The Sheltering Sky / Let It Come Down / the Spider's House

by Paul Bowles

  Late in the afternoon a large automobile drew up in front of the hotel entrance. It was the Lyles’ Mercedes.

  “Of all the utterly idiotic things to have done! To try to find some lost village no one ever heard of!” Mrs. Lyle was saying. “You nearly made me miss tea. I suppose you’d have thought that amusing. Now drive away these wretched brats and come in here. Mosh! Mosh!” she cried, suddenly charging at a group of native youngsters who had approached the car. “Mosh! Imshi!” She raised her handbag in a menacing gesture; the bewildered children slowly backed away from her.

  “I must find the right term to get rid of them with here,” said Eric, jumping out and slamming the door. “It’s no use saying you’ll get the police. They don’t know what that is.”

  “What nonsense! Police, indeed! Never threaten natives with the local authorities. Remember, we don’t recognize French sovereignty here.”

  “Oh, that’s in the Rif, Mother, and it’s Spanish sovereignty.”

  “Eric! Will you be quiet? Don’t you think I know what Madame Gautier told me? What do you mean?” She stopped as she saw the table under the arcade, still laden with the dirty dishes and glasses left by Port and Kit. “Hello! Someone else has arrived,” she said in a tone that denoted the greatest interest. She turned accusingly to Eric. “And they’ve eaten outside! I told you we could have eaten outside, if you’d only insisted a bit. The tea’s in your room. Will you bring it down? I must see about that putrid fire in the kitchen. And get out the sugar and open a new tin of biscuits.”

  As Eric returned through the patio with the box of tea, Port came in the door from the street.

  “Mr. Moresby!” he cried. “What a pleasant surprise!”

  Port tried to keep his face from falling. “Hello,” he said. “What are you doing here? I thought I’d recognized your car outside.”

  “Just one second. I’ve got to deliver this tea to Mother. She’s in the kitchen waiting for it.” He rushed through the side door, stepping on one of the obscene dogs that lay exhausted just inside in the dark. It yelped lengthily. Port hurried upstairs to Kit and imparted the latest bad news to her. A minute later Eric pounded on the door. “I say, do have tea with us in ten minutes in room eleven. How nice to see you, Mrs. Moresby.”

  Room eleven was Mrs. Lyle’s, longer but no less bare than the others, and directly over the entrance. While she drank her tea, she kept rising from the bed where everyone was sitting for lack of chairs, going to the window and crying “Mosh! Mosh!” into the street.

  Presently Port could no longer contain his curiosity. “What is that strange word you’re calling out the window, Mrs. Lyle?”

  “I’m driving those thieving little niggers away from my car.”

  “But what are you saying to them? Is it Arabic?”

  “It’s French,” she said, “and it means get out.”

  “I see. Do they understand it?”

  “They’d jolly well better. More tea, Mrs. Moresby!”

  Tunner had begged off, having heard enough about the Lyles from Kit’s description of Eric. According to Mrs. Lyle, Aïn Krorfa was a charming town, especially the camel market, where there was a baby camel they must photograph. She had taken several shots of it that morning. “It’s too sweet,” she said. Eric sat devouring Port with his eyes. “He wants more money,” Port thought. Kit noticed his extraordinary expression, too, but she put a different interpretation on it.

  When tea was over, and they were taking their leave, since they seemed to have exhausted all the possible subjects for conversation, Eric turned to Port. “If I don’t see you at dinner, I’ll drop in on you tonight afterward. What time do you go to bed?”

  Port was vague. “Oh, any time, more or less. We’ll probably be out fairly late looking around the town.”

  “Righto,” said Eric, patting his shoulder affectionately as he shut the door.

  When they got back to Kit’s room she stood gazing out the window at the skeletal fig tree. “I wish we’d gone to Italy,” she said. Port looked up quickly. “Why do you say that? Is it because of them, because of the hotel?”

  “Because of everything.” She turned toward him, smiling. “But I don’t really mean it. This is just the right hour to go out. Let’s.”

