The Stories of Paul Bowles (51 page)

W
HEN I WAS
a boy, Mother’s favorite spot for reading, the place where she sat when she was going to read for a long time, was an old chaise longue, kept always in the same position in a corner of the east room, far enough from the walls so that the light came in over her shoulders on both sides. The back of the chaise longue was piled with dozens of small down-stuffed cushions. It was a comfortable seat to recline in. Sometimes I would use it for a few minutes in the morning before she was up. Once she caught me there and ridiculed me.

Getting decrepit in your old age! she scoffed. You’re a growing boy. That’s a chair for an adult.

The garden was the place to lie on a summer afternoon. Overhead the wind hissed in the high eucalyptus and cypress trees. There were flying skeins of fog that swept by very fast, just above, sometimes catching the tops of the trees and swooping down through the branches. One summer when I was back from school in England I did all my studying out there on the ground behind bushes or hedges, or anywhere that was hidden from the sight of the house.

And I would lie face-down in the hot garden, and look beneath the
cut tips of the grass spears, into the miniature forest where the ants lived. Most of them were very small, and were not troubled by the mat I spread out over their domain. If the large red ones discovered it, as now and then they did, they attacked at once, and there was nothing to do but carry the mat somewhere else.

It went without saying that the Medina was forbidden territory. Mother would have reacted very badly had she known I had ever been in it alone. But from time to time I went on an errand and had the opportunity to slip into the old town and find my way along the alleys for a few minutes. I loved the way they suddenly changed direction and burrowed under the houses. In fact, you went under a house to get into the alley where Mama Tiemponada’s brothel stood. Hers was not the only one there, but it was the biggest. All the houses in the alley were brothels. The women leaned in the doorways and made remarks to the men walking by. I found the place mysterious and sinister. It seemed natural enough that Mother should not want me to come to the Medina.

One evening as I stood outside Mama Tiemponada’s in the alley watching the door, it opened and a single Moroccan boy came out. He stood still for an instant, and looking up at the full moon directly above, whistled once at it, then walked away. This struck me as very strange, and I remembered it. The whistle was casual and intimate, suggesting that the moon and he had been good friends for a long time. A year or two later, when Bouselham came to work for us, I thought I recognized him as the same boy.

Probably it would have been better for me if I’d got to know Father, but I never did. It did not occur to me to wonder what sort of man he was. His fiftieth birthday was well behind him when I was born, and by then he was interested primarily in golf. He paid no attention to me, and very little to Mother. At daybreak he would get up, eat a big breakfast, and ride his favorite horse to the country club at Boubana. We would not see him again until evening. The ladies said to Mother: Colonel Driscoll is so impressive up there on his horse! Their own husbands drove in their cars to the country club. I was convinced that they were secretly laughing at us because Father was so odd.

As a boy I sometimes played with Amy, because she lived on the property next to ours, down the road. She was five years older than I, a tomboy, and full of sadistic impulses which she often vented on me. When she was twenty her mother died, and Amy was left alone in a
house far too big for her. Then she began to spend almost all her time with Mother.

I was not surprised when Mother announced casually one day: Amy has a buyer for Villa Vireval. She’s coming to stay with us for a while.

Soon Amy was with us. She had changed with the years, and was now an introverted, nervous young woman with a passion for precision. She had an annoying tic: the constantly repeated clearing of her throat. In the beginning Father made an effort to converse with her, even though he was very much against having her with us. She was neurotic, he said; she was morbid and self-centered, and she sapped Mother’s energy.

What’s wrong with that girl? Can’t she leave you alone for a minute?

Mother, who like anyone else enjoyed being admired, was grateful even for Amy’s devotion.

She’s a well-balanced girl. I can’t think what you have against her.

As usual the gossip got the basic facts fairly straight, but the motivations wrong. Everyone was certain that Father had left home because of Bouselham, when actually it was because he could no longer bear to be in the same house with Amy. He put up with her for six months. Then, seeing that she had no intention of leaving, and that Mother was adamant in her refusal to suggest to her that she find another place to live, he suddenly went off to Italy. Mother was unperturbed. Your father needs a holiday, she said to me after he had gone. Of course she assumed he would return.

It was precisely at that point that Bouselham emerged from his obscurity. Father had engaged him a year or so earlier, when he was sixteen, as an assistant gardener. He weeded, raked, and carried water in the lower garden, and one seldom saw him anywhere near the house. But when Father left, he began to come into the kitchen, where the maids would give him tea. Before long he was eating regularly there with them, rather than sitting under a tree with whatever he had brought with him from home.

How did the relationship start between him and Mother? What was the beginning of it? There is no way of bringing up the subject with Bouselham, since it has never been mentioned and thus does not exist between us. But I know that whatever the beginning may have been, it was Mother who set it in motion.

Often Bouselham had nothing to do but sit in a café smoking kif, and it was not always certain that there would be someone who could play
cards with him. Most men worked during the day and came into the café after they had finished. Bouselham did not have to work. Ever since the colonel had gone away he had been with the colonel’s wife. She did not want him to work, because then he would have to get up very early every morning, whereas she liked to sleep late and have him with her. All the men in the café knew that Bouselham had a rich Nazarene woman who gave him whatever he wanted.

And this was what Amy eventually began to say to Mother in one way or another, over and over. In her view it was wrong of Mother to have Bouselham with her, not only because his culture, religion and social class were not hers, but also because he was too young for a woman of her age. Usually Mother replied blandly that she didn’t agree, but now and then she said a bit more. I heard her say one day: You’re trying to encroach on my private life, Amy, and you have no right to.

Not too long after that, Amy decided to go to Paris where a friend had invited her. She packed up very quickly and was suddenly gone. Mother limited her comment to saying: Amy’s a very sweet girl who has everything to learn, I’m afraid. And whether she will or not, I wonder.

