The Twelve Rooms of the Nile Part 16

"The work is so physical," Flo said. She felt clammy circles of sweat spreading out from her armpits. She hadn't noticed the heat before, enjoying herself thoroughly. She'd always liked manual labor. f.a.n.n.y considered it drudgery. Ironing, mucking out stalls, and grooming the ponies, all done on the sly.

"I think your dress may be ruined." He touched a patch of the garment that had dried to a lighter shade than the rest.

"I don't care." She removed her bonnet and fanned herself. "When do we take them down?"

"As soon as they are dry. Not long." He dipped a sponge in the bucket and mopped his neck with it, then shook back his hood to dribble water on his head. Flo felt much hotter watching him refresh himself. He stopped, dipped the sponge again, wrung it out, and leaned toward her. "May I?"

Before she could answer, he began carefully patting her face, the way a medical man would bathe a febrile patient. She remembered the story of his sister, Caroline. Had he sat by her bed when she was feverish? Was he reenacting the kindnesses he had lavished on her while she was dying? The thought was disquieting, and she pushed it from her mind. "Oh," she said, "that feels quite wonderful."

"Yes." He continued to apply the sponge to her cheeks and temples, careful to avoid her sleeves. "I would make a terrible woman," he said, "if only because of the clothing you must endure, though no one admires a well-cut frock more than I."

She had closed her eyes, but opened them as he led her by the arm to a spot where they sat in a small wedge of dappled shade cast by a locust tree growing out of the temple floor.

"I have often tried to imagine what it must be like."

"What what is like?" She was happy to listen to whatever he had to say as long as the sponging continued.

"Being a woman. Wearing all those petticoats and whalebone corsets. Shawls that catch on doork.n.o.bs and in wheel spokes. And tiaras."

"Tiaras?"

"You know what I mean-the gewgaws, the paraphernalia."

She did; still, she wished to draw him out. "But is not a man equally constrained in a vest and trousers, cravat, coat, and hat?" Water trickled down between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "None of us lives nearly so simply as the Nubians," she added.

"True."

"But I do understand," she continued. "It's a question of degree. How much whalebone? How many petticoats and hoops? I, for example, will not wear a hooped skirt."

"Exactly! But a man's clothing is more practical and less confining."

"Yet you yourself have complained about the lack of freedom in middle-cla.s.s life." She touched the coa.r.s.e cloth of his djellaba. "And here, you dress in robes."

"I suppose we are both prisoners of our privilege."

"Yes." She felt suddenly anxious. This was the stopping point in her own contemplations, the place beyond which she could venture no further because her life was at odds with her beliefs, the place where self-doubt crept in to ruin her moral clarity. For the very privilege that so confined her had also spared her from bondage and hopelessness of a different sort.

"I should like to spend a month as a man," she said, her face as frank as the sun.

"I can understand that."

It was pleasant to talk with no boundaries and in the middle of an ancient temple with a whiff of Aouadallah's pipe tobacco on the air, which she equated with serious male topics of discussion. She felt completely unconstrained, a child at play. "Are they dry yet? What if the wind comes up?"

Gustave rose and tested an edge of paper. "About another twenty minutes, I think, though leaving them longer doesn't hurt." He folded his arms beneath his head and lay on the ground.

"Good," said Flo. She thought fleetingly of Trout-surely it was past noon-and decided that she could be late. She'd stay until they took the squeezes down.

The sun was overhead, withdrawing any remaining shade, beating down directly on them.

Aouadallah had dozed off, his pipe beside him on the ground, his worry beads slipped from his fingers.

Gustave stood up again. "Can you picture me all tricked out in laces and fichus and millinery with beaded flowers? Or, conversely, beneath a veil?" He twisted his hood around so that the black pompoms dangled below his eyes.

She laughed until she was out of breath as he dramatized his femininity, shaking his hips, stringing a few Arabic words together into a song. "Habibi!" he croaked in a falsetto. "Darling, Allah, Karnak, Asiyoot, Edfu." When he had reduced her to hiccups and tears, he tested the paper again. "Done," he declared. His voice was naturally loud, she realized.

They peeled the squeezes loose from the wall, lifting them like bandages from a wound. "Max says blotter paper would have been better, but it takes too long to dry and costs too much."

The squeezes were thin and translucent as a baby's fingernails. She held one up to the sun and saw how beautifully it had captured the hieroglyphs. Not a detail had been lost. Though the work was boring, the results were superb. He numbered each sheet, noting its date and location on a sketch of the temple.

