The Married Man (40 page)

They took the road to the right. A little farther on, the macadam gave out to be replaced by gravel. Soon they came to the massive structure of the Berber Palace with its alternating square and rounded arches, its tile roofs and its pale blank walls. Sometimes a small window, barred, was pierced into a wall, always at an improbable place, as if the rooms inside were of madly varying heights. As soon as they’d gone down two steps and along a walkway redolent of thyme, they were in an immense garden planted with palms crowding up from geometric plots of clipped bushes. The walkways were lined with white and faded blue tiles. A few tiles were missing. The inner courtyard was still large enough to seat a symphony orchestra.

No one was around. Caged birds hanging in doorways were singing and flickering in the shadows, twitching shuttles of gold
through the gloom. A small fountain drooled into a clear basin. Through the water green moss could be seen, waving from black boulders like hair on drowned heads. The thrown-open doors here and there were carved and painted wood decorated with abstract sunbursts. Like a bored shopper at the bazaar, the sun itself was feebly fingering the dusty lusters of a chandelier far inside a room, with no intent to buy. They went in one door and could smell stale smoke from last night’s banquet. An empty plastic water bottle had been thrown on the carpet. A tile dado lined the walls all the way round at shoulder height.

Their guide, Ahmed, clapped loudly and called out something in Arabic. At last a white man in his fifties could be seen crossing the courtyard. He was wearing sunglasses and had a full head of graying hair cut short and spiky that grew low on his forehead. He had a goatee that emphasized the squareness of his jaw. His loose orange sweater was decorated with wide black bands on the sleeves, like an exaggerated sign of mourning. He seemed self-conscious walking toward them in sunlight as they watched from the shadows. At least his stride looked unnatural and he hung his head until he’d come within calling distance. He tried to speak French but with a German accent. Within a moment they’d all found their way into English.

He explained that he was German and a friend of the owner, who was Muslim and sleeping through the difficult Ramadan day.

“Do you think we can eat something?” Austin asked.

“An omelette. I’m sure they could make you a cheese omelette and a green salad. Would you like to eat outside? In the sun?”

Austin turned to Julien; would he be too cold? The German suddenly shrugged and said, “I don’t work here. I’m a guest.” He smiled. “I don’t know why I’m interfering.” He looked at Julien. “You won’t be cold. It’s protected from the wind.” Julien asked where the toilet was and shuffled off toward it with Ahmed. The German said in a low voice, “I can see how ill your friend is—is he your son?”

“Friend.”

The German, who said he was called Hermann, touched Austin’s arm. They were seated at a rusting white metal table on the pale blue and white tile floor. Unseen birds were chirping from within the stand of trees toward the entrance to the grounds.

“What’s that delicious smell?”

“Orange blossom,” the German said, then added, confidingly, “I know what he has. My friend just died of it. Your friend is not long for this world.”

“Oh?” Austin asked nervously. He felt a flutter of panic play like fire over his solar plexus. The early spring was so calm with all the daytime torpor of a small Moroccan village, and even though it was noon the sun seemed veiled and remote. Was Julien about to die? “He’s come so close to dying before, but he always survives. He has miraculous powers of recuperation.”

“No,” the man said, shaking his head, “he’s dying.”

This is “German coarseness,” Austin said to himself, quick to label the offending stubbornness, although he knew few Germans and usually detested the almost inevitable generalizations everyone made about national character.

Hermann added, “I’m a doctor. I watched my friend—” He interrupted himself and touched Austin’s sleeve again, “It’s all right, we needn’t say the name of the disease, but I know what he—do you say, what he suffers
of?
”

“From
. You say
from.”
Austin put on a bright social smile. “And what brings you to Morocco?”

“I will tell you all,” the man said solemnly. “I am bisexual. I have a good wife I live with since thirty years. But my real love was my friend. I am a doctor, a
Narkosearzt.”

“Anesthesiologist?”

“Yes, but a doctor of that. But my friend was a famous surgeon. You see?” He pointed to a neat scar fifteen centimeters long buried in his clipped hair. “I had a brain tumor, most unusual. That’s why I have trouble speaking. I know English very good before, but now I forget and only slowly, slowly the words come.”

For a moment Austin was confused. He thought the “friend,” the surgeon, had been a brain surgeon and had removed the tumor, but a moment later Austin had reshuffled the kaleidoscope and saw the same elements in a new configuration. He smiled and said, “Your English is perfect. Don’t worry. Did you know your friend for many years?”

“Yes, yes, all my life. He was twenty years older than me, but age means nothing to the souls—”

“Kindred spirits.”

“Yes. That.”

“And did your wife know him?”

“Oh, yes, we were all very close. You know, in Europe we do not go into details, no, but she knew. Ah! Here comes your friend.”

Julien was slowly coming down the long
allée
of trees and boxwood hedges. He stopped to gather a mass of orange blossom in his arms and to breathe in the fragrance. He was smiling as he walked with tiny, stiff steps toward them, accompanied by the deferential guide, who was frowning. Julien’s outer robe was faintly damascened, which made it shine when it caught the light.

Over lunch Hermann talked on and on. It seemed that his older lover, the “friend,” had fallen for a Berber from this very village. “My friend bought this palace and installed Ali in it. His plan was to turn it into a hotel that Ali could run. But Ali, who is thirty now—ah! how time, like a bird …” He mimed flapping wings.

“Flies?”

“Yes, how time flies.” He said that Ali had never learned how to run a hotel. He’d become obsessed with sports-car racing and had never concentrated on ordering food, supervising the staff, holding down expenses.

“When my friend was dying he asked me to look after Ali. Now I’m here, although I have had much mental loss with the tumor. Ali’s family is challenging his inheritance of this palace, as is the commune, as are the pasha’s original descendants.”

This man with the unsmiling mouth, the big, unironic eyes and the look of confusion traceable to his scarred skull, seemed disturbingly intimate and real. For so long now Austin and Julien had been rocked in the comforting arms of French gaiety and discretion, the illusions made possible by silence or elision. Now here was a flat-footed (if unsteady) German with a metal plate in his head and a verbal problem in several languages who was, with all the misguided kindliness in the world, making them look at the inevitable, from which they’d so long averted their eyes.

“It’s strange for me,” Hermann said. “I’m here to recuperate but all I can do is worry and worry about Ali.” With a familiar Teutonic gesture,
he performed an immense shrug of his shoulders and let his lifted hands collapse rhetorically onto the slats of the chair he was sitting on. With the same gesture he propelled himself into a standing position and said, much more loudly,
“Gut!
We go?”

“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.

T
he 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.