The Stories of Paul Bowles
Read The Stories of Paul Bowles Online
Authors: Paul Bowles
Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #Literary
Introduction by Robert Stone
The Fourth Day Out from Santa Cruz
Istikhara, Anaya, Medagan and the Medaganat
Things Gone and Things Still Here
PAUL BOWLES’S
ruthless unsentimentality and cruel wit are not for everyone. Some readers enjoy a liberated voice in his work. One acquaintance of mine says he has “a piece missing.” Ordinary human sympathy is the piece I think she means. Bowles’s enthusiasts are glad to trade sympathy for the absence of ordinariness. Nobody denies he could cast a spell.
“At his best,” said
Time
magazine, “Bowles has no peer.” Gore Vidal wrote that “Bowles has had few equals in the second half of the twentieth century.” These claims seem a bit defiant, almost inviting argument.
The spirit of literary fashion, which goeth where it listeth, is presently more or less by Bowles’s side. He was colorful and exotic, toughminded to the point of being mean, hip, apparently gay, and leftist in politics. A contemporary and associate of the Beat writers, Bowles shared their vitalist spirit and libertine ways.
It is difficult to remember or imagine now how much ridicule and derision the Bohemian poets and writers of the 1950s had to endure. World War II—vintage feature writers liked to invent anecdotes in which celebrities such as Hemingway and Dame Edith Sitwell amusingly insulted Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and other ragged, supposedly unwashed
Americans. Bowles, expatriate and cosmopolitan, could afford to leave the fifties’ Media Goon Squad an ocean away, while offering exotic bouts of refuge to persecuted colleagues. Incidentally, aspiring Bohemians might study in the career of Paul Bowles how having a lot of money equips a young person for life in the counterculture.
As an American in Tangier, Bowles gave the red-baiters of the McCarthy period a miss as well. He actually joined the Communist Party for a while in the thirties, not the only fastidious socialite and misanthrope to embrace the party of the toileers in those days. In his autobiography,
Without Stopping,
Bowles tells us a little about the party’s shortcomings.
“The Communist Party USA, it seemed to me, could serve only as a harassing instrument; all attempts to give it the air of an American institution were doomed to failure. It was legal and thus absurd; for it to have meaning it would have to be driven underground. I had no faith in any political procedure save conspiracy.”
Covertness might also spare a man of Bowles’s sensitivity and reserve long hours of odious camaraderie.
Bowles’s greatest stories are contained in this volume, which represents the work of forty years. There is juvenilia, some of it patently novice work, along with experimentation that occasionally misfires and some late epistolary stories describing the dreary postcolonial Tangier in which he was a long-lingering Euro-American. These later pieces cast an interesting light on Bowles’s fascination for dramatic and bizarre misfortune. Tangier in the sixties was a dangerous place for the remittance ladies and gentlemen who vainly hoped to retain a privileged pukkasahib status. The nominally socialized Islamic monarchy had no inclination to extend them one.
Bowles was a contradictory and eccentric figure, possessed nonetheless of an old-fashioned reticence and discretion. His autobiography is a fine chronicle of the postwar musical and literary world. In it and other autobiographical writings, he includes characters ranging from his good friend Gertrude Stein to Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones (utterly unheard of by him, he tells us, on introduction). But although he is quite commonly associated with a gay milieu and although many of his stories present an intense and undeniable sexual charge, he never chose to publicly review his love life or encourage speculation about it. (He did once
ask an editor, appearing genuinely puzzled, why so many people seemed to assume he was gay.) In addressing the stories in this collection it seems appropriate simply to follow Paul Bowles’s preferences and consider his fiction as he himself presented it.
“The Delicate Prey,” his great Moroccan story of the 1940s, is included here and represents all the elements upon which Bowles’s reputation rests. It is also one of the most traditionally structured of his short prose works. Perfect in sound and detail, “The Delicate Prey” seems to gather itself out of dark magic, half-recognized music echoing over the reaches of a space both fearful and lyrical. Its lovely sinister light winks from a quarter where no light belongs.
Only when the story is well under way does the reader recognize the melody or identify the light. Like the terrifying magician in Eliot’s
The Waste Land,
Bowles’s narrative is about to show us fear in a handful of dust. Fear is the glimmering quality we have been glimpsing from the start. The light marks the edge of reasonable expectation, the borders of dread. They have been there, at hand, all along. And they have been much closer than we had allowed ourselves to suspect.
Three Filali merchants, trading in the Sahara, determine that the time has come for their setting out across dangerous territory frequented by bandits.
Two of the merchants are brothers with a taste for religious speculation; they pass their free time at the market discussing the sura and the compass of the law. The youngest merchant is their nephew. His speculative interest follows his romantic chances with the dark-skinned girls of the
quartier.
