Let It Come Down

by Paul Bowles

  “What goes on in your head?” he said when the servants had all gone out and the room had fallen back into its quiet.

  Even that annoyed her. She considered the question insolent. It assumed an intimacy which ought to have existed between them, but which for some reason did not. “But why not?” she wondered, looking closely at his satisfied, serious expression. The answer came up ready-made and absurd from her subconscious; it sounded like doggerel. “It doesn’t exist because he doesn’t exist.” This was ridiculous, certainly, but it struck a chord somewhere in the vicinity of the truth. “Unreal. What does it mean for a person to be unreal? And why should I feel he is unreal?” Then she laughed and said: “My God! Of course! You want to feel you’re alive!”

  He set his cup and saucer on the floor, saying: “Huh?”

  “Isn’t that what you said to me the first night you came here, when I asked what you wanted most in life?”

  “Did I?”

  “You most assuredly did. You said those very words. And of course, you know, you’re so right. Because you’re not really alive, in some strange way. You’re dead.” With the last two words, it seemed to her she heard her voice turning a shade bitter.

  He glanced at her swiftly; she thought he looked hurt.

  “Why am I trying to bait the poor man?” she thought. “He’s done no harm.” It was reasonless, idiotic, yet the desire was there, very strong.

  “Why dead?” His voice was even; she imagined its inflection was hostile.

  “Oh, not dead!” she said impatiently. “Just not alive. Not really. But we’re all like that, these days, I suppose. Not quite so blatantly as you, perhaps, but still …”

  “Ah.” He was thinking: “I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to get going.”

  “We’re all monsters,” said Daisy with enthusiasm. “It’s the Age of Monsters. Why is the story of the woman and the wolves so terrible? You know the story, where she has a sled full of children, crossing the tundra, and the wolves are following her, and she tosses out one child after another to placate the beasts. Everyone thought it ghastly a hundred years ago. But today it’s much more terrible. Much. Because then it was remote and unlikely, and now it’s entered into the realm of the possible. It’s a terrible story not because the woman is a monster. Not at all. But because what she did to save herself is exactly what we’d all do. It’s terrible because it’s so desperately true. I’d do it, you’d do it, everyone we know would do it. Isn’t that so?”

  Across the shining stretches of floor, at the bottom of a well of yellow light, he saw his briefcase waiting. The sight of it lying there reinforced his urge to be gone. But it was imperative that the leavetaking be casual. If he mentioned it vaguely now, the suggestion would be easier to act upon in another five minutes. By then it would be eleven-thirty.

  “Well,” he began, breathing in deeply and stretching, as if to rise.

  “Do you know anyone who wouldn’t?” He suddenly realized that she was serious about whatever it was she was saying. There was something wrong with her; she ought to have been lying there contentedly, perhaps holding his hand or ruffling his hair and saying a quiet word now and then. Instead she was tense and restless, talking anxiously about wolves and monsters, seeking either to put something into his mind or to take something out of it; he did not know which.

  “Do you?” she insisted, the words a despairing challenge. It was as if, had he been able to answer “Yes,” the sound of the word might have given her a little peace. He might have said: “Yes, I do know someone,” or even: “Yes, such a person exists,” and she would perhaps have been comforted. The world, that far-away place, would have become inhabitable and possible once again. But he said nothing. Now she took his hand, turned her face down to him coquettishly.

  “Speaking of monsters, now that I recall your first evening here, I remember. God! You’re the greatest monster of all. Of course! With that great emptiness in your hand. But my God! Don’t you remember? Don’t you remember what I told you?”

  “Not very much of it,” he said, annoyed to see his chance of escape being pulled further away from him. “I don’t take much stock in that sort of stuff, you know.”

  “Stock, indeed!” she snorted. “Everyone knows it’s perfectly true and quite scientific. But in any case, whether you take stock or not—what an expression!—just remember, you can do what you want. If you know what you want!” she added, a little harshly. “You have an empty hand, and vacuums have a tendency to fill up. Be careful what goes into your life.”

  “I’ll be careful,” he said, standing up. “I’m afraid I’ve got to be going. It’s getting late.”

  “It’s not late, darling,” she said, but she made no effort to persuade him to stay on. “Call a cab.” She pointed to the telephone. “It’s 24-80.”

  He had not thought of that complication. “I’ll walk,” he said. “I need the exercise.”

  “Nonsense! It’s five miles. You can’t.”

  “Sure I can,” he said smiling.

  “You’ll get lost. You’re mad.” She was thinking: “He probably wants to save the money. Shall I tell him to have it put on our bill?” She decided against it. “Do as you like,” she said, shrugging.

  As he took up his briefcase, she said: “I shall see you down to the door,” and despite his protests she walked ahead of him down the stairs into the hall where a few candles still burned. The house was very still.

  “The servants are all in bed, I guess,” he said.

  “Certainly not! I haven’t dismissed Hugo yet.” She opened the door. The wind blew in, rippling her peignoir.

  “You’d better go up to bed. You’ll catch cold.”

  He took the hand she held forth. “It was a wonderful evening,” he declared.

  “Luis will be back in a few days. You must come to dinner then. I’ll call you, darling.”

  “Right.” He backed away a few steps along the gravel walk.

  “Turn to your left there by that clump of bamboo. The gate’s open.”

  “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  Stepping behind the bamboo thicket, he waited to hear her close the door. Instead, he heard her say: “Ah, Hugo. There you are! You may lock the gate after Mr. Dyar.”

  “Got to do something about that,” he thought, walking quickly to the right, around the side of the house to the terrace where the swimming-pool reflected the stars in its black water. It was a chance to take, because she would probably have been watching, to see him go out through the gate. But she might think he already had slipped out when she was not looking; otherwise it would be very bad. The idea of just how bad it could be struck him with full force as he hesitated there by the pool, and as he hurried ahead down the steps into the lower garden he understood that he had committed an important tactical error. “But I’d have been locked out of the garden, goddam it,” he thought. “There was nothing else I could do.”

  He had now come out from behind the shadow of the house into the open moonlight. Ahead of him something which had looked like part of the vegetation along the path slowly rose and walked toward him. “Let’s go,” said Thami.

  “Shut up,” Dyar whispered furiously. At the moment they were in full view of the house.

  And as she strained to identify the second person, even to the point of opening one of the doors and silently stepping out onto the terrace to peer down through the deforming moonlight, the two men hurried along the path that led to the top of the cliff, and soon were hidden from her sight.

  Part Four

  * * *

  ANOTHER KIND OF SILENCE

  XX

  Dyar lay on his back across the seat in the stern of the boat, his hands beneath his head, looking up at the stars, vaguely wishing that at some time or another he had learned a little about astronomy. The rowboat they had brought along to get aboard and ashore in scudded on top of the dark waves a few feet behind him, tied to a frayed towing rope that was too short. He ha
d started out by arguing about the rope, back at Oued el Ihud when they were bobbing around out there a hundred feet or so from the cliffs, trying to attach the two craft together, but then he had decided to save his words for other, more important things. And in any case, now that the Jilali was away from the land, he paid no attention to what was said to him, feeling, no doubt, that he was master of the immediate situation, and could afford to disregard suggestions made by two such obvious landlubbers as Thami and the crazy Christian gentleman with him. The moment of greatest danger from the police had been passed when the Jilali was rounding the breakwater, before the others had ever got into the boat. Now they were a good mile and a half from shore; there was little likelihood of their being seen.

  From time to time the launch passed through choppy waters where the warmer Mediterranean current disagreed with the waves moving in from the Atlantic. Small whitecaps broke and hissed in the dark alongside, and the boat, heaving upward, would remain poised an instant, shuddering as its propeller left the water, and then plunging ahead like a happy dolphin. To the right, cut out by a razor-blade, the black mountains of Africa loomed against the bright sky behind them. “This lousy motor’s going to give us trouble yet,” thought Dyar: the smell of gasoline was too strong. An hour ago the main thing had been to get aboard; now it was to get ashore. When he felt the land of the Spanish Zone under his feet he supposed he would know what the next step was to be; there was no point in planning unless you knew what the possibilities were. He relaxed his body as much as he could without risking being pitched to the floor. “Smoke?” called Thami.

  “I told you no!” Dyar yelled, sitting up in fury, gesturing. “No cigarettes, no matches in the boat. What’s the matter with you?”

  “He wants one,” Thami explained, even as the Jilali, who was steering, struck a match and tried to shelter the flame from the wind. The attempt was unsuccessful, and Thami managed to dissuade him from lighting another. “Tell him he’s a goddam fool,” called Dyar, hoping thus to enlist Thami on his side, but Thami said nothing, remaining hunched up on the floor near the motor.

  There was no question of sleeping; he was much too alert for that, but as he lay there in a state of enforced inactivity, thinking of nothing at all, he found himself entering a region of his memory which, now that he saw it again, he thought had been lost forever. It began with a song, brought back to him, perhaps, by the motion of the boat, and it was the only song that had ever made him feel really happy: “Go. To sleep. My little pickaninny. Mammy’s goin’ to slap you if you don’t. Hushabye. Rockabye. Mammy’s little baby. Mammy’s little Alabama coon.” Those could not have been the words, but they were the words he remembered now. He was covered by a patchwork quilt which was being tucked in securely on both sides—with his fingers he could feel the cross-stitching where the pieces were joined—and his head was lying on the eiderdown pillow his grandmother had made for him, the softest pillow he had ever felt. And like the sky, his mother was spread above him; not her face, for he did not want to see her eyes at such moments because she was only a person like anyone else, and he kept his eyes shut so that she could become something much more powerful. If he opened his eyes, there were her eyes looking at him, and that terrified him. With his eyes closed there was nothing but his bed and her presence. Her voice was above, and she was all around; that way there was no possible danger in the world.

  “How the hell did I think of that?” he wondered, looking behind him as he sat up, to see if the lights of Tangier had yet been hidden by Cape Malabata. They were still there, but the black ragged rocks were cutting across them slowly, covering them with the darkness of the deserted coast. Atop the cliff the lighthouse flashed again and again, automatically, becoming presently a thing he no longer noticed. He rubbed his fingers together with annoyance: somehow they had got resin on them, and it would not come off.

