The Sheltering Sky - Bowles, Paul [122]
When everything had been put back, she took up a lipstick and a small hand mirror, and turning toward a light, ostentatiously made up. There were cries of admiration. She passed the objects to one of them and invited her to do the same. When all three had brilliant red lips and were looking enraptured at themselves and at each other, she showed them that she would leave the lipstick as a gift for them, but that in return they must let her out into the street. Their faces reflected eagerness and consternation: they were eager to have her out of the house but fearful of Belqassim. During the consultation that followed, Kit sat beside her valise on the floor. She watched them, not feeling that their discussion had anything to do with her. The decision was being made far beyond them, far beyond this unlikely little room where they stood chattering. She ceased looking at them and stared impassively in front of her, convinced that because of the drums she would get out. Now she was merely waiting for the moment. After a long time they sent the servant girl away; she returned accompanied by a little black man so old that his back bent far forward as he shuffled along. In his shaking hand he held a huge key. He was muttering protestations, but it was clear that he had already been persuaded. Kit sprang up and took her bag. Each of the wives came to her as she stood there, and implanted a solemn kiss in the middle of her forehead. She stepped to the door where the old man stood, and together they crossed the courtyard. As they went along he said a few words to her, but she could not answer. He took her to another part of the house and opened a small door. She stood alone in the silence of the street.
Chapter 28
The blinding sea was there below, and it glistened in the silver morning light. She lay on the narrow shelf of rock, face down, head hanging over, watching the slow waves moving inward from far out there where the curving horizon rose toward the sky. Her fingernails grated on the rock; she was certain she would fall unless she hung on with every muscle. But how long could she stay there like that, suspended between sky and sea? The ledge had been growing constantly narrower; now it cut across her chest and hindered her breathing. Or was she slowly edging forward, raising herself ever so slightly on her elbows now and then to push her body a fraction of an inch nearer the edge? She was leaning out far enough now to see the sheer cliffs beneath at the sides, split into towering prisms that sprouted fat gray cacti. Directly below her, the waves broke soundlessly against the wall of rock. Night had been here in the wet air, but now it had retreated beneath the surface of the water. At the moment her balance was perfect; stiff as a plank she lay poised on the brink. She fixed her eye on one distant advancing wave. By the time it arrived at the rock her head would have begun to descend, the balance would be broken. But the wave did not move.
“Wake up! Wake up!” she screamed.
She let go.
Her eyes were already open. Dawn was breaking. The rock she leaned against hurt her back. She sighed, and shifted her position a bit. Among the rocks out there beyond the town it was very quiet at this time of the day. She looked into the sky, saw space growing ever clearer. The first slight sounds moving through that space seemed no more than variations on the basic silence of which they were made. The nearby rock forms and the more distant city walls came up slowly from the realm of the invisible, but still only as emanations of the shadowy depths beneath. The pure sky, the bushes beside her, the pebbles at her feet, all had been drawn up from the well of absolute night. And in the same fashion the strange languor in the center of her consciousness, those vaporous ideas