Let It Come Down

by Paul Bowles

  Eunice Goode wandered over to the group, followed by Madame Jouvenon, and stood behind Holland’s chair drinking a glass of straight gin. She looked down at the back of his head, and said in a soft but unmistakably belligerent voice: “I don’t know who you are, but I think that’s all sheer balls.”

  He squirmed around and looked up at her; deciding she was drunk, he ignored her, and went on talking. Presently Madam Jouvenon whispered to Eunice that she must go, and the two went toward the door where Abdelmalek stood, his robes blowing in the beeze.

  “Who is that extraordinary woman with Miss Goode?” asked the English lady. “I don’t recall ever having seen her before.” No one answered. “Don’t any of you know?” she pursued fretfully.

  “Yes,” said Daisy at length. She hesitated a moment, and then, her voice taking on a vaguely mysterious tone: “I know who she is.”

  But Madame Jouvenon had left quickly, and Eunice was already back, dragging a chair with her, which she installed as close as possible to Richard Holland’s, and in which she proceeded to sit suddenly and heavily.

  From time to time Dyar closed his eyes, only to open them again quickly when he felt the room sliding forward from under him. Looking at the multitude of shadows on the ceiling, he did not think he felt the alcohol too much. But it became a chore to keep his eyes open for very long at a stretch. He heard the voices arguing around him; they seemed excited, and yet they were talking about nothing. They were loud, and yet they seemed far away. As he fixed one particular part of a monumental shadow stretching away into the darker regions of the ceiling, he had the feeling suddenly that he was seated there surrounded by dead people—or perhaps figures in a film that had been made a long time before. They were speaking, and he heard their voices, but the actual uttering of the words had been done many years ago. He must not let himself be fooled into believing that he could communicate with them. No one would hear him if he should try to speak. He felt the cold rim of his glass on his leg where he held it; it had wet through his trousers. With a spasmodic movement he sat up and took a long drink. If only there had been someone to whom he could have said: “Let’s get out of here.” But they all sat there in another world, talking feverishly about nothing, approving and protesting, each one delighted with the sound his own ideas made when they were turned into words. The alcohol was like an ever-thickening curtain being drawn down across his mind, isolating it from everything else in the room. It blocked out even his own body, which, like the faces around him, the candle flames and the dance music, became also increasingly remote and disconnected. “God damn it!” he cried suddenly. Daisy, intent on what Richard Holland was saying, distractedly reached out and took his hand, holding it tightly so he could not withdraw it without an effort. He let it lie in hers; the contact helped him a little to focus his attention upon the conversation.

  “Oh no!” said Holland. “The species is not at all intent on destroying itself. That’s nonsense. It’s intent on being something which happens inevitably to entail its destruction, that’s all.”

  A man came through the door from the garden and walked quickly across the room to where Abdelmalek stood talking with several of his guests. Dyar was not alert enough to see his face as he moved through the patches of light in the centre of the room, but he thought the figure looked familiar.

  “Give me a sip,” said Holland, reaching down and taking his wife’s glass out of her hand. “There’s nothing wrong in the world except that man has persuaded himself he’s a rational being, when really he’s a moral one. And morality must have a religious basis, not a rational one. Otherwise it’s just play-acting.”

  The old English lady lit another cigarette, throwing the match on the floor to join the wide pile of ashes she had scattered there. “That’s all very well,” she said with a touch of petulance in her cracked voice, “but nowadays religion and rationality are not mutually exclusive. We’re not living in the Dark Ages.”

  Holland laughed insolently; his eyes were malignant. “Do you want to see it get dark?” he shouted. “Stick around a few years.” And he laughed again. No one said anything. He handed the glass back to Mrs. Holland. “I don’t think anyone will disagree if I say that religion all over the world is just about dead.”

  “I certainly shall,” said the English lady with asperity. “But no matter.”

