Winter

Winter marks the withdrawal of the spectacle that sustains the Bloodworths’ house and sharpens Driss’s sense of confinement. As November rain ends the tourist season, the house contracts into a colder, quieter routine; for Driss, that change turns Paris from a distant hope into an urgent plan for escape.

The seasonal turn

The novel sets winter against the elaborate gatherings at Azna. In the warmer season, staff hang fairy lights in tamarisk trees, struggle with a failing electrical supply, and decorate the grounds with tangerines wrapped in silver foil. Guests arrive for weekends organized by Dally and Richard, while a Gnawa group performs and visitors gather around food and drink. The festivities transform the ksour into a destination, though their staged abundance depends on local workers’ labor and makes the village part of a curated tourist experience.

That performance extends beyond the weekend parties. The post-dinner library and adjoining rooms offer visitors hot chocolate and tea, Arab music, decorative furnishings, and expansive views over the valley. Richard and Dally also make cannabis readily available to guests. At the annual picnic, Dally arranges four jeeps, poses for a newspaper photographer, and worries over details as small as strawberries, parasols, and dust on the shortbread. The scene presents hospitality as meticulous staging: the remote setting is packaged for visitors and publicity, while the people who work there remain part of the display.

The house closes down

In November, rain arrives and the tourists disappear. Part of the house is boarded up, and Angela and Roger Bloodworth retreat to its heated ground floor. The contrast is not simply between warm weather and cold: the busy, outward-facing house gives way to a reduced domestic life, and Driss notices the couple’s loneliness as well as his own impatience. The seasonal downturn exposes how much the household’s activity depends on visitors and how differently its residents experience their time there.

Driss also sees a private strain behind the Bloodworths’ life together. He hears them arguing in the main house: Roger shrieks, something breaks, and a door slams. He does not know what caused the quarrel, but the disturbance complicates the image of the English couple as comfortable hosts. Their winter isolation appears in the same period that Driss begins to feel increasingly imprisoned.

Paris as an escape plan

With the afternoons shortening and hunting guns sounding closer, Driss thinks incessantly about Paris. He asks Roger about the roads leading there: routes through the mountains into France are expensive, but he knows Moroccans drive north from Algeciras and imagines that he might hitch a ride. The Bloodworths try to dissuade him. Their wish that he stay is not, as Driss understands it, a matter of needing help with the gardens or swimming pool; he senses that they do not want to face the winter alone together.

The disagreement reveals how differently they understand migration. Angela recalls the couple’s earlier travels and speaks sympathetically about people crossing borders, but Driss does not share that expansive, idealized account. He wants to reach Paris without the police knowing. His aim is practical: he needs enough money to live through a winter there, and his status and restricted freedom make departure difficult.

Confinement and seasonal contrast

The village remains visible but inaccessible to Driss. At night he sees its lights at the bottom of the valley and sometimes wants to climb the wall and walk to San Martín to see the girls in the cafés. The Bloodworths have made clear that leaving would compromise them as well as him, so the winter house feels less like shelter than containment. Against the summer’s movement of guests, jeeps, performances, and planned excursions, his wish to cross the wall gives the seasonal shift a sharper human consequence.

Winter therefore changes the scale of the story. The tourist season displays Azna as an abundant, carefully arranged experience; its end leaves Driss confronting the limits of the life available to him there. The season does not resolve his plan to leave, but it concentrates the pressures behind it: the closed-down house, the Bloodworths’ desire for him to stay, his lack of money, and his determination to reach Paris.