The Stories of Paul Bowles (18 page)

“My brother has blond hair,” he said with pride. Then confusedly he put the shirt back on and laid his arm about her shoulder. “You are beautiful because you have blue eyes. But even some of us have blue eyes. In any case, you are
magnificent!
” He started ahead again, singing a song in Spanish.

“Es pa’ mi la más bonita,

La mujer que yo más quiero
…”

They came to a cactus fence, with a small gate of twisted barbed wire. A yellow puppy rushed up to the gate and barked delightedly.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Mjid, although she had given no sign of fear. “You are my sister. He never bites the family.” Continuing down a dusty path between stunted palms which were quite dried-up and yellow, they came presently to a primitive bower made of bamboo stalks. In the center was a tiny bench beside a wall, and around the edges several desiccated rose plants grew out of the parched earth. From these he picked two bright red roses, placing one in her hair and the other under his
chechia,
so that it fell like a lock of hair over his forehead. The thick
growth of thorny vines climbing over the trellises cast a shadow on the bench. They sat awhile in silence in the shade.

Mjid seemed lost in thought. Finally he took her hand. “I’m thinking,” he said in a whisper. “When one is far away from the town, in one’s own garden, far from everyone, sitting where it is quiet, one always thinks. Or one plays music,” he added.

Suddenly she was conscious of the silence of the afternoon. Far in the distance she heard the forlorn crow of a cock. It made her feel that the sun would soon set, that all creation was on the brink of a great and final sunset. She abandoned herself to sadness, which crept over her like a chill.

Mjid jumped up. “If Ghazi wakes!” he cried. He pulled her arm impatiently. “Come, we’ll take a walk!” They hurried down the path, through the gate, and across a bare stony plateau toward the edge of the mountain.

“There’s a little valley nearby where the brother of the caretaker lives. We can go there and get some water.”

“Way down there?” she said, although she was encouraged by the possibility of escaping from Ghazi for the afternoon. Her mood of sadness had not left her. They were running downhill, leaping from one rock to the next. Her rose fell off and she had to hold it in her hand.

The caretaker’s brother was cross-eyed. He gave them some foul-smelling water in an earthen jug.

“Is it from the well?” she inquired under her breath to Mjid.

His face darkened with displeasure. “When you’re offered something to drink, even if it’s poison, you should drink it and thank the man who offers it.”

“Ah,” she said. “So it is poison. I thought so.”

Mjid seized the jug from the ground between them, and taking it to the edge of the cliff, flung it down with elegant anger. The cross-eyed man protested, and then he laughed. Mjid did not look at him, but walked into the house and began a conversation with some of the Berber women inside, leaving her to face the peasant alone and stammer her dozen words of Arabic with him. The afternoon sun was hot, and the idea of some water to drink had completely filled her mind. She sat down perversely with her back to the view and played with pebbles, feeling utterly useless and absurd. The cross-eyed man continued to laugh at intervals, as if it provided an acceptable substitute for conversation.

When Mjid finally came out, all his ill-humor had vanished. He put out his hand to help her up, and said: “Come, we’ll climb back up and have tea at the farm. I have my own room there. I decorated it myself. You’ll look at it and tell me if you have as pleasant a room in your house in America for drinking tea.” They set off, up the mountain.

The woman at the villa was obsequious. She fanned the charcoal fire and fetched water from the well. The children were playing a mysterious, quiet game at a far end of the enclosure. Mjid led her into the house, through several dim rooms, and finally into one that seemed the last in the series. It was cooler, and a bit darker than the others.

“You’ll see,” said Mjid, clapping his hands twice. Nothing happened. He called peevishly. Presently the woman entered. She smoothed the mattresses on the floor, and opened the blinds of the one small window, which gave onto the sea. Then she lit several candles which she struck onto the tile floor, and went out.

His guest stepped to the window. “Can you ever hear the sea here?”

“Certainly not. It’s about six kilometers away.”

