The Stories of Paul Bowles (62 page)

Then one evening as his friend lay gracefully coiled in front of him, he began to think of the old man, and formed an idea that put all other things out of his mind. There had not been any kif paste in the house for several weeks, and he decided to make some. He bought the ingredients the following day, and after work he prepared the paste. When it was done, he mixed a large amount of it in a bowl with milk and set it down for the snake. Then he himself ate four spoonfuls, washing them down with tea.

He quickly undressed, and moving the table so that he could reach it, stretched out naked on a mat near the door. This time he continued to tap on the table, even after the snake had finished drinking the milk. It lay still, observing him, as if it were in doubt that the familiar drumming came from the brown body in front of it.

Seeing that even after a long time it remained where it was, staring at him with its stony yellow eyes, Allal began to say to it over and over: Come here. He knew it could not hear his voice, but he believed it could feel his mind as he urged it. You can make them do what you want, without saying a word, the old man had told him.

Although the snake did not move, he went on repeating his command, for by now he knew it was going to come. And after another long wait, all at once it lowered its head and began to move toward him. It
reached his hip and slid along his leg. Then it climbed up his leg and lay for a time across his chest. Its body was heavy and tepid, its scales wonderfully smooth. After a time it came to rest, coiled in the space between his head and his shoulder.

By this time the kif paste had completely taken over Allal’s mind. He lay in a state of pure delight, feeling the snake’s head against his own, without a thought save that he and the snake were together. The patterns forming and melting behind his eyelids seemed to be the same ones that covered the snake’s back. Now and then in a huge frenzied movement they all swirled up and shattered into fragments which swiftly became one great yellow eye, split through the middle by the narrow vertical pupil that pulsed with his own heartbeat. Then the eye would recede, through shifting shadow and sunlight, until only the designs of the scales were left, swarming with renewed insistence as they merged and separated. At last the eye returned, so huge this time that it had no edge around it, its pupil dilated to form an aperture almost wide enough for him to enter. As he stared at the blackness within, he understood that he was being slowly propelled toward the opening. He put out his hands to touch the polished surface of the eye on each side, and as he did this he felt the pull from within. He slid through the crack and was swallowed by darkness.

On awakening Allal felt that he had returned from somewhere far away. He opened his eyes and saw, very close to him, what looked like the flank of an enormous beast, covered with coarse stiff hair. There was a repeated vibration in the air, like distant thunder curling around the edges of the sky. He sighed, or imagined that he did, for his breath made no sound. Then he shifted his head a bit, to try and see beyond the mass of hair beside him. Next he saw the ear, and he knew he was looking at his own head from the outside. He had not expected this; he had hoped only that his friend would come in and share his mind with him. But it did not strike him as being at all strange; he merely said to himself that now he was seeing through the eyes of the snake, rather than through his own.

Now he understood why the serpent had been so wary of him: from here the boy was a monstrous creature, with all the bristles on his head and his breathing that vibrated inside him like a far-off storm.

He uncoiled himself and glided across the floor to the alcove. There was a break in the mud wall wide enough to let him out. When he had pushed himself through, he lay full length on the ground in the crystalline
moonlight, staring at the strangeness of the landscape, where shadows were not shadows.

He crawled around the side of the house and started up the road toward the town, rejoicing in a sense of freedom different from any he had ever imagined. There was no feeling of having a body, for he was perfectly contained in the skin that covered him. It was beautiful to caress the earth with the length of his belly as he moved along the silent road, smelling the sharp veins of wormwood in the wind. When the voice of the muezzin floated out over the countryside from the mosque, he could not hear it, or know that within the hour the night would end.

On catching sight of a man ahead, he left the road and hid behind a rock until the danger had passed. But then as he approached the town there began to be more people, so that he let himself down into the seguia, the deep ditch that went along beside the road. Here the stones and clumps of dead plants impeded his progress. He was still struggling along the floor of the seguia, pushing himself around the rocks and through the dry tangles of matted stalks left by the water, when dawn began to break.

The coming of daylight made him anxious and unhappy. He clambered up the bank of the seguia and raised his head to examine the road. A man walking past saw him, stood quite still, and then turned and ran back. Allal did not wait; he wanted now to get home as fast as possible.

Once he felt the thud of a stone as it struck the ground somewhere behind him. Quickly he threw himself over the edge of the seguia and rolled squirming down the bank. He knew the terrain here: where the road crossed the oued, there were two culverts not far apart. A man stood at some distance ahead of him with a shovel, peering down into the seguia. Allal kept moving, aware that he would reach the first culvert before the man could get to him.