  Aïn Krorfa was beginning to awaken from its daily sundrugged stupor. Behind the fort, which stood near the mosque on a high rocky hill that rose in the very middle of the town, the streets became informal, there were vestiges of the original haphazard design of the native quarter. In the stalls, whose angry lamps had already begun to gutter and flare, in the open cafés where the hashish smoke hung in the air, even in the dust of the hidden palm-bordered lanes, men squatted, fanning little fires, bringing their tin vessels of water to a boil, making their tea, drinking it.

  “Teatime! They’re really Englishmen dressed for a masquerade,” said Kit. She and Port walked very slowly, hand in hand, perfectly in tune with the soft twilight. It was an evening that suggested languor rather than mystery.

  They came to the river, here merely a flat expanse of white sand stretching away in the half light, and followed it a while until the sounds of the town became faint and high in the distance. Out here the dogs barked behind the walls, but the walls themselves were far from the river. Ahead of them a fire burned; seated by it was a solitary man playing a flute, and beyond him in the shifting shadows cast by the flames, a dozen or so camels rested, chewing solemnly on their cuds. The man looked toward them as they passed, but continued his music.

  “Do you think you can be happy here?” asked Port in a hushed voice.

  Kit was startled. “Happy? Happy? How do you mean?”

  “Do you think you’ll like it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know!” she said, with an edge of annoyance in her voice. “How can I tell? It’s impossible to get into their lives, and know what they’re really thinking.”

  “I didn’t ask you that,” Port remarked, nettled.

  “You should have. That’s what’s important here.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “Not for me. I feel that this town, this river, this sky, all belong to me as much as to them.”

  She felt like saying: “Well, you’re crazy,” but she confined herself to: “How strange.”

  They circled back toward the town, taking a road that led between garden walls.

  “I wish you wouldn’t ask me such questions,” she said suddenly. “I can’t answer them. How could I say: yes, I’m going to be happy in Africa? I like Aïn Krorfa very much, but I can’t tell whether I want to stay a month or leave tomorrow.”

  “You couldn’t leave tomorrow, for that matter, even if you did want to, unless you went back to Boussif. I found out about the buses. It’s four days before the one for Bou Noura leaves. And it’s forbidden to get rides on trucks to Messad now. They have soldiers who check along the way. There’s a heavy fine for the drivers.”

  “So we’re stuck in the Grand Hotel.”

  “With Tunner,” thought Port. Aloud: “With the Lyles.”

  “God forbid,” Kit murmured.

  “I wonder how long we’ve got to keep on running into them. I wish to hell they’d either get ahead of us once and for all, or let us get ahead of them and stay there.”

  “Things like that have to be arranged,” said Kit. She, too, was thinking of Tunner. It seemed to her that if presently she were not going to have to sit opposite him over a meal, she could relax completely now, and live in the moment, which was Port’s moment. But it seemed useless even to try, if in an hour she was going to be faced with the living proof of her guilt.

  It was completely dark when they got back to the hotel. They ate fairly late, and after dinner, since no one felt like going out, they went to bed. This process took longer than usual because there was only one wash basin and water pitcher—on the roof at the end of the corridor. The town was very quiet. Some café radio was playing a transcription of a record by Abd-el-Wahab: a dirge-like popular song called: I Am Weeping
Upon Your Grave. Port listened to the melancholy notes as he washed; they were broken into by nearby outbursts of dogs barking.

  He was already in bed when Eric tapped on his door. Unfortunately he had not turned off his light, and for fear that it showed under the door he did not dare pretend to be asleep. The fact that Eric tiptoed into the room, a conspiratorial look on his face, displeased him. He pulled his bathrobe on.

  “What’s the matter?” he demanded. “Nobody’s asleep.”

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you, old man.” As always, he appeared to be talking to the corners of the room.

  “No, no. But it’s lucky you came when you did. Another minute and my light would have been out.”

  “Is your wife asleep?”

  “I believe she’s reading. She usually does before she goes to sleep. Why?”

  “I wondered if I might have that novel she promised me this afternoon.”

  “When, now?” He passed Eric a cigarette and lit one himself.

  “Oh, not if it will disturb her.”

