Free The Spider's House by Paul Bowles Page A

“It’s all right here. There’s no one listening.”
    Amar did not understand, but he smiled and looked around the dim little garden. How peaceful it was, with the light evening breeze stirring the small leaves of the grapevine that clusteredaround the electric bulb, making the shadows move and change on the yellow mat below. For a moment he pushed aside the thought of money. From time to time the dark water beside them rippled audibly, as if a tiny fish had come to the surface for an instant and then darted beneath. It was in peaceful moments such as this, his father had said, that men were given to know just a little of what paradise was like, so that they might yearn for it with all their soul, and strive during their time on earth to be worthy of going there. He felt utterly comfortable and happy; soon the hot mint tea would be carried out to them, and he had asked for a sprig of verbena to be put in each glass. And when he had the money he would begin looking for real European shoes, and sell his Jewish sandals….
    “No, not this year,” the man resumed, a wicked light suddenly in his eyes. “May their race rot in Hell.”
    Amar looked at him in surprise. If anyone said that, he could mean only the French, but he was not aware that the man had made any previous allusion to them. As he turned the subject over in his mind, he was conscious that the potter was staring at him with a nascent suspicion.
    “Don’t you know about Ibn Saud?” he asked suddenly. “Have you never heard of him?”
    “Of course,” said Amar, stung by the tone of the other’s voice. “The Sultan of the Hejaz.”
    “Huwa hada ,” said the man, “but I can see you don’t know anything about what’s going on in the world. You should wake up, boy. There are great things happening. Ibn Saud is a man with a head. This year not a single hadji from Morocco has got into Mecca. They all got as far as Djedda and had to turn back,”
    “Poor things,” said Amar, commiserating immediately.
    “Poor things?” the man cried. “Poor donkeys! They should have stayed home. Is this a year to go off to Mecca, when that filthy carrion of a dog they gave us is still sitting there on the Sultan’s throne? No, I swear if I had power I’d shut the doors of every mosque in the country until we get our Sultan back. And if that doesn’t bring him, you know what will.”
    Amar did indeed know. The man meant jihad, the wholesaleslaughter by every Moslem of all available unbelievers. He sat silent, a little stunned by the man’s violence. By no means was he unaware of the fact that the French had put a false monarch on the throne of his country; he assumed that everyone in the world knew that. He resented the indignity the same as anyone else, but he did so without giving the matter any thought. In his experience the substitution of Ben Arafa for Sidi Mohammed had not altered anything; the reason was that he had not come in contact with anyone who had strong political convictions. His father had fulminated against unbelievers and their evil work in Morocco ever since he could remember, and this new bit of malevolence on their part—to kidnap the Sultan and hold him prisoner on an island in the sea, replacing him with a doddering old man who might as well be deaf, dumb and blind—was merely the most recent in a long list of hostile acts on their part.
    But now he saw for the first time that there were men who gave it much more than a passing glance, for whom it was more than a concept, a string of words about a distant happening; he saw the symbolic indignity turn into a personal affront, disapproval transformed into rage. The man sat there glaring at him, a vague shadow, that of a grape leaf, played across his wrinkled forehead. An owl suddenly uttered an absurd, melancholy sound in the canebrake across the stream, and Amar was made conscious in an instant of a presence in the air, something which had been there all the time, but which he had never