“But it looks as though you could drop a stone into it,” she objected, hearing the false inflection of her voice; she was not interested in the conversation, she had the feeling that everything had somehow gone wrong.

“What am I doing here? I have no business here. I said I wouldn’t come.” The idea of such a picnic had so completely coincided with some unconscious desire she had harbored for many years. To be free, out-of-doors, with some young man she did not know—
could
not know—that was probably the important part of the dream. For if she could not know him, he could not know her. She swung the little blind shut and hooked it. A second later she opened it again and looked out at the vast expanse of water growing dim in the twilight.

Mjid was watching her. “You are crazy,” he said at last despairingly. “You find yourself here in this beautiful room. You are my guest. You should be happy. Ghazi has already left to go to town. A friend came by with a horse and he got a ride in. You could lie down, sing, drink tea, you could be happy with me…” He stopped, and she saw that he was deeply upset.

“What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” she said very quickly.

He sighed dramatically; perhaps it was a genuine sigh. She thought: “There is nothing wrong. It should have been a man, not a boy, that’s all.”
It did not occur to her to ask herself: “But would I have come if it had been a man?” She looked at him tenderly, and decided that his face was probably the most intense and beautiful she had ever seen. She murmured a word without quite knowing what it was.

“What?” he said.

She repeated it: “Incredible.”

He smiled inscrutably.

They were interrupted by the sound of the woman’s bare feet slapping the floor. She had a tremendous tray bearing the teapot and its accessories.

While he made the tea, Mjid kept glancing at her as if to assure himself that she was still there. She sat perfectly still on one of the mattresses, waiting.

“You know,” he said slowly, “if I could earn money I’d go away tomorrow to wherever I could earn it. I finish school this year anyway, and my brother hasn’t the money to send me to a Medersa at Fez. But even if he had it, I wouldn’t go. I always stay away from school. Only my brother gets very angry.”

“What do you do instead? Go bathing?”

He laughed scornfully, sampled the tea, poured it back into the pot, and sat up on his haunches. “In another minute it will be ready. Bathing? Ah, my friend, it has to be something important for me to risk my brother’s anger. I make love those days, all day long!”

“Really? You mean all day?” She was thoughtful.

“All day and most of the night. Oh, I can tell you it’s marvelous, magnificent. I have a little room,” he crawled over to her and put his hand on her knee, looking up into her face with an eagerness born of faith. “A room my family knows nothing about, in the Casbah. And my little friend is twelve. She is like the sun, soft, beautiful, lovely. Here, take your tea.” He sipped from his glass noisily, smacking his lips.

“All day long,” she reflected aloud, settling back against the cushions.

“Oh, yes. But I’ll tell you a secret. You have to eat as much as you can. But that’s not so hard. You’re that much hungrier.”

“Yes, of course,” she said. A little gust of wind blew along the floor and the candles flickered.

“How good it is to have tea and then lie down to rest!” he exclaimed, pouring her more tea and stretching out beside her on the mattress. She made a move as if to spring up, then lay still.

He went on. “It’s curious that I never met you last year.”

“I wasn’t in town very much. Only evenings. And then I was at the beach. I lived on the mountain.”

He sat up. “On this mountain here? And I never saw you! Oh, what bad luck!”

She described the house, and since he insisted, told him the rent she had paid. He was ferociously indignant. “For that miserable house that hasn’t even a good well? You had to send your Mohammed down the road for water! I know all about that house. My poor friend, you were robbed! If I ever see that dirty bandit I’ll smash his face. I’ll demand the money you paid him, and we’ll make a trip together.” He paused. “I mean, I’ll give it to you of course, and you can decide what you want to do with it.”

As he finished speaking he held up her handbag, opened it, and took out her fountain pen. “It’s a beautiful one,” he murmured. “Do you have many?”

“It’s the only one.”

“Magnificent!” He tossed it back in and laid the bag on the floor.

