The Spider's House

  That was what she must remember, she told herself, because she felt that the place represented an undefinable but very real danger. It meant nothing, never could mean anything, to Polly Burroughs. For that to happen, she would have to go back, back, she did not know how many thousands of years, but back far enough for it to denote some sort of truth. If she possessed any sort of religion at all, it consisted in remaining faithful to her convictions, and one of the basic beliefs upon which her life rested was the certainty that no one must ever go back. All living things were in process of evolution, a concept which to her meant but one thing: an unfolding, an endless journey from the undifferentiated toward the precise, from the simple toward the complex, and in the final analysis from the darkness toward the light. What she was looking down upon here tonight, the immense theatre full of human beings still unformed and unconscious, bathed in sweat, stamping and shrieking, falling into the dust and writhing and twitching and panting, all belonged unmistakably to the darkness, and therefore it had to be wholly outside her and she outside it. There could be no temporizing or mediation. It was down there, spread out before her, a segment of the original night, and she was up here observing it, actively conscious of who she was, and very intent on remaining that person, determined to let nothing occur that might cause her, even for an instant, to forget her identity.

  As time passed, she could feel Stenham growing restless, but it had not occurred to her that he might be hungry until he suddenly rose and announced that he was going down to see what sort of food was on sale at the stands. “Anything special you want?” he asked her. She replied that she was not very hungry. “I’ll bring back something. Nimchiou? Shall we go?” he said, turning to Amar, who jumped to his feet.

  When she and the other youth were alone, she asked him his name. “Mohammed,” he answered, flattered by her question, but particularly because she had said vous to him instead of tu. “And have you known Amar for a long time?” “Oui,” he said vaguely, as if the subject were of no possible interest. They were silent for a while. Then he asked her where her husband had gone; she burst into laughter and immediately felt a wave of disapproval emanate from him. Bending toward him, she saw his stern young face in the moonlight; swiftly she grew very serious, and committed the even graver error of telling him that Stenham was just a friend. “A very old friend,” she added, hoping that this might in some way save her from worse opprobrium. Apparently it was not a mitigating circumstance in his eyes, for he merely grunted, and soon burst out indignantly: “You shouldn’t have come here with him if he’s not your husband. Where is your husband?”

  “He’s dead,” she told him, not being sure of the Moslem attitude toward divorce.

  “How long ago did he die?” he wanted to hear. Now she began to improvise wildly. He had been killed in the War, leaving her with three children. (She did know that they approved of a woman’s bearing as many children as possible.) This was not well received, either; he obviously thought she should be with them, and not consorting with a strange man. “This is a holy place, you know,” he informed her; his words were a reproach and a warning. “Ah, oui, je sais,” she agreed feebly.

  The music and dancing went on; it must go on without a break for at least twenty-four hours, Stenham had told her. Occasionally the singing in one circle or another would disintegrate for a time into a series of savage rhythmical cries, vomited from a hundred throats at the same split second, with a simultaneity which gave the sound an extraordinary solidity. She sat listening to the senseless noise rather in the way one looks down into a tank full of crocodiles, her principal emotion one of thankfulness at being where she was, at not having accompanied Stenham to the food-stands, which were in the center of a constant throng. To her it seemed that he had been gone for well over an hour; she could not understand how buying a little food could take so long. In the tent nearest to where she and the silent Mohammed sat, the flames were unusually bright, women were laughing behind its slightly waving walls, and outside, a few paces higher up the hill, a tethered horse stamped its hoof on the earth. The astringent smoke from the numberless fires of thuya branches curled lazily upward, sometimes sweeping suddenly back down and making a flat screen above the hillside as a breeze gave chase to it. Then the screen would move out over the furthest fires into the deserted countryside and be dissipated, and again the casual spirals would form. Each turban, donkey, and olive branch was needle-clear in the powerful moonlight. (If she had had a newspaper she could have read it easily, she was certain—even the fine print.) The moonlight was hard; it gave the impression of having converted all the elements of the landscape into one substance, not blue, not black, not green, not white, but a new color whose thousand gradations partook of the essences of all those colors. And everywhere in this world made soft by the hard light from above, the fires burned, looking redder than fire should look.

