Let It Come Down

by Paul Bowles

  The fine rain came down, cold and smelling fresh. Then it became heavier and more determined. He had his raincoat. If it rained too hard he would get soaked, anyway, but it made no difference. For quite a while now the streets had been almost empty. “The slums,” he thought. “Poor people go to bed early.” The places through which he was passing were like the tortuous corridors in dreams. It was impossible to think of them as streets, or even as alleys. There were spaces here and there among the buildings, that was all, and some of them opened into other spaces and some did not. If he found the right series of connections he could get from one place to the next, but only by going through the buildings themselves. And the buildings seemed to have come into existence like plants, chaotic, facing no way, topheavy, one growing out of the other. Sometimes he heard footsteps echoing when someone passed through one of the vault-like tunnels, and often the sound died away without the person’s ever coming into view. There were the mounds of garbage and refuse everywhere, the cats whose raging cries racked the air, and that ever-present acid smell of urine: the walls and pavements were encrusted with a brine of urine. He stood still a moment. From the distance, through the falling rain, floated the sound of chimes. It was the clock in the belfry of the Catholic church in the Siaghines striking the quarter of the hour. Ahead there was the faint roar of the sea breaking against the cliffs below the ramparts. And as he stood there, again he found himself asking the same questions he had asked earlier in the day: “What am I doing here? What’s going to happen?” He was not even trying to find the Bar Lucifer; he had given that up. He was trying to lose himself. Which meant, he realized, that his great problem right now was to escape from his cage, to discover the way out of the fly-trap, to strike the chord inside himself which would liberate those qualities capable of transforming him from a victim into a winner.

  “It’s a bad business,” he whispered to himself. If he was so far gone that when he came out to find Hadija, instead of making every effort to locate the place, he allowed himself to stumble along for an hour or so in the dark through stinking hallways like the one where he stood at the moment, then it was time he took himself in hand. And just how? It was a comforting idea, to say you were going to take yourself in hand. It assumed the possibility of forcing a change. But between the saying and the doing there was an abyss into which all the knowledge, strength and courage you had could not keep you from plunging. For instance, tomorrow night at this time he would be still more tightly fettered, sitting in the Jouvenons’ flat after dinner, having some petty little plan of action prepared for him. At each moment his situation struck him as more absurd and untenable. He had no desire to do that kind of work, and he had no interest in helping Madame Jouvenon or her cause.

  However, it was nice to have the money; it was comfortable to be able to take a cab when it was raining and he was tired and wanted to get home; it was pleasant to go into a restaurant and look at the left-hand side of the menu first; it was fun to enter a shop and buy a present for Hadija. (The box with the bracelet in it bulged in his raincoat pocket.) You had to make a choice. But the choice was already made, and he felt that it was not he who had made it. Because of that, it was hard for him to believe that he was morally involved. Of course, he could fail to put in an appearance tomorrow night, but that would do no good. They would find him, demand explanations, threaten him probably. He could even return the money by cashing express cheques, depositing the hundred dollars back into the account and writing a cheque to Madame Jouvenon for five hundred. It was still not too late for that. Or probably it was—all she had to do was to refuse. Her cheque had been cashed; that remained a fact, part of the bank’s records.

  It suddenly seemed to him that he could to some extent neutralize the harm he had done himself by reporting his action to the American Legation. He laughed softly. Then he would be in trouble, and also there would be no more money. He knew that was the action of a victim. It was typical: a victim always gave himself up if he had dared to dream of changing his status. Yet at the moment the prospect was attractive.

  Right now he wanted to get out of this rubbish-heap and home to bed. By going toward the sound of the sea, he suspected, he could arrive at some sort of definite thoroughfare which would follow along inside the ramparts. That would lead him down to the port. The thing turned out to be more complicated than he had thought, but he did manage eventually to get down into the wider streets. Here there were men walking; they were always eager to point the way out of the Arab quarter, even in the pouring rain, and often even without being asked. Their fundamental hostility to non-Moslems showed itself clearly in this respect. “This way out,” the children would call, in whatever language they knew. It was a refrain. Or if you were pushing your way in, “You can’t get through that way,” they would say.

  He came out into the principal street opposite the great mosque. A little beyond, atop the ramparts, perched the Castle Club (Open All Night. Best Wines and Liquors Served. Famous Attractions. Ernesto’s Hawaiian Swing Band), through whose open window spilled the sound of a high tenor wailing into a microphone.

  From here on, the way was straight, and open to the sea wind. Twenty minutes later he was cursing in front of the entrance to the Hotel de la Playa, ringing the bell and pounding on the plate glass of the locked door in an attempt to waken the Arab who was asleep in a deck-chair on the other side. When the man finally let him in he looked at him reproachfully, saying: “Sí, sí, sí.” In his mailbox with the key was a note. He went to his room, stripped off his wet clothes, and stepped into the corner to take a hot shower. There was no hot water. He rubbed himself down with the turkish towel and got into his bathrobe. Sitting on the bed, he opened the note. Where the hell are you? it said. Will be by at nine tomorrow morning. Jack.

