The Stories of Paul Bowles (76 page)

As to my writing S. herself, there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it. She’s made it very clear that she prefers not to hear from me. And what could I say at this point? “I hope you won’t regret your decision”? As you tell me, she already suspects that I disapprove of that decision, so that anything I might say would change suspicion to conviction. It would be hard to get her to believe that I have no objection to what she’s doing. She probably prefers to imagine me as being scandalized by her behavior; it would be more fun for her that way. She expects me to mind that things didn’t work out in the way I thought they would. But that’s only because she doesn’t know me. What she must consider to be my archaic epistolary style has helped her to think of me as an opinionated and uncompromising old bastard.

Nevertheless, please believe me when I tell you that she can fall in love with a Japanese garage mechanic, sleep with you, and marry an orangutan, and it will all be the same to me. There’s not enough time in life for recriminations.

(1987)

I
N THOSE DAYS
the social life of the city was sharply divided between the Moroccans and the Europeans, whose relationship to the former was the traditional one of master-servant. The average European household was normally run by a staff of five or six Moroccans. A larger establishment understandably needed a good many more, and the native work force was often fortified with a European chef, housekeeper and chauffeur. An unaccountable exception, according to local gossip, was the house of Sir Nigel Renfrew, who would have been expected to need a good-sized staff, but who was reported as employing only one man and one maid. This anomaly was repeatedly discussed by the members of the British colony, and one heard vague reports hinting that there was more than mere parsimony behind Sir Nigel’s spartan limiting of his help.

The year of his arrival in Tangier is uncertain; apparently it was immediately after the close of the Second World War. He must have brought a considerable fortune with him (either legally or clandestinely, which is more likely) for he lost no time in putting up a series of large apartment houses on what were then the outskirts of town. It’s doubtful that he recuperated his investment on any of these constructions,
since there were dozens of empty apartments all over town, waiting for occupancy.

The first eye-witness account I had of Sir Nigel came from two English friends whom he had invited to lunch. They waited for an hour and a half for him to appear, which he did without offering any apology or explanation; then they waited another half hour for the single manservant to arrange the dining table and bring the food. Their account of the ordeal was brief; they agreed that he was “insufferable.” As far as I’m aware, neither of them ever returned to his house. All this did not deter me, two or three years later, from accepting, along with a group of British and Canadian journalists, an invitation to dinner at Sir Nigel’s.

We had to leave our cars at some distance from the house and walk through an untended pasture where a few sheep grazed. It was still daylight, but I wondered aloud how we should find our way back to the road in the dark. One of the journalists, however, had a flash-light with him.

Sir Nigel’s unprepossessing appearance surprised me. He was a short man, very thin, with a seamed face and small colorless eyes set very close together. He seated himself between two correspondents whom he evidently knew fairly well, and spoke with them, paying no attention whatever to the rest of us. I studied his face, and decided that it was incapable of smiling, or indeed of replacing its expression of permanent displeasure with any other. He radiated hostility, and it was clear that the guests felt this; they ceased talking among themselves, and sat silently listening to their host’s scratchy voice.

A black manservant brought whiskey, soda and ice. When he had gone out, Sir Nigel waved his arms and said: “You see that man? I brought him from Zanzibar. He’s my cook, butler and gardener. You’d need half a dozen of your Moors to do the same job. Pack of lazy buggers, lolling about, smoking their pipes and cadging food. Useless sods.” He glared at us as if he suspected us of being disguised Moroccans, and I saw that he was already drunk.

On the floor in a dim part of the room there were several drums of varying sizes and shapes, all of them covered in zebra hide. In the hope of providing him with a different topic of conversation, I asked Sir Nigel if they also had been imported from Zanzibar. Looking at me with an expression which I could only interpret as one of acute rancor and contempt, he answered rapidly: “I have a house there,” and returned to his excoriation of Moroccans.

