The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

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 appetite for whores 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 anticipating 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 sexy 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 breasts—“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 whore 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 whorehouse, he’d be sunk.

• • •

Gustave and Max encountered a man in white robes soon after going ashore. He was Père Issa, the French consular agent in Kenneh. He buttonholed them as they passed in front of his house, happy to encounter a pair of genuine Frenchmen.

They decamped to a café 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 Père 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 assistance?”

• • •

Half an hour later, lounging on a divan in a brothel, Gustave opened his manuscript and reread the sentence at the top of the page:

A woman’s cunt is as distinctive as her face, the lips below as unique as those above.


While Max of the still-pimpled prick took his pleasure upstairs, Gustave paid two almas to pose instead of servicing him. New entries for L’Encyclopédie 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 glass, shaves or waxes her entire body. Her pubis, oiled and plump, is a hillock cleft by labia 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, whores 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*sholes, too, are charming, the entire assemblage 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 whores, 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 platitudes?—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 whores and pagan bacchanals! What had befallen the practice of sacred copulation? Now there was a way for the English lark to converse with God! Actually, if he believed in God, 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 fashion from roiling chaos his own sacrifice to lay upon the altar not of God, 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 bêtise 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 fashion in hats. The sheer nobility 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 shit 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 whores 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.