James Salter - Burning the Days

These European women, few as they were, now seem faint pencil marks on the North African page. It was more or less clear why they had come and also that they would find little here. The bargains that could be struck were meager. Perhaps it was exactly this, the injudiciousness, their need for luck, that made one remember them at all.

—

In Morocco, where we went for good weather in which to fly the new airplanes, F-100s — more powerful and less forgiving — with which we were to be equipped, the air was different. Morocco had been a French colony and bordered another sea. From its coast one could reach England or even the New World. There were boulevards, apartment houses, the elegy of French names.

Fedala was to the south with wide beaches and surf breaking close to shore. It was for off-duty hours, inexplicable blue bulbs in the ceiling of the hotel and a waiter awkwardly pouring the wine. We would sit on the terrace in the evening, the faces around the table slowly becoming indistinct. In the distance the sea, which defined everything, fell endlessly upon itself. Our glory was endless, too. We were great captains all. We sat at ease. The beeves had been slaughtered; the cooks, all in white, stood ready to prepare the meal. The idle hours are passed in drinking, talking, desiring. There are weeks left in the campaign; another follows.

Later there is the Sphinx, named probably for its predecessor in Paris on Boulevard Edgar Quinet. You could see it from the air, iron gates and a gravel driveway. Inside it was tiled, a nightclub: downstairs, blue films and books; upstairs, women. The rooms on the second floor faced the sea. “As many times as you like,” she said, speaking French at the bar. At the far end of the room a band was playing. She was from Marseille, skin pale and shining like fruitwood. Her dress was cut low, her breasts smooth and perfectly separated. We danced like a couple, as if we had come there together. She was pressed against me. The black tile pillars slid before my eyes, the mirrors, the trio at the floorside table, two men and a girl with short black hair, the gold of a wedding band on her finger. They were the haut monde, come for titillation.

Canadian pilots are entering. The band is playing something I would like to remember. Far away it seems, unmourned, are all the other nights, the unattainable women, nurses, admirals’ daughters, the colonel’s wife that time unsteadily playing blackjack. “Just give me a little bitty one,” she pleaded, “don’t give it to me unless it’s little.” It was dealt. A jack. She stared at it, looked at her hole card, stared again. Her handsome, slurred face. “All right,” she announced, “twenty-one.” But it was not. The dealer took the money.

The morning light of Africa is brilliant and flat. The empty street, the silence. How was it? they want to know. That, one can embroider, one can tell, but there is a foolish thing one cannot — she came to the gate to say goodbye. She asked if you would write, a postcard from Port Lyautey, addressed simply to Dené, Sphinx, Fedala.

In Tangier the peddlers and guides were outside at all hours, some displaying letters of recommendation. In 1956 you could buy a palace — baths, servants’ quarters, patios — for twelve thousand dollars. Like other exotic cities, Tangier reeked of dust, of the endless cycle of living and dying. The market was teeming, hundreds of stalls, chickens with their feet tied lying docilely on the ground, mounds of tomatoes, many misshapen, goats, women nursing babies, bags of grain. It seemed merciless. In the garden of the sultan’s palace legions of ants were streaming around a dead sparrow.

I wake from a nap. The city is at its most frightening, most implacable. Day is past and night is falling. Across the avenue two girls at the beach club are hanging up their bathing suits to dry. To be alone here, I think … to be improvident or penniless, to feel the darkness on every side.

I am not sure where the terror of North Africa comes from — from its emptiness, I suppose, from all that is unknowable. Life is cheap there, it is only a husk. Perhaps it is the cruelty, the mutilation, the followers of El Glaoui drenched with gasoline and set afire, although, as someone said, it had thoughtfully not been done in front of their children and wives; the British sergeants found with their genitals sewn in their mouths; the man who was in “that square” in Marrakech and turned to bargain with someone — when he turned back, his wife was gone, never seen again. Perhaps it was the trade in sex, the White Horse, where beneath bright lights, as calmly as if undressing backstage, a young Spanish girl, flawless as a statue, steps from her clothes. A heavier girl produces a threatening device and straps it on …

We crossed Gibraltar, like a pebble far below, and then brown, hard Spain. We were going home with new airplanes, the first of those that could routinely fly faster than the speed of sound. They landed at high speed, touching down at a hundred and eighty miles an hour. On the luxurious runways and in the smooth air of North Africa this was not a challenge, but our own field was much smaller. We were at thirty-seven thousand feet, and letting down, I felt a nervousness I couldn’t get rid of. We entered traffic, dropped gear on the downwind leg, turned onto final. Everything looked all right. Two hundred and twenty on approach, then across the end of the runway, power off, waiting to touch. A faint jolt. The ground is streaming by. As we park, the group and wing commanders hand up cold beer.

In the end I missed North Africa. I missed its desolation and the brilliance of the light. We, too, were nomads there. We traveled and lived in tents; we had our time-worn code, our duties, and nothing more: to fly, to sit in the shade of the canvas and eat a white-bread sandwich with grimy hands, to fly again.

We were equals there, all ranks. “Hit me,” the colonel says. “I can’t, I’ll get court-martialed,” Geraghty, who is dealing, squeals. They are drunkenly comparing Rolexes. “What’s wrong with yours? It has no calendar, must be experimental,” Geraghty says. All these faces, so well known. All these lives, so momentarily intimate.

In formation with Minish one day, coming back from a mission, I on his wing — without a word he pulled up and did an Immelmann, I as close as you can get, then another and another, then some loops and rolls, two or three away from me, all in hot silence, I had not budged a foot, the two of us together, not a word exchanged, like secret lovers in some apartment on a burning afternoon.

—

We went in the autumn, a squadron at a time, to the Gironde, in the southwest of France, for more gunnery. The field there, Cazaux, girlishly white, was beside a lake. A squadron from another wing, one I had for a time flown with, was already there. They were sitting outside the barracks when we arrived, like ranch hands, sucking blades of grass. It often seemed not so much a profession as a way of wasting time, waiting for something to happen, your name to come up on the scheduling board, the scramble phone to ring, the last flights to land. The faces of these others had not changed in the year or two since last seen: Vandenburg, Paul Ingram, Christman, who married a countess, Vandevander, Leach. They greeted us casually. It was as if we had come to graze and they were another clan, peaceful if not friendly, now obliged to share.

We laze through the days. They become the sacred past. The days that Faulkner said were the most exciting of his life. He said that to Sylvester, a major who’d been an information officer stationed in Greenville, Mississippi, not far from Faulkner’s home, during the Korean War. A librarian Sylvester knew had offered to introduce him to Faulkner as a favor. At the agreed-upon time, Faulkner appeared. He was drunk. He was wearing a wrinkled planter’s suit in the coat pocket of which was a bottle, Sylvester took it to be gin. They talked about flying and the days, Faulkner said, when he had been a flyer in France. He had never been that. He had told it many times, to women, to men. Perhaps he had come to believe it.