The Stories of Paul Bowles (64 page)

A
BDALLAH LIVED WITH
his wife in a two-room house on a hillside several miles from the center of town. They had two children. The girl was in school and the boy lived at the house of an Englishman for whom he did gardening.

Long ago the woman had set the pattern of their life by going out to work as a maid in Nazarene houses. She was strong and jolly, and the Nazarenes liked her. They recommended her to their friends, so that she was never without employment, and was able to work at several houses each day. Since she turned over all her wages to Abdallah, there was no need for him to work. Sometimes he suspected that the Nazarenes were paying her more than she claimed, but he said nothing.

The woman was also expert at carrying things out of the houses of the Nazarenes without their being aware of it. In earlier days she had handed over these bits of plunder to him along with the money; what they brought at the joteya was a welcome bonus. Working so long for the Nazarenes, however, had given her a taste for the way the Nazarenes lived. She began to complain when Abdallah tried to carry off a bath towel or a sheet or a fancy serving dish, for she wanted these things in the house with her. When he took away a small traveling alarm clock
which she particularly prized, she stopped speaking to him and would have nothing to do with him. He was angry and mortified, and he began to sleep in the other room, sending the girl to sleep with her mother.

The silent war between them had not gone on for very long before Abdallah took a great interest in Zohra, a young woman living up the road, whose husband only recently had left her. Because she needed money, she encouraged Abdallah’s attentions, and soon he was eating and sleeping in her house with her, not caring that his behavior was causing unfavorable comment throughout the neighborhood.

Zohra was not long in discovering that Abdallah could not pay for anything. Having moved out of his house, he could scarcely go back at the end of the month and ask his wife for money. Once she saw how matters stood, Zohra thought only of getting rid of him, and she did her utmost to make his life unbearable.

Early one afternoon he paid a visit to his house, knowing that his wife would be away at work. It was a Friday, so that his daughter was not at school. She was in the patio, washing out some clothes. He greeted her, but she scarcely looked up. Her mother has filled her head with lies about me, he thought. Then he went inside and called his wife’s name. At the same time his eye alighted on a transparent plastic bag, stuffed into a niche in the wall. He stepped nearer and saw something shining inside the bag. Without looking further, he hid it inside his djellaba, called his wife’s name once more, and returned to the patio.

Tell your mother I was here, he said to the girl. She did not reply, and he added: Don’t listen to the neighbors.

She fixed him for a second with a resentful stare before she bent again to scrub the clothes.

He climbed up the hillside and sat down in the woods so he could examine the contents of the bag in private. There were twelve big spoons there, all of them exactly alike. After admiring them for a while, he wrapped them up and set out for the town to show them to a friend in Emsallah who knew about such things.

The man assured him that the soup spoons were of the purest silver, and offered to give him seventy thousand francs for them. Abdallah said he needed time to consider it, and that he would return. From Emsallah he went directly to the joteya and put the silver in the hands of a dillal, who began to make the rounds of the market with it. The bids finally reached a hundred thousand francs, and the spoons were sold.

That night at Zohra’s he lay awake, fully dressed, with the banknotes clutched in his hand. Early in the morning he went out and bought ten goats, all of them black. Then he rented a shack with a shed beside it where he could keep them at night. He was careful to choose a quarter that lay at some distance from his own, one that was reached by a different road, reasoning that this would reduce the likelihood of an unexpected encounter with Zohra or his wife.

He found his new life agreeably restful. Each morning at daybreak he went out with the goats, driving them along the back road to Boubana and then through the valley toward Rehreh. Here he would sit in the shade of a ruined farmhouse and look down at the goats as they wandered over the hillside.

Sometimes he fell asleep for a while as he sat watching them. This was dangerous: they could get into a patch of cultivated ground and he would have trouble with the farmer. Even more important was a recently passed law stipulating that henceforth no motorist would be held responsible for any livestock he happened to hit on the highway. Worse than that, it was the owner of the animals who had to pay a stiff fine for each one killed. The country people were unable to fathom the reasons for an order that seemed so perverse, but they understood that it was wiser to keep their animals far from the roads.

