The Sheltering Sky - Bowles, Paul [7]
“You’re sad,” said Smail.
“No, no.” He looked up and smiled wistfully, then resumed watching the glass.
“You live only a short time. Il faut rigoler.”
Port was impatient; he was not in the mood for cafe philosophizing.
“Yes, I know,” he said shortly, and he sighed. Smail pinched his arm. His eyes were shining.
“When we leave here, I’ll take you to see a friend of mine.”
“I don’t want to meet him,” said Port, adding: “Thank you anyway.”
“Ah, you’re really sad,” laughed Smail. “It’s a girl. Beautiful as the moon.”
Port’s heart missed a beat. “A girl,” he repeated automatically, without taking his eyes from the glass. He was perturbed to witness his own interior excitement. He looked at Smail.
“A girl?” he said. “You mean a whore.”
Smail was mildly indignant. “A whore? Ah, my friend, you don’t know me. I wouldn’t introduce you to that. Cest de la saloperie, ca! This is a friend of mine, very elegant, very nice. When you meet her, you’ll see.”
The musician stopped playing the oud. Inside the cafe they were calling out numbers for the lotto game: “Ouahad aou tletine! Arbaine!”
Port said: “How old is she?”
Smail hesitated. “About sixteen. Sixteen or seventeen.”
“Or twenty or twenty-five,” suggested Port, with a leer.
Again Smail was indignant. “What do you mean, twenty-five? I tell you she’s sixteen or seventeen. You don’t believe me? Listen. You meet her. If you don’t like her, you just pay for the tea and we’ll go out again. Is that all right?”
“And if I do like her?”
“Well, you’ll do whatever you want.Ó “But I’ll pay her?”
“But of course you’ll pay her.”
Port laughed. “And you say she’s not a whore.”
Smail leaned over the table towards him and said with a great show of patience: “Listen, Jean. She’s a dancer. She only arrived from her bled in the desert a few weeks ago. How can she be a whore if she’s not registered and doesn’t live in the quartier? Eh? Tell me! You pay her because you take up her time. She dances in the quartier, but she has no room, no bed there. She’s not a whore. So now, shall we go?”
Port thought a long time, looked up at the sky, down into the garden, and all around the terrace before answering: “Yes. Let’s go. Now.”
Chapter 5
When they left the cafe it seemed to him that they were going more or less in the same direction from which they had just come. There were fewer people in the streets and the air was cooler. They walked for a good distance through the Casbah, making a sudden exit through a tall gateway onto a high, open space outside the walls. Here it was silent, and the stars were very much in evidence. The pleasure he felt at the unexpected freshness of the air and the relief at being in the open once more, out from under the overhanging houses, served to delay Port in asking the question that was in his mind: “Where are we going?” But as they continued along what seemed a parapet at the edge of a deep, dry moat, he finally gave voice to it. Smail replied vaguely that the girl lived with some friends at the edge of town.
“But we’re already in the country,” objected Port.
“Yes, it’s the country,” said Smail.
It was perfectly clear that he was being evasive now; his character seemed to have changed again. The beginning of intimacy was gone. To Port he was once more the anonymous dark figure that had stood above him in the garbage at the end of the street, smoking a bright cigarette. You can still break it up. Stop walking. Now. But the combined even rhythm of their feet on the stones was too powerful. The parapet made a wide curve and the ground below dropped steeply away into a deeper darkness. The moat had ended some hundred feet back. They were now high above the upper end of an open valley.
“The Turkish fortress,” remarked Smail, pounding on the stones with his heel.
“Listen to me,” began Port angrily, “where are we going?” He looked at the rim of uneven black mountains ahead of them on the horizon.
“Down there.” Smail pointed to the valley. A moment later he stopped walking. “Here are the stairs.” They leaned over the ledge. A narrow iron staircase was fastened to the side of the wall. It had no railing and led straight downward at a steep angle.