He’s a handsome youth and popular there. Hence he’s not pleased to hear he’ll be exchanging the carpeted tents of the women for weeks of desert encampments.
Setting out across the desert, the three are accosted by a man of the Moungari tribe. The Moungari asks to travel in their company. The Filali merchants agree.
By a ruse, the Moungari lures the brothers to their death in an ambush. Their nephew becomes his prisoner. At just this point in the story, the margins of safety, reason, and reasonableness are passed. The unfortunate prisoner knows to expect anything under the terrible sky of this wilderness to which he has been carried by treachery. Bowles’s reader comes to the same realization and, insofar as such a thing is possible,
shares the character’s fate. To thrust the fortunes of a fictive creation upon the reader in the most intense manner possible is, of course, the fundamental goal of fiction. In this matchless, classic story, with its lovely structure and delectable sound, Bowles does it as well as it has ever been done. Similarly, in the story “A Distant Episode,” the reader is compelled to share both the foolishness and insight of the singularly luckless European professor.
Whatever part Paul Bowles may have given away to the competition, it was not psychological acuity. And perhaps because of his sure head for interior conditions, no other writer I can think of writes so well about the effects of narcosis. In no other’s work may we experience so acutely the burrowing of paranoia’s worm, the comic yet distantly disturbing non sequitur, the hopelessly complexifying suspicion.
Many American writers have attempted to render the high state on the page. Few did it well and Jack Kerouac was not one of them. William Burroughs could turn the pharmacopoeia into fiendish comedy, broad burlesque. But in stories like “He of the Assembly,” we can follow the adept into the resinous groves in a manner unmatched. Or, as they might say at the Cafe of the Two Bridges, we may savor the delights.
Bowles died in 1999 and the wonderful, dangerous world to which he attached himself is gone. He was an artist of two disciplines, a cosmopolite who bridged the worlds of Gertrude Stein and Allen Ginsberg while being a friend of both. A wide range of sensibilities are dealt with in these stories, an entire half century of conflicting assumptions variously challenged.
As the new century casts up its artistic idioms and heroic modes, deeply original and adventurous work like Bowles’s will help us find our way back toward the deserts over which we have passed and lead us back again. We shall use his stories to connect milieus of time and place and also enthusiasms—artistic, political, erotic—that are already beginning to lose a common language.
—R
OBERT
S
TONE
New York City, 2001
T
HE MELTING SNOW DRIPPED
from the balconies. People hurried through the little street that always smelled of frying fish. Now and then a stork swooped low, dragging his sticklike legs below him. The small gramophones scraped day and night behind the walls of the shop where young Amar worked and lived. There were few spots in the city where the snow was ever cleared away, and this was not one of them. So it gathered all through the winter months, piling up in front of the shop doors.
But now it was late winter; the sun was warmer. Spring was on the way, to confuse the heart and melt the snow. Amar, being alone in the world, decided it was time to visit a neighboring city where his father had once told him some cousins lived.
Early in the morning he went to the bus station. It was still dark, and the empty bus came in while he was drinking hot coffee. The road wound through the mountains all the way.
When he arrived in the other city it was already dark. Here the snow was even deeper in the streets, and it was colder. Because he had not wanted to, Amar had not foreseen this, and it annoyed him to be forced to wrap his burnous closely about him as he left the bus station. It was an
unfriendly town; he could tell that immediately. Men walked with their heads bent forward, and if they brushed against a passer-by they did not so much as look up. Excepting the principal street, which had an arclight every few meters, there seemed to be no other illumination, and the alleys that led off on either side lay in utter blackness; the white-clad figures that turned into them disappeared straightway.
“A bad town,” said Amar under his breath. He felt proud to be coming from a better and larger city, but his pleasure was mingled with anxiety about the night to be passed in this inimical place. He abandoned the idea of trying to find his cousins before morning, and set about looking for a fondouk or a bath where he might sleep until daybreak.
Only a short distance ahead the street-lighting system terminated. Beyond, the street appeared to descend sharply and lose itself in darkness. The snow was uniformly deep here, and not cleared away in patches as it had been nearer the bus station. He puckered his lips and blew his breath ahead of him in little clouds of steam. As he passed over into the unlighted district he heard a few languid notes being strummed on an oud. The music came from a doorway on his left. He paused and listened. Someone approached the doorway from the other direction and inquired, apparently of the man with the oud, if it was “too late.”
“No,” the musician answered, and he played several more notes.
Amar went over to the door.
“Is there still time?” he said.
“Yes.”
He stepped inside the door. There was no light, but he could feel warm air blowing upon his face from the corridor to the right. He walked ahead, letting his hand run along the damp wall beside him. Soon he came into a large dimly lit room with a tile floor. Here and there, at various angles, figures lay asleep, wrapped in gray blankets. In a far corner a group of men, partially dressed, sat about a burning brazier, drinking tea and talking in low tones. Amar slowly approached them, taking care not to step on the sleepers.