Often when the weather was hot Abdallah did not take the trouble to drive the goats up the valley, but sat under a pine tree in a field not far from the road to Rmilat. Here he was obliged to force himself to stay awake and keep his eye on them, for they could easily stray onto the road. One breathless afternoon, however, he felt a powerful need for sleep overtaking him, and even though he fought against it, he was unable to keep from dropping into a deep slumber.

He awoke to a squealing of brakes, looked down at the road, and saw what had happened. Two of his goats had wandered in front of a truck, and lay dead on the asphalt.

He jumped up, drove the others away from the road, and then hurried back to drag the two dead animals over to the ditch. If the police were to pass by now, they would immediately identify them as part of his flock, and take him with them.

A youth whom he recognized as the son of the man who lived next door to his shack came along, pushing an empty wheelbarrow. He called to him, and pointed to the bodies in the ditch.

Get rid of these for me, will you? I don’t care where you hide them, but don’t go along the road with them. When you come back here with the empty wheelbarrow you get the money.

He did not explain to the boy why he was so eager to remove the carcasses instead of simply leaving them there in the ditch for the dogs. If the boy realized the importance of his task, he would be dissatisfied with the small amount Abdallah intended to give him.

The lad heaved the two goats into the wheelbarrow and set off along a path that led through the scrub down toward the river. It was a Sunday, and scores of women were doing their washing along the banks of the stream; the bushes were tents of drying sheets. He pushed the wheelbarrow along until he came to the bridge over the sluice. On the upper side the water was deep and black; on the other side a rivulet trickled at the bottom of a twisting gulley. He decided to dump the goats into the deep water, and rolled up his sleeves.

At that moment a woman standing on the bank at the foot of the bridge began to shout at him. It was her land he was standing on, she cried, and he could take his carrion somewhere else. He let her shout and watched her wave her arms for a long time, saying nothing. Then, seeing that a crowd was gathering, he spat contemptuously, tipped the wheelbarrow and let the animals splash into the water. The woman’s voice rose to a scream as she announced that she was going to the police.

I know you! she shrieked. I know where your father lives! You’ll sleep in jail!

The boy did not even look at her as he pushed his wheelbarrow ahead of him. To get to where Abdallah was waiting for him, he went along the highway.

When Abdallah saw him coming, he walked to meet him, noted the empty wheelbarrow, and paid him, assuming that the goats were hidden somewhere among the bushes and brambles near the bend in the river.

Less than an hour later the woman was at the comisaría waving her arms as she denounced the boy. The police listened attentively, feeling certain that they were on their way to collecting some fines.

When they had fished the goats out of the water and dumped them in a back room at the police station, the woman led them to the house of the boy’s father.

The boy was indignant. Deep water’s the best place to throw them, he protested. The man paid me to take them away. Ask him.

On the adjoining plot of land they found Abdallah sitting dejectedly with his eight remaining goats. Come on, they said. We’ve got something to show you. And they made him go with them to the comisaría, where they confronted him with the two wet carcasses, and demanded an immediate payment of forty thousand francs.

Abdallah was shocked. I haven’t even got ten, he said.

That’s all right, they told him. We’ll take four of your goats.

At this Abdallah set up an outcry. How can two goats be worth four? he kept shouting. They laughed and pushed him out, but the scene had been so noisy that people had gathered outside the entrance, trying to see in through the front door. Zohra, who was waiting for a bus on the other side of the road, quickly got the story from others who stood nearby.

Ah, so he has goats, she said to herself, and as she rode up the hill in the bus all her rancor against Abdallah returned. He could never even pay for a loaf of bread, but he has goats.

She set about spreading the news around the neighborhood that Abdallah, contrary to what everyone thought, had not left Tangier at all, but lived below Vasco da Gama with a flock of goats. She was certain that this would get to Abdallah’s wife, which it very soon did.

Abdallah’s wife had never bothered to file a complaint against him for having abandoned her and the children, since she knew she would get nothing out of it. Now however she determined to go and claim support. If Abdallah had goats, he had them only because of her spoons; of that she was certain. He must not be allowed to keep them.

The following day, instead of reporting to work at the Nazarenes’, she went to declare that her husband had left her. After a long wait, she was allowed into an office. As he filled out a paper, the official asked her where Abdallah worked.

He doesn’t work. He has no money.

The man raised his arms. Then what do you expect us to do? If he has no money, why did you come here?

He has goats, she said.

A few weeks later a message from the government arrived for her, telling her to go to the comisaría of her quarter. There a policeman was assigned to her, and together they started to walk to the shack where Abdallah lived.

Ever since the police had gone away with half his flock, Abdallah had
not taken the trouble to drive the four remaining goats out to the fields where they could graze. He merely sat in the doorway of his shack, watching the starving animals wander around the small enclosure. Once in a while he brought in an armful of weeds for them.

The policeman told the woman to wait in the road while he went in and got the goats. She peered through the gate and saw the four bony, dried-up creatures. The policeman was talking, and then he came out through the gate, driving the goats ahead of him.

As he shut the gate she stole another glance inside and saw Abdallah sitting by the door of the shack, his face buried in his hands. At that moment, if only he had looked up, she would have called out something to him, to make him understand that it was all right, that he could return to her. But he did not move. The gate cut across her view of him, and she was in the road, walking with the policeman and the goats.

For an instant she regretted not having spoken to him: he looked so solitary and hopeless. Then she remembered the shawl. Three days earlier, after months of planning, she had managed to avail herself of a huge soft cashmere shawl which she intended to keep. She thought she had done well to hold her tongue.

In this world it’s not possible to have everything, she told herself.

(1980)

I
T WAS THE DAY
when the President of the United States was due to arrive with his wife on a visit to the King and Queen. Throughout the preceding afternoon squads of men had been running up and down the boulevard, dragging with them heavy iron stands to be used as barricades along the curbs. Mang Huat rose from his bed sweaty and itching, having slept very little during the night. Ever since he had been advised that the procession would be passing in front of the hotel he had been awaiting the day with mounting dread. The smallest incident could jeopardize his career. It needed only one lunatic with a hand grenade.

With distaste he pulled aside the curtains near his bed and peered out into the light of the inauspicious day. Later, when he had showered, he returned to the window and stood for a long time. Above the city the grey sky was ahum with helicopters; so far none had hit the tops of the highest chedis towering above the temples, but people in the street watched with interest each time an object clattered overhead in the direction of a nearby spire. At times, when a police car was on its way through the quarter, all traffic was suspended, and there would follow an unusual, disturbing hush in which he could hear only the whir of the insects
in the trees. Then there would come other sounds of life, farther away: the cries of children and the barking of dogs, and they too were disturbing, these naked noises in place of the unceasing roar of motors.

No one seemed to know when the royal cortege would go by. The radio had announced the time as ten o’clock, but gossip in the lobby downstairs, reportedly straight from police headquarters, fixed the starting hour as noon. Mang Huat decided not to have breakfast, nor indeed to eat at all until the danger had passed and he was free from tension.

He sat behind his desk tapping the point of an eyetooth with his fingernail, and looking thoughtfully across at Miss Pakun as she typed. The magenta silk curtains at his office windows stirred slightly with the breath of an oscillating fan. They gave the room a boudoir glow in which a motion or a posture sometimes could seem strangely ambivalent. Today the phenomenon, rather than stimulating him, merely increased the distrust he had been feeling with regard to his secretary. She was unusually attractive and efficient, but he had to tell himself that this was not the point. He had engaged her in what he considered good faith, assuming that the information she had written on her application form was true. He had chosen her from among several other equally presentable applicants because she bore the stamp of a good bourgeois upbringing.

