NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (78 page)

Bowles said, “People come every day. There are film and TV people. The
équipe
take over. Some Germans stayed for eleven days and dropped
food and sandwiches everywhere. Some people want me to sign their books. The ones with the most chutzpah say to me, ‘Since we were in Tangier we didn’t want to leave until we saw what you looked like.’ ”

“I suppose because you keep to yourself, people seek you out.”

But another reason that people sought him out was that he had no telephone.

“I work all the time,” Bowles said. “Malraux said to me, ‘Never let yourself become a public monument. If you do, people will piss on you.’ ”

“That’s good.”

Bowles leaned over, snatched at the blackout curtains, missed, and then gathered his bathrobe again.

“Is it dark?”

“It must be—it’s after seven,” I said. “I ought to be going.”

“I don’t know whether I’ll go anywhere with this leg,” he said, staring at his thin shanks under the blanket. He looked up at me. “We’ll meet again, Inshallah. Are you staying in Tangier?”

“I might leave tomorrow.”

He took a puff on his
kif
cigarette and kept the smoke in his lungs.

“Everyone is always leaving tomorrow.”

Darkness had fallen. I had to grope my way out of Bowles’s apartment, and I stumbled down the stairs—the elevator was not working. But I was elated. I had met Bowles, he had been friendly and he seemed to typify a place that had been something of a riddle to me.

Pleased with myself for this pleasant encounter, I kept walking, down Bowles’s road, that had once been called Imam Kastellani, up to the main road and past the Spanish consulate, and into town, about a twenty-minute walk. I needed to find a quiet place to write everything down, the whole conversation. I entered a bar, The Negresco, and ordered a glass of beer and began writing.

“You’re a writer,” the bartender said. His name was Hassan. He asked to see the page, and smiled at my handwriting. “Do you know Mohammed Choukri? He is a writer. He is over there.”

I was introduced to a small smiling man with a big mustache. He was
slightly drunk, but he was alert and voluble. His books, he said, had been translated by Bowles. His best-known novel was
For Bread Alone.
But he had published other books, in Arabic and French. One was a diaristic account of his meetings with Jean Genet.

“Genet preferred me to Bowles,” Choukri said, a twinkle in his eye, as though defying me to guess the reason. He was small, fine-featured, smoking heavily, in his late fifties or early sixties. He wore a tweed jacket and a tie and seemed almost professorial.

“Why?”

“Because I am marginal,” Choukri said. “Bowles is from a great family. He has money. He has position. But I am a Berber, from a little village, Nador. Until I was twenty I was illiterate.” He licked his thumb and pretended to stamp a document with it. “I had thirteen brothers and sisters. Nine of them died of poverty—tuberculosis and other diseases.”

“How long have you known Bowles?”

“Twenty-one years,” Choukri said. “He is a miser. In twenty-one years he has not bought me even one cup of coffee.”

You’re not difficult; you’re simply mean
, a friend of Bowles once said to him. Bowles reflected:
I’ve thought about it for some years, and have decided he was probably right. The meanness however is not personal; it’s just New England parsimony, and I’ve never questioned its correctness.

“Do you think he’s happy here?”

“You can’t ask that question now,” Choukri said. “You should have asked him that thirty years ago.”

We stood at the bar, drinking beer. The beer slopped on my little notebook. I had been interrupted writing about Bowles. Now there was more—this sudden encounter with one of Bowles’s oldest friends in Morocco. It was dreamlike, too. All those names: Gertrude Stein, Aaron Copland, the Duke of Pembroke, William Burroughs, Jean Genet—familiar and intrusive and unreal in this smoky Tangerine bar, another unlikely interlude in the hello-good-bye of travel.

“He is a nihilist,” Choukri said.

That seemed to sum him up, the man who had once owned an island and visited Wilton Manor; who now stubbornly lived in one room, warmed by a blowtorch.

“Did Tangier do that to him?”

“Tangier is a mysterious city,” Choukri said. “When you solve the mystery it is time to leave.”

I could not have imagined a better exit line to serve my departure—from Tangier, from Morocco, from the Mediterranean. But the line vanished from my mind the next morning as I boarded the ferry
Boughaz
for the trip across the Straits.

I was thinking of how there was an aspect of Mediterranean travel that was like museum-going, the shuffling, the squinting, the echoes, the dust, the dubious treasures. You were supposed to be reverential. But even in the greatest museums I had been distracted, and found myself gazing out of museum windows at traffic or trees, or at other museum-goers; places like that were always the haunt of lovers on rainy Sundays. Instead of pictures, I often looked at the guards, the men or women in chairs at the entrances to rooms, the way they stifled yawns, their watchful eyes, their badges. No museum guard ever resembles a museum-goer, and my Mediterranean was like that.

Herculean was a word I kept wanting to use but never did. The only Herculean part of my trip was every night having to describe how I had spent the day, without leaving anything out; turning all my actions into words. It was like a labor in a myth or an old story. I could not sleep until the work was done. Mediterranean travel for me—for many people—was sometimes ancestor worship and sometimes its opposite. This was unlike any other trip I had taken, because although the journey was over, the experience wasn’t. Travel was so often a cure; I was cured of China and Peru, by going; I was cured of Fiji and Sri Lanka. Cured of Kenya and Pakistan. Cured of England, after many years. But my trip had not cured me of the Mediterranean, and I knew I would go back, the way you went back to a museum, to look—at pictures or out the window—and think; back to some Mediterranean places I saw, and more that I missed.

The mooring lines of the
Boughaz
were hauled aboard just as dawn broke. I thought of what Bowles had said. Don’t become a monument or people will piss on you. There was no danger of my becoming a monument, but Gibraltar was another story. Perhaps that explained why I had been so flippant when I had seen it the first time, and maybe so many monuments explained the mood of my Mediterranean travel, or some of it.

The darkness in the sky dissolved, as though rinsed in light. Into that
eastern sky leaked yellow-orange, pinking to paleness, a whole illuminated day ahead, looming behind the Rock to the northeast, grander at this distance, and then the pair of pillars big and small on the facing shores. The sea was calm, and glittered under limitless sky—it was going to be a wonderful morning, the sort of restful brilliance you get, the sky exhausted of clouds, after days of storms. The light grew brighter, revealing the day, and it just got better, as this rosy dawn became a sunset in reverse.

P
AUL
T
HEROUX
was born in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1941 and published his first novel,
Waldo
, in 1967. His subsequent novels include
The Black House, The Family Arsenal, Picture Palace
(winner of the Whitbread Prize for fiction),
O-Zone, The Mosquito Coast
, which was made into a hit movie starring Harrison Ford, the critically acclaimed
My Secret History
, and
Chicago Loop.
His bestselling and highly successful travel books include
The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, Riding the Iron Rooster, To the Ends of the Earth
, and
The Happy Isles of Oceania.