Alaa al-Aswany - The Automobile Club of Egypt

Abdoun looked back at them and answered calmly, “You’re in the wrong. Instead of demanding your rights, you’re afraid. You don’t say anything, and as a result, Alku can do what he likes.”

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you, Abdoun?” someone asked him.

“By God, just the opposite. I feel bad for you, but if you had just demanded civil treatment from Alku, he couldn’t be treating you any worse.”

“You want us to go head-to-head with Alku?”

“Aren’t we all human beings like he is?”

“You’re deluded.”

The conversation carried on in this vein until they all fell quiet, drained of the energy or will to keep discussing the matter. They tried to cheer themselves up at the café before going back to the drudgery of work. Their daily routine helped them to forget their predicament. Their submissiveness was a refuge, and they lost themselves in work, having come to the conclusion that with a little patience their ordeal would come to an end, and everything would go back to normal. Alku’s rampages, however, only got worse, and bad luck does not come in single doses. As they were all busy doing the cleaning one morning, they were surprised to see Labib the telephone operator rushing toward them, shouting, “Help! Abd el-Malek is in a really bad way!”

The party was held in the hunting lodge in Fayoum, where the king stayed when he wanted to hunt waterfowl. It was an elegant, white two-story structure, with nothing else around it but a swimming pool beautifully illuminated at night by an underwater lighting system. Near the pool, two tables had been laid out a little distance apart so that those at one could not overhear what those at the other were saying. At the first table sat the old Princess Mahitab and her consort, Prince Shawkat, with Prince Shakib and his wife, and at the second sat Carlo Botticelli with three women, a white-skinned foreigner in her twenties, a plump olive-skinned woman in her thirties and, between them, Mitsy Wright wearing a low-cut black dress, showing off her cleavage and her beautifully turned shoulders, her long hair falling over them. Botticelli sat chatting with the three women as he looked them over with a hint of worry. He wanted to reassure himself that they were up to scratch. From time to time, Botticelli would get up and ask one of them to come with him. He would take a step backward and look at her as if examining an old master painting and then whisper a remark: “Go easy on the rouge,” “You need to freshen your eyeliner” or “Straighten the shoulder of your dress.” Then he would return to the table, letting the woman go off to the bathroom to carry out his instructions. He had already examined two of them, and now it was Mitsy’s turn. She was surprised to find him pulling her away from the table by the hand.

“I want to speak to you,” he said in English.

She got up and went with him. She had worked out what he was doing and was not going to let him give her a beauty critique as he had done with the others. If he mentioned her lipstick or her eyeliner, he would regret it. Perhaps guessing how she might react, he took a different tack. He looked at her and gave her an affectionate smile.

“You are so beautiful.”

“Thank you.”

“This night might be a turning point in your life. I hope that you appreciate the gravity of the moment.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, it’s not every day that you meet the king.”

“What exactly do you want me to do?”

“His Majesty adores beauty,” Botticelli said suavely. “And if he asks for something, he always gets it.”

Mitsy looked at him with anger in her eyes, but he continued, “You will see that His Majesty is a jolly nice chap and actually quite humble.”

Mitsy turned her back on him and returned to her table. Botticelli was not in the least worried by Mitsy’s sharp reaction. He knew that she would submit to the king if the time came. Otherwise, she would not have accepted the invitation in the first place. She had turned up, and that’s what mattered. Her edginess was just her way of overcoming her shyness in the situation. How strange women are, Botticelli thought to himself as he looked again at the three sitting there in front of him. Were someone to say to any of them that they had come to sell their bodies, she would wipe the floor with him. They had this marvelous power of self-deception. Despite his long experience with women, or perhaps because of it, Botticelli had no great respect for them. Palace rumor had it that in his youth he had been in love with a Greek woman from Alexandria, only to discover that she had been cheating on him with a friend of his, and thereafter he never trusted a woman again. After having convinced scores of women to sell their bodies and finding well-thought-of and respectable women who were ready to go to bed with the king, he no longer believed that any woman could be virtuous. These seductive and delicate creatures all wore a false veneer of innocence but were ready to lie or do anything else for riches. Each had her price. Any woman could be seduced if the time and manner were right. Not surprisingly, Botticelli’s opinion of women had led him to avoid marriage, leaving him a bachelor now in his fifties. When drinking with his friends, they would goad him about it, but he would just laugh.

“Why should I get married?” he would ask them. “I always have a mistress. Marriage is a just a chance to be a cuckold.”

His friends kept trying to convince him otherwise, but Botticelli would dismiss their efforts with a wave of his hand and declaim, “Gentlemen! You can defend your romantic image of women all you like, but no one knows them better than I do. They are fantastic creatures but with no sense of honor. That’s the sad truth, and there’s no point denying it. You are like diners waiting for your meal in a restaurant, whereas I work in the kitchen and know how the most tempting dishes are prepared.”

Waiting for the king to arrive, Botticelli sat at the table with the three prospective candidates. The table with the princes was superfluous to his plans, and they knew that they were merely extras, there to provide the right backdrop. It would have been unseemly for the king of Egypt and the Sudan to come and pick out a girl for the night surreptitiously, and so Botticelli had invited these members of the royal family to make the whole thing look aboveboard. In their part, the royal extras felt some pride that the king trusted them to observe him in his most private moments. They kept themselves removed from the main course of events, eating and drinking and chatting away in French, the princes spluttering and coughing with merriment as their wives laughed along sweetly and flirtatiously. From time to time they would cast a glance at the king’s table in order to check whether they should go on paying no attention to what was happening behind their backs or whether the moment had come for them to make their excuses to the king and depart.

It was after one in the morning, and the king had still not turned up. Mitsy sat silently while the others chatted away with Botticelli, giving forced laughs as they kept glancing at the doorway, worried that the king might not turn up at all but not daring to ask Botticelli. Mitsy sat there among them in her own world. She had a blank smile on her face and an absent look in her eyes. She felt neither timorous nor anxious. She was just astonished. She had been watching everything as if it were a piece of theater. Yet again, she felt that she did not understand herself and that she was behaving out of character, as if driven along by some irresistible force. Why had she come? To present herself to the king or, more precisely, to wait for permission to go to bed with the king. That was the truth of the matter. She had done this to herself and could not claim to be a victim. She could not claim that her father had forced her into this. He could not make her do anything she did not want to.