His equivocal feelings about Miss Pakun dated from the previous week, when his cashier, Udom by name, had reported seeing her walking along the street in an unsanitary and disreputable quarter of Thonburi on the other side of the river. Udom knew the area well; it was a neighborhood of shacks, mounds of garbage, opium houses and brothels. If she lived over there, why had she given the Sukhumvit address? And if not, what legitimate excuse could she have for visiting this unsavory part of the city? He had even wondered if Pakun were her true name.

Mang Huat was proud of his three-room suite at the Krungthep Plaza. At thirty-two he was manager of the hotel, and that pleased him. Through a small window in the wall of his salon he could, if he felt so inclined, look down into the lobby and see what was happening in almost every corner of it. He never used the peephole. It was enough that the staff knew of its existence.

From where he sat he could hear the trickle of the fountain in the next room. A friend, recently moved to Hong Kong, had left it with him, and he had spent a good deal of money getting it installed. Miss Pakun
coughed, probably to remind him that he was smoking. She always coughed when he smoked. On a few occasions when she had first come to work for him he had put out his cigarette. Today he was not much concerned with the state of her throat. Nor, he thought, did he care whether she lived at the elegant address in Sukhumvit or in a slum alley of Thonburi. He no longer had any intention of forging an intimate friendship with her.

Late in the morning Udom knocked on his door. Udom was a friend from university days, down on his luck, who had begged for work at the hotel. Mang Huat, persuaded that it was unrealistic to expect any man to possess more than one good quality, had given the job of cashier to Udom, who was unreliable but honest.

Ever since his uncle’s partner had placed him in his present exalted position, Mang Huat had experienced the bliss of feeling sheltered from the outside world. Today for the first time that delicious peace of mind was being threatened. It was absurd, he knew; there was little likelihood of an accident, but any situation beyond his control caused him undue anxiety.

Udom came over to the desk and murmured gloomily that the American Security men were downstairs asking for a passkey to the rooms. I told them I’d have to speak to you, he went on. It’s not obligatory, you know. Only the keys of certain specific rooms, if they ask for them.

I know that, said Mang Huat. Give them a passkey.

The guests are going to object.

Mang Huat bridled. What difference does that make? Give them whatever keys they ask for. Just be sure you get them all back.

It scandalized him that anyone should hesitate to accept this added protection, but then Udom could be counted on to create complications and find objections. Mang Huat suspected that he had not entirely outgrown his youthful Marxist sympathies, and sometimes he wondered if it had been wise to take him on to the staff.

Pangs of hunger were making his nervousness more acute. It was twenty-five minutes past one. Miss Pakun had not yet returned from lunch. All at once he realized that a new sound which filled the air outside had been going on for some time. He stepped to the window. The big official cars were rolling past, and at a surprising speed. His eye suddenly
caught the two white Bentleys from the palace, enclosed by their escort of motorcycles. He held his breath until they were gone. Even then he listened for a minute before he telephoned to order his lunch.

Late in the afternoon the receptionist rang his office to say that a guest was demanding to see him. Suddenly the threat was there again. I can’t see anyone, he said, and hung up.

Five minutes later Udom was on the wire. I was afraid this would happen, he said. An Englishman is complaining that the police searched his room.

Tell him I’m not in my office, said Mang Huat. And to Miss Pakun: No incoming calls. You hear?

Twilight had come down all at once, brought on by a great black cloud that swelled above the city. The thought occurred to him that he could let Miss Pakun go now, before the rain came. He stood at the window staring out. The city sparkled with millions of extra lights; they were looped in fanciful designs through the branches of the trees across the canal. A triumphal arch had been built over the entrance to the bridge, spectacularly floodlighted in red and blue to show a thirty-foot-high face of the visiting president, with appropriate words of welcome beneath, in English and Thai.

