by Paul Bowles
“Are they your daughters?” asked Eunice. Madame Papaconstante said with some force that they were not. Then she explained that they served at the bar and acted as hostesses in the private rooms. A third girl stuck her head through the beaded curtain in the doorway that led into the back; she was very young and extraordinarily pretty. She stared at Eunice for a moment in some surprise before she came out and walked across to the entrance door.
“Who’s that?” said Eunice.
A fille indigène, said Madame Papaconstante, an Arab girl who worked for her. “Very intelligent. She speaks English,” she added. The girl turned and smiled at them, an unexpected smile, warming as a sudden ray of strong sunlight on a cloudy day.
“She’s a delightful creature,” said Eunice. She stepped to the bar and ordered a gin. Madame Papaconstante followed with difficulty and stood at the end beaming, her fleshy hands spread out flat on the bar so that her numerous rings flashed.
“Won’t you have something?” suggested Eunice.
Madame Papaconstante looked astonished. It was an unusual evening in the Bar Lucifer when someone offered her a drink. “Je prendrais bien un machaquito,” she said, closing her eyes slowly and opening them again. They took their drinks to a small rickety table against the wall and sat down. The Arab girl stood in the doorway looking out into the dark, occasionally exchanging a word with a passerby.
“Hadija, ven acá,” called Madame Papaconstante. The girl turned and walked lightly to their table, smiling. Madame Papaconstante took her hand and told her to speak some English to the lady.
“You spikin English?” said the girl.
“Yes, of course. Would you like a drink?”
“I spikin. What you drink?”
“Gin.” Eunice held up her glass, already nearly empty. The girl made a grimace of disgust.
“Ah no good. I like wan Coca-Cola.”
“Of course.” She caught the eye of one of the girls at the bar, and shouted to her: “Una Coca-Cola, un machaquitoy un gin!” Hadija went to the bar to fetch the drinks.
“She’s exquisite,” said Eunice quickly to Madame Papaconstante. “Where did you find her?”
“Oh, for many years she has been playing in the street here with the other children. It’s a poor family.”
When she returned to the table with the glasses Eunice suggested she should sit with them, but she pretended not to hear, and backed against the wall to remain there looking calmly down at them. There was a desultory conversation for twenty minutes or a half-hour, during which Eunice ordered several more gins. She was beginning to feel very well; she turned to Madame Papaconstante. “Would you think me rude if I sat with her alone for a bit? I should like to talk with her.”
“Ça va,” said Madame Papaconstante. It was unusual, but she saw no reason to object.
“She is absolutely ravishing,” added Eunice, flinging her cigarette across the room so that it landed in the alley. She rose, put her arm around the girl, and said to her in English: “Have another Coca-Cola and bring it inside, into one of the rooms.” She gestured. “Let’s sit in there where it’s private.”
This suggestion, however, outraged Madame Papaconstante. “Ah, non!” she cried vehemently. “Those rooms are for gentlemen.”
Eunice was unruffled. Since to her mind her aims were always irreproachable, she rarely hesitated before trying to attain them. “Come along, then,” she said to the girl. “We’ll go to my hotel.” She let go of Hadija and stepped to the bar, fumbling in her handbag for money. While she was paying, Madame Papaconstante got slowly to her feet, wheezing painfully.
“She works here, vous savez!” she shouted. “She is not free to come and go.” As an afterthought she added: “She owes me money.”
Eunice turned and placed several banknotes in her hand, closing the fingers over them gently. The girls behind the bar watched, their eyes shining.
“Bonsoir, Madame,” she said with warmth. An expression of great earnestness spread over her face as she went on: “I can never thank you enough. It has been a charming evening. I shall stop by tomorrow and see you. I have a little gift I should like to bring you.”
Madame Papaconstante’s large mouth was open, the words which had intended to come out remained inside. She let her gaze drop for a second to her hand, saw the corners of two of the bills, and slowly closed her mouth. “Ah,” she said.