Of the dinner, I recall only that we ate seated on hassocks in groups of three, at three low tables, and that as the meal progressed our host became visibly more excited. He had forgotten the Moroccans, and was now heaping maledictions and obscenities upon the French and Spanish. They had no idea of how to run a colony, or of how to manage the ignorant and slothful natives. I had an unreasoning conviction that our Amphitryon’s mounting frenzy was the result of a decision he had made to involve us in an unpleasantness of some sort.

“You know, he’s out of his mind,” I muttered to the Canadian beside me. He nodded, not looking away from the malevolent face.

When the Zanzibari brought on the fruit, Sir Nigel sprang to his feet. “In a minute,” he shouted, “you’re going to see something you’ll not forget, by God. And remember, they come of their own accord.” With that he rushed from the room, and we remained, staring at one another.

Soon we heard a slight commotion. A curtain moved in the wall behind the drums, and a tall, muscular black woman strode in, not looking in our direction, and proceeded to light several lamps in that part of the room. Then she turned to lift the curtain while five girls in their midteens ambled in and sank to the floor, each beside a drum. They were clad in diaphanous white gowns, and their hair fell loosely about their shoulders. Three of them were what would be called raving beauties; the other two were merely pretty. The sight was impressive. Sir Nigel had been right in saying we would not forget it.

The girls began to thump indiscriminately on the drums, which, being so much more resonant than the hand drums Moroccan girls are used to playing, filled the room with a chaos of rhythmless pounding. Like the black woman who had ushered them in, they behaved as though the Europeans in front of them were invisible. No one attempted to say anything.

Suddenly Sir Nigel stood before us, brandishing a long circus whip. He had changed into jodhpurs and black leather boots, and his face had turned such a dangerously dark red that I wondered if we might not be going to witness then and there the death from apoplexy of Sir Nigel Renfrew. Although his movements appeared to be uncoordinated, he had no difficulty in cracking his whip with a maximum of sound, and this he proceeded to do about the heads of the cowering girls, who gave little shrieks of simulated terror as they writhed at his feet among the drums.

And now Sir Nigel gave a great shout, to which the girls responded by attacking each other in a wild free-for-all, yanking hair, ripping open the bodices of the filmy gowns and uttering prolonged, hair-raising screams. Sir Nigel hopped up and down, emitting little grunts, cracking the whip and from time to time actually lashing one of the frantic girls with it. A moment before, they had been play-acting, but now they began to sob, and to use their fingernails in the fight. No signal was given that I could detect, but once again the curtain was lifted and the black woman advanced upon the crazy group, forcing them apart and pulling them to their feet. Then she shoved them under the curtain and we were left with Sir Nigel, who still flicked his whip as he strode in our direction.

His exertions of a minute ago had left him short of breath. “They’re locked into their rooms now, you see.” He cracked the whip over our heads and stared into our faces, one after the other, as he pulled a heavy key from his pocket and shook it at us. “But if anybody feels like spending a little time with one of them, this is the master key.” His eyes flashed; they were the eyes of an enraged chimpanzee. I realized that for him the evening had been leading up to this moment. The others were clearly of the same mind, for no one said anything, and there was a long silence. Then Sir Nigel uttered a scornful “Hah!” and tossed the whip in the direction of the drums.

“I’m afraid I must be getting back to the hotel,” someone said. There were general murmurs of assent, and we all rose and thanked our host, who saw us to the door. He bowed. “Good night,” he said in mellifluous tones. “Good night, you bloody swine, good night.”

As we went up through the dark pasture, one of the Englishmen who knew Sir Nigel gave us some of the details. It was true that the girls came of their own accord, from villages in the hills roundabout. Each one was locked up for a month, and upon leaving was given an expensive qaftan, something she could never have hoped otherwise to possess. It was the sight of the garment which inspired other girls to come to Tangier and seek out Sir Nigel. They were not really mistreated, he said. Each had her own room in the servants’ quarters, and was supplied with food by the black woman. Now I understood why Sir Nigel would not have Moroccan servants; it would have been impossible. If any Moroccan had got wind of what went on in the house, there would have been an immediate scandal.

