Paul Bowles - The Sheltering Sky

They talked on a little while. The lieutenant brought up the possibility of a visit some evening to the quartier reserve. “One of these days,” said Tunner dispassionately.

“You need a little relaxation. Too much brooding is bad, I know just the girl—” He stopped, remembering from experience that explicit suggestions of that nature generally destroy the very interest they are meant to arouse. No hunter wants his prey chosen and run to earth for him, even if it means the only assurance of a kill.

“Good. Good,” said Tunner absently.

Soon he rose and took his leave. He would return tomorrow morning and the next, and every morning after that, until one day Lieutenant D’Armagnac would meet him at the door with a new light in his eyes, and say to him: “Enfin, mon ami! Good news at last!”

In the garden he looked down at the bare, baked earth. The huge red ants were rushing along the ground waving their front legs and mandibles belligerently in the air. Ahmed shut the gate behind him, and he walked moodily back to the pension.

He would have his lunch in the hot little dining room next to the kitchen, making the meal more digestible by drinking a whole bottle of vin rose. Then stupefied by the wine and the heat he would go upstairs to his room, undress, and throw himself on his bed, to sleep until the sun’s rays were more oblique and the countryside had lost some of the poisonous light that came out of its stones that midday. Walks to towns round about were pleasant: there were bright Igherm on the hill, the larger community of Beni Isguen down the valley, Tadjmout with its terraced pink and blue houses, and there was always the vast palmeraie where the town dwellers had built their toy-like country palaces of red mud and pale palm thatch, where the creak of the wells was constant, and the sound of the water gurgling in the narrow aqueducts belied the awful dryness of the earth and air. Sometimes he would merely walk to the great market place in Bou Noura itself, and sit along the side under the arcades, following the progress of some interminable purchase; both buyer and seller employed every histrionic device short of actual tears, in their struggle to lower and raise the price. There were days when he felt contempt for these absurd people; they were unreal, not to be counted seriously among the earth’s inhabitants. These were the same days he was so infuriated by the soft hands of the little children when they unconsciously clutched at his clothing and pushed against him in a street full of people. At first he had thought they were pickpockets, and then he had realized they were merely using him for leverage to propel themselves along more quickly in the crowd, as if he had been a tree or a wall. He was even more annoyed then, and pushed them away violently; there was not one among them who was free of scrofula, and most were completely bald, their dark skulls covered with a crust of sores and an outer layer of flies.

But there were other days when he felt less nervous, sat watching the calm old men walk slowly through the market, and said to himself that if he could muster that much dignity when he got to be their age he would consider that his life had been well spent. For their mien was merely a natural concomitant of inner well-being and satisfaction. Without thinking too much about it, eventually he came to the conclusion that their lives must have been worth living.

In the evenings he sat in the salon playing chess with Abdelkader, a slow-moving but by no means negligible adversary. The two had become firm friends as a result of these nightly sessions, When the boys had put out all the lamps and lanterns of the establishment except the one in the corner where they sat at the chessboard, and they were the only two left awake, they would sometimes have a Pernod together, Abdelkader smiling like a conspirator afterward as he got up to wash the glasses himself and put them away; it would never do for anyone to know he had taken a drink of something alcoholic. Tunner would go off up to bed and sleep heavily. He would awaken at sunrise thinking: “Perhaps today—” and by eight he would be on the roof in shorts taking a sunbath; he had his breakfast brought up there each day and drank his coffee while studying French verbs. Then the itch for news would grow too strong; he would have to go and make his morning inquiry.

The inevitable happened: after having made innumerable sidetrips from Messad the Lyles came to Bou Noura. Earlier in the same day a party of Frenchmen had arrived in an old command car and taken rooms at the pension. Tunner was at lunch when he heard the familiar roar of the Mercedes. He grimaced: it would be a bore to have those two around the place. He was not in a mood to force himself to politeness. With the Lyles he had never established any more than a passing acquaintanceship, partly because they had left Messad only two days after taking him there, and partly because he had no desire to push the relationship any further than it had gone. Mrs. Lyle was a sour, fat, gabby female, and Eric her spoiled sissy brat grown up; those were his sentiments, and he did not think he would change them. He had not connected Eric with the episode of the passports; he supposed they had been stolen simultaneously in the Aïn Krorfa hotel by some native who had connections with the shady elements that pandered to the Legionnaires in Messad.

Now in the hall he heard Eric say in a hushed voice: “Oh, I say, Mother, what next? That Tunner person is still mucking about here.” Evidently he was looking at the room slate over the desk. And in a stage whisper she admonished him: “Eric! You fool! Shut up!” He drank his coffee and went out the side door into the stifling sunlight, hoping to avoid them and get up to his rooms while they were having lunch. This he accomplished. In the middle of his siesta there was a knock on the door. It took him a while to get awake. When he opened, Abdelkader stood outside, an apologetic smile on his face.

“Would it disturb you very much to change your room?” he asked.

Tunner wanted to know why.

“The only rooms free now are the two on each side of you. An English lady has arrived with her son, and she wants him in the room next to her. She’s afraid to be alone.”

This picture of Mrs. Lyle, drawn by Abdelkader, did not coincide with his own conception of her. “All right,” he grumbled. “One room’s like another. Send the boys up to move me.” Abdelkader patted him on the shoulder with an affectionate gesture. The boys arrived, opened the door between his room and the next, and began to effect the change. In the middle of the moving Eric stepped into the room that was being vacated. He stopped short on catching sight of Tunner.

“Aha!” he exclaimed. “Fancy bumping into you, old man! I expected you’d be down in Timbuctoo by now.”

Tunner said: “Hello, Lyle.” Now that he was face to face with Eric, he could hardly bring himself to look at him or touch his hand. He had not realized the boy disgusted him so deeply.

“Do forgive this silly whim of Mother’s. She’s just exhausted from the trip. It’s a ghastly lap from Messad here, and she’s in a fearful state of nerves.”

“That’s too bad.”

“You understand our putting you out.”

“Yes, yes,” said Tunner, angry to hear it phrased this way. “When you leave I’ll move back in.”

“Oh, quite. Have you heard from the Moresbys recently?”

Eric, when he looked at all into the face of the person with whom he was speaking, had a habit of peering closely, as if he placed very little importance on the words that were said, and was trying instead to read between the lines of the conversation, to discover what the other really meant. It seemed to Tunner now that he was observing him with more than a usual degree of attention.