The Stories of Paul Bowles (35 page)

Suddenly, with two simultaneous motions, Donald’s mother slapped her napkin into her place and pushed her chair back violently. She rose and ran out of the room, slamming the door. No one said anything. Donald sat frozen, unable to look up, unable even to breathe. Then he realized that his father had got up, too, and was on his way out.

“Leave her alone, Owen,” said Gramma.

“You keep out of this,” his father said. His footsteps made the stairs creak as he went up. No one said anything until Gramma made as if to rise. “I’m going up,” she declared.

“For God’s sake, Abbie, sit still,” Grampa told her. Gramma cleared her throat, but did not get up.

Aunt Louisa looked very red, and the muscles of her face were twitching. “Hateful,” she said in a choked voice. “Just hateful.”

“I felt like slapping his face,” confided Aunt Emilie. “Did you hear what he said to me when we were having our presents?”

At a glance from Uncle Greg, Aunt Emilie stopped. “Why, Donald!” she exclaimed brightly, “you’ve scarcely touched your dinner! Aren’t you hungry?”

In his mind’s eye he was seeing the bedroom upstairs, where his father was twisting his mother’s arm and shaking her to make her look at him. When she wouldn’t, he punched her, knocking her down, and kicked her as hard as he could, all over her body. Donald looked up. “Not very,” he said.

Without warning Mr. Gordon began to talk, holding his glass in front of him and examining it as he turned it this way and that. “Family quarrels,” he sighed. “Same old thing. Reminds me of my boyhood. When I look back on it, it seems to me we never got through a meal without a fight, but I suppose we must have once in a while.” He set the glass down. “Well, they’re all dead now, thank God.”

Donald looked quickly across at Mr. Gordon as if he were seeing him for the first time.

“It’s snowing!” cried Gramma triumphantly. “Look, it’s snowing again. I knew we’d have more snow before dark.” She did not want Mr. Gordon to go on talking.

Aunt Louisa sobbed once, got up, and went out into the kitchen. Uncle Ivor followed her.

“Why, Donald! You’ve got the wishbone!” cried Aunt Emilie. “Eat the meat off it and we’ll hang it up over the stove to dry, and tomorrow we’ll wish on it. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

He picked it up in his fingers and began to chew on the strips of white meat that clung to it. When he had carefully cleaned it, he got down and went out into the kitchen with it.

The room was very quiet; the tea-kettle simmered on the stove. Outside the window the falling snowflakes looked dark against the whiteness beyond. Aunt Louisa was sitting on the high stool, doubled over, with a crumpled handkerchief in her hand, and Uncle Ivor was bending over her talking in a very low voice. Donald laid the wishbone on the sink shelf and started to tiptoe out, but Uncle Ivor saw him. “How’d you like to go up to the henhouse with me, Donald?” he said. “I’ve got to find us a dozen eggs to take back to Rutland.”

“I’ll get my coat,” Donald told him, eager to go out before his father came back downstairs.

The path up the hill to the henhouse had been made not by clearing the snow away, but by tramping it down. The new snow was drifting over the track; in some places it already had covered it. When Uncle Ivor went into the henhouse Donald stood still, bending his head back to catch some snowflakes in his mouth. “Come on in and shut the door. You’ll let all the heat out,” Uncle Ivor told him.

“I’m coming,” said Donald. He stepped through the doorway and closed the door. The smell inside was very strong. As Uncle Ivor approached the hens, they set up a low, distrustful murmur.

“Tell me, Donald,” said Uncle Ivor as he explored the straw with his hands.

“What?” said Donald.

“Does your mother often run to her room and shut the door, the way she did just now?”

“Sometimes.”

“Why? Is your father mean to her?”

“Oh,” said Donald vaguely, “they have fights.” He felt uncomfortable.

“Yes. Well, it’s a great pity your father ever got married. It would have been better for everybody if he’d stayed single.”

“But then I wouldn’t have been born at all,” cried Donald, uncertain whether Uncle Ivor was serious or not.

“At least, we
hope
not!” said Uncle Ivor, rolling his eyes and looking
silly. Now Donald knew it was a kind of joke, and he laughed. The door was flung open. “Donald!” roared his father.

“What is it?” he said, his voice very feeble.

“Come out here!”

He stumbled toward the door; his father was peering inside uncertainly. “What are you doing in there?” he demanded.

“Helping Uncle Ivor look for eggs.”