As a matter of fact, trouble did break out some months later, and one can only assume that it was linked to the presence of the girls. Sir Nigel left the country and was absent for several years. He did return, however, to die of a heart attack sitting at a table on the terrace of the Café de Paris, in the center of Tangier, at noon.

B
Y DAY HER EMPTY ROOM
had four walls, and the walls enclosed a definite space. At night the room continued forever into the darkness.

“If there are no mosquitos why do we have mosquito nets?”

“The beds are low and we have to tuck ourselves in with the nets, so that our hands can’t fall out and touch the floor,” Tom said. “You don’t know what might be crawling there.”

The day she arrived, the first thing he did after showing her the room where she would sleep, was to take her on a tour of the house. It was dim and clean. Most of the rooms were empty. It seemed to her that the help occupied the greater part of the building. In one room five women sat in a row along the wall. She was presented to all of them. Tom explained that only two of them were employed in the house; the others were visitors. There was the sound of men’s voices in another room, a sound which turned swiftly to silence at Tom’s knock on the door. A tall, very black man in a white turban appeared. She had the instant impression that he resented her presence, but he bowed gravely. “This is Sekou,” Tom told her. “He runs things around here. You might not guess it, but he’s extremely bright.” She glanced at her brother nervously; he seemed
to know why. “Don’t worry,” he added. “Nobody knows a word of English here.”

She could not go on talking about this man while she stood facing him. But when they were on the roof later, under the improvised awning, she continued the conversation. “What made you assume that I thought your man was stupid? I know you didn’t say that; but you as much as said it. I’m not a racist, you know. Do
you
think he looks slow-witted?”

“I was just trying to help you see the difference between him and the others, that’s all.”

“Oh,” she said. “There’s an obvious difference, of course. He’s taller, blacker, and with finer features than the others.”

“But there’s a basic difference, too,” Tom told her. “You see, he’s not a servant like them. Sekou is not his name. It’s his title. He’s a kind of chief.”

“But I saw him sweeping the courtyard,” she objected.

“Yes, but that’s just because he wants to. He likes to be in this house. I don’t mind having him here. He keeps the other men in order.”

They wandered to the edge of the roof. The sun was blinding.

“I can’t believe that,” she laughed. “He has the face of a tyrant.”

“I doubt if anyone suffers under him. You know,” he went on, suddenly raising his voice, “you
are
a racist. If Sekou were white, the idea would never have occurred to you.”

She faced him, there in the burning sunlight. “If he were white, he’d have a different face. After all, it’s the features that give a face expression. And I’m willing to bet anything that if he keeps the men in order he does it through fear.”

“I don’t think it’s likely,” he said. “But even so, why not?”

She went inside and stood in the doorway to her room. The maid had changed the position of her rug and mattress, so that they both lay at a ninety-degree angle to the way they had been arranged before. This disturbed her, although she did not know why.

My Dear Dorothy:

I was shocked to read the letter you wrote after your accident. Lucky you weren’t going fast. By the time you get this your leg will probably be in good condition. I hope so. I’m always surprised that any mail at all can get here, as it’s really the end of the world. When I think that the
nearest town to the town where we are is Timbuctoo, I get a sort of sinking feeling. It’s only momentary, however. What I have to remember is that I’m here because at the time it seemed an ideal solution, and all things considered, really the only thing to do. What else would have got me out of that depression that came over me after the divorce, except a long stay in a sanatorium. And who knows? Even that might not have done the trick. And financially it would have been ausgeschlossen, in any case. With Tom coming on his Guggenheim this seemed perfect. The idea was to get away from everything that could remind me in any way of what I’d been going through. This is certainly the antithesis of New York and of any place you can think of in the U.S.A. I was worried about food, but so far neither of us has been sick. Probably the important thing is that the cook is civilized enough to believe in the existence of bacteria, and is very careful to sterilize whatever needs sterilizing. The Niger River Valley is no place to come down with any disease. Fortunately we can get French mineral water for drinking. If its delivery should be cut off, or if it should not arrive in time, we’d have to drink what there is here, boiled and with Halazone. All this may sound silly, but living here makes one into a hypochondriac. You may wonder why I don’t describe the place, tell you what it looks like. I can’t. I don’t believe I could be objective about it, which would mean that when I finished you’d have less of an idea what it’s like than before I started. You’ll have to wait until you see what Tom does with it, although he hasn’t yet painted any landscapes at all—only what he sees in the kitchen: vegetables, fruit, fish, and a few sketches of natives bathing in the river. You’ll see it all when we get back.

