The Sheltering Sky - Bowles, Paul [40]
Kit looked at Tunner and laughed. Port felt that they had a secret between them. “I was wondering how long it would be before you discovered them,” she said.
Again they discussed the flies, Tunner calling upon the driver to attest to their number in Nfn Krorfathis for Port’s benefit, because he hoped to gain a recruit for his projected exodus to Messad-and Kit repeating that it would be only logical to examine the town before making any decisions. So far she found it the only visually attractive place she had seen since arriving in Africa.
This pleasant impression, however, was based wholly upon her appreciation of the verdure she could not help noticing behind the walls as the bus sped onward toward the town; the town itself, once they had arrived, seemed scarcely to exist. She was disappointed to see that it rather resembled Boussif, save that it appeared to be much smaller. What she could see of it was completely modern and geometrically laid out, and had it not been for the fact that the buildings were white instead of brown, and for the sidewalks bordering the principal street, which lay in the shadows of projecting arcades, she easily could have thought herself still in the other town. Her first view of the Grand Hotel’s interior quite unnerved her, but Tunner was present and she felt impelled to sustain her position as one who had the right to twit him about his fastidiousness.
“Good heavens, what a mess!” she exclaimed; actually her epithet fell far short of describing what she really felt about the patio they had just entered. The simple Tunner was horrified. He merely looked, taking in each detail as it reached his gaze. As for Port, he was too sleepy to see much of anything, and he stood in the entrance, waving his arms around like a windmill in an attempt to keep the flies away from his face.
Originally having been built to shelter an administrative office of the colonial government, the building since had fallen on evil days. The fountain which at one time had risen from the basin in the center of the patio was gone, but the basin remained. In it reposed a small mountain of reeking garbage, and reclining on the sides of the mountain were three screaming, naked infants, their soft formless bodies troubled with bursting sores. They looked human there in their helpless misery, but somehow not quite so human as the two pink dogs lying on the tiles nearby-pink because long ago they had lost all their hair, and their raw, aged skin lay indecently exposed to the kisses of the flies and sun. One of them feebly raised its head an inch or so off the floor and looked at the newcomers vacantly through its pale yellow eyes; the other did not move. Behind the columns which formed an arcade at one side were a few amorphous and useless pieces of furniture piled on top of each other. A huge blue and white agateware pitcher stood near the central basin. In spite of the quantity of garbage in the patio, the predominating odor was of the latrine. Above the crying of the babies there was the shrill sound of women’s voices in dispute, and the thick noise of a radio boomed in the background. For a brief instant a woman appeared in a doorway. Then she shrieked and immediately disappeared again. In the interior there were screams and giggles; one woman began to cry out: “Yah, Mohammed!” Tunner swung about and went into the street, where he joined the porters who had been told to wait outside with the luggage. Port and Kit stood quietly until the man called Mohammed appeared: he was wrapping a long scarlet sash around and around his waist; the end still trailed along the floor. In the course of the conversation about rooms, he kept insisting that they take one room with three beds-it would be cheaper for them and less work for the maids.
“If I could only get out of here,” Kit thought, “before Port arranges something with him!” But her sense of guilt expressed itself in allegiance; she-could not go out into the street because Tunner was there and she would appear to be choosing sides. Suddenly she, too, wished Tunner were not with them. She would feel much freer in expressing her own preferences. As she had feared, Port went upstairs with the man, returning presently to announce that the rooms were not really bad at all.