The Married Man (39 page)

“It’s about as restful as an LSD trip,” Austin murmured to Julien as a boy of nine in a white nightshirt and sequined red fez spun past rattling large tin castanets. Julien laughed faintly, as a saint might who has already moved halfway toward transcendence.

T
hey rented a car and headed south through the mountains. The highway was just two lanes. What appeared on the map to be a straight line turned out to be hundreds of hairpin curves. At first the landscape was innocent enough—the melting snow in the mountains was flowing into the irrigation ditch beside the road and making it into a clear, clean stream, leaping and cascading from step to step down the slope, the flow as thick as a cable. At some points the falling water was so capacious its splashing was audible through the closed windows. The fields were just beginning to take on a bit of spring color. The two men drove through a village of charming old wood houses, neatly painted.

And then they began to climb, up and up. At a scenic spot high in the mountains they stopped for gas; they could see their breath. A little girl came toward them with something for sale, a small, stoppered vial of attar of roses. Along the roadside three men were crouching beside sections of quartz geodes. The amethyst-colored points made Austin think of sharks’ teeth.

With his peripheral vision Austin was constantly monitoring Julien. He was aware of how Julien was sitting up or slouched down in the car, whether his mouth sounded dry when he spoke, whether he was in pain or developing a cramp.

Their car climbed higher and higher. They drove through clouds, which they could see from below as they approached them. No one was living up here, not even shepherds, and they encountered only one vehicle, a bus barreling down from a higher peak and pushing them perilously close to the edge of a ravine. When they got above the clouds they saw an eagle wheeling past, its wings spread, looping in slow, majestic circles.

At last they descended onto the plain beyond and by dark they were at their hotel in Taroudant, a small city east of Agadir.

Julien loved the hotel and they spent four days there. He was worried when he saw the room with its bed on a mezzanine, fifteen stairs to go up, but in fact he managed them well, if sometimes with a little push from Austin. The hotel, which occupied the former palace of a local ruler, was built against the old mud city walls. In the evening, sitting out by the modern pool in deck chairs, they watched the starlings swooping into and out of the square niches let into the thick terracotta walls. The pasha’s massive wood gates were thrown open and the noisy, chaotic road was dimly visible behind an intricate metal grill. The blue pool was lit from within. Four tall, skinny palm trees in a row soared up above the walls and their parapets. Outside the walls they could hear the clip-clop of horses and the gruff voice of a driver, and even see a cart moving, dusty, behind the grill. A muezzin, his voice tinny and amplified, called the faithful to prayer, while by the pool the bartender tuned in a little radio to dance music. The bartender was wearing black knee breeches with a tiny waist, the
sarwel
.

Every meal was torture. There was a European dining room and a Moroccan. Nine times out of ten they chose a table far from the other French tourists in the formal European dining room. There they’d sit in nearly total silence. Julien would take a long, long time to eat. Usually the other guests had left and their dishes had been cleared while Julien still faced a full plate. Julien would try to eat a few things, just several sips of clear broth, or a bit of dry toast, but within a few minutes his diaphragm would start to heave, his face would lengthen and he would grab one of the sacks from the plane and throw up in it. Austin would fill the silence and try to lessen the feeling of defeat by
saying something absurdly general and pleasantly genteel, what he thought of as “dowager chat,” but in the midst of his babbling Julien would suddenly stand and totter out, walking with his slow, dragging tread. Often Austin was impatient with Julien for walking so slowly but revealed nothing. He remembered hearing that “toward the end” even if some nourishment got down nothing was absorbed, the digestive system could no longer extract any benefit from food—but could this be the end?

Some evenings they stood by a pond and looked down at big wet boulders that would suddenly crack apart and slide: turtles. One of the turtles was so lazy, almost inert, that they nicknamed it “Lucy.” As the evening came in, the cold arrived with it. Julien was cold all the time and he bundled up in several layers of clothes; when Austin touched his hand it was always icy. Julien wore pale tan jeans that rode very low in the back; Austin turned quickly once and saw two Arab bellboys laughing and looking at Julien’s skinny ass, nudging each other in the ribs.

