NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  I met Mohammed at the Hotel El-Minzah, one of the landmarks of Tangiers, an elegant place but untypical in being rather expensive.

  “Mr. Paul Bowles is ill,” he said.

  “You told me that yesterday. Is he sicker now?”

  “Perhaps,” Mohammed said.

  “Did you deliver my letter?”

  “Yes.”

  “No answer?”

  “You can ask Mr. Paul Bowles.”

  “And how will I do that?”

  “You can meet him.”

  The problem was finding him. And it was odd that everyone knew him and yet no one could say exactly where he lived. Even odder was the fact that he had been living in the same apartment block for almost forty years. He did not get out much. He had sought exile in Tangier; he had also sought exile in his apartment. Mohammed knew the name of the building in which Bowles lived, and the street, but no one seemed to recognize these names. My taxi driver had to ask directions. The street had been renamed—it was no longer Imam Kastellani. The building had no number. It was about a mile from the center of Tangier, in what counted as a suburb. And it was not much of a building—four nondescript stories, you entered by the back, and the ground floor was occupied by two shops.

  A small girl playing in the foyer told me in French, “The American Bowles is upstairs in number twenty—the fourth floor.”

  I went up and rang the bell and waited. I rang it four times, standing in the semidarkness of the hallway. Except for the jangling of the bell, there was no other sound inside. The afternoon was cold and damp, the building smelled gloomily of stewed meat. I thought: If I am spared, if I attain the age of eighty-five, I do not want to live in a place like this. Give me sunshine.

  “One time I visited Bowles and when I entered his apartment he was being thrown into the air by an Arab,” my friend Ted Morgan had told me.

  Historian and biographer (Maugham, Churchill and FDR, as well as William Burroughs), Morgan had lived in Tangier in his previous incarnation as Sanche de Gramont. His descriptions of Tangier in his Burroughs biography, Literary Outlaw, had rekindled my desire to visit the city, which he regarded as lurid but fun. But what was this about Bowles being thrown into the air?

  “The Arab was muscular and had a very serious expression, and he was bouncing Bowles the way you might throw a baby in the air to make it laugh. That was what struck me. Bowles was giggling madly as he went up and down.”

  But there was no answer from Bowles’s apartment. I turned to buzz the elevator when the door of number twenty opened and a dark and rather tough-looking Moroccan in a black leather jacket stood facing me.

  “Yes?”

  I said, “I would like to see Mr. Bowles.”

  The Arab stared at me. Why had it taken so long for him to answer the door?

  I said, “I want to ask him if he received my letter.”

  It seemed a lame excuse, but the man nodded. “Wait here. I will ask him.”

  He had left the door ajar, so I could see into the shadowy apartment, to a room with cushions and low chairs, a sort of Moroccan parlor, with shelves but not many books. There was a small kitchen to the right, a stove with a blackened kettle on it; but it was cold—nothing cooking. I nudged the door with my foot, and as I did so the Arab returned.

  “You can go in,” he said. He was abrupt, neither polite nor rude. And he was strong. I could just imagine this Arab as the man in Ted Morgan’s story, tossing the distinguished writer in the air and making him giggle. The Arab vanished, leaving me to find my own way.

  The parlor was dark—I could not read the titles of the few books on the shelves. Another small room beyond it was darker still, but its shadows were an effect of the brightness in the last room, where Paul Bowles lay in a brown bathrobe, on a low pallet against one wall, propped up, like a monk in a cell.

  My first impression of the room was that it was very warm and very cluttered. The heat came from a hissing blowtorch attached to a gas bottle, a primitive heater shooting a bluey-orange flame at Bowles from a few feet away. The litter of small objects included notebooks and pens, as well as medicine bottles and pills, and tissues. There was an odor of camphor and eucalyptus in the air that gave it the atmosphere of a sickroom.

  “Come in, come in,” Bowles said. “Yes, I know your books. Take that chair.”

  He had a genteel American voice, rather soft, with one of those patrician East Coast accents that is both New York and New England—but in fact placeless, more a prep school than a regional accent.

