Paul Bowles - The Sheltering Sky

She bathed lengthily; the cool water on her skin awakened an impulse to sing. Each time she bent to get water between her cupped palms she uttered a burst of wordless song. Suddenly she stopped and listened. She no longer heard the drums—only the drops of water falling from her body into the pool. She finished her bath in silence, her excess of high spirits gone; but life did not recede from her. “It’s here to stay,” she murmured aloud, as she walked toward the bank. She used her coat as a towel, hopping up and down with cold as she dried herself. While she dressed she whistled under her breath. Every so often she stopped and listened for a second, to see if she could hear the sound of voices, or the drums starting up again. The wind came by, up there above her head, in the tops of the trees, and there was the faint trickle of water somewhere nearby. Nothing more. All at once she was seized with the suspicion that something had happened behind her back, that time had played a trick on her: she had spent hours in the pool instead of minutes, and never realized it. The festivities in the ksar had come to an end, the people had dispersed, and she had not even been conscious of the cessation of the drums. Absurd things like that did happen, sometimes. She bent to take her wrist watch from the stone where she had laid it. It was not there; she could not verify the hour. She searched a bit, already convinced that she would never find it: its disappearance was a part of the trick. She walked lightly over to the wall and picked up her valise, flung her coat over her arm, and said aloud to the garden: “You think it matters to me?” And she laughed before climbing back across the broken wall.

Swiftly she walked along, focusing her mind on that feeling of solid delight she had recaptured. She had always known it was there, just behind things, but long ago she had accepted not having it as a natural condition of life. Because she had found it again, the joy of being, she said to herself that she would hang on to it no matter what the effort entailed. She pulled a piece of bread from the pocket of her coat and ate it voraciously.

The alley grew wide, its wall receding to follow the line of vegetation. She had reached the oued, at this point a flat open valley dotted with small dunes. Here and there a weeping tamarisk tree lay like a mass of gray smoke along the sand. Without hesitating she made for the nearest tree and set her bag down. The feathery branches swept the sand on all sides of the trunk—it was like a tent. She put on her coat, crawled in, and pulled the valise in after her. In no time at all she was asleep.

Lieutenant d’Armagnac stood in his garden supervising Ahmed and several native masons in the work of topping the high enclosing wall with a crown of broken glass. A hundred times his wife had suggested this added protection for their dwelling, and he like a good colonial had promised but not performed; now that she was returning from France he would have it ready for her as one more pleasant surprise. Everything was going well: the baby was healthy, Mme. d’Armagnac was happy, and he would go up to Algiers at the end of the month to meet them. At the same time they would spend a happy few days in some good little hotel there—a sort of second honeymoon—before returning to Bou Noura.

It was true that things were going well only in his own little cosmos; he pitied Captain Broussard down in Sba and thought with an inward shudder that but for the grace of God all that trouble would have fallen upon him. He had even urged the travelers to stay on in Bou Noura; at least he was able to feel blameless on that score. He had not known the American was ill, so that it was not his fault the man had gone on and died in Broussard’s territory. But of course death from typhoid was one thing and the disappearance of a white woman into the desert was another; it was the latter which was making all the trouble. The terrain around Sba was not favorable to the success of searching parties conducted in jeeps; besides, there were only two such vehicles in the region, and the expeditions had not been inaugurated immediately because of the more pressing business of the dead American at the fort. And everyone had imagined that she would be found somewhere in the town. He regretted not having met the wife. She sounded amusing—a typical, high-spirited American girl. Only an American could do anything so unheard—of as to lock her sick husband into a room and run off into the desert, leaving him behind to die alone. It was inexcusable, of course, but he could not be really horrified at the idea, as it seemed Broussard was. But Broussard was a puritan. He was easily scandalized, and unpleasantly irreproachable in his own behavior. He had probably hated the girl because she was attractive and had disturbed his poise; that would be difficult for Broussard to forgive.

He wished again that he could have seen the girl before she had so successfully vanished from the face of the earth. At the same time he felt mixed emotions regarding the recent return of the third American to Bou Noura: he liked the man personally, but he hoped to avoid involvement in the affair, he wanted no part of it. Above all he prayed that the wife would not turn up in his territory, now that she was practically a cause célèbre. There was the likelihood that she, too, would be ill, and the curiosity he felt to see her was outweighed by the dreaded prospect of complications in his work and reports to be made out. “Pourvu qu’ils la trouvent là-bas!” he thought ardently.

There was a knock at the gate. Ahmed swung it open. The American stood there; he came each day in the hope of getting news, and each day he looked more despondent at hearing that none had been received. “I knew the other one was having trouble with his wife, and this was the trouble,” said the lieutenant to himself when he glanced up and saw Tunner’s unhappy face.

“Bonjour, monsieur,” he said jovially, advancing upon his guest. “Same news as always. But that can’t continue forever.”

Tunner greeted him, nodding his head understandingly on hearing what he had expected to hear. The lieutenant allowed the intervention of a silence proper to the occasion, then he suggested that they repair to the salon for their usual cognac. In the short while he had been waiting here at Bou Noura, Tunner had come to rely on these morning visits to the lieutenant’s house as a necessary stimulus for his morale. The lieutenant was sanguine by nature, his conversation was light and his choice of words such that he was easily understandable. It was agreeable to sit in the bright salon, and the cognac fused these elements into a pleasant experience whose regular recurrence prevented his spirits from sinking all the way into the well of despair.

His host called to Ahmed, and led the way into the house. They sat facing each other.

“Two weeks more and I shall be a married man again,” said the lieutenant, beaming at him, and thinking that perhaps he might yet show the Ouled Naïl girls to an American.

“Very good, very good.” Tunner was distraught. God help poor Madame d’Armagnac, he thought gloomily, if she had to spend the rest of her life here. Since Port’s death and Kit’s disappearance he hated the desert: in an obscure fashion he felt that it had deprived him of his friends. It was too powerful an entity not to lend itself to personification. The desert—its very silence was like a tacit admission of the half-conscious presence it harbored. (Captain Broussard had told him, one night when he was in a talkative mood, that even the Frenchmen who accompanied the peloton into the wilderness there managed to see djnoun, even though out of pride they refused to believe in them.) And what did this mean, save that such things were the imagination’s simple way of interpreting that presence?