Settling against the pillows he ruminated. “Perhaps some day I shall go to America, and then you can invite me to your house for tea. Each year we’ll come back to Morocco and see our friends and bring back cinema stars and presents from New York.”

What he was saying seemed so ridiculous to her that she did not bother to answer. She wanted to ask him about the twelve-year-old girl, but she could find no excuse for introducing the subject again.

“You’re not happy?” He squeezed her arm.

She raised herself to listen. With the passing of the day the countryside had attained complete silence. From the distance she could hear a faint but clear voice singing. She looked at Mjid.

“The
muezzin? You
can hear it from here?”

“Of course. It’s not so far to the Marshan. What good is a country house where you can’t hear the
muezzin?
You might as well live in the Sahara.”

“Sh. I want to listen.”

“It’s a good voice, isn’t it? They have the strongest voices in the world.”

“It always makes me sad.”

“Because you’re not of the faith.”

She reflected a minute and said: “I think that’s true.” She was about to
add: “But your faith says women have no souls.” Instead she rose from the mattress and smoothed her hair. The
muezzin
had ceased. She felt quite chilled. “This is over,” she said to herself. They stumbled down the dark road into town, saying very little on the way.

He took her to her small hotel. The cable she had vaguely expected for weeks was there. They climbed the stairs to her room, the concierge looking suspiciously after them. Once in the room, she opened the envelope. Mjid had thrown himself onto the bed.

“I’m leaving for Paris tomorrow.”

His face darkened, and he shut his eyes for an instant. “You must go away? All right. Let me give you my address.” He pulled out his wallet, searched for a piece of paper, and finding none, took a calling card someone had given him, and carefully wrote.

“Fuente Nueva, “he said slowly as he formed the letters.” It’s my little room. I’ll look every day to see if there’s a letter.”

She had a swift vision of him, reading a letter in a window flooded with sunshine, above the city’s terraced roofs, and behind him, in the darkness of the room, with a face wise beyond its years, a complacent child waiting.

He gave her the card. Underneath the address he had written the word “Incredible,” enclosed in quotation marks and underlined twice. She glanced quickly to see his face, but it betrayed nothing.

Below them the town was blue, the bay almost black.

“The lighthouse,” said Mjid.

“It’s flashing,” she observed.

He turned and walked to the door. “Good-bye,” he said. “You will come back.” He left the door open and went down the stairs. She stood perfectly still and finally moved her head up and down a few times, as if thoughtfully answering a question. Through the open window in the hallway she heard his rapid footsteps on the gravel in the garden. They grew fainter.

She looked at the bed; at the edge, ready to fall to the floor, was the white card where she had tossed it. She wanted more than anything to lie down and rest. Instead, she went downstairs into the cramped little salon and sat in the corner looking at old copies of
L’Illustration.
It was almost an hour before dinner would be served.

(1950)

H
OW MANY MIDNIGHTS,
she wondered, had she raised the shade, opened the big window, and leaned out to gaze across the gently stirring city toward the highest towers? Over there behind a certain unmistakable group of them was his building, and at the very top of the building was his apartment, six flights up. In the summer she would look out over the rooftops at some length and sigh, and during the hottest weeks she moved her bed over, directly under the window. Then she would turn off all the lights and sit on the bed combing her hair in the glowing dimness of the city night, or sometimes even by moonlight, which of course was perfect. In the winter, however, she had to content herself with a moment of looking and a flash of imagining before she bounded across the room into bed.

It was winter now. She was walking crosstown, east, along one of the late Forties. This part of town always had seemed vaguely mysterious to her because of its specially constructed buildings that did not quite touch the pavement. All the buildings just north of the Grand Central were built that way, to absorb the shock, Van had told her; and there were long stretches of grillwork in the sidewalks through which, particularly at night, one could see another world beneath: railway tracks and sometimes
a slowly moving train. When it snowed, as it was doing now, the snow filtered down through the grills and covered the ties; then they were even more apparent.