“Hmmph!” Donald stepped out and his father shut the door.

They started to walk along the road in the direction of the Smithson farm. Presently his father fell in behind him and prodded him in the back, saying: “Keep your head up. Chest out! D’you want to get round-shouldered? Before you know it you’ll have curvature of the spine.”

When they had got out of sight of the house, in a place where the tangle of small trees came to the edge of the road on both sides, his father stopped walking. He looked around, reached down, picked up a handful of the new snow, and rolled it into a hard ball. Then he threw it at a fairly large tree, some distance from the road. It broke, leaving a white mark on the dark trunk. “Let’s see you hit it,” he told Donald.

A wolf could be waiting here, somewhere back in the still gloom of the woods. It was very important not to make him angry. If his father wanted to take a chance and throw snowballs into the woods, he could, but Donald would not. Then perhaps the wolf would understand that he, at least, was his friend.

“Go on,” said his father.

“No. I don’t want to.”

With mock astonishment his father said: “Oh, you don’t?” Then his face became dangerous and his voice cracked like a whip. “Are you going to do what I told you?”

“No.” It was the first time he had openly defied him. His father turned very red.

“Listen here, you young whippersnapper!” he cried, his voice tight with anger. “You think you’re going to get away with this?” Before Donald knew what was happening, his father had seized him with one hand while he bent over and with the other scooped up as much snow as he could. “We’ll settle this little matter right now,” he said through his teeth. Suddenly he was rubbing the snow violently over Donald’s face, and at the same time that Donald gasped and squirmed, he pushed what was left of it down his neck. As he felt the wet, icy mass sliding down his
back, he doubled over. His eyes were squeezed shut; he was certain his father was trying to kill him. With a desperate lunge he bounded free and fell face-downward into the snow.

“Get up,” his father said disgustedly. He did not move. If he held his breath long enough he might die.

His father yanked him to his feet. “I’ve had just about enough of your monkeyshines,” he said. Clutching him tightly with both hands, he forced him to hobble ahead of him, back through the twilight to the house.

Donald moved forward, looking at the white road in front of him, his mind empty of thoughts. An unfamiliar feeling had come to him: he was not sorry for himself for being wet and cold, or even resentful at having been mistreated. He felt detached; it was an agreeable, almost voluptuous sensation which he accepted without understanding or questioning it.

As they advanced down the long alley of maple trees in the dusk his father said: “Now you can go and cry in your mother’s lap.”

“I’m not crying,” said Donald loudly, without expression. His father did not answer.

Fortunately the kitchen was empty. He could tell from the sound of the voices in the parlor that Aunt Louisa, Uncle Ivor and Mr. Gordon were getting ready to leave. He ran upstairs to his room and changed his clothes completely. The hole he had breathed in the ice on the windowpane had frozen over thickly again, but the round mark was still visible. As he finished dressing his mother called him. It was completely dark outside. He went downstairs. She was standing in the hallway.

“Oh, you’ve changed your clothes,” she said. “Come out and say good-by to Aunt Louisa and Uncle Ivor. They’re in the kitchen.” He looked quickly at her face to see if there were signs of her recent tears: her eyes were slightly bloodshot.

Together they went into the kitchen. “Donald wants to say good-by to you,” she told Mr. Gordon, steering Donald to Aunt Louisa. “You’ve given him a wonderful Christmas”—her voice became reproachful—“but it was
much
too much.”

The thick beaver collar of Mr. Gordon’s overcoat was turned up over his ears, and he had on enormous fur gloves. He smiled and clapped his hands together expectantly; it made a cushioned sound. “Oh, it was a lot of fun,” he said. “He reminds me a little of myself, you know, when I was his age. I was a sort of shy and quiet lad, too.” Donald felt his mother’s
hand tighten on his shoulder as she pushed him toward Aunt Louisa. “Mm,” she said. “Well, Auntie Louisa, here’s somebody who wants to say good-by to you.”

Even in the excitement of watching Uncle Willis and Uncle Greg drive the others off in the sleigh, Donald did not miss the fact that his father had not appeared in the kitchen at all. When the sleigh had moved out of sight down the dark road, everyone went into the parlor and Grampa put another log on the fire.

“Where’s Owen?” Gramma said in a low voice to Donald’s mother.

“He must be upstairs. To tell the truth, I don’t care very much where he is.”

“Poor child,” said Gramma. “Headache a little better?”

“A little.” She sighed. “He certainly managed to take all the pleasure out of
my
Christmas.”

