Let It Come Down

by Paul Bowles

  “Good morning. What can I do for you?”

  The long hesitation. “Well, it’s sort of hard. I don’t quite know how to tell you. I think I’ve gotten into some trouble.”

  The consul or vice-consul would look at him searchingly. “You think?” A pause. “Perhaps you’d better begin by telling me your name.” Whereupon he would give him not only his name, but the whole stupid story of what had happened yesterday noon at the Empire. The man would look interested, clear his throat, put his hand out on the desk, say: “First of all, let’s have the cheque.”

  “I haven’t got it. I deposited it in the bank.”

  “That was bright!” (angrily). “Just about ten times as much work for us.”

  “Well, I needed money.”

  The man’s voice would get unpleasant. “Oh, you needed money, did you? You opened an account and drew on it, is that it?”

  “That’s right.”

  Then what would he say? “So now you’ve got cold feet and want to be sure you won’t get in trouble.”

  Dyar imagined his own face growing hot with embarrassment, saying: “Well, the fact that I came here to tell you about it ought to prove that I want to do the right thing.”

  The other would say: “Mr. Dyar, you make me laugh.”

  Where would it get him, an interview like that? Beyond making him an object of suspicion for the rest of the time he was in the International Zone, just what would going to the Legation accomplish?

  As he started up the ramp that led to the taxi stand at the foot of the Castle Club he passed a doorway where a dog and a cat, both full-grown, lay in the sun, lazily playing together. He stopped and watched for a moment, along with several passers-by, all of whom wore the same half unbelieving, pleased smile. It was as if without their knowing it the spectacle served as proof that enmity was not inescapably the law which governed existence, that a cessation of hostilities was at least thinkable. He passed along up the street in the hot morning sun, through the Zoco Chico to Ramlal’s shop. The door was locked. He went back to the Zoco, into the Café Central, and telephoned Wilcox, standing at the bar beside the coffee machine, being buffeted by all the waiters.

  “Not open yet!” cried Wilcox, and he paused. “Well,” he said finally, “hang around until he is. That’s all you can do.” He paused again. “But for God’s sake don’t hang around in front of the store! Just walk past every fifteen or twenty minutes and take a quick look.”

  “Right. Right.” Dyar hung up, paid the fat barman for the call, and walked out into the square. It was twenty minutes to ten. If Ramlal was not open now, why would he be any more likely to be open at ten-thirty, or eleven? “The hell with that,” he thought, starting to amble once more in the direction of the shop.

  It was still closed. For him that settled it. He would go down to the beach for a while and lie in the sun. It was Wilcox who had put the idea into his head. All he had to do was to get back up here a little before half-past twelve, which was when the Crédit Foncier closed. First he stopped and had coffee and several slices of toast with butter and strawberry jam.

  The beach was flat, wide and white, and it curved in a perfect semicircle to the cape ahead. He walked along the strip of hard sand that the receding tide had uncovered; it was a wet and flattering mirror for the sky, intensifying its brightness. When he had left behind the half mile or so of boarded-up bathing cabins and bars, he took off his shoes and socks and rolled up his trousers. Until now the beach had been completely empty, but ahead two figures and a donkey were approaching. When they drew near he saw that it was two very old Berber women dressed as if it were zero weather in red-and-white-striped wool. They paid him no attention. Out here where no hill followed the shore line there was a small sharp wind to chill whatever surface was not in the sun. Before him now he saw several tiny fishing boats beached side by side. He came up to them. They had been abandoned long ago: the wood was rotten and the hulls were filled with sand. There was no sign of a human being in any direction. The two women and the donkey had left the beach, gone inland over the dunes, and disappeared. He undressed and got into a boat that was half buried. The sand filled the bow and sloped toward the centre of the boat, making a perfect couch that faced the sun.

  Outside the wind blew by, but in here there was nothing but the beating of the hot sun on the skin. He lay a while, intensely conscious of the welcome heat, in a state of self-induced voluptuousness. When he looked at the sun, his eyes closed almost tight, he saw webs of crystalline fire crawling across the narrow space between the slitted lids, and his eyelashes made the furry beams of light stretch out, recede, stretch out. It was a long time since he had lain naked in the sun. He remembered that if you stayed long enough the rays drew every thought out of your head. That was what he wanted, to be baked dry and hard, to feel the vaporous worries evaporating one by one, to know finally that all the damp little doubts and hesitations that covered the floor of his being were curling up and expiring in the great furnace-blast of the sun. Presently he forgot about all that, his muscles relaxed, and he dozed lightly, waking now and then to lift his head above the worm-eaten gunwale and glance up and down the beach. There was no one. Eventually he ceased doing even that. At one point he turned over and lay face down on the hard-packed sand, feeling the sun’s burning sheet settle over his back. The soft, regular cymbal-crash of the waves was like the distant breathing of the morning; the sound sifted down through the myriad compartments of the air and reached his ears long afterward. When he turned back and looked straight at the sky it seemed farther away than he had ever seen it. Yet he felt very close to himself, perhaps because in order to feel alive a man must first cease to think of himself as being on his way. There must be a full stop, all objectives forgotten. A voice says “Wait”, but he usually will not listen, because if he waits he may be late. Then, too, if he really waits, he may find that when he starts to move again it will be in a different direction, and that also is a frightening thought. Because life is not a movement toward or away from anything; not even from the past to the future, or from youth to old age, or from birth to death. The whole of life does not equal the sum of its parts. It equals any one of the parts; there is no sum. The full-grown man is no more deeply involved in life than the new-born child; his only advantage is that it can occasionally be given him to become conscious of the substance of that life, and unless he is a fool he will not look for reasons or explanations. Life needs no clarifying, no justification. From whatever direction the approach is made, the result is the same: life for life’s sake, the transcending fact of the living individual. In the meantime you eat. And so he, lying in the sun and feeling close to himself, knew that he was there and rejoiced in the knowledge. He could pretend, if he needed, to be an American named Nelson Dyar, with four thousand pesetas in the pocket of the jacket that lay across the seat in the stern of the boat, but he would know that it was a remote and unimportant part of the entire truth. First of all he was a man lying on the sand that covered the floor of a ruined boat, a man whose left hand reached to within an inch of its sun-heated hull, whose body displaced a given quantity of the warm morning air. Everything he had ever thought or done had been thought or done not by him but by a member of a great mass of beings who acted as they did only because they thought they were on their way from birth to death. He was no longer a member: having committed himself, he could expect no help from anyone. If a man was not on his way anywhere, if life was something else, entirely different, if life was a question of being, for a long continuous instant that was all one, then the best thing for him to do was to sit back and be, and whatever happened, he still was. Whatever a man thought, said or did, the fact of his being there remained unchanged. And death? He felt that some day, if he thought far enough, he would discover that death changed nothing, either.

  G

  The pleasant bath of vague ideas in which his mind had been soaking no longer sufficed to keep him completely dormant. Making an effort, he raised his head a l
ittle and turned his wrist to see the time. It was ten minutes past twelve. He sprang up, dressed quickly save for his socks and shoes, and started back along the still-deserted beach. Even though he walked so fast that he was painfully out of breath, by the time he reached the first buildings it was a quarter to one. The Crédit Foncier would be closed; he would have to do the job after lunch. He came opposite the Hotel de la Playa, crossed the beach, climbed the steps to the street and went in barefooted. The boy at the desk handed him a message. “Jack has been phoning; he’s going nuts,” he thought, as he looked at the slip. But it said: “Sr. Doan, 25–16. Inmediatamente.” Still assuming that this was probably Wilcox trying frantically to reach him, perhaps from the office or home of someone else, he gave the boy the number and stood drumming with his fingers on the desk until the communication was made.

  He took the telephone, heard a man’s voice say: “American Legation”. Quietly he hung up, and without explaining anything to the boy went and sat down in a corner where he put on his socks and shoes. After he had tied the second lace carefully he sat back and shut his eyes. Under the fingers of each hand he felt the smooth bevelled wood of a chair-arm. A truck went by slowly, backfiring. The lobby smelled faintly of chloride of lime. For the first few minutes he felt neither calm nor perturbation; he was paralysed. Then when he opened his eyes he thought, almost triumphantly: “So this is what it’s like.” And immediately afterward he was conscious for the second time that day of being extremely hungry. He had no plan of action; he wanted to eat, he wanted to get the Ramlal business over with and let Wilcox know it was finished. After that, depending on how he felt, he might call Mr. Doan at the Legation and see what he wanted. (It consoled him to think there was no certainty that the call had to do with the Jouvenon nonsense; as a matter of fact, at moments he was almost certain it could not be that at all.) But as to the dinner at Madame Jouvenon’s apartment …

  He jumped up and shouted for the boy, who was hidden by the desk. “Taxi!” he cried, pointing at the telephone. He went to the door and stood looking up the avenue, trying to reassure himself by considering that if they had been going to handle the thing roughly they would not have begun by telephoning. But then he remembered something Daisy had said to him—that the Zone was so small it was generally possible for the police to put their finger on anyone in a few hours. The Legation could afford to sit back and be polite, at least until they saw how he intended to play it.

  The taxi came coasting down the side street from the town above, drew up before the entrance. He hurried to get in, and, leaning forward from the back seat, directed it along the Avenida de España to the foot of the Arab town.

  •••••

  The day moved by; the city lay basking in the hot bright air. About noon, up on the mountain in the rose garden of the Villa Hesperides Daisy de Valverde did a bit of weeding. Then when the exertion became too much for her she had a rubber mattress put by the pool and lay on it in her bathing suit. There were far too few days like this in Tangier during the winter. When Luis came back from Casablanca she would talk to him again seriously about Egypt. Each year since the war they had spent part of the winter in Cairo, Luxor or Wadi Haifa, but this year for one reason and another they had not summoned the energy to set forth. Then she had tried at the last minute to get a room at the Mamounia in Marrakech, and, finding it impossible, had hit on the idea of appropriating Madame Werth’s reservation, arguing that in any case that lady, always in poor health, was likely to be unable to avail herself of it when the time came. But that little plan had of course been frustrated by Jack Wilcox’s infuriating behaviour.

  “He’s really rather sweet,” she said to herself, thinking not of Wilcox, but of Dyar. Soon she rose, walked into the house and rang for Mario. “Get me the Hotel de la Playa on the telephone,” she said.

  •••••

  Wilcox had gone to the Atlantide, undressed, and got into bed. There, in spite of his anxiety about the Ashcombe-Danvers sterling transfer, he had fallen into a deep slumber, exhausted finally by the wakeful night behind him. He awoke at twenty-five minutes past one (just as Dyar was entering Ramlal’s shop), saw the time, and in a fury called downstairs to see what had happened. When anything went wrong, it was usually the fault of one of the employees at the desk.

  “Have I had any calls?” he demanded. The young man did not know; he had just come on at one o’clock.

  “Well, look in my box!” shouted Wilcox. The young man was rattled. He began to read him the messages for the person in the room on the floor beneath. “Oh, good Jesus Christ Almighty!” Wilcox yelled, and he dressed and went down to the desk to see for himself. His box was empty. There was nothing he could do, so he gave the youth at the desk a tongue-lashing and went into the bar to sit gloomily over a whisky and grunt briefly now and then in answer to the barman’s sporadic chatter, thinking how possible it was for Dyar to have come, announced himself at the desk, and been told that Mr. Wilcox was out.

  XVI

  Perspiring a little after his rapid climb up from the port, Dyar stepped from the street’s yellow glare into the darkness of the shop. Young Ramlal was reading a newspaper; he sat dangling his legs from a high table which was the only piece of furniture in the tiny room. When he glanced up, no expression of recognition appeared on the features of his smooth face, but he jumped down and said: “Good morning. I expected you to come earlier.”

  “Well, I came by twice, but you were closed.”

  “Ah, too early. Will you have a cigarette?”

  “Thanks.”

  Tossing his lighter on to the table, the Indian continued: “I have been waiting for you. You see, I could not leave the package here, and I did not want to carry it with me when I go to eat lunch. If you had not come I’d have waited. So you see I am glad to see you.” He smiled.

  “Oh,” said Dyar. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting.”

  “Not at all, not at all.” Ramlal, happy to have extracted an apology, took a key from his trousers pocket and opened a drawer in the table. From this he lifted a large cardboard box marked Consul. Twenty Tins of Fifty. A Blend of the Finest Matured Virginian Grown Tobaccos. “I would not advise counting it here,” he said. “But here it is.” He opened the box and Dyar saw the stacks of thin white paper. Then swiftly he closed it, as if more than this rapid exposure to air and light risked spoiling its delicate contents. Keeping one thin dark hand protectingly spread over the carton, Ramlal went on: “They were counted of course by my father in Gibraltar, and by me again last night. Therefore I assure you there are one thousand eight hundred five-pound-notes in the box. If you wish to make a count now, it is quite all right. But——” He waved expressively at the throng passing in the street a few feet away, and smiled. “One never knows, you know.”

  “Oh, hell. That doesn’t matter.” Dyar tried to look friendly. “I’ll take your word for it. If there’s any mistake we know where to find you, I guess.”

  The other, looking faintly offended as he heard the last sentence, turned away and brought out a large sheet of shiny blue-and-white wrapping paper with the words Galeries Lafayette printed across it at regular intervals. With professional dexterity he made a smart package and tied it up with a length of immaculate white string.

  “There we are,” he said, stepping back and bowing slightly. “And when you write Mr. Ashcombe-Danvers please don’t neglect to give him my father’s greetings and my respects.”

  Dyar thanked him and went out into the street holding his parcel tightly. Half done, anyway, he thought. By the time he had dined something the Crédit Foncier would be open. He strolled up through the Zoco de Fuera to the Italian restaurant where he had eaten the previous night. The bundles of big soiled white notes had not looked like money at all; the colour of money was green, and real bills were small and convenient. It was no new sensation for him to have in his hands a large sum of banknotes which did not belong to him, so that the idea of his responsibility did not cause him u
ndue nervousness. At the restaurant he laid the package on the floor near his feet and glanced down at it occasionally during the meal. Today of all days, he thought, he would have liked to be free, to rent a little convertible, perhaps, and drive out into the country with Hadija, or even better, to hop on a train and just keep going down into Africa, to the end of the line. (And from there? Africa was a big place and would offer its own suggestions.) He would even have settled for another pilgrimage to the beach, and this time he would have gone into the water and had a little exercise. Instead of which the best part of the afternoon would be occupied by the visits to the Crédit Foncier and the Hotel Atlantide, and Wilcox would find fault and yell at him, once he knew the money was safe in the bank. He decided to tell him he had gone by Ramlal’s and found it closed three times, instead of twice.

  A few minutes after two he got up, took his parcel, and paid the bill to the stout patronne who stood behind the bar by the door. As he stepped into the brilliant sunlight he pitied himself a little for his obligations on such an afternoon. When he got to the Crédit Foncier the doors were open, and he went into the shabby gloom of its public room. Behind the iron grillwork of the wickets the accountants were visible, seated on high stools at their chaotic desks. He started up the chipped marble staircase; an Arab in uniform called him back. “Mr. Benzekri,” he said. The Arab let him continue, but looked after him suspiciously.

  The buff walls of the little office were disfigured by rusty stains that spread monstrously from the ceiling to the floor. Mr. Benzekri sat in a huge black chair, looking even sadder than when they had met at the Café España. He nodded his head very slowly up and down as he unwrapped the box, as if he were saying: “Ah, yes. More of this dirty paper to count and take care of.” But when he saw the carefully tied bundles inside, he looked up at Dyar sharply.