by Paul Bowles
They got him onto his feet, but he would not dance. He stood before them, staring at the ground, stubbornly refusing to move. The owner was furious, and so annoyed by the laughter of the others that he felt obliged to send them away, saying that he would await a more propitious time for exhibiting his property, because he dared not show his anger before the elder. However, when they had left he dealt the Professor a violent blow on the shoulder with his cane, called him various obscene things, and went out into the street, slamming the gate behind him. He walked straight to the street of the Ouled Nail, because he was sure of finding the Reguibat there among the girls, spending the money. And there in a tent he found one of them still abed, while an Ouled Nail washed the tea glasses. He walked in and almost decapitated the man before the latter had even attempted to sit up. Then he threw his razor on the bed and ran out.
The Ouled Nail saw the blood, screamed, ran out of her tent into the next, and soon emerged from that with four girls who rushed together into the coffee house and told the qaouaji who had killed the Reguiba. It was only a matter of an hour before the French military police had caught him at a friend’s house, and dragged him off to the barracks. That night the Professor had nothing to eat, and the next afternoon, in the slow sharpening of his consciousness caused by increasing hunger, he walked aimlessly about the courtyard and the rooms that gave onto it. There was no one. In one room a calendar hung on the wall. The Professor watched nervously, like a dog watching a fly in front of its nose. On the white paper were black objects that made sounds in his head. He heard them: “Grande Epicene du Sahel. Juin. Lundi, Mardi, Mercredi. . . .”
The tiny inkmarks of which a symphony consists may have been made long ago, but when they are fulfilled in sound they become imminent and mighty. So a kind of music of feeling began to play in the Professor’s head, increasing in volume as he looked at the mud wall, and he had the feeling that he was performing what had been written for him long ago. He felt like weeping; he felt like roaring through the little house, upsetting and smashing the few breakable objects. His emotion got no further than this one overwhelming desire. So, bellowing as loud as he could, he attacked the house and its belongings. Then he attacked the door into the street, which resisted for a while and finally broke. He climbed through the opening made by the boards he had ripped apart, and still bellowing and shaking his arms in the air to make as loud a jangling as possible, he began to gallop along the quiet street toward the gateway of the town. A few people looked at him with great curiosity. As he passed the garage, the last building before the high mud archway that framed the desert beyond, a French soldier saw him. “Tiens,” he said to himself, “a holy maniac.”
Again it was sunset time. The Professor ran beneath the arched gate, turned his face toward the red sky, and began to trot along the Piste d’ln Salah, straight into the setting sun. Behind him, from the garage, the soldier took a pot shot at him for good luck. The bullet whistled dangerously near the Professor’s head, and his yelling rose into an indignant lament as he waved his arms more wildly, and hopped high into the air at every few steps, in an access of terror.
The soldier watched a while, smiling, as the cavorting figure grew smaller in the oncoming evening darkness, and the rattling of the tin became a part of the great silence out there beyond the gate. The wall of the garage as he leaned against it still gave forth heat, left there by the sun, but even then the lunar chill was growing in the air.
About the Author
PAUL BOWLES was born in 1910 and studied music with composer Aaron Copland before moving to Tangier, Morocco, with his wife, Jane. his first novel, The Sheltering Sky, was a bestseller in the 1950s and was made into a film by bernardo bertolucci in 1990. bowles’s prolific career included many musical compositions, novels, collections of short stories, and books of travel, poetry, and translations.
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BOOKS BY PAUL BOWLES
NOVELS
The Sheltering Sky
Let It Come Down
The Spider’s House
Up Above the World
NOVELLA
Too Far from Home
SHORT STORIES
The Delicate Prey
A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard
The Time of Friendship
Pages from Cold Point and Other Stories
A Distant Episode Things Gone and Things Still Here
Midnight Mass and Other Stories
Call at Corazón and Other Stories
Collected Stories, 1939-1976
Unwelcome Words
A Thousand Days for Mokhtar
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Without Stopping
Days: A Tangier Diary
LETTERS
In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles (edited by Jeffrey Miller)
POETRY
Two Poems
Scenes
The Thicket of Spring
Next to Nothing: Collected Poems,
1926-1977
NONFICTION, TRAVEL, ESSAYS, MISCELLANEOUS
Yallah! (written by Paul Bowles, photographs by Peter W. Haeberlinb)
Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue
Points in Time
Paul Bowles: Photographs (edited by Simon Bischoff)
Credits
Cover design by MARY SCHUCK
Copyright
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following magazines in which some of these stories originally appeared: Harper’s Bazaar, Horizon, Life and Letters, Mademoiselle, Partisan Review, Penguin New Writing, View, Wake, World Review, and Zero.
A hardcover edition of this book was reissued in 1972 by Ecco Press.
THE DELICATE PREY. Copyright © 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950 by Paul Bowles. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First Harper Perennial edition published 2006.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN-10: 0-06-113734-0 (pbk.)
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-113734-1 (pbk.)
EPub Edition © JULY 2011 ISBN: 9780062119346
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