The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (10 page)

Inside the sleeping cabin, the lamp he held shed a golden annulus within a fainter penumbra of ocher. The textures and hues of the
room continued vibrant in the dim light. The red and blue geometrics of the divan covers fashioned from kilim rugs, the Persian carpet on the floor, the froth of mosquito netting pendant from the ceiling—all invited the hand of a painter or a writer. For the sake of this bellyful of colors, he was willing to endure the ubiquitous fleas and biting flies, the pestilential invasions of rats along the tow ropes from the docks.

“Bring the light closer,” Max said, hiking up his robe.

Just then, Joseph called down from the upper deck. “A runner is come with post, effendis.”

“We will attend to it shortly,” Max replied, intent on centering his groin in the brightest part of the light.

Gustave peered at seven blisters on the head and shaft of his friend’s noble part. Max retracted his foreskin, the better to expose them.

“The fellow looks angry,” Gustave said. “A gift from one of the dancing girls?”

“No doubt. I’ll see a proper doctor when we return to Cairo. None in these parts, I’m sure.”

Max was right. What passed for medicine in Upper Egypt was superstition verging on perversity. In Kom Ombo, he’d seen barren women exposing their bellies to the urine stream of idiots. Even in Cairo, consumptives routinely kissed the genitals of dervishes in hopes of a cure. “Do they hurt,
mon ami
?”

“I feel them. What about you? Have you checked yourself?”

“Yes. I’m all right.”

“I wonder if this little gathering of blisters could be the result of riding in the desert, the sand rubbing me raw.”

Gustave shook his head. “I would not think so.” He lowered the lamp onto the table. “Sand wouldn’t cause discrete sores, would it?”

“The doctor’s son speaks and I listen, effendi.” Max pulled up his underwear and sat on the divan. The normally lighthearted expression on his face flagged. “My first case of the pox.”

“I hope not.” Gustave moved the lamp to the top of a small bookcase
and sat down opposite Max. “No, I think with the pox you have only one sore.” Years before, when he had lost his virginity to a house-maid in Rouen, he thought he had syphilis. Too ashamed to tell his father, he’d conferred instead with the pharmacist, who had dispensed a salve that cleared up his rash in short order. Pox was so common that one could not worry about it and live a normal life. Nevertheless, sometimes he
did
worry about it. He did not wish to lose his mind, following his teeth and hair. In Cairo he had made a side trip without Max to an asylum attached to the mosque of Sultan Kalaoon, thinking to disport himself with lunatics. There, he had come upon a room of syphilitics in every stage of the disease. A dozen stood bent over at the waist, their pelisses hitched up around their bellies the better to show the doctor their bloody, chancred assholes. He’d vowed a lifetime of abstinence on the spot, knowing he wouldn’t stick to it.

“I have dipped my pen into too many inkpots,” Max said, pouring himself half a tumbler of wine.

They’d finished the good French brandy allotted for the Nile cruise. A dozen more bottles were stored with the rest of their belongings at the villa of Suleiman Pasha in Alexandria. The crew of the
cange,
all Mahometans, didn’t admit to consuming alcohol, but had no trouble securing contraband rice wine for the Franks.

Max began to putter with his photographs.

“I’m going up for some air,” Gustave told him. “And to get the post.”

On a charcoal burner at the bow, Joseph was preparing a hearty dinner of roasted lamb, rice, olives, and fava beans. Given the circumstances, the dragoman’s cooking was delectable. And to ensure satiety, they stocked dates, almonds, onions, and bread on board, a combination primed for dyspepsia. Gustave had a strong and ever-enlarging stomach. Before leaving Alexandria, he had to have his best trousers altered to attend a banquet at Suleiman Pasha’s. His girth had continued to increase on a diet of Ottoman and Egyptian cuisine. He was particularly fond of meat and cheese pies, called
būrek
in Turkish and
sanbusa
in Arabic, and of baklava, a dessert that appeared on tinned
trays in all its declensions with charming names such as “bird’s nest,” and “maiden’s thigh.”

Captain Ibrahim was lounging upwind of the brazier, his feet dangling over the bow. Seeing Gustave, he pointed toward his sleeping niche, a recess in the deck where he and the crew slept, as if packed in long boxes. There, tied up in a piece of cloth, Gustave found the post.

