The Sheltering Sky - Bowles, Paul [64]
He did not hesitate. “The tear.”
“It isn’t fair,” she objected. “Some people have to work very hard for a tear. Others can have them just for the thinking.”
“What system of exchange is fair?” he cried, and his voice sounded as if he were really drunk. “And whoever invented the concept of fairness, anyway? Isn’t everything easier if you simply get rid of the idea of justice altogether? You think the quantity of pleasure, the degree of suffering is constant among all men? It somehow all comes out in the end? You think that? If it comes out even it’s only because the final sum is zero.”
“I suppose that’s a comfort to you,” she said, feeling that if the conversation went on she would get really angry.
“None at all. Are you crazy? I have no interest in knowing the final figure. But I am interested in all the complicated processes that make it possible to get that result inevitably, no matter what the original quantity was.”
“The end of the bottle,” she murmured. “Perhaps a perfect zero is something to reach.”
“Is it all gone? Hell. But we don’t reach it. It reaches us. It’s not the same thing.”
“He’s really drunker than I am,” she thought. “No, it isn’t,” she agreed.
And as he was saying: “You’re damned right,” and flopping violently over to lie on his stomach, she went on thinking of what a waste of energy all this talk was, and wondering how she could stop him from working himself up into an emotional state.
“Ah, I’m disgusted and miserable!” he cried in a sudden burst of fury. “I should never take a drop because it always knocks me out. But it’s not weakness the way it is with you. Not at all. It takes more will power for me to make myself take a drink than it does for you not to. I hate the results and I always remember what they’ll be.”
“Then why do you do it? Nobody asks you to.”
“I told you,” he said. “I wanted to be with you. And besides, I always imagine that somehow I’ll be able to penetrate to the interior of somewhere. Usually I get just about to the suburbs and get lost. I don’t think there is any interior to get to any more. I think all you drinkers are victims of a huge mass hallucination.”
“I refuse to discuss it,” said Kit haughtily, climbing down from the bed and struggling her way through the folds of netting that hung to the floor.
He rolled over and sat up.
“I know why I’m disgusted,” he called after her. “It’s something I ate. Ten years ago.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Lie down again and sleep,” she said, and went out of the room.
“I do,” he muttered. He crawled out of the bed and went to stand in the window. The dry desert air was taking on its evening chill, and the drums still sounded. The canyon walls were black now, the scattered clumps of palms had become invisible. There were no lights; the room faced away from the town. And this was what he meant. He gripped the windowsill and leaned out, thinking: “She doesn’t know what I’m talking about. It’s something I ate ten years ago. Twenty years ago.” The landscape was there, and more than ever he felt he could not reach it. The rocks and the sky were everywhere, ready to absolve him, but as always he carried the obstacle within him. He would have said that as he looked at them, the rocks and the sky ceased being themselves, that in the act of passing into his consciousness, they became impure. It was slight consolation to be able to say to himself: “I am stronger than they.” As he turned back into the room, something bright drew his eye to the mirror on the open door of the wardrobe. It was the new moon shining in through the other window. He sat down on the bed and began to laugh.
Chapter 20
Port spent the next two days trying assiduously to gather information about El Ga’a. It was astonishing how little the people of Bou Noura knew about the place. Everyone seemed in agreement that it was a large city-always it was spoken of with a certain