You've Got to Read This (16 page)

"Dead, probably," said Julia. They began to feel cold.

"Come," said Inez. "Sing with me." They sang a song about leaving and never returning, four or five times through. When Senor Ramirez awakened he suggested to Julia that they go for a walk. She accepted sweetly, and so they started off through the woods. Soon they reached a good-sized field where Senor Ramirez suggested that they sit for a while.

"The first time I went to bed with a woman," he said, "it was in the country like this. The land belonged to my father. Three or four times a day we would come out into the fields and make love. She loved it, and would have come more often if I had asked her to. Some years later I went to her wedding and I had a terrible fight there. I don't even remember who the man was, but in the end he was badly hurt. I can tell you that."

"If you put your arms around me," said Julia, "I will feel less cold. You don't mind my asking you to do this, but I love you very much and I feel very contented with you."

"That's good," said Senor Ramirez, looking off at the mountains and shielding his eyes from the sun. He was listening to the sound of the waterfall, which was louder here. Julia was laughing and touching various parts of his body.

"Ah," she said. "I don't mind my side hurting me so badly if I can only be happy the way I am now with you. You are so sweet and so wonderful."

He gave her a quick loud kiss on the mouth and rose to his feet.

JANE BOWLES • 85

"Listen," he said. "Wouldn't you like to come into the water with me?"

"I am too sick a woman to go into the water, and I am a little bit afraid."

"In my arms you don't have to be afraid. I will carry you. The current would be too strong for you to manage anyway." Senor Ramirez was now as gay as a lark, although he had been bored but a moment before. He liked nothing better than performing little feats that were assured of success from the beginning. He carried her down to the river, singing at the top of his voice.

The noise of the falls was very loud here, and Julia clung tightly to her escort.

"Don't let go, now," she said. But her voice seemed to fly away behind her like a ribbon caught in the wind. They were in the water and Senor Ramirez began to walk in the direction of the falls.

"I will hold tight, all right," he said. "Because the water runs pretty swiftly near the falls." He seemed to enjoy stepping precariously from one stone to another with Julia in his arms.

"This is not so easy, you know. This is damned hard. The stones are slippery." Julia tightened her grip around his neck and kissed him quickly all over his face.

"If I let you go," he said, "the current would carry you along like a leaf over the falls, and then one of those big rocks would make a hole in your head. That would be the end, of course." Julia's eyes widened with horror, and she yelled with the suddenness of an animal just wounded.

"But why do you scream like that, Julia? I love you, sweetheart." He had had enough of struggling through the water, and so he turned around and started back.

"Are we going away from the waterfall?"

"Yes. It was wonderful, wasn't it?"

"Very nice," she said.

He grew increasingly careless as the current slackened, with the result that he miscalculated and his foot slipped between two stones. This threw him off his balance and he fell. He was unhurt, but the back of Julia's head had hit a stone. It started to bleed profusely. He struggled to his feet and carried her to the riverbank. She was not sure that she was not dying, and hugged him all the more closely. Pulling her along, he walked quickly up the hill and back through the woods to where Inez and Alfredo were still sitting.

"It will be all right, won't it?" she asked him a bit weakly.

"Those damn rocks were slippery," he growled. He was sulky, and eager to be on his way home.

"Oh, God of mine!" lamented Inez, when she saw what had happened.

"What a sad ending for a walk! Terrible things always happen to Julia. She is a daughter of misfortune. It's a lucky thing that I am just the contrary."

Senor Ramirez was in such a hurry to leave the picnic spot that he did not even want to bother to collect the various baskets and plates he had
86 " A DAY IN THE OPEN

brought with him. They dressed, and he yelled for them all to get into the car. Julia wrapped a shawl around her bleeding head. Inez went around snatching up all the things, like an enraged person.

"Can I have these things?" she asked her host. He nodded his head impatiently. Julia was by now crying rhythmically like a baby that has almost fallen asleep.

The two women sat huddled together in the back of the car. Inez explained to Julia that she was going to make presents of the plates and baskets to her family. She shed a tear or two herself. When they arrived at the house, Senor Ramirez handed some banknotes to Inez from where he was sitting.

