The Stories of Paul Bowles (79 page)

“It’s only blood. I think you’d better stay here a while.”

“No, no, no, no!” Rolling in her vomit on the floor.

“No, no, no!” Trying to rub the blood from her lips and face.

Down, down, blood and all, vomit and all, into the feather-bedded floor. Only the turnip stench to breathe in an airless pocket. Then, choking, having been smothered, she rose from below and breathed deeply of the open black air around her, sickened by the nature of the dream, certain that it would be repeated, terrified above all by the thought that the orders governing this phenomenon should be coming from without, from another mind. This was unacceptable.

TOM FOUND HER
reasoning faulty. “You had a nightmare, and of course that’s not something to worry about. But to be obsessed by the idea that Sekou or anyone else is in charge of your dreams is pure paranoia. It’s based on nothing at all. Can’t you see that?”

“I can see how
you
think that, yes.”

“I’m convinced that once you told it, all of it, it would stop worrying you.”

“It makes me feel like throwing up just to think of it.”

The steady burning of the pressure lamp between them on the floor inspired Anita to exclaim: “It’s too bright, too noisy, and too hot.”

“Don’t pay it any attention. Forget about it.”

“It’s rather hard to do that.”

“You know if I turn it down we won’t be able to see anything.”

After a moment she said: “These vegetables here are really abject. I don’t understand you. You paint practically nothing but food, yet you don’t care what you eat.”

“What d’you mean, I don’t care? I care very much. I don’t complain, if that’s what you’re expecting. The vegetables here are what there is, unless you want French canned food, which, knowing you, I don’t believe you do. I think it’s a miracle they can get even this much out of the sand.”

Suddenly Johara was in the room; she announced the next course.

“I didn’t hear her come upstairs, did you?”

She snorted. “With this lamp going you wouldn’t hear an elephant.”

“No, but even without the lamp, have you noticed that you never hear any footsteps in this house?”

She laughed. “I’m only too aware of it. That’s part of what bothers me at night. I’ve never heard a sound in my room when it’s night. Any number of people could be there and I wouldn’t know it.”

Tom said nothing; his mind obviously was on something else. For a few minutes they sat in silence. When she began to speak again, her voice made it clear that she had been ruminating.

“Tom, did you ever hear of slippery elm?”

He sat up straight. “Of course. Granny used to swear by it for sore throat. They put it out in tablets, like cough-drops. I remember how
upset she was when they stopped manufacturing them. I doubt that slippery elm exists today in any form.”

He stole a glance at her, suspecting that this was her devious way of dealing with the material of the dream. He waited.

Her next question struck him as comic. “Isn’t saltpeter what they put into prisoners’ food?”

“They used to, I don’t know whether they do nowadays. What are you doing, preparing a compendium of useless knowledge?”

“No, I just wondered.”

He arranged the cushions behind him and stretched out.

“You want to know who I think Sekou is?” he asked her.

“How do you mean, who he is?”

“Who he is for you, I mean. I think he’s Mother.”

“What?!” she cried, very loud.

“I’m serious. I remember how Mother used to come and stand beside my bed in the dark, and just stand there. And I was always terrified she’d know I was awake. So I had to breathe calmly and not move a muscle. And she used to do the same thing by your bed. I’d hear her go into your room. Didn’t you ever find her there, right beside your bed, standing perfectly still?”

“I don’t remember. It’s a pretty crazy idea, to have a black African play the role of your mother.”

“You’re just looking at it from the outside. But I’m willing to bet it’s a guilt dream, and who’s the one who always makes you feel guilty? Mother, every time.”

“I’m not a Freudian,” she told him. “But even if you admit—which I don’t for a minute—that the dream comes from feeling guilt, and that I’m remembering Mother from when I was little, it gets nowhere in explaining why I’m so sure Mother’s being played by Sekou. Haven’t you got a theory for that?”

“A very good one. There’s just no connection between what’s in the dream and why you think you dream it. Try putting Sekou into the dream when you go over it in your mind, and see how he reacts.”

“I never go over it in my mind. It’s bad enough to have to experience it without playing around with it when I’m awake.”

