One sign of my disfavour was the withdrawing of the Jews from my table. Only my young fan, M. Josef, dared the Pasha’s disapproval. Passionately he warned me to make good my losses and leave the city. This was typical greedy pessimism and caution. The aeroplane company was still a more than viable concern and I knew the Pasha to be a man of vision. He would recover from his disappointment in due course and continue the project. How could our master possibly advertise an air force and then not provide one, I asked. These are large decisions, the Jew said. Thereafter he became a little more cautious of me. Later he refused even to nod at me in the street. I realise now how the Jews were already plotting against me with my old nemesis. Mr Mix, sharing my anxieties no doubt, became more friendly, but he also showed too little faith in my abilities and instincts. He proposed we discreetly purchase tickets from the military authorities at the railway depot. We should make for Tangier and leave Morocco while we were ahead. It felt a little churlish to point out that I was scarcely ahead! I would be ahead when a new Hawk sprang into our city’s perfect sky. I would be ahead when the world’s newsreels and papers bannered my name, when Sikorski, Sopwith and Grumman were relegated to explanatory footnotes in the History of Aviation. I would be ahead when Il Duce welcomed me back to Rome, birthplace and capital of the New European Order, and showed me the factories he had built to manufacture my planes.
How could I have anticipated the small-mindedness of the Berber? His willingness to bend his ear to any whispered calumny? I might have made T’hami the most honoured leader in Muslim Africa, respected by every European power, by America and the Orient. His Maghrib would have formed a true and lasting bastion against Bolshevism. His legions would have flown to battle as they had ridden all those centuries before in the service of the Moorish Emirs. Yet now their eyes would be directed not upon the Peninsula Christians but upon the waiting world of their fellow Muslims: men desperate for a sense of purpose, for noble leadership. Europe would not have demanded they be Christian, merely that they be Muslim gentlemen, like Saladin in The Talisman. When chivalry recognises chivalry there is rarely anything but agreement.
To a degree this anxiety did heighten my sense of danger and I longed to break the bonds of my indiscretion. Yet through missing the occasional appointment, through being on the knife-point of discovery several times, we only provided further piquancy to her lusts and, consequently, I was drawn into fascinated compliance with her insatiable and unsentimental sexual adventurings.
The suburban world sees the world of the sexual voyager as one of unrelenting sweats and groans, of bodies forever pumping and wriggling, of oddly marked buttocks, of mouths agape and eyes rolled back, of miscellaneous objets sportifs, but they imagine the world of pornography, not our world of erotic exploration. Our world provided as much conversation and irony, as much self-knowledge, as much concerned kindness and good humour as any human intercourse, for without it our couplings would be no more than congress between beast and beast. There would be no interest in it, no frisson. There would be only confirmation of previous experience and no true experiment. Sex is not merely a series of techniques whereby the woman learns to please her man. There is sharing. There is love. Even in Hell.
There is the sharing of power. And this is heaven. There is the equality of forces, the mutual education of the senses. The other condition is called in Prague and elsewhere ‘erotomania’, when even food and security are forgotten by those caught in its grip. The madness has driven many a man and woman to their death, especially in such circumstances as ours. Loti himself recounts the tale of how he stole a woman from the Sultan’s harem and how she paid, nonetheless, the ultimate price for her perfidy.
In France they recognise this disease, just as they recognise schizophrenia or megalomania, and of course it most often arises in divorce and murder cases, where it is sympathetically taken into account. This is one difference between the Q’ranic and the Napoleonic Codes especially puzzling to a cuckolded Musselman. As a believer in rationalism I continued to place faith in the Pasha’s fundamental sense of fair play. I believed he awaited only the arrival of the aero-engines before sending for me.
I had already written a number of apologies and explanations to my employer via Hadj Idder. These had cost me rather more in gratuities to the vizier than I was any longer receiving from my own petitioners. I was greatly surprised, long after my vigil had begun, to find Mr Mix also offering the vizier ‘message envelopes’ and expressing gushing interest in his fellow negro’s goodwill. Mr Mix no longer had his film camera. He had been shooting, he said, a special-interest scene over in the dungeons - a kind of artistic light and shade study, old and new Marrakech, he said. He had not meant any harm, but the Pasha’s Special Guard had come upon him and grown suspicious. They had confiscated his equipment and impounded most of his films. He was now in the process, like myself, of attempting to restore himself in the Pasha’s good offices. Thereafter we spent many hours together in the ante-room, yet I found him strangely unforthcoming about his own problems.
‘I ain’t complaining, Max, except the bastard has me in a double-bind. I can’t pay off my debt without that camera! We got to catch that train, Max. You can get us out. After all, I made you famous.’ He seemed more than a little alarmed when I told him I was not leaving without my films, but appeared reconciled to this profound, if unpalatable, justice, only adding darkly, ‘Remember, Max. Every day you wait on him makes T’hami more aware of his power over you. Every day gets you in deeper.’
How he had come by the fine modern camera and the elegant suits he had worn upon his arrival at the Pasha’s court (and still wore) he would not say. I guessed that he had won the heart of some Westernised Moroccan heiress or of some equally wealthy sheikh from whom his camera had been a parting gift. But Mix would not be drawn. He had that deceptively innocent and flattering habit of asking you always about yourself, always diverting attention from his own activities and thoughts. I think he was genuinely interested in what I had to teach him, but my efforts to learn from him, perhaps, were not equally encouraged.