"They are so lovely," she said. "With all those delicate curves and lines, they remind me of hats."

"Yes, like felt hats for ladies. The molded shapes are subtle. The creases and folds make the style." He seemed pleased by their joint powers of expression.

With Aouadallah, they stacked them on a simple tin tray. They had made more than forty.

"Or they could be French pastries," Flo added. "They look good enough to eat." She had missed breakfast. Soon everything would call food to mind.

"Turkish pastries," he said. "We had them in Cairo, made of perhaps fifty thin layers of dough, with honey and nuts between."

By now she was salivating. Her stomach growled. Had he heard it?

He gathered up the brushes but left the buckets for the next round. "Am I not a slave to Max?" he asked. "He expects me to make squeezes at every monument. That means thousands if he has his way. Thousands of hats."

"You must reason with him." They set off toward the dahabiyah, back down the hill toward the river.

"It is difficult. He is as insistent as a sore toe."

"I like that," she said. She could imagine more conversations in which the goal was to capture things in words, things almost too ephemeral and delicate for expression. It would be like writing poems in the air. "Now I must go and tend to my maid."

"Do a good job. We will need her for Koseir. Make her feel indebted to you, Rossignol. Spare nothing."

"I would treat her well in any case," Flo said, immediately regretting the self-righteous tone. She stopped and touched his hand. "But I shall follow your advice. I shall lavish on her greater sweetness and care than ever."

Back on the dahabiyah, she felt gay and relaxed for the first time in a long while-eager, indeed, to show Selina and Charles her ruined brown dress.

15.

KENNEH.

The infamous Street of Scholars in Kenneh was not the site of a school or mosque, but where the almas plied their trade. Sadly, Gustave had no appet.i.te for wh.o.r.es by the time he reached it. The return visit to Kuchuk Hanem a week before had resulted in heartbreak and disillusion. Love belonged in the brothel, but there, too, it could inflict pain. For seven weeks he had indulged the fantasy that Kuchuk Hanem took special interest in him and was eagerly antic.i.p.ating his return. Her lovemaking on the second visit was desultory, mechanical. She didn't feel well, she explained to Joseph. Even after Max brought out the camera, she couldn't shake her malaise, agreeing to pose in her s.e.xy silk trousers and jacket only when Gustave offered a bonus. It saddened him to learn that she'd sold her pet polka-dotted lamb to the butcher. She posed instead with a kitten, a blur of fur that whirled from her grasp like a dust devil. The two resulting photographs-he captioned them "Bored" and "Impatient"-depressed him even more. He told Max to keep the portraits.

"I agree they won't do for the mantel, but don't you want them for your desk drawer?" Max asked that morning as they docked at Kenneh. "Look"-he pointed to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s-"you can see her nipples in this one."

"I don't care. I don't want them."

Max made kissing sounds. "My poor boy, has she broken your heart?" He smacked his lips again while holding up the pair of calotypes.

They bore no resemblance to the woman whose memory Gustave had been savoring. Gone was the delicious naughtiness of the wh.o.r.e who had jumped on his back and then curled up beside him, holding his hand while she slept. Had she even remembered him? He might as well have wooed his right hand.

He hated this vestige of the romantic in himself, the vulnerability of it. Were his dreamier, mooning self ever to escape the confines of the wh.o.r.ehouse, he'd be sunk.

Gustave and Max encountered a man in white robes soon after going ash.o.r.e. He was Pere Issa, the French consular agent in Kenneh. He b.u.t.tonholed them as they pa.s.sed in front of his house, happy to encounter a pair of genuine Frenchmen.

They decamped to a cafe where they explained their missions to him.

"So, you are tourists, I take it?" he asked, smiling.

Gustave was relieved not to have to continue the impersonation of a bureaucrat. "Yes. We are here to experience the riches of the Orient."

Max explained that they wished to take a caravan trip to the Red Sea and asked if Pere Issa might help. The consul responded enthusiastically, offering to aid in securing camels and guides. Furthermore, he had a brother in Koseir who would welcome their company.

"We wish to take an English lady, a friend, with us," Gustave told him.

"Is that so?" The consul drained his cup of Turkish coffee. "How can I be of a.s.sistance?"

