Travels

by Paul Bowles

That way he stayed outside the cage a little longer.

  In New York he thought only of Morocco.

  Like a convict planning a prison break he prepared his escape.

  And summer found him sailing toward the east. He stayed in Fez this time.

  And though his parents awaited him in New York

  He went to South America to see how it looked.

  The forests and the mountains delighted him, but he did not stay.

  He was in California writing music. He was in New York writing music.

  Orson Welles wanted music for two plays, and he provided it.

  Kristians Tonny and his wife arrived in New York.

  Jane Auer appeared on the scene, and the four set out for Mexico.

  The day after they arrived in Mexico City Jane disappeared.

  Much later they heard she had gone to Arizona.

  After a few months they went on to Guatemala. It was very fine.

  He hurried to New York to orchestrate his first ballet.

  He took Jane Auer to hear it played by the Philadelphia Orchestra.

  Soon Jane Auer became Jane Bowles.

  With too much luggage they boarded a Japanese ship and went southward.

  Then they were in Guanacaste with the monkeys and parrots

  And they carried a parrot with them from Costa Rica to Guatemala.

  They were on the Côte d’Azur when Chamberlain visited Munich.

  They were in New York when Hitler marched eastward.

  He was writing music for theater and film directors And Jane was writing a novel.

  They decided to go and live in Mexico. The hacienda was ten thousand feet up.

  When he had to fly to New York to work, Jane stayed behind.

  The rooming-house where they lived that winter was run by the poet Auden.

  At half past six each morning Jane met the poet in the dining-room.

  Jane was a friend of Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika.

  And Auden had married her. They had things to talk about.

  Soon they were back in Mexico. He was composing a zarzuela.

  And Jane was writing a novel.

  One day she came to the end of it.

  The next day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

  They went to Tehuantepec and listened to the marimbas.

  He was still working on the zarzuela. He was also writing a second ballet.

  They went to New York and he became a music critic.

  Jane’s novel was published and Leonard Bernstein conducted the zarzuela.

  He went to Mexico and admired the new volcano Paricutin.

  The Belgian Government-in-Exile commissioned music for a film on the Congo.

  Collaborating with Salvador Dali, he wrote a third ballet.

  Then he began to write short stories, and grew tired of writing theater music.

  He went to Cuba and El Salvador. Jane was writing a play.

  He stopped being a music critic, but continued to write music for Broadway.

  One night he dreamed he was in Morocco. The dream made him very happy.

  A publisher commissioned him to write a novel.

  He decided to leave New York and go back to Morocco.

  In Fez he began to write The Sheltering Sky.

  He continued to write it as he moved here and there in the Sahara.

  He met Jane in Tangier and took her to Fez.

  A stream rushed by under their windows as they worked. He finished his novel.

  He had already written music for Tennessee Williams’ first Broadway success.

  He was not surprised to learn that Tennessee wanted him for another play.

  He went to New York and wrote the score.

  After the opening he took Tennessee back to Morocco with him.

  The weather was bad, and Tennessee stayed less than a month.

  He and Jane were living at the Farhar in Tangier. Truman Capote arrived.

  For six weeks he amused them at mealtimes.

  There were many parties and picnics.

  Jane worked in her cottage, but he did not know what she was writing.

  He was chagrined to hear that the publishers did not want his book.

  We expected a novel, they said, and this is not a novel.

  So it was published first in London.

  They went to England and stayed a few weeks in Wiltshire.

  Jane wanted to spend the winter in Paris. He decided on Sri Lanka.

  On the ship he started a novel about Tangier.

  He went to stay on a tea plantation in the hills.

  Where leopards hid behind rocks and carried off the dogs.

  He took a boat across to Dhanushkodi in India.

  India was hotter than Sri Lanka. He worked on his novel.

  When he arrived in Paris, Jane was not ready to leave.

  He was making an opera out of Garcia Lorca’s Yerma.

  This was for Libby Holman. They spent a month together in Andalusia.

  Autumn in Fez. Winter and spring in the Sahara.

