I turned on the ancient heaters and opened the windows. Then I went to the sinister black phone sitting on the bedside table. The Windsor phones have no numbers or dials, and they seem to have been inside these rooms since about 1950. You pick up the receiver, there is a soft crackling, and eventually a voice says “Salaam.” I asked for an ice bucket. I asked for it as a joke, in fact, but the reply was “Right away, sir.” One of the ancient staff members in a djellaba and turban delivered it with thunderous punctuality. I placed the bucket next to the bed and opened the Le Baron as the evening prayers started up. There is something life-affirming about peeling back the foil cap of a champagne bottle and prying open the wires. I remembered that someone once praised a book of Henry Miller by saying that reading it was like listening to all the champagne corks in the world going off at the same time. A book, in other words, that made you glad that you were alive. The Le Baron was fresh and acidic and well made. It may have been the only North African sparkling wine, but it was a pretty good one, a noble effort to do something tricky and difficult. I had the feeling that Labib made it for his own pleasure more than anything. It had his warmth at its core, his fear for the future.
Ten minutes past six. I drank it slowly in bed, and soon the night air came up off the street, with its taste of hundred-year-old trees and shish smoke and—for some reason—buttered popcorn. I made a silent toast to my mother, who would have enjoyed drinking it with me in that fusty, darkened room where the shutters were falling off their hinges. One never ends where one began, and over those two years of drinking in countries that by long tradition had decided against the corrosive pleasures of alcohol, I had come to love my 6:10 drink more than anything in the inanimate world. I enjoyed it more here than I did elsewhere precisely because here its enigma was more fragile, more lucidly despised and feared. The reasons for hating it are all valid. But by the same token they are not really reasons at all. For in the end alcohol is merely us, a materialization of our own nature. To repress it is to repress something that we know about ourselves but cannot celebrate or even accept. It is like having a dance partner we cannot trust with our wallet.
The room filled with carbide light from the street. More than at any moment in those two years, I felt the words of Pindar coming back as I drank through that entire bottle of Egyptian sparkling. The words described the god Dionysus: hagnon phengos oporas, “the pure light of high summer.” It was a phrase I could not forget, and I suppose it denoted something that I had been looking for all along. That light seemed to fill me right then, pouring out of those delicate rose-colored bubbles swimming at the edge of a cheap wineglass soiled by a dead ant. The word alcohol now seemed distant and irrelevant to this mood.
And so I thought back, as I stepped gingerly into that gentle drunken state, to the time I had lain in a field of English wheat and waited for a combine harvester to chop me into pieces. I must have known something then that my body, at least, chose not to forget thereafter. It was a sort of forgiveness.
By the time I emptied the bottle, I was half asleep, and when I woke, the Windsor staff had cleared away the ice bucket and the glass and the bottle itself. My mother had left as well, and I was alone in the sunlight waiting for a clock somewhere to strike six yet again, as it would every day until the final call of all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LAWRENCE OSBORNE is the author of two novels and six books of nonfiction. His short story “Volcano” was selected for Best American Short Stories 2012. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Newsweek, Forbes, Tin House, Harper’s, Condé Nast Traveler, and many other publications. Osborne has led a nomadic life, residing for years in France, Italy, Morocco, the United States, Mexico, and Thailand. He currently lives in Istanbul.
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