“Oh, here, perhaps,” said the young man, holding his g lass of water up to the light and studying it carefully.
“In France!” the woman cried excitedly. “Madame Gautier told me herself, and I’ve read it in ever so many books and papers.”
“What revolting water,” he murmured. He set the glass on the table. “I don’t think I shall drink it.”
“What a fearful sissy you are! Stop complaining! I don’t want to hear about it! I can’t bear to hear any more of your talk about dirt and worms. Don’t drink it. No one cares whether you do or not. It’s frightful for you, anyway, washing everything down with liquids the way you do. Try to grow up. Have you got the paraffin for the Primus, or did you forget that as well as the Vittel?”
The young man smiled with poisonous mock benevolence, and spoke slowly, as if to a backward child: “No, I did not forget the paraffin as well as the Vittel. The tin is in the back of the car. Now, if I may, I think I shall take a little walk.” He rose, still smiling most unpleasantly, and moved away from the table.
“Why, you rude puppy! I’ll box your ears!” the woman called after him. He did not turn around.
“Aren’t they something?” whispered Port.
“Very amusing,” said Kit. She was still angry. “Why don’t you ask them to join us on our great trek? It’s all we’d need.”
They ate their fruit,in silence.
After dinner, when Kit had gone up to her room, Port wandered around the barren street floor of the hotel, to the writing room with its impossible, dim lights far overhead; to the palm-stuffed foyer where two ancient French women in black sat on the edges of their chairs, whispering to one another; to the front entrance, in which he stood a few minutes staring at a large Mercedes touring car parked opposite; and back to the writing room. He sat down. The sickly light from above scarcely illumined the travel posters on the walls: Fes la Mysterieuse, Air-France, Visitez I’Espagne. From a grilled window over his head came hard female voices and the metallic sound of kitchen activities, amplified by the stone walls and tile floors. This room, even more than the others, reminded him of a dungeon. The electric bell of the cinema was audible above all the other noises, a constant, nerveracking background. He went to the writing tables, lifted the blotters, opened the drawers, searching for stationery; there was none. Then he shook the inkwells; they were dry. A violent argument had broken out in the kitchen. Scratching the fleshy parts of his hands, where the mosquitoes had just bitten him, he walked slowly out of the room through the foyer, along the corridor into the bar. Even here the light was weak and distant, but the array of bottles behind the bar formed a focal point of interest for the eyes. He had a slight indigestion—not a sourness, but the promise of a pain which at the moment was only a tiny physical unhappiness in some unlocatable center. The swarthy barman was staring at him expectantly. There was no one else in the room. He ordered a whiskey and sat savoring it, drinking slowly. Somewhere in the hotel a toilet was flushed, making its sounds of choking and regurgitation.
The unpleasant tension inside him was lessening; he felt very much awake. The bar was stuffy and melancholy. It was full of the sadness inherent in all deracinated things. “Since the day the first drink was served at this bar,” he thought, “how many moments of happiness have been lived through, here?” The happiness, if there still was any, existed elsewhere: In sequestered rooms that looked onto bright alleys where the cats gnawed fish-heads; in shaded cafés hung with reed matting, where the hashish smoke mingled with the fumes of mint from the hot tea; down on the docks, out at the edge of the sebkha in the tents (he passed over the white image of Marhnia, the placid face); beyond the mountains in the great Sahara, in the endless regions that were all of Africa. But not here in this sad colonial room where each invocation of Europe was merely one more squalid touch, one more visible proof of isolation; the mother country seemed farthest in such a room.
As he sat regularly swallowing small mouthfuls of warm whiskey, he heard footsteps approaching in the corridor. The young Englishman came into the room, and without looking in Port’s direction sat down at one of the small tables. Port watched him order a liqueur, and when the barman was back behind the bar, he walked over to the table. “Pardon, monsieur,” he said. “Vous parlezfranvais?” “Oui, oui,” the young man answered, looking startled. “But you also speak English?” pursued Port quickly. “I do,” he replied, setting his glass down and staring at his interlocutor in a manner which Port suspected was completely theatrical. His intuition told him that flattery was the surest approach in this case. “Then maybe you can give me some advice,” he went on with great seriousness.
The young man smiled weakly. “If it’s about Africa, I daresay I can. I’ve been mucking about here for the past five years. Fascinating place, of course.”
“Wonderful, yes.”
“You know it?” He looked a bit worried; he wanted so much to be the only traveler.
“Only certain parts,” Port reassured him. “I’ve traveled a good deal in the north and west. Roughly Tripoli to Dakar.”
“Dakar’s a filthy hole.”
“But so are ports all over the world, What I wanted advice about is the exchange. What bank do you think it’s best to use? I have dollars.”
The Englishman smiled. “I think I’m rather a good person to give you such information. I’m actually Australian myself, but my mother and I live mostly on American dollars.” He proceeded to offer Port a complete exposition of the French banking system in North Africa. His voice took on the inflections of an old-fashioned professor; his manner of expressing himself was objectionably pedantic, Port thought. At the same time there was a light in his eyes which not only belied the voice and manner but also managed to annul whatever weight his words might carry. It seemed to Port that the young man was speaking to him rather as if he thought he were dealing with a maniac, as if the subject of conversation had been chosen as one proper to the occasion, one which could be extended for as long a time as necessary, until the patient was calmed.
Port allowed him to continue his discourse, which presently left banking behind and went into personal experiences. This terrain was more fertile; it obviously was where the young man had been heading from the start. Port offered no comments, save for an occasional polite exclamation which helped to give the monologue the semblance of a conversation. He learned that prior to their arrival in Mombasa the young man and his mother, who wrote travel books and illustrated them with her own photographs, had lived for three years in India, where an elder son had died; that the five African years, spent in every part of the continent, had managed to give them both an astonishing list of diseases, and they still suffered intermittently from most of them. It was difficult, however, to know what to believe and what to discount, since the report was decorated with such remarks as: “At that time I was manager of a large import-export firm in Durban,” “The government put me in charge of three thousand Zulus,” “In Lagos I bought a command car and drove it through to Casamance,” “We were the only whites ever to have penetrated into the region,” “They wanted me to be cameraman for the expedition, but there was no one in Cape Town I could trust to keep the studios running properly, and we were making four films at the time.” Port began to resent his not knowing better how far to go with his listener, but he let it all pass, and was delighted with the ghoulish pleasure the young man took in describing the dead bodies in the river at Douala, the murders in Takoradi, the self-immolating madman in the market at Gao. Finally the talker leaned back, signaled to the barman to bring him another liqueur, and said: “Ah, yes, Africa’s a great place. I wouldn’t live anywhere else these days.”