“You must forgive me for having taken up so much of your time,” Eunice continued. “I know you are busy. But you have been very kind. Thank you.”
By now Madame Papaconstante had regained control of herself. “Not at all,” she said. “It was a real pleasure for me.”
During this dialogue Hadija had remained unmoving by the door, her eyes darting back and forth from Eunice’s face to that of her patronne, in an attempt to follow the meaning of their words. Now, having decided that Eunice had won in the encounter, she smiled tentatively at her.
“Good night,” said Eunice again to Madame Papaconstante. She waved brightly at the girls behind the bar. The men looked around for the first time, then resumed their talk. Eunice took Hadija’s arm and they went out into the dark street. Madame Papaconstante came to the door, leaned out, saying softly: “If she does not behave herself you will tell me tomorrow.”
“Oh, she will, I’m certain,” said Eunice, squeezing the girl’s arm. Merci mille fois, madame. Bonne nuit.”
“What she sigh you?” demanded Hadija.
“She said you were a very nice girl.”
“Sure. Very fine.” She slipped ahead, since there was not room for them to walk abreast.
“Don’t go too fast,” said Eunice, panting from her attempt to keep up with her. When they came out on to the crest of the hill at Amrah, she said: “Wait, Hadija,” and leaned against the wall. It was a moment she wanted to savour. She was suddenly conscious of the world outside herself—not as merely a thing that was there and belonged to other people, but as something in which she almost felt she could share. For the first time she smelled the warm odour of fulfilment on the evening air, heard the nervous beating of drums on the terraces with something besides indifference. She let her eyes range down over the city and saw clearly in the moonlight the minaret on the summit of the Charf with its little black cypress trees around it. She pounded her cane on the pavement with pleasure, several times. “I insist too hard on living my own life,” she thought. The rest of the world was there for her to take at any moment she wished it, but she always rejected it in favour of her own familiar little cosmos. Only sometimes as she came out of sleep did she feel she was really in life, but that was merely because she had not had time to collect her thoughts, to become herself once more.
“What a beautiful night,” she said dreamily. “Come and stand here a minute.” Hadija obeyed reluctantly. Eunice grasped her arm again. “Listen to the drums.”
“Drbouka. Women make.”
“Aha.” She smiled mysteriously, following with her eye the faint line of the mountains, range beyond range, blue in the night’s clarity. She did not hope Hadija would be able to share her sensations; she asked only that the girl act as a catalyst for her, making it possible for her to experience them in their pure state. As a mainspring for her behaviour there was always the aching regret for a vanished innocence, a nostalgia for the early years of life. Whenever a possibility of happiness presented itself, through it she sought to reach again that infinitely distant and tender place, her lost childhood. And in Hadija’s simple laughter she divined a prospect of return.
The feeling had persisted through the night. She exulted to find she had been correct. At daybreak, while Hadija was still asleep beside her, she sat up and wrote in her notebook: “A quiet moment in the early morning. The pigeons have just begun to murmur outside the window. There is no wind. Sexuality is primarily a matter of imagination, I am sure. People who live in the warmer climates have very little of it, and so society there can allow a wide moral latitude in the customs. Here are the hea
lthiest personalities. In temperate regions it is quite a different matter. The imagination’s fertile activity must be curtailed by a strict code of sexual behaviour which results in crime and depravity. Look at the great cities of the world. Almost all of them are in the temperate zone.” She let her eyes rest a moment on the harbour below. The still water was like blue glass. Moving cautiously so as not to wake Hadija, she poured herself a small amount of gin from the nearly empty bottle on the night table, and lit a cigarette. “But of course all cities are points of infection, like decayed teeth. The hypersensitivity of urban culture (its only virtue) is largely a reaction to pain. Tangier has no urban culture, no pain. I believe it never will have. The nerve will never be exposed.”
She still felt an itch of regret at not having been allowed to go into a back room of the Bar Lucifer with Hadija. That would have given her a certain satisfaction—in her eyes it would have been a pure act. Perhaps another time, when she and Madame Papaconstante had come to know each other better, it would be possible.