Van worked here in this neighborhood: he was manager of a large bookshop and lending library on Madison Avenue. And he lived in the neighborhood as well, only farther over east, between Third and Second Avenues. His place was not ideal, either as to actual physical comfort or as to locality (since the immediate district was clearly a slum), but with her help he had made it livable, and she used to tell him: “New York and Paris are like that: no clear demarcation of neighborhoods.”

In any case, they already had signed a sublease for a place near Gramercy Park which was to be free the first of March. This was of prime importance because they planned to marry on Valentine’s Day. They were by no means sentimental souls, either one of them, and for that very reason it seemed to June a little daring to announce to their friends during cocktails: “It’s to be Valentine’s Day.”

Her father, who always was to be counted on to do the thoughtful thing, was staking them to two weeks in Bermuda. “God knows why,” Van said. “He hates my guts.”

“I don’t know how you can say a thing like that about Dad,” objected June. “He’s never been anything but the essence of politeness with you.”

“That’s right,” said Van, but impenitently.

She crossed Lexington Avenue. The entire sky looked as though it were being illumined from above by gray-violet neons. The tops of the buildings were lost in the cloud made by the falling snow. And the harbor sounds, instead of coming from the river ahead, came from above, as if the tugs were making their careful way around the tips of the towers. “This is the way New York was meant to be,” she thought—not the crowded fire-escape, open-hydrant, sumac-leaved summer. Just this quiet, damp, neutral weather when the water seemed all around. She stood still a moment in the middle of the block, listening to the fog horns; there was a whole perspective of them. In the remotest background was a very faint, smothered one that said: “Mmmmm! Mmmmm!” “It must be on the Sound,” she thought. She started to walk again.

In her coat pocket she had the keys, because this was to be a special night. Not that there had been any overt reference to that: there was no need for it. It had been implicit in their conversation yesterday afternoon when she had stopped in at the bookshop to see him. They had stood a
few minutes talking in the back of the store among the desks, and then he had slipped her the keys. That was surely the most exciting single thing that ever had happened between them—the passage of the keys from his hand to hers. By the gesture he gave up what she knew was most dear to him: his privacy. She did not want him to think that she was in any way unaware of this, and she said in a low voice: “You can trust me with them, I think,” laughing immediately afterward so that her remark should not sound ridiculous. He had kissed her and they had gone out for ten minutes to have coffee.

Sitting at the counter he had told how he had caught a man stealing books the night before. (The bookshop was open at night; because of the location it seemed they did almost as much business in the evening as they did during the day.) Van had just finished arranging a display of new books in one of the show windows, and was standing outside in the street looking in. He had noticed a man wearing a long overcoat, standing by the technical books. “I had my eye on him from the beginning. It’s a type, you know. You get to spot them. He looked at me right through the window. I suppose he thought I was just another man in the street. I had on
my
overcoat, too.” And the man had taken a quick glance around the store to be sure that no one was watching him, had reached up, snatched down a book and dropped it inside his coat. Van had gone quickly to the corner, tapped the traffic policeman on the shoulder and said: “Would you mind coming into my store for a minute? I want you to arrest a man.” They had caught him, and when they had opened his coat they found he already had taken three books.

Van always said: “You see some funny things in a bookshop,” and often they were really funny. But this story struck June as remotely sinister rather than amusing. Not because it had to do with a theft, certainly. It was not the first case of booklifting he had related to her. Perhaps it was because more than anything else she hated being watched behind her back, and involuntarily she put herself in the place of the thief, with whom she felt that Van had not been quite fair. It seemed to her that he might have gone in and said to him: “I’ve been watching you. I’ve seen everything you’ve been doing. Now, I give you one last chance. Put back whatever you’ve taken and get the hell out, and don’t come back in here.” To spring on the man out of the dark after spying on him did seem a little unfair. But she knew she was being absurd. Van could never be unfair with anyone; this was his way of handling the affair, and it was typical
of him: he never would argue. She never knew even when he was angry with her until after it was all over, and he told her, smiling: “Gee, I was burned up last Friday.”

