Alexandra Singer

by Tea at the Grand Tazi

  Her sleep was fitful and erratic and her painting had reached another low point. Nothing came out as she intended. She painted with agitation. Every day, her incompetence screamed at her. She worked herself into a trance, crying and swearing as she staggered in front of each canvas.

  As the dust of the changing season came swirling up the streets, Maia seemed to have lost her ability to see in colour. The light eluded her, and the paintings were finished in shades of grey, in tones of sepia and muddy browns, like an old photograph that for many years has been hidden away in a drawer. Maia had sought light and the bright sun for her art, but the Historian had brought only darkness. The Historian’s austerity, his absolute control, drained her of all vibrancy and hope. Full only of apprehension for her future, she breathed the stifled air of oppression. In her imagination, she approached the canvas aggressively and flung down the paint, using jagged brushed strokes of violent crimson to depict the sky. She dreamt in colour, in purples, violets and crimsons, painted in thick, broad streaks, which enveloped the viewer, but the work she produced depicted only stagnant dim shadows moving lethargically across the canvas. She had arrived in a city full of mental vigour, only to be confronted by a growing sleeplessness. When she remembered her experiences, they made her recoil in disgust. Her life had become so thoroughly dependent upon the conscious whims of others, the imposing presence elicited by the people who now surrounded her. She saw her future as bleak.

  For several days Armand had neglected to visit and she was becoming frantic with the need that had taken over. She began to wander the streets alone after dark, meeting visitors both fluid and mysterious, slipping through the opening and closing of the city gates. She knew that in one way or another, Armand would begin to expect payment. She wondered if Mahmoud could help her, but even her addled mind could remember his involvement in Atlas.

  By wandering the streets alone, Maia was able to see sights that she would otherwise not have seen. Sights that fascinated and appalled her, reminding her of the otherness in this society, in which she had no place.

  She came upon a small, quiet square, where a few men were gathered around a wizened looking young man, long haired and filthy, sitting upon a rug. Despite the thick layers of dirt that encased the young man’s body and the dark, matted hair that hung around his face, his beauty was marred only by the slightly simian quality of his face.

  Having edged through the crowd, Maia was now close enough to see that the marks he wore upon his arms revealed him to be a member of the fellowship to which she too belonged.

  He conveyed an exuberant charisma that enraptured the crowd, who were listening intently as he began his story. His long pink tongue darted lizard-like across each side of his mouth as he spoke in French. Maia nudged a small, insipid looking woman who was standing by her.

  “What is his name?”

  “Larbi. Women are not supposed to listen to the stories he tells.”

  “But you do?”

  The woman said nothing but inclined her head towards Larbi. Men leaned their rusting bicycles against the walls to stop and listen. One man whispered something unintelligible to her in Arabic and made a gesture with his hand, as if to send her away.

  Larbi was flinging his arms around, making strange patterns in the night air. His English was surprisingly good, and Maia wondered if he had lived a very different life before the one that stood before her.

  “This is the story of the girl who married a snake.” The crowd seemed to shudder in horror and Maia realised that she had arrived just in time.

  The storyteller’s voice grew alternately low and sad, then rising, his eyes narrowing and widening.

  “Once there was a woman who married a rich merchant and lived on the very edge of the desert. He had two beautiful young children, a boy and a girl, but the man had lost his wife when she was a young woman. She died of a snake bite. But even in death she was a threat to his new wife, who hated the children. In turn, the children detested the stepmother, for she was a cruel and evil woman. She punished them and sought useless tasks for them to do. She beat them and scalded their tiny hands. In what little free time they had, the children would run freely in the land close to the house. But the boy was very stupid, whilst the girl was extraordinarily clever, and the stepmother saw this, which made her detest the girl even more.

  “One afternoon, the children went for a walk, but became lost. For hours they walked around, unable to find their way. Several times they found themselves back in the desert, and try as they might, they couldn’t find their way home.

  “A huge, strange creature appeared before them, grimacing. I cannot go into too much detail for you all, for it is shocking, but let it suffice to say that the creature’s skin was raw, as if it had shed its previous skin, its hair was sparse and it seemed as if all the brutality of the world was etched upon its face. They saw that the creature was a woman, and she took out from behind her back the huge net which she used for catching butterflies. The beautiful butterflies fluttered away from her, hiding from her net, but she used many tricks to recapture them. Forsaken in the shifting sands, which barred their way, hidden within the deep density of the palm trees, their stepmother had succeeded in finding them and she brought them back to the house where she committed horrendous cruelties towards the children which I am unable to relate.

  “The children had long suspected that their stepmother was an ogress, and now she revealed herself to them. The father was often away a great deal, and the ogress was an expert in the art of witchcraft, so that he believed his wife was beautiful, kind, and loving to his children.”

  Something about the man compelled Maia to stay and listen, pressed among the crowd in the saffron glow of the fading light.

  “The father was away so often that the cruelty of the stepmother was never exposed, and indeed he was so enchanted by her, that had he learnt about her cruelty he never would have believed it. The ogress had all sorts of unnatural relations with animals, and one evening she found herself to be pregnant, and not by her usual partner, but by a serpent.”