Half an hour later, lounging on a divan in a brothel, Gustave opened his ma.n.u.script and reread the sentence at the top of the page: A woman's c.u.n.t is as distinctive as her face, the lips below as unique as those above.

While Max of the still-pimpled p.r.i.c.k took his pleasure upstairs, Gustave paid two almas to pose instead of servicing him. New entries for L'Encyclopedie du Con.

Yussefa's mons venus is more merkin than mound. A springy thicket of curls rises up like an evergreen forest in the midst of a desert. . . . Fatima, smooth as sea gla.s.s, shaves or waxes her entire body. Her pubis, oiled and plump, is a hillock cleft by l.a.b.i.a edged with a frill of looser skin the same color as the dark circles beneath her eyes. Gazing at her face, one cannot help but recall those ribbons of purplish flesh bedecking the sweet gift package in the declivity below.

At his signal, one alma refreshed her pose, the gold coins dangling from her jacket pleasantly clicking. The women were naked from the waist down.

Kenneh was small enough that word of their arrival had spread quickly. In Egypt, windows and sometimes doors remained open in fair weather, with much of life conducted within public earshot.

It was all so different from home, where narrow vestibules and locked doors led to the place of greatest seclusion and seat of family power, the bedroom, as if every citoyen were expected to harbor secrets. Living out of doors, like the Egyptians, a lie carried no farther than the human voice.

The models lay side by side on their backs with their knees raised up.

Vertical grins, vertical grins! Like the professional girls of France, wh.o.r.es here are happy to display their bottoms. What could be more enticing than to watch from behind a woman bending over until that second little mouth appears in a pout. Below the crack of the derriere, the a.s.sholes, too, are charming, the entire a.s.semblage like an exclamation point, as if their behinds are perpetually elated or surprised.

It was heartening to write something obscene and unpremeditated. On the other hand, it gave rise to a vexing old question: Why did he write exclusively of saints and wh.o.r.es, as if there were nothing of interest between the two extremes? Max had remonstrated with him for this. Write about regular provincials, he'd urged, going so far as to suggest the case of a woman named Delamare who had shocked the hamlet of Ry with her adultery and suicide. But he could not stomach the thought of writing about ordinary people, people whom in reality he would despise. To inhabit the cheery smugness of the grocer or pharmacist, the clerk or banker's wife with their endless plat.i.tudes?-unthinkable. Nor did he wish to write about himself.

Rossignol came to mind. Would she be a suitable subject? Unlike rebellious men who took up dissipation, high-minded women like Rossignol turned to religion for solace. O for the days of temple wh.o.r.es and pagan baccha.n.a.ls! What had befallen the practice of sacred copulation? Now there was a way for the English lark to converse with G.o.d! Actually, if he believed in G.o.d, Gustave, too, could have warmed to the religious life. He had experienced a diminished version of its appeal in writing the life of a saint who spent a mono-maniacal half century in the desert.

He jotted down words alongside his crude sketches, notes for later, when he would create flesh, bone, color, perfume-desire itself-by means of other little marks on paper through the miracle of language. To be lost in it, to comb through its vast nomenclatures for botany, for cloud formations and machine parts, its heaps of ornaments and junk-how he missed it!

He put down his pencil and glanced outside. The window framed a bright collage of the street. As he beheld it, he began to compose it in his mind: sunlight teeming with dust motes, moving swatches of color, and voices circulating like currents of incoherent verse. For him it was always thus-the world and then, simultaneously, his rendering of it, as organically attached as a shadow. Was that not enough to occupy the rest of his life? To fas.h.i.+on from roiling chaos his own sacrifice to lay upon the altar not of G.o.d, but of Art? Or were they the same? Could he return to Croisset and resume life within his hermitage without regard to the failure of The Temptation?

He resumed sketching. Perhaps after he'd completed a second or third book, he'd return to it. Now he must press forward with a new project. Between the insufferable betise of bourgeois life and rank, undifferentiated failure, lay only one option: the pursuit of art as a sacred calling. To capture the quicksilver iridescence of a pigeon's breast while all around you men admired bird droppings on each other's heads like the latest fas.h.i.+on in hats. The sheer n.o.bility of the enterprise filled him with premature pride. What appealed to him was not just the escape Art provided from the ordinary world of commerce and family, from shoveling the s.h.i.+t of mediocrity from pile to identical pile, but also its difficulty, the purity of intention, the tricky simplicity of it. Better a sublime writing flop than law or industry, with their endless iterations and vulgarities, their superfluous stuff. For when he wrote well, there was nothing like it. Time stood still and he disappeared into its transfixing calm.