Not until Hadija awoke did she telephone down for breakfast. It gave her great pleasure to see the girl, wearing a pair of her pyjamas, sitting up crosslegged in the bed daintily eating buttered toast with a knife and fork, to show that she knew how to manage those Western accessories. She sent her home a little before noon, so she would not be there when the Spanish maid arrived. In the afternoon she called at the Bar Lucifer with a small bottle of perfume for Madame Papaconstante, Since then almost every other night she had brought Hadija back with her to the hotel. She had never seen the old fisherman again—she could hardly expect to see him unless she returned to the beach, and she was not likely to do that. She had forgotten about getting exercise; her life was too much occupied at the moment with Hadija for her to be making resolutions and decisions for improving it. She taxed her imaginative powers devising ways of amusing her, finding places to take her, choosing gifts that would please her. Faintly she was conscious through all this that it was she herself who was enjoying these things, that Hadija merely accompanied her and accepted the presents with something akin to apathy. But that made no difference to her.
When she was happy she invariably invented a reason for not being able to remain so. And now, to follow out her pattern, she allowed an idea to occur to her which counteracted all her happiness. She had made an arrangement with Madame Papaconstante whereby it was agreed that on the nights when Hadija did not go with her to the Metropole she was to remain at home with her parents. Madame Papaconstante had assured her that the girl did not even put in appearance at the bar those evenings, and up until now Eunice had not thought to question the truth of her statements. But today, when Conchita returned from the market with her arms full of flowers, notwithstanding the fact that Hadija had left the room only three hours before and did not expect to return until tomorrow night, Eunice suddenly decided she wanted her back again that same evening. She would get her some very special gift in the Rue du Statut, and they would have a little extra celebration, surrounded by the lilies and poinsettias. She would go to the Bar Lucifer and have Madame Papaconstante send someone to fetch her.
It was at this moment that the terrible possibility struck her: what if she found Hadija in the bar? If she did, it could only mean that she had been there all along, that the parent story was a lie, that she lived in one of the rooms behind the bar, perhaps. (She was working up to the climax.) Then the place was a true bordel, in which case—it had to be faced—there was a likelihood that Hadija was entertaining the male customers in bed on those other nights.
The idea stirred her to action: she threw her notebook on to the floor and jumped out of bed with a violence that shook the room and startled Conchita. When she had dressed she wanted to start out immediately for the Bar Lucifer, but she reflected on the uselessness of such a procedure. She must wait until night and catch Hadija in flagrante delictu. By now there was no room in her mind for doubt. She was convinced that Madame Papaconstante had been deceiving her. Assailed by memories of former occasions when she had been trusting and complacent only to discover that her happiness had rested wholly on falsehoods, she was all too ready this time to seek out the deception and confront it.
As the afternoon advanced toward evening she grew more restless, pacing back and forth from one side of the room to the other, again and again going out on to the balcony and looking toward the harbour without seeing it. She even forgot to walk up to the Rue du Statut for Hadija’s present. A black cloud gathered above the harbour and twilight passed swiftly into night. Gusts of rain-laden wind blew across the balcony into the room. She shut the door and decided, since she was dressed, to go downstairs for dinner rather than have it in bed. The orchestra and the other diners would help to keep her mind occupied. She could not hope to find Hadija at the bar before half-past nine.
When she got downstairs it was too early for dinner. There was no electricity tonight; candles burned in the corridors and oil lamps in the public rooms. She went into the bar and was engaged in conversation by an elderly retired captain from the British Army, who insisted on buying her drinks. This annoyed her considerably because she did not feel free to order as many as she wanted. The old gentleman drank slowly and reminisced at length about the Far East. “Oh God Oh God Oh God!” she said to herself. “Will he ever shut up and will it ever be eight-thirty?”