A letter from dear Bouilhet, another from
Maman,
and a third he didn’t recognize. The consul had probably tossed in the month-old issue of
La Presse.
He’d save it for after dinner, while he smoked.

With his back to the river, he sat in a chair on the port side to read. His mother missed him and sent kisses. Baby Caroline was flourishing, stringing her words into sentences and torturing the cats, which vanished like startled snakes when she toddled into a room. His mother urged him to continue his letters, no matter how brief or haphazard. She closed with bear hugs.

Bouilhet’s letter smacked of his usual sass. Gustave read it quickly, chuckling, knowing he’d savor it again in a day or two. Bouilhet had been a scholarship boy at Gustave’s preparatory school, but they weren’t close until university. The first time he laid eyes on Bouilhet there he had thought he was looking into a mirror or a pane of glass struck by the light to reflect his gaze. Since they were both students, even their clothing was similar. A year after their reunion, Bouilhet had left school for lack of funds, but the friendship had continued. He supported himself by tutoring students in Latin and Greek, leaving him time to work on his epic poem,
Melaenis,
several new stanzas of which he’d copied on a separate sheet.

The third envelope was cream-colored and thick. The paper, slick to the touch, was the kind he liked to use because it allowed his quill to skim along as fast as he could think, and absorbed the ink nicely. High cotton content, no doubt. He was attuned to the few sensual pleasures of his desk: papers, pens, nibs, inks—even pen wipes—provided a particular visual tang, a texture, an odor. He sniffed the envelope. No perfume. The imprint on the sealing wax was illegible.
Carefully, he drew his penknife along the top and withdrew three crisp sheets, evenly folded. The hand was a woman’s, orderly and pretty. Not like Louise’s, who wrote in a great looping rush. At the height of their affair, she wrote him three times a day, each letter a more volcanic outpouring than the last. He’d kept his departure a secret so he didn’t have to bid her farewell. He wanted only silence from her. As to why he was buying her gifts, he hadn’t a clue.

This missive was from Miss Nightingale. He examined the envelope again: there was no sign that it had passed through the post office at Alexandria, which would explain how it had reached him so quickly. No doubt, the natives knew where each European party was camped on any given day. The letter had been sped to him via grapevine.

A drawing on the third page caught his eye. He thought it was a sketch of a mummy, but on closer inspection, he noticed that the writer had drawn eyes and a smile on the exposed face of a figure otherwise completely enshrouded. He stroked the smiling face with his forefinger and studied the diagram. Its precision and lighthearted detail indicated a warmth and jocularity he hadn’t detected in Miss Nightingale on the road.

He admired the letter’s fluency and vivacity. As he read, appetizing whiffs of roast lamb and beans, the clean scent of steamed rice, wafted over him. Whenever he reread the letter years later, he was haunted by a vague memory of hunger—of heightened awareness and the anticipation of pleasure. But now he tempered his enthusiasm. He was wary of Englishwomen, as he seemed especially susceptible to their charms. He had discovered this with Gertrude and Harriet Collier.

He had met the sisters on the beach at Trouville when he was nineteen. They might have remained casual summer acquaintances but for a freakish fire in their cottage. He had spotted the flames and carried Harriet, the invalid sister, to safety in his arms. Afterward, when she suffered from nightmares, Dr. Flaubert insisted on caring for her at home. At Rouen, Gustave and Caroline countered her demons with card games and puppet plays. The trio became fast friends.

When he moved to Paris for law school, he called on the sisters at their house on the Champs-Élysées. At first his visits were chatty family affairs, with Captain and Mrs. Collier in attendance. Because the entire family held writers in the highest regard, he felt especially welcome. They shared his enthusiasm for Hugo, Byron, and Wordsworth, for Chateaubriand and Shakespeare. Both sisters were bluestockings, versed in the classics and contemporary literature. He confided to them that he had written a book called
Novembre,
and read some of it aloud. Chez Collier he felt safe and appreciated.

