by Paul Bowles
“I see. Trying to get rid of old Royer,” said Mr. Van Siclen lazily, shaking his head with mock disapproval. “Poor old Royer who never did any harm except ruin a girl’s life here and there.”
“Oh, I’m so glad!” she cried; the force of her emotion startled him. He glanced at her suspiciously.
“Glad about what?”
“Glad that you agree with me about Monsieur Royer.”
“That he’s a useless old rake who’ll be up to no good until the day he dies? Sure I agree.”
“Of course you do,” she assured him; she did not see that he was baiting her.
“But I don’t agree with you about keeping him away from anybody. Why? Sauve qui peut, I always say. And the devil take the hindmost.”
She was genuinely indignant. “How can you talk that way? I’m being perfectly serious, even if you’re not.”
“I’m perfectly serious, too. After all, a girl’s education has to start somewhere, some time.”
“I think you’re quite revolting. Education, indeed!” Her eyes looked beyond his face, through the window, to the stunted cypresses below, at the top of the cliff. She could remember some experiences she would have liked to avoid, or at least have put off until later, when she might have been ready for them. Her aunt in Málaga had been far too lenient, otherwise it never would have been possible for her to meet the sailor from the Jaime II, much less to have made an appointment with him in the Alameda for the following day. And the two students she had gone on the picnic with to Antequera, who had thought they could take advantage of her because she was not Spanish. “I must still have had a slight accent,” she thought. She was sure it was because of such memories as these that she now had “sad days,” when she felt that life would never be right again. There were many things a girl should not know until she was married, and they were the very things it seemed every man was determined to impart to her. Once she was married and it all mattered so much less, precisely then the opportunities for learning were cut down to a minimum. But of course it was better that way.
Slowly her expression was changing from indignation to wistfulness. Voluptuous memories burned in the mind like fire in the tree stump: they were impossible to put out, and they consumed from within, until suddenly nothing was left. If she had a great many memories instead of only a few, she reflected, she would surely be lost.
“You wouldn’t talk that way, so playfully, if you knew the hazards of bringing up a girl in this place,” she said wearily. “With these Moors all about, and strange new people coming to the pension every day. Of course, we try to get the good Moors, but you know how they are—utterly undependable and mad as hatters, every one of them. One never knows what any of them will take it into his head to do next. Thank God we can afford to send Charlotte to school in England.”
“I’m chilly,” said Mr. Van Siclen. He rose from the table rubbing his hands together.
“Yes, it’s cool. It’s the wind. Mind, I have absolutely nothing personal against Monsieur Royer. He’s always been a model of fine behavior with me. It isn’t that at all. If he were a young man” (she almost added: “like you”), “I’d think it was amusing. I don’t object to a young man who’s sowing his wild oats. That’s to be expected. But Monsieur Royer is at least fifty. And he goes after such mere children. A young man is more likely to be interested in older women, don’t you think? That isn’t nearly so dangerous.” She followed him with her gaze, turning her head as he went toward the door. “Not nearly.”
He paused in the doorway, the same inexpressive smile on his lips. “Send him out to El Menar.” He had a little native house at El Menar, where he was digging through the Roman and Carthaginian layers of rubble, trying to get at the earlier material. “If he chases the girls around out there they’ll find him in a couple of days behind a rock with a coil of wire around his neck.”
“Such brutes!” she cried. “How can you stay out there all alone with those wild men?”
“They’re fine people,” he said, going out.
She looked around the empty room, shivered, and went out onto the terrace, feeling unpleasantly nervous. The wind was near to being a gale, but the clouds, which until now had covered the sky, were breaking up, letting the hard blue backdrop of the sky show through in places. In the cypresses the wind whistled and hissed, and when it hit her face it took her breath away. The air was sharp with the odor of eucalyptus, and damp from the fine spray of the breaking waves below. Then, when the landscape was least prepared for such a change, the sun came out. In all these years of living in Morocco she never had ceased wondering at the astonishing difference made by the sun. Immediately she felt the heat seeping in through her pores, the wind was warm, no longer hostile; the countryside became greener, smiled, and slowly the water down there turned to a brilliant blue. She breathed deeply and said tentatively to herself that she was happy. She was not sure it was true, for it seldom happened, but sometimes she could bring it about in this way. It seemed to her that long ago she had known happiness, and that the brief moments of it she found now were only faint memories of the original state. Now, she always felt surrounded by the ugliness of humanity; the scheming little human mind was always present. A certain unawareness of what went on around her was essential if she were to find even normal contentment.
She saw a Moroccan coming toward her from the driveway. Vaguely she knew that his arrival would entail something unpleasant, but for the moment she refused to think about it. She ran her hand through her hair which the wind had blown awry, and tried to bring her mind back to the pension. There was Mr. Richmond’s mirror which was broken, Brahim needed a new electric bulb in the pantry, she had to look in the laundry for an undershirt of Bob’s that was missing, she must catch Pedro before he drove the station wagon into town, to remind him to stop at the Consulate and pick up Miss Peters whom she had invited for tea.
The Moroccan, his ragged djellaba whipping in the wind, emerged from the shadows of the nearest eucalyptus. She exclaimed with annoyance and turned to face him. He was old and he carried a basket. Suddenly she remembered him from last year: she had bought mushrooms from him. And as she remembered, she glanced involuntarily at the withered hand holding the basket and saw the six dark fingers that she knew would be there. “Go away!” she cried passionately. “Cir fhalak!” She wheeled about and began to run down the path to her cottage in the garden below. Without looking behind she went in and slammed the door behind her. The room smelled of damp plaster and insecticide. She stood a moment at the window looking apprehensively up the path through the bushes. Then, feeling slightly absurd, she drew the curtains across and began to remove her make-up. As a rule the mornings took care of themselves; it was the hours after noon that she had to beware of, when the day had begun to go toward the night, and she no longer trusted herself to be absolutely certain of what she would do next, or of what unlikely idea would come into her head. Once again she peered between the curtains up the sunlit path, but there was nobody.
2
THE MONTHS IN Spain had been not at all relaxing; he was fed up with the coy promises of eyes seen above fans, furious with mantillas, crucifixes and titters. Here in Morocco, if love lacked finesse, at least it was frank. The veils over the faces did not disturb him; he had learned long ago to decipher the features beneath. Only the teeth remained a hazard. And the eyes he could read as easily as words. When they showed any interest at all, they expressed it clearly, with no hint of the prudishness he so hated.
Above a bank of thick clouds the twilight sky burned with a fierce blueness. He turned into the crowded native quarter. He had sent his luggage to the Pension Callender by taxi and had arranged to take Mr. Callender’s station wagon when it started up from the market just before dinner. That left him free to wander a half-hour or so in the Medina, nothing on his mind, nothing in his hands. He turned into the Rue Abdessadek. The hooded figures in the street moved from stall to stall, their hands making the decorative oriental gestures, t
heir voices strident with disagreement over prices. It was all familiar to Monsieur Royer, and very comforting. He felt he could again breathe easily. Slowly he ascended the hill, trying to recall a passage of something he once had read and loved: “Le temps qui coule ici n’a plus d’heures, mais—” He could not get beyond this point into the other thought. Turning into a smaller street, he was suddenly met by an overpowering odor of jasmine; it came from behind the wall beside him. He stood still a moment beneath the overhanging branch of a fig tree on the other side of the wall, and inhaled slowly, deliberately, still hoping to get beyond that part of the thought which had to do with time. The jasmine would help. It was coming to him: “mais, tant le loisir—” No.
A child brushed against him, and he had the impression that it had done so purposely. He glanced down: sure enough, it was begging. In a cajoling, unnatural little voice that set his nerves on edge it was asking alms, raising a tiny cupped hand toward him. He began to walk quickly, still sniffing the jasmine, feeling the elusive phrase he sought moving a little further away from him. The child hurried along beside him, continuing its odious chant. “No!” he cried explosively, without looking down at it again, and forcing his legs to take enormous strides in the hope of escaping its singsong voice.
“Le temps qui coule ici n’a plus d’heures, mais tant—” he murmured aloud, to cover the sound beside him. It was impossible. Now his mood was irrevocably shattered. The child, growing bolder, touched his leg with a tentative finger. “Dame una gorda,” it whined. With a suddenness and ferocity which astonished him even as he acted, he dealt it a savage blow in the face, and a fraction of a second later heard it moan. Then he watched it duck and run to the side of the street where it stood against the wall holding its hand to its face and staring at him with an expression of reproach and shocked disbelief.
Already he was feeling a sharp pang of regret for his behavior. He stepped toward the cowering child, not aware of what he was about to say or do. The child looked up; its pinched face was pale in the light of the arc-lamp that swung above. He heard himself say in a tremulous voice: “Porqué me molestas así?” It did not answer, and he felt its silence making an unbridgeable abyss between them. He took hold of its thin arm. Again, without stirring, it made its absurd, animal moan. In a new access of rage he struck it again, much harder. This time it made no sound; it merely stood. Completely unnerved and miserable, Monsieur Royer turned and walked off in the direction from which he had just come, colliding with a shrouded woman who was emptying garbage from a pan into the middle of the street. She called after him angrily, but he paid no attention. The idea that the Moroccan urchin must consider him with the same dread and contempt it felt for any other Christian interloper was intolerable to him, for he considered himself a particularly understanding friend of the Moslems. He hurried back through the town to the market, found the station wagon, and got into it. By the light of the many flares in the vegetable stands opposite, he recognized old Mr. Richmond of the Bank of British West Africa sitting on the seat facing him.
“Good evening,” said Monsieur Royer, feeling that any kind of conversation at all would help him to recover from the ill-humor induced by his walk.
Mr. Richmond grunted a reply, and after a pause said: “You’re Royer, I believe?”
“Aha, you remember me,” smiled Monsieur Royer. But Mr. Richmond said no more.
Presently Pedro arrived, his arms full of bundles which he piled on the floor between them. He greeted Monsieur Royer ceremoniously, and explained that they would not be going directly to the pension because they had to stop by the airport to call for Miss Charlotte, who was coming down from London. As they drove slowly through the crowded market, several times Monsieur Royer saw Mr. Richmond glance across at him with a surreptitiousness which bordered on the theatrical. “Pauvre vieux,” he thought. “He’s losing his grip.”
3
IT HAD BEEN a nerve-racking flight down, through clouds most of the way, with sudden terrifying exits into regions of pitiless burning sunlight against which the softness of the clouds seemed a protection. She was not afraid of flying; the uneasiness had begun long before she had left school. Each morning on waking she had smelled the freshly cut grass, heard the birds’ familiar chirping in the bushes, and said to herself that she did not want to leave.
Of course there was no question of her not going home to visit her family; although her mother had come to England the year before to spend the vacation months with her, she had not seen her father for two years, and she really cared more for him than she did for her mother. He was quiet, he looked at her in a strange, appraising manner that enormously flattered her and, above all, he let her alone, refrained from making suggestions for the betterment of her appearance or character, which ostensibly meant that he considered her a fully formed individual. And while she had to admit that her mother was sweet, at the same time she could not help thinking her silly and something of a nuisance: she was so laden with advice and so eternally ready to bestow it. And the more one took, the more of it she attempted to unload upon one. There was no end to the chain of suggestions and admonitions. She told herself that this constant watching was a very common misapplication of maternal love, but that did not make it any easier to bear.
Her last two days at school she had spent packing slowly, automatically; they had been filled with a particular anguish which she finally brought herself to diagnose. It was sheer apprehensiveness at the prospect of being again with her mother. Other years she had prepared to go home without feeling this tremulous dread. It was as they left London Airport and she was bracing herself against the plane’s banking that the reason came to her; without realizing it she already had determined to resist. The discovery was a shock. For a moment she felt like a monster. “I can’t go home feeling like this,” she thought. But as the plane righted itself, and, soaring higher, broke through the pall of fog into the clarity above, she sighed and sat back to read, reflecting that after all the decision was purely private and could scarcely be read in her face. However, throughout the flight, as the plane moved onward from sunlight into shadow and out again, she continued from time to time to be plagued by the feeling that she had become disloyal; and with this suspicion went the fear that in some way she might hurt her mother.
It was a small airport. Before the plane had landed Charlotte had sighted the station wagon, standing in the glare of the floodlights near the shack which served as waiting-room and customs office. She was not surprised to find that her father had not come to meet her; he left the pension only when he was forced to. Pedro piled her luggage on top and helped her into the back of the car.
“Pleasant journey?” Mr. Richmond asked when they had greeted each other and she was seated beside him.
“Yes, thank you,” she said, waiting to be presented to the other gentleman sitting opposite them. He was obviously from the Continent and of a rather distinguished appearance, she thought. But Mr. Richmond looked unconcernedly out at the lights of the airport, and so she spoke with the gentleman anyway.
They chatted about the weather and the natives. The car climbed the steep road; at each turn its headlights swept the white walls along the sides, crowned with masses of trailing flowers and vines. High in the dark trees a few cicadas continued to rasp their daytime song. She and the gentleman were still talking when the station wagon pulled into the garage. Mr. Richmond, however, had not said another word.
4
AT THE PENSION nothing had changed since her last visit. Her mother looked younger and prettier than ever, and seemed, if possible, still more scatterbrained and distraught—so much so that she too forgot to introduce her to the French gentleman. However, since he was seated in the farthest corner of the dining-room by the window, and was already finishing when the family sat down to eat, it did not matter much.
Her father looked at her across the table and smiled.
“So there you are,” he said with satisfaction. He paused and turned to his wife
: “Better get Señorita Marchena busy on a dress.” And to Charlotte: “There’s a big shindig Saturday night at the Country Club.”
“Oh, but I have plenty of things to wear!” she objected.
