The Sheltering Sky - Bowles, Paul [101]
There was a knock at the gate. Ahmed swung it open. The American stood there; he came each day in the hope of getting news, and each day he looked more despondent at hearing that none had been received. “I knew the other one was having trouble with his wife, and this was the trouble,” said the lieutenant to himself when he glanced up and saw Tunner’s unhappy face.
“Bonjour, monsieur,” he said jovially, advancing upon his guest. “Same news as always. But that can’t continue forever.”
Tunner greeted him, nodding his head understandingly on hearing what he had expected to hear. The lieutenant allowed the intervention of a silence proper to the occasion, then he suggested that they repair to the salon for their usual cognac. In the short while he had been waiting here at Bou Noura, Tunner had come to rely on these morning visits to the lieutenant’s house as a necessary stimulus for his morale. The lieutenant was sanguine by nature, his conversation was light and his choice of words such that he was easily understandable. It was agreeable to sit in the bright salon, and the cognac fused these elements into a pleasant experience whose regular recurrence prevented his spirits from sinking all the way into the well of despair.
His host called to Ahmed, and led the way into the house. They sat facing each other.
“Two weeks more and I shall be a married man again,” said the lieutenant, beaming at him, and thinking that perhaps he might yet show the Ouled Nail girls to an American.
“Very good, very good.” Tunner was distraught. God help poor Madame d’Armagnac, he thought gloomily, if she had to spend the rest of her life here. Since Port’s death and Kit’s disappearance he hated the desert: in an obscure fashion he felt that it had deprived him of his friends. It was too powerful an entity not to lend itself to personification. The desert-its very silence was like a tacit admission of the half-conscious presence it harbored. (Captain Broussard had told him, one night when he was in a talkative mood, that even the Frenchmen who accompanied the peloton into the wilderness there managed to see djnoun, even though out of pride they refused to believe in them.) And what did this mean, save that such things were the imagination’s simple way of interpreting that presence?
Ahmed brought in the bottle and the glasses. They drank for a moment in silence; then the lieutenant remarked, as much to break the silence as for any other reason: “Ah, yes. Life is amazing. Nothing ever happens the way one imagines it is going to. One realizes that most clearly here; all your philosophic systems crumble. At every turn one finds the unexpected. When your friend came here without his passport and accused poor Abdelkader, who ever would have thought that this short time later such a thing would have happened to him?” Then, thinking that his sequence of logic might be misinterpreted, he added: “Abdelkader was very sorry to hear of his death. He bore him no grudge, you know.”
Tunner seemed not to be listening. The lieutenant’s mind ambled off in another direction. “Tell me,” he said, curiosity coloring his voice, “did you ever manage to convince Captain Broussard that his suspicions about the lady were unfounded? Or does he still think they were not married? In his letter to me he said some very unkind things about her. You showed him Monsieur Moresby’s passport?”
“What?” said Tunner, knowing he was going to have trouble with his French. “Oh, yes. I gave it to him to send to the Consul in Algiers with his report. But he never believed they were married, because Mrs. Moresby promised to give him her passport, and in place of that, ran away. So he had no idea who she really was.”
“But they were husband and wife,” pursued the lieutenant softly.
“Of course. Of course,” said Tunner with impatience, feeling that for him even to engage in such a conversation