Tangier

The Lovers

Late one July afternoon when Tangier was just beginning to cool down, Jean Tassigny was driving to the Mountain from the Emsallah Tennis Club when he noticed Tessa and David Hawkins' Arabian geldings tied up in front of La Colombe. Vanessa Bolton's little Porsche was parked there too, and Herve Beaumont's Fiat coupe. Jean stopped, pulled on his tennis sweater, and walked inside to buy a Depeche de Tanger.

The little shop was jammed. Peter Zvegintzov was darting about, frantically trying to serve his customers. The Manchesters were browsing through horticultural magazines, and Skiddy de Bayonne was sniffing imported teas. Jean picked up his paper, then embraced Vanessa Bolton. David Hawkins, crop stuck into his boot, rushed over to give him a double kiss. Jean waved to David's sister, Tessa, who was deep in conversation with Herve Beaumont. Jean knew Tessa was sleeping with Herve 's sister Florence, but whether with her own brother too he wasn't sure. Still his suspicions made him feel sophisticated, a part of tout Tanger. Though he'd been living in the city less than a year, he'd already acquired a sense of its complexities and overlapping social circles.

Half an hour later, at home, reading on his bed, Jean felt his heart suddenly begin to pound. He read the offending lines again. There was no mistake. Robin Scott had found out about his affair with Claude and had printed it in his wretched column.

His abdomen grew weak. He felt as if he'd just been kicked. He had to tell Claude, tell her at once, but she was downstairs in the salon with her father sipping an aperitif. Had General Bresson seen it? Probably not. He was contemptuous of gossip and didn't read English very well. But Joop de Hoag could read English perfectly, and was due back in Tangier in two more days. Scott had mentioned the possibility of a crime passionnel. Was Monsieur de Hoag really capable of that?

Jean remained upstairs, waiting for the General to leave. But when it became apparent he was staying on for dinner, Jean dressed and descended to the salon. There he endured an hour of tedious small talk, gazing desperately at Claude all the while. But the more boldly he tried to attract her attention, the more coolly she pretended she didn't understand; finally, seeing she was annoyed, he submitted to an interminable wait.

At dinner the General reminisced about Algeria. "Morocco," he said, "was pleasant during the Protectorate, but in Algeria life was truly sweet. It was France, with all the virtues of the Republic and the additional luxury of slaves."

The man was insufferable, but Jean nodded all the same. No point in antagonizing him-Jean only wished he'd leave. Hours later Jean escorted him to his car, and after he'd driven off, he looked down upon Tangier. At night, from the Mountain, it was a distant field of flickering lamps, a thousand beacons beckoning lovers to romantic passageways and glowing minarets.

Jean sighed, walked back to the villa. Claude had already retired to her room. He helped himself to a cognac, waiting for the servants to finish clearing up. When they were done, he gulped the last of his drink and hurried up the stairs.

"Fool!" She nearly spat at him. "Do you want my father to find out?" Then, before he could answer, she smiled, threw her arms around him, and begged him to undress.

He pulled out Robin's column, passed it to her with a trembling hand.

"What's this? 'Burning white hot-an older woman-passionate lovers-crime passionnel.' " She threw it on the floor. "Trash!"

Jean flung himself on the bed, and after a while, after she'd paced the room, she sat beside him, lifted his head onto her lap, and ran her fingers through his hair.

"I could kill Robin for this! But don't worry-Joop won't see it. He doesn't read the Depeche. He'll be busy when he gets back."

"What if someone tells him?"

"No one will."

"Your father? Or one of the British? They love to write anonymous notes."

"In that case I'll deny it. I'll say it isn't true. I've tipped a fortune to the servants. He'll have to accept my word."

"What if he doesn't? He'll watch us. He'll be suspicious. Robin found out. Too many people know."

"Never mind," she said. "We'll be careful. Perhaps, at times, we have been indiscreet."

He looked up at her, thinking of all the times she'd flaunted their affection. She loved danger, courted it, used it to enhance her pleasure and provoke his fear.

"What would he do?" he asked.

"Joop? Oh-he'd kill us, I suppose. Or perhaps he'd just kill you." She laughed, a deep, throaty laugh. Then she pulled his ears.