The floor of the tunnel under the road was ribbed with hard little waves of sand. The smell of the mountains was in the air that moved through. There were places in here where he could have hidden, but he kept moving, and soon reached the other end. Then he continued to the second culvert and went under the road in the other direction, emerging once again into the seguia. Behind him several men had gathered at the entrance to the first culvert. One of them was on his knees, his head and shoulders inside the opening.

He now set out for the house in a straight line across the open
ground, keeping his eye on the clump of palms beside it. The sun had just come up, and the stones began to cast long bluish shadows. All at once a small boy appeared from behind some nearby palms, saw him, and opened his eyes and mouth wide with fear. He was so close that Allal went straight to him and bit him in the leg. The boy ran wildly toward the group of men in the seguia.

Allal hurried on to the house, looking back only as he reached the hole between the mud bricks. Several men were running among the trees toward him. Swiftly he glided through into the alcove. The brown body still lay near the door. But there was no time, and Allal needed time to get back to it, to lie close to its head and say: Come here.

As he stared out into the room at the body, there was a great pounding on the door. The boy was on his feet at the first blow, as if a spring had been released, and Allal saw with despair the expression of total terror in his face, and the eyes with no mind behind them. The boy stood panting, his fists clenched. The door opened and some of the men peered inside. Then with a roar the boy lowered his head and rushed through the doorway. One of the men reached out to seize him, but lost his balance and fell. An instant later all of them turned and began to run through the palm grove after the naked figure.

Even when, from time to time, they lost sight of him, they could hear the screams, and then they would see him, between the palm trunks, still running. Finally he stumbled and fell face downward. It was then that they caught him, bound him, covered his nakedness, and took him away, to be sent one day soon to the hospital at Berrechid.

That afternoon the same group of men came to the house to carry out the search they had meant to make earlier. Allal lay in the alcove, dozing. When he awoke, they were already inside. He turned and crept to the hole. He saw the man waiting out there, a club in his hand.

The rage always had been in his heart; now it burst forth. As if his body were a whip, he sprang out into the room. The men nearest him were on their hands and knees, and Allal had the joy of pushing his fangs into two of them before a third severed his head with an axe.

(1977)

I
T WAS NOT
his fault that he had lost his job, Abdelkrim explained to his friends. For more than a year and a half he had worked at Patricia’s, and they always had got on smoothly. This is not to say that she did not find fault with him; but Nazarenes always criticize the work Moslems do for them, and he was used to that. Although at such moments she looked at him as though he were a small child, her objections came out in a gentler voice than most Nazarenes use. His tasks were simple enough, but they had demanded his constant presence on the property. Unless he were given specific permission to go to the cinema or sit in a café for an hour or two, he was obliged to be on hand. Patricia relied solely upon taxis; she had no car, so that Abdelkrim was able to live comfortably in the garage, where he cooked his own meals and listened to his radio.

Patricia had come from California a few years ago and bought the house. She was not exactly a girl, because she told him she had already been married to three different men, but she looked like a girl, and behaved, he said, like a nervous virgin who suspected she was never going to find a husband. I swear, he said, you wouldn’t think she’d ever had a man.

She wore peculiar clothes, and pounds of jangling jewelry (it was all silver and copper, he said, not gold). Even her long earrings made a constant clicking sound. Abdelkrim’s feeling about her was that she was a nice girl, but crazier than most Nazarenes. Even when the weather was not cold she wanted a fire roaring in the fireplace. There were plenty of electric lights, but she would only burn candles; she said electricity gave a dead light. The house was crammed with zebra hides and leopard pelts, and there was a collection of monstrous wooden heads which she claimed were African gods. Abdelkrim could see for himself that they represented devils. He always looked past them rather than at them.

For the six months prior to his dismissal Patricia’s mother had been staying with her. She was a small excitable woman with bulging black eyes. In her frequent arguments with Patricia she shrieked and sometimes wept, and he decided that it was her mother who had made Patricia crazy.

Abdelkrim’s job consisted of three distinct kinds of work. In the morning he had to walk two miles to the market in the city, buy the food for the day and carry it back to the house. Afternoons he worked in the garden, and at night he acted as watchman. Patricia had presented her terms at the beginning, and he had accepted them. Since then he had never been absent for an hour without permission.

