Sal he recognizes me immediately, and like Charles he is wearing different clothes, a different fashion, which offers a very different image from the one Pete struck in Amsterdam. A newly coined image, a newly minted stamp. In any case Pete’s got on a linen jacket, baggy trousers and is carrying a small men’s pocketbook. He is, he tells me, here on business but the business is clearly not my business. Import/export, I ask good-humoredly. ‘Course, yeah, Pete answers. The call for prayer sounds and reminds me of Istanbul, of Mr. Yapar and the minarets, of a hailer of images. I ought to send a postcard to Cengiz. I suppose Pete didn’t meet Cengiz, or Charles, but I won’t ask. He and I order more to drink and sink deeper into our chairs. He didn’t go east, to Istanbul, or if he did that’s not what he’s telling me. He went south to Barcelona with some friends, then came here and is staying with people in the Socco. A rich German’s house, he says. Which may account for his new clothes. He doesn’t mention Olivier and neither do I, a lesson I learned from the English brothers. Pete may tell me in time, I content myself with that, leaving him on the veranda or patio, picking up my keys from Mr. Mrabet, the urbane concierge who, I’ve decided, has a developed sense of the ridiculous. I’m not sure why I think this.
My simple room has a remarkable view of the harbor. Like Pete, the English brothers might appear on the horizon out of nowhere, and I’d be happy to see them. Though they wouldn’t come by boat. And no Madame Butterfly is watching for them. If one of them were to dock, though, it’d be Paul, I think. Jessica might show up. She must be well into her pregnancy, by now. Unless she’s miscarried or had an abortion. Perhaps the birth was extremely premature and she had three tiny babies, triplets. What would happen if all three looked into the mirror at the exact same moment?
In the distance the green-blue water moves toward and away from land, a gentle rolling motion that in a second could become roiling and rocking. Still water runs deep but constant movement assures one of continuity though this is against, always against, one’s better judgment. I choose a postcard for the English brothers, my mother and Charlotte. The same one, of the hotel patio.
I lie on the bed and look out the window then at the room’s whitewashed walls with their message of past and faded glory. Faded glory isn’t failure. This room is a palimpsest, hiding many layers of lives, which can be counted by the number of times the room has been repainted. Like a tree’s rings. The hotel was once owned by French people, but is now in Moroccan hands. Mr. Mrabet may be an owner or an employee. If an owner, a small businessman, he’d be subject to, as my father warned, the fluctuations of the market. Which must be worse than the banal vagaries of love. Mr. Mrabet, responsible for all this, or Mr. Mrabet, a Willy Loman, subject to all this.
The hotel’s past elegance is an oasis, a fantasy. It produces delicate troubling thoughts as does looking into the face of a very very old man or woman. Reading faces, reading walls. Some friends say it’s easy to read me, the involuntary expression on my face. The only recourse might be plastic surgery but if I had it done this young I’d have to do it every five or ten years and end up with no epidermal elasticity at all, with no ability to smile. Or with a fixed smile. A forehead much too high, not necessarily noble like Bette Davis’s as Queen Elizabeth, or it’d be unearthly like Peggy Lee’s. And I’d be permanently dissembled.
From my window, the people at the tables below are flat, and if I were to draw them they’d lack any true proportion and I wouldn’t know where the vanishing point would be. I don’t have that kind of perspective. It could be anywhere. As in those old cartoons by Fleischer where the character jumps out of the ink bottle and draws himself, then jumps
My simple room has a remarkable view of the harbor. Like Pete, the English brothers might appear on the horizon out of nowhere, and I’d be happy to see them. Though they wouldn’t come by boat. And no Madame Butterfly is watching for them. If one of them were to dock, though, it’d be Paul, I think. Jessica might show up. She must be well into her pregnancy, by now. Unless she’s miscarried or had an abortion. Perhaps the birth was extremely premature and she had three tiny babies, triplets. What would happen if all three looked into the mirror at the exact same moment?
In the distance the green-blue water moves toward and away from land, a gentle rolling motion that in a second could become roiling and rocking. Still water runs deep but constant movement assures one of continuity though this is against, always against, one’s better judgment. I choose a postcard for the English brothers, my mother and Charlotte. The same one, of the hotel patio.
I lie on the bed and look out the window then at the room’s whitewashed walls with their message of past and faded glory. Faded glory isn’t failure. This room is a palimpsest, hiding many layers of lives, which can be counted by the number of times the room has been repainted. Like a tree’s rings. The hotel was once owned by French people, but is now in Moroccan hands. Mr. Mrabet may be an owner or an employee. If an owner, a small businessman, he’d be subject to, as my father warned, the fluctuations of the market. Which must be worse than the banal vagaries of love. Mr. Mrabet, responsible for all this, or Mr. Mrabet, a Willy Loman, subject to all this.
The hotel’s past elegance is an oasis, a fantasy. It produces delicate troubling thoughts as does looking into the face of a very very old man or woman. Reading faces, reading walls. Some friends say it’s easy to read me, the involuntary expression on my face. The only recourse might be plastic surgery but if I had it done this young I’d have to do it every five or ten years and end up with no epidermal elasticity at all, with no ability to smile. Or with a fixed smile. A forehead much too high, not necessarily noble like Bette Davis’s as Queen Elizabeth, or it’d be unearthly like Peggy Lee’s. And I’d be permanently dissembled.
From my window, the people at the tables below are flat, and if I were to draw them they’d lack any true proportion and I wouldn’t know where the vanishing point would be. I don’t have that kind of perspective. It could be anywhere. As in those old cartoons by Fleischer where the character jumps out of the ink bottle and draws himself, then jumps
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