Um chá no deserto(The Sheltering Sky)
Tunner:
We're probably the first tourists they've had since the war.
Kit:
Tunner we're not tourists. We're travellers.
Tunner:
Oh. Whats the difference?
Port:
A tourist is someone, who thinks about going home the moment they arrive,
Tunner.
Kit:
Whereas a traveller might not come back at all.
Tunner: You mean I'm a tourist.
Kit:
Yes Tunner. And I'm half-and-half.
Tunner:
You've been to North Africa before, Port. Kit and I will just follow your
plan.
Port: My only plan is, I have no plan.
Port:
I had a strange dream last night, I'm just remembering..........
I won't remember it if I don't tell it. I was travelling on a train, which
I realised was going to crash into a mountain....
I knew it was going to crash but...at some point I knew I could stop the crash
if I could only open my mouth and scream
And then I realised it was too late...because I had reached up and broken
off my teeth with my hand as if they were made of plaster...
Decided to sob, one of those terrible dream sobs...
Kit:
Other people's dreams are so dull.
Port: Kit has days when everything in the world
is merely a sign for something else. A white Mercedes can't just simply be
a white Mercedes. It must have a secret meaning about the whole of life. Everything
is an omen. Nothing can just be what it is.
Port:
Could you be happy here?
Kit: Happy? Happy? How do you mean?
Port: I mean could you like it here?
Kit: How do I know? God, I wish you wouldn't
ask me questions like this!
Really! I can't answer them. What do you want me to say? "Yes I'll be
happy in Africa?" I like Ain Krorfa so much, but I can't tell whether
I want to stay for a month or I want to leave tomorrow.
Paul
Bowles: Are you lost?
Kit: Yes.
Narrator: Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.