It was not a good garden to be in on a hot afternoon. Since the house was new, there was not one bush or tree big enough to provide any shade. Abdelkrim did not mind working in the sun, but he liked to rest fairly often and smoke a pipe of kif, and in order for that to give him the greatest relaxation and pleasure, he must be sitting somewhere deep in the shade. As a boy fifteen years ago, he had known shady places nearby where he and his friends played. He had vivid memories of the pine woods at Moujahiddine, the grove of high eucalyptus trees that covered the hillside at Ain Chqaf, and the long shaded tunnels the boys cut through the jungle of matted vines and blackberry bushes outside his house. All this was gone now; new villas covered the countryside.

There did remain one place where he could find the sort of shade he had loved to seek out in his boyhood. Half an hour’s walk from Patricia’s house, around the long cemetery wall, over the fields, and down into the valley of Boubana, took him to the country club, nestling in an oasis of greenery. Behind the clubhouse lay a strip of the original forestland, with a slow-moving stream that meandered noiselessly through it. The golf
course was more often than not deserted; he could run across the fairways without fear of being seen, and then follow the stream until he came to the forest. Where the big trees began, it was like entering a huge silent building. The screaming of the cicadas was left outside with the sunlight. Once inside, all he could hear was the stirring of leaves in the upper branches, a distant watery sound that seemed to him the perfect music for a hot summer afternoon.

One Friday Abdelkrim asked if he might be absent in the afternoon of the following day, since it was a national holiday. Without replying Patricia went into another room and began to confer with her mother. When she came out she said that they had been planning to go on a picnic with some American friends, but that they could arrange to go on Sunday just as well.

Saturday came up hot and still. Since there was to be a parade, his friends had gone off to the town to see it. When Abdelkrim had carried the food back from the market and left it in the kitchen, he went quietly to his room in the garage. There he put his bread, tunafish and olives into a small bag, along with everything else that would help him to pass a pleasant afternoon, and went out through the gate bound for Boubana. Probably he would not have undertaken the long walk in the heat of the day (for it was unusually hot) if only there had been a dark corner of the garden where he could have sat and smoked and drunk his tea in shadowed privacy. This sun is poison, he said to himself as he went along.

When he entered the forest he was already hungry. Not far from one of the paths that snaked through the underbrush, he found a large flat rock where he spread out his things and ate a leisurely lunch. This is the place to be, he thought, not standing in the sun on the Boulevard along with fifty thousand others, waiting to see a few floats go past. He smoked a few pipes of kif, and laying his sebsi beside him on the rock, he yawned, leaned back, and stretched. At that moment he became aware of a commotion in the bushes on the other side of the stream. There were grunts and wheezes, and then a heavy thud as something hit the ground. He remained immobile for an instant, then swiftly threw himself face downward, flat on the earth.

The sounds came closer. He raised his head a bit and saw, not far away, five men carrying a big black cube as they stumbled along the path among the trees. In another instant he knew that the object, which seemed to be almost too heavy for them to manage, was a safe. There was
a crackling sound as they dropped it into a mass of bushes. Rapidly they uprooted plants and gathered armfuls of leaves, tossing them in piles, to cover all signs of the object.

With great caution Abdelkrim crawled in the opposite direction, still flat on his belly. A dry branch cracked under him as he slid across it. The sounds of activity behind him ceased. A voice said: Someone’s there.

Then he got to his feet wildly and ran. At one point he made the mistake of looking back. The five men stood there, staring after him. But he had recognized one of them, and in turn had been recognized.

He ran panting out of the woods, across a field, and into a lane bordered by thorn bushes. Three farmers were stretched out under a tree, eyeing him with surprise. He slowed his pace. When he was out of their sight he pulled off his sweat-soaked shirt. The police might easily question the farmers.

He was now certain that no one was following him. He got to the paved road, where an occasional car went by, and breathed more easily.

What he had seen in that brief instant of looking back was the brutal face of Aziz, the waiter in the bar at the Country Club. Everyone feared and disliked him, but the director kept him working there because one blow of his huge fist on the top of the head landed a troublesome client on the floor. They said of Aziz, and only half in jest, that the only times he prayed were just after he had killed someone.

If the farmers should mention that they had seen a young man hurrying along the lane, the police could find him and ask him questions, and no matter what he told them, if Aziz were caught, he would never believe it had not been Abdelkrim who had betrayed him.

