«Yes».
«You’ve seen everything. You can go back to New York. Tangier holds no secrets for you now».
Dyar laughed uneasily. After a pause he said: «What’s up tomorrow? Do I come around to the agency?»
Wilcox was lighting a cigarette. «You might drop in sometime during the late afternoon, yes».
His heart sank. Then he was angry. «He knows damned well I want to start work. Playing cat and mouse». He said nothing.
When they arrived in the town, Wilcox called: «Atlantide». The cab turned right, climbed a crooked street, and stopped before a large doorway. «Here’s fifty pesetas,» said Wilcox, pressing some notes into his hand. «My share».
«Fine,» said Dyar. «Thanks».
«Good night».
«Good night».
The driver looked expectantly back. «Just wait a minute,» said Dyar, gesturing. He could still see Wilcox in the lobby. When he had gone out of sight, Dyar paid the man, got out, and started to walk downhill, the rain at his back. The street was deserted. He felt pleasantly drunk, and not at all sleepy. As he walked along he muttered: «Late afternoon. Drop in, do. Charmed, I’m sure. Lovely weather». He came to a square where a line of cabs waited. Even in the storm, at this hour, the men spied him. «Hey, come! Taxi, Johnny?» He disregarded them and cut into a narrow passageway. It was like walking down the bed of a swiftly running brook; the water came almost to the tops of his shoes, sometimes above. He bent down and rolled up his trousers, continued to walk. His thoughts took another course. Soon he was chuckling to himself, and once he said aloud: «Golden apples, my ass!»
III
Thami was furious with his wife: She had a nose bleed and was letting it drip all over the patio. He had told her to get a wet rag and try to stanch it with that, but she was frightened and seemed not to hear him; she merely kept walking back and forth in the patio with her head bent over. There was an oil lamp flickering just inside the door, and from where he lay on his mattress he could see her hennaed feet with their heavy anklets shuffle by every so often in front of him. Rain fell intermittently, but she did not seem to notice it.
That was the worst part of being married, unless one had money — a man could never be alone in his own house; there was always female flesh in front of him, and when he had had enough of it he did not want to be continually reminded of it. «Yah latif!» he yelled. «At least shut the door!» In the next room the baby started to cry. Thami waited a moment to see what Kinza was going to do. She neither closed the door nor went to comfort her son. «Go and see what he wants!» he roared. Then he groaned: «Al-lah!» and put a cushion over his abdomen, locking his hands on top of it, in the hope of having an after-dinner nap. If it were not for his son, he reflected, he would send her back where she belonged to her family in the Rif. That might pave the way, at least, to his being taken back by his brothers and permitted to live with them again.
He had never considered it just of Abdelmalek and Hassan to have taken it upon themselves to put him out of the house. Being younger than they, he had of course to accept their dictum. But certainly he had not accepted it with good grace. It was typical of him to consider that they had acted out of sheer spite, and he behaved accordingly. He committed the unpardonable offense of speaking against them to others, dwelling upon their miserliness and their lecherousness; this trait had gradually estranged him from practically all his childhood friends. Everyone knew he drank and had done so since the age of fifteen, and although that was generally considered in the upper-class Moslem world of Tangier sufficient grounds for his having been asked to leave the Beidaoui residence, still, in itself it would not have turned his friends against him. The trouble was that Thami had a genius for doing the wrong thing; it was as if he took a perverse and bitter delight in cutting himself off from all he had ever known, in making himself utterly miserable. His senseless marriage with an illiterate mountain girl — surely he had done that only in a spirit of revenge against his brothers. He must certainly have been mocking them when he rented the squalid little house in Emsallah, where only laborers and servants lived. Not only did he take alcohol, but he had recently begun to do it publicly, on the terraces of the cafés in the Zoco Chico. His brothers had even heard, although how much truth lay in the report they did not know, that he had been seen going on numerous trips by train to Casablanca, an activity which usually meant only one thing: smuggling of one sort or another.
Thami’s friends now were of recent cultivation, and the relationships between him and them not particularly profound ones. Two were professors at the Lycée Français, ardent nationalists who never missed an opportunity during a conversation to excoriate the French, and threw about terms like «imperialist domination,» «Pan-Islamic culture» and «autonomy». Their violence and resentment against the abuses of an unjust authority struck a sympathetic chord in him; he felt like one of them without really understanding what they were talking about. It was they who had given him the idea of making the frequent trips to the French Zone and (—for it was perfectly true: he had been engaging in petty smuggling —) carrying through with him fountain pens and wrist watches to sell there at a good profit. Every franc out of which the French customs could be cheated, they argued, was another nail in the French economic coffin; in the end the followers of Lyautey would be forced to abandon Morocco. There were also the extra thousands of francs which it was agreeable to have in his wallet at the end of such a journey.
Another friend was a functionary in the Municipalité. He too approved of smuggling, but on moral grounds, because it was important to insist on the oneness of Morocco, to refuse to accept the three zones into which the Europeans had arbitrarily divided it. The important point with regard to Europeans, he claimed, was to sow chaos within their institutions and confuse them with seemingly irrational behavior. As to the Moslems, they must be made conscious of their shame and suffering. He frequently visited his family in Rabat, always carrying with him a large bunch of bananas, which were a good deal cheaper in Tangier. When the train arrived at Souk el Arba the customs officers would pounce on the fruit, whereupon he would begin to shout in as loud a voice as possible that he was taking the bananas to his sick child. The officers, taking note of the growing interest in the scene on the part of the other native passengers, would lower their voices and try to keep the altercation as private and friendly as they could. He, speaking excellent French, would be polite in his language but noisy in his protest, and if it looked at any point as though the inspectors might be going to placate him and let the bananas by, he would slip into his speech some tiny expression of defiant insult, imperceptible to the other passengers but certain to throw the Frenchmen into a fury. They would demand that he give up the bananas then and there. At this point he would appear to be making a sudden decision; he would pick up the bunch by the stem and break the fruit off one by one, calling to the fourth-class passengers, mostly simple Berbers, to come and eat, saying sadly that since his sick son was not to have the bananas he wanted to give them to his countrymen. Thus forty or fifty white-robed men would be crouching along the platform munching on bananas, shaking their heads with pity for the father of the sick boy, and turning their wide accusing eyes toward the Frenchmen. The only trouble was that the number of customs inspectors was rather limited. They all had fallen into the trap again and again, but now they remembered the functionary only too well, and the last time he had gone through they had steadfasdy refused to notice the bananas at all. When Thami heard this he said: «So you went through to Rabat with them?» «Yes,» said the other a little dejectedly. «That’s wonderful,» said Thami with enthusiasm. The functionary looked at him. «Of course!» Thami cried. «You broke the law. They knew it. They didn’t dare do anything. You’ve won». «I suppose that’s true,» said the other after a moment, but he was not sure Thami understood what it was all about.