He spent the night in her bed, but at dawn, before the servants were awake, he got up quietly and stole back to his room. He disliked leaving her, often dreamed of lazy early morning bouts of love, breakfast on her terrace facing the sea, the two of them, naked to the morning sun, sipping coffee as they caressed. But that was impossible. Their whole situation was impossible, though Claude seemed to thrive on its risk.

A year earlier, when Jean Tassigny was interviewed in Paris by Joop de Hoag, he wasn't at all certain exactly what he was being hired to do. The Dutchman was vague about the details, and Jean was too excited to inquire. The idea of living in Tangier was more important to him than the job, and besides Monsieur de Hoag had given him assurances that his training would be invaluable to a career in high finance.

A few weeks after the interview Jean received a formal letter. He'd receive fifteen hundred francs a month, and food and lodgings at the de Hoag house. He'd be treated, in Monsieur de Hoag's words, "as a member of my family," for which, in return, he'd act as Joop de Hoag's homme de confiance.

He arrived in Tangier on a windless autumn day when the light sparkled off white buildings, etching the town against sky and sea. He was dazzled by this effect, and also by the de Hoag house-a great, square, earth-colored mansion that looked as permanent and stately as a bank. Its gleaming double doors of brass swung slowly open like the entrance to a vault, and on the other side, from a terrace cut into rock, he looked upon the fabled city that guarded the Mediterranean Sea. It spread like gleaming mercury back from the bay, surrounded by forests of wild pine and the mountains of the Rif. But there was more than the wondrous clarity of light and the views that ravished him that day. There was a woman, the most beautiful he'd ever seen-Monsieur de Hoag's young wife, Claude.

Claude. Mysterious as the moonlit Casbah, he thought, guarded as the medina walls. He made up names for her-"Tangier Nightbird," "Aphrodite of the Mountain"-wrote them out on slips of paper, then burned the slips and scattered the ashes upon the sea. Why wasn't he a poet? Why couldn't he discover her in a name? It would take a Rimbaud to do that, he thought, but he became obsessed, and though untalented he tried.

Each morning he and Monsieur de Hoag left early for their office, a shabby building near the port. Here he pored over ledgers, studied reports of Brazilian diamond mines, enciphered de Hoag's orders to buy and sell, and telexed them abroad. He learned leverage and arbitrage, the mechanisms of Liechtenstein corporations and numbered Swiss accounts. De Hoag showed him how to move silver bullion through three markets in a week, take a position in Dutch giders while the Deutschemark fluctuated down, ride the Italian lira, liquidate cocoa futures at the proper time, then move the profits back into gold, the only commodity a man could trust.

There was an exhausting excitement about these forays in and out of gold, deep, intense pondering up to the moment of the move, terrifying tension during the wild speculative phase, and then relief, vast relief, when once again the money was safe. Five sets of midday tennis did not leave Jean so fatigued.

De Hoag taught much, but there were things he would not reveal: the identities of his clients and his informants in Johannesburg and Geneva-matters too confidential, it seemed, even for an homme de confiance. Still Jean was patient, certain he'd learn them in time. And, meanwhile, he thought of Claude.

It was an ecstatic torment to face her over dinner, her dark gleaming lips, her wild turquoise eyes. They'd sit, the three of them, when the de Hoags were not invited out, at the end of a long refectory table laden with china, candelabra, flowers. He and Monsieur de Hoag wore smoking jackets; Claude, in the middle, wore a strapless gown and a diamond necklace that glittered upon her neck. They ate while silent liveried Moroccans served, and talked of Tangier, its society, its vagaries and strife. Often, too, Claude's father would come, and then Jean would be seated at the far end. The retired general and Monsieur de Hoag would speak of world events while he and Claude exchanged smiles through the candle flames.

He wondered what she thought of him then, if she was really conscious that he was there. She often seemed aloof, though there were times when she was kind: she held a reception to introduce him to the young people and gave him permission to use her car.

In those first months, while he explored Tangier, found his way into its low-life bars, discovered the special quality of its intoxicants, the warming, ballooning power of its kif, he was content to regard Claude de Hoag as an untouchable object beyond his reach. But as time passed and he grew weary of the formal rituals of the Mountain, he fell into the habit of retiring to his bedroom after work, facing a window from an armchair, and watching as the sun set behind the house and the city faded slowly from his sight. Then, when it was dark and like magic Tangier took on another shape-redrawn, it seemed, by lines of electric lamps-he'd fall into reveries in which he imagined himself and Claude moving separately through a night maze of streets toward a fog-shrouded square where they embraced. At these moments, when he dreamed of wrapping her in his arms, his fantasies became as real to him as anything in his life. He'd imagine the warmth of her through her clothes, and his body would throb with desire.

