Joe Haldeman - Lindsay and the Red City Blues

VIP免费

2024-12-23 0 0 107.26KB 12 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

LINDSAY AND THE RED CITY BLUES

"The ancient red city of Marrakesh," his guidebook said, "is the last large oasis fo

travelers moving south into the Sahara. It is the most exotic of Moroccan cities, where Arab

Africa and Black Africa meet in a setting that has changed but little in the past thousan

years."

In midafternoon, the book did not mention, it becomes so hot that even the flies stop

moving.

The air conditioner in his window hummed impressively but neither moved nor cooled the

air. He had complained three times, and the desk clerk responded with two shrugs and a

blank stare. By two o'clock his little warren was unbearable. He fled to the street, where i

was hotter.

Scott Lindsay was a salesman who demonstrated chemical glassware for a large scientific-

supply house in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Like all Washingtonians, Lindsay though

that a person who could survive summer on the banks of the Potomac could survive i

anywhere. He saved up six weeks of vacation time and flew to Europe in late July. Paris was

pleasant enough, and the Pyrenees were even cool, but nobody had told him that on Augus

first all of Europe goes on vacation; every good hotel room has been sewed up for six

months, restaurants are jammed or closed, and you spend all your time making bad travel

connections to cities where only the most expensive hotels have accommodations.

In Nice a Canadian said he had just come from Morocco, where it was hotter than hell bu

there were practically no tourists this time of year. Scott looked wistfully over the poisone

but still blue Mediterranean, felt the pressure of twenty million fellow travelers at his back,

remembered Bogie, and booked the next flight to Casablanca.

Casablanca combined the charm of Pittsburgh with the climate of Dallas. The still air was

thick with dust from high-rise construction. He picked up a guidebook and riffled through i

and, on the basis of a few paragraphs, took the predawn train to Marrakesh.

"The Red City," it went on, "takes its name from the color of the local sandstone fro

which the city and its ramparts were built." It would be more accurate, Scott reflected,

though less alluring, to call it the Pink City. The Dirty Pink City. He stumbled along the

sidewalk on the shady side of the street. The twelve-inch strip of shade at the edge of the

sidewalk was crowded with sleeping beggars. The heat was so dry he couldn't even sweat.

He passed two bars that were closed and stepped gratefully into a third. It was a Mosle

bar, a milk bar, no booze, but at least it was shade. Two young men slumped at the bar,

arguing in guttural whispers, and a pair of ancients in burnooses sat at a table playing a static

game of checkers. An oscillating fan pushed the hot air and dust around. He raised a finge

at the bartender, who regarded him with stolid hostility, and ordered in schoolboy French a

small bottle of Vichy water, carbonated, without ice, and, out of deference to the guidebook,

a glass of hot mint tea. The bartender brought the mint tea and a liter bottle of Sidi Harazi

water, not carbonated, with a glass of ice. Scott tried to argue with the man but he only

stared and kept repeating the price. He finally paid and dumped the ice (which the guideboo

had warned him about) into the ashtray. The young men at the bar watched the transaction

with sleepy indifference.

The mint tea was an aromatic infusion of mint leaves in hot sugar water. He sipped an

was surprised, and perversely annoyed, to find it quite pleasant. He took a paperback novel

out of his pocket and read the same two paragraphs over and over, feeling his eyes track,

unable to concentrate in the heat.

He put the book down and looked around with slow deliberation, trying to be impresse

by the alienness of the place. Through the open front of the bar he could see across the street,

where a small park shaded the outskirts of the Djemaa El Fna, the largest open-air market in

Morocco and, according to the guidebook, the most exciting and colorful; which itself was

the gateway to the mysterious labyrinthine medina, where even this moment someone was

being murdered for his pocket change, goats were being used in ways of which Allah did no

approve, men were smoking a mixture of camel dung and opium, children were

merchandised like groceries; where dark men and women would do anything for a price, an

the price would not be high. Scott touched his pocket unconsciously, and the hard bulge o

the condom was still there.