  “I’m not well at the moment. I had a blocked artery in my leg. The doctor operated immediately, and I think it worked. But here I am. I can’t walk. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to.”

  Yet, apart from lying there on his pallet, he did not look ill and he certainly did not seem elderly. His face was almost boyish, his hair was white but there was a lot of it—he had the look of a parson or a schoolmaster. What he had just said was precise. He spoke carefully, sometimes ironically, and was responsive. His hearing was excellent, his mind was sharp. Only his posture—supine—and his thinness, indicated that he might be ill. Otherwise he looked like someone whom I had disturbed in his nap, which was possibly the case.

  Everything he might need was within reach. He was surrounded by books and papers and medicine, by a teapot and spoons and matches; and the wall facing him was divided into shelves and cubbyholes, in which there were stacks of sweaters and scarves and manuscripts. Some of the manuscripts were typed, and others were musical scores.

  On the low table near where Bowles lay there was a large metronome, and bottles of capsules and tubes of ointment, and cassette tapes and a tin of Nesquik and cough drops and a partly eaten candy bar and a crumpled letter from the William Morris Agency and another note folded and jammed into an envelope scribbled, Paul Bowles, Tanger, Maroc, a vague address but it had obviously found him, as I had, with little more information than that.

  That metronome reminded me of something Bowles said in a letter to Henry Miller. The letter is in his collection In Touch, and it relates to his choosing to live in Tangier. “I agree with you about doing things slowly,” he wrote. “Now that I think of it, it’s one of the reasons why I’m still here. One can set one’s life metronome at the speed that seems convenient for living. In the States the constant reminder that time is passing, that one must be quick, removes all the savor of being in the midst of living.”

  Blackout curtains covered the window. That impressed me. You would not know in this small back room whether it was night or day, nor what country you were in.

  “I am very sorry to disturb you,” I said. “It was kind of you to see me. I won’t stay long.”

  He had blue piercing eyes. His thin hands were folded over his brown robe, and some papers lay on his lap. The blowtorch hissed and fizzed.

  “I’m glad you came,” he said.

  “But I can see you’re working. I know I’m interrupting.”

  “I wish I could get up,” Bowles said. “I’m doing a translation—Roderigo Rey Rosa, a Guatemalan. And I have some work to do on a piece of music. What brings you to Tangier?”

  “I’ve been traveling in the Mediterranean, trying to make some sense of it. Going to places I’ve never been before,” I said. “But you’ve been here since—when?”

  “I first came here in 1931,” Bowles said, tugging his robe closer to his throat. “I was planning to go to Villefranche. Gertrude Stein said, ‘Go to Tangier.’ I didn’t know Tangier from Algiers. She had been here. She was very interested in a local painter.”

  Gertrude Stein—hadn’t she also sent Sir Francis Rose and Dorothy Carrington to Corsica? And Robert Graves to Mallorca? And Hemingway to Spain? My impression of her now was of a big bossy lesbian, queening it in her salon in Paris, directing literary traffic, sending writers to unlikely destinations in the Mediterranean.

  “I came with Aaron Copland,” Bowles said. “He hated it. There is often drumming at night here—you must have hea
rd it. Aaron couldn’t sleep. He used to hear these drums and say, ‘The natives are on the warpath.’ He was very worried. He went away, but I stayed.”

  “But you must have traveled a great deal. I love your Mexican stories, especially ‘Pastor Dow at Tacaté.’ Pastor Dow and his wind-up phonograph, playing jazz so that the Indians will stay and listen to his sermon.”

  “I was in Mexico from ’36 until—when was Pearl Harbor?”—I reminded him—“Yes, until 1941,” he said. And he smiled. “My favorite part of ‘Pastor Dow’ is the little girl with the small alligator dressed up as a doll.”

  “Have you done any traveling lately?”

  “I went to Madrid last June to hear a performance of my music.”

  “What about the United States—do you have a hometown?”

  “New York is my hometown, if New York can be called a hometown,” Bowles said. “But I haven’t been back to America for twenty-seven years. I’m not afraid of flying. It’s just that it’s a lot of trouble—all the delays and waiting. And you can only bring one suitcase. I liked traveling in the great days, by ship, when I could bring half a dozen trunks—two of them might be filled with books. Now that is impossible.”