  Out of the shadows beside her Stenham appeared, startling her. A second later Amar was there behind him. “Did you get anything?” she asked.

  “I did. Two dozen skewers of lamb. Shish kebab. Amar’s got the whole lot. Sorry to be so long. The crush was terrific.”

  They sat eating, the two Moroccans at one end of the log and the two Americans at the other. The meat had a peculiar flavor, not spicy but herbal. “We can’t drink the water,” Stenham said, “so we’ll have to go down and have tea afterward in one of the cafés.”

  She was surprised that there should be cafés here, but her mouth was full and she said nothing. Presently, “It seems I ought by all rights to be your wife,” she told him, laughing. “Mohammed thinks it’s indecent of me to be here, an unattached woman.”

  “It is,” he agreed. “Very indecent. If you’re unattached, it can only mean you’re potentially attached to anyone and everyone. You shouldn’t have told him.”

  “I don’t think it would have helped much not to. Amar certainly knows we’re not married.”

  “Oh, Amar! He’s different.”

  She reached for another skewer. “I can feel that, but I don’t quite know where the difference lies.”

  “It’s everywhere, everywhere,” Stenham said absently.

  “And anyway,” she pursued, making her voice jovial again, “I believe you already have a wife in some part of this world, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, I have a wife.” He laughed shortly. “What part of this world she’s in, though, I couldn’t tell you. Last I heard she was in Brazil. But that was quite a while ago.”

  “If I were your wife and I heard you talk about me in that offhand manner, I think I’d kill you. Assuming, of course, that I were and you did. If and if.”

  “My dear Lee,” he said with mock courtesy, “those two ifs are mutually exclusive. But in the case of my true wife—I was almost going to say her name aloud and risk seeing Sidi Bou Chta vanish in a puff of smoke—she knows damned well how I talk about her, and I hear that when she mentions me it’s a lot worse. There’s no love lost, I can tell you.”

  “I don’t know whether to sympathize with you or with her. What’s she like? Not that a description coming from you would—”

  He cut her short, rather rudely, she thought, saying: “There are two more skewers. You want one? The two kids have eaten sixteen between them. I’ve counted.”

  “No, I don’t. I’m finished.”

  “Well, then, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to eat both of them. I had no lunch. And then let’s go clown and have our tea and see something. The whole thing is magnificent.”

  “Good,” she said, rising and making a silent resolution to be amenable here; even if it proved terribly difficult, it would be more satisfying in the end than finding objections at every turn. She wanted to take the maximum of remembered trophies back to Paris with her, and she knew herself well enough to realize that her shell of recalcitrance, if she indulged herself to the point of donning it, would impede her receptivity.

  When they had stumbled down the hill over stones and bushes that lay hidde
n in the shadow of olive leaves, they stopped for a while on the fringe of the nearest ring of spectators, and gradually wedged their way in toward a position from which they could see the dancing. Well over a hundred men participated, all of them in white djellabas and turbans, chanting breathlessly as they heaved and dipped. Their movements were rather like those of horses, she decided. Sometimes they pawed the earth with a certain spiritedness and nobility; then they went back to being work-horses, straining to pull their invisible loads as they all bent in one direction and then in another. “How strange,” she said to Stenham, because it was like nothing she had ever seen or imagined. She could not see his face, but he pushed her toward the fore, saying nothing, and stationed Amar on her left and Mohammed on her right, he standing directly behind her. This solicitousness annoyed her: it made her feel like a piece of property being guarded against thieves, and, which was worse, she suspected it to be a maneuver, very probably unconscious, aimed at influencing her reactions to what she was seeing—an attempt, as it were, to establish a sort of mesmeric control. And, in any case, there was an extremely tall man directly in front of her. She moved ahead, the men politely yielded and allowed her to step into the front ranks facing the circle of dancers. Now she was able to see that the circle was really an ellipse; at one end of the enclosed space was a huge bonfire whose flames shot up to the height of her face, and at the other was a smaller ring of a dozen or so seated men playing drums. “It’s quite a show,” she said to herself contentedly, and she became interested in the pattern of the dance. From time to time she looked back to be sure Stenham and the boys were there. Once Amar waved to her, his face beaming with delight.