The best condoms in the world are packaged in a blue plastic cylinder, squared off along

the prolate axis, about the size of a small matchbox. The package is a marvel of technology,

held fast by a combination of geometry and sticky tape, and a cool-headed man, under goo

lighting conditions, can open it in less than a minute. Scott had bought six of them in the

drugstore in Dulles International, and had opened only one. He hadn't opened it for the

Parisian woman who had looked like a prostitute but had returned his polite proposition with

a storm of outrage. He opened it for the fat customs inspector at the Casablanca airport, who

had to have its function explained to him, who held it between two dainty fingers like a dea

sea thing and called his compatriots over for a look.

The Djemaa El Fna was closed against the heat, pale-orange dusty tents slack and pallid in

the stillness. And the trees through which he stared at the open-air market, the souk, were

also covered with pale dust; the sky was so pale as to be almost white, and the street an

sidewalk were the color of dirty chalk. It was like a faded watercolor displayed under too

strong a light.

"Hey, mister." A slim Arab boy, evidently in his early teens, had slipped into the place

and was standing beside Lindsay. He was well scrubbed and wore Western-style clothing,

discreetly patched.

"Hey, mister," he repeated. "You American?"

"Nu. Eeg bin Jugoslay."

The boy nodded. "You from New York? I got four friends New York."

"Jugoslay."

"You from Chicago? I got four friends Chicago. No, five. Five friends Chicago."

"Jugoslav," he said.

"Where in U.S. you from?" He took a melting ice cube from the ashtray, buffed it on his

sleeve, popped it into his mouth, crunched.

"New Caledonia," Scott said.

"Don't like ice? Ice is good this time day." He repeated the process with another cube.

"New what?" he mumbled.

"New Caledonia. Little place in the Rockies, between Georgia and Wisconsin. I don't like

polluted ice."

"No, mister, this ice okay. Bottle-water ice." He rattled off a stream of Arabic at the

bartender, who answered with a single harsh syllable. "Come on, I guide you through

medina."

"No."

"I guide you free. Student, English student. I take you free, take you my father's factory."

"You'll take me, all right."

"Okay, we go now. No touris' shit, make good deal."

Well, Lindsay, you wanted experiences. How about being knocked over the head an

raped by a goat? "All right, I'll go.

But no pay."

"Sure, no pay." He took Scott by the hand and dragged him out of the bar, into the park.

"Is there any place in the medina where you can buy cold beer?"

"Sure, lots of place. Ice beer. You got cigarette?"

"Don't smoke."

"That's okay, you buy pack up here." He pointed at a gazebo-shaped concession on the

edge of the park.

"Hell, no. You find me a beer and I might buy you some cigarettes." They came out of the

shady park and crossed the packed-earth plaza of the Djemaa El Fna. Dust stung his throa

and nostrils, but it wasn't quite as hot as it had been earlier; a slight breeze had come up. One

industrious merchant was rolling up the front flap of his tent, exposing racks of leathe

goods. He called out, "Hey, you buy!" but Scott ignored him, and the boy made a fis

gesture, thumb erect between the two first fingers.

Scott had missed one section of the guidebook: "Never visit the medina without a guide;

the streets are laid out in crazy, unpredictable angles and someone who doesn't live there will

be hopelessly lost in minutes. The best guides are the older men or young Americans who

live there for the cheap narcotics; with them you can arrange the price ahead of time, usually

about 5 dirham ($1.10). Under no circumstances hire one of the street urchins who pose as

students and offer to guide you for free; you will be cheated or even beaten up and robbed."

They passed behind the long double row of tents and entered the medina through the Bab

Agnou gateway. The main street of the place was a dirt alley some eight feet wide, flanke

on both sides by small shops and stalls, most of which were closed, either with curtains o

steel shutters or with the proprietor dozing on the stoop. None of the shops had a wall on the

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

LINDSAYANDTHEREDCITYBLUES"TheancientredcityofMarrakesh,"hisguidebooksaid,"isthelastlargeoasisfortravelersmovingsouthintotheSahara.ItisthemostexoticofMoroccancities,whereArabAfricaandBlackAfricameetinasettingthathaschangedbutlittleinthepastthousandyears."Inmidafternoon,thebookdidnotmention,itbecomess...

展开>> 收起<<

Joe Haldeman - Lindsay and the Red City Blues.pdf

共12页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Joe Haldeman - Lindsay and the Red City Blues

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: