The Sheltering Sky (28 page)

Atallah did not lift the curtain until evening, when by the light of his lamp he saw them both asleep on the blanket. He set the lamp down in the doorway and went out.

Some time later she awoke. It was silent and hot in the room. She sat up and looked at the long black body beside her, inert and shining as a statue. She laid her hands on the chest: the heart beat heavily, slowly. The limbs stirred. The eyes opened, the mouth broke into a smile.

“I have a big heart,” he said to her, putting his hand over hers and holding it there on his chest.

“Yes,” she said absently.

“When I feel well, I think I’m the best man in the world. When I’m sick, I hate myself. I say: you’re no good at all, Amar. You’re made of mud.” He laughed.

There was a sudden sound in another part of the house. He felt her cringe. “Why are you afraid?” he said. “I know. Because you are rich. Because you have a bag full of money. Rich people are always afraid.”

“I’m not rich,” she said. She paused. “It’s my head. It aches.” She pulled her hand free and moved it from his chest to her forehead.

He looked at her and laughed again. “You should not think.
Ça c’est mauvais.
The head is like the sky. Always turning around and around inside. But very slowly. When you think, you make it go too fast. Then it aches.”

“I love you,” she said, running her finger along his lips. But she knew she could not really get to him.

“Moi aussi,”
he replied, biting her finger lightly.

She wept, and let a few tears fall on him; he watched her with curiosity, shaking his head from time to time.

“No, no,” he said. “Cry a little while, but not too long. A little while is good. Too long is bad. You should never think of what is finished.” The words comforted her, although she could not remember what was finished. “Women always think of what is finished instead of what is beginning. Here we say that life is a cliff, and you must never turn around and look back when you’re climbing. It makes you sick.” The gentle voice went on; finally she lay down again. Still she was convinced that this was the end, that it would not be long before they found her. They would stand her up before a great mirror, saying to her: “Look!” And she would be obliged to look, and then it would be all over. The dark dream would be shattered; the light of terror would be constant; a merciless beam would be turned upon her; the pain would be unendurable and endless. She lay close against him, shuddering. Shifting his body toward her, he took her tightly in his arms. When next she opened her eyes the room was in darkness.

“You can never refuse a person money to buy light,” said Amar. He struck a match and held it up.

“And you are rich,” said Atallah, counting her thousand-franc notes one by one.

“Vôtre nom, madame.
Surely you remember your name.”

She paid no attention; it was the only way of getting rid of them.

“C’est inutile.
You won’t get anything out of her.”

“Are you certain there’s no kind of identification among her clothing?”

“None, mon capitaine.”

“Go back to Atallah’s and look some more. We know she had money and a valise.”

A cracked little church bell pealed from time to time. The nun’s garments made a rippling sound as she moved about the room.

“Katherine Moresby,” said the sister, pronouncing the name slowly and all wrong.
“C’est bien vous, n’est-ce pas?”

“They took everything but the passport, and we were lucky to find that.”

“Open your eyes, madame.”

“Drink it. It’s cool. It’s lemonade. It won’t hurt you.” A hand smoothed her forehead.

“No!” she cried. “No!”

“Try to lie still.”

“The Consul at Dakar advises sending her back to Oran. I’m waiting for a reply from Algiers.”

“It’s morning.”

“No, no, no!” she moaned, biting the pillowcase. She would never let any of it happen.

“It’s taking this long to feed her only because she refuses to open her eyes.”

She knew that the constant references to her closed eyes were being made only in order to trap her into protesting: “But my eyes are open.” Then they would say: “Ah, your eyes are open, are they? Then—look!” and there she would be, defenseless before the awful image of herself, and the pain would begin. This way, sometimes for a brief moment she saw Amar’s luminous black body near her in the light of the lamp by the door, and sometimes she saw only the soft darkness of the room, but it was an unmoving Amar and a static room; time could not arrive there from the outside to change his posture or split the enveloping silence into fragments.

“It’s arranged. The Consul has agreed to pay the Transafricaine for her passage. Demouveau goes out tomorrow morning with Estienne and Fouchet.”

“But she needs a guard.”

There was a significant silence.

“She’ll sit still, I assure YOU.”

“Fortunately I understand French,” she heard herself saying, in that language. “Thank you for being so explicit.” The sound of such a sentence coming from her own lips struck her as unbelievably ridiculous, and she began to laugh. She saw no reason to stop laughing: it felt good, there was an irresistible twitching and tickling in the center of her that made her body double up, and the laughs rolled out. It took them a long time to quiet her, because the idea of their trying to stop her from doing something so natural and delightful seemed even funnier than what she had said.

When it was all over, and she was feeling comfortable and sleepy, the sister said: “Tomorrow you are going on a trip. I hope you will not make things more difficult for me by obliging me to dress you. I know you are capable of dressing yourself.”

She did not reply because she did not believe in the trip. She intended to stay in the room lying next to Amar.

The sister made her sit up, and slipped a stiff dress over her head; it smelled of laundry soap. Every so often she would say: “Look at these shoes. Do you think they will fit you?” Or: “Do you like the color of your new dress?” Kit made no answer. A man had hold of her shoulder and was shaking her.

“Will you do me the favor of opening your eyes, madame?” he said sternly.

“Vous lui faites mal,”
said the sister.

She was moving with others in a slow procession down an echoing corridor. The feeble church bell clanged and a cock crowed nearby. She felt the cool breeze on her cheek. Then she smelled gasoline. The men’s voices sounded small in the immense morning air. Her heart began to race when she got into the car. Someone held her arm tightly, never letting go for an instant. The wind blew through the open windows, filling the car with the pungent odor of wood-smoke. As they jolted along, the men kept up a constant conversation, but she did not listen to it. When the car stopped there was a very brief silence in which she heard a dog barking. Then she was taken out, car doors were slammed, and she was led along stony ground. Her feet hurt: the shoes were too small. Occasionally she said in a low voice, as if to herself. “No.” But the strong hand never let go of her arm. The smell of gasoline was very heavy here. “Sit down.” She sat, and the hand continued to hold her.

Each minute she was coming nearer to the pain; there would be many minutes before she would actually have reached it, but that was no consolation. The approach could be long or short—the end would be the same. For an instant she struggled to break free.

“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.”

As the cab drew up in front of the hotel, and a porter stepped out to open the door, Miss Ferry said: “Oh, by the way, a friend of yours, a Mr. Tunner, has been bombarding us with wires and letters for months. A perfect barrage from down in the desert. He’s been very upset about you.” She looked at the face beside her as the car door opened; at the moment it was so strange and white, so clearly a battlefield for desperate warring emotions, that she felt she must have said something wrong. “I hope you don’t mind my presumption,” she continued, a little less sure of herself, “but we promised this gentleman we’d notify him as soon as we contacted you, if we did. And I never had much doubt we would. The Sahara’s a small place, really, when you come right down to it. People just don’t disappear there. It’s not like it is here in the city, in the Casbah. . . .” She felt increasingly uncomfortable. Mrs. Moresby seemed quite oblivious of the porter standing there, of everything. “Anyway,” Miss Ferry continued impatiently, “when we knew for sure you were coming I wired this Mr. Tunner, so I shouldn’t be surprised if he were right here in town by now, probably at this hotel. You might ask.” She held out her hand. “I’m going to keep this cab to go home in, if you don’t mind,” she said. “Our office has been in touch with the hotel, so everything’s all right. If you’ll just come around to the Consulate in the morning—” Her hand was still out; nothing happened. Mrs. Moresby sat like a stone figure. Her face, now in the shadows cast by the passersby, now full in the light of the electric sign at the hotel entrance, had changed so utterly that Miss Ferry was appalled. She peered for a second into the wide eyes. “My God, the woman’s nuts!” she said to herself. She opened the door, jumped down and ran into the hotel to the desk. It took a little while for her to make herself understood.

A few minutes later two men walked out to the waiting cab. They looked inside, glanced up and down the sidewalk; then they spoke questioningly to the driver, who shrugged his shoulders. At that moment a crowded streetcar was passing by, filled largely with native dock workers in blue overalls. Inside it the dim lights flickered, the standees swayed. Rounding the corner and clanging its bell, it started up the hill past the Café d’Eckmühl-Noiseux where the awnings flapped in the evening breeze, past the Bar Metropole with its radio that roared, past the Café de France, shining with mirrors and brass. Noisily it pushed along, cleaving a passage through the crowd that filled the street, it scraped around another corner, and began the slow ascent of the Avenue Gallieni. Below, the harbor lights came into view and were distorted in the gently moving water. Then the shabbier buildings loomed, the streets were dimmer. At the edge of the Arab quarter the car, still loaded with people, made a wide U-turn and stopped; it was the end of the line.

Bab el Hadid, Fez.