It was so difficult then to face her, speak to her of inane little things, use the "vous" form, smile in the mornings, refer to her, always, as "Madame."

Once, when he saw her walking her dogs alone along the beach below the cliffs, he sensed that she was lonely and that he might have her if he wished. He even dreamed of how he might declare himself, practiced the gesture by which he would take her hand, kiss it, then return it to her cheek, all the while staring at her with a mixture of longing and tragic obsessiveness in his eyes. There were no words in this fantasy, only glances, gestures that spoke eloquently of his desire, a silent, tranquil ballet by which he asked for her and she accepted him, promising with a smile that in time their silent contract would be sealed.

He imagined this scene taking place in her garden against a backdrop of a flawless sky, with the coast of Spain set hazily behind and the African sun beating upon eucalyptus which dappled the light before it grazed her face. She would be dressed in a flimsy cotton caftan dyed blue by Toureq artisans in the south. A strand of graduated pearls would glow soft against her throat. He was surprised by the compression of this vision, but was wise enough to understand that he obtained more pleasure from the formal contemplation of his passion than from coarse fantasies of its display.

He began then to read romantic novels, to quench an endless thirst for love. He felt like a shopgirl at first, pathetic, deprived, but when he discovered Stendhal's Lucien Leuwen he quickly lost his shame. He read the book slowly, carefully, rereading certain passages many times. He wanted to make the pleasure last, inhale deeply of each lovesick fume. He re-experienced his growing love for Claude as Lucien's love crystallized for Madame de Chasteller, and although he knew he was being foolish, he persisted, seeking escape from the torment of living beside a woman he adored and yet could not possess.

He needed an escape too from Monsieur de Hoag, who was often hard with him and difficult to please. Whenever Jean offered a suggestion at the office, de Hoag turned on him with a sarcastic smile. "Perhaps, Jean," he'd ask, "you have capital of your own to risk? What? No? Well in that case, my boy, may I suggest you conclude your apprenticeship before proposing absurd ventures doomed to fail."

By November their relationship had begun to change. Jean had the feeling that de Hoag had been insincere with him, that he was being exploited, used as a clerk, that de Hoag had no intention of handing him responsibilities or ever allowing him to make decisions on his own. Perhaps, he thought, it's because I'm young; perhaps he dislikes me because he's jealous of my strength and looks. Joop de Hoag was an ugly man, small, fat, bald, almost repulsive when he smiled. His eyes were small, squirrelish, unyielding, and his mouth was tight with greed.

Why had Claude married him? How could she bear to share his bed? De Hoag had bought her-Jean was sure of that. General Bresson had sold her to him when she was barely out of school. Now the General was rich, and the Dutchman owned a stunning wife.

There was another thing that bothered him: de Hoag's alliance with Omar Salah. Jean knew the chief of customs from the tennis club, where they'd played together several times. The man's conduct was appalling: he cheated on line calls, served before his opponent was prepared, and cursed in Arabic as he rushed the net. De Hoag was involved with him in shady deals, secret, illegal bullion accounts for Salah's rich Moroccan friends. Jean had no proof of this (the details were locked in Monsieur de Hoag's private safe) but he found the idea odious and used it to justify the adulteries in his dreams.

After Christmas the rains began, great torrential showers. Claude left Tangier to spend the winter with friends in Kenya, and a few weeks later Monsieur de Hoag set off for Sao Paulo to inspect his holdings there. Jean, alone with the servants in the old villa, wandered from room to room at night. Water slashed upon the roof, mud slid down the Mountain. Tangier was wet and dark, its cafe s were dreary, full of Moroccans shrouded in hoods that gave off an odor of mildewed wool.

Somehow he got through the winter, consoled by the Hawkins', the Beaumonts, Inigo, Vanessa Bolton, Robin Scott. And then, in spring, Tangier became his mistress-he fell in love with the city once again.