  Jane wanted to return to Morocco.

  He drove to the French frontier and picked her up.

  But she liked Spain so much that they spent a month there.

  She finished her play and went to New York.

  He finished his novel and went to Bombay.

  The Indian railways had suffered in the past two years.

  In South India he was put into a screening camp

  Along with twenty thousand Tamils caught while trying to escape to Sri Lanka.

  But although they were there for months and years

  He got out after two days, and went to Sri Lanka.

  In midsummer he was in Venice. He was in Madrid when a wire came from Ceylon.

  It was possible now to buy a small island off the coast of Sri Lanka.

  He bought it and went to New York to write music for Jane’s play.

  In the summer he was in Rome, working on a film for Visconti.

  He did not know what he was doing, but he did it anyway.

  That winter in Tangier, while he had paratyphoid, William Burroughs came to see him.

  It was a year before they got to know one another.

  In the summer he started to write a third novel, this one about Fez.

  It was half finished when he and Jane sailed

  To pass the winter on Taprobane, the island off the coast of Sri Lanka.

  Jane was not well. She was not happy there.

  After two months she returned to Tangier.

  He finished his novel and took a cruise to Japan.

  Then he went back to Tangier and continued his work on the Garcia Lorca opera.

  His parents came to visit him. They enjoyed Morocco. He was surprised.

  He thought about his island, and decided to go to Sri Lanka and sell it.

  The Suez Canal was blocked. He had to go via Cape Town.

  He passed the winter at Taprobane and set sail for Mombasa.

  While he was in Kenya Jane suffered a stroke.

  He took her to England to be examined.

  The doctors could do nothing, and they returned to Tangier.

  Soon she became worse and had to go to London again. It was a bad time.

  In Madeira her health grew worse. She was obliged to go to New York.

  Tennessee, who loved her, came from Florida to meet her at the airport.

  The Garcia Lorca opera was produced. It was not a success.

  Libby Holman had worked very hard, but there was no director.

  He and Jane went back to Tangier. But then a telegram came from Tennessee

  Saying he needed music for a new play.

  He sent him the script for Sweet Bird of Youth.

  Part of the music was written in Tangier and part on the New York-bound ship.

  The Rockefeller Foundation gave him a grant to record music in Morocco.

  He spent six months taping music in the mountains, the desert and the city.

  The
following year he began to tape Moroccan story-tellers. Jane seemed to be better, but she still could not see to work.

  He took Allen Ginsberg to Marrakesh.

  But they arrived the day the Medina burned.

  The smoke from the bazaars and souks was heavy in the air.

  Jane’s health was now less good. They went twice to America, saw their parents.

  Consulted doctors who might be of use. But no doctor could be of use.

  In Tangier on the Monte Viejo he wrote his fourth novel.

  He began to translate what Mohammed Mrabet recorded.

  A publisher asked him to write a book about Cairo.

  He did not want to do it, so he playfully suggested Bangkok.

  The publisher agreed. He went to Bangkok via Panama. He was appalled.

  You have arrived fifteen years too late, everyone told him.

  The trees were gone. The klongs had been filled in. The air was foul.

  After four months the Thai authorities forced him to leave.

  In Tangier he found that Jane needed to be hospitalized.

  He took her to Spain.

  Then he agreed to go to California to teach.

  He told his students that he was not a teacher and could not teach.

  They laughed, thinking he was eccentric.

  After the first semester he returned to Morocco.

  Jane begged to be taken back to Tangier. The doctors advised against it.

  Nevertheless he took her back with him because she was so unhappy.

  It was a disaster. She would not eat, and grew weak and thin.

  He admitted defeat and returned her to the hospital in Spain.

  She remained there. She died there. Her grave is unmarked.

  After that it seemed to him that nothing more happened.

  He went on living in Tangier, translating from Arabic, French and Spanish.

  He wrote many short stories, but no novels.

  There continued to be more and more people in the world.

  And there was nothing anyone could do about anything.

