The Spider's House by Paul Bowles Page B

mosque, and, further on, the concrete box that had been the scene of so many afternoons of childhood pleasure, the cinema, plastered with shiny photographs of men with guns. Then he turned left again through a narrow street jammed with waiting donkeys and men pushing wheelbarrows, whose downhill course shortly burrowed beneath the houses. Presently he came out into a vast open place dotted here and there with circular towers. It was like a burning village: greasy black smoke poured from the turrets of baked earth. Boys in rags ran back and forth carrying armfuls of green branches which they stuffed into the doors of the ovens. The smoke billowed and hovered in the air close to the ground, not seeming willing to venture upward toward the gray sky. In a further corner, built against the high ramparts of the city, was a section where the ovens had been constructed on two levels. There was a stairway onto the enormous flat mud roof, and he climbed up to survey the scene. Near by in the doorway of a small shed crouched a bearded man. Amar turned and spoke to him.
    “Any work for me?”
    The man stared at him for a moment without showing any interest. Then he said: “Who are you?”
    “The son of Driss the fqih ,” he replied.
    The man stared harder. “What’s the use of lying?” he demanded. “You’re the son of Driss the fqih? You ?” He turned away and spat.
    Amar was taken aback. He looked down at his bare feet, wriggled his toes, and reflected that he should have put his shoes on before climbing up here.
    “What’s the matter with me?” he said finally, with a certain belligerency. “And what difference does it make, my name? I only asked you if you had any work.”
    “Can you make clay?” the man said.
    “I can learn how to do anything in a quarter of an hour.”

    The man laughed, stroked his beard, and slowly got to his feet. “Come,” he said, and he led him to the entrance of another small shed further along the roof. Inside in the dimness was a boy squatting on the floor beside a large tank of water, rubbing his hands together. “Go in,” the man said. They stood looking down at the boy, who did not glance up. “You rub as hard as you can,” he told Amar, “and if you find even the smallest pebble you take it out, and then you keep rubbing until each handful is like silk.”
    “I see,” said Amar. It seemed like the easiest sort of work. He waited until they got back outside, and then he asked: “How much?”
    “Ten rial a day.”
    It was the normal wage.
    “With lunch,” added Amar, as though it went without saying.
    The man opened his eyes wide. “Are you crazy?” he cried. (Amar merely looked at him fixedly.) “If you want to work, step inside here and start. I don’t need any help. I’m only doing you a favor.”
    Any work that Amar did, even of the simplest kind, such as carrying water at the tannery or holding the long threads with which the tailors made the frogging on the fronts of the djellabas, fascinated him while he was doing it; it was sheer pleasure for him to be completely occupied—the sort of delight he could not know when there was room in his mind for him to remember that he was himself. He set to work mixing water with the clay, rubbing, smoothing, washing, removing particles. At the end of the morning the man came inside, looked, and raised his eyebrows. He stooped over, examined the quality of the mixture carefully, dipping the tips of his fingers into it and squeezing them together.
    “Good,” he said. “Go home to lunch.”
    Amar glanced up. “I’m not hungry yet.”
    “Come with me.”
    They went to the end of the long roof, down the stairs, and across a stretch of bare ground to where great bundles of branches had been piled. Here another stairway had been cutinto the earth. The astringent smell of wet clay was tempered with a sweeter, musky odor which came from several fig trees down below, beside a channel of the river where the water flowed by very