  It was not long before she became aware that something absurd had begun to happen inside her. It was a little as though she were living her life ahead of time. It had started, she thought, while she was sitting up there with Mohammed. Observing the phenomenon from the outside, she came to the conclusion that it might be because no one had ever before made her feel quite-so unwanted. She had seen herself back in Fez in the horrible little Hôtel des Ambassades, separating her valises from those of Stenham, alone in a cab riding to the station (as if there were trains running now, she thought with a sudden wry grimace). She was in the train with the new issue of Time and a copy of the Paris Herald on her lap; she was on the Algeciras ferry watching the gray, lumpy mountains of the African coast slowly fade into the distance; she was eating shrimps under an awning in a waterfront café, being brushed against by the newsboys passing among the tables; she was sitting with the Stuarts at Horcher’s in Madrid with the treasure of her Moroccan trip stored away in her memory, a treasure which would seem the richer for being kept hidden, with only a piquant detail divulged here and there—just enough to suggest the solid mass beneath the surface. “I have so many things to tell you, but I don’t know where to begin. My mind is so disorderly.” “Don’t be silly, Polly. I’ve never known anyone with a clearer mind, or such a gift for telling experiences.”

  The insistent drums were an unwelcome reminder of the existence of another world, wholly autonomous, with its own necessities and patterns. The message they were beating out, over and over, was for her; it was saying, not precisely that she did not exist but rather that it did not matter whether she existed or not, that her presence was of no consequence to the rest of the cosmos. It was a sensation that suddenly paralyzed her with dread. There had never been any question of her “mattering”; it went without saying that she mattered, because she was important to herself. But what was the part of her to which she mattered?

  She pulled out a cigarette and lighted it with impatient gestures. Unreasonably enough, she felt that she had already seen whatever the festival might have to offer. If one man went into a trance and beat his breast and tore out handfuls of hair during his seizure, as was now happening in front of her, it was the same as if a score of men were to do it, one after the other or all together. There could be no progression: she refused to slip into the hypnotic design. If all the members of this particular circle of leaping figures became possessed, took out their souls and threw them onto the pile in the middle (they were doing it; she knew it) so that there was only one undifferentiable writhing mass in there and no one was sure of getting his own back when it was finished, and, moreover, no one cared, then she had seen that, too, and she did not need to go on to another group to see the same thing done again, this time to a slightly different drum rhythm and with the addition of oboes and occasional gunfire. But Stenham was succumbing, she was positive of that; certainly he never had intended any resistance. He was going to let his enthusiasm for the idea of the thing carry him off into a realm whose atmosphere was too thin for rationality to exist in it, and where consequently everything could be confused with everything else—a state of false ecstasy, false because self-induced. That was why she would have none of it, she insisted to herself; she wanted no counterfeit emotions.

