The Sheltering Sky - Bowles, Paul [74]
The young Arab and the woman engaged in a long argument, he making extravagant gestures while he demanded she open the door, and she refusing to touch it. Finally she went away. They heard her slippered feet shuffling along the path, then they heard, the dog bark again, the woman’s reprimands, followed by yelps as she struck it, after which they heard nothing.
“What is it?” cried Kit desperately. “Pourquoi on ne nous laisse pas entrer?”
He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “Madame is coming”, he said.
“Oh, good God!” she said in English. She seized the knocker and hammered violently with it, at the same time kicking the base of the door with all her strength. It did not budge. Still smiling, the Arab shook his head slowly from side to side. “Peut pas,” he told her. But she continued to pound. Even though she knew she had no reason to be, she was furious with him for not having been able to make the woman open the door. After a moment she stopped, with the sensation that she was about to faint. She was shaking with fatigue, and her mouth and throat felt as though they were made of tin. The sun poured down on the bare earth; there was not a square inch of shadow, save at their feet. Her mind went back to the many times when, as a child, she had held a reading glass over some hapless insect, following it along the ground in its frenzied attempts to escape the increasingly accurate focusing of the lens, until finally she touched it with the blinding pinpoint of light, when as if by magic it ceased running, and she watched it slowly wither and begin to smoke. She felt that if she looked up she would find the sun grown to monstrous proportions. She leaned against the wall and waited.
Eventually there were steps in the garden. She listened to their sound grow in clarity and volume, until they came right up to the door. Without even turning her head she waited for it to be opened; but that did not happen.
“Qui est la?” said a woman’s voice.
Out of fear that the young Arab would speak and perhaps be refused entrance for being a native, Kit summoned all her strength and cried: “Vous ites la proprietaire?”
There was a short silence. Then the woman, speaking with a Corsican or Italian accent, began a voluble entreaty: “Ah, madame, allez vous en, je vous en supplie!… Vous ne pouvez pas entrer ici! I regret! It is useless to insist. I cannot let you in! No one has been in or out of the hotel for more than a week! It is unfortunate, but you cannot enter!”
“But, madame,” Kit cried, almost sobbing, “my husband is very ill!”
“Aie!” The woman’s voice rose in pitch and Kit had the impression that she had retreated several steps into the garden; her voice, a little farther away, now confirmed it. “Ah, mon dieu! Go away! There is nothing I can do!”
“But where?” screamed Kit. “Where can I go?”
The woman already had started back through the garden. She stopped to cry: “Away from El Ga’a! Leave the city! You cannot expect me to let you in. So far we are free of the epidemic, here in the hotel.”
The young Arab was trying to pull Kit away. He had understood nothing except that they were not to be let in. “Come. We find fondouk,” he was saying. She shook him off, cupped her hands, and called: “Madame, what epidemic?”
The voice came from still farther away. “But, meningitis. You did not know? Mais oui, madame! Partez! Partez!” The sound of her hurried footsteps became fainter, was lost. Around the corner of the passageway a blind man had appeared, and was advancing toward them slowly, touching the wall as he moved. Kit looked at the young