“Well, all I can say, Nita, is that it’ll go on bothering you until you pull it to pieces and examine it carefully.”

“The day I decide what I’m guilty of, I’ll tell you.”

EVERYONE IN THE TOWN
knew of Mme. Massot. She and her husband had lived there when the French ruled the region. Then, just after Independence, when Mme. Massot was not yet twenty years old, her husband had died, leaving her with a photographer’s studio and very little else. She had a darkroom and she had learned how to develop and print photographs. Having a monopoly on this service was not as remunerative as it might have been elsewhere, for there was very little call for it. Of late the number of young people with cameras had increased, so that she not only developed and printed, but sold film as well. A few young natives who had lived in Europe repeatedly tried to persuade her to stock video tapes, but she explained that she did not have the capital to invest.

After the death of Monsieur Massot she had briefly entertained the idea of returning to France, but she soon decided that she did not really want to do that. Life in Montpellier would be a good deal more expensive, and there was no guarantee that she would find a suitable place to live, with an extra room to be used as a darkroom.

Only a handful of white people found it strange that she was willing to stay on alone in a city of blacks. As for her, from the day of her arrival directly after her marriage, she had found the black people sympathetic, kind, generous and well-disposed. She could find no fault in them save a tendency to be careless about time. Often they seemed not to know either the hour or the day. The younger citizens were aware that Europeans considered this a defect in their countrymen, and did their utmost to be punctual when they were dealing with foreigners. Although Mme. Massot was cordial with the other French inhabitants, she had established her particular friendships with the families of the native bourgeoisie. She had never learned to speak any of the local tongues, but these people spoke a passable French, and their sons were surprisingly proficient in the language. Seldom did she find herself wishing to be in France, and then only fleetingly. The climate here was pleasant if one did not mind the heat, which she did not, and with her asthmatic condition it was ideal. People in Europe continually surprised her by assuming that the city must be dirty and unhealthy, and very likely she surprised them by maintaining that the streets were cleaner and more free of objectionable odors than those of any European city. She knew how to live in the desert, and
she managed to remain in excellent health all during the year. The difficult months were May and June, when the heat became trying and the wind covered one with sand if one went outside, and July and August, when rain fell and the air was damp, and reminded her that she had suffered from asthma in her early days.

Before Anita’s arrival Mme. Massot and Tom had become friends, principally, he supposed, because she had worked for a year at a small art gallery in the rue Vignon, and being unusually aware had absorbed a good deal of painter lore during that time, all of which had remained with her since then. She was still able to discuss the private lives of several painters of the era and the prices fetched by their canvases, and Tom found this appealing. Her year in Paris had made a kind of gossip between them possible. He thought now of inviting her once again for a meal. This was always a risky undertaking because she was an expert cook, particularly of local dishes using native ingredients. Unlike many autodidacts she was not averse to sharing her discoveries with anyone who had the same interest in cooking as she. With her encouragement Tom had learned to prepare two or three dishes successfully.

“I’ll have her for lunch on Monday,” he told Anita. “And you can do me a great favor once again if you go to her shop and invite her. You can get some films at the same time. You know the way now, so you won’t need anybody to go with you. Do you mind? I’d lose a morning’s work if I went.”

“I don’t mind. But I should think a little exercise would be good for you.?”

“I get my exercise running on the shore before breakfast. You know that. I don’t need more. So you tell Mme. Massot we’ll expect her for lunch Monday, will you? She speaks English.”

“You forget I majored in French.”

She had no desire to walk through the town, but she rose, saying, “Well, I’m off while the air is only at blood temperature.”

When she came to the stand where she and Sekou had sat and had cold drinks, she found it shut. She had not been eager to come on this errand for Tom because she had a superstitious conviction that the encounter with the two American barbarians might repeat itself. She even found herself listening for the detestable sound of their motorcycle in the distance. Before she got to the market she decided that the two had left the town and gone to another place where they could terrify a new
lot of natives, the people here undoubtedly having grown used to their presence.

