Lori Ostlund - The Bigness of the World

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Bernadette and Sheila settle in at the only decent hotel in Tafraoute, a clean, unusually quiet place run by a graceful man in his sixties who never leaves the premises, relying, he explains, on a nephew to bring him everything he needs. They have seen the nephew only once, the first evening, when they arrived so exhausted from the trip that Bernadette had been unable to carry her backpack the half mile from the market, where the bus had left them, to the hotel. Instead, much to her embarrassment, she had been obliged to pay a boy to carry the pack for her, and he had served as their guide also, leading them through the dark streets with a backpack slung over each shoulder, for he had insisted on carrying Sheila’s as well. When they arrived at the hotel, however, the boy had refused to accompany them inside, and they had paused just outside the door to hand him four dirhams and, for good measure, a handful of pennies that they were tired of carrying. He held the door for them, and even as it swung closed, they could hear him running away in the darkness — bare feet thudding, coins clinking reassuringly in his pocket.

“Welcome,” the hotelier cried out warmly when they stepped into the foyer, rising effortlessly to greet them from where he knelt in front of an extremely hairy man who was seated, trouser legs rolled, bare feet soaking in a basin of water. “Rest your bags,” said the hotelier, as though the bags were the ones exhausted from the trip, but they set their backpacks down and then stood awkwardly nearby as the hotelier knelt once again and continued with his task, washing the hairy man’s feet, which were also hairy and looked like two spiders resting in the basin of water.

The hairy man was in his forties perhaps, though his excessive hairiness had a way of obscuring his age, making him appear older at first glance and then, perhaps because hair suggested a certain vitality, younger. In any case, he was a good deal younger than the hotelier, and he smoked with elaborate disinterest as the hotelier lifted his feet from the basin and dried them tenderly with a white towel that hung down from his shoulder, handling them as one would delicate china at the end of a very long dinner party. As he worked, the hotelier asked the women polite questions about where they were from and whether they had become ill on the bus, and he chuckled pleasantly at their descriptions of people vomiting all around them.

“My nephew,” he said suddenly in the midst of this discussion, indicating the hairy man with an elegant inclination of his head, and they had both stared at the nephew, waiting, for it seemed as though the hotelier had been planning to tell them something, perhaps about the nephew and vomiting, but after a lengthy silence it occurred to them that the hotelier had simply been introducing his nephew, and he, coming to the same realization, grunted belatedly in their direction.

Later, once they had filled in the register, shown their passports, and paid for the night, the hotelier escorted them to their room, gliding along ahead of them in his ghostly white djellaba. The nephew had not moved from his chair as the three of them completed the paperwork, though he did rise as they left the room, in what they had imagined was a gentlemanly gesture, but in fact, he was simply moving himself nearer the desk, upon which sat a bell that he began to tap impatiently even as they made their way down the hallway to their room. Each time they admired some aspect of their room — the tightness with which the sheets had been tucked, the coolness of the tiles, the way that sparseness translated into beauty — the hotelier bowed slightly in their direction while the bell punctuated their comments like a series of exclamation marks, lending urgency and falseness to everything they said.

“My nephew,” the hotelier said at last. “He requires my assistance.” And with a final bow, he was gone.

Each morning when they go out, the hotelier waves at them from the courtyard, where he can always be found hanging sheets and towels to dry, and when they return in the afternoon, he insists in his gently assertive way that they drink tea with him in his quarters, which they do, the three of them stumbling along in French while he shows them, day after day, the same collection of six or seven magazine photographs of Richard Chamberlain, whose face he strokes absentmindedly with his thumb as they converse. Beyond these photographs, there is nothing about his room that suggests an individual presence, but it is beautiful nonetheless, with a bed in one corner, prayer mat tucked beneath it, and a living area to the other side, which is where they drink their tea, sitting close together on cushions made from old saddlebags around a brass table, round like an oversized plate, with spindly wooden legs that hold it several feet off the ground.

“Please stay tomorrow,” the hotelier urges them each day as they are backing toward the door, having finished their sweet mint tea and finished looking at the photos of Richard Chamberlain and discussing his performance in The Thorn Birds, which neither woman has seen and the hotelier has seen only in English, a language he does not understand. And they do stay. They had planned to spend just two days in Tafraoute, two days in which to view the Belgian’s rocks and the pink homes, but they have been here seven, a full week, and still they have no plan to leave. It is not the hotelier’s daily invitation that holds them but an overwhelming lethargy unlike anything they have ever experienced and to which both women have succumbed, blaming it on the bus trip with its endless curves and vomiting. But they both know that it is more than that.

They stay even though they have run out of tourist activities — or perhaps because they have run out of them. Sometimes, they begin a game of dominoes with their breakfast and play through the morning until lunchtime, looking around the café in wonder to realize that hours have passed, that customers have come and gone, that bread and jam have given way to brochettes and soup. Other days, lying side by side on the twin beds in their room, they read books that the hotelier has given them, no doubt to keep them here, books left behind by other travelers, the sorts of books that they privately scoffed at their colleagues for reading back home, books about espionage and romance and mystery novels that pulled one along out of a simple need to know who had committed the murder and why — neatly answerable questions that did not beget other questions, which meant that once the book was finished, it stayed finished. They read quickly, skimming the pages for relevant facts, though neither of them has ever read in this way before, without regard to style or details, to the nuances of description. They finish two or three books a day, but after several days of this, they find themselves shocked at how easily they have been drawn back into a routine, as though routine were an addiction that their bodies held fast to even as their minds plotted an escape.

When they return to the hotel on the eighth afternoon, the hotelier is not waiting for them with tea, and though they have made a point to complain to each other about his presumptuousness and the sickly sweetness of the tea, they feel strangely offended by his absence, offended and disappointed. When he still has not made an appearance by the time they return from dinner, they are worried as well, for he can always be found washing out the bathroom sinks or rinsing down the foyer tiles or, once these tasks are completed, sitting quietly at his window seat, watching the world outside, the world from which he has exiled himself. Bernadette and Sheila have wondered aloud what it is he thinks as he sits there — whether he is thinking regretfully about his decision to leave the world or feeling vindicated by it. Never has it occurred to them that he still considers himself a part of it, considers himself the one whose job it is to sit and watch.