As usual the meal was execrable. However, eating in the dining-room she at least found the food hot, whereas by the time it reached her bed it generally had ceased being even warm. Between orchestral numbers she could hear the wind roaring outside, and the rain streamed down the long French windows of the dining-room. “I shall get soaked,” she thought, but the prospect was in no way a deterrent. On the contrary, the storm rather added to the drama in which she was convinced she was about to participate. She would plod through the wet streets, find Hadija, there would be an awful scene, perhaps a chase through the gale up into a forsaken corner of the Casbah or to some solitary rock far out above the strait. And then would come the reconciliation in the windy darkness, the admissions and the promises, and eventually the smiles. But this time she would bring her back to the Metropole for good.
After she had finished eating she went up to her room, changed into slacks, and slipped into a raincoat. Her hands were trembling with excitement. The air in the room seemed weighted down with the thick sweetness of the lilies. The candle flames waved back and forth as she moved about in haste, and the shadows of the flowers crouched, leapt to the ceiling, returned. From a drawer in one of her trunks she took a large flashlight. She stepped out, closing the door behind her. The candles went on burning.
V
It looked like a bright spring day. The sun shone on the laurel that lined the garden path where Sister Inez strolled, clutching her breviary. Until she arrived at the fountain her long black skirts hid the fact that she was barefoot. It was the sort of garden whose air one would expect to be weighted with the sweet smell of jasmin, and although they did not appear, one could imagine birds twittering and rustling their wings with nervous delight in the shadow of the bushes. Sister Inez stretched forth one shining foot and touched the water in the basin; the sky glimmered whitely. From the bushes Father José watched, his eyes bright as he followed the two little feet moving one behind the other through the clear water. Suddenly Sister Inez undid her cowl, which was fastened with a snap-hook under her chin: her black tresses fell over her shoulders. With a second brusque gesture she unhooked her garments all the way down (it was remarkably easy), opened them wide, and turned to reveal a plump young white body. A moment later she had tossed her apparel upon a marble bench and was standing there quite naked, still holding her little black book and her rosary. Father José’s eyes opened much wider and his gaze turned heavenwards: he was praying for the strength to resist temptation. In fact, the words PIDIENDO EL AMPARO DIVINO appeared in print across the sky, and remained there, shaking slightly, for several seconds. What followed was not a surprise to Dyar
, since he had not expected the divine aid to be forthcoming, nor was he startled when a moment later three other healthy young nuns made their entrances from as many different directions to join the busy couple in the fountain, thus making the pas de deux into an ensemble number.
Subsequently the scene of activities was shifted to an altar in a nearby church. Dyar, sensing that the frenzy of this episode announced the imminent end of the film, nudged Thami and offered him a cigarette which, after awakening with a jolt, he accepted automatically and allowed to be lighted. By the time he was really conscious the images had come to an abrupt finish and the screen was a blinding square of light. Dyar paid the first fat man, who stood in the hallway still yawning, and they went downstairs. “If two gentlemen wishing room one hour——” the fat man began, calling after them. Thami shouted something up at him in Spanish; the young man let them out into the empty street where the wind blew.
•••••
When Eunice Goode stepped into the little bar she was disappointed to see that Hadija was not in sight. She walked up to the counter, looking fixedly at the girl who stood behind it, and noted with pleasure the uneasiness her sudden appearance was causing in the latter’s behaviour. The girl made an absurd attempt to smile, and slowly backed against the wall, not averting her gaze from Eunice Goode’s face. And, indeed, the rich foreign lady’s mien was rather formidable: her plump cheeks were suffused with red, she was panting, and under her heavy brows her cold eyes moved with a fierce gleam.
“Where is everyone?” she demanded abruptly.
The girl began to stammer in Spanish that she did not know, that she thought they were out that way. Then she made for the end of the bar and tried to slip around it to get to the door that led back to the other rooms. Eunice Goode pushed her with her cane. “Give me a gin,” she said. Reluctantly the girl returned to where the bottles were and poured out a drink. There were no customers.
