Amiable as he was, any former intimacy that had existed between us was only occasionally evident. I have since known other naïf’s with a similar uncalled-for defeatism, a lack of faith in their own outstanding abilities. Sometimes I thought no amount of encouraging back-patting, of reassurances as to the many opportunities open in the race world to a negro of his intelligence and natural breeding, would cheer him up.
About his film-making he had an honest sense of vocation. He had undoubted gifts in that direction. I tried to reassure him. I spoke once more of the lucrative market in America and this time he listened more thoughtfully. He told me he would consider my idea. We used English. All the other petitioners in the ante-rooms used French, Arabic or Berber, yet while we shared their uncertainties and enjoyed a common misery, they showed all that friendliness, and a generosity of spirit which is one of the great wonders of the Moroccan soul. I had never felt closer to these people. It is another trait, of course, they share with the British, this approval of failure as conferring some kind of moral superiority upon the failed.
Meanwhile, Rosie von Bek had begun to show signs of nervousness and her sexual demands, though quite as urgent, had a rather ritualistic quality at times. More than once she told me how T’hami would not let her leave, that he had insisted on guards going with her to Tangier, that her passport had been held by means of a bureaucratic error which the Pasha insisted he was doing everything to correct. Everything was impounded. Moreover she had begun to object to certain sexual ideas which, she had already told him, had not found any great popularity in the West since the days of Caligula. She said this admonition had stopped him temporarily until he had made her explain who Caligula had been, whereupon the Thane of Tafouelt had grinned and told her that he could see the similarity but, Allah be praised, he had no discontented Praetorians to cut short God’s purpose for him. As a result, he now had some nervous homosexual in his library, translating Gibbon into French while another limp-wristed half-caste found an innovative means of making some sense of the lives of the Caesars in the local dialect. She was not entirely joking when she told me El Glaoui was looking speculatively at his favourite horse these days. ‘I pity,’ she said, ‘his closer relatives.’ She thanked God that she had had the sense to keep quiet about the Decameron. So far she had been able to dissuade him from The Thousand and One Days of Sodom by assuring him that de Sade had not been a real Marquis.
Again it was impressed upon me how potent, perhaps especially to absolute monarchs, is the power of myth.
TWENTY-SEVEN
TO ALIEN EYES, says Prinz Lobkowitz, colours which to us speak of comfort, security and pleasure might for them represent death and threat. Thus we look upon Mars and find it desolate while the Martian looks on Earth and finds it foul.
I do not think I was unduly incautious in the way I conducted my life while out of the Pasha’s favour. Indeed, I had planned for some while to transfer accounts to Tangier and convert francs into other currencies through my British bank.
I did not want immediately to begin such movements of money, of course, until I was restored in the Pasha’s confidence. Otherwise he would construe my actions as a confirmation of any guilt he imagined me to feel. As principal shareholder in so many banks, he might easily decide to confiscate my money! Too often the failures of his own engineering schemes came about as a result of bribery and corruption, of bad materials being put in place of good, of unskilled people being employed at half the wages of the skilled. I knew that if he was investigating my factory, he would soon discover that I had conducted myself honourably in every aspect. I could not, of course, speak for individual workers or indeed for my native foremen, but I saw no way in which they could deceive me. I am not, after all, easily deceived. I would have lived for a while quietly until I found a means of slipping unnoticed from the city, preferably with Miss von Bek, and getting as quickly as possible to Rome and civilisation, where we would no longer be dependent upon the whims of a local tyrant. But then came Iago into my Moorish fantasy.
I had made her tell me of the secret rooms and what went on there. She showed me some oddly-placed bruises. It was curious what he had done to her and she gave me an insight into that alien point of view. This heady intimacy with an unknowing third partner is part of the terrible attraction of infidelity. It is why some women in particular can never fully escape from its temptations, its delightful and astonishing discoveries, its revelations of human complexity and, indeed, of human perfidy. For some, infidelity is the closest thing to a vocation they know. I am not among their number, but I suspect Rose von Bek was. She became the ever-available repository of extraordinary secrets, some of which she shared, some of which she nursed to herself, rationing the distribution of her knowledge and thus increasing her sense of power. Yet she was to learn that much of what she possessed was the illusory - or at best temporary - power of the whore. She was a woman, I once said, unworthy of her own base inclinations. Together we might, so to speak, have conquered Italy. At that time I could still see that potential in our partnership. I spoke of it. After all, I said, she had the ear of the Duce.
‘That was never the part of his anatomy I influenced,’ she said, and she remained uncommunicative, stroking the side of her jaw with her long fingers, staring speculatively at me with her strange, violet eyes while she considered my proposal. It was time, she agreed, that she got out. She had been a fool to play the game as long as she had. She had not backed, she said, all the winners. It was the story of her life. ‘But they say you’re a singularly fortunate gambler, Max.’
I could not think where she would have heard this. ‘I rarely gamble,’ I said. ‘Life, after all, is enough of a gamble.’
‘That’s what they say.’ She was climbing now with expert swiftness back into her camisole. We had found a useful cubicle at one end of the aeroplane factory. It had been intended to house a modern toilet and bath, but the Pasha’s whims had discarded Western plumbing at the last moment. Now the room contained some quilts and cushions and a few of the things we needed for our love-making. The wonderful shapes of my planes surrounded us in the semi-darkness like the creatures of an unearthly mythology, regarding us with friendly but puzzled concern. The place still stank of glue and resin and aeroplane dope, of the treated silk and the drums of petrol, the oil and the charcoal which the absent factory-workers used to prepare their food. Sometimes, when she had gone, I would light the lamps and stroll amongst my beautiful monsters, running my hand over their smooth bodies, longing for the moment when the powerful new engines nestled in their housings, ready to give violent life to the most advanced air fleet in the world! Even in America they would be startled when my birds came shimmering over their horizon! Hever would be powerless. How on Earth could his petty accusations make sense when I returned to Hollywood a hero, a leading figure in Mussolini’s wonderful Round Table of latter-day knights-errant, a famous inventor and explorer?
I must admit I came to miss the comradely pleasures of the Pasha’s dinners and found fresh European company only rarely now, usually in the cafes and hotel bars around the Djema al Fna’a. These people were not always of the best type, but were the kind of petty racketeers and drifters who accumulate wherever the law we revere is weak or non-existent. I had no time for them. Even in my loneliness, my yearning for civilised company, I disdained to have much to do with them.