Elaine Duncan is such a nut. Imagine her asking me if I don’t miss Peter. How does a mind like that work? At first I thought she was pulling my leg, but then I realized she was perfectly serious. I suppose it’s just her kind of sentimentality. She knows what I was going through and what it cost me to make the final decision. She also knows me well enough to realize that once I’d decided to get out of it, it was because I understood I couldn’t stay any longer with Peter, and most assuredly wasn’t of two minds about it. It’s clear she’s hoping I regret having got out of the marriage. I’m afraid she’s in for a big disappointment. At last I feel free. I can have my own thoughts, without anybody offering me a penny for them. Tom works all day in silence, and doesn’t notice whether I talk or not.
It’s so refreshing to be with somebody who pays no attention to you, doesn’t notice whether you’re there or not. All feelings of guilt evaporate. This is all very personal, of course. But in a place like this you become autoanalytical.

I do hope you’re completely recovered from the effects of the accident, and that you’ll keep warm. Here it’s generally just a little over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. You can imagine how much energy I have!

Devotedly,

Anita

NIGHTS WERE SLOW
in passing. Sometimes as she lay in the silent blackness it seemed to her that the night had come down and seized the earth so tightly that daylight would be unable to show through. It could already be noon of the next day and no one would know it. People would go on sleeping as long as it remained dark, Tom in the next room, and Johara and the watchman whose name she never could remember, in one of the empty rooms across the courtyard. They were very quiet, those two. They retired early and they rose early, and the only sound she ever heard from their side of the house was an occasional dry cough from Johara. It bothered her that there was no door to her room. They had hung a dark curtain over the doorway between Tom’s room and hers, so that the light of his roaring Coleman lamp would not bother her. He liked to sit up reading until ten o’clock, but immediately after the evening meal she was always somnolent, and had to go to bed, where she would sleep heavily for two or three hours before she awoke to lie in the dark, hoping that it was nearly morning. The crowing of cocks near and far was meaningless. They crowed at any time during the night.

In the beginning it had seemed quite natural that Johara and her husband should be black. In New York there had always been two or three black servants around the house. There she thought of them as shadows of people, not really at home in a country of whites, not sharing the same history or culture and thus, in spite of themselves, outsiders. Slowly, however, she had begun to see that these people here were masters of their surroundings, completely at home with the culture of the place. It was to be expected, of course, but it was something of a shock to realize that the
blacks were the real people and that she was the shadow, and that even if she went on living here for the rest of her life she would never understand how their minds worked.

Dear Elaine:

I should have written you ages ago when I first got here, but I’ve been under the weather for the past few weeks—not physically, really, except that the spirit and the flesh aren’t separated. When I’m depressed, everything in my body seems to go to pieces. I suppose that’s normal, perhaps it isn’t. God knows.

It’s true, when I first looked out at the flat land that went on and on to the horizon, I felt my depression dissolving in all that brightness. It didn’t seem possible that there could be so much light. And the stillness that surrounded each little sound! You feel that the town is built on a cushion of silence. That was something new—an amazing sensation, and I was very conscious of it. I felt that all this was exactly what I needed, to get my mind off the divorce and the rest of the trouble. There was nothing that had to be done, no one I had to see. I was my own master, and didn’t even have to bother with the servants if I didn’t want to. It was like camping out in a big empty house. Of course in the end I did have to bother with the servants, because they did everything wrong. Tom would tell me: Leave them alone. They know what they’re doing. I suppose they do know what they mean to do, but they don’t seem to be able to do it. If I find fault with the food, the cook looks bewildered and aggrieved. This is because she knows she’s famous in the Gao region as the woman whose cuisine pleases the Europeans. She listens and agrees, but in the manner of one soothing a deranged invalid. I suspect she thinks of me in just such terms.