  “Tomorrow would be better, don’t you think?” said Port, looking at him.

  “Right you are. What I actually came about was that money—” He hesitated.

  “Which?”

  “The three hundred francs you lent me. I want to give them back to you.”

  “Oh, that’s quite all right.” Port laughed, still looking at him. Neither one spoke for a moment.

  “Well, of course, if you like,” Port said finally, wondering if by any unlikely chance he had misjudged the youth, and somehow feeling more convinced than ever that he had not.

  “Ah, excellent,” murmured Eric, fumbling about in his coat pocket. “I don’t like to have these things on my conscience.”

  “You didn’t need to have it on your conscience, because if you’ll remember, I gave it to you. But if you’d rather return it, as I say, naturally, that’s fine with me.”

  Eric had finally extracted a worn thousand-franc note, and held it forth with a faint, propitiatory smile. “I hope you have change for this,” he said, finally looking into Port’s face, but as though it were costing him a great effort. Port sensed that this was the important moment, but he had no idea why. “I don’t know,” he said, not taking the proffered bill. “Do you want me to look?”

  “If you could.” His voice was very low. As Port clumsily got out of bed and went to the valise where he kept his money and documents, Eric seemed to take courage.

  “I do feel like a rotter, coming here in the middle of the night and bothering you this way, but first of all I want to get this off my mind, and besides, I need the change badly, and they don’t seem to have any here in the hotel, and Mother and I are leaving first thing in the morning for Messad and I was afraid I might not see you again—”

  “You are? Messad?” Port turned, his wallet in his hand. “Really? Good Lord! And our friend Mr. Tunner wants so much to go!”

  “Oh?” Eric stood up slowly. “Oh?” he said again. “I daresay we could take him along.” He looked at Port’s face and saw it brighten. “But we’re leaving at daybreak. You’d better go immediately and tell him to be ready downstairs at six-thirty. We’ve ordered tea for six o’clock. You’d better have him do likewise.”

  “I’ll do that,” said Port, slipping his wallet into his pocket. “I’ll also ask him for the change, which I don’t seem to have.”

  “Good. Good,” Eric said with a smile, sitting down again on the bed.

  Port found Tunner naked, wandering distractedly around his room with a DDT bomb in his hand. “Come in,” he said. “This stuff is no good.”

  “What have you got?”

  “Bedbugs, for one thing.”

  “Listen. Do you want to go to Messad tomorrow morning at six-thirty?”

  “I want to go tonight at eleven-thirty. Why?”

  “The Lyles will drive you.”

  “And then what?”

  Port improvised. “They’ll be coming back here in a few days and going straight on to Bou Noura. They’ll take you down and we’ll be there expecting you. Lyle’s in my room now. Do you want to talk with him?”

  “No.”

  There was a silence. The electric light suddenly went off, then came on, a feeble orange worm inside the bulb, so that the room looked as if it were being viewed through heavy black glasses. Tunner glanced at his disordered bed and shrugged. “What time did you say?”

  “Six-thirty they’re going.”

  “Tell him I’ll be down at the door.” He frowned at Port, a faint suspicion in his face. “And you. Why aren’t you going?”

  “They’ll only take one,” he lied, “and besides, I like it here.”

  “You won’t once you’ve gotten into your bed,” said Tunner bitterly.

  “You’ll probably have them in Messad too,” Port suggested. He felt safe now.

  “I’ll take my chances on any hotel after this one.”

  “We’ll look for you in a few days in Bou Noura. Don’t crash any harems.”

  He shut the door behind him and went back to his room. Eric was still sitting in the same position on the bed, but he had lighted another cigarette.

  “Mr. Tunner is delighted, and’ll meet you at six-thirty down at the door. Oh, damn! I forgot to ask him about the change for your thousand francs.” He hesitated, about to go back out.

  “Don’t bother, please. He can change it for me tomorrow on the way, in case I need it changed.”

  Port opened his mouth to say: “But I thought you wanted to pay me back the three hundred.” He thought better of it. Now that the thing was settled, it would be tragic to risk a slip-up, just for a few francs. So he smiled and said: “Surely. Well, I hope we’ll see you when you come back.”