  A muted sound of collective horror flickered through the audience, and Maia saw them shift forward to listen even more intently.

  “Soon afterwards, the father died on his travels, captured by thieves and left for dead in the desert. The children mourned for him, but they wept too for fear of the future that awaited them. With their last hope gone, the children, now slightly older, succeeded in escaping. They built a shelter so deep inside the oasis that the ogress was unable to find them. They spent evenings huddled together listening to her tread the paths nearby their shelter, calling out their names with a kindness that they had not known since their mother had been alive.

  “One evening, as the sun set, the girl decided to leave the hut and her sleeping brother to see what had happened to the ogress, as they had not heard her shouting for quite some time. The girl knew that at this hour the ogress was often asleep, from the late afternoons until the sky was black and the stars could be glimpsed, in preparation for all her nightly exertions. The girl walked up the pathway to the house of sandstone where she had once known such cruelty, and now it was even more dilapidated than in the days when her father had been alive. Insects of all kinds scurried in and out of the windows. The shutters were broken and hanging loose, and the girl was able to see inside as she crept up to the window.”

  Larbi stopped abruptly. He got up and began to walk off, but the men shouted at him. “What happens? How can you leave us like this?”

  The storyteller shrugged and continued walking, but a stocky member of the audience grabbed him and forced him back. He smiled and sat down. It was all part of his act.

  “Then, instead of finding the ogress fast asleep as she had expected, the girl found the ogress lying in terror upon the trodden floor, trying to scream. She was muttering incessantly for help, but the girl looked on with contempt for the stepmother she had learnt to despise.

  “Yet the ogress was not giving birth
. Not, at least, from between her thighs. A few moments later, she was forced to stop her screaming. Something grotesque was wriggling its way out of her gaping mouth, as the ogress and the girl’s eyes met in a shared moment of horror.

  “All of a sudden, the snake made its entrance into the world, slithering out of the mouth of the ogress. It bit its own mother, and as she died, the ogress rocked with all the agonies of poison and the girl simply watched the woman, transfixed. She had no time to run away, the snake was already fully grown and it turned its head to speak to her. It slithered over and was soon breathing at her neck and coiling itself around her. It tried to hiss at her seductively, and there was nothing the girl could do to fight back as it took her on the very floor where her stepmother had died and now lay motionless, the fluid of afterbirth pouring from her lifeless mouth.”

  The crowd was transfixed.

  “When the brother came to look for the girl at the house, he marched into his former home and found the girl and the snake together.”

  Larbi stood up and shouted, “Yet wait! There is no happy ending!” His eyes were magnetic and he smiled apologetically. “If anybody would like to make a small donation for my upkeep, it would be gratefully appreciated... ” He pulled a small clay bowl from beneath his cloak and went around, offering it to the crowd. During this momentary pause, a snake trader brought his snakes into the centre of the crowd. The onlookers recoiled from them in delight and horror as the snakes horribly flickered their tongues through their stitched mouths. At the side of the square some other snake charmers toyed with defanged black cobras, whilst robed Berber men and a few women chewed upon fried locusts.

  On the side of the street an old man was laying the lute, high sweet notes rose into the air and floated above her head and the cobra rose out of its circle, its scaly loops undulating and its reptile body upright, its small reptile head keeping in perfect time to the music as it bobbed its head about, its eyes moving almost lasciviously.

  Maia saw Larbi sit down and someone brought him over some mint tea as several richer members of the crowd evidently took the opportunity to purchase some snakes. After a while Larbi returned to take his place once more, counting the coins in his bowl. Seemingly pleased with the result, he intoned a blessing in Arabic, and started the story again. His voice began to rise, then whisper, and his eyes grew large and wide.

  “The snake kept the girl captive and the boy was forced to stay at the house. The snake presided over the household and soon began to speak against the girl whom he had forced to become his wife. He was forging a bond with the girl’s brother, whispering seductively evil thoughts every day that the boy was finding hard to resist. The main desire in life for this creature was corruption. It resolved to protect the boy from what it had come to consider its wife’s malevolence, for it was aware of how vehemently the girl still despised it. By this time, the girl was no longer beautiful, the hardships and trials of her dreadful life having worn her down. When her brother looked at her, he sometimes felt a rush of sympathy, but the opportunity they might have had to make their escape was long past, and he was now starting to enjoy the company of the snake.

  “One evening the malicious snake and his brother-in-law hatched a vicious plan. As the girl was reluctantly preparing an elaborate evening meal, the snake slithered up behind her affectionately, and viciously bit her on her neck. Just as her stepmother had died, the girl began to writhe in agony, the poison coursing through her veins. The snake and the boy, left together, leaving the girl alone in the house to die. But the snake had bitten her only lightly, and she survived.

  “The brother did not mourn his sister. He felt that she had been lost to him many years earlier, when she had allowed herself to become the property of the snake. So the boy, now a handsome young man, together with the snake, went off together into the night, the snake as dedicated to destruction as it had been when it first came into the world, and the boy now addicted and utterly corrupted by the snake.”