  “I’m sorry, but in most parts of the world today, professing a religion is purely a matter of politics, and has practically nothing to do with faith. The Hindus are busy letting themselves be seen riding in Cadillacs instead of smearing themselves with sandalwood paste and bowing in front of Ganpati. The Moslems would rather miss evening prayer than the new Disney movie. The Buddhists think it’s more important to take over in the name of Stalin and Progress than to meditate on the four basic sorrows. And we don’t even have to mention Christianity or Judaism. At least, I hope not. But there’s absolutely nothing that can be done about it. You can’t decide to be irrational. Man is rational now, and rational man is lost.”

  “I suppose,” said the English lady acidly, “that you’re going to tell us we can no longer choose between good and evil? It seems to me that would come next on your agenda.”

  “God, the man’s pretentious,” Daisy was thinking. As she grew increasingly bored and restive, she toyed with Dyar’s fingers. And to himself Dyar said: “I don’t want to listen to all this crap.” He never had been one to believe that discussion of abstractions could lead to anything but more discussion. Yet he did listen, perhaps because in his profound egotism he felt that in some fashion Holland was talking about him.

  “Oh, that!” said Holland, pretending to sound infinitely patient. “Good and evil are like white and black on a piece of paper. To distinguish them you need at least a glimmer of light, otherwise you can’t even see the paper. And that’s the way it is now. It’s gotten too dark to tell.” He snickered. “Don’t talk to me about the Dark Ages. Right now no one could presume to know where the white ends and the black begins. We know they’re both there, that’s all.”

  “Well, I must say I’m glad to hear we know that much, at least,” said the English lady testily. “I was on the point of concluding that there was absolutely no hope.” She laughed mockingly.

  Holland yawned. “Oh, it’ll work itself out, all right. Until then, it would be better not to be here. But if anyone’s left afterward, they’ll fix it all up irrationally and the world will be happy again.”

  Daisy was examining Dyar’s palm, but the light was too dim. She dropped the hand and began to arrange her hair, preparatory to getting up. “Enfin, none of it sounds very hopeful,” she remarked, smiling.

  “It isn’t very hopeful,” he said pityingly; he enjoyed his role as diagnostician of civilization’s maladies, and he always arrived at a negative prognosis. He would happily have continued all night with an appreciative audience.

  “Excuse me. I’ve got to have another drink,” said Dyar, lunging up onto his feet. He took a few steps forward, turned partially around and smiled at Daisy, so as not to seem rude, and saw Mrs. Holland rise from her uncomfortable position on the floor to occupy the place on the divan which he had just vacated. Then he went on, found himself through the door, standing on the balcony in the damp night wind. There seemed to be no reason for not going down the wide stairs, and so he went softly down and walked along the path in the dark until he came to a wall. There was a bench; he sat down in the quiet and stared ahead of him at the nearby silhouettes of moving branches and vines. No music, no voices, not even the fountains could be heard here. But there were other closer sounds: the leaves of plants rubbed together, stalks and pods hardened by the winter rattled and shook, and high in a palmyra tree not far away, the dry slapping of an enormous fan-shaped branch (which covered and uncovered a certain group of stars as it waved back and forth), was like the distant slamming of an old screen door. It was difficult to believe a tree in the wind could make that hard, vaguely mechanical noise.

  For a
while he sat quite still in the dark, with nothing in his mind save an awareness of the natural sounds around him; he did not even realize that he was welcoming these sounds as they washed through him, that he was allowing them to cleanse him of the sense of bitter futility which had filled him for the past two hours. The cold wind eddied around the shrubbery at the base of the wall; he hugged himself but did not move. Shortly he would have to rise and go back into the light, up the steps, into the room whose chaos was only the more clearly perceived for the polite gestures of the people who filled it. For the moment he stayed sitting in the cold. “Here I am,” he told himself once again, but this time the melody, so familiar that its meaning was gone, was faintly transformed by the ghost of a new harmony beneath it, scarcely perceptible and at the same time, merely because it was there at all, suggestive of a direction to be taken which made those three unspoken words more than a senseless reiteration. He might have been saying to himself: “Here I am and something is going to happen.” The infinitesimal promise of a possible change stirred him to physical movement: he unwrapped his arms from around himself and lit a cigarette.