In one of the big sitting rooms some of the local notables sat around the fireplace with their beads, eating from big plates with their right hands and watching television. On the screen, the king was participating in a religious ceremony in Casablanca, in a building that was projected to be the world’s largest mosque, but was only partially finished. The king wore a white silk cloak and hood. So did the
imam
, whose big black glasses looked disconcertingly modern under his hood. Austin asked the clerk behind the desk what the holiday was. “We’re toward the end of Ramadan,” he said.

Ah, Austin thought, that’s why the notables are eating so late and the hotel staff looks so pale by day. No food until sundown, not even any water, and of course no cigarettes. It was hardest on the smokers, people said. Usually Muslims slept as much as they could by day and then feasted till midnight. Then they set their alarms for four in the morning so they could eat breakfast before dawn and a new bout of fasting. The thought flickered through Austin’s mind that the whole population must be partying now, eating and making music and talking and laughing. He could imagine slipping out of the hotel once Julien fell asleep and trailing through smoky streets past open door
ways giving onto rooms lit by kerosene lamps and crowded with robed figures….

The next morning a guide, who spoke fluent French, attached himself to them as soon as they came out of the hotel. He lined up a carriage (undoubtedly the driver would slip him a commission later). The carriage was painted green and was bedizened with dangling hands of Fatima cut out of black plastic and spotted with red and yellow stars. They asked to be shown the outside of the walls. The carriage rolled past low olive trees with small gray-green leaves. Children were playing with a rubber tire. In some places the walls, which were medieval, had started to crumble. The carriage lurched when it went across a deep rut and almost turned over. Austin let out a little cry (“It’s going to turn over!”), and Julien laughed at him with his deep but no longer resonant laugh. The driver called out something like “Geesh” to the horses in a reproachful tone, as one might say, “Giddyap.” They went past some crudely fashioned cages in which rabbits were being raised. Then they passed a tannery. An old man was washing skins in a well of foul-smelling green liquid in which he was standing waist-high in rubber hip boots. When their carriage turned in through the gate, into the winding narrow streets, few people were out; the demands of Ramadan had driven the lethargic but uncomplaining population indoors.

One day they rode out to a chic hotel compound where millionaires vacationed and played golf. The hotel itself was empty. At the end of a long walkway beside a stream was a swimming pool, surrounded by English people, bright red and fat, slathered in sun lotion. They were eating hamburgers; the smell of the cooking meat on the grill was heavy and wintry, nauseating. Five or six of the English had been talking all at once, fluty and merry, until they caught sight of Julien and Austin. The bathers were wearing swimsuits, but Julien and Austin, intimidated by the reputation of the place, had put on coats and ties. The English guests just stared at Julien with hostility. Austin became very nervous and said he wanted to go back to the main hotel dining room, which was deserted. But first Julien had to make the grand tour of the grounds—fields planted with vegetables, rose gardens, tennis courts, individual bungalows. He had the strength
for all that. In the distance they saw the greens under the wide-cast arc of sprinklers. Julien hadn’t noticed how his presence had reduced those English men and women to appalled silence.

At lunch they were waited on by an old, dignified Moroccan who treated them with a deference that concealed a certain tenderness. They were self-quarantined in the formal dining room, which was painted pistachio green and hung with chandeliers the shape of grape clusters. Julien started with a melon and went on to boiled fish and steamed potatoes. It turned slightly cold and they took their coffee (mint tea for Julien) in the dark, empty
salon
, looking at a television program from France.

On the drive back to town they were hailed by the guide from the day before, a skinny man in his early thirties who smelled of old tobacco. He’d overheard them saying during their tour of the city walls that they were interested in buying an old Koran. Now he showed them a well-preserved hand-written Koran with glossy illuminated letters at the beginning of each
sura
. He said a friend of his needed to sell it in order to have enough money to pass his driver’s test (the
baksheesh
apparently ran very high), but Julien said to Austin, “We can’t take on the world’s problems,” and added to the guide, “I don’t like this copy, I don’t think it’s beautiful.”