  He laid the piece of paper on the night table and got into bed, leaving the window closed. He could tell by the sound that it was raining too hard to have it open.

  Book Three

  * * *

  THE AGE OF MONSTERS

  XV

  In the night the wind veered and the weather changed, bringing a luminous sky and a bright moon. In his bed at the Atlantide, Wilcox blamed his insomnia on indigestion. His dreams were turbulent and broken; he had to step out of a doorway into the street that was thronged with people who pretended to be paying him no attention, but he knew that among the passersby were hidden the men who were waiting for him. They would seize him from behind and push him into a dark alley, and there would be no one to help him. Each time he awoke he found himself lying on his back, breathing with difficulty, his heart pounding irregularly. Finally he turned on the light and smoked. As he sat partially up in bed, looking around the room which seemed too fully lighted, he reassured himself, arguing that no one had seen Dyar in his office, and that thus no one would be able to know when he left Ramlal’s shop that he was carrying the money. To look at the situation clearly, he forced himself to admit that the Larbi gang did have ways of finding things out. Ever since he had discovered that the dreaded El Kebir was back from his short term in jail at Port Lyautey (he had caught sight of him in the street the very afternoon he had left Dyar alone in the office, which was why he had hurried to the telephone and told Dyar to go home) the fear that one of the gang might somehow learn of Dyar’s connection with him had been uppermost in his mind. But this time he had been really circumspect; he did not think they knew anything. Only, it must be done immediately. With each hour that passed, they were more likely to get wind of the project. He wondered if it had been wise to go to the Hotel de la Playa and leave the note, if it might not have been better simply to keep telephoning all night until he had found Dyar in. He wondered if by any chance the British had had their suspicions aroused. He began to wonder all sorts of things, feeling at every moment less and less like sleeping. “That damned zabaglione,” he thought. “Too rich.” And he got up to take a soda-mint. While he was at the medicine-cabinet he shook a gardenal tablet out of its tube as well, but
then he reflected that it might make him oversleep, and he did not trust the desk downstairs to call him. They occasionally missed up, and it was imperative that he should rise at eight. He got back into bed and began to read the editorial page of the Paris Herald.

  •••••

  It was about this time when Daisy de Valverde awoke feeling unaccountably nervous. Luis had gone to Casablanca for a few days on business, and although the house was full of servants she never slept well when she was alone. She listened, wondering if it had been a sudden noise which had brought her back from sleep: she heard only the endless sound of the sea against the rocks, so far below that it was like a shell being held to the ear. She opened her eyes. The room was bathed in brilliant moonlight. It came in from the west, but on all sides she could see the glow of the clear night sky out over the water. Slipping out of bed, she went and tried the door into the corridor, just to be positive it was locked. It was, and she got back into bed and pulled an extra blanket up over her, torturing herself with the fantasy that it might have been unlocked, so that it would have opened just a bit when she tried it, and she would have seen, standing just outside, a great ragged Moor with a beard, looking at her evilly through slits of eyes. She would have slammed the door, only to find that he had put one huge foot through the opening. She would have pushed against it with all her might, but …

  “Shall I never grow up?” she thought. Did one never reach a stage when one had complete control of oneself, so that one could think what one wanted to think, feel the way one wanted to feel?

  •••••

  Thami had gone home late. The considerable number of pipes of kif he had shared with his friends in the café throughout the evening had made him a little careless, so that he had made a good deal of noise in the process of getting his clothes off. The baby had awakened and begun to wail, and the kif, instead of projecting him through a brief region of visions into sleep, had made him wakeful and short of breath. During the small hours he heard each call to prayer from the minaret of the nearby Emsallah mosque, as well as the half-hourly chants of reassurance that all was well with the faithful; each time the arrowlike voice rang out through the still air there was a sporadic outburst of cock-crows round about. Finally the fowls refused to go back to sleep, and their racket became continuous, up there on the roofs of the houses. Instinctively, when he had lain down, Thami had put Eunice’s cheque under his pillow. At dawn he slept for an hour. When he opened his eyes, his wife was shuffling about barefoot and the baby was screaming again. He looked at his watch and called out: “Coffee!” He wanted to be at the bank before it opened.

  •••••

  Dyar slept fitfully for a while, his mind weighted down with half-thoughts. About four he sat up, feeling very wide-awake, and noticed the brightness outside. The air in the room was close. He went to the window, opened it, and leaned out, studying the moonlit details on the hills across the harbour: a row of black cypresses, a house which was a tiny cube of luminous white half-way between the narrow beach and the sky, in the middle of the soft brown waste of the hillside. It was all painted with meticulous care. He went back to his bed and got between the warm covers. “This is no good,” he said to himself, thinking that if he were going to feel like this he would rather remain a victim always. At least he would feel like himself, whereas at the moment he was all too conscious of the pressure of that alien presence, clamouring to be released. “It’s no good. It’s no good.” Miserable, he turned over. Soon the fresh air coming in the window put him to sleep. When he opened his eyes again the room was pulsing with sunlight. The sun was out there, huge and clear in the morning sky, and its light was augmented by the water, thrown against the ceiling, where it moved like fire. He jumped up, stood in the window, stretched, scratched, yawned and smiled. If you got up early enough, he reflected, you could get on board the day and ride it easily, otherwise it got ahead of you and you had to push it along in front of you as you went. But however you did it, you and the day came out together into the dark, over and over again. He began to do a few setting-up exercises there in front of the open window. For years he had gone along not being noticed, not noticing himself, accompanying the days mechanically, exaggerating the exertion and boredom of the day to give him sleep for the night, and using the sleep to provide the energy to go through the following day. He did not usually bother to say to himself: “There’s nothing more to it than this; what makes it all worth going through?” because he felt there was no way of answering the question. But at the moment it seemed to him he had found a simple reply: the satisfaction of being able to get through it. If you looked at it one way, that satisfaction was nothing, but if you looked at it another way, it was everything. At least, that was the way he felt this morning; it was unusual enough so that he marvelled at the solution.