He lavished love upon it as before he'd lavished love on Claude. Its arches, its gardens, its whiteness enchanted him, filled him with tenderness, compelled him to explore. Flowers were bursting out, blossoms on the bougainvillea, lace on the jacaranda trees. He walked the Boulevard, strode through the Socco, discovered the markets, the souks, found places where men beat copper, worked leather, fashioned clay, spun wool. He spent hours in the medina, listening for music that erupted in sudden bursts from shadowed doors. He visited the spice shops, priced ambergris, tasted olives, almonds, dates, then prowled the junk stores looking for Berber jewelry, pausing by fountains to watch women washing clothes. He breathed the rankness of the medina, the dust of the Casbah walls. The beaches, white, untouched, glowed like platinum in the sun. On golden Sundays he sat on Avenue d'Espagne watching the waves thunder against the jetties in the bay. This was a city, he thought, made for lovers, a city built for passion, for long kisses and secret trysts. Its faint putrescence, its architectural decay provided shelter for his lust.

And then Claude came back from Kenya, tanned, aglow. The house was alive again. She worked her garden, cut flowers, placed them everywhere in bowls. She seemed to smile at him more often, and even Monsieur de Hoag was less hard with him than before.

He'd been foolish, he thought, to have dreamed of loving her. Tangier was a city so palpable with romance that it had forced him to invent a lover lest the brilliant setting go to waste.

He decided to concentrate on tennis, in the hope that the discipline of vigorous exercise would clear her from his mind. He began to get up early, run down the Mountain to improve his wind. He played an hour before breakfast with a trainer, and after work returned and played again till dusk. He picked up matches with Spanish businessmen and young, aggressive Moroccans. His game improved. He won a tournament. His body tanned. He became lean and hard.

One afternoon when he returned from the courts Claude stopped him in the hall. She wanted to take up tennis, she said, and asked him if he'd help. He told her that of course he would, and so, with Monsieur de Hoag's approval, they went together to the little tennis shop on Rue Goya and he watched as she was outfitted with a racket, shoes, and clothes.

She was awkward at first, broke her swing at the wrist, but he coached her until she could play a decent game. He ran her about the court, fed her backhands, slices, forehands, serves, and when he noticed an error in her form he crossed to her side of the net, stood behind her, placed his hand beside hers on the racket, and slowly moved her through the strokes.

It was then that his adoration was revived. Her body became demystified. He became accustomed to touching her, seeing her bare arms and legs, looking at her face beaded with perspiration, thinking of her as a woman, warm, alive. His dreams of the autumn, formal ballets played out against sun-dappled seascapes, gave way quite suddenly to moist fantasies of flesh, thrashing limbs, grasping hands, sucking tongues and mouths.

He felt then that they shared a physical attraction, all the more powerful because it was unspoken and taboo. He'd catch her watching him, and sometimes, when he stood behind her pressed against her back, he'd feel her spine tremble where they touched as if her body, heated by exercise, was crying out. He knew then that he only had to wait, that sometime soon, at the proper moment, when they were alone or in public unobserved, he had only to let his hand linger a moment too long and she would not be able to resist.

But when? When might he do it? When might he seize her, kiss her, caress her, cause her to moan and heave? How would they become lovers? When?

It would not be easy, for Tangier was small. The people of the town liked nothing better than to spy upon their neighbors and unravel their affairs. So the tennis court became a stage where they enacted an erotic dance. They used the public game to disguise their private play. Each rally held a hidden meaning, each exchange of shots was a coupling in code. A soft service became a caress. A smash was an aggressive thrust. Sometimes he'd toy with her, feed her soft seductive lobs, and then, when she was near the net, he'd send a passing shot hurtling by her side. They'd smile at each other as if to acknowledge the meaning of the play. They were tennis lovers. Their courtship was the game. With swishing rackets they flirted hour after hour, vigorously twitching each other's lust.

Afterward, on the club terrace, drinking beer in sweat-soaked clothes, Jean would recognize the glint of desire in her eyes, but he said nothing, determined she should make the first advance.

She did, finally, on a hot May afternoon. Monsieur de Hoag was in Geneva on a business trip. Jean had left the office early to join Claude on the courts at noon. They played hard, the heat was terrific, and afterward Claude suggested they take a drive.

