The Stories of Paul Bowles

  That afternoon he saw Idir, and he told him he would bring a friend with him to Idir’s room after the evening meal. Then he went home and drank cognac. When the girl arrived he had finished the bottle, and he was drunk and more unhappy than ever. “Don’t take it off,” he told her when she began to unfasten her veil. “We’re going out.” She said nothing. They took the back streets to Idir’s room.

  Idir sat in his chair listening to the radio. He had not expected a girl, and when he saw her take off her veil the beating of his heart made his head ache. He told her to sit in the chair, and then he paid no more attention to her and sat on the bed talking only with Lahcen, who did not look at her either. Soon Lahcen got up. “I’m going out to get some cigarettes,” he said. “I’ll be right back.” He shut the door after him, and Idir quickly went and locked it. He smiled at the girl and sat on the table beside her, looking down at her. Now and then he smoked a pipe of kif. He wondered why Lahcen was taking so long. Finally he said: “He’s not coming back, you know.” The girl laughed and shrugged. He jumped up, took her hand, and led her to the bed.

  In the morning when they were getting dressed, she told him she lived at the Hotel Sevilla. It was a small Moslem hotel in the center of the Medina. He took her there and left her. “Will you come tonight?” she asked him. Idir frowned. He was thinking of Lahcen. “Don’t wait for me after midnight,” he said. On his way home he stopped at the Café Nadjah. Lahcen was there. His eyes were red and he looked as though he had not slept at all. Idir had the feeling that he had been waiting for him to appear, for when he came into the café Lahcen quickly got up and paid the qahouaji. They walked down the main street of Dradeb without saying anything, and when they got to the road that leads to the Merkala beach, they turned down it, still without speaking.

  It was low tide. They walked on the wet sand while the small waves broke at their feet. Lahcen smoked a cigarette and threw stones into the water. Finally he spoke. “How was it?”

  Idir shrugged, tried to keep his voice flat. “All right for one night,” he said. Lahcen was ready to say carelessly: “Or even two.” But then he realized that Idir did not want to talk about the night, which meant that it had been a great event for him. And when he looked at his face he was certain that Idir wanted the girl for himself. He was sure he had already lost her to him, but he did not know why he had not thought of that in the beginning. Now he forgot the true reason why he had wanted to take her to Idir.

  “You thought I brought her just to be good to you!” he cried. “No, sidi! I left her there to see if you were a friend. And I see what kind of friend you are! A scorpion!” He seized the front of Idir’s garments and struck him in the face. Idir moved backward a few steps, and got ready to fight. He understood that Lahcen had seen the truth, and that now there was nothing at all to say, and nothing to do but fight. When they were both bloody and panting, he looked for a flash at Lahcen’s face, and saw that he was dizzy and could not see very well. He drew back, put his head down, and with all his force ran into Lahcen, who lost his balance and fell onto the sand. Then quickly he kicked him in the head with the heel of his shoe. He left him lying there and went home.

  In a little while Lahcen began to hear the waves breaking on the sand near him. “I must kill him,” he thought. “He sold my ring. Now I must go and kill him.” Instead, he took off his clothes and bathed in the sea, and when he had finished, he lay in the sun on the sand all day and slept. In the evening he went and got very drunk.

  At eleven o’clock Idir went to the Hotel Sevilla. The girl was sitting in a wicker chair by the front door, waiting for him. She looked carefully at the cuts on his face. Under her veil he saw her smile.

  “You fought?” Idir nodded his head. “How is he?” He shrugged. This made her laugh. “He was always drunk, anyway,” she said. Idir took her arm, and they went out into the street.

  (1960)

  He of the Assembly

  He salutes all parts of the sky and the earth where it is bright. He thinks the color of the amethysts of Aguelmous will be dark if it has rained in the valley of Zerekten. The eye wants to sleep, he says, but the head is no mattress. When it rained for three days and water covered the flatlands outside the ramparts, he slept by the bamboo fence at the Café of the Two Bridges.

