The Sheltering Sky

by Paul Bowles

‘Everyone is always leaving tomorrow,’ Bowles had said to me when I told him I was taking the ferry back to Spain the next day.

‘How friendly are they? Their faces are masks. They all look a thousand years old. What little energy they have is only the blind, mass desire to live, since no one of them eats enough to give him his own personal force.

Guilt at being well fed and healthy among them? But suffering is equally divided among all men; each has the same amount to undergo …’

Emotionally he felt that this last idea was untrue, but at the moment it was a necessary belief: it is not always easy to support the stares of hungry people.

asking himself if any American can truthfully accept a definition of life which makes it synonymous with

suffering.

For years it had been one of his superstitions that reality and true perception were to be found in the conversation of the labouring classes. Even though now he saw clearly that their formulas of thought and speech are as strict and as patterned, and thus as far removed from any profound expression of truth as those of any other class, often he found himself still in the act of waiting, with the unreasoning belief that gems of wisdom might yet issue from their mouths.

The validity of his existence at that moment was predicated on the assumption that she had not moved, but was still sitting there. It was as if she could still see him from the window, tiny and far away as he was, walking rhythmically uphill and down, through light and shadow; it was as if only she knew when he would turn around and walk the other way.

It made her sad to realize that in spite of their so often having the same reactions, the same feelings, they never would reach the same conclusions, because their respective aims in life were almost diametrically opposed.

It was useless to pretend otherwise. And just as she was unable to shake off the dread that was always with her, he was unable to break out of the cage into which he had shut himself, the cage he had built long ago to save himself from love.

‘the sky here’s very strange. I often have the sensation when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind.’

‘You know what?’ he said with great earnestness. ‘I think we’re both afraid of the same thing. And for the same reason. We’ve never managed, either one of us, to get all the way into life. We’re hanging on to the outside for all we’re worth, convinced we’re going to fall off at the next bump. Isn’t that true?’

‘Since he has no shame,’ thought Port, ‘I’ll have no mercy.’ So he said: ‘The reason I won’t lend you money is that I know I’ll never get it back, and I haven’t enough to give away. You see?