The day Amy left I wandered into her room and looked around. It needed a thorough cleaning. I pulled the bureau out from the wall and peered down behind it. Underneath, wedged behind a back leg, was a crumpled postcard-size glossy print of Bouselham in bathing trunks on the beach at Sidi Qanqouch. For me this put Amy’s quarrel with Mother in a new light. For a moment I was even sorry she was gone; it would have been fun to see what a few leading questions might have brought out from behind those thin precise lips of hers. Had she coveted Bouselham for herself? Or did Mother interrupt something that was already going on between them when she brought Bouselham into the house to sleep in her room.

The tale had been going around Tangier for many months. I heard it first from an English woman; she had just arrived here, and so had no way of knowing that the subject of her story was my mother. The colonel’s wife used to disappear every night into the dark corners of the garden to meet the gardener, who was no more than a boy, an ordinary Moroccan workman. And when the colonel had had enough of her nonsense he had left, whereupon she had calmly taken the servant into the house and lived with him. I’m told she’s even given him a racing car! she added, pretending to burst into laughter.

Probably, I said.

There is no doubt that Mother changed in certain respects during the time Bouselham was living in the house. She did buy a second-hand Porsche convertible for him, and this was certainly most unlike her. Her manner became distant; she seemed uninvolved in all the things that heretofore had been her life. When I suggested that I move out of the house and take a flat in town, she merely raised her eyebrows. You’ll come to dinner twice a week, was all she said.

What finally decided her against Bouselham was a long and complicated saga involving his sister. Once she had carefully checked on the details of the story, her resolve to get rid of him was instantaneous. However, the only way she could devise for accomplishing this was so drastic as to be laughable. Mother has lived in this country for many years, and should not have been so deeply disturbed by Bouselham’s behavior, particularly since it had nothing whatever to do with her. To me what he did seems natural enough, but then, I was born here. I first heard about it from Bouselham himself, not long after I moved out of the house and took the apartment in town.

I had been out to dinner and had walked home afterward. A thunderstorm was approaching from the direction of the strait. Soon hail showered against the windows. There was a very bright bolt of lightning, and the electricity was gone. I got out a flashlight, started some candles burning, and stood in front of the fireplace for a while. The thunderstorm circled around and came back, and it rained harder. In the midst of this there was a banging on the door, and when I opened it found Bouselham standing there, completely wet.

He looked as wild and as pleased with himself as ever, in spite of the rivulets of rain running down his face. Immediately he took off his shoes and socks and crouched in front of the fireplace, almost inside it, while he talked. Every day, he said, he was seeing a lawyer friend of his who was helping him.

To do what? I asked.

Avoiding a direct answer, he pivoted on his heels to face me, and asked if I could let him have ten thousand francs. The lawyer had to have the money for photocopies and notarizations. His fee would be contingent upon the success of his case, later. As soon as I had agreed to let him have the money, the story began to come out.

A certain rich merchant of the Medina, intent on the pleasures of the
twilight hour, used to go each day and sit in a café at the end of the city. Here he could see in three directions, and hundreds of people were visible nearby and in the distance, walking along the roads. Each day, sooner or later, a girl passed by with an older woman who carried a basket. He sat at a table on the sidewalk, facing in the direction from which they always came, so that he could see them from far away, and watch the girl as she approached. Every afternoon he saw her eyes pick him out from among the others at the café, but from that moment on she would give no sign of knowing he was there.

How many years since I’ve seen such a beauty? he sighed. He would notice them coming far down the road under the eucalyptus trees, long before she could see him, for they were walking into the sunset light. The instant came when she saw him, and then her head bent forward. The rich merchant would watch her as she came nearer, his eyes never leaving her. It seemed to him that she was dancing rather than walking, and as she went past, often so near that he could have touched her djellaba by stretching out his arm, he was exasperated by the impossibility of speaking with her.

Maybe one day they’ll let her out by herself, he thought, and so he waited.

The day finally came when he saw her walking along carrying the basket herself, and no one was with her. Ah, he said softly, rubbing the ends of his fingers together. He called the waiter and paid him. Then he sat quietly until she had gone by. As the girl turned the corner he got up and began to walk after her.

He caught up with her only after she had gone into another street. May I drive you somewhere? he asked her.

You may drive me home if you like, she said.

This was not what the rich merchant had hoped to hear. However, he led her to his car, which was parked not far away.

I brought Bouselham a cup of coffee. He sipped it, still crouching by the fire, and said nothing for several minutes. Then abandoning his storytelling manner, he went on casually, as though recapitulating a tale I already knew.

And I was just coming out of a bacal there, and I saw this Mercedes parked up ahead. And not with Belgian license-plates, either. Moroccan ones, and that means money. And then, while I was still looking, I stopped believing what I was seeing, because the door of the car opened
and my sister got out and ran up toward the corner. I knew she’d seen me and didn’t think I’d seen her. The first thing I thought of was going after her and killing her. While I stood there the car drove away. I didn’t see the man or get the number.

What good would that have done, if you’d killed her? I said, although I knew that for him it was one of those meaningless European remarks. Surprisingly, he laughed and said: I’m not that stupid. I felt sorry for her, though, that night when I got her alone at home and saw how frightened she was.

I saw you get out of the car, I told her. But then I said: You say he’s always at the Café Dakhla. Tomorrow you’re going to show me which one he is. As you walk past him you’re going to cough.

And she did, and when he left the café I followed him and saw him get into his Mercedes. I watched him drive away and I thought: Maybe. Maybe. Incha’ Allah!

Once he had identified the man through his license-plate, he began to ask questions, first going to the qahouaji there in the café, and then having narrowed his search, to several merchants and bazaar-keepers in the city.