Mme. Massot seemed to be delighted with the invitation. “How’s Tom?” she said. “You came to the shop not long ago, but I haven’t seen Tom in a very long time.”

Back in the house she climbed to the roof where Tom was working, and told him: “She’ll come Monday. Is she a dyke, d’you think?”

Tom cried: “Good Lord! How would I know? I never asked her. Where’d you get such an idea?”

“I don’t know. It just occurred to me as we were talking. She’s so serious.”

“I’d be very surprised if she were.”

Recently the air had been charged with dust, and each day there seemed to be more of it. Apparently it was politer to call it sand, or so Tom said, but he agreed that if it was sand, it was pulverized sand, which is another term for dust. There was no avoiding it. Certain downstairs rooms let less of it in, but the doors could not really be shut, and the powder was being propelled by a constant wind which carried it into the narrowest spaces.

WHEN MONDAY CAME
,
the dust had reached such a state of opacity that from the roof it was impossible to distinguish forms in the street below. Tom decided that they would have to eat in one of the downstairs rooms with the door shut. “It’ll be claustrophobic,” he said, “but what else can we do?”

“I know one thing we can do,” Anita told him. “Not today, but fast, just the same. And that’s to get out of this town. Think of our lungs. We might as well be living in a coal mine. And it’s going to start raining soon. Then what do we have? Mud City. You’ve always said the place was uninhabitable half the year.”

Mme. Massot was shown upstairs by a kitchen maid, lighting the way in the gloom with a guttering candle. She held in front of her what looked like a shoe box, which she immediately presented to Tom.

“The herbs I promised you,” she said. “Only it’s a little late to be giving them to you now.”

He opened the box. Inside, it was divided into three small compartments,
all filled with black earth, out of which grew small fringes and feathers of green. “Oregano, marjoram and tarragon,” she said, pointing. “But you have to keep the box covered at this season. The sand will choke the plants.”

“I love it,” Anita volunteered, examining the box. “It’s like a little portable garden.”

“I keep all my herbs inside the house and covered up.”

“We should have made this appointment two weeks ago,” Tom said. “I hate to think of you walking all the way through this hellish weather. And how do you manage to arrive here looking so unruffled, so svelte and chic?”

Anita had been thinking exactly that. Mme. Massot was impeccably clothed in a khaki ensemble, clearly something designed for use in the desert, but which would have been equally elegant on the rue de Faubourg St. Honoré. “Ah,” she said, unwinding the turban from her head and shaking it. “The secret is that Monsieur Bessier passed me in the market and drove me straight here in his truck. So it was a question of two minutes rather than forty.”

“What a fantastic garment!” Anita cried with enthusiasm, stretching forth her hand to touch the lower part. “Do you mind?”

Mme. Massot raised her arms behind her head to facilitate the examination. “It’s really an adaptation of Saharan serrouelles combined with the local boubou,” she explained. “It’s my own invention.”

“It’s absolutely perfect,” Anita told her. “But you didn’t get the material here.”

“No, no. I got it in Paris, and had it made up there. I’m not very good with a needle and thread. But the design is so simple that I’m convinced a local tailor could make a copy easily. The trick is in the cutting on the bias, so that the top seems to be a part of the trousers, and the whole thing, from the shoulders to the ankles, is one line, seamless.”

“It’s certainly the right color for today,” Tom told her.

“I don’t mind the weather,” she said. “This is the price we have to pay for what we get the rest of the year. It’s a nuisance, but I find it a challenge. That doesn’t mean that I don’t often rush off to France at this time of the year, because I do. My brother has a farm not far from Narbonne. Summer in Provence is lovely. But you know, I’m here today primarily to see your pictures.”

“Yes.” Tom looked unhappy. “Too bad you can’t see them by daylight,
but it’ll have to be downstairs, and by pressure lamp. I can’t unpack them up here with this dust and sand.”

Lunch was announced by Johara, and the same kitchen maid guided them down the dark stairway, holding her candle aloft. “It’s really a shame,” Anita remarked, “having to eat down here. It’s so much pleasanter on the terrace under the awning. But there’s certainly no help for it.”