He took a deep breath. Perhaps he could return to the writing life. What else was there?

The wh.o.r.es began to dress. He closed his notebook and bid them farewell, blowing loud kisses off his fingertips. "Adieu, monsieur," they chimed. As the door slammed behind them, a sudden gust billowed the red curtains at the window like skirts kicked up by a dancer. He heard Max stepping briskly across the floor overhead.

But what would his subject be? What had been left unsaid by the greats? By Balzac, Rabelais, Hugo, Corneille, and Stendahl? And if he didn't write about sainthood or depravity, what could he tackle? The question took up residence in his belly like an ill-digested meal. And there it remained.

16.

A CABINET OF RELICS.

Trout's toothache followed an erratic course over the next two days. She improved, then worsened, sometimes better in the morning, sometimes in the evening. The swelling, too, increased and shrank unpredictably. But she slept through the nights, and awoke rested.

Flo didn't mind caring for her patient, though without her medical texts, she had to improvise. Twice a day she applied whiskey-infused cotton wool to the inflamed area and immobilized Trout's jaw. She continued the warm broths and added a vinegar and chamomile wash six times a day, boiling the concoction first.

With Trout indisposed, Selina replaced her as lady's maid, helping Flo to dress and coif. Trout watched with dismay, but abided by Flo's strict order for complete bed rest. The only exception was the chamber pot, which Trout would not so much as allow Flo or Selina to touch.

On the third morning, after an hour-long application of the cotton wool, pus and blood erupted from the area around the tooth. Trout was appalled, Flo relieved. Within hours, the gums were less tender and the swelling had decreased. "One more day in bed," Flo told her that afternoon. "That is the best medicine."

For all Trout's complaining, Flo was surprised to note, she clearly did not enjoy being ill and the object of so much attention. She was a compliant patient, following Flo's regimens to the dot, but seemed faintly humiliated to require help from others. After the pain subsided, Flo made her promise not to chew on that side of her mouth until she could consult a dentist on the Continent or back home. "Even if you are tempted," Flo insisted, as Trout, thinner and pastier, prepared to take the stairs for her first breakfast on deck in four days. "You mustn't forget." Trout agreed.

After she recovered, Trout's demeanor changed, though Flo could not say exactly how or why. At first she thought Trout had sweetened (perhaps in grat.i.tude?). But the change was subtler than that. Trout seemed no happier, merely a tad less sullen and more cooperative. Perhaps the change was simply the kittenish softness of persons who have been ill and not yet fully regained their strength. What energy Trout had she seemed to waste in restlessness, pacing back and forth on the deck, her crocheting slung around her neck or stashed in her pocket. She spoke little and sat apart, writing in her brown notebook, silently watching the river's green ribbons spool past. She must be lonely, Flo thought, though neither woman made an effort to alleviate that fact. They hardly spoke.

Four days later, on a bright Tuesday in April, they drifted into Kenneh. After lunch, Flo went ash.o.r.e with Efreet-Youssef, along the wide curve of sand that served as the harbor, eager to find Gustave's cange.

The overall impression of the town was of buildings thrown up overnight to make a dazzling first impression. Close to the river, mud brick houses with lopsided balconies leaned over the dusty thoroughfares, creating doglegged pa.s.sageways that hovered uncertainly above the streets. Most were whitewashed or painted in bright colors-turquoise famously warded off the evil eye. Farther inland, she glimpsed grimmer wooden shacks, and streets converging into alleys or footpaths irregular and narrow as animal tracks. A gentle disrepair marked every structure, suggesting that neither better materials nor greater precision would count for much against the onslaught of the heat and the sand and the inundation.

She soon found the cange, its tricolor bunting deflated in the still air. She waved to the sailors swabbing the deck. They waved back, calling out greetings in Arabic to her and Youssef. Joseph came running, obviously dragged from a nap by a crewman. Bowing, he explained that the two gentlemen had gone into town for supplies. He did not know when they would return.

Supplies again. And, suspiciously, without Joseph's a.s.sistance. She tore a sheet of paper from her aide-memoire: My dear Gustave: We arrived in Kenneh today at noon. Can you come to the Parthenope tomorrow night? Would 7:30, directly after dinner, be convenient? I hope you are prepared to convince the customers. I am counting on it!

Yours in haste,