Paul Bowles - The Sheltering Sky

They were having dinner. A traveling salesman eating inside in the dining room had brought a portable radio with him and was tuned in to Radio Oran. In the kitchen a louder radio was playing Egyptian music.

“You can put up with this sort of thing for just so long. Then you go crazy,” said Kit. She had found patches of fur in her rabbit stew, and unfortunately the light in that part of the patio was so dim that she had not made the discovery until after she had put the food into her mouth.

“I know,” said Port absently. “I hate it as much as you.”

“No, you don’t. But I think you would if you didn’t have me along to do your suffering for you.”

“How can you say that? You know it’s not so.” He toyed with her hand: having made his decision he felt at ease with her. She, however, seemed unexpectedly irritable.

“Another town like this will fix me up fine,” she said. “I shall simply go back and take the first boat out for Genoa or Marseille. This hotel’s a nightmare, a nightmare!” After Tunner’s departure she had vaguely expected a change in their relationship. The only difference his absence made was that now she could express herself clearly, without fear of seeming to be choosing sides. But rather than make any effort to ease whatever small tension might arise between them, she determined on the contrary to be intransigent about everything. It could come about now or later, that much-awaited reunion, but it must be all his doing. Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they both had made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent. One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen.

The following night, which was the eve of their departure for Bou Noura, they had dinner early, and Kit went up to her room to pack. Port sat on at their dark table under the arcades, until the other diners inside had finished. He went into the empty dining room and wandered about aimlessly, looking at the proud proofs of civilization: the varnished tables covered with sheets of paper instead of tablecloths, the heavy glass salt shakers, and the opened bottles of wine with the identifying napkins tied around their necks. One of the pink dogs came crawling into the room from the kitchen, and seeing him, continued to the patio, where it lay down and sighed deeply. He walked through the door into the kitchen. In the center of the room, under the one weak light bulb, stood Mohammed holding a large butcher’s knife with its point sticking in the table. Under the point was a cockroach, its legs still feebly waving. Mohammed regarded the insect studiously, He looked up and grinned.

“Finished?” he asked.

“What?” said Port.

“Finished with dinner?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Then I’ll lock the dining room.” He went and moved Port’s table back into the room, turned off the lights and locked both doors. Then he put out the light in the kitchen. Port moved into the patio. “Going home to sleep?” he inquired.

Mohammed laughed. “Why do you think I work all day? Just to go home to sleep? Come with me. I’ll show you the best place in Aïn Krorfa.”

Port walked with him out into the street, where they conversed for a few minutes. Then they moved off down the street together.

The house was several houses, all with a common entrance through a large tiled courtyard. And each house had several rooms, all very small, and, with the exception of those on the ground floor, all at varying levels. As he stood in the courtyard in the faint light that was a blend of carbide lamp glare and starlight, all the bright little boxlike interiors looked like so many ovens around him. Most of them had their door or windows open, and were filled to bursting with men and girls, both sexes uniformly dressed in flowing white garments. It looked festive, and it exhilarated him to see it; certainly he had no feeling that it was a vicious place, even though at first he tried hard to see it as such.

They went to the door of a room opposite the entrance, and Mohammed peered in, saluting certain of the men sitting inside on the couches along the walls. He entered, motioning to Port to follow him. Room was made for them, and they sat down with the others. A boy took their order for tea and quickly ran out of the room across the court. Mohammed was soon engaged in conversation with a man sitting nearby. Port leaned back and watched the girls as they drank tea and chatted with the men, sitting opposite them on the floor; he was waiting for a licentious gesture, at least a hint of a leer. None was forthcoming.

For some reason which he was unable to fathom, there were a good many small children running about the establishment. They were well behaved and quiet as they played in the gloomy courtyard, exactly as if it had belonged to a school instead of a brothel. Some of them wandered inside the rooms, where the men took them on their laps and treated them with the greatest affection, patting their cheeks and allowing them occasional puffs on their cigarettes. Their collective disposition toward contentment might easily be due, he thought, to the casual benevolence of their elders. If one of the younger ones began to shed tears, the men laughed and waved it away; it soon stopped.

A fat black police dog waddled in and out of the rooms, sniffing shoes; it was the object of everyone’s admiration. “The most beautiful dog in Aïn Krorfa,” said Mohammed as it appeared panting in the doorway near them. “It belongs to Colonel Lefilleul; he must be here tonight.”

When the boy returned with the tea he was accompanied by another, not more than ten years old, but with an ancient, soft face. Port pointed him out to Mohammed and whispered that he looked ill.

“Oh, no! He’s a singer.” He signaled to the child, who began to clap his hands in a syncopated rhythm and utter a long repetitious lament built on three notes. To Port it seemed utterly incongruous and a little scandalous, hearing this recent addition to humanity produce a music so un-childlike and weary. While he was still singing, two girls came over and greeted Mohammed. Without any formalities he made them sit down and pour the tea. One was thin with a salient nose, and the other, somewhat younger, had the apple-like cheeks of a peasant; both bore blue tattoo marks on the foreheads and chins. Like all the women, their heavy robes were weighted down with an assortment of even heavier silver jewelry. For no particular reason neither one appealed to Port’s fancy. There was something vaguely workaday about both of them; they were very much present. He could appreciate now what a find Marhnia had been, her treachery notwithstanding. He had not seen anyone here with half her beauty or style. When the child stopped singing Mohammed gave him some coins; he looked at Port expectantly as well, but Mohammed shouted at him, and he ran out. There was music in the next room: the sharp reedy rhiata and the dry drums beneath. Since the two girls bored him, Port excused himself and went into the courtyard to listen.

In front of the musicians in the middle of the floor a girl was dancing, if indeed the motions she made could properly be called a dance. She held a cane in her two hands, behind her head, and her movements were confined to her agile neck and shoulders. The motions, graceful and of an impudence verging on the comic, were a perfect translation into visual terms of the strident and wily sounds of the music. What moved him, however, was not the dance itself so much as the strangely detached, somnambulistic expression of the girl. Her smile was fixed, and, one might have added, her mind as well, as if upon some object so remote that only she knew of its existence. There was a supremely impersonal disdain in the unseeing eyes and the curve of the placid lips. The longer he watched, the more fascinating the face became; it was a mask of perfect proportions, whose beauty accrued less from the configuration of features than from the meaning that was implicit in their expression-meaning, or the withholding of it. For what emotion lay behind the face it was impossible to tell. It was as if she were saying: “A dance is being done. I do not dance because I am not here. But it is my dance.” When the piece drew to its conclusion and the music had stopped, she stood still for a moment, then slowly lowered the cane from behind her head, and tapping vaguely on the floor a few times, turned and spoke to one of the musicians. Her remarkable expression had not changed in any respect. The musician rose and made room for her on the floor beside him. The way he helped her to sit down struck Port as peculiar, and all at once the realization came to him that the girl was blind. The knowledge hit him like an electric shock; he felt his heart leap ahead and his head grow suddenly hot.