  XII

  Back in the room Eunice Goode, on her way to being a little more drunk than usual (the presence of many people around her often led her to such excesses), was in a state of nerves. A recently arrived guest, a young man whom she did not know, and who, in spite of his European attire, was obviously an Arab, had come up to Hadija as she and Eunice stood together by the phonograph and greeted her familiarly in Arabic. Fortunately Hadija had had the presence of mind to answer: “What you sigh?” before turning her back on him, but that had not ended the incident. A moment later, while Eunice was across the room having her glass replenished, the two had somehow begun to dance. When she returned and saw them she had wanted terribly to step in and separate them, but of course there was no way she could do such a thing without having an excuse of some sort. “I shall make a fearful scene if I start,” she said to herself, and so she hovered about the edge of the dance-floor, now and then catching hold of a piece of furniture for support. At least, as long as she remained close to Hadija the girl would not be so likely to speak Arabic. That was the principal danger.

  Hadija was in misery. She had not wanted to dance (indeed, she considered that her days of enforced civility to strange men, and above all Moslem men, had come to a triumphant close), but he had literally grabbed her. The young man, who was squeezing her against him with such force that she had difficulty in breathing, refused to speak anything but Arabic with her, even though she kept her face set in an intransigent mask of hauteur and incomprehension. “Everyone knows you’re a Tanjaouia,” he was saying. But she fought down the fear that his words engendered. Only her two protectors, Eunice and the American gentleman, knew. Several times she tried to push him away and stop dancing, but he only held her with increased firmness, and she realized unhappily that any more vehement efforts on her part would attract the attention of the other dancers, of whom there were now only two couples. Occasionally she said in a loud voice: “O.K.” or “Oh, yes!” so as to reassure Eunice, whom she saw watching her desperately.

  “Ch’andek? What’s the matter with you? What are you trying to do?” the young man was saying indignantly. “Are you ashamed of being a Moslem? It’s very bad, what you are doing. You think I don’t remember you from the Bar Lucifer? Ha! Hamqat, entina! Hamqat!” His breath smelled strongly of the brandy he had been drinking all day.

  Hadija was violently indignant. “Ana hamqat?” she began, and realized too late that she had given herself away. The young man laughed delightedly, and tried to get her to go on, but she froze into absolute silence. Finally she cried out in Arabic: “You’re hurting me!” and breaking from his embrace hurried to Eunice’s side, where she stood rubbing her shoulder. “Wan fackin bastard,” she said under her breath to Eunice, who had witnessed her linguistic indiscretion and realized that as far as the young man was concerned the game was up.

  “Shut up!” She seized Hadija’s arm and pulled her off into an empty corner.

  “I want wan Coca-Cola,” objected Hadija. “Very hot. That lousy guy dance no good.”

  “Who is he, anyway?”

  “Wan Moorish man live in Tangier.”

  “I know, but who? What’s he doing in the Beidaoui palace?”

  “He plenty drunk.”

  Eunice mused a moment, letting go of Hadija’s arm. With as much dignity as she could summon, she strode across the room towards Hassan Beidaoui, who, seeing her coming, turned around and managed to be talking animatedly with Madame Werth by the time she reached him. The manœuvre proved quite worthless, of course, since Eunice’s piercing “I say!” began while she was still ten feet away. She tapped Hassan’s arm and he faced her patiently, prepared to listen to another series of incomprehensible reminiscences about Crown Prince Rupprecht.

  “I say!” She indicated Hadija’s recent dancing partner. “I say, isn’t that the eldest son of the Pacha of Fez? I’m positive I remember him from Paris.”

  “No,” said Hassan quietly. “That is my brother Thami. Would you like to meet him?” (This suggestion was prompted less by a feeling of amiability toward Eunice Goode than by one of spite toward Thami, whose unexpected appearance both Hassan and Abdelmalek considered an outrage. They had suggested he should leave, but being a little drunk he had only laughed. If anyone present could precipitate his departure, thought Hassan, it was this outlandish American woman.) “Will you come?” He held out his arm. Eunice reflected quickly, and said she would be delighted.