The air was oppressively warm and moist.
“Where is the bath?” said Amar.
“Down there,” answered one of the men in the group, without even looking up. He indicated the dark corner to his left. And, indeed, now that Amar considered it, it seemed to him that a warm current of air
came up from that part of the room. He went in the direction of the dark corner, undressed, and leaving his clothes in a neat pile on a piece of straw matting, walked toward the warmth. He was thinking of the misfortune he had encountered in arriving in this town at nightfall, and he wondered if his clothes would be molested during his absence. He wore his money in a leather pouch which hung on a string about his neck. Feeling vaguely for the purse under his chin, he turned around to look once again at his clothing. No one seemed to have noticed him as he undressed. He went on. It would not do to seem too distrustful. He would be embroiled immediately in a quarrel which could end badly for him.
A little boy rushed out of the darkness toward him, calling: “Follow me, Sidi, I shall lead you to the bath.” He was extremely dirty and ragged, and looked rather more like a midget than a child. Leading the way, he chattered as they went down the slippery, warm steps in the dark. “You will call for Brahim when you want your tea? You’re a stranger. You have much money…”
Amar cut him short. “You’ll get your coins when you come to wake me in the morning. Not tonight.”
“But, Sidi! I’m not allowed in the big room. I stay in the doorway and show gentlemen down to the bath. Then I go back to the doorway. I can’t wake you.”
“I’ll sleep near the doorway. It’s warmer there, in any case.”
“Lazrag will be angry and terrible things will happen. I’ll never get home again, or if I do I might be a bird so my parents will not know me. That’s what Lazrag does when he gets angry.”
“Lazrag?”
“It is his place here. You’ll see him. He never goes out. If he did the sun would burn him in one second, like a straw in the fire. He would fall down in the street burned black the minute he stepped out of the door. He was born down here in the grotto.”
Amar was not paying strict attention to the boy’s babble. They were descending a wet stone ramp, putting one foot before the other slowly in the dark, and feeling the rough wall carefully as they went. There was a sound of splashing water and voices ahead.
“This is a strange
hammam,
” said Amar. “Is there a pool full of water?”
“A pool! You’ve never heard of Lazrag’s grotto? It goes on forever, and it’s made of deep warm water.”
As the boy spoke, they came out onto a stone balcony a few meters above the beginning of a very large pool, lighted beneath where they stood by two bare electric bulbs, and stretching away through the dimness into utter dark beyond. Parts of the roof hung down, “Like gray icicles,” thought Amar, as he looked about in wonder. But it was very warm down here. A slight pall of steam lay above the surface of the water, rising constantly in wisps toward the rocky ceiling. A man dripping with water ran past them and dove in. Several more were swimming about in the brighter region near the lights, never straying beyond into the gloom. The plunging and shouting echoed violently beneath the low ceiling.
Amar was not a good swimmer. He turned to ask the boy: “Is it deep?” but he had already disappeared back up the ramp. He stepped backward and leaned against the rock wall. There was a low chair to his right, and in the murky light it seemed to him that a small figure was close beside it. He watched the bathers for a few minutes. Those standing at the edge of the water soaped themselves assiduously; those in the water swam to and fro in a short radius below the lights. Suddenly a deep voice spoke close beside him. He looked down as he heard it say: “Who are you?”
The creature’s head was large; its body was small and it had no legs or arms. The lower part of the trunk ended in two flipper-like pieces of flesh. From the shoulders grew short pincers. It was a man, and it was looking up at him from the floor where it rested.
“Who are you?” it said again, and its tone was unmistakably hostile.
Amar hesitated. “I came to bathe and sleep,” he said at last.
“Who gave you permission?”
“The man at the entrance.”
“Get out. I don’t know you.”
Amar was filled with anger. He looked down with scorn at the little being, and stepped away from it to join the men washing themselves by the water’s edge. But more swiftly than he moved, it managed to throw itself along the floor until it was in front of him, when it raised itself again and spoke.
“You think you can bathe when I tell you to get out?” It laughed shortly, a thin sound, but deep in pitch. Then it moved closer and pushed its head against Amar’s legs. He drew back his foot and kicked the head, not very hard, but with enough firmness to send the body off balance. The thing rolled over in silence, making efforts with its neck to keep
from reaching the edge of the platform. The men all looked up. An expression of fear was on their faces. As the little creature went over the edge it yelled. The splash was like that of a large stone. Two men already in the water swam quickly to the spot. The others started up after Amar, shouting: “He hit Lazrag!”