"Adios,"
he said. The two women got out of the car and stood in the street.

"Will you come back again?" Julia asked him tenderly, ceasing to cry for a moment.

"Yes, I'm coming back again," he said.
"Adios."
He pressed his foot on the accelerator and drove off.

The bar was packed with men. Inez led Julia around through the patio to their room. When she had shut the door, she slipped the banknotes into her pocket and put the baskets on the floor.

"Do you want any of these baskets?" she asked.

Julia was sitting on the edge of her bed, looking into space. "No, thank you," she said. Inez looked at her, and saw that she was far away.

"Senor Ramirez gave me four drinking cups made out of plastic," said Inez. "Do you want one of them for yourself?"

Julia did not answer right away. Then she said: "Will he come back?"

"I don't know," Inez said. "I'm going to the movies. I'll come and see you afterwards, before I go into the bar."

"All right," said Julia. But Inez knew that she did not care. She shrugged her shoulders and went out through the door, closing it behind her.

A D i s t a n t E p i s o d e

by Paul Bowles

Introduced by John L'Heureux

A DISTANT EPISODE" IS SOMETHING VERY RARE IN CONTEMPORARY

literature, a story that partakes of the visceral power and primal intelligence of legend and myth. Once you have read it, it will stay with you forever. It is, quite simply, unforgettable.

Most stories in this collection take place in a world we recognize. They are social stories, concerned with characters in a moral universe, and in large part they depend on and take their significance from moral and social underpinnings. They explore the human struggle with humanity or with nature or with self. And why not? What is more immediate to us than
us:
our lives, our world? What matters more than the human condition?

And yet "A Distant Episode," this odd and inexplicable story, depends on nothing we acknowledge about the human condition. It concerns itself with horrors that are scarcely imaginable. It speaks of human nature not in its humanity but in its nature, which here is anything but human. It has an authority that springs not from knowledge but from intuition. It is a cold hard story, haunting and pitiless.

In "A Distant Episode," as in all his work, Bowles creates his fictive world with an economy as effective as it is astonishing. By the end of the first paragraph we have moved from our own known, rational world to the peculiar isolated world of Bowles, a moral vacuum surrounded by desert, where the air smells of orange blossoms, pepper, excrement, and rotten fruit, and where the accouterments of civilization carried by the Professor—

maps, sun lotions, medicines—are worse than useless, they are ridiculous.

The land of intellect, in the person of the Professor, is about to encounter its primal past and, like it or not, he stands in for us, he takes us with him. He is a professor of linguistics, passionate for sound and meaning, but romantic, reckless, offering himself eagerly—like all of us—to the dark seductions of the forbidden. "Hassan Ramani," he repeats over and over, a password to this fierce ancient land where he will discover there are no languages, only dialects, and where he will lose his tongue, his language, his identity, his self.

"The Reguiba is a cloud across the face of the sun," the Professor knows, but, preposterously, he is determined to buy keepsake boxes made from camel udders and, willfully and at least half aware of the dangers he faces, he pays a
qaouaji
to lead him out to the edge of the desert where the Reguibat are camped. The trip to the desert is itself a warning and a token of what is to come. It is deep night, and they pass through a rift in the city wall and descend on a winding road between rocks where the sweet black odor of rotten meat hangs in the air. The Professor fears the
qaouaji
will cut his throat, but the
qaouaji
has a fate more exquisite in mind. He takes the
INTRODUCTION BY JOHN L'HEUREUX • 89

Professor's fifty francs and leaves him within sight of the Reguibat camp, free to go down or go back. A true professor, he ponders whether this is a situation or a predicament; an eager victim, he climbs down the side of the moonlit cliff and delivers himself to the inhabitants of the encampment. At once he is fallen upon by dogs, and then by the Reguibat themselves, who kick him into unconsciousness, rob him, bind him, and dump him in a sack.

Later, an indifferent gesture, they cut out his tongue.