She crossed Third Avenue. Up to now the snow had been melting as fast as it fell, but the air was getting colder, and the sidewalk began to show silver. The keys jingled in her coat pocket; she pulled off her glove and felt for them. They also were cold. When she had left her house, she had said to her parents: “I’m going out with Van. I’ll probably be rather late.” They had merely said: “Yes.” But she thought she had intercepted a look of mutual understanding between them. It was all right: in ten more days they would be married. She had climbed up the six steep flights of stairs on a good many evenings during the past two years, just to spend an hour or so with him, but never, she reflected with an obscure sort of pride, had anything ever occurred between them which was not what her parents would call “honorable.”

She had arrived at the apartment house; it had a gray-stone façade and a good deal of wrought iron around the entrance door. A woman who looked like a West Indian of some sort came out. Noticing that June was carrying a potted plant under her arm, she held the door partially open for her. June thanked her and went in. It was a rubber plant she had bought for Van’s apartment. He was inclined to be indifferent about flowers, and, she feared, about decoration in general. She always had hoped to develop aesthetic appreciation in him, and she considered that she had made remarkable progress during the past year. Practically all the adornments in his apartment were objects either of her buying or her choosing.

She knew just how many steps there were to each flight of stairs: nineteen for the first and fifteen for the others. The halls were tiled in black and white, like a bathroom, and tonight, to add to that impression, the stairs and floors were thoroughly wet with the melting snow people had tracked in; the air smelled of wet doormats, wet rubbers, wet clothing. On the third floor a huge perambulator of black leatherette nearly blocked the passageway between the stairs. She frowned at it and thought of the fire regulations.

Because she did not want to be out of breath she mounted the stairs slowly. Not that Van would be there when she arrived—it was still too early—but being out of breath always created in her a false kind of excitement which she particularly wanted to avoid tonight. She turned the
key in the lock and stepped inside. It gave her a strange sensation to push open the door all by herself and stand there in the hall alone, smelling the special odor of the place: an amalgam in which she imagined she detected furniture polish, shaving cream and woodsmoke. Woodsmoke there surely was, because he had a fireplace. It was she who had persuaded him to have it installed. And it had not been nearly so expensive to build as he had imagined it was going to be, because since this was the top floor the chimney had only to be built up through the roof. Many times he had said to her: “That was one sensible idea you had,” as though the others had not been just as good! They had cut down the legs of all the living-room furniture so that it nestled nearer the floor and made the room seem spacious; they had painted each wall a different shade of gray, adding the occasional wall brackets of ivy; they had bought the big glass coffee table. All these things had made the place pleasanter, and they had all been her ideas.

She shut the door and went into the kitchen. It was a little chilly in the apartment; she lit the gas oven. Then she unwrapped the wet brown paper from around the rubber plant, and set the pot upright on the table. The plant leaned somewhat to one side. She tried to make it stand straight, but it would not. The icebox motor was purring. She took out two trays of ice and dumped the cubes into a bowl. Reaching up to the top shelf of the cabinet she brought down an almost full bottle of Johnny Walker, and set it, along with two highball glasses, onto the big lacquer tray. The room suddenly seemed terribly close; she turned off the oven. Then she scurried about looking for newspapers with which to lay a fire. There were only a few, but she found some old magazines in the kitchen. She rolled the newspapers into thin little logs and set them at various angles across the andirons. Underneath she pushed crumpled pages of the magazines, and on top she put what kindling wood there was. The logs she decided to leave until the kindling already was burning. When the fire was laid, but not lighted, she looked out the window. The snow was coming down thicker than it had been when she came in. She drew the heavy woolen curtains; they covered one entire wall, and they too had been her idea. Van had wanted to have Venetian blinds made. She had tried to make him see how hideous they would be, but although he had agreed that the black-and-white curtains were smart, he never would admit that Venetian blinds were ugly. “Maybe you’re right, for this
room,” he said. “For every room in the world,” she had wanted to declare, but she decided against it, since after all, he had given in.