  “How long has this been home for you?”

  “I moved to this apartment in 1957, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I meant Tangier.”

  “Years,” Bowles said. “I had a house in Sri Lanka for a while. But I like it here. I like Islamic countries. It’s very corrupt here, but not as corrupt as some of these Central American countries.”

  “Has it changed you, living here so long?”

  “Living here, among Muslims, I suppose I’ve become more patient and fatalistic,” Bowles said. “You have no control over things, so what can you do? Muslims live their faith, they are seldom hypocrites. But hypocrisy is part of Christianity.”

  “What is it about Tangier that attracts so many foreigners?”

  He shrugged. The question did not provoke him. He had perhaps heard it ten thousand times. He said, “They don’t stay. The Beats came here twice, first in ’57, and then in ’61. Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg.”

  “And William Burroughs?” I said, prompting him.

  “Burroughs was here,” Bowles said. “For a long time he didn’t know where he was. Then he was writing Naked Lunch. He’d finish a sheet of foolscap and drop it on the floor. Allen gathered them and put them in order.”

  It was well known that Bowles kept his distance from the Beats. These people were simply passing through. But Bowles was a respectable exile—superficially, at least. He was married, for one thing. Jane Bowles was another famous figure of Tangier. Her novel Two Serious Ladies was one of the strangest books I had ever read; accomplished, but odd. They kept an alligator as a pet. They had no children. Jane was frankly lesbian and towards the end of her life had been confined to a wheelchair. Daniel Farson wrote in his biography of Francis Bacon, “She drank; he preferred drugs like majoun. She called herself, with self-lacerating cruelty, ‘Crippie the Kike dyke.’ ” Bacon said Jane “died in a madhouse in Málaga, it must have been the worst thing in the world. Looked after by nuns, can you imagine anything more horrible?”

  “Sex, for Bowles, appears to have been an embarrassment rather than a relief or a consummation of more delicate feelings,” the poet Iain Finlayson was quoted as saying in Farson’s book. “His fondness for young men can perhaps be better viewed as somewhat pedagogic and paternal.”

  But that was obviously the past—and probably the distant past. He seemed to me a man who masked all his feelings; he had a glittering eye, but a cold gaze. He seemed at once preoccupied, knowledgeable, worldly, remote, detached, vain, skeptical, eccentric, self-sufficient, indestructible, egomaniacal, and hospitable to praise. He was like almost every other writer I had known in my life.

  Talking about the Beats, Bowles mentioned Allen Ginsberg. “Ginsberg is a rabbi manqué,” he said. “He looks like a professor of chemistry. I read Howl. I didn’t love it. I read Kaddish, his next, and liked it more.”

  “What about Naked Lunch?”

  “Burroughs had a sense of humor,” Bowles said. “No jokes in the others.”

  “What do you read for pleasure?”

  “Recently I reread Victory. It is very sinister when those three men show up. And Passage to India. I reread that. I didn’t like it as much as the first time.”

  “You said a moment ago that you had a place in Sri Lanka,” I said.

  “It was an island,” Bowles said. “I loved it. I happened to be visiting the Duke of Pembroke at Wilton—”

  “David Herbert’s father,” I said.

  “Yes, and I met Sybil Colfax. I told them I wanted to go somewhere warm. They suggested Ceylon. It was an awful trip on a Polish ship. I went to Colombo and then down to Galle and then on to this island. It was small, not more than an acre, but covered with wonderful plants that a Frenchman had brought from all over the world. When the island was put up for sale I wired my bank and bought it.”

  And now in this small hot room, with the shades drawn, he was on another island. No living space could have been smaller than this back room where he obviously lived and worked; he ate here, he wrote here, he slept here. His books, his music, his medicine. His world had shrunk to these walls. But that was merely the way it seemed. It was another illusion. His world was within his mind, and his imagination was vast.

  I said I ought to be going. He said, “You’re welcome to stay,” and opened a flat tobacco can and took out a hand-rolled cigarette and offered me one.