  And as the small boat passed more certainly into a region of shadowed safety, farther from lights and the possibility of discovery, he found himself thinking of the water out here as a place of solitude. The boat seemed to be making less noise now. His mind turned to wondering what kind of man it was who sat near him on the floor, saying nothing. He had talked with Thami, sat and drunk with him, but during all the moments they had been in one another’s company it never had occurred to him to ask himself what thoughts went on behind those inexpressive features. He looked at Thami: his arms were folded around his tightly drawn-up knees, and his head, thrown back, rested against the gunwale. He seemed to be looking upward at the sky, but Dyar felt certain that his eyes were closed. He might even be asleep. “Why not?” he thought, a little bitterly. “He’s got nothing to lose. He’s risking nothing.” Easy money for Thami—probably the easiest he ever would make with the little boat. “He doesn’t give a damn whether I get there or not. Of course he can sleep. I ought to have come alone.” So he fumed silently, without understanding that the only reason why he resented this hypothetical sleep was that he would have no one to talk to, would feel more solitary out there under the winter sky.

  The Jilali, standing in the bow, began to sing, a ridiculous song which to Dyar’s ears sounded like a prolonged and strident moaning. The noise it made had no relation to anything—not to the night, the boat, not to Dyar’s mood. Suddenly he had a sickeningly lucid glimpse of the whole unlikely situation, and he chuckled nervously. To be tossing about in a ramshackle old launch at three in the morning in the Strait of Gibraltar with a couple of idiotic barbarians, on his way God only knew where, with a briefcase crammed with money—it made no sense. That is to say, he could not find a way of believing it. And since he could not believe it, he did not really have any part in it; thus he could not be very deeply concerned in any outcome the situation might present. It was the same old sensation of not being involved, of being left out, of being beside reality rather than in it. He stood up, and almost fell forward onto the floor. “Shut up!” he roared; the Jilali stopped singing and called something in a questioning voice. Then he resumed his song. But as Dyar sat down again he realized that the dangerous moment had passed: the vision of the senselessness of his predicament had faded, and he could not recall exactly why it had seemed absurd. “I wanted to do this,” he told himself. It had been his choice. He was responsible for the fact that at the moment he was where he was and could not be elsewhere. There was even a savage pleasure to be had in reflecting that he could do nothing else but go on and see what would happen, and that this impossibility of finding any other solution was a direct result of his own decision. He sniffed the wet air, and said to himself that at last he was living, that whatever the reason for his doubt a moment ago, the spasm which had shaken him had been only an instant’s return of his old state of mind, when he had been anonymous, a victim. He told himself, although not in so many words, that his new and veritable condition was one which permitted him to believe easily in the reality of the things his senses perceived—to take part in their existences, that is, since belief is participation. And he expected now to lead the procession of his life, as the locomotive heads the train, no longer to be a helpless incidental somewhere in the middle of the line of events, drawn one way and another, without the possibility or even the need of knowing the direction in which he was heading.

  These certainties he pondered explain the fact that an hour or so later, when he could no longer bear the idea that Thami had not once shifted his position, Dyar lurched to his feet, stepped over, and kicked him lightly in the ribs. Thami groaned and murmured something in Arabic.

  “What’s the idea? You can sleep later.”

  Thami groaned again, said: “What you want?” but the words were covered by the steady stream of explosions made by the motor. Dyar leaned down, and yelled. “It’s going to be light soon, for God’s sake! Sit up and keep an eye open. Where the hell are we?”

  Thami pointed lazily toward the Jilali. “He knows. Don’t worry.” But he rose and went to sit in the bow, and Dyar squatted down between the motor an
d the gunwale, more or less where Thami had been sitting. It was warmer here, out of the wind, but the smell of the gasoline was too strong. He felt a sharp emptiness in his stomach; he could not tell whether it was hunger or nausea, because it wavered between the two sensations. After a few minutes he rose and walked uncertainly to join Thami. The Jilali motioned to them both to go and sit in the stern. When Dyar objected, because the air was fresh here by the wheel, Thami said: “Too heavy. It won’t go fast this way,” and they stumbled aft to sit side by side back there on the wet canvas cushions. Long ago the moon had fallen behind a bank of towering, thick clouds in the west. Above were the stars, and ahead the sky presently assumed a colourless aspect, the water beneath melting smokelike, rising to merge momentarily with the pallid air. The Jilali’s turbaned head took on shape, became sharp and black against the beginning eastern light.

  “You sure you know where we’re going?” Dyar said finally.

  Thami laughed. “Yes. I’m sure.”

  “I may be wanting to stay up there quite a while, you know.”

  Thami did not speak for a moment. “You can stay all your life if you want,” he said sombrely, making it clear that he did not relish the idea of staying at all.

  “What about you? How do you feel about it?”

  “Me? Feel about what?”

  “Staying.”

  “I have to go to Tangier with him.” Thami indicated the Jilali.

  Dyar turned to face him furiously. “The hell you do. You’re going to stay with me. How the hell d’you think I’m going to eat up there all by myself?”