  Glossary

  From Their Heads are Green, 1963

  AHOUACHE In the Grand Atlas and in territories to the south of it, a formal festival involving groups of dancers, singers and percussionists.

  BAKHSHISH A gratuity.

  BENDIR A large disc-shaped drum with one membrane. BHIKKU A Buddhist monk.

  BIDONVILLES The shanty towns that have grown up during the past three decades around the urban centers of North Africa. Not a geographically restrictive term.

  BLED The countryside.

  BUTAGAZ Butane gas, used for cooking.

  CAID The chieftan of a tribe (or fraction of a tribe).

  CAIQUE A rowboat or sailing boat.

  CHEHADE The spoken sentence affirming the Islamic faith.

  CHIKH The leader, in this case, of a group of folk musicians.

  CICERONE A tourist guide.

  COMEDOR The dining room in a small hotel.

  COUSCOUS (properly COUSCSOU) A form of pasta, made by sprinkling drops of water over flour.

  DAGOBA Buddhist burial mound.

  DAHVEN The repeated backward and forward motion of the torso of a seated person.

  DARBOUKA Large ceramic hand drum.

  DHOTI A loincloth worn by men in India.

  DJAOUI Resin for burning, especially with benzoin in it.

  DJELLABA A hooded overgarment with sleeves. Formerly a man’s garment, but now worn by both sexes.

  FRAJA Mass dancing.

  GANNEGA A small disc-shaped drum with a single fine membrane.

  GITANOS Gypsies.

  GOPURAM Ornamented tower at the gateway to a Hindu temple.

  GUENNAOUA (singular GUENNAOUI) A religious brotherhood, most of whose members are of Sudanese extraction, descendents of slaves. Their choreographed ritual is useful in the curing of madness, seizures and scorpion stings. They also rid houses of undesirable spirits.

  HAIK Woman’s traditional outer covering, generally of fine white wool.

  IMAM Leader of prayer in the mosque.

  IMDYAZEN In certain Berber-speaking regions of Morocco, professional itinerant musicians.

  IMOCHAGH Tamachek term for Touareg.

  JOTEYA Second-hand market.

  KATIB Secretary.

  KHALIFA A deputy official.

  KIF The fine leaves at the base of the flowers of the common hemp plant, chopped and mixed (ideally in a ratio of seven to four) with tobacco grown in the same earth.

  KISSARIA In a Moslem town, the quarter of the souks devoted to the sale of textiles, clothing and luxury articles.

  LITHAM The cloth worn over the lower half of a woman’s face.

  MAHIA Alcohol distilled from fruit.

  MAJOUN In North Africa majoun is the word for jam. Used in its special sense it is the word for any sweet preparation eaten with the purpose of inducing hallucinations; its active ingredient is the hemp plant.

  MEDINA The Arabic word for city. In North Africa it indicates in particular that part of any city which was built by the Moslems and was already in existence at the time of the arrival of the Europeans.

  MEHARISTES Saharan military cavalrymen mounted on camels.

  MEKTOUB Destiny.

  MIJMAH A brazier.

  MOTTOUI Leather pouch for carrying kif on one’s person.

  MOULOUD The holiday commemorating the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed; also the month in which it occurs.

  MOUSSEM Seasonal festival held at the tomb of a saint.

  MRUQ Sauce.

  M’TARRBA The high narrow mattresses that line the walls of the rooms in a Moslem house.

  MSKA A clear yellow gum resin.

  NABOULA Bladder. Specifically a lamb’s bladder, dried and softened, in which to store kif hermetically.

  NARGILEH A water-pipe consisting of a jar and a hose with a mouthpiece.

  PARADOR An inn. In Spain and Morocco a specific term for government-run tourist hostelries.

  PASEO An avenue, generally with a strip of garden in the center.

  PELOTON In French military usage, a detachment of soldiers. PIRITH Buddhist purification ceremony QAHAOUAJI Tea-maker.

  QSBAH Large reed transverse flute with a low register.

  RHAITA Reed instrument, equivalent to oboe.

  RONDA Card game, suggestive of gin rummy

  SEBSI Long thin pipe for smoking kif.