  “Go on. It’s a kif cigarette,” he said. Kif was marijuana, majoun was hashish jam. He added, “I always have my tea at four. And look, it’s almost five-thirty.”

  We puffed away, Bowles and I, and now I recognized one of the odors in the room that earlier I had not been able to put a name to. We smoked in silence for a while, and then my scalp tightened and a glow came on in my brain and behind my eyes.

  “I take it for health effect,” Bowles said. “They should legalize it, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I was going to bring you a bottle of wine.”

  “I don’t drink. Next time bring me chocolates.”

  We kept puffing, companionably, saying nothing. Then I saw what Bowles’s real strength was: he was stubborn. People came and went. Bowles stayed. People started and abandoned their symphonies and novels. Bowles finished his own. People got sick and neglected their work. Bowles took to his bed and kept working. His life was a masterpiece of non-attachment, of a stubborn refusal to become involved in anyone else’s passions. I could just imagine his blue eyes narrowing and his thin lips saying, I’m not moving.

  Bowles said, “People come every day. There are film and TV people. The équipe take over. Some Germans stayed for eleven days and dropped food and sandwiches everywhere. Some people want me to sign their books. The ones with the most chutzpah say to me, ‘Since we were in Tangier we didn’t want to leave until we saw what you looked like.’ ”

  “I suppose because you keep to yourself, people seek you out.”

  But another reason that people sought him out was that he had no telephone.

  “I work all the time,” Bowles said. “Malraux said to me, ‘Never let yourself become a public monument. If you do, people will piss on you.’ ”

  “That’s good.”

  Bowles leaned over, snatched at the blackout curtains, missed, and then gathered his bathrobe again.

  “Is it dark?”

  “It must be—it’s after seven,” I said. “I ought to be going.”

  “I don’t know whether I’ll go anywhere with this leg,” he said, staring at his thin shanks under the blanket. He looked up at me. “We’ll meet again, Inshallah. Are you staying in Tangier?”

  “I might leave tomorrow.”

  He took a puff on his kif cigarette and kept the smoke in his lungs.

  “Everyone is always leaving tomorrow.”

 
; Darkness had fallen. I had to grope my way out of Bowles’s apartment, and I stumbled down the stairs—the elevator was not working. But I was elated. I had met Bowles, he had been friendly and he seemed to typify a place that had been something of a riddle to me.

  Pleased with myself for this pleasant encounter, I kept walking, down Bowles’s road, that had once been called Imam Kastellani, up to the main road and past the Spanish consulate, and into town, about a twenty-minute walk. I needed to find a quiet place to write everything down, the whole conversation. I entered a bar, The Negresco, and ordered a glass of beer and began writing.

  “You’re a writer,” the bartender said. His name was Hassan. He asked to see the page, and smiled at my handwriting. “Do you know Mohammed Choukri? He is a writer. He is over there.”

  I was introduced to a small smiling man with a big mustache. He was slightly drunk, but he was alert and voluble. His books, he said, had been translated by Bowles. His best-known novel was For Bread Alone. But he had published other books, in Arabic and French. One was a diaristic account of his meetings with Jean Genet.

  “Genet preferred me to Bowles,” Choukri said, a twinkle in his eye, as though defying me to guess the reason. He was small, fine-featured, smoking heavily, in his late fifties or early sixties. He wore a tweed jacket and a tie and seemed almost professorial.

  “Why?”

  “Because I am marginal,” Choukri said. “Bowles is from a great family. He has money. He has position. But I am a Berber, from a little village, Nador. Until I was twenty I was illiterate.” He licked his thumb and pretended to stamp a document with it. “I had thirteen brothers and sisters. Nine of them died of poverty—tuberculosis and other diseases.”

  “How long have you known Bowles?”

  “Twenty-one years,” Choukri said. “He is a miser. In twenty-one years he has not bought me even one cup of coffee.”

  You’re not difficult; you’re simply mean, a friend of Bowles once said to him. Bowles reflected: I’ve thought about it for some years, and have decided he was probably right. The meanness however is not personal; it’s just New England parsimony, and I’ve never questioned its correctness.