By being completely aware of, and focusing his attention on the smallest details of the life going on around him, Tom manages to objectify the details, and so he remains outside, and far from them. He paints whatever is in front of his eyes at any moment, in the kitchen, or the market, or the edge of the river: vegetables and fruit being sliced, often with the knife still embedded in the flesh, bathers and fish from the Niger. My trouble is that this life sweeps me along with it in spite of me. I mean that I am being forced to participate in some sort of communal
consciousness that I really hate. I don’t know anything about these people. They’re all black, but nothing like “our” blacks in the States. They’re simpler, more friendly and straightforward, and at the same time very remote.

Something is wrong with night here. Logic would have it that night is only the time when the sky’s door is open and one can look out on infinity, and thus that the spot from which one looks out is of no importance. Night is night, no matter from where perceived. Night here is no different from night somewhere else. It’s only logic that says this. Day is huge and bright and it’s impossible to see farther than the sun. I realize that by “here” I don’t mean “here in the middle of the Sahara on the banks of the River Niger” but “here in this house where I’m living.” Here in this house with the floors of smooth earth where the servants go barefoot and you never hear anyone coming until he’s already in the room.

I’ve been trying to get used to this crazy life here, but it takes some getting used to, I can tell you. There are many rooms in the house. In fact, it’s enormous, and the rooms are big. And they look even larger, without furniture, of course. There is no furniture at all except for the mats on the floors of the rooms where we sleep and our suitcases and the wardrobes where we hang the few clothes we have with us. It was because of these wardrobes that the house was available, because they made it count as a “furnished house,” and that made the rent so high that no one wanted to take it. By our standards, of course, it’s very cheap, and God knows it should be, with no electricity and no water, without even a chair to sit in or a table to eat at, or, for that matter, a bed to sleep in.

Naturally I knew it was going to be hot, but I hadn’t imagined this sort of heat—solid, no change from day to day, no breeze. And remember, no water, so to take even a sponge bath is an entire production number. Tom is angelic about the water. He lets me have about all we can get hold of. He says females need more than men do. I don’t know whether that’s an insult or not, and I don’t care as long as I can get the water. He also says it’s not hot. But it is. I don’t know how to convert Centigrade into Fahrenheit, but if you do, change 46° C into F., and you’ll see that I’m right. 46° was what my thermometer registered this morning.

I don’t know which is worse, day or night. In the daytime, of course, it’s a little hotter, although not much. They don’t believe in windows here, so the house is dark inside, and that gives you a shut-in feeling. Tom
does a lot of his work on the roof in the sun. He claims he doesn’t mind it, but I can’t believe it’s not bad for him. I know it would be the end of me if I sat up there the way he does, hours at a time and with no break.

I had to laugh when I read your question about how I felt after the divorce, whether I “still cared” a little for Peter. What a crazy question! How could I still care for him? The way I feel now, if I never see another man it will be too soon. I’m really fed up with their hypocrisy, and I’d willingly send them all to Hell. Not Tom, of course, because he’s my brother, even though trying to live with him under these conditions isn’t easy. But trying to live at all in this place is hard. You can’t imagine how remote from everything it makes you feel.

The mail service here is not perfect. How could it be? But it’s not impossible. I do get letters, so be sure and write me. After all, the post office is this end of the umbilical cord that keeps me attached to the world. (I almost added:
and to sanity.)

I hope all is well with you, and that New York hasn’t grown any worse than it was last year; although I’m sure it has.

Much love, and write.

Anita