Saltlight

Chapter 1: The Strait

The ferry from Gibraltar cut a white seam across water so blue it looked artificial, and Beatrice Ainsley stood at the rail watching Africa materialize from haze. She had never seen a continent arrive before. Connecticut offered no such spectacle — the familiar hills and elms simply were, had always been, would persist whether you noticed them or not. But this was different. The Moroccan coast assembled itself in stages: first a dark smudge, then the suggestion of buildings, then the unmistakable geometry of a city climbing upward from its harbor like something growing toward the sun.

Henry was below, in their cabin, sleeping off the champagne he'd opened at breakfast to celebrate their arrival. She had watched him drink two glasses, then a third, then pour a fourth while telling her about Paul Bowles and the light and the cafés where a man could think. He'd fallen asleep mid-sentence, his head tipping back against the cabin wall, mouth slightly open, and she had covered him with a blanket and come up to the deck alone.

She was thirty years old. She had been married for four years. She had given up a teaching position at the Linden School for Girls in Hartford — not a prestigious post, but hers, earned through two years of graduate work and a thesis on the Romantic poets that her adviser had called "uncommonly perceptive." She had given it up because Henry needed to write, and Henry needed Tangier to write, and Henry needed her to be in Tangier while he wrote. The logic had seemed airtight in their apartment in New Haven, where Henry's restlessness had grown so acute that he paced the rooms like something caged, picking up books and setting them down, starting sentences he couldn't finish.

"I'm suffocating here," he had told her in January, standing at their kitchen window while snow fell on the bare maples outside. "Every street reminds me of what I'm supposed to be doing. Every face in the faculty club is waiting for the next book. I need somewhere without expectations. Somewhere new."

She had not pointed out that Tangier was not without expectations — that he was bringing all of his expectations with him, packed alongside the typewriter and the boxes of blank paper. She had not said this because she loved him, and because she believed in his talent, and because the celebrated war novel — "The Distances Between" — had been so genuinely extraordinary that she could not imagine the man who wrote it being incapable of writing again. Writer's block was a season, not a climate. It would pass. Everything passed.

So she had written her letter of resignation to the headmistress, Mrs. Collier, who had received it with pursed lips and a silence that communicated more than any reprimand could. She had packed their books and closed up the apartment and followed her husband across the Atlantic, and now here she was, watching Tangier emerge from the morning light like a promise she wasn't sure anyone intended to keep.

The city, as they drew closer, revealed itself as white. Startlingly, almost aggressively white — the buildings stacked and tumbled over one another in a cascade of whitewashed walls and flat roofs, punctuated by the green tiles of minarets and the dark rectangles of windows. It looked nothing like any city she had known. It looked, she thought, like a place that had been scrubbed clean of the past and was waiting to be written on.

The thought pleased her, and she held onto it as the ferry maneuvered into the harbor, as the smell of the city reached her — salt and diesel and something sweet she couldn't identify, something vegetal and warm — and as the sounds arrived: the cries of gulls, the shouts of dockworkers in Arabic and Spanish, the clatter of carts, the distant thread of music from somewhere she couldn't see.

She went below to wake Henry.

He came up rumpled and blinking, his dark hair falling across his forehead in the way that had first attracted her attention at a faculty dinner in 1946, when he'd been the young veteran-novelist everyone wanted to meet and she'd been a graduate student seated at the wrong end of the table. He was handsome in a particular American way — square-jawed, broad-shouldered, with the kind of easy physical confidence that came from having been good at sports and war and everything else that mattered to men. At thirty-three, he still looked like the photograph on the back of his book jacket, though the lines around his eyes had deepened and there was a puffiness to his face that hadn't been there two years ago.

"There it is," he said, squinting at the city. "There it is, Bea. You see?"

"I see it."

"Bowles says the light here changes everything. Changes the way you think. He says you can't write the same sentences in Tangier that you'd write in New York."

"What kind of sentences do you write in Tangier?"

He smiled — the real smile, the one that still worked on her. "That's what we're going to find out."

They disembarked into chaos. The dock was a compression of bodies and languages and competing claims on their attention. Boys materialized to carry their luggage, shouting offers in French and English and Arabic. A man in a djellaba tried to sell Henry a leather bag. Another pressed a sprig of jasmine into Beatrice's hand and demanded payment. Henry laughed and paid everyone, scattering coins with the generosity of a man who believed money was a minor character in the story of his life.

A car was waiting — arranged by someone Henry knew, or knew of, or had corresponded with; the networks of the expatriate world were opaque to her. The driver was a small, neat Moroccan man in a Western suit who spoke precise French and drove with terrifying confidence through streets that seemed designed for donkeys rather than automobiles. They climbed from the port into the European quarter — the Ville Nouvelle — where the buildings were French colonial, cream-colored with iron balconies, and the cafés spilled onto wide sidewalks under striped awnings.

"The International Zone," Henry said, as though naming a character. "No single country controls it. French, Spanish, British, American — everyone has a piece, so nobody's really in charge. You can do anything here, Bea. Anything at all."

She watched a woman in a fur stole walk past a beggar sitting cross-legged on the pavement. "That seems like it could be a problem as much as a freedom."

"That's what makes it interesting."

The villa was on the Marshan, the old residential hill above the Medina, and it was more than she had expected. Two stories of whitewashed walls behind a garden gate, with blue shutters and a terrace that looked out over the rooftops to the strait. Bougainvillea climbed the walls in violent pink. A fig tree stood in the small courtyard, its leaves broad and dusty. Inside, the rooms were tiled in geometric patterns of blue and white, cool and shadowed, with high ceilings and the faint smell of cedar.

