Read East of Suez for Free Online Page B

rats. There wasn’t a line of plaster or stone that didn’t advertise having had a long, sunburnt, and abused life, as though every wall, every architectural feature had been beaten regularly with chains. Even the big hotels looked like crumbling marzipan.
    A turn around the back of one of these placed us at the vinecovered, but otherwise nondescript entrance to the “fathers’ fort,” as my new friend called it. The newest part of this distanced itself from the church proper by three earlier extensions to the original apse. He shrugged apologetically at his residence as he got out of the car, as though to say, “It isn’t much, but it’s home.” I shook hands with Father O’Mahannay when he got out. I helped him with his suitcase as the driver examined his own dirty fingernails.
    “Try the Alithia,” the priest said confidentially, pressing my arm as we said goodbye. “It’s run by some Greek friends of mine. Tell them I sent you.”
    By now I could feel the ant-like thread of sweat running down the inside of my shirtsleeves. The priest instructed the driver and again we were off through the maze of streets. For me it was like a travel film: ocher-and-white buildings, few sidewalks, busy people on both sides of the street. I was truly on my own now, without my guide. The noisy traffic ahead, the din of the streets, the ragged vendors, the hanging meat and baskets of fruit, the smell, the sweat, all hit me anew as we bumped our passage through the crowd. An old woman with a mattress roll on her back stopped and waved our taxi along. The driver nodded solemnly and revved past her. A bizarrely painted bus pulled in front of us. Decorated with saints and gurus, domes and dancing figures, it was a work of art on wheels; surely it should be in a museum before it was further blackened by its billowing exhaust.
    At last we arrived in a quieter neighborhood, where the scooters, tuk-tuks , and motorcycles didn’t follow us. And as the gas-driven wheels fell back, the green of the jungle crept into the empty spaces. There seemed to be a battle going on between the asphalt and the jungle; where one was winning, the other retreated. But I remembered from the plane, as we approached the landing field, that the jungle was the chief fact of life in this part of the country, not roads nor concrete buildings. The jungle could be held back for only so long. It had patience, it could wait.
    At length, the taxi pulled off the two-lane strip of pavement and drove up a semi-circular lane, passed a line of superannuated taxis, and stopped. “Hotel Alithia,” the driver announced, almost formally, still staring straight ahead of him through the windshield. I held out a fistful of strange-looking money toward the driver. He made a selection and only scowled when I asked for a receipt. It came on the back of a piece of cardboard, originally part of a shoebox.
    The hotel looked both old and French. The tile floors were old, the plumbing, when I encountered it, French. There were screened verandas along the front and large windows out of Bogart movies. The whole set-up looked ripe for that southern American writer whose main character is always shouting for “Stella!” The hotel was set in a moldering garden that looked more like a modest forest threatening to consume the hostelry. Green and all of its variations hung about canes and vines under the blast of the late-afternoon heat. A thin, gray-faced woman in white was scrubbing the stairs as if her life depended upon it. She was using a swab of rags, as though there were no mops available. Another lean and hungry-looking figure was cleaning the windows with a squeegee.
    The landlord frowned and shook his head until I dropped the name of Father O’Mahannay, which I read from my notebook, sounding out the letters one at a time, like a backward seven-year-old. Suddenly there was a smile on his face. Two glasses and a large bottle of cold beer appeared on the counter. I wrote my name