“A mean shame,” said Gramma.

“It was all I could do to look Ivor in the face just now. I meant it.”

“I’m sure they all understood,” said Gramma soothingly. “Just don’t you fret about it. Anyway, Owen’ll be gone tomorrow, and you can rest up.”

Shortly after Uncle Willis and Uncle Greg got back, Donald’s father came downstairs. Supper was eaten in almost complete silence; at no time did his father speak to him or pay him any attention. As soon as the meal was over his mother took him upstairs to bed.

When she had left him, he lay in the dark listening to the sound of the fine snow as the wind drove it against the panes. The wolf was out there in the night, running along paths that no one had ever seen, down the hill and across the meadow, stopping to drink at a deep place in the brook where the ice had not formed. The stiff hairs of his coat had caught the snow; he shook himself and climbed up the bank to where Donald sat waiting for him. Then he lay down beside him, putting his heavy head in Donald’s lap. Donald leaned over and buried his face in the shaggy fur of his scruff. After a while they both got up and began to run together, faster and faster, across the fields.

MS Chakdara

(1957)

J
UST BEHIND
the hotel was the river. If it had come from very far inland it would have been wide and silent, but because it was really only a creek swollen by the rains, and its bed was full of boulders, it made a roaring noise which the photographer briefly mistook for more rain. The heat and the trip had tired him out; he had eaten the cold fried fish and the leathery omelet that oozed grease, the brown bean paste with rice and burned bananas, and had been overtaken suddenly by a sleepiness powerful as the effect of a drug. Staggering to his bed, he had ripped off his shirt and trousers, lifted the stiff mosquito-net that reeked of dust, and dropped like a stone onto the mattress, only distantly noticing its hardness before he lost himself in sleep.

But in the night when he awoke he realized he had been in the false sleep of indigestion; staring into the blackness over his head he told himself that it was going to be hard to find the way back into oblivion. It was then that he had become aware of the night’s changeless backdrop of sound, and had taken it for rain. Now and then, far above his head (how could the ceiling be that high?) a firefly’s nervous little light flashed its indecipherable code for an instant or two. He was lying on his back; something small was crawling down his chest. He put his hand there; it
was a slowly moving drop of sweat. The rough sheet under him was wet. He wanted to move, but if he did there would be no end to the shifting, and each new position would be more uncomfortable than the last. In the anonymous darkness of a nearby room someone coughed from time to time; he could not tell whether it was a man or a woman. The meal he had eaten lay like ten meals in his stomach. Slowly the memory of it was suffused with a nebulous horror—particularly the heavy cold omelet shining with grease.

Lying there smelling the dust from the netting was like being tied up inside a burlap bag. To get out into the street and walk—that was what he wanted, but there were difficulties. The electricity went off at midnight; the old man who ran the hotel had told him that. Instead of putting the matches under his pillow he had left them in his trouser-pocket, and the idea of stepping out on to the floor barefoot without a light did not appeal to him. Besides, he reminded himself, listening again to the wide, strangely distant clamor out there, it was raining. But to move along the dead streets even under the invisible rain would be a pleasure.…If he lay quite still, sleep might return. Finally, in desperation he yanked the net aside and sprang out of bed, across the room in the direction of the chair over which he had thrown his clothes.

He managed to get into his shirt and trousers in the space of three matches; his shoes he pounded on the concrete floor in the dark, to tumble out a possible centipede or scorpion. Then he struck a fourth match and opened the door into the
patio.
Here it was no longer pitch-black. The huge potted plants were visible in the night’s lead-colored light, but the sky, stifled by a cloud that no starlight could pierce, seemed not to be there at all. It was not raining. “The river must be very close,” he thought.

He walked along the covered
corredor,
grazing the tentacles of orchids that hung in baskets and jars from the eaves, bumping into the pieces of wicker furniture, and found the entrance door, closed and doubly bolted. Carefully he slid back the metal bars and opened the door, pulling it shut after him. The gloom of the street was as profound as that of the
patio
and the air as still as it had been under the mosquito-net. But it had an indefinite vegetable scent—a sweet odor of both fulfillment and exhaustion.