  SEMOLINA Grains made from grinding any cereal. In North Africa the process is slow: drops of water are sprinkled over the surface of flour, and the resulting accretions are shaken until they are globular and of the desired size.

  SOUK (properly SOUQ) The word is used throughout North Africa to mean a market. In the larger cities it has a second, more specific use in designating a street or quarter devoted to the buying and selling (and often the manufacture) of one given commodity.

  SPANIOLINE Plural of SPANIOLI, a Spaniard.

  TARBOOSH High-crowned skullcap, a fez.

  TBOLA Plural of TBEL, North African side-drum, played with sticks.

  TOB Mixture of straw and earth (and often manure) for masonry.

  TOUBIB Doctor.

  TSEUHEUR The theory and practice of black magic.

  YMAKA The small black skullcap worn by male Jews.

  ZAMAR Riffian double-reed musical instrument.

  ZAOUIA The seat of a religious brotherhood, generally comprising a mosque, a school and the tomb of the sect’s founder.

  ZEBU The East Indian humped ox.

  A Bowles Chronology

  By Daniel Halpern

  Paul Bowles with Tennessee Williams – a photo taken during Williams’ first visit to Morocco in January 1949

  Chronology

  1910 Born Paul Frederic Bowles on December 30 in |amaica, Queens, New York City, the only child of Rena Winewisser and Claude Dietz Bowles. (Bowles family immigrated to New England in the seventeenth century; Paul’s grandfather, Frederick Bowles, fought for the Union in
the Civil War and settled in Elmira, New York. Rena Winewisser’s grandfather was a German freethinker and political radical who came to the United States in 1848; her father owned a department store in Bellows Falls, Vermont, before moving family to a 165-acre farm near Springfield, Massachusetts.) Father is a dentist. The family lives at 108 Hardenbrook Avenue in Jamaica, the building where his father has his office and laboratory.

  1911-15 Bowles learns to read by age four and keeps notebooks with drawings and stories, a habit that will continue throughout his childhood. His activities are strictly regimented by father. He spends summers with paternal grandparents in Glencora, New York, or at the Winewissers’.

  1916-18 Family moves to 207 De Grauw Avenue in Jamaica in summer 1916. Bowles begins attending Model School in Jamaica the following year, entering at the second grade level. Mother reads him stories of Hawthorne and Poe. Beginning in 1918, Bowles goes to Manhattan twice a week for orthodontic treatment, which will continue for ten years; makes monthly visits to New York Public Library on 42nd Street, where Anne Carroll Moore, a family friend, is head of the children’s department. Receives books from Moore and visits her Greenwich Village apartment. Father confiscates notebooks in a fit of rage. (Bowles would write in his autobiography: “This was the only time my father beat me. It began a new stage in the development of hostilities between us”)

  1919 Bowles and parents catch influenza but survive worldwide epidemic. Father buys phonograph, collects classical recordings, and forbids his son from bringing jazz records into the house. Bowles continues to buy “dance” records. After family buys piano, Bowles studies theory, sight-singing, and piano technique. Writes “Le Carré: An Opera in Nine Chapters” about two men who exchange wives.

  1920-21 Keeps diary filled with imaginary events and made-up characters. Writes daily “newspaper.” Is promoted from fourth to sixth grade.

  1922 Family moves to 34 Terrace Avenue in Jamaica. Bowles gives readings of his poems and stories after school. Buys first book of poetry, Arthur Waley’s A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems.

  1924 Graduates Model School and attends public high school in Flushing, New York. Appointed humor editor of The Oracle, the school magazine.

  1925-26 Writes crime stories with the recurring character “the Snake-Woman” and reads them at the summer home of Anna, Jane, and Sue Hoagland, friends of the family in Glenora. Meets the Hoaglands’ friend Mary Crouch (later Oliver). Transfers to Jamaica High School. Reads English writer Arthur Machen. Is deeply impressed by a performance of Stravinsky’s The Firebird at Carnegie Hall. Shows talent in painting.