The Sheltering Sky - Bowles, Paul [53]
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 and desirable than the idea of spending the rest of her life in the Sahara, and that she considered him the luckiest of men to be on his way back there. A correspondence had ensued, and letters had gone back and forth between Bordeaux and Bou Noura. Less than a year later he had gone to Algiers and met her as she got off the boat. The honeymoon had been spent in a little bougainvillaea-covered villa up at Mustapha-Superieur (it had rained every day), after which they had returned together to the sunlit rigors of Bou Noura.
It was impossible for the lieutenant to know how nearly her preconceived notion of the place had coincided with what she had discovered to be its reality; he did not know whether she was going to like it or not. At the moment she was already back in France waiting for their first child to be born. Soon she would return and they would be better able to tell.
At present he was bored. After Mme. d’Armagnac had left, the lieutenant had attempted to pick up his old life where he had broken it off, but he found the girls of the Bou Noura quartier exasperatingly uncomplicated after the more evolved relationship to which he latterly had become accustomed. Thus he had occupied himself with building an extra room onto his house to surprise his wife on her return. It was to be an Arab salon. Already he was having the coffee table and couches built, and he had bought a beautiful, large cream-colored wool rug for the wall, and two sheepskins for the floor. It was during the fortnight when he was arranging this room that the trouble began.
The trouble, while it was nothing really serious, had managed to interfere with his work, a fact which could not be overlooked. Moreover, being an active man, he was always bored when he was confined to his bed, and he had been there for several days. Actually it had been a question of bad luck; if only someone else had happened on it-a native, for instance, or even one of his inferiors-he would not have been obliged to give the thing so much attention. But he had had the misfortune to discover it himself one morning while making his semi-weekly tour of inspection of the villages. Thereby it became official and important. It had been just outside the walls of Igherm, which he always visited directly after Tolfa, passing on foot through the cemetery and then climbing the hill; from the big gate of Igherm he could see the valley below where a soldier from the Poste waited in a truck to pick him up and carry him on to Beni Isguen, which was too far to walk. As he had been about to go through the gate into the village, his attention had been drawn by something which ought to have looked perfectly normal. A dog was running along with something in its mouth, something large and suspiciously pink, part of which dragged along the ground. But he had stared at the object.