The Sheltering Sky

Through a doorway he caught a glimpse of the long succession of tiny, brightly-lit rooms, and the men seated everywhere on the reed matting that covered the floors. They all wore either white turbans or red chechias on their heads, a detail which lent the scene such a strong aspect of homogeneity that Port exclaimed: “Ah!” as they passed by the door. When they were on the terrace in the starlight, with an oud being plucked idly in the dark nearby, he said to his companion: “But I didn’t know there was anything like this left in this city.” The Arab did not understand. “Like this?” he echoed. “How?”

“With nothing but Arabs. Like the inside here. I thought all the cafés were like the ones in the street, all mixed up; Jews, French, Spanish, Arabs together. I thought the war had changed everything.”

The Arab laughed. “The war was bad. A lot of people died. There was nothing to eat. That’s all. How would that change the cafés? Oh no, my friend. It’s the same as always.” A moment later he said: “So you haven’t been here since the war! But you were here before the war?”

“Yes,” said Port. This was true; he had once spent an afternoon in the town when his boat had made a brief call there.

The tea arrived; they chatted and drank it. Slowly the image of Kit sitting in the window began to take shape again in Port’s mind. At first, when he became conscious of it, he felt a pang of guilt. Then his fantasy took a hand, and he saw her face, tight-lipped with fury as she undressed and flung her flimsy pieces of clothing across the furniture. By now she had surely given up waiting and gone to bed. He shrugged his shoulders and grew pensive, rinsing what was left of his tea around and around in the bottom of the glass, and following with his eyes the circular motion he was making.

“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 café 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 café 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.”

“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.”

V

When they left the café 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.