Back at the hotel they sat beside the pool and looked at the starlings rushing out of the old wall like sparks up a chimney. Thinking of their life back in Paris, Julien began to criticize Austin’s friend Rod, whom he had never even met. “You like him just because you two can gossip all night long like housewives. But he sounds to me like a ne’er-do-well and a drug addict.”

Indignant, Austin said, “At least his conversation is lively and interesting.”

Julien was quiet so long that Austin, against his will, looked over to verify his expression, which was stony. But when at last he spoke, his voice sounded deeper and more vulnerable: “It’s too bad I didn’t die six months ago when I was still interesting. Now you’ll remember me only as I was at the end—boring and drugged on morphine.”

Austin said, “You mean too much to me to judge you as either dull or interesting.” And it was true, true that Austin was so
enthralled
by
Julien’s health and survival that he never thought he was dull, even though sometimes he became irritated when Julien started nodding off. Apparently he needed the morphine to mask the pain in his back and to calm the impulse to vomit, but the drug meant that he was alert now only for a few hours each day.

On the way back to their room, Austin said, “I think you’re a bit better.”

“Well, I didn’t vomit my meals today. It’s not exactly miraculous but I can’t complain.”

A furniture dealer in Paris had told Austin to be sure to see the Berber Palace that was just off the road between Taroudant and Ouazarzate, before the turn-off up through the mountains back to Marrakesh. “It’s completely out-of-the-way,” the dealer had said, “and very beautiful. We ate lunch there.”

Julien and Austin drove there with the guide. He had another Koran to show them, badly battered, perfectly square, slipped inside a leather satchel that folded shut like an envelope and could be worn on a chain around the neck. “You put a chain through this hoop,” the guide said. Then he laughed, showing his stained teeth. “Not
you
, of course, but
one.”
His laugh turned into a cough. Julien shifted away from him, afraid of being exposed to tuberculosis. Austin was
certain
that that fear was going through Julien’s mind.

Despite his fears, Julien bought the Koran and was never seen without it afterwards. He fell asleep with it on his lap, usually still in its scuffed and water-stained leather case with the coarse stitching. Sometimes, when he was drowsy from morphine, he’d thumb through the pages with their long, cursive comet-tails and their bug-track vowel signs which looked like those radiating dots in comic strips that indicate delighted surprise or sudden enlightenment. It was the perfect book for a weary, dying man—pious, incomprehensible pages to strum, an ink cloud of unknowing.

Julien was wearing a cotton caftan with tan and white vertical stripes over a T-shirt, under a gauzy white caftan and a white wool sweater he’d draped over his shoulders. He kept the sweater close by in case he began to shiver. He’d abandoned his jeans since the seams cut into his fleshless hips and legs. Only in these robes did he feel comfortable.
His black hair was thin and oily, pressed into a cap on his head; many white hairs were scattered through the black. Seen from behind his ears looked immense, especially if the sunlight was shining through them, perhaps because his neck had become so scrawny. His eyebrows had grown shaggy and his nose looked much bigger, as if old age, frustrated by his quick decline, had decided to rush ahead and hit him now.

Although he walked very slowly, he was still game. He wanted to go places and see things. If he sat tranquilly in one place the morphine would make him fall asleep. He smiled sweetly wherever he went, though he spoke so softly people couldn’t hear him and Austin would have to repeat what he’d said. When he smiled his face broke into hundreds of lines that hadn’t been there six months earlier.

The guide, who knew not to wear them out with his talk, kept silent in the back seat and spoke only to indicate the way to the Berber Palace. Austin appreciated his discretion; he obviously sensed that they were living through a difficult moment, but he didn’t ask questions or let his curiosity show through. The day was hot except when a breeze blew; then they were reminded that winter had just ended and that the mountain peaks on the horizon were still deep in snow. They slowed down as they rolled into a village of low houses and teeming streets. The pedestrians’ dull-witted stares were the look of grouchy nicotine withdrawal.