He turned to the left: the long empty main street, lined with one-story buildings, led straight down to the
paseo
along the sea. As he walked, the unmoving hot-house air became veined with the fresher
smell of seaweed on the beach. At each intersecting street he had to go down six steps to the road level, cross, and climb up again to the sidewalk. In the rainy season, the
propietario
of the hotel had told him, there was a rowboat at each corner to ferry the pedestrians across. Like the intermingling of the land and sea odors that he breathed, two opposing but entwined sensations took possession of him: a relief amounting almost to delight, and a faint feeling of nausea which he decided to combat because he felt that not to have been able to leave all suggestion of illness behind showed a lack of strength. He tried to put more springiness into his walk, but discovered almost immediately that it was too hot to make any more than a minimum of effort. He was sweating even more now than he had been in his bed. He lighted an Ovalado. The taste of the sweet tobacco was a part of the night.

The
paseo
bordering the sea-front was about half a mile long. He had imagined there would be some slight stirring of the air here, but he could detect no difference. Still, now and then there was the soft intimate sound of a small wave breaking gently on the sand just below. He sat down on the balustrade and rested, in the hope of cooling off a little. The sea was invisible. He could have been sitting on the peak of a cloud-covered mountain—the gloom in front of him would have been that formless and all-embracing. Yet the sea’s casual noises had no element of distance in them, as sea sounds have. It was as though they were taking place in a vast, closed courtyard. The concrete slabs on which he sat were damp, and a little cooler than his flesh. He smoked two cigarettes and strained his ears to hear some sound, made even indirectly, by human agency. But there was nothing more than the desultory slipping and sucking of the lazy water on the beach below. He glanced up and down the empty
paseo.
Far out along the shore to the west there was a light. It was orange, it flickered: a bonfire? He resumed walking, more slowly than before, ahead of him the distant blaze, the one point of light in the landscape.

A wide flight of steps led down onto the beach. Just beyond, he could see the flimsy structure of a pier that had been built out over the water. He stood still and listened. The fitful licking of small waves around the piles sounded as though it were happening in an echo-chamber.

He ran lightly down the steps and passed underneath the pier. It was definitely cooler walking along on the sand than it had been up on the
paseo.
He felt wide-awake now, and decided to see how much nearer to
the light down the shore fifteen minutes would put him. Night-colored crabs hurried along the sand just ahead of his moving feet, completely soundless and almost invisible. A little beyond the end of the
paseo
the sand gave place to a hard coral surface which was easier to walk on. Out of prudence he kept as near to the water’s edge as possible.

There was a difference between this walk and innumerable other midnight jaunts he had made, and he was inclined to wonder what made it so pleasant. Perhaps he was enjoying it simply because the fabric here was of pure freedom. He was not looking for anything; all the cameras were back in the hotel room.

Occasionally he lifted his eyes from the dim brainlike configurations of coral beneath his feet and looked inland, to see whether he could make out any signs of habitation. It seemed to him that there might be sand dunes a few hundred feet back, but in the absence of light it was impossible to be certain of even that much. The sweat trickled down his spine and over his coccyx, sliding in between his buttocks. Maybe the best idea would be to undress completely. But then there would be the bother of carrying his clothing, and he wanted his hands free, even at the risk of chafing.

The question of freedom was governed by the law of diminishing returns, he said to himself, walking faster. If you went beyond a certain point of intensity in your consciousness of desiring it, you furnished yourself with a guarantee of not achieving it. In any case, he thought, what is freedom in the last analysis, other than the state of being totally, instead of only partially, subject to the tyranny of chance?

There was no doubt that this walk was dispelling the miasma of indigestion that had lain within him. Three minutes to go, said the bright minute-hand of his watch; the orange light ahead seemed smaller than it had from the town. Why an arbitrary fifteen minutes? He smiled at the precise urban pattern in which his mind had automatically moved. If he lifted his arm he could touch the sky, and it would be moist, tepid and voluptuously soft.

And now in the distance ahead, on the landward side, he heard sounds which he quickly identified as the voices of hundreds of young frogs. The light, now that he studied it, was moving in a strange fashion: slightly up and down, and sideways as well, but without appearing to alter its position. All at once it became a huge flame belching upward, an instant later scattering cascades of red sparks, and he understood that he
had arrived. The bonfire burned on the floor of a gently swaying craft not a hundred feet ahead of him. A naked man stood above it, tossing it palm branches. The photographer stopped walking and listened for the sound of human voices, but the happy chorus of frogs filled the air.

He stepped ahead several paces and decided to call out.
“Hola!”
The man wheeled about, jumped over the nearer side of the boat (the water was extremely shallow) and came running up to him.

