The Shivan Letters: IV
Tarot Cards and Bones
Diary Entry
Tangiers, November 28, 1966
I came here to buy a rug, and ended up co-running a secret supper club for women in exile.
There is no word for what we do here. It isn’t a restaurant, though bodies are fed. Not quite a salon, either. And cult would be lazy, though I can’t blame anyone for the assumption when Nadège begins anointing strangers with frankincense while murmuring half-spells in French. I suppose you could say it’s a theater for enjoyment without context. Not everything needs a justifying narrative.
Each night, fifty oils lamps are lit between the main room and the garden. We lounge in kaftans dyed with ink and saffron—fabrics with the desert still caught in their hems. We eat barefoot, by candlelight, to the tune of gipsy piano and chatter that unravels across the tables like silk being pulled through a loom. No one speaks of the outside world unless it crawls in uninvited on its own two legs. Whatever we’ve built here, it has slipped the leash of definition. Some have started calling it Les Chambres des Revenantes—the place of the returned. I don’t ask what they mean. I know better than to translate a feeling too soon.
The women who come are of an unclassifiable genus—half-legend, half-fugitive. One fled a Venetian family fortune to become a glassblower in Fez. Another claims she was once engaged to the Shah’s cousin, before he vanished on a yacht filled with the spoils of a recently excavated 17th-century pirate ship.
That particular absurdity was met with the only fitting response: a pause, suspended like a verdict mid-air. It is entirely plausible. God knows, the truly wealthy are permitted a level of eccentricity the rest of us can only aspire to.
Fumiko Corsi sat across from me, peeling a fig with a knife the size of a communion wafer. A violet silk chemise clung to her tiny frame in sensuous desperation. Around her neck, a rope of pearls hung so low they read like a noose from another life. Half-Italian, half-Japanese, her face is a palimpsest of eros and exile—weathered, exquisite, and slightly uninhabitable, if you catch my drift. Apparently she is the widow of a Corsican fishing magnate who died at sea, leaving her a comfortable sum with which to, as she says, “wander into fate by accident.” Every time I see her at the club, she is writing erotic haiku on some tattered remnant—an old customs form, diplomatic memos, shipping invoices.
Earlier today I had traded three gold coins for a strand of antique garnets and a goatskin-bound volume of Sufi poetry annotated in wine-dark Urdu. Tonight, with the garnets around my neck, I sat with Fumiko as the candles guttered low and the sky turned that sickle-blade blue I’ve only ever seen here. At some point, I zeroed in on her scribblings. In the margins of a prayer leaflet from the Sidi Bou Abib Mosque:
He wept when I came.
I lit a cigarette, said,
“You’ll get used to it.”
The irony hit mid-chew and I nearly aspirated a pistachio shard and died laughing. Fumiko, unbothered, pulled a second scribble from her smut stack.
“This one’s yours,” she said, with a wry look. “Footnotes from the Diablotine,” emphasizing the word, clearly a nod to our red door.
I scanned her hieroglyphics in silence: