by Paul Bowles
It seemed that at last he had found the right place; here he could indulge his very special tastes without thought of outside interference. During the two years he lived there on the Marshan he came little by little to think of his tastes as not much more special than as if the small glasses contained wine. It was all so easy, and no one objected. At this point his euphoria destroyed his common sense. The neat display of little glasses on the shelves of his refrigerator seemed to him irresistible, and he began to imagine that his European acquaintances would find them equally attractive. “Have a glass,” he would urge a visitor. “It’s delicious chilled.”
The Europeans, duly shocked, were not in a position to do more than add this latest wonderful scandal to their repertory of gossip. The sinister novelty of Harper’s behavior delighted them. “Of course the man is completely mad,” they assured one another at the end of each discussion. In a sense they were right. Had he been wholly sane, he would have continued to admire the display of the glasses and partake of their contents in strict privacy as he had done when he first arrived in Tangier. Instead, he would read aloud the names on them to his guests: “Abdeslam, Mohammed, Abderrahman, Omar. Which tempts you? Ali?”
The Europeans thus importuned talked so much about the strange Mr. Harper that their Moroccan servants could not help overhearing their accounts. In this way a fqih of Souq el Bqar came to know about the unusual Englishman. He gave the matter much thought. Even though the blood served a therapeutic purpose, he sensed something objectionable in the consuming by a Nazarene of so much Moslem blood. He felt sure that there must be Koranic strictures prohibiting such practices, but not being conversant with the holy scripture, he was unable to do more than conjecture. At length he consulted an imam from a mosque in Dradeb, who assured him that the partaking of human blood was an abomination in the eyes of Allah. The Christian must be prevented from drinking any more Moslem blood.
When religious leaders in Islam reach a decision, it is implemented with surprising speed. Hugh Harper received a procès-verbal: he must leave Tangier within eight days. No reason was given, but none was necessary. Where he went after being declared persona non grata in Morocco is not known.
(1985)
Unwelcome Words
I
I‘M GLAD YOU REPLIED to my letter from the blue, although sorry to see that you imagine I think of you as a captive audience merely because you’re confined to your room. Or was that said simply to make me feel guilty for having remained mobile?
Of course prices began to rise here long before the international oil blackmail of the seventies. We watched them go up, always thinking: They can’t go any higher. Everything’s five times as expensive as it was ten years ago. Since 1965 importation has been forbidden. So instead of imported goods we had smuggled goods, which fetched whatever people were willing to pay for them. (I suppose one should remember that prices here were incredibly low in the thirties and forties, so that they could keep on rising more or less indefinitely before they were equal to those of Europe or America. Then came the oil inflation, so that they’re still going up, and still lower than other countries.)
Five years or so after independence, Christopher was talking with an old Berber somewhere in the south. In the midst of a general conversation the old man leaned toward him and said confidentially: “Tell me. How long is this Independence going to go on?”
I remember in 1947 I sent to New York for a thousand dollars. (If you care to remember, that was enough to live on for three or four months in those days, at least here.) The bank where it was supposed to have been sent didn’t have it, but they advised me to try all the other banks in town. There were more than forty of them here then. I’d try two or three a day; nobody knew anything. A month later I still didn’t have my money. The American Legation suggested I go to the first bank and demand it, at the same time hinting that the American Minister would take steps if they failed to produce it. Magic result: the clerk went straight to a filing cabinet and pulled out the check. But I’ve always wondered what they hoped to gain by holding it up for such a long time. (It seemed very long to me then, and I was indignant about it.) Now things are much worse. All foreign money coming into the country is thrown into a pool in Casablanca and kept there while interest is collected from those who borrow it, generally over a period of three months. Eventually the sum shows up on your bank statement, charged at whatever was the lowest rate during that period. It’s perfectly understandable considering that the war goes on and is expensive, but that doesn’t lessen the inconvenience. We’re probably lucky not to have to pay a special war tax, and God knows, that may yet come. Sufficient unto the day.
You ask for news about me: my daily life, what I think about, my opinions on exterior events. All in good time, if I can do it. But what happens here in the city carries much more weight than what we hear from outside. There are plenty of crimes, but each year we seem to have one murder which interests everyone. The special interest lies in the victims having been non-Moslems. This fascinates Moslems as well as infidels, although doubtless for different reasons.
For instance, two years ago, while the workmen were still building the new mosque between here and the Place de France, an elderly woman used to appear from a building across the street, carrying pots of tea and coffee to the men. She’d come early in the morning, before sunrise, when the air was still cold, and the workmen looked forward to her arrival. One day she failed to appear, and later the same day they heard that she’d been murdered in her bed. Someone had managed to climb up to her window and get into her apartment, and before leaving he had prudently cut her throat. He’d expected to find hidden money (which, the woman being Jewish, he naturally assumed he’d unearth some where). But she lived in poverty; he found nothing but a blue plastic transistor radio, and he took it. After that, although the workmen got no more tea or coffee, they had music from the blue transistor, but only for a few days. A neighbor of the murdered woman noticed the radio there among the mounds of tiles, and was so certain she had recognized it that she mentioned it to a policeman in the street. So of course they caught the workman, who said he wouldn’t have cut the old Jewess’s throat if he’d known how poor she was!
Then there was the case, last year, of the two old Americans (I don’t think you ever knew them) who lived in a small house high up on the Old Mountain, at the very end of the navigable road, where it turns into what’s left of the Roman road. They were truly isolated there, without a telephone or another house in sight. So after several decades of living up there in peace, they were suddenly attacked. The husband was in the garden at the edge of the woods, filling a ditch with water. The attackers felled him and pushed his head into the ditch. The wife saw everything through the window before they went into the house and beat her up, trying to make her tell where “the money” was hidden. (These people were penniless, living on their Social Security checks.) There was no money, so after landing a few more kicks in the woman’s face, the marauders went on their way. The husband died; the wife survived. The incident alarmed the Europeans living on the Old Mountain Road, all of whom have large properties and are already guarded by night watch men; the muggers chose the old couple precisely because they were unprotected, and of course got nothing at all out of it. The grapevine claims that the criminals were caught about two months later. They were part of a gang that lived in a cave on the coast to the west. But who knows? These things are taken more seriously by the European residents than food riots and battles with the so-called Polisario in the Sahara. The bridge-table mentality, if you’ll pardon the slur.
So anyway, that’s that for now.
II
GOOD THAT we’re back in touch.
You’re wrong; I do remember the last time we saw each other. You were living in that crazy apartment on the roof of the castle, and there was a terrible wind coming from the harbor. You had a few people there for dinner, and I remember the door onto the roof being opened and the wind blowing through the ent
ire flat, so that everyone was calling out: Shut the door! What the precise year was, I don’t know, because the episode seems to have no context. The only other detail I recall is your remark that you couldn’t read anything written after the eighteenth century. I accepted it as a personal idiosyncrasy; since then I’ve thought about it, wondering how healthy such a self-imposed stricture is for a twentieth-century author. Is it that you don’t read contemporary writing any longer in order to escape from its possibly pernicious influence, or that any contact with present-day fiction is repugnant to you because it suggests the idea of competition? Of course your reasons for excluding the nineteenth century remain unexplained in any case. Although in music I could easily make a similar sweeping statement, relegating to oblivion all the music of the nineteenth century. But that kind of generalization is never fruitful, it seems to me, and I wonder how closely you adhere to your dictum.
Half the time I haven’t even been sure where you were during these past fifteen years or so. Through others I heard you’d been living in Hong Kong, Tokyo and even Malaysia. (There was a town there which you were said to be fond of, but I can’t remember its name. On the east coast, and fairly far north.) Once you’d got out of the habit of writing to me, you no longer knew where to write, which is understandable. The excuse applies even more strongly to me, since you had no fixed residence, whereas I always had a home base.
I needn’t ask you if you remember Betty and Alec Howe, since they were your bridge and canasta partners, along with all the other residents I avoided knowing for years. Both of them died ten days or so ago; who knows of what? He first, and she a few days later. Smina is convinced that Betty did herself in so as not to have to go through Alec’s funeral. She could be right; I never knew the Howes except at parties and in the market. I suspect you won’t bemoan their passing.
And of course there’s the incredible Valeska. She’s been back here several times since you have, although not in the past five years or so. Abdelouahaïd conceived a strong dislike for her, mainly because she steadfastly refused to sit in the front seat of the Mustang, even though it was the only comfortable passenger’s seat in the car. Her insistence upon riding in back rubbed him the wrong way, since he assumed, and probably quite correctly, that she wanted to make it clear to the public that he was the chauffeur. This basic antipathy made it easy for him to criticize other facets of her behavior. This he constantly did to me, but of course not to her. Then one day he found his chance and sprang. The result was so insane that I couldn’t upbraid him afterwards as I should have.
On the days when I went to fetch Valeska at the hotel she always sat by a table in the courtyard, reading, doing crossword puzzles or whatever, but very busy. Abdelouahaïd would drive right up to the head of the stairs so she couldn’t help seeing us, and she always glanced up once, so that it was certain she’d noticed. For some reason I couldn’t fathom, she never budged until I got out of the car and went down into the courtyard and crossed it and stood within a foot of her table. This was a sacred rite. One day I stayed at home and sent Abdelouahaïd for her. When she saw him going down into the courtyard she jumped up and followed him up to the car, he said, asking again and again: “Where’s Paul? Where’s Paul?”
At this point Satan must have arrived and prompted Abdelouhaïd to look at the ground and say sadly: “Paul’s dead.” You’ll be able to imagine the screeches and squawks that followed on this announcement. He helped her into the car and they set off for Itesa. As you know, he doesn’t speak English, but he knew enough words to convey to her that I was lying on the floor, and that people were standing around looking at me.
He said that as they got to the Plaza del Kuweit, Valeska suddenly cried out: “Oh Christ! My camera’s at the hotel. Never mind. Go on.”
She was literally hysterical when she saw me, safe and sound, and I thought: This is too much, and saw myself taking her to Beni Makada to the psychiatrist. Then she wheeled and shrieked at Abdelouahaïd: “You son of a bitch!”