"Henry, this must cost —"

"Don't worry about it. The advance covers us for a year, easily. Longer, with the exchange rate."

The advance. His publisher had given him a generous sum for the second novel — the novel that existed, so far, only as a title ("The Burnt Country") and a two-page outline that Henry had written in a single feverish evening and never revised. That had been eighteen months ago. The money was real; the book was not.

Beatrice set her suitcase in the bedroom and opened the shutters. The view was extraordinary — the white tumble of the Medina below, the harbor beyond, and then the strait, that narrow band of water separating two continents. She could see the faint outline of Spain on the far side, gray and insubstantial, like a memory of somewhere she'd already left behind.

She stood there for a long time, letting the city's noise rise up to her: the call to prayer from a nearby mosque, the bark of a dog, the laughter of children playing somewhere she couldn't see. She thought about Mrs. Collier's pursed lips. She thought about her thesis on the Romantic poets, which sat in a box somewhere in the hold of a ship, or perhaps in a storage facility in New Haven, slowly yellowing. She thought about the word "sacrifice" and whether it applied to what she'd done or whether "choice" was more accurate, and whether the distinction mattered.

Henry appeared in the doorway behind her. "I'm going to set up my study in the back room. The one with the good light."

"That sounds right."

"I can feel it, Bea. I can feel the book here. It's been waiting for me in this city."

She turned and smiled at him, because she wanted to believe it, and because believing in Henry's talent had become so habitual that she sometimes forgot it was a choice.

"I'm glad," she said. "I'm glad we came."

That first week, Henry set up his study with the meticulous attention of a man building a shrine. The typewriter — a Royal Quiet De Luxe he'd carried across the Atlantic like a sacred object — was positioned on a desk facing the window. Reams of paper were stacked on a shelf. Pencils were sharpened and arranged in a ceramic cup. A bottle of Scotch was placed on a side table, "for emergencies," he said, with the grin that meant he knew it was a cliché and didn't care.

Beatrice unpacked their books and arranged them on the shelves in the sitting room. She hung their clothes in the cedar wardrobe. She found the kitchen and learned its mysteries — the small gas stove, the icebox that needed daily replenishing, the tap water that Henry's contact had warned them not to drink. She bought bottled water and bread and oranges from a shop at the bottom of the hill, communicating in her schoolgirl French with the shopkeeper, a grave old man who corrected her pronunciation with gentle insistence.

She was, she realized, doing what she had always done: making a home for Henry to work in. Creating the conditions for his genius. She had done it in New Haven — cooking his meals, fielding his telephone calls, managing the correspondence with his publisher and agent so that he could focus on the writing that never came. She was doing it again here, in a different city, with different oranges and a different view, but the essential pattern was unchanged.

On the third day, she climbed down from the Marshan into the Medina.

She had been warned about it — by Henry, by the driver who'd met them at the port, by a British woman she'd met at the café on the Petit Socco who'd said, "Don't go in alone, dear, you'll never come out." The warnings had the opposite of their intended effect. She wanted to be lost.

The Medina was a labyrinth. There was no other word for it. The streets — if they could be called streets — were narrow passages between high walls, some barely wide enough for two people to pass, others opening suddenly into small squares where old men sat on stone benches and cats slept in patches of sun. The light fell in shafts and slants, cut by the walls and the overhanging upper stories of buildings, so that she moved constantly between brightness and shadow. The smells changed with every turn: fresh bread, then leather, then something rank and animal, then mint, then the sharp sweetness of cedar shavings.

She was lost within fifteen minutes. The passages forked and doubled back and led to dead ends and opened onto stairways that climbed to nowhere she recognized. She felt a flutter of panic, then a strange exhilaration. No one knew where she was. No one was waiting for her. She was anonymous, invisible, free.

A boy of perhaps ten appeared at her elbow. "Madame? You are lost?"

"I think so, yes."

"Where you want to go?"

"I don't know."

He considered this with the seriousness it deserved. "Then you are not lost," he said. "You are just walking."

She laughed — a real laugh, the first in weeks — and gave him a coin, and he vanished into the labyrinth as though he'd never existed.

She kept walking. She found a square where women sold vegetables from baskets — tomatoes so red they looked painted, bundles of coriander, pyramids of lemons. She found a street of metalworkers, the air ringing with the sound of hammers on copper. She found a mosque with a green-tiled minaret and a fountain in its courtyard where pigeons drank. She found a café the size of a closet where an old man served her mint tea in a glass so small it fit in her palm, the tea scalding and sweet, and she sat on a wooden stool and watched the life of the Medina flow past her like a river she'd only just discovered.

When she finally emerged — through a gate she hadn't entered by, onto a street she didn't recognize — the sun was low and the city was turning gold. She asked a policeman for directions back to the Marshan and climbed the hill as the call to prayer sounded from a dozen minarets, the voices overlapping and echoing until the whole city seemed to vibrate with a single sustained note.

Henry was on the terrace, drinking Scotch. The typewriter was silent.

"Where have you been?" he asked, without particular concern.

"The Medina."

"Alone?"

"Yes."

"Brave girl." He raised his glass. "I've been thinking about the opening chapter. I think I've got it. Not on paper yet, but up here." He tapped his temple. "It's coming, Bea. I can feel it."

She sat down beside him and accepted the glass he poured for her. The strait was turning purple in the fading light. Spain had disappeared. There was only water and sky and the white city below, and the sound of the muezzin, and the smell of jasmine from the garden, and her husband's certainty that the words would come, and her own growing suspicion that they would not.