Without greeting him, taking him perhaps for someone else, the man said:
“Tapiama? Vas a Tapiama?”
The photographer, never having heard of Tapiama, stuttered a bit and finally said,
“Sí,”
whereupon the other seized his arm and pulled him along to the edge of the water. “The tide’s all the way out. We’ll start in a minute.”

He could see two other people in the craft, lying flat on the floor, one on each side of the fire, as far from its heat as possible. The photographer squatted down and removed his shoes and socks, then waded to the boat. When he stood in the center of it (the fire was still crackling brightly) he turned and watched the naked man loosening the rope that held the craft in place.

“The whole thing is absurd.” He could only distrust the very naturalness with which all this was coming about—the indifference to his unexpected arrival on the part of the two passengers, and perhaps even more, the highly suspect readiness of the boatmen to take off the moment he had appeared. He told himself, “Things don’t happen this way,” but since beyond a doubt they were doing so, any questioning of the process could lead only in the direction of paranoia. He dropped to the floor of the boat and pulled out his packet of Ovalados. The naked boatman, the coil of dripping rope around his black forearm like a bracelet, sprang aboard, and with his big toe nudged one of the supine passengers who stirred, rose to his knees, and glanced about with annoyance. “Where is it?” he demanded. Without replying, the boatman handed him the shorter of two poles that had lain along the gunwale. Together they began to propel the punt along the invisible surface of the water. The frogs’ canticle and the fire’s flare filled the night.

Having answered
“Sí”
to the Tapiama question, the photographer felt he could scarcely take the retrogressive step of asking “What is Tapiama?” or “Where is Tapiama?” And so, much as he would have liked to know, he decided to wait. This shallow body of water beneath them—estuary, lagoon? River more likely, since the boatman had said the tide was out.
But not the stream whose troubled passage among the boulders he had heard from his bed.

They pushed on, now and then passing beneath clumps of high vegetation where the frogs’ song was briefly covered by another sound, inexplicable and brutal, like the sudden tearing of a vast sheet of strong linen. From time to time something solid and heavy splashed nearby, as if a man had fallen into the water. And occasionally the other passenger raised himself on one elbow and without too much effort managed to revive the dying fire with another dry palm-leaf.

Probably it was less than an hour before they came to a landing in the mud. The two passengers leapt out and hurried away into the darkness. The boatman, after carefully donning a pair of short underpants, tapped the photographer on the arm and asked him for sixty centavos. He gave him seventy-five and clambered out into the soft mud, his shoes in his hand.

“Wait a minute,” said the man. “I’ll go with you.” The photographer was pleased. When the boatman, looking blacker now in his white shorts, had secured the punt to an upright log driven into the mud, he led the way upward through a tangle of undergrowth, saying casually at one point: “Are you going across tomorrow?”

“Across? No.”

“Aren’t you here for the company?” The voice implied that to be here otherwise than for the company laid one open to unnameable suspicion.

The time had come to be truthful, he feared, although he did not relish the position he knew it would put him in. “I never heard of the company,” he said. “I just arrived in Rio Martillo tonight. What sort of company?”

“Sugar,” said the other. Then he stood still in the dark and spoke slowly: “
Entonces
—why have you come to Tapiama? They don’t like
millonarios
here, you know.” Understanding that this was the contemptuous coastal term for Americans, the photographer quickly lied. “I’m Danish,” he said, but feeling that his voice lacked conviction he immediately added: “Do we go through any more mud, or can I put my shoes on?”

The man had started up again. “Wash your feet at the
cantina,
if you like,” he told him over his shoulder. In another minute they were there: all in the dimness an open space, a dozen or so palm-leaf huts at one end of it, at the other a platform which must be a loading dock, the empty
night and openness of water behind it; and half-way between the dock and the cluster of dwellings, the
cantina,
itself only a very large hut without a front wall.

A faint light came from within; there was no sound but the frogs on all sides, and the occasional tearing rasp in the branches high overhead. “Why is the place open at this hour?” demanded the photographer. The boatman stopped in the middle of the clearing and adjusted his shorts briefly. “Don Octavio runs it from six in the morning until six at night. His brother runs it from six at night until six in the morning. The company lets the men off from work at different hours. They come here with their
pago
and spend it. They like it better here than at home. Not so many mosquitoes.” It could have been the photographer’s imagination that made the man’s voice sound bitter as he spoke the last words. They continued across the clearing and stepped into the
cantina.