The Sheltering Sky - Bowles, Paul [55]
Mohammed laughed when he saw them. “What have you been doing?” he said accusingly. He rolled his eyes toward the woman. Port felt a little sleepy now and thought only of getting back to the hotel and into bed. He shook his head. “Yes, Yes,” insisted Mohammed, determined to have his joke. “I know! The young Englishman who went to Messad the other day, he was like you. Pretending always to be innocent. He pretended the woman was his mother, that he never would go near her, but I caught them together.”
Port did not answer immediately. Then he jumped, and cried: “What!”
“Of course! I opened the door of room eleven, and there they are in the bed. Naturally. You believed him when he said she was his mother?” he added, noticing Port’s incredulous expression. “You should have seen what I saw when I opened the door. Then you would know what a liar he was! Just because the lady is old, that does not stop her. No, no, no! Nor the man. So I say, what have you been doing with her. No?” He went on laughing.
Port smiled and paid the woman, saying to Mohammed: “Look. You see, I’m paying only two hundred francs I promised for the tea. You see?”
Mohammed laughed louder. “Two hundred francs for tea! Too much for such old tea! I hope you had two glasses, my friend.”
“Good night,” said Port to the room in general, and he went out into the street.
BOOK TWO
THE EARTH’S SHARP EDGE
‘Good-bye,’ says the dying man to the mirror they hold in front of him. ‘We won’t be seeing each other any more.
—VALERY CHAPTER 18 As commander of the military post of Bou Noura, Lieutenant d’Armagnac found the life there full if somewhat unvaried. At first there had been the novelty of his house; his books and furniture had been sent down from Bordeaux by his family, and he had experienced the pleasure of seeing them in new and unlikely surroundings. Then there had been the natives. The lieutenant was intelligent enough to insist on allowing himself the luxury of not being snobbish about the indigenous population. His overt attitude toward the people of Bou Noura was that they were an accessible part of a great, mysterious tribe from whom the French could learn a great deal if they only would take the trouble. And since he was an educated man, the other soldiers at the post, who would have enjoyed seeing all the natives put behind barbed wire and left there to rot in the sun (“… comme on a fait en Tripolitaine”), did not hold his insanely benevolent attitude against him, contenting themselves by saying to one another that some day he would come to his senses and realize what worthless scum they really were. The lieutenant’s true enthusiasm for the natives had lasted three years. About the time he had grown tired of his half-dozen or so Ouled NaYl mistresses, the period of his great devotion to the Arabs came to an end. It was not that he became any less objective in meting out justice to them; it was rather that he suddenly ceased thinking about them and began taking them for granted.
That same year he had gone back to Bordeaux for a six weeks’ stay. There he had renewed his acquaintance with a young lady whom he had known since adolescence; but she had acquired a sudden and special interest for him by declaring, as he was about to leave for North Africa to resume his duties, that she could imagine nothing more wonderful