  IT SEEMS THERE WAS a man named Ben Tajah who went to Fez to visit his cousin. The day he came back he was walking in the Djemaa el Fna, and he saw a letter lying on the pavement. He picked it up and found that his name was written on the envelope. He went to the Café of the Two Bridges with the letter in his hand, sat down on a mat and opened the envelope. Inside was a paper which read: “The sky trembles and the earth is afraid, and the two eyes are not brothers.” Ben Tajah did not understand, and he was very unhappy because his name was on the envelope. It made him think that Satan was nearby. He of the Assembly was sitting in the same part of the café. He was listening to the wind in the telephone wires. The sky was almost empty of daytime light. “The eye wants to sleep,” he thought, “but the head is no mattress. I know what that is, but I have forgotten it.” Three days is a long time for rain to keep falling on flat bare ground. “If I got up and ran down the street,” he thought, “a policeman would follow me and call to me to stop. I would run faster, and he would run after me. When he shot at me, I’d duck around the corners of houses.” He felt the rough dried mud of the wall under his fingertips. “And I’d be running through the streets looking for a place to hide, but no door would be open, until finally I came to one door that was open, and I’d go in through the rooms and courtyards until finally I came to the kitchen. The old woman would be there.” He stopped and wondered for a moment why an old woman should be there alone in the kitchen at that hour. She was stirring a big kettle of soup on the stove. “And I’d look for a place to hide there in the kitchen, and there’d be no place. And I’d be waiting to hear the policeman’s footsteps, because he wouldn’t miss the open door. And I’d look in the dark corner of the room where she kept the charcoal, but it wouldn’t be dark enough. And the old woman would turn and look at me and say: ‘If you’re trying to get away, my boy, I can help you. Jump into the soup-kettle.’” The wind sighed in the telephone wires. Men came into the Café of the Two Bridges with their garments flapping. Ben Tajah sat on his mat. He had put the letter away, but first he had stared at it a long time. He of the Assembly leaned back and looked at the sky. “The old woman,” he said to himself. “What is she trying to do? The soup is hot. It may be a trap. I may find there’s no way out, once I get down there.” He wanted a pipe of kif, but he was afraid the policeman would run into the kitchen before he was able to smoke it. He said to the old woman: “How can I get in? Tell me.” And it seemed to him that he heard footsteps in the street, or perhaps even in one of the rooms of the house. He leaned over the stove and looked down into the kettle. It was dark and very hot down in there. Steam was coming up in clouds, and there was a thick smell in the air that made it hard to breathe. “Quick!” said the old woman, and she unrolled a rope ladder and hung it over the edge of the kettle. He began to climb down, and she leaned over and looked after him. “Until the other world!” he shouted. And he climbed all the way down. There was a rowboat below. When he was in it he tugged on the ladder and the old woman began to pull it up. And at that instant the policeman ran in, and two more were with him, and the old woman had just the time to throw the ladder down into the soup. “Now they are going to take her to the commissariat,” he thought, “and the poor woman only did me a favor.” He rowed around in the dark for a few minutes, and it was very hot. Soon he took off his clothes. For a while he could see the round top of the kettle up above, like a porthole in the side of a ship, with the heads of the policemen looking down in, but then it grew smaller as he rowed, until it was only a light. Sometimes he could find it and sometimes he lost it, and finally it was gone. He was worried about the old woman, and he thought he must find a way to help her. No policeman can go into the Café of the Two B
ridges because it belongs to the Sultan’s sister. This is why there is so much kif smoke inside that a berrada can’t fall over even if it is pushed, and why most customers like to sit outside, and even there keep one hand on their money. As long as the thieves stay inside and their friends bring them food and kif, they are all right. One day police headquarters will forget to send a man to watch the café, or one man will leave five minutes before the other gets there to take his place. Outside everyone smokes kif too, but only for an hour or two—not all day and night like the ones inside. He of the Assembly had forgotten to light his sebsi. He was in a café where no policeman could come, and he wanted to go away to a kif world where the police were chasing him. “This is the way we are now,” he thought. “We work backwards. If we have something good, we look for something bad instead.” He lighted the sebsi and smoked it. Then he blew the hard ash out of the chqaf. It landed in the brook beside the second bridge. “The world is too good. We can only work forward if we make it bad again first.” This made him sad, so he stopped thinking, and filled his sebsi. While he was smoking it, Ben Tajah looked in his direction, and although they were facing each other, He of the Assembly did not notice Ben Tajah until he got up and paid for his tea. Then he looked at him because he took such a long time getting up off the floor. He saw his face and he thought: “That man has no one in the world.” The idea made him feel cold. He filled his sebsi again and lighted it. He saw the man as he was going to go out of the café and walk alone down the long road outside the ramparts. In a little while he himself would have to go out to the souks to try to borrow money for dinner. When he smoked a lot of kif he did not like his aunt to see him, and he did not want to see her. “Soup and bread. No one can want more than that. Will thirty francs be enough the fourth time? The qahouaji wasn’t satisfied last night. But he took it. And he went away and let me sleep. A Moslem, even in the city, can’t refuse his brother shelter.” He was not convinced, because he had been born in the mountains, and so he kept thinking back and forth in this way. He smoked many chqofa, and when he got up to go out into the street he found that the world had changed.

