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officials obliged to travel in unfriendly zones. But the rest-houses of
Yemen are rather like the medieval type inns described in
Don
Quixote
and
The Decameron.
They are, in no way, modern hotels, but some–
thing else completely. In Yemen, the rest-houses are located, for the
most part, in old gloomy buildings on the outskirts of the cities; for
example, at San'a the rest-house is in an old Turkish ex-prison. Like the
Castello dell'Inominat'o
described in such minute detail by Manzoni,
the rest-houses have, on the ground floor, an anteroom or porter's
office which is, in reality, a guardroom: rifles, scimitars, cartridge belts,
daggers hang from nails on the walls; various armed men (in Yemen it
is very difficult to distinguish a soldier from a common citizen: both
are armed more or less in the same way) are stretched out on the
floor, on cushions or mats, or else seated around small tables on
which tiny cups of coffee are set.
From the anteroom, you go up to the second floor on a roughly
made staircase with immensely high steps. Here the traveler is shown
into the reception room, the Yemenite version of the hall. It is a large
rather squalid rectangular room with a close row of straight-backed
chairs and easy chairs arranged around the walls as they are in a
ballroom in the provinces. The furniture is Western; in one rest-house
they were all in Louis XV style, ruthlessly curled and gilded. On the
floor, large printed carpets; at the windows, fluttering curtains of
flowered cretonne. The traveler sits down on an easy chair, sips the
usual Turkish coffee and li stens to the radio spill forth an uninterrupted
and noisy stream of government propaganda. Finally, an individual in
robe and turban (a director, a secretary, or merely a servant?) arrives
to give a brief account of the situation in the rest-house. Well, the
traveler can choose between two equally disagreeable alternatives:
either to sleep with four other guests in a large room or to sleep
alone in a small room in which, however, there are still all the belong–
ings of someone who is away on a trip for the moment.
The traveler naturally chooses the second alternative if he is a
foreign er; if he is a Yemenite, he' l! probably choose the first; the
Yemenites are sociable, affectionate and have a medieval inclination
towards promiscuity. The traveler, following the servant who carries
his bags, passes through the hall on which the doors of the bedrooms
face. They are all wide open and inside you can see an expanse of
unmade beds and men lying down on the covers, or sitting on the
edge of their beds talking and drinking coffee. But here is the little room.
Alas, it's very close to the bathroom and the least you can say about the
bathrooms in the rest-houses is that they don't exactly emanate a perfume
