The Sheltering Sky - Bowles, Paul [74]
The immigration authorities at his disembarkation had not been satisfied to leave a blank after the word Profession on their papers as he had done in his passport. (That passport, official proof of his existence, racing after him, somewhere behind in the desert!) They had said: “Surely monsieur must do something.” And Kit, seeing that he was about to contest the point, had interposed quickly: “Ah, yes. Monsieur is a writer, but he is modest!” They had laughed, filled in the space with the word ecrivain, and made the remark that they hoped he would find inspiration in the Sahara. For a while he had been infuriated by their stubbornness in insisting upon his having a label, an etat-civil. Then for a few hours the idea of his actually writing a book had amused him. A journal, filled in each evening with the day’s thoughts, carefully seasoned with local color, in which the absolute truth of the theorem he would set forth in the beginning-namely, that the difference between something and nothing is nothing-should be clearly and calmly demonstrated. He had not even mentioned the idea to Kit; she surely would have killed it with her enthusiasm. Since the death of his father he no longer worked at anything, because it was not necessary, but Kit constantly held the hope that he would begin again to write-to write no matter what, so long as he worked at it. “He’s a little less insupportable when he’s working,” she explained to others, and by no means totally in jest. And when he saw his mother, which was seldom, she too would say: “Been working?” and look at him with her large sad eyes. He would reply: “Nope,” and look back at her insolently. Even as they were driving to the hotel in the taxi, with Tunner saying: “What a hellhole” as he saw the miserable streets, he had been thinking that Kit would be too delighted at the prospect; it would have to be done in secret-it was the only way he would be able to carry it off. But then when he had got settled in the hotel, and they had started their little pattern of cafe life at the Eckmuhl-Noiseux, there had been nothing to write about—he could not establish a connection in his mind between the absurd trivialities which filled the day and the serious business of putting words on paper. He thought it was probably Tunner who prevented him from being completely at ease. Tunner’s presence created a situation, however slight, which kept him from entering into the reflective state he considered essential. As long as he was living his life, he could not write about it. Where one left off, the other began, and the existence of circumstances which demanded even the vaguest participation on his part was sufficient to place writing outside the realm of possibility. But that was all right. He would not have written well, and so he would have got no pleasure from it. And even if what he might have written had been good, how many people would have known it? It was all right to speed ahead into the desert leaving no trace.
Suddenly he remembered that they were on their way to the hotel in El Ga’a. It was another night and they had not yet arrived; there was a contradiction somewhere, he knew, but he did not have the energy to look for it. Occasionally he felt the fever rage within him, a separate entity; it gave him the image of a baseball player winding up, getting ready to pitch. And he was the ball. Around and around he went, then he was flung into space for a while, dissolving in flight.
They stood over him. There had been a long struggle, and he was very tired. Kit was one; the other was a soldier. They were talking, but what they said meant nothing. He left them there standing over him, and went back where he had come from.
“He will be as well off here as anywhere else this side of Sidibel-Abbes,” said the soldier. “With typhoid all you can do, even in a hospital, is to keep the fever as low as possible, and wait. We have little here in Sha in the way of medicine, but these”—he pointed to a tube of pills that lay on an overturned box by the cot