It wasn’t that Van had really bad taste. He had an innate sensitivity and a true intelligence which became manifest whenever he talked about the books he had read (and he read a good many during odd moments at the bookshop). But his aesthetic sense had never been fully awakened. Naturally she never mentioned it—she merely made small suggestions which he was free to take or to leave as he saw fit. And usually, if she let her little hints fall at strategic moments, he would take them.

On the mantel were two enormous plaster candelabra covered with angels; she had brought them herself all the way from Matamoros Izúcar in Mexico. Actually she had packed six of them, and all had broken except these two which did not quite match, one of them being somewhat taller than the other. (These were among the few things about which Van was still a bit recalcitrant: he could not be sure he liked them, even yet.) Each one held six candles. She went to a drawer in the desk and got out a dozen long yellow tapers. Often she brought him a dozen at a time. “Where am I supposed to put the damned things?” he would complain. She got a knife from the kitchen and began to scrape the bottoms of the candles to make them fit the holders. “In the middle of this operation he’s going to arrive,” she said to herself. She wanted the place to be perfect before he got there. Nervously she tossed the paraffin scrapings into the fireplace. She had a feeling that he would not just come up; it would be more like him to ring from the vestibule downstairs. At least, she hoped he would do that. The time it would take him to get up the six flights might make a great difference in the way the room would look. She fitted the last candle into the bright holder and sighed with relief. They were slow-burning ones; she decided to light them now before returning the candelabra to the mantel. Up there they looked beautiful. She stepped back to admire their splendor, and for a moment watched the slowly moving interplay of shadows on the wall. She switched off the electric lights in the room. With the fireplace aglow the effect would be breathtaking.

Impetuously she determined to do a very daring thing. It might possibly annoy Van when he first saw it, but she would do it anyway. She rushed to the other side of the room and feverishly began to push the divan across the floor toward the fireplace. It would be so snug to be
right in front of the blaze, especially with the snow outside. The cushions fell off and a caster got entangled with the long wool of the goatskin rug she had given him for his birthday. She got the rug out of the way and continued to manipulate the divan. It looked absurd out there in the middle of the room, and she swung one end around so that it lay at right angles to the fireplace, against the wall. After she had piled the cushions back she stepped aside to observe it, and decided to leave it there. Then the other pieces had to be arranged. The whole room was in disorder at this point.

“I know he’s going to open that door this minute,” she thought. She turned the overhead light back on and quickly began to shift chairs, lamps and tables. The last piece to be moved was a small commode that she had once helped him sandpaper. As she carried it across the room its one little drawer slid out and fell on the floor. All the letters Van had received in the past months were there, lying in a fairly compact heap at her feet. “Damnation!” she said aloud, and as she said it, the hideous metallic sound of the buzzer in the kitchen echoed through the apartment. She let go of the commode and rushed out to press the button that opened the door downstairs onto the street. Then, without pressing it, she ran back into the living room and knelt on the floor, quickly gathering up the letters and dumping them into the drawer. But they had been piled carefully into that small space before the accident, and now they were not; as a result the drawer was overfull and would not close. Again she spoke aloud. “Oh, my God!” she said. And she said that because for no reason at all it had occurred to her that Van might think she had been reading his correspondence. The main thing now was to get the commode over into the corner; then she might be able to force the drawer shut. As she lifted it, the buzzer pealed again, with insistence. She ran into the kitchen, and this time pressed the answer button with all her might. Swiftly she hurried back and carried the commode into the corner. Then she tried to close the drawer and found it an impossibility. In a burst of inspiration she turned the little piece of furniture around so that the drawer opened toward the wall. She stepped to the fireplace and touched a match to the paper logs. By now he would have got only about to the fourth floor; there were three more.