Both girls were appealing. Gertrude was lively and rambunctious, her cheeks rosy with good health, while Harriet radiated the languishing beauty of the semi-invalid, that incandescent pallor that haunted the pages of his beloved Romantics. Both were devout and decorous, attending church every Sunday and abiding strictly by the rules of chaperonage. The three of them never left the house. This made for a less direct sort of coquetry than he was accustomed to. Flirtations took the form of verbal fencing, particularly for Harriet, whose wit was sufficiently nimble to trade innuendos and double entendres.

Slowly, like a net drifting to the bottom of the sea, his interest settled on her. Her large blue eyes and slightly disheveled clothes were uniquely alluring. She had a spinal disorder and usually lay stretched out in fetching poses on the sofa or chaise longue. Chronic debility lent her an ethereal air. And while he could pinpoint no obvious changes, over the months her demeanor increasingly hinted that she desired him. Was he imagining it, or did her poses and gestures sometimes verge on the overtly suggestive?

He began to daydream obsessively about her—lurid, priapic scenarios in which he rescued and then made passionate love to her. She intruded on his sex life with prostitutes. While a whore was fellating him, he’d picture Harriet on her back, clothed in petticoats and a camisole, her eyes half closed, her legs beginning to fall open. Sometimes, when he visited her, he had to camouflage his arousal by remaining seated with a book in his lap.

These fantasies had no future—which made them more ardent—
because even Harriet, with her reduced prospects for a husband, was afflicted with that peculiar English virtue a
strong sense of duty
. Gertrude sometimes called it “constancy of purpose,” speaking in English as though the idea could not be translated because it didn’t exist in French. Perhaps it didn’t. Nor did he comprehend this duty. He knew it wasn’t confined to sex, but wreaked the greatest havoc there. Englishwomen knew nothing about their bodies. Alfred, his closest confidant in things venereal, had once bedded an English maid who did not know what or where the clitoris was. Was it possible in the year 1843 that an educated woman like Harriet Collier was ignorant of her magic button? Alfred claimed his English maid had never masturbated and that after he taught her how, she declared him superfluous.

One day, shortly before he failed his second-year law exams, he found himself alone with Harriet. Gertrude had gone to fetch a book from the library. He was sitting next to her on the sofa, reading aloud, when she took his hand and entwined her fingers with his. A preternatural light in her eyes seemed to draw him into their blueness, pulling him into the vortex of her gaze. She lifted his hand to her pale lips and lightly kissed each fingertip.

Just then, Mrs. Collier paused in the doorway with a smile on her face that chilled him to the bone. When he turned back to Harriet, the expression on
her
face alarmed him even more, for she appeared to be begging for his love, for a respectable future with him in a house like the one in which he suddenly felt like a captive. His stomach flopped over. He must have blanched. He withdrew his hand. When Gertrude returned with her book, he made his excuses and fled, never to return.

Outside in the street, he wanted to scream out of guilt and shame. What courage she must have marshaled to take his hand! And those exquisite, gauzy fingertip kisses! If Mrs. Collier hadn’t inadvertently rescued him with that vulgar smile when she thought she’d glimpsed a potential son-in-law, he might have promised Harriet anything. How weak and softhearted he was, how easily seduced! His contempt for marriage, his years of indiscriminate sex had been insufficient defense.
He was still a romantic!
As a corrective, he remained celibate for the next four months.

He didn’t know what had happened to Harriet. Gertrude had married and become a patron of the arts. Probably no suitor had claimed Harriet because of her weak constitution and the presumption she couldn’t carry an infant to term. What an elegant spinster she would make, clad in dark dresses befitting one no longer prowling for a mate, but set off to one side, like a beautiful vase reduced to holding umbrellas. From time to time he allowed himself to remember her: faintly damp with fever, wearing a fawn silk gown and roses in her hair, she reclined upon a brocade settee or draped herself over an armchair, lank as a set of clothes awaiting their owner to gather them up and put them on.

• • •

My dear Miss Nightingale:

Your letter reached me within two days, carried, I think, on the back of a donkey without benefit of franking but rather because a Mahmoud knew an Essem, who knew an Ismael, who had heard of a Youssef and here it is, in my hand. I hope that mine to you will travel as swiftly.

I owe you a debt of thanks for taking the time to explain the levinge and save me from “the biting hordes.” You are right—the standard mosquito netting is insufficient, and I have the welts to prove it!