  “Yes, indeed,” smiled Eric, looking at the floor. He got up suddenly and went to the door. “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  Port locked the door after him and stood by it, musing. Eric’s behavior had impressed him as being unusually eccentric, yet he still suspected that it was explainable. Being sleepy, he turned off what remained of the light and got into bed. The dogs barked in chorus, far and nearby, but he was not molested by vermin.

  That night he awoke sobbing. His being was a well a thousand miles deep; he rose from the lower regions with a sense of infinite sadness and repose, but with no memory of any dream save the faceless voice that had whispered: “The soul is the weariest part of the body.” The night was silent, save for a small wind that blew through the fig tree and moved the loops of wire hanging there. Back and forth they rubbed, creaking ever so slightly. After he had listened a while, he fell asleep.

  Chapter XVI

  KIT SAT UP in bed, her breakfast tray on her knees. The room was lighted by the reflection of the sun on the blue wall outside. Port had brought her her breakfast, having decided after observing their behavior that the servants were incapable of carrying out any orders whatever. She had eaten, and now was thinking of what he had told her (with ill-concealed relish) about having got rid of Tunner. Because she, too, had secretly wished him gone, it seemed to her a doubly ignoble thing to have done. But why? He had gone of his own free will. Then she realized that intuitively she already was aware of Port’s next move: he would contrive to miss connections with Tunner at Bou Noura. She could tell by his behavior, in spite of whatever he said, that he had no intention of meeting him there. That was why it seemed unkind. The deceit of the maneuver, if she were correct, was too bald; she determined not to be a party to it. “Even if Port runs out on him, I’ll stay and meet him.” She reached over and set the tray on the jackal skin; badly cured, the pelt gave off a sour odor. “Or am I only trying to go on punishing myself by seeing Tunner in front of me every day?” she wondered. “Would it be better really to get rid of him?” If only it were possible to dig behind the coming weeks and know! The clouds above the mountains had been a bad sign, but not in the way she had imagined. Instead of the wreck there had been another experience w
hich perhaps would prove more disastrous in its results. As usual she was being saved up for something worse than she expected. But she did not believe it was to be Tunner, so that it really was not important how she behaved now with regard to him. The other omens indicated a horror more vast, and surely ineluctable. Each escape merely made it possible for her to advance into a region of heightened danger. “In that case,” she thought, “why not give in? And if I should give in, how would I behave? Exactly the same as now.” So that giving in or not giving in had nothing to do with her problem. She was pushing against her own existence. All she could hope to do was eat, sleep and cringe before her omens.

  She spent most of the day in bed reading, getting dressed only to have lunch with Port down in the stinking patio under the arcade. Immediately on returning to her room she pulled her clothes off. The room had not been made up. She straightened the bedsheet and lay down again. The air was dry, hot, breathless. During the morning Port had been out in the town. She wondered how he could support the sun, even with his helmet; it made her ill to be in it even for five minutes. His was not a rugged body, yet he had wandered for hours in the oven-like streets and returned to eat heartily of the execrable food. And he had unearthed some Arab who expected them both to tea at six. He had impressed it upon her that on no account must they be late. It was typical of him to insist upon punctuality in the case of an anonymous shopkeeper in Aïn Krorfa, when with his friends and with her he behaved in a most cavalier fashion, arriving at his appointments indifferently anywhere from a half-hour to two hours after the specified time.

  The Arab’s name was Abdeslam ben Hadj Chaoui; they called for him at his leather shop and waited for him to close and lock the front of it. He led them slowly through the twisting streets as the muezzin called, talking all the while in flowery French, and addressing himself principally to Kit.

  “How happy I am! This is the first time I have the honor to invite a lady, and a gentleman, from New York. How I should like to go and see New York! What riches! Gold and silver everywhere! Le grand luxe pour tout le monde, ah! Not like Aïn Krorfa—sand in the streets, a few palms, hot sun, sadness always. It is a great pleasure for me to be able to invite a lady from New York. And a gentleman. New York! What a beautiful word!” They let him talk on.