The Sheltering Sky - Bowles, Paul [17]
“This hotel has the most extraordinary plumbing system; the water taps do nothing but sigh and gurgle constantly, no matter how tightly one shuts them off. The stupidity of the French! It’s unbelievable! They’re all mental defectives. Madame Gautier herself told me they have the lowest national intelligence quotient in the world. Of course, their blood is thin; they’ve gone to seed. They’re all part Jewish or Negro. Look at them!” She made a wide gesture which included the whole room.
“Oh, here, perhaps,” said the young man, holding his g lass of water up to the light and studying it carefully.
“In France!” the woman cried excitedly. “Madame Gautier told me herself, and I’ve read it in ever so many books and papers.”
“What revolting water,” he murmured. He set the glass on the table. “I don’t think I shall drink it.”
“What a fearful sissy you are! Stop complaining! I don’t want to hear about it! I can’t bear to hear any more of your talk about dirt and worms. Don’t drink it. No one cares whether you do or not. It’s frightful for you, anyway, washing everything down with liquids the way you do. Try to grow up. Have you got the paraffin for the Primus, or did you forget that as well as the Vittel?”
The young man smiled with poisonous mock benevolence, and spoke slowly, as if to a backward child: “No, I did not forget the paraffin as well as the Vittel. The tin is in the back of the car. Now, if I may, I think I shall take a little walk.” He rose, still smiling most unpleasantly, and moved away from the table.
“Why, you rude puppy! I’ll box your ears!” the woman called after him. He did not turn around.
“Aren’t they something?” whispered Port.
“Very amusing,” said Kit. She was still angry. “Why don’t you ask them to join us on our great trek? It’s all we’d need.”
They ate their fruit,in silence.
After dinner, when Kit had gone up to her room, Port wandered around the barren street floor of the hotel, to the writing room with its impossible, dim lights far overhead; to the palm-stuffed foyer where two ancient French women in black sat on the edges of their chairs, whispering to one another; to the front entrance, in which he stood a few minutes staring at a large Mercedes touring car parked opposite; and back to the writing room. He sat down. The sickly light from above scarcely illumined the travel posters on the walls: Fes la Mysterieuse, Air-France, Visitez I’Espagne. From a grilled window over his head came hard female voices and the metallic sound of kitchen activities, amplified by the stone walls and tile floors. This room, even more than the others, reminded him of a dungeon. The electric bell of the cinema was audible above all the other noises, a constant, nerveracking background. He went to the writing tables, lifted the blotters, opened the drawers, searching for stationery; there was none. Then he shook the inkwells; they were dry. A violent argument had broken out in the kitchen. Scratching the fleshy parts of his hands, where the mosquitoes had just bitten him, he walked slowly out of the room through the foyer, along the corridor into the bar. Even here the light was weak and distant, but the array of bottles behind the bar formed a focal point of interest for the eyes. He had a slight indigestion-not a sourness, but the promise of a pain which at the moment was only a tiny physical unhappiness in some unlocatable center. The swarthy barman was staring at him expectantly. There was no one else in the room. He ordered a whiskey and sat savoring it, drinking slowly. Somewhere in the hotel a toilet was flushed, making its sounds of choking and regurgitation.
The unpleasant tension inside him was lessening; he felt very much awake. The bar was stuffy and melancholy. It was full of the sadness inherent in all deracinated things. “Since the day the first drink was served at this bar,” he thought, “how many moments of happiness have been lived through, here?” The happiness, if there still was any, existed elsewhere: In sequestered rooms that looked onto bright alleys where the cats gnawed fish-heads; in shaded cafes hung with reed matting, where the hashish smoke mingled with the fumes of mint from the hot tea; down on the docks, out at the edge of the sebkha in the tents (he passed over the white image of Marhnia, the placid face); beyond the mountains in the great Sahara, in the endless regions that were all of Africa. But not here in this sad colonial room where each invocation of Europe was merely one more squalid touch, one more visible proof of isolation; the mother country seemed farthest in such a room.