Пол Боулз - Let it come down

It was about this time when Daisy de Valverde awoke feeling unaccountably nervous. Luis had gone to Casablanca for a few days on business, and although the house was full of servants she never slept well when she was alone. She listened, wondering if it had been a sudden noise which had brought her back from sleep: she heard only the endless sound of the sea against the rocks, so far below that it was like a shell being held to the ear. She opened her eyes. The room was bathed in brilliant moonlight. It came in from the west, but on all sides she could see the glow of the clear night sky out over the water. Slipping out of bed, she went and tried the door into the corridor, just to be positive it was locked. It was, and she got back into bed and pulled an extra blanket up over her, torturing herself with the fantasy that it might have been unlocked, so that it would have opened just a bit when she tried it, and she would have seen, standing just outside, a great ragged Moor with a beard, looking at her evilly through slits of eyes. She would have slammed the door, only to find that he had put one huge foot through the opening. She would have pushed against it with all her might, but.

«Shall I never grow up?» she thought. Did one never reach a stage when one had complete control of oneself, so that one could think what one wanted to think, feel the way one wanted to feel?

Thami had gone home late. The considerable number of pipes of kif he had shared with his friends in the café throughout the evening had made him a little careless, so that he had made a good deal of noise in the process of getting his clothes off. The baby had awakened and begun to wail, and the kif, instead of projecting him through a brief region of visions into sleep, had made him wakeful and short of breath. During the small hours he heard each call to prayer from the minaret of the nearby Emsallah mosque, as well as the half-hourly chants of reassurance that all was well with the faithful; each time the arrowlike voice came out through the still air there was a sporadic outburst of cockcrows roundabout. Finally the fowls refused to go back to sleep, and their racket became continuous, up there on the roofs of the houses. Instinctively, when he had lain down, Thami had put Eunice’s check under his pillow. At dawn he slept for an hour. When he opened his eyes, his wife was shuffling about barefoot and the baby was screaming again. He looked at his watch and called out: «Coffee!» He wanted to be at the bank before it opened.

Dyar slept fitfully for a while, his mind weighted down with half-thoughts. About four he sat up, feeling very wide-awake, and noticed the brightness outside. The air in the room was close. He went to the window, opened it, and leaned out, studying the moonlit details on the hills across the harbor: a row of black cypresses, a house which was a tiny cube of luminous white halfway between the narrow beach and the sky, in the middle of the soft brown waste of the hillside. It was all painted with meticulous care. He went back to his bed and got between the warm covers. «This is no good,» he said to himself, thinking that if he were going to feel like this he would rather remain a victim always. At least he would feel like himself, whereas at the moment he was all too conscious of the pressure of that alien presence, clamoring to be released. «It’s no good. It’s no good». Miserable, he turned over. Soon the fresh air coming in the window put him to sleep. When he opened his eyes again the room was pulsing with sunlight. The sun was out there, huge and clear in the morning sky, and its light was augmented by the water, thrown against the ceiling, where it moved like fire. He jumped up, stood in the window, stretched, scratched, yawned and smiled. If you got up early enough, he reflected, you could get on board the day and ride it easily, otherwise it got ahead of you and you had to push it along in front of you as you went. But however you did it, you and the day came out together into the dark, over and over again. He began to do a few setting-up exercises there in front of the open window. For years he had gone along not being noticed, not noticing himself, accompanying the days mechanically, exaggerating the exertion and boredom of the day to give him sleep for the night, and using the sleep to provide the energy to go through the following day. He did not usually bother to say to himself: «There’s nothing more to it than this; what makes it all worth going through?» because he felt there was no way of answering the question. But at the moment it seemed to him he had found a simple reply: the satisfaction of being able to get through it. If you looked at it one way, that satisfaction was nothing, but if you looked at it another way, it was everything. At least, that was the way he felt this morning; it was unusual enough so that he marveled at the solution.

The air’s clarity and the sun’s strength made him whistle in the shower, made him note, while he was shaving, that he was very hungry. Wilcox came at five minutes of nine, pounded heavily on the door and sat down panting in the chair by the window.

«Well, today’s the big day,» he said, trying to look both casual and jovial. «Hated to get you up so early. But it’s better to get these things done as fast as possible».

«What things?» said Dyar into his towel as he dried his face.

«Ashcombe-Danvers’s money is here. You’re taking it from Ramlal’s to the Crédit Fonder. Remember?»

«Oh». An extra and unwelcome complication for the day. He did not sound pleased, and Wilcox noticed it.

«What’s the matter? Business breaking into your social life?»

«No, no. Nothing’s the matter,» Dyar said, combing his hair in front of the mirror. «I’m just wondering why you picked me to be messenger boy».

«What d’you mean?» Wilcox sat up straight. «It’s been understood for ten days that you were going to take the job off my hands. You’ve been raising hell to start work. The first definite thing I give you to do, and you wonder why I give it to you! I asked you to do it because it’ll be a lot of help to me, that’s why!»

«All right, all right, all right. I haven’t raised any objection, have I?»

Wilcox looked calmer. «But Jesus, you’ve got a screwy attitude about the whole thing».

«You think so?» Dyar stood in the sunlight looking down at him, still combing his hair. «It could be the whole thing’s a little screwy».

Wilcox was about to speak. Then, thinking better of it, he decided to let Dyar continue. But something in his face must have warned Dyar, for instead of going ahead and bringing in the British currency restrictions as he had intended, just to let Wilcox see that by «screwy» he meant «illegal» (since Wilcox seemed to think he was wholly ignorant of even that detail), said only: «Well, it ought not to take long, at any rate».

«Five minutes,» said Wilcox, rising. «Have you had coffee?» Dyar shook his head. «Let’s get going, then».

«God, what sun!» Dyar cried as they stepped out of the hotel. It was the first clear morning he had seen, it made a new world around him, it was like emerging into daylight after an endless night. «Smell that air,» he said, stopping to stand with one hand on the trunk of a palm tree, facing the beach, sniffing audibly.

«For Christ’s sake, let’s get going!» Wilcox cried, making a point of continuing to walk ahead as fast as he could. He was letting his impatience run away with him. Dyar caught up with him, glanced at him curiously; he had not known Wilcox was so nervous. And in his insistence upon taking great strides, Wilcox stepped into some dog offal and slipped, coming down full length on the pavement. Picking himself up, even before he was on his feet, he snarled at Dyar. «Go on, laugh, God damn you! Laugh!» But Dyar merely looked concerned. There was no way of laughing in such a situation. (The sudden sight of a human being deprived of its dignity did not strike him as basically any more ludicrous and absurd than the constant effort required for the maintenance of that dignity, or than the state itself of being human in what seemed an undeniably non-human world.) But this morning, to be agreeable, he smiled as he helped dust off Wilcox’s topcoat. «Did it get on me?» demanded Wilcox.