The Invitation(100)

Who was this person, I asked, who needed so urgently to speak with me? They preferred not to name themselves, came the reply.

The whole situation was absurd. Essaouira to Tangier is no small journey, and the roads are bad. I knew that it would mean a day’s travelling, and no inconsiderable expense. I suppose that I could have merely ignored the summons – for a summons was what it was. But curiosity had got the better of me.

There was one other mad idea. A hope, secretly cherished – but so impossible, so preposterous that I cannot even bring myself to name it here.

I had avoided Tangier. I did not want to be surrounded by expatriates and the clamour and complications they brought with them. It had sounded a frenetic place, and I had desired solitude. But it was not so different in aspect from Essaouira: the white buildings, the rough navy of the sea.

The hotel, el Minzah, is the best in the city, possibly in the whole of Morocco. I was shown up to the grandest of the suites, the door swept open for me by a member of staff who disappeared like smoke along the corridor.

I did not recognize the figure sitting before me at first. The linen suit was still immaculate. But the body inside was terribly changed and diminished. His face was the worst. I could hardly look at him, this simulacrum of the man he had once been.

Whenever I had imagined seeing him again it had not been like this. In my fantasies he had been strong, healthy, and I had gone at him with all the fury of an avenging spirit. It was why I had not allowed myself to try and meet with him: I had known that I might not be able to stop, that I might actually kill him. But I could see, even without having it confirmed, that he did not need my assistance in that regard.

‘Hello,’ he said, and his voice too was a broken thing.

Even now, I felt that he had the upper hand. My shock on seeing him like this had unnerved me, thrown me onto the back foot. I tried to remember what it was I had decided I would say to him at this point.

‘Have you decided to confess?’ I asked him.

He smiled at me, and his face was a grinning skull. The charm of that smile was all gone. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘because I’m dying?’

Before I could decide how to answer him he said, ‘I am, of course. Well on the way.’ I saw the brief tremor of it then, the fear that his manner had attempted to conceal. ‘I was ill then, too – though it was the early stages. The business trips I made to Milan, if you remember …’

I nodded.

‘I was travelling over the border, to Switzerland, to a clinic there. At that time there was still a possibility – they were trying transfusions, to get rid of the bad cells in the blood. In some cases it works. I did not want her to know. I did not want my shareholders to know, either. It was convenient if it was believed that I had business in Italy.’

‘Why did you come here?’

‘Oh, I haven’t made a special journey for you – you need not worry about that. I have come here for treatment. Conventional medicine has had no effect – but there is a man, a Sufi. He cannot cure me, but he is able to do something for the pain.’

I wouldn’t pity him. ‘Do you know how far I have travelled, to get here?’

‘It is why I could not come to Essaouira. They tell me I am too ill to be moved. And I thought that we still had some matters to discuss, you and I.’

‘There is nothing you can say to me that I am interested in hearing,’ I told him, ‘unless it is your confession.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘then I am afraid that you have travelled all that way in vain.’

He got up from his seat unsteadily, and made a few shuffling steps towards the corner of the room. His movements were those of an elderly man, cramped and painful. I watched him, trying to decide where he was headed, wondering what could merit the difficulty of it. And then I saw the drinks cabinet set up in the corner.

‘I had it sent over,’ he said, seeing me look at it. ‘From New York.’

Only a man like Truss, I thought, would have had his cocktail cabinet shipped overseas to a Muslim city to accompany him in his dying days.

He got to work with the lemons, the spirit and sugar. I saw that his hands as he made up the drinks were surprisingly steady, betraying only the faintest tremor. I imagine that he achieved this by some great effort of will. He brought them over to the low table between the seats. I took the chair opposite him. He sat, lifted the drink to his lips, savoured it. It was difficult not to stare at his face, at the thin grey skin, the architecture of bone sharp beneath it. I still could not believe it was the same man.

‘In fact, I would like to make a confession, of sorts. But not the one that you are asking for, that you feel you deserve. I know that you will never believe me, but I am innocent of that.’ His voice had changed, I realized. The authority had gone from it. ‘I loved her.’

‘No,’ I said, remembering all that she had told me, ‘you loved the idea of her. In the same way that you loved that chess piece.’

He shook his head. ‘It wasn’t like that,’ he said.

‘Tell me, then, what it was like. Because I think that you took a sixteen-year-old girl, who had lost everyone she loved, and tried to force her into your idea of the ideal woman. And when she realized this, and tried to escape, you killed her.’

‘No.’ He was shaking his head now, his eyes closed. ‘No, that isn’t right. I married her because she was brave, and good. I thought that she could make me good.’ He opened his eyes, and I was unnerved to see that he was weeping. ‘I know that I failed her. But I did not kill her. I wanted to kill you, when I realized it.’