The Sheltering Sky (25 page)

And so the days went by, each one imperceptibly hotter than the one before it, as they moved southward across the desert. Mornings—the painful journey under the unbearable sun; afternoons—the soft hours beside Belqassim (the short interlude with the other no longer bothered her, since Belqassim always stood by); and nights—the setting forth under the now waning moon, toward other dunes and other plains, each more distant than the last and yet indistinguishable from it.

But if the surroundings seemed always the same, there were certain changes appearing in the situation that existed among the three of them: the ease and lack of tension in their uncomplicated relationship began to be troubled by a noticeable want of good feeling on the part of the older man. He and Belqassim had endless argumentative discussions in the hot afternoons when the camel drivers were sleeping. She also would have liked to take advantage of the hour, but they kept her awake, and although she could not understand a word they said, it seemed to her that the older man was warning Belqassim against a course of action upon which the latter was stubbornly determined. In a perfect orgy of excitement he would go through a lengthy mimicry in which a group of people successively registered astonishment, indignant disapproval and rage. Belqassim would smile indulgently and shake his head with patient disagreement; there was something both intransigent and self-assured about his attitude in the matter that infuriated the other, who, each time it seemed that further expostulation would be useless, got up and took a few steps away, only to turn a moment later and renew the attack. But it was quite clear that Belqassim had made up his mind, that no threat or prophecy of which his companion was capable would succeed in altering the decision he had made. At the same time Belqassim was adopting an increasingly proprietary attitude toward Kit. Now he made it understood that he suffered the other to take his brief nightly pleasure with her only because he was being exceptionally generous. Each evening she expected that he finally would refuse to yield her up, fail to rise and walk over to lean against a tree when the other approached. And indeed, he had taken to grumbling objections when that moment arrived, but still he let his friend have her, and she supposed that it was a gentleman’s agreement, made for the duration of the voyage.

During the middle of the day it was no longer the sun alone that persecuted from above—the entire sky was like a metal dome grown white with heat. The merciless light pushed down from all directions; the sun was the whole sky. They took to traveling only at night, setting out shortly after twilight and halting at the first sign of the rising sun. The sand had been left far behind, and so had the great dead stony plains. Now there was a gray, insect-like vegetation everywhere, a tortured scrub of hard shells and stiff hairy spines that covered the earth like an excrescence of hatred. The ashen landscape as they moved through it was flat as a floor. Day by day the plants grew higher, and the thorns that sprouted from them stronger and more cruel. Now some reached the stature of trees, flat-topped and wide, and always defiant, but a puff of smoke would have afforded as much protection from the sun’s attack. The nights were moonless and much warmer. Sometimes as they advanced across the dark countryside there was the startled sound of beasts fleeing from their path. She wondered what she would have seen if it had been daylight, but she did not feel any real danger, At this point, apart from a gnawing desire to be close to Belqassim all the time, it would have been hard for her to know what she did feel. It was so long since she had canalized her thoughts by speaking aloud, and she had grown accustomed to acting without the consciousness of being in the act. She did only the things she found herself already doing.

One night, having stopped the caravan to go into the bushes for a necessary moment, and seeing the outline of a large animal in the dimness near her, she cried out, and was joined instantly by Belgassim, who consoled her and then forced her savagely to the ground where he made unexpected love to her while the caravan waited. She had the impression, notwithstanding the painful thorns that remained in various parts of her flesh, that this was a usual occurrence, and she suffered calmly the rest of the night. The next day the thorns were still there and the places had festered, and when Belqassim undressed her he saw the red welts and was angry because they marred the whiteness of her body, thus diminishing greatly the intensity of his pleasure. Before he would have anything to do with her, she was forced to undergo the excruciating extraction of every thorn. Then he rubbed butter all over her back and legs.

Now that their love making was carried on in the daytime, each morning when it was definitely over, he left the blanket where she lay and took a gourba of water with him to a spot a few yards distant, where he stood in the early sunlight and bathed assiduously. Afterwards she, too, would fetch a gourba and carry it as far away as she could, but often she found herself washing in full view of the entire camp, because there was nothing behind which she could conceal herself. But the camel drivers paid her no more attention at such moments than did the camels themselves. For all that she was a topic of intense interest and constant discussion among them, she remained a piece of property that belonged to their masters, as private and inviolable as the soft leather pouches full of silver these latter carried slung across their shoulders.

At last there came a night when the caravan turned into a well trodden road. In the distance ahead a fire blazed; when they came abreast of it they saw men and camels sleeping. Before dawn they stopped outside a village and ate. When morning came, Belqassim went on foot into the town, returning some time later with a bundle of clothing. Kit was asleep, but he woke her and spread the garments out on the blanket in the ambiguous shadow of the thorn trees, indicating that she undress and put them on. She was pleased to lay aside her own clothes, which were in an unrecognizable state of dishevelment at this point, and it was with growing delight that she pulled on the full soft trousers and got into the loose vests and the flowing robe. Belqassim watched her closely when she had finished and was walking about. He beckoned her to him, took up a long white turban and wound it around her head, hiding her hair completely. Then he sat back and watched her some more. He frowned, called her to him again and produced a woolen sash with which he bound the upper part of her body tightly, pressing it against her bare skin directly under her arms and tying it firmly in the back. She felt a certain difficulty in breathing, and wanted him to take it off, but he shook his head. Suddenly she understood that these were men’s garments and that she was being made to look like a man. She began to laugh; Belqassim joined her in her merriment, and made her walk back and forth in front of him several times; each time she passed he patted her on the buttocks with satisfaction. Her own clothes they left there in the bushes, and when an hour or so later Belqassim discovered that one of the camel drivers had appropriated them, presumably with the intention of selling them as they passed through the village presently, he was very angry, and wrenched them away from the man, bidding him dig a shallow hole and bury them then and there while he watched.

She went to the camels and opened her bag for the first time, looked into the mirror on the inside of the lid, and discovered that with the heavy tan she had acquired during the past weeks she looked astonishingly like an Arab boy. The idea amused her. While she was still trying to see the ensemble effect in the small glass, Belqassim came up, and seizing her, bore her off bodily to the blanket where he showered kisses and caresses upon her for a long time, calling her “Ali” amid peals of delighted laughter.

The village was an agglomeration of round mud huts with thatched roofs; it seemed strangely deserted. The three left the camels and drivers at the entrance and went on foot to the small market, where the older man bought several packets of spices. It was unbelievably hot; the rough wool against her skin and the tightness with which the sash was bound about her chest made her feel that at any moment she would collapse into the dust. The people squatting in the market were all very black, and most of them had old, lifeless faces. When a man addressed himself to Kit, holding up a pair of used sandals (she was barefoot), Belqassim pushed forward and answered for her, indicating with accompanying gestures that the young man with him was not in his right mind and must not be bothered or spoken to. This explanation was given several times during their walk through the village; everyone accepted it without comment. At one point an aged woman whose face and hands were partially devoured by leprosy reached up and seized Kit’s clothing, asking alms. She glanced down, shrieked, and clutched at Belqassim for protection. Brutally he pushed her away from him, so that she fell against the beggar; at the same time he poured forth a flood of scornful invective at her, spitting furiously on the ground when he had finished. The onlookers seemed amused; but the older man shook his head, and later when they were back at the edge of the town with the camels, he began to berate Belqassim, pointing wrathfully at each item of Kit’s disguise. Still Belqassim only smiled and answered in monosyllables. But this time the other’s anger was unappeasable, and she had the impression that he was delivering a final warning which he knew to be futile, that henceforth he would consider the matter outside the domain of his interest. And sure enough, neither that day or the next did he have anything to do with her.

They started at dusk. Several times during the night they met processions of men and oxen, and they passed through two smaller villages where fires burned in the streets. The following day while they rested and slept there was a constant stream of traffic moving along the road. That evening they set out even before the sun had set. By the time the moon was well up in the sky they bad arrived at the top of a slight eminence from which they could see, spread out not far below, the fires and lights of a great flat city. She listened to the men’s conversation, hoping to discover its name, but without success.

An hour or so later they passed through the gate. The city was silent in the moonlight, and the wide streets were deserted. She realized that the fires she had seen from the distance had been outside the town, along the walls where the travelers encamped. But here within, all was still, everyone slept behind the high, fortress-like facades of the big houses. Yet when they turned into an alley and dismounted to the sound of the mehara growling in chorus, she also heard drums not far away.

A door was opened, Belqassim disappeared into the dark, and soon there was life stirring within the house. Servants arrived, each one carrying a carbide lamp which he set down among the packs being removed from the camels. Soon the entire alley had the familiar aspect of a camp in the desert. She leaned against the front of the house near the door and watched the activity. Suddenly she saw her valise among the sacks and rugs. She stepped over and took it. One of the men eyed her distrustfully and said something to her. She returned to her vantage point with the bag. Belqassim did not reappear from inside for a long time. When he came out he turned directly to her, took her arm, and led her into the house.

Later when she was alone in the dark she remembered a chaos of passageways, stairways and turnings, of black spaces beside her suddenly lighted for an instant by the lamp Belqassim carried, of wide roofs where goats wandered in the moonlight, of tiny courtyards, and of places where she had to stoop to pass through and even then felt the fringe of loose fibres hanging from the palmwood beams brushing the turban on her head. They had gone up and down, to the left and to the right, and, she thought, through innumerable houses. Once she had seen two women in white squatting in the corner of a room by a small fire while a child stood by stark naked, fanning it with a bellows. Always there had been the hard pressure of Belqassim’s hand on her arm as, in haste and with a certain apprehension it seemed to her, he guided her through the maze, deeper and deeper into the immense dwelling. She carried her bag; it bumped against her legs and against the walls. Finally they had crossed a very short stretch of open roof, climbed a few uneven dirt steps, and after he had inserted a key and pulled open a door, they had bent over and entered a small room. And here he had set the light down on the floor, turned without speaking a word, and gone out again, locking the door behind him. She had heard six retreating footsteps and the striking of a match, and that was all. For a long time she had stood hunched over (for the ceiling was too low for her to stand upright), listening to the silence that swarmed around her, profoundly troubled without knowing why, vaguely terrified, but for no reason she could identify. It was more as though she had been listening to herself, waiting for something to happen in a place she had somehow forgotten, yet dimly felt was still there with her. But nothing happened; she could not even hear her heart beat. There was only the familiar, faint hissing sound in her ears. When her neck grew tired of its uncomfortable position she sat down on the mattress at her feet and pulled small tufts of wool out of the blanket. The mud walls, smoothed by the palm of the mason’s hand, had a softness that attracted her eye. She sat gazing at them until the fire of the lamp weakened, began to flutter. When the little flame had given its final gasp, she pulled up the blanket and lay down, feeling that something was wrong. Soon, in the darkness, far and near, the cocks began to crow, and the sound made her shiver.

The limpid, burning sky each morning when she looked out the window from where she lay, repeated identically day after day, was part of an apparatus functioning without any relationship to her, a power that had gone on, leaving her far behind. One cloudy day, she felt, would allow her to catch up with time. But there was always the immaculate, vast clarity out there when she looked, unchanging and pitiless above the city.

By her mattress was a tiny square window with iron grillwork across the opening; a nearby wall of dried brown mud cut off all but a narrow glimpse of a fairly distant section of the city. The chaos of cubical buildings with their flat roofs seemed to go on to infinity, and with the dust and heat-haze it was hard to tell just where the sky began. In spite of the glare the landscape was gray—blinding in its brilliancy, but gray in color. In the early morning for a short while the steel-yellow sun glittered distantly in the sky, fixing her like a serpent’s eye as she sat propped up against the cushions staring out at the rectangle of impossible light. Then when she would look back at her hands, heavy with the massive rings and bracelets Belqassim had given her, she could hardly see them for the dark, and it would take a while for her eyes to grow used to the reduced interior light. Sometimes on a far-off roof she could distinguish minute human figures moving in silhouette against the sky, and she would lose herself in imagining what they saw as they looked out over the endless terraces of the city. Then a sound near at hand would rouse her; quickly she would pull off the silver bracelets and drop them into her valise, waiting for the footsteps to approach up the stairs, and for the key to be turned in the lock. An ancient Negro slave woman with a skin like an elephant’s hide brought her food four times a day. At each meal, before she arrived bearing the huge copper tray, Kit could hear her wide feet slapping the earthen roof and the silver bangles on her ankles jangling. When she came in, she would say solemnly:
“Sbalkheir,”
or
“Msalkheir,”
close the door, hand Kit the tray, and crouch in the corner staring at the floor while she ate. Kit never spoke to her, for the old woman, along with everyone else in the house with the exception of Belqassim, was under the impression that the guest was a young man; and Belqassim had portrayed for her in vivid pantomime the reactions of the feminine members of the household should they discover otherwise.

She had not yet learned his language; indeed, she did not consider making the effort. But she had grown used to the inflection of his speech and to the sound of certain words, so that with patience he could make her understand any idea that was not too complicated. She knew, for instance, that the house belonged to Belqassim’s father; that the family came from the north, from Mecheria, where they had another house; and that Belqassim and his brothers took turns conducting caravans back and forth between points in Algeria and the Soudan. She also knew that Belqassim, in spite of his youth, had a wife in Mecheria and three here in the house, and that with his own wives and those of his father and his brothers, there were twenty-two women living in the establishment, exclusive of the servants. And these must never suspect that Kit was anything but an unfortunate young traveler rescued by Belqassim as he was dying of thirst, and still not fully recovered from the effects of his ordeal.

Belqassim came to visit her at mid-afternoon each day and stayed until twilight; it would occur to her when he had left and she lay alone in the evening, remembering the intensity and insistence of his ardor, that the three wives must certainly be suffering considerable neglect, in which case they must already be both suspicious and jealous of this strange young man who for such a long time had been enjoying the hospitality of the house and the friendship of their husband. But since she lived now solely for those few fiery hours spent each day beside Belqassim, she could not bear to think of warning him to be less prodigal of his love with her in order to allay their suspicion. What she did not guess was that the three wives were not being neglected at all, and that even if such had been the case, and they had believed a boy to be the cause of it, it never would have occurred to them to be jealous of him. So that it was out of pure curiosity that they sent little Othman, a Negro urchin who often ran about the house without a stitch of clothing on him, to spy on the young stranger and report to them what he looked like.

Frog-faced Othman accordingly installed himself in the niche under the small stairway leading from the roof to the high room. The first day he saw the old slave woman carrying trays up and down, and he saw Belqassim going to visit in the afternoon and coming away again much later adjusting his robes, so that he was able to tell the wives how long their husband had spent with the stranger and what he thought was going on. But that was not what they wanted to know; they were interested in the stranger himself—was he tall and did he have light skin? The excitement they felt at having an unknown young man living in the house, particularly if their husband were sleeping with him, was more than they could endure. That he was handsome and desirable they did not doubt for an instant, other-wise Belqassim would not keep him there.

The next morning after the old slave had carried the breakfast tray down, Othman crawled out of his niche and rapped gently on the door. Then he turned the key and stood there in the open doorway with a carefully studied expression of forlorn pertness on his small black face. Kit laughed. The small naked being with the protruding stomach and the ill-matched head struck her as ridiculous. The sound of her voice was not lost on little Othman, who nevertheless grinned and pretended suddenly to be overcome by a paroxysm of shyness. She wondered if Belqassim would mind if a child like this were to come into the room; at the same time she found herself beckoning to him. Slowly he advanced, head down, finger in mouth, his huge pop-eyes rolled far upward, fixed on hers. She stepped across the room and closed the door behind him. In no time at all he was giggling, turning somersaults, singing silly, pantomimic songs, and in general acting the fool to beguile her. She was careful not to speak, but she could not help laughing from time to time, and this disturbed her a little, because her intuition had begun to whisper to her that there was something factitious about his gaiety, something faintly circumspect in the growing intimacy of his regard; his antics amused her but his eyes alarmed her. Now he was walking on his hands. When he stood upright again he flexed his arms like a gymnast. Without warning he sprang to her side where she sat on the mattress, pinched her biceps under their robes, and said innocently:
“Deba, enta,”
indicating that the young guest was to exhibit his prowess as well. She was suddenly wholly suspicious; she pushed his lingering hand away, at the same time feeling his little arm brush deliberately across her breast. Furious and frightened, she tried to hold his gaze and read his thoughts; he was still laughing and urging her to stand up and perform. But the fear in her was like a mad motor that had started up. She looked at the grimacing reptilian face with increasing terror. The emotion was a familiar feeling to have there inside her; the overwhelming memory of her intimacy with it cut her off from all sense of reality. She sat there, frozen inside her skin, knowing all at once that she did not know anything—neither where nor what she was; there was a slight, impossible step that must be taken toward one side or the other before she could be back in focus.

Perhaps she sat staring at the wall too long to please Othman, or perhaps he, having made his great discovery, felt no need of providing her with further entertainment: after a few desultory dance steps he began backing toward the door, still keeping his eyes unflinchingly fixed on hers, as if his distrust of her were so great that he believed her capable of any treachery. When he reached the doorway, he felt softly behind his back for the latch, swiftly stepped out, slammed the door shut and locked it.

The slave brought her the noonday meal, but she still sat unmoving, eyes unseeing. The old woman held up morsels of food before her face, tried to push them into her mouth. Then she went out to look for Belqassim, to tell him that the young gentleman was ill or bewitched, and would not eat. But Belqassim was lunching that day at the home of a leather merchant at the far end of the city, so she could not reach him. Deciding to take matters into her own hands, she went to her quarters off a courtyard near the stables, and prepared a small bowl of goat’s butter and powdered camel dung which she mixed carefully with a pestle. This done, she made a ball of half of it and swallowed it without chewing it. With the rest she anointed the two thongs of a long leather whip she kept by her pallet. Carrying the whip she returned to the room where Kit still sat motionless on her mattress. When she had shut the door behind her she stood a while gathering her forces, and presently she broke into a monotonous, whining song, flourishing the serpentine lash slowly in the air as she chanted, watching Kit’s paralyzed countenance for a sign of awareness. After a few minutes, seeing that none was forthcoming, she moved closer to the mattress and brandished the whip above her head; at the same time she began to move her feet in a slow, shuffling step that made the heavy bands of silver on her ankles ring in a rhythmical accompaniment to her song. Soon the sweat ran down the furrows of her black face, dripped onto her garments and onto the dry earthen floor where each drop slowly spread to make a large round spot. Kit sat, conscious of her presence and her musty odor, conscious of the heat and the song in the room, but none of it was anything that had to do with her—it was alI like a distant, fleeting memory, far on the outside. Suddenly the old woman brought the whip down across her face with a quick, light gesture. The lithe greased leather wrapped itself around her head for the fraction of a second, stinging the skin of her cheek. She sat still. A few seconds later she slowly raised her hand to her face, and at the same time she gave a slight scream, not loud, but unmistakably a sound made by a woman. The old slave watched fearfully, perplexed; clearly the young man was under a very serious spell. She stood looking as Kit fell back on the mattress and surrendered herself to a long fit of crying.