  The glare of fire before her face, the long white robes catching its redness in their folds as the men crouched and leapt, and the darkness pressing in from left and right! But it was not darkness, since darkness has no breath and hands. “Mr. Stenham,” she called, looking back past the bearded faces, the tightly wound turbans, the shining black eyes, and mouths stretched (in a monkey-like, frozen smile that had nothing to do with smiling) to reveal the rows of white teeth (“wild animals”), heads tilted upward to see over other heads, and panic began to pour in upon her from all sides. “Mr. Stenham!” She was with her back to the fire now, her eyes running over the rows of fascinated faces, looking desperately for the lighter face. “Nonsense,” she said aloud, horrified that the panic had been able to get in so easily. It simply wasn’t possible; she knew herself too well. But there were her knees, feeling like paper tubes. She turned around and called his name again into the uproar, like a pebble being tossed against an onrushing locomotive. And then she caught sight of him for a flash, between two cavorting figures as they gyrated. He had moved all the way around to the other side of the circle. Rage exploded in her; she could feel its heat just beneath the skin of her throat and cheeks and forehead. But now at least she knew where he was, and she turned and pushed her way toward the outer edges until she was free to walk normally. It was dark here after the fire’s glare, and she bumped blindly into several astonished strollers before she regained her vision.

  “Well, that was an unpleasant experience,” she thought, to help her to believe it was over. When she had worked her way around to what she thought was the place where she had seen Stenham, she had to look for rather a long time before she located him. Then she took up a position behind him and concentrated on regaining complete command of herself. To do this she tried to get back into the stream of fantasy in which she had been swimming a while ago, but it was no good—the sober brown interior of Horcher’s would not come alive. It might as well have been the Hanging Gardens of Babylon she was striving to evoke. The act of walking had partly calmed her, and rather than risk losing the solace of even that meager control, she decided to speak to him now. She called his name as loud as she dared, and, miraculously, he heard and turned. Now she smiled, put on as natural an expression as she could muster. He came slowly back toward her, pushing his way past the transfixed onlookers. “It’s better from this side,” he remarked. “Yes,” she said, then after waiting what she thought was a normal interval, she suggested they go and have their tea. “Ah, of course!” he cried. “Amar! Mohammed!” he called. They appeared from different sides, and together the four wandered away from the light, into the dark.

  The café consisted of several strips of matting placed on uneven ground, fenced in by bunches of green branches wired together. Long stakes had been driven into the earth at arbitrary points and blankets suspended by their corners from them, but in a completely haphazard fashion. Near the entrance, behind a little counter of rocks, the qaouaji and his assistants crouched; the remainder of the space was fairly well filled with seated and reclining men. Ev
en beside the center pole the draped ceiling was not high enough to stand up under; they had to advance with their heads bent far forward.

  Once they were installed on the mat and had been given glasses of tea, she said to Stenham: “You know, I thought I’d lost you for a while.”

  “Oh, no,” he said lightly. “I had my eye on you. I knew just where you were.”

  “Oh, you did!” She wanted to ask him why he had gone around to the other side and left her alone, but she suspected she could not go into the subject without losing her temper.

  “Anyway, this’ll be our headquarters, this café,” he went on. “We can always find each other back here. When we want to sleep, they’ll clear out the people from this whole end, and we’ll have it to ourselves. The qaouaji seems all right.”

  When they had drunk the tea, Stenham suggested they go out again. Amar and Mohammed had already risen and were standing outside the entrance.

  “Why don’t you go, and I’ll stay here and rest,” she said. “Come back in a half hour or so and maybe I’ll feel like going out with you again. I’m a little tired.” What she meant was: “Stay here with me awhile,” and she thought surely he would interpret her words thus.

  “But how can you stay alone?” he exclaimed. “I don’t like to leave you here all by yourself.”

  “Why not?” she demanded sourly. “At least I can’t get lost in here.”

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” His voice sounded uncertain. “Shall I order you another tea before I go?”

  “No, thanks. I’ll order one if I want it.”

  He glanced at her oddly. “Well, so long.” Then he stooped and said a few words to the qaouaji. When he had gone out, she counted to ten slowly, then sprang up, ramming her head against the blankets above, which she had forgotten. Quickly she stepped across the café and out through the opening, turning in the opposite direction to the one Stenham had taken. The wind had come up stronger. She looked back for a second, to fix the place in her mind; the shape of the olive tree above the café was unmistakable. Then, in a turmoil of rage and self-pity, she strode ahead up the hill, at first oblivious and afterward indifferent to the men who gazed at her.