It was a cloudless, windy day of violent waves on the Atlantic shore. She chose a deserted little bay between Cap Spartel and Robinson Plage. They parked on the cliffs, climbed down to the beach, and without a word started to undress. Finally, standing bare, they turned to one another and stared. There was a pause as they ached and tensed, the sort of pause, it seemed to Jean, that must always occur before a passionate event. Then she came to him, circled his waist, pressed her cheek against his shoulder. He felt her shudder as he wrapped her in his arms.

They made love in a cranny in the cliffs, searing, thrusting, violent. Then, pulled apart, they lay on their backs in the sand, chests heaving, listening to the surf. Jean wanted to speak, but all his thoughts were chaotic. He was conscious only that their act had been momentous, and that by it everything in his life was now, irrevocably, changed.

They made love again. This time she rode him. He gazed up at her, her face held high, her turquoise eyes upon the sea reflecting back the sun. She rode and rode, never looking down. Waves smashed against the sand. He felt that they were joined.

Afterward they swam, then licked the salt off each other's cheeks.

At the house that night she led him to her suite. The weeks of tennis had built up such a backlog of desire that it took them until dawn to use it up. They were savage with each other, devouring, excessive. He ravished her, again and again, and she provoked him further with demands. Finally, when they were finished, Jean felt they'd pushed to the limits of their polarity. He was proud of his manhood, and falling off to sleep he was conscious that his sense of it had been enlarged.

When Monsieur de Hoag came back and they could no longer be alone, they'd brush against each other in the villa halls. Their hands would touch fleetingly as they'd seat themselves for dinner. Over breakfast in the mornings they could hardly bear the stress.

After a few days Claude could stand it no longer. She suddenly stopped playing tennis in the middle of a match. They got into her car and drove madly down the coast. In Asilah, in a Portuguese hotel, they made love on a stained old mattress while dry thunder rumbled in the sky.

Tangier embraced them. Something tragic about the city, Jean thought, provided resonance for their affair. He thought of himself as a man living in a decaying temple; he prayed at an altar of erotic love while a storm raged outside.

Through May and June Monsieur de Hoag was constantly away, on a series of brief business trips to Zurich, Monaco, and Rome. On one of these occasions Jean and Claude were invited together to Barclay's house, a strange, irrelevant dinner, Jean thought, where Claude's father had acted like a fool. Apropos of nothing the General turned to the Governor and began complaining about his phone. Jean, embarrassed, looking around, confronted Omar Salah glaring at him with hate.

Afterward he told Claude, then asked if she thought Salah suspected their affair.

"It wasn't Salah who was watching you," she said with a scornful laugh. "It was Barclay. He couldn't tear his eyes away."

"But why?"

"He's an English pederast. Are you blind, Jean? Haven't you noticed him on the terrace of the tennis club devouring you as if you were his feast?" And then, fondling his testicles: "How Peter Barclay would love to get his hands on these!"

Joop de Hoag, she told him, only had one ball. The other, undescended, had atrophied inside. "He disgusts me," she said with a grimace. "Physically he disgusts me. I despise his body and loathe his wealth."

She kissed him a while, then suddenly turned over on her back. "I lied to you, Jean," she said. "Last year I slept with Salah. We spent a weekend together in Marrakech. Per-haps he suspects us. I don't know."

He could hardly believe it, but when he questioned her she refused to tell him any more.

"Tangier is complicated," she said. "Things here are not so simple as they seem."

Yes, there was something torturous about Tangier, a sense he had of tension and labyrinthine density all around. Was the romantic charm of this old city merely its facade? Was it an abyss into which he'd flung himself for love?

He lay awake that night listening to the distant cries of the muezzin, thinking about women and deceit. He was twenty-three; Claude was thirty-five. Together their bodies sang, but there was disconnection between their minds. He'd perceived this in her before, sometimes when they were making love: a lack of focus, a concentration upon herself, her eyes, always averted, fixed on some distant point. Is it possible, he asked himself, that she and Salah are still involved? Why would he stare at me like that? Could she have told him? Is she mad?

Sometimes he thought that she was. She seemed to want to dare the world to discover them, to take chances no sane person in her position would want to take. She insisted they rent horses and gallop publicly down the Spartel beach. On a tennis ball with a pen she wrote that she loved him, then demanded he smash aces until her words were worn away.

