XXII
As he lay in the back of the truck, protected somewhat from the cold by Kit, now and then he was aware of the straight road beneath him. The twisting roads of the past weeks became alien, faded from his memory; it had been one strict, undeviating course inland to the desert, and now he was very nearly at the center.
How many times his friends, envying him his life, had said to him: “Your life is so simple.” “Your life seems always to go in a straight line.” Whenever they had said the words he heard in them an implicit reproach: it is not difficult to build a straight road on a treeless plain. He felt that what they really meant to say was: “You have chosen the easiest terrain.” But if they elected to place obstacles in their own way—and they so clearly did, encumbering themselves with every sort of unnecessary allegiance—that was no reason why they should object to his having simplified his life. So it was with a certain annoyance that he would say: “Everyone makes the life he wants. Right?” as though there were nothing further to be said.
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 écrivain, 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 état-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 café life at the Eckmühl-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 Sba in the way of medicine, but these—” he pointed to a tube of pills that lay on an overturned box by the cot—“will bring the fever down, and that is already a great deal.”
Kit did not look at him. “And peritonitis?” she said in a low voice.
Captain Broussard frowned. “Do not look for complications, madame,” he said severely. “It is always bad enough without that. Yes, of course, peritonitis, pneumonia, heart stoppage, who knows? And you, too, maybe you have the famous El Ga’a meningitis that Madame Luccioni was kind enough to warn you about. Bien sur! And maybe there are fifty cases of cholera here in Sba at this moment. I would not tell you even if there were.”
“Why not?” she said, finally looking up.
“It would be absolutely useless; and besides, it would lower your morale. No, no. I would isolate the sick, and take measures to prevent the spread of the disease, nothing more. What we have in our hands is always enough. We have a man here with typhoid. We must bring down the fever. That is all. And these stories of peritonitis for him, meningitis for you, do not interest me in the least. You must be realistic, madame. If you stray outside that, you do harm to everyone. You have only to give him his pills every two hours, and try to make him take as much soup as possible. The cook’s name is Zina. It would be prudent to be in the kitchen with her now and then to be sure there is always a fire and a big pot of soup constantly hot and ready. Zina is magnificent; she has cooked for us twelve years. But all natives need to be watched, always. They forget. And now, madame, if you will pardon me, I shall get back to my work. One of the men will bring you the mattress I promised you from my house, this afternoon. It will not be very comfortable, doubtless, but what can you expect—you are in Sba, not in Paris.” He turned in the doorway. “Enfin, madame, soyez courageuse!” he said, frowning again, and went out.
Kit stood unmoving, and slowly looked about the bare little room with the door on one side, and a window on the other. Port lay on the rickety cot, facing the wall, breathing regularly with the sheet pulled up around his head. This room was the hospital of Sba; it had the one available bed in the town, with real sheets and blankets, and Port was in it only because no member of the military force happened to be ill at the moment. A mud wall came halfway up the window outside, but above that the sky’s agonizing light poured in. She took the extra sheet the captain had given her for herself, folded it into a small square the size of the window, got a box of thumbtacks out of Port’s luggage, and covered the open space. Even as she stood in the window she was struck with the silence of the place. She could have thought there was not a living being within a thousand miles. The famous silence of the Sahara. She wondered if as the days went by each breath she took would sound as loud to her as it did now, if she would get used to the ridiculous noise her saliva made as she swallowed, and if she would have to swallow as often as she seemed to be doing at the moment, now that she was so conscious of it.