Paul Bowles - The Sheltering Sky

“If I could only get out of here,” Kit thought, “before Port arranges something with him!” But her sense of guilt expressed itself in allegiance; she could not go out into the street because Tunner was there and she would appear to be choosing sides. Suddenly she, too, wished Tunner were not with them. She would feel much freer in expressing her own preferences. As she had feared, Port went upstairs with the man, returning presently to announce that the rooms were not really bad at all.

They engaged three smelly rooms, all giving onto a small court whose walls were bright blue. In the center of the court was a dead fig tree with masses of barbed wire looped from its branches. As Kit peered from the window a hungry-looking cat with a tiny head and huge ears walked carefully across the court. She sat down on the great brass bed, which, besides the jackal skin on the floor by it, was the only furnishing in the room. She could scarcely blame Tunner for having refused at first even to look at the rooms. But as Port said, one always ends by getting used to anything, and although at the moment Tunner was inclined to be a little unpleasant about it, by night he would probably have grown accustomed to the whole gamut of incredible odors.

At lunch they sat in a bare, well-like room without windows, where the temptation was to whisper, since the spoken word was attended by distorting echoes. The only light came from the door into the main patio. Port clicked the switch of the overhead electric bulb: nothing happened. The barefoot waitress giggled. “No light,” she said, setting their soup on the table.

“All right,” said Tunner, “we’ll eat in the patio.”

The waitress rushed out of the room and returned with Mohammed, who frowned but set about helping them move the table and chairs out under the arcade.

“Thank heavens they’re Arabs, and not French,” said Kit. “Otherwise it would have been against the rules to eat out here.”

“If they were French we could eat inside,” said Tunner.

They lighted cigarettes in the hope of counteracting some of the stench that occasionally was wafted toward them from the basin. The babies were gone; their screams came from an inner room now.

Tunner stopped eating his soup and stared at it. Then he pushed his chair back and threw his napkin onto the table. “Well, by God in heaven, this may be the only hotel in town, but I can find better food than this in the market. Look at the soup! It’s full of corpses.”

Port examined his bowl. “They’ve weevils. They must have been in the noodles.”

“Well, they’re in the soup now. It’s thick with ’em. You all can eat here at Carrion Towers if you like. I’m going to dig up a native restaurant.”

“So long,” said Port. Tunner went out.

He returned an hour later, less belligerent and slightly crest-fallen. Port and Kit were still in the patio, sitting over coffee and waving away flies.

“How was it? Did you find anything?” they asked.

“The food? Damned good.” He sat down. “But I can’t get any information on how to get out of this place.”

Port, whose opinion of his friend’s mastery of the French language had never been high, said: “Oh.” A few minutes later he got up and went out into the town to collect by himself whatever bits of knowledge he could relating to the transportation facilities of the region. The heat was oppressive, and he had not eaten well. In spite of these things he whistled as he walked along under the deserted arcades, because the idea of getting rid of Tunner made him unaccountably lively. Already he was noticing the flies less.

Late in the afternoon a large automobile drew up in front of the hotel entrance. It was the Lyles’ Mercedes.

“Of all the utterly idiotic things to have done! To try to find some lost village no one ever heard of!” Mrs. Lyle was saying. “You nearly made me miss tea. I suppose you’d have thought that amusing. Now drive away these wretched brats and come in here. Mosh! Mosh!” she cried, suddenly charging at a group of native youngsters who had approached the car. “Mosh! Imshi!” She raised her handbag in a menacing gesture; the bewildered children slowly backed away from her.

“I must find the right term to get rid of them with here,” said Eric, jumping out and slamming the door. “It’s no use saying you’ll get the police. They don’t know what that is.”

“What nonsense! Police, indeed! Never threaten natives with the local authorities. Remember, we don’t recognize French sovereignty here.”

“Oh, that’s in the Rif, Mother, and it’s Spanish sovereignty.”

“Eric! Will you be quiet? Don’t you think I know what Madame Gautier told me? What do you mean?” She stopped as she saw the table under the arcade, still laden with the dirty dishes and glasses left by Port and Kit. “Hello! Someone else has arrived,” she said in a tone that denoted the greatest interest. She turned accusingly to Eric. “And they’ve eaten outside! I told you we could have eaten outside, if you’d only insisted a bit. The tea’s in your room. Will you bring it down? I must see about that putrid fire in the kitchen. And get out the sugar and open a new tin of biscuits.”

As Eric returned through the patio with the box of tea, Port came in the door from the street.

“Mr. Moresby!” he cried. “What a pleasant surprise!”

Port tried to keep his face from falling. “Hello,” he said. “What are you doing here? I thought I’d recognized your car outside.”

“Just one second. I’ve got to deliver this tea to Mother. She’s in the kitchen waiting for it.” He rushed through the side door, stepping on one of the obscene dogs that lay exhausted just inside in the dark. It yelped lengthily. Port hurried upstairs to Kit and imparted the latest bad news to her. A minute later Eric pounded on the door. “I say, do have tea with us in ten minutes in room eleven. How nice to see you, Mrs. Moresby.”

Room eleven was Mrs. Lyle’s, longer but no less bare than the others, and directly over the entrance. While she drank her tea, she kept rising from the bed where everyone was sitting for lack of chairs, going to the window and crying “Mosh! Mosh!” into the street.

Presently Port could no longer contain his curiosity. “What is that strange word you’re calling out the window, Mrs. Lyle?”

“I’m driving those thieving little niggers away from my car.”

“But what are you saying to them? Is it Arabic?”

“It’s French,” she said, “and it means get out.”

“I see. Do they understand it?”

“They’d jolly well better. More tea, Mrs. Moresby!”

Tunner had begged off, having heard enough about the Lyles from Kit’s description of Eric. According to Mrs. Lyle, Aïn Krorfa was a charming town, especially the camel market, where there was a baby camel they must photograph. She had taken several shots of it that morning. “It’s too sweet,” she said. Eric sat devouring Port with his eyes. “He wants more money,” Port thought. Kit noticed his extraordinary expression, too, but she put a different interpretation on it.

When tea was over, and they were taking their leave, since they seemed to have exhausted all the possible subjects for conversation, Eric turned to Port. “If I don’t see you at dinner, I’ll drop in on you tonight afterward. What time do you go to bed?”

Port was vague. “Oh, any time, more or less. We’ll probably be out fairly late looking around the town.”

“Righto,” said Eric, patting his shoulder affectionately as he shut the door.

When they got back to Kit’s room she stood gazing out the window at the skeletal fig tree. “I wish we’d gone to Italy,” she said. Port looked up quickly. “Why do you say that? Is it because of them, because of the hotel?”