Bewildered and frightened, Amar turned and ran back to the ramp. In the blackness he stumbled upward. Part of the wall scraped his bare thigh. The voices behind him grew louder and more excited.
He reached the room where he had left his clothing. Nothing had changed. The men still sat by the brazier talking. Quickly he snatched the pile of garments, and struggling into his burnous, he ran to the door that led into the street, the rest of his clothes tucked under his arm. The man in the doorway with the oud looked at him with a startled face and called after him. Amar ran up the street barelegged toward the center of the town. He wanted to be where there were some bright lights. The few people walking in the street paid him no attention. When he got to the bus station it was closed. He went into a small park opposite, where the iron bandstand stood deep in snow. There on a cold stone bench he sat and dressed himself as unostentatiously as possible, using his burnous as a screen. He was shivering, reflecting bitterly upon his poor luck, and wishing he had not left his own town, when a small figure approached him in the half-light.
“Sidi,” it said, “come with me. Lazrag is hunting for you.”
“Where to?” said Amar, recognizing the urchin from the bath.
“My grandfather’s.”
The boy began to run, motioning to him to follow. They went through alleys and tunnels, into the most congested part of the town. The boy did not bother to look back, but Amar did. They finally paused before a small door at the side of a narrow passageway. The boy knocked vigorously. From within came a cracked voice calling:
“Chkoun?”
“
Annah!
Brahim!” cried the boy.
With great deliberation the old man swung the door open and stood looking at Amar.
“Come in,” he finally said; and shutting the door behind them he led them through the courtyard filled with goats into an inner room where a feeble light was flickering. He peered sternly into Amar’s face.
“He wants to stay here tonight,” explained the boy.
“Does he think this is a
fondouk?
”
“He has money,” said Brahim hopefully.
“Money!” the old man cried with scorn. “That’s what you learn in the
hammam!
How to steal money! How to take money from men’s purses! Now you bring them here! What do you want me to do? Kill him and get his purse for you? Is he too clever for you? You can’t get it by yourself? Is that it?” The old man’s voice had risen to a scream and he gestured in his mounting excitement. He sat down on a cushion with difficulty and was silent a moment.
“Money,” he said again, finally. “Let him go to a
fondouk
or a bath. Why aren’t you at the
hammam?
” He looked suspiciously at his grandson.
The boy clutched at his friend’s sleeve. “Come,” he said, pulling him out into the courtyard.
“Take him to the
hammam!
” yelled the old man. “Let him spend his money there!”
Together they went back into the dark streets.
“Lazrag is looking for you,” said the boy. “Twenty men will be going through the town to catch you and take you back to him. He is very angry and he will change you into a bird.”
“Where are we going now?” asked Amar gruffly. He was cold and very tired, and although he did not really believe the boy’s story, he wished he were out of the unfriendly town.
“We must walk as far as we can from here. All night. In the morning we’ll be far away in the mountains, and they won’t find us. We can go to your city.”
Amar did not answer. He was pleased that the boy wanted to stay with him, but he did not think it fitting to say so. They followed one crooked street downhill until all the houses had been left behind and they were in the open country. The path led down a narrow valley presently, and joined the highway at one end of a small bridge. Here the snow was packed down by the passage of vehicles, and they found it much easier to walk along.
When they had been going down the road for perhaps an hour in the increasing cold, a great truck came rolling by. It stopped just ahead and the driver, an Arab, offered them a ride on top. They climbed up and made a nest of some empty sacks. The boy was very happy to be rushing through the air in the dark night. Mountains and stars whirled by above his head and the truck made a powerful roaring noise as it traveled along the empty highway.
“Lazrag has found us and changed us both into birds,” he cried when he could no longer keep his delight to himself. “No one will ever know us again.”
Amar grunted and went to sleep. But the boy watched the sky and the trees and the cliffs for a long time before he closed his eyes.
Some time before morning the truck stopped by a spring for water.
In the stillness the boy awoke. A cock crowed in the distance, and then he heard the driver pouring water. The cock crowed again, a sad, thin arc of sound away in the cold murk of the plain. It was not yet dawn. He buried himself deeper in the pile of sacks and rags, and felt the warmth of Amar as he slept.
When daylight came they were in another part of the land. There was no snow. Instead, the almond trees were in flower on the hillsides as they sped past. The road went on unwinding as it dropped lower and lower, until suddenly it came out of the hills upon a spot below which lay a great glittering emptiness. Amar and the boy watched it and said to each other that it must be the sea, shining in the morning light.
The spring wind pushed the foam from the waves along the beach; it rippled Amar’s and the boy’s garments landward as they walked by the edge of the water. Finally they found a sheltered spot between rocks, and undressed, leaving the clothes on the sand. The boy was afraid to go into the water, and found enough excitement in letting the waves break about his legs, but Amar tried to drag him out further.