  BEN TAJAH WAS NOT a rich man. He lived alone in a room near Bab Doukkala, and he had a stall in the bazaars where he sold coathangers and chests. Often he did not open the shop because he was in bed with a liver attack. At such times he pounded on the floor from his bed, using a brass pestle, and the postman who lived downstairs brought him up some food. Sometimes he stayed in bed for a week at a time. Each morning and night the postman came in with a tray. The food was not very good because the postman’s wife did not understand much about cooking. But he was glad to have it. Twice he had brought the postman a new chest to keep clothes and blankets in. One of the postman’s wives a few years before had taken a chest with her when she had left him and gone back to her family in Kasba Tadla. Ben Tajah himself had tried having a wife for a while because he needed someone to get him regular meals and to wash his clothes, but the girl was from the mountains, and was wild. No matter how much he beat her she would not be tamed. Everything in the room got broken, and finally he had to put her out into the street. “No more women will get into my house,” he told his friends in the bazaars, and they laughed. He took home many women, and one day he found that he had en noua. He knew that was a bad disease, because it stays in the blood and eats the nose from inside. “A man loses his nose only long after he has already lost his head.” He asked a doctor for medicine. The doctor gave him a paper and told him to take it to the Pharmacie de l’Étoile. There he bought six vials of penicillin in a box. He took them home and tied each little bottle with a silk thread, stringing them so that they made a necklace. He wore this always around his neck, taking care that the glass vials touched his skin. He thought it likely that by now he was cured, but his cousin in Fez had just told him that he must go on wearing the medicine for another three months, or at least until the beginning of the moon of Chouwal. He had thought about this now and then on the way home, sitting in the bus for two days, and he had decided that his cousin was too cautious. He stood in the Djemaa el Fna a minute watching the trained monkeys, but the crowd pushed too much, so he walked on. When he got home he shut the door and put his hand in his pocket to pull out the envelope, because he wanted to look at it again inside his own room, and be sure that the name written on it was beyond a doubt his. But the letter was gone. He remembered the jostling in the Djemaa el Fna. Someone had reached into his pocket and imagined his hand was feeling money, and taken it. Yet Ben Tajah did not truly believe this. He was convinced that he would have known such a theft was happening. There had been a letter in his pocket. He was not even sure of that. He sat down on the cushions. “Two days in the bus,” he thought. “Probably I’m tired. I found no letter.” He searched in his pocket again, and it seemed to him he could still remember how the fold of the envelope had felt. “Why would it have my name on it? I never found any letter at all.” Then he wondered if anyone had seen him in the café with the envelope in one hand and the sheet of paper in the other, looking at them both for such a long time. He stood up. He wanted to go back to the Café of the Two Bridges and ask the qahouaji: “Did you see me an hour ago? Was I looking at a letter?” If the qahouaji said, “Yes,” then the letter was real. He repeated the words aloud: “The sky trembles and the earth is afraid, and the two eyes are not brothers.” In the silence afterwards the memory of the sound of the words frightened him. “If there was no letter, where are these words from?” And he shivered because the answer to that was: “From Satan.” He was about to open the door when a new fear stopped him. The qahouaji might say, “No,” and this would be still worse, because it would mean that the words had been put directly into his head by Satan, that Satan had chosen him to reveal Himself to. In that case He might appear at any moment. “Ach haddou laillaha ill’ Allah…,” he prayed, holding his two forefingers up, one on each side of him. He sat down again and did not move. In the street the children were crying. He did not want to hear the qahouaji say: “No. You had no letter.” If he knew that Satan was coming to tempt him, he would have that much less power to keep Him away with his prayers, because he would be more afraid.

