motor boat except Austin dared not touch these merrymakers. Women in white caftans, girdled with gold belts, were jogging past on the backs of donkeys; the men, outfitted in freshly laundered white djellabahs, looked washed and pressed themselves, joyous at the end of their onerous religious duties. People were eating, drinking and smoking with an exaggerated pleasure, as if such simple daily acts were themselves signs of daring revelry.