At this point the old woman heard steps on the stairs. Terrified that Belqassim was returning and would punish her for meddling, she dropped the whip and turned toward the door. It opened, and one after the other the three wives of Belqassim strode into the room, bending their heads slightly forward to avoid scraping them on the ceiling. Paying no attention to the old woman, they rushed as one person to the mattress and threw themselves upon Kit’s prostrate form, wrenching the turban from her head and ripping her garments open by sheer force, so that all at once the upper part of her body was entirely unclothed. The onslaught was so unexpected and so violent that the thing was accomplished in a very few seconds; Kit did not know what was happening. Then she felt the whip strike across her breasts. As she screamed she reached out and grasped a head that bobbed in front of her. She felt the hair, the soft features of the face beneath her clenched fingers. With all her might she pulled it downward and tried to rip the thing to shreds, but it would not tear; it merely became wet. The whip was making streaks of fire across her shoulders and back. Someone else was screaming now, and shrill voices were crying out. There was the weight of a body against her face. She bit into soft flesh. “Thank God I have good teeth,” she thought, and she saw the words of the sentence printed in front of her as she clamped her jaws together, felt her teeth sinking into the mass of flesh. The sensation was delicious. She tasted the warm salt blood on her tongue, and the pain of the blows receded. There were many people in the room; the air was a jumble of sobs and screeches. Above the noise she heard Belqassim’s voice shout furiously. Knowing now that he was there, she relaxed the grip of her jaws, and received a violent blow in the face. The sounds sped away and she was alone in the dark for a while, thinking she was humming a little song that Belqassim, often had sung to her.

Or was it his voice, was she lying with her head in his lap, with her arms stretching upward to draw his face down to hers? Had there been a quiet night in between, or several nights, before she was sitting cross-legged in the large room lighted by many candles, in a gold dress, surrounded by all these sullen-faced women? How long would they keep filling her glass with tea as she sat there alone with them? But Belqassim was there; his eyes were grave. She watched him: in the static posture of a character in a dream he removed the jewelry from around the necks of the three wives, turning repeatedly to place the pieces gently in her lap. The gold brocade was weighted down with the heavy metal. She stared at the bright objects and then at the wives, but they kept their eyes on the floor, refusing to look up at all. Beyond the balcony in the court below, the sound of men’s voices constantly augmented, the music began, and the women around her all screamed together in her honor. Even as Belqassim sat before her fastening the jewelry about her neck and bosom she knew that all the women hated her, and that he never could protect her from their hatred. Today he punished his wives by taking another woman and humiliating them before her, but the other somber woman faces around her, even the slaves looking in from the balcony, would be waiting from this moment on, to savor her downfall.

As Belqassim fed her a cake, she sobbed and choked, showering crumbs into his face.
“G igherdh ish’ed our illi,”
sang the musicians below, over and over, while the rhythm of the hand drum changed, slowly closing in upon itself to form a circle from which she would not escape. Belqassim was looking at her with mingled concern and disgust. She coughed lengthily in the midst of her sobbing. The kohl from her eyes was streaking her face, her tears were wetting the marriage robe. The men laughing in the court below would not save her, Belqassim would not save her. Even now he was angry with her. She hid her face in her hands and she felt him seize her wrists. He was talking to her in a whisper, and the incomprehensible words made hissing sounds. Violently he pulled her hands away and her head fell forward. He would leave her alone for an hour, and the three would be waiting. Already they were thinking in unison; she could follow the vengeful direction of their thoughts as they sat there opposite her, refusing to look up. She cried out and struggled to rise to her feet, but Belqassim shoved her back fiercely. A huge black woman tottered across the room and seated herself against her, putting her massive arm around her and pinning her against the pile of cushions on the other side. She saw Belqassim leave the room; straightway she unhooked what necklaces and brooches she could; the black woman did not notice the movements of her hands. When she had several pieces in her lap she tossed them to the three sitting across from her. There was an outcry from the other women in the room; a slave went running in search of Belqassim. In no time he was back, his face dark with rage. No one had moved to touch the pieces of jewelry, which still lay in front of the three wives on the rug. (
“G igherdh ish’ed our illi,”
insisted the song sadly.) She saw him stoop to pick them up, and she felt them strike her face and roll down upon the front of her dress.