I don’t think she’s ever forgiven him for his joke, but he’s still delighted by the memory of it. As I say, I couldn’t bring myself to criticize him, since in a way he did it for me, thinking that she might change her behavior as a result. But naturally it changed nothing, she considering it merely an arbitrary action by a crazy Arab who was curious to see how she’d react.
They’re building fancy villas all around me. They’re well built but hideous, and look like old-fashioned juke boxes, their façades plastered with wrought iron and tile work. Each one is required by law to have a chimney, but in no case is the chimney connected with anything inside the house, being purely decorative. The builders are waiting for buyers who don’t arrive. Will they ever? The prices seem very high: between $125,000 and $200,000, and there’s no heat, of course—no furnace, no fireplaces—and often no space outside for a garden. Yet it’s that space which determines whether they’re to be considered officially villas, or merely houses (which don’t have to have chimneys).
I hope all’s well with you, and that you’ll reply.
III
I’VE MADE IT an objective to write you regularly if not frequently, to keep you in touch with this section of the outside world; it may help to aerate your morale. Clearly the only way to give you an idea of my life is for me to write whatever comes into my head. In the conscious selection of material to include, there is the possibility of imposing a point of view, a parti pris. I think my procedure will give you a more accurate picture of my daily life—at least, that part of it which goes on inside my head, by far the most important part.
I’ve often imagined being in your unenviable situation in the event of a fire or an earthquake. Not to be able to get out of your bed and try to run to safety. Or if you’re in your wheelchair, not to be able to go anywhere in it save up and down the corridors. I think that would be my main preoccupation, but again, maybe it wouldn’t, since one doesn’t live in constant expectation of fires and earthquakes. But I can see myself lying awake at night imagining in detail what it would be like to be asphyxiated by smoke or suddenly flung to the floor with a girder on top of my legs and the dust of plaster choking me. I hope you don’t do that, and I somehow doubt that you do. By now you must have become enough of a fatalist to be able to consider all objective phenomena as concomitants of your condition. If that’s the case, it may be partially due to your having had to put up for eight years with an impossible wife—a kind of training for the ultimate attainment of a state of total acceptance. At the same time it has occurred to me that the constant presence of a woman like Pamela may easily have augmented the tension which led eventually to the stroke. You suffered unnecessarily for those eight years. Pamela was a racist. She felt she operated on a higher level than yours because she was aware that three hundred years ago her ancestors were living in Massachusetts, whereas yours were living in some benighted region of the Ukraine. “We were here first, so of course it’s ours, but we love to have you here, because it makes life more interesting.” Am I wrong, or was Pamela like that? Weren’t you always aware of a profound contradiction between what she said and the way she acted? At this great remove, I don’t remember her very well. That is to say, her face escapes me; I can’t project an image of it. I do remember her voice however. It was beautifully modulated and a pleasure to listen to, except when she was angry. This was to be expected: one purposely changes one’s voice and delivery as a means of communicating one’s emotion. Yet now I have to ask: was Pamela ever angry? When I replay the mental tape I have of the breakfast in Quito (in that crazy ice-cream parlor with the balcony where they served food) I hear those trenchant staccato phrases of hers not as expressions of annoyance but as orders being given to an inferior. They had the desired effect: you shrank into your shell and said no more. Everything was delightful as long as there was no resistance; then commands had to be issued.
The truth is that for two or three decades I haven’t thought of her at all. I thought of her this morning onl
y because I was trying, from what I knew of your life, to imagine possible causes of a cerebral lesion. I admit that after the fact it’s of purely academic interest. The autopsy doesn’t cure the patient.
AFTER I WOKE UP this morning I recalled a silly song I heard as a child, when it was sung to me by a woman named Ethel Robb. (I don’t know who she was, but I seem to remember that she was a schoolteacher.) The words struck me as so strange that I learned them by heart.
In der vintertime ven der valley’s green
And der vind blows along der vindowsill
Den der vomen in der vaudeville
Ride der velocipedes around der vestibule.
(The melody was a variant of “Ach, du lieber Augustin.”) Surely you never heard the song. I wonder if anyone ever did, outside Miss Robb’s circle of acquaintances.
The early twenties was the time for absurd lyrics: witness “Oh by Jingo,” “The Ogo Pogo,” “Lena was the Queen of Palestina,” “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” “Barney Google” and God knows what else. There was also a Fanny Brice song called “Second-Hand Rose,” which got me into trouble with the mother of my hostess when I sang it at a party here in the sixties. She paid no attention to: “Even the piano in the parlor Papa bought for ten cents on the dollar.” But when I got to “Even Abie Cohen, that’s the boy I adore, had the nerve to tell me he’d been married before,” the lady jumped up and ran across to the divan where I was sitting. She seized my face between her thumb and fingers and squeezed, crying: “Even you, Paul Bowles, even you?” It was all so sudden and dramatic that I felt I’d committed a major solecism. Fortunately there were other guests who knew the song, and they were able to convince her that I hadn’t been extemporizing for the occasion, although she didn’t seem completely mollified.