  She was not surprised to find Thami exactly the sort of Arab she most disliked and habitually inveighed against: outwardly Europeanized but inwardly conscious that the desired metamorphosis would remain forever unaccomplished, and therefore defiant, on the offensive to conceal his defeat, irresponsible and insolent. For his part, Thami behaved in a particularly obnoxious fashion. He was in a foul humour, having met with no success either in attempting to get the money for the boat from his brothers, or in persuading them to agree to the sale of his house in the Marshan. And again, this hideous woman was his idea of the typical tourist who admired his race only insofar as its members were picturesque.

  “You want us all to be snake-charmers and scorpion-eaters,” he raged, at one point in their conversation, which he had inevitably manœuvred in such a direction as to permit him to make his favourite accusations.

  “Naturally,” Eunice replied in her most provoking manner. “It would be far preferable to being a nation of tenth-rate pseudo-civilized rug-sellers.” She smiled poisonously, and then belched in his face.

  At that moment Dyar came in. The candlelight seemed bright to him and he blinked his eyes. Seeing Thami in the centre of the room, he looked surprised for an instant, and then went up to him and greeted him warmly. Without seeming to see Eunice, he took him by the arm and led him aside. “I want to settle my little debt with you, from the other night.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” said Thami, looking at him expectantly. And as the money changed hands, Thami said: “She’s here. You have seen her?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “You brought her?”

  “No. Miss Goode over there.” Dyar jerked his chin in her direction, and Thami fell to thinking.

  From where she stood Eunice watched them, saw Dyar slip some notes into Thami’s hand, and guessed correctly that Thami had been the friend who had lent him the money to pay Hadija at the Bar Lucifer. It was the realization of her worst fears, and in her present unbalanced state she built it up into a towering nightmare. The two men held her entire future happiness in their hands. If anyone had observed her face closely at that moment, he would unhesitatingly have declared her mad, and he would probably have moved quickly away from her. It had suddenly flashed upon her, the realization of how supremely happy she had been at the Beidaouis’ this evening—at least, it seemed so to her now. Hadija belonged completely to her, she had been accepted, was even having a
small success at the moment as Miss Kumari, chatting in monosyllables with Dr. Waterman in a corner. But Miss Kumari’s feet were planted at the edge of a precipice, and it required the merest push from either of the two men there (she clenched her fists) to topple her over the brink. The American was the more dangerous, however, and she already had set in motion the apparatus that was destined to get rid of him. “It can’t fail,” she thought desperately. But of course it could fail. There was no particular reason to believe that he would keep the appointment so clumsily arranged by Madame Jouvenon for tomorrow, nor were there any grounds for confidence in her ability to make matters go as they were supposed to go. She opened her mouth wide and after some difficulty belched again. The room was going away from her; she felt it draining off into darkness. Making a tremendous effort, she prevented herself from tipping sideways toward the floor, and took a few steps forward, perhaps with the intention of speaking to Dyar. But the effort was too much. Her final remaining energy was used in reaching a nearby empty chair; she slid into it and lost consciousness.

  Daisy had joined Dyar, without, however, paying any notice to Thami, who unobtrusively walked away. “Good God!” she cried, seeing Eunice’s collapse. “That’s a lovely sight. I don’t intend to be delegated to carry it home, though, which is exactly what will happen unless I leave.” She paused, and seemed to be changing her mind. “No! Her little Greek friend can just call for a taxi and the servants can dump her in. I’m damned if I’ll play chauffeur to Uncle Goode, and I’m damned if I’ll go home to keep from doing it, either. Hassan—aren’t they both sweet? don’t you love them?——” Dyar assented. “—He’s offered to show us the great room, and that doesn’t happen every day. I’ve seen it only once, and I’m longing to see it again. So there’s going to be no victim here, making a Red Cross ambulance out of the car, and going up that fiendish narrow street to the Metropole. God.” She paused, then went on. “They’re not ready to take us yet. They want to wait till a few more people have left. But I must talk to you before you disappear again. I saw you run out, darling. You’ve got to stop acting like a pariah. Come over here and sit down. I’ve got two things to say to you, and both are important, and not very pleasant.”