One morning they played very early at the club, even before Monsieur de Hoag was awake. After a hard set she came with him into the men's changing room. Claiming she was excited by the danger and the smell, she insisted he make love to her on the wooden bench between the lockers. He complied because it was still early and no one else was about, but in the middle of the act he opened his eyes and saw the crippled boy who raked the courts watching them from the door. He didn't tell Claude but later he was scared. He knew that now that one Arab had learned their secret, all Tangier had learned it too.

There was something corrupting about the city, he thought, something infectious about its rot. His golden love for Claude had tarnished to a mellow rust. He was beginning to enjoy her whirlpool, her sense of treachery, her bizarre desires.

Together they went to see Inigo, to confide in him, confess their affair. The painter, flattered to be chosen as their confidant, invited them to make a tour of his house. He was charming, almost childlike, as he led them through room after room, each connected to the next by a Moorish arch, each containing a finished painting hanging from the wall by chains. In his studio he showed them an uncompleted portrait of Patrick Wax. The old man was seated before a display of crucifixes; a Pekingese, sprouting a pink erection, gazed out from beneath Wax's chair.

When they had seen everything, and had finished gasping over the perfection of his technique, Inigo led them to a little room beside his pool. "This is a steambath," he said, opening a valve. "I built it to remind myself of the many amusing people I've met in the bathhouses of New York."

Claude was delighted, clapped her hands. "Please, Inigo," she said, "let Jean make love to me here. You can watch us if you like."

For a moment Jean was stunned, then excited by her idea. How far I've come, he thought, since I dreamed of her in the fall.

Inigo released more steam, smiled, and left to fetch his crayons. They were already undressed, locked on the floor of wooden slats, when he returned and began to sketch.

Afterward they knelt beside him, naked, their bodies slick.

Peering at his drawing, they discovered themselves as vague, amorphous figures lost in mist. It was a tour de force of draftsmanship. Inigo ripped it from his sketchbook and presented it to Claude as a gift. He placed his arms around their bare shoulders, hugged them tight, then lit and passed a kif cigarette.

"I have a new project for a painting," he said. "Six cocks. Just six. The midsections of their owners too, of course-navels, thighs, hairs. The cocks not hard, not erect, just hanging loose. The title: Six Cocks at Midday."

He looked at Jean, and then back to Claude. "With your permission, Madame, I should like to include his in the work."

Jean squirmed with embarrassment, but Claude giggled with glee.

"I'm perfectly serious," said the painter, reaching down and gently taking hold of Jean's organ with his hand. "Good proportions. Good heft. Perhaps I will locate it third from the left, a little closer to the foreground plane, standing out a bit from the other five. You understand the reference, of course: Six Persimmons by the Zen painter Mu Ch'i."

Such erudition! People didn't speak like that in Paris. Jean Tassigny was happy he'd come to live in Tangier. In this white, glittering city one could discover who one was. One could dive through a gleaming surface of idealizations and illusions, and swim about in murky depths.

Now there was danger.

Two days after they read about themselves in Robin's column, Jean and Claude drove out to the airport to meet Monsieur de Hoag. He was flying in from Lisbon on a morning flight. The field was only fifteen minutes from the house, but they left an hour early to drive along the sea.

Claude parked above the "Grottoes of Hercules," caves in the cliffs that marked the entrance to the Straits. They walked down toward the ruin of an ancient Roman sardine factory, eroded by two thousand years of winds and drifting sands. The beach was deserted. They stripped, plunged into the sea, then returned to the sand and made love.

It was a defiant act, well calculated by Claude, for she knew this spot was on the line of approach to the main runway of the Tangier airport. When they were finished, they lay naked to the sun and watched the plane sail in. It was not five hundred feet above them and seemed to float as it crossed the sky. Probably no one in the plane could see them, and certainly no one could have made them out. But still, it seemed to Jean, it was a strange and desperate thing to do.

After the plane passed and began to bank they rushed to the car, dressing as they ran. Jean drove quickly to the terminal. They arrived in time to mount the observation deck and watch the passengers cross the tarmac to the lounge.

A few minutes later Jean stood back while Claude ran to her husband, embraced him, welcomed him home to Tangier. He stepped forward then to formally shake his employer's hand. Joop de Hoag handed him the baggage checks. Jean felt pity for him, and terror.