  Maia felt the entire crowd shiver, and then it erupted into applause as the ragged storyteller shuffled through the people. Larbi held his clay bowl stretched out for any extra coins. Maia dropped some in his bowl and fell away.

  She wondered why it was the girl who had to suffer, what had then happened to the girl, and why her punishment for existence had been a dreadful death. Abandoned because she had become old and ugly, childless, alone amongst the sand dunes, her virginity lost, considered worthless and now isolated, what would become of her?

  Maia turned back towards the crowd in the hope of finding Larbi, but he and the snake sellers had already left the square. Maia stood still, jostled by the people walking past, but she could not feel them. She was thinking about the girl and her fate, and she felt that she too had been seduced into taking the plunge into a pool of terrible emptiness.

  Chapter 13

  Larbi’s story haunted Maia’s nights. Her mind was becoming as cloudy as the dust that would swirl in from the desert. The inhabitants of Marrakech seemed to be even more restless than normal. Tension rose until it exploded, like a crescendo of wrong notes. Anxiety pursued with an intensity that shrouded the air, and grey clouds lurked over the mountains.

  Maia now hadn’t seen the Historian for weeks. In the afternoons, she painted and slept, and when Armand was in the mood, he visited her and they passed the time by making love. Yet there was now no pretence of any tenderness between them. Armand did not fail to supply her with her needs, despite her increasing narcotic appetite. But with desperation she paced her empty room, accepting the scant affection he bestowed on her.

  In the evenings Maia found herself unable to stay away from the bar at the Grand Tazi. She drank the mint tea that Mahmoud offered her with enthusiasm, and every night Tariq delighted in creating new concoctions. Her favourite was cold mint tea with vodka. Even Mahmoud commented on her intake.

  “Are you not taking a little too much, Maia?”

  “Why do you care?”

  He laughed heartily.

  “Because I still need you to paint! And it is not too good for you.”

  “Why do you care about what I drink? You introduced me to something far worse.”

  “I do not know what you mean, dear! You are imagining things. It is not the same!” He ambled off to charm some more guests.

  But Mahmoud had begun to notice that the colours and shapes of Maia’s paintings were as murky as her mind. “Well, has the spider emerged from his lair?”

  “Spider?”

  “Mihai. Your Historian. You must know that you are his collateral, little fly, his collateral! My hands are tied, little fly.”

  “Little fly? Why do you keep calling me that?”

  “We are all caught in his web. Sticky, sticky!”

  “I could leave.”

  Suddenly he was serious. “We both know that you will not do that.”

  “And what makes you think that?”

  “He won’t let you go, you know too much about him now.”

  “Not at all, Mahmoud. I don’t know what you mean. The problem is that I don’t know anything. I never see him.”

  “That is no problem,” he said, and suddenly he looked extraordinarily depressed. “I am being squeezed,”

  “By who?”

  “Who do you suppose? By your employer.”

  “Not the Historian? I thought you were friends.”

  “Who else? He takes so much from me,” and he looked down at the ground.

  Against all her instincts, Maia was sympathetic towards Mahmoud. She was too weak to fight against any of them now, and she didn’t care enough to bother.

  “How can I have any sympathy for you Mahmoud? After what you did to me.”

  “It was not my choice,” he said despairingly. “We were acting for the Historian. He made us.”

  “Armand too?”

  Mahmoud made a clicking sound with his tongue, “That man acts on his own. And the Historian is not my friend. Nor yours.”

  A
cross the bar Maia caught sight of Armand; she lowered her face for fear that he might see her. The bar swirled and warped with bubbling voices, the spiralling exhalations and the loosening of inhibitions. Mahmound relaxed into the seat beside her and placed his hand upon her knee. Maia wished that he would leave her alone. He tapped a stubby finger on the table top to an unheard rhythm.

  She left him in a mood of frustration; unable to elicit any sense from him. At the bar the guests dropped out and were succeeded by other people. Maia returned to the riad.

  Maia painted women in natural poses, capturing them in moments of action, walking sedately in the serpentine streets. Now the wind was blowing, she found that her view from the rooftops was becoming useless, the women always fully garbed, dark, barely visible figures. They were depicted as only insignificant black dots on her canvas, for that was how they seemed to her, small and inconsequential.

  As she slipped further into dependence and craving, a voice within her still reprimanded her for her days of indolence and futility, and she knew that the longer she stayed in this expatriate refuge, the further she would become corrupted.

  Maia’s fear was that she too would become like the Historian, like Armand, nihilistic pleasure seekers on the periphery of a world, which they would never be able to enter, and exiled from the one they had rejected. She knew that she had never found the bright light and inspiration she had been hoping for. Nothing good had come out of this escapade; no decent work, no friendships. The chance to paint nude women, still eluded her. So she decided to enter the private world of women, and then she could draw the images and transfer them to the canvas.

  Armand did not visit her for days and Maia wondered if she ought to go in search of a new supplier. But her craving was not yet so strong, and so she now worked up the courage to visit the hamam alone.

  On entering, she undressed. She saw the other naked women wandering around without shame, bodies moving forwards through the steam. Maia looked at the women and imagined how she would portray their secret world.