Paul Bowles - The Sheltering Sky

“Raoul! Ici!” cried the man with her. Someone seized her other arm. Still she fought, sliding almost down to the ground between them. She scraped her spine on the tin molding of the packing case where they sat.

“Elie est costaude, cette garce!”

She gave up, and was lifted again to a sitting position, where she remained, her head thrown far backward. The sudden roar of the plane’s motor behind her smashed the walls of the chamber where she lay. Before her eyes was the violent blue sky—nothing else. For an endless moment she looked into it. Like a great overpowering sound it destroyed everything in her mind, paralyzed her. Someone once had said to her that the sky hides the night behind it, shelters the person beneath from the horror that lies above. Unblinking, she fixed the solid emptiness, and the anguish began to move in her. At any moment the rip can occur, the edges fly back, and the giant maw will be revealed.

“Allez! En marche!”

She was in a standing position, she was turned about and led toward the quivering old Junkers. When she was in the co-pilot’s seat in the cockpit, tight bands were fastened across her chest and arms. It took a long time; she watched dispassionately.

The plane was slow. That evening they landed at Tessalit, spending the night in quarters at the aerodrome. She would not eat.

The following day they made Adrar by mid-afternoon; the wind was against them. They landed. She had become quite docile, and ate whatever was fed her, but the men took no chances. They kept her arms bound. The hotel proprietor’s wife was annoyed at having to look after her. She had soiled her clothes.

The third day they left at dawn and made the Mediterranean before sunset.

Miss Ferry was not pleased with the errand on which she had been sent. The airport was a good way out of town and the taxi ride there was hot and bumpy. Mr. Clarke had said: “Got a little job for you tomorrow afternoon. That crackpot who was stuck down in the Soudan. Transafricaine’s bringing her up. I’m trying to get her on the American Trader Monday. She’s sick or had a collapse or something. Better take her to the Majestic.” Mr. Evans at Algiers had finally reached the family in Baltimore that very morning; everything was all right. The sun was dropping behind the bastions of Santa Cruz on the mountain when the cab left town, but it would be another hour before it set.

“Damned old idiot!” she said to herself. This was not the first time she had been sent to be officially kind to a sick or stranded female compatriot. About once a year the task fell to her, and she disliked it intensely. “There’s something repulsive about an American without money in his pocket,” she had said to Mr. Clarke. She asked herself what possible attraction the parched interior of Africa could have for any civilized person. She herself had once passed a weekend at Bou Saada, and had nearly fainted from the heat.

As she approached the airport the mountains were turning red in the sunset. She fumbled in her handbag for the slip of paper Mr. Clarke had given her, found it. Mrs. Katherine Moresby . She dropped it back into the bag. The plane had already come in; it lay alone out there in the field. She got out of the cab, told the driver to wait, and hurried through a door marked: Salle d’Attente . Immediately she caught sight of the woman, sitting dejectedly on a bench, with one of the Transafricaine mechanics holding her arm. She wore a formless blue and white checked dress, the sort of thing a partially Europeanized servant would wear; Aziza, her own cleaning woman, bought better looking ones in the Jewish quarter.

“She’s really hit bottom,” thought Miss Ferry. At the same time she noted that the woman was a great deal younger than she had expected.

Miss Ferry walked across the small room, conscious of her own clothes; she had bought them in Paris on her last vacation. She stood before the two, and smiled at the woman.

“Mrs. Moresby?” she said. The mechanic and the woman stood up together; he still held her arm. “I’m from the American Consulate here.” She extended her hand. The woman smiled wanly and took it. “You must be absolutely exhausted. How many days was it? Three?”

“Yes.” The woman looked at her unhappily.

“Perfectly awful,” said Miss Ferry. She turned to the mechanic, offered him her hand, and thanked him in her almost unintelligible French. He let go of his charge’s arm to acknowledge her greeting, seizing it again immediately afterward. Miss Ferry frowned impatiently: sometimes the French were incredibly gauche. Jauntily she took the other arm, and the three began to walk toward the door.

“Merci,” she said again to the man, pointedly, she hoped, and then to the woman: “What about your luggage? Are you all clear with the customs?”

“I have no luggage,” said Mrs. Moresby, looking at her.

“You haven’t?” She did not know what else to say.

“Everything’s lost,” said Mrs. Moresby in a low voice. They had reached the door. The mechanic opened it, let go of her arm, and stepped aside for them to go through.

“At last,” thought Miss Ferry with satisfaction, and she began to hurry Mrs. Moresby toward the cab. “Oh, what a shame!” she said aloud. “It’s really terrible. But you’ll certainly get it back.” The driver opened the door and they got in. From the curb the mechanic looked anxiously after them. “It’s funny,” went on Miss Ferry. “The desert’s a big place, but nothing really ever gets lost there.” The door slammed. “Things turn up sometimes months later. Not that that’s of much help now, I’ll admit.” She looked at the black cotton stockings and the worn brown shoes that bulged. “Au revoir et merci,” she called to the mechanic, and the car started up.

When they were on the highway, the driver began to speed. Mrs. Moresby shook her head slowly back and forth and looked at her beseechingly. “Pas si vite!” shouted Miss Ferry to the driver. “You poor thing,” she was about to say, but she felt this would not be right. “I certainly don’t envy you what you’ve just been through,” she said. “It’s a perfectly awful trip.”

“Yes.” Her voice was hardly audible.

“Of course, some people don’t seem to mind all this dirt and heat. By the time they go back home they’re raving about the place. I’ve been trying to get sent to Copenhagen now for almost a year.”

Miss Ferry stopped talking and looked out at a lumbering native bus as they overtook it. She suspected a faint, unpleasant odor about the woman beside her. “She’s probably got every known disease,” she said to herself. Observing her out of the corner of her eye for a moment, she finally said: “How long have you been down there?”

“A long time.”

“Have you been under the weather for long?” The other looked at her. “They wired you were sick.”

Neglecting to answer, Mrs. Moresby looked out at the darkening countryside. There were the many lights of the city ahead in the distance. That must be it, she thought. That was what had been the matter: she had been sick, probably for years. “But how can I be sitting here and not know it?” she thought.

When they were in the streets of the city, and the buildings and people and traffic moved past the windows, it all looked quite natural—she even had the feeling she knew the town. But something must still be quite wrong, or she would know definitely whether or not she had been here before.

“We’re putting you in the Majestic. You’ll be more comfortable there. It’s none too good, of course, but it’ll certainly be a lot more comfortable than anything down in your neck of the woods.” Miss Ferry laughed at the force of her own understatement. “She’s damned lucky to have all this fuss made about her,” she was thinking to herself. “They don’t all get put up at the Majestic.”