It was even hotter once he had crossed the bridge and started to climb the hill. He had heard enough about Aziz to know that the most prudent thing for him to do at the moment was to get out of Tangier. His brother Mustapha would be happy to see him. Agadir was a long way off, but once he was there he would have no expenses.

He walked to the house with the afternoon sun beating down on his back. In the garage he threw himself onto the mattress and thought about his bad luck. His kif, his pipe, everything he had taken with him to the woods, had remained behind, there on the rock.

He would catch the night bus for Casablanca, the one that left the beach at half past eleven. Patricia and her mother must suspect nothing; indeed, his main consideration was how to get out of the garage and
through the big gate without their hearing him, for at night the only sounds near the house came from the crickets. If one of them were to hear the gate click behind him when he crept out, he knew they would rush out and go screaming along the road after him in their bathrobes.

Soon Patricia knocked on the door, interrupting his meditations. I thought I heard you come in, she said with satisfaction. Afraid that his disturbed state might somehow show in his face, he forced himself to smile, but she did not notice because she had more to say. They had been invited by Monsieur and Madame Lemoine to attend a Jilala party at half past seven, and he could come too for a half hour if he wanted. It was to be at Hadj Larbi’s house, which was not far away, so that it would be easy for him to walk back before dark.

Abdelkrim nodded vigorously in agreement, an expression of unfeigned satisfaction on his face. He saw his problem being solved for him.

Now that he no longer dreaded the night, he was eager for it to arrive. The suitcase he would take with him was ready; he hid it in a dark corner of the garage. At precisely half past seven Monsieur Lemoine was outside in the road, sounding his car horn; Madame Lemoine sat stiffly beside him. Patricia, loaded down with chains and medallions, ran to the car and leaned in to speak with Madame Lemoine. Now and then she raised her head and shouted the word Mother! toward the house.

Abdelkrim could hear the older woman complaining in her bedroom as she got her things together. Finally she came out, looking more irritable than usual. He sat between them on the back seat.

Hadj Larbi’s garden was bounded at one end by a row of tall cypresses, black against the twilit sky. As they went in, one of Hadj Larbi’s sons, whom Abdelkrim knew, came up to him and led him to the musicians’ side of the courtyard. We have the Jilala in for my uncle every year during the smayyim, he told him.

Abdelkrim sat down on a mat beside the moqqaddem. An old man in a white djellaba came out of the house and stood facing the musicians. The drums began a leisurely rhythm, and he bent forward and slowly shuffled back and forth over the paving stones.

As the drummers increased their speed, the old man’s feet ceased to scrape and drag; his legs now seemed to be springing upward of their own accord. He strained at the end of the sash that was wound about his waist and held by the man behind him. His eyes were on the fire, and he wanted to hurl himself into it. The music swelled in volume, the drummers
began to hit the ground with the rims of their benadir, and the old man’s frenzy increased. His face constantly changed its expression, distorted as if by waves of water washing over it. He was coming into the presence of the saint who would lead him far beyond the visible world to a place where his soul would be cleansed.

When he finally toppled to the ground there was a concerted rush of men to pull him away from the fire. They clustered around, touching his head, covering him with a blanket, lifting him carefully and carrying him away, out of sight.

Above the riad’s wall Abdelkrim saw the dark obelisks of the cypresses. If he himself were to invoke Sidi Maimoun or Sidi Rahal, he was certain they would pay him no attention; it was too late for young men to expect to get in touch with the saints. He slipped out into the garden, said good-night to a servant standing in the doorway, and was on his way.

At the garage he picked up his valise, locked the gate behind him, and set out for the bus terminal on the beach, trying not to imagine the scene that would ensue the next morning when they found him gone. He waited nearly three hours for the bus to open its doors and let the passengers in.

Two months later he had reliable word that Aziz and his accomplices had been caught the very day after the robbery, there in the same part of the woods while they hammered at the safe, trying to get it open. He returned to Tangier and went directly to Patricia’s house. But a maid whom he did not know brought him word that she would not see him.

The maid’s expression was apologetic; out of friendliness she added: The old one and the young one, they both say they’ll never forgive you. The idea of this struck her as strangely comic, and she laughed.

Abdelkrim turned to look with scorn at the garden. More to himself than to her he said: One real tree, and it would have been different.

But in any case she had not heard him, or had not understood, for she continued to smile. No, they don’t want to see you, she said again.

(1980)