He is a fool by nature, they recognize, and with his cooperation they make him into a fool of their own devising. They dress him in rows and rows of garlands made from the bottoms of tin cans strung together until he is cloaked from head to foot in tinkling armor. And then they make him dance. In time he does it well, adding flourishes of his own: guttural shouts, grimaces, and the obscene gestures they have taught him. He becomes a valuable property indeed.

For a year and a half he acts out the role they have given him. He does not think, he cannot talk, he exists only. Not Kafka, not Sartre, not Beckett, not one of them has explored the horrors and the emptiness of language lost, of meaninglessness, of man at the mercy of a universe without purpose or design or justification, in quite the way Bowles explores it here. It is horrible and unforgettable. And still more so at the end when the Professor is sold as an entertainment. Transported from the desert to a house and bargained for as the unique prize he is, the Professor hears the sound of classical Arabic and begins to recognize language; he sees the days and dates of a calendar and begins to recognize time. Feeling returns to him, and thought, and intolerable pain. For an unspeakable moment he is called back to the world he has lost, the language he professed, the self he will never be again in this mad and pointless universe.

Bowles takes us through this hideous pilgrimage to nowhere in the cool, disengaged voice of a narrator whose diction is elegant, whose tone is indifferent. The cleanliness of the prose serves only to intensify our horror.

We know that what happens to the Professor could happen to any of us.

Alone, at night, in a foreign place where the language is strange and we have lost our way, we fear it will. To some, of course, it
has,
but they have not returned to tell about it.

"A Distant Episode" taps into something in us that is primeval, irrational, barbarous, and terror-ridden. It is, in the most aweful sense, a true story.

A Distant E p i s o d e

Paul Bowles

T
he September sunsets were at their reddest the week the Professor decided to visit A'in Tadouirt, which is in the warm country. He came down out of the high, flat region in the evening by bus, with two small overnight bags full of maps, sun lotions and medicines. Ten years ago he had been in the village for three days; long enough, however, to establish a fairly firm friendship with a cafe-keeper, who had written him several times during the first year after his visit, if never since. "Hassan Ramani," the Professor said over and over, as the bus bumped downward through ever warmer layers of air. Now facing the flaming sky in the west, and now facing the sharp mountains, the car followed the dusty trail down the canyons into air which began to smell of other things besides the endless ozone of the heights: orange blossoms, pepper, sun-baked excrement, burning olive oil, rotten fruit. He closed his eyes happily and lived for an instant in a purely olfactory world. The distant past returned—what part of it, he could not decide.

The chauffeur, whose seat the Professor shared, spoke to him without taking his eyes from the road.
"Vous etes geologue?"

"A geologist? Ah, no! I'm a linguist."

"There are no languages here. Only dialects."

"Exactly. I'm making a survey of variations on Moghrebi."

The chauffeur was scornful. "Keep on going south," he said. "You'll find some languages you never heard of before."

As they drove through the town gate, the usual swarm of urchins rose up out of the dust and ran screaming beside the bus. The Professor folded his dark glasses, put them in his pocket; and as soon as the vehicle had come to a standstill he jumped out, pushing his way through the indignant boys who clutched at his luggage in vain, and walked quickly into the Grand Hotel Saharien. Out of its eight rooms there were two available—one facing the market and the other, a smaller and cheaper one, giving onto a tiny yard full of refuse and barrels, where two gazelles wandered about. He took the smaller room, and pouring the entire pitcher of water into the tin basin, began to wash the grit from his face and ears. The afterglow was nearly gone from the sky, and the pinkness in objects was disappearing, almost as he watched. He lit the carbide lamp and winced at its odor.

After dinner the Professor walked slowly through the streets to Hassan
90

PAUL BOWLES • 91

Ramani's cafe, whose back room hung hazardously out above the river. The entrance was very low, and he had to bend down slightly to get in. A man was tending the fire. There was one guest sipping tea. The
qaouaji
tried to make him take a seat at the other table in the front room, but the Professor walked airily ahead into the back room and sat down. The moon was shining through the reed latticework and there was not a sound outside but the occasional distant bark of a dog. He changed tables so he could see the river. It was dry, but there was a pool here and there that reflected the bright night sky. The
qaouaji
came in and wiped off the table.