  The air’s clarity and the sun’s strength made him whistle in the shower, made him note, while he was shaving, that he was very hungry. Wilcox came at five minutes to nine, pounded heavily on the door and sat down panting in the chair by the window.

  “Well, today’s the big day,” he said, trying to look both casual and jovial. “Hated to get you up so early. But it’s better to get these things done as fast as possible.”

  “What things?” said Dyar into his towel as he dried his face.

  “Ashcombe-Danvers’s money is here. You’re taking it from Ramlal’s to the Crédit Foncier. Remember?”

  “Oh.” An extra and unwelcome complication for the day. He did not sound pleased, and Wilcox noticed it.

  “What’s the matter? Business breaking into your social life?”

  “No, no. Nothing’s the matter,” Dyar said, combing his hair in front of the mirror. “I’m just wondering why you picked me to be messenger boy.”

  “What d’you mean?” Wilcox sat up straight. “It’s been understood for ten days that you were going to take the job off my hands. You’ve been raising hell to start work. The first definite thing I give you to do, and you wonder why I give it to you! I asked you to do it because it’ll be a lot of help to me, that’s why!”

  “All right, all right, all right. I haven’t raised any objection, have I?”

  Wilcox looked calmer. “But Jesus, you’ve got a screwy attitude about the whole thing.”

  “You think so?” Dyar stood in the sunlight looking down at him, still combing his hair. “It could be the whole thing’s a little screwy.”

  Wilcox was about to speak. Then, thinking better of it, he decided to let Dyar continue. But something in his face must have warned Dyar, for the latter, instead of going ahead and bringing in the British currency restrictions as he had intended, just to let Wilcox see that by “screwy” he meant “illegal” (since Wilcox seemed to think he was wholly ignorant of even that detail), said only: “Well, it ought not to take long, at any rate.”

  “Five minutes,” said Wilcox, rising. “Have you had coffee?” Dyar shook his head. “Let’s get going, then.”

  “God, what sun!” Dyar cried as they stepped out of the hotel. It was the first clear morning he had seen, it made a new world around him, it was like emerging into daylight after an endless night. “Smell that air,” he said, stopping to stand with one hand on the trunk of a palm tree, facing the beach, sniffing audibly.

  “For Christ’s sake, let’s get going!” Wilcox cried, making a point of continuing to walk ahead as fast as he could. He was letting his impatience run away with him. Dyar caught up with him, glanced at him curiously; he had not known Wilcox was so nervous. And in his insistence upon taking great strides, Wilcox stepped into some dog offal and slipped, coming down full length on the pavement. Picking himself up, even before he was on his feet, he snarled at Dyar. “Go on, laugh, God damn you! Laugh!” But Dyar merely looked concerned. There was no way of laughing in such a situation. (The sudden sight of a human being deprived of its dignity did not strike him as basically any more ludicrous and absurd than the constant effort required for the maintainence
of that dignity, or than the state itself of being human in what seemed an undeniably non-human world.) But this morning, to be agreeable, he smiled as he helped dust off Wilcox’s topcoat. “Did it get on me?” demanded Wilcox.

  “Nope.”

  “Well, come on, God damn it.”

  They stopped for coffee at the place where Dyar had taken breakfast the previous day, but Wilcox would not sit down.

  “We haven’t got time.”

  “We? Where are you going?”

  “Back to the Atlantide as soon as I know you’re really on your way to Ramlal’s, and not down on to the beach to sunbathe.”

  “I’m on my way. Don’t worry about me.”

  They walked to the door. “I’ll leave you, then,” Wilcox said. “You got everything straight?”

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  “Come up to the hotel when you’re finished. We can have some breakfast then.”

  “Fine.”

  Wilcox walked up the hill feeling exhausted. When he got to the Atlantide he undressed and went back to bed. He would have time for a short nap before Dyar’s arrival.

  Following the Avenida de España along the beach toward the old part of town, Dyar toyed with the idea of going to the American Legation and laying the whole story of Madame Jouvenon before them. But who would “they” be? Some sleek-jowled individual out of the Social Register who would scarcely listen to him at first, and then would begin to stare at him with inimical eyes, put a series of questions to him in a cold voice, making notes of the replies. He imagined going into the spotless office, receiving the cordial handshake, being offered the chair in front of the desk.