  He of the Assembly stood. Behind him was a wall. In his hand was the sebsi. Over his head was the sky, which he felt was about to burst into light. He was leaning back looking at it. It was dark on the earth, but there was still light up there behind the stars. Ahead of him was the pissoir of the Carpenters’ Souk which the French had put there. People said only Jews used it. It was made of tin, and there was a puddle in front of it that reflected the sky and the top of the pissoir. It looked like a boat in the water. Or like a pier where boats land. Without moving from where he stood, He of the Assembly saw it approaching slowly. He was going toward it. And he remembered he was naked, and put his hand over his sex. In a minute the rowboat would be bumping against the pier. He steadied himself on his legs and waited. But at that moment a large cat ran out of the shadow of the wall and stopped in the middle of the street to turn and look at him with an evil face. He saw its two eyes and for a while could not take his own eyes away. Then the cat ran across the street and was gone. He was not sure what had happened, and he stood very still looking at the ground. He looked back at the pissoir reflected in the puddle and thought: “It was a cat on the shore, nothing else.” But the cat’s eyes had frightened him. Instead of being like cats’ eyes, they had looked like the eyes of a person who was interested in him. He made himself forget he had had this thought. He was still waiting for the rowboat to touch the landing pier, but nothing had happened. It was going to stay where it was, that near the shore but not near enough to touch. He stood still a long time, waiting for something to happen. Then he began to walk very fast down the street toward the bazaars. He had just remembered that the old woman was in the police station. He wanted to help her, but first he had to find out where they had taken her. “I’ll have to go to every police station in the Medina,” he thought, and he was not
hungry any more. It was one thing to promise himself he would help her when he was far from land, and another when he was a few doors from a commissariat. He walked by the entrance. Two policemen stood in the doorway. He kept walking. The street curved and he was alone. “This night is going to be a jewel in my crown,” he said, and he turned quickly to the left and went along a dark passageway. At the end he saw flames, and he knew that Mustapha would be there tending the fire of the bakery. He crawled into the mud hut where the oven was. “Ah, the jackal has come back from the forest!” said Mustapha. He of the Assembly shook his head. “This is a bad world,” he told Mustapha. “I’ve got no money,” Mustapha said. He of the Assembly did not understand. “Everything goes backwards,” he said. “It’s bad now, and we have to make it still worse if we want to go forwards.” Mustapha saw that He of the Assembly was mkiyif ma rassou and was not interested in money. He looked at him in a more friendly way and said: “Secrets are not between friends. Talk.” He of the Assembly told him that an old woman had done him a great favor, and because of that three policemen had arrested her and taken her to the police station. “You must go for me to the commissariat and ask them if they have an old woman there.” He pulled out his sebsi and took a very long time filling it. When he finished it he smoked it himself and did not offer any to Mustapha, because Mustapha never offered him any of his. “You see how full of kif my head is,” he said laughing. “I can’t go.” Mustapha laughed too and said it would not be a good idea, and that he would go for him.