The buzzer in the antechamber sounded. Miss Pakun answered it, and a bellboy in scarlet uniform came in with a note on a tray. He’s had smallpox, Mang Huat said to himself. Who can have hired him? On his pad he scribbled a reminder to have the boy discharged in the morning, and took the note from him. Udom had written:
The man is in the bar getting the guests to sign a petition. I think you should see him.

Mang Huat read the note twice in disbelief. Then he pounded the desk once with his fist, and Miss Pakun glanced up. Because he was angry, he reminded himself that above all he must keep his composure. With such malcontents it was imperative to be adamant, and not to allow oneself to be drawn into discussion, much less argument.

The buzzer sounded. Tell him I’ll be free in five minutes, he said to Miss Pakun.

There was no longer any question of letting her go before the storm broke. She would simply have to take her shoes off, like other people in that squalid quarter where she surely lived, and wade barefoot through the puddles and ponds, to the end of the alley where a taxi could not take
her. In a moment she came back in and sat down, patting her hair and smoothing her skirt. At that moment a police car must have been in the neighborhood, for there was one of the sudden ominous silences outside. While Miss Pakun carefully applied a whole series of cosmetics to her features, he sat in the stillness and heard a gecko chatter just beyond the air-conditioning box behind him; the tentative chirruping pierced the slight whir of the motor. And the insects in the trees still droned. He was sorry he had made a time limit. The five minutes of silence seemed like twenty. When the time was up Miss Pakun, resplendent, rose once more and turned to go out. Mang Huat stopped her.

No typing, please, while the man is here, he said crisply. Only shorthand. You can do it. (Her face had begun to change its expression.) This is an agitator, he stressed. We must have a record of everything he says.

Miss Pakun always grew timid and claimed insufficient knowledge of English if he asked her to transcribe a conversation in that language. The results of her work, however, were generally successful. Mang Huat glowered. You must get every word. He may threaten me.

The visitor came in, followed by Miss Pakun. He was young, and looked like a university student. With a brief smile he sat down in a chair facing Mang Huat, and said: Thank you for letting me in.

Mang Huat took this as sarcasm. You came to complain?

You see, the young man began, I’m trying to get an extension of my tourist visa without leaving the country.

Mang Huat slapped the desk hard with the flat of his hand. Someone has made a mistake. You are looking for the Immigration Department. My secretary will give you the address.

The young man raised his voice. I was trying to lead up to my complaint. But I’ll make it now. It’s an affront to your guests to allow the Americans into the rooms.

Ah! Perhaps you should complain to the Thai police, Mang Huat suggested, standing up to show that the meeting was at an end. My secretary can also give you that address.

The young Englishman stared at him for an instant with patent disgust. You’re the perfect manager for this abject institution, he muttered. Then, seeing that Miss Pakun had risen and was holding the door open for him, he got up and stalked out, doing his best to slam the outer door of the antechamber behind him. Equipped against such rough treatment,
the door merely gave its usual cushioned hiss. Coming at that moment, the sound, which to Mang Huat represented the very soul of luxury, caused him to heave a sigh of pure sensuous pleasure.

That will be all, he told Miss Pakun. She took up her handbag, showed him her most luscious smile for the fraction of a second, and shut the door behind her.

It was now night, and the rain was falling heavily. Miss Pakun would get very wet, he thought, a twinge of pity spicing his satisfaction. He went into the next room and lay back on the divan to watch television for a few minutes. Then he got up. It was the moment to make his evening excursion to the kitchen and, having examined the food, order his dinner. He lighted a cigarette and took the elevator down to the lobby.

In front of the reception desk he frowned with disapproval at the spots left on the carpet by the wet luggage being brought in. At that moment he happened to glance across the crowded lobby, and saw Miss Pakun emerge from the bar, accompanied by the young Englishman. They went directly out into the street. By the time Mang Huat was able to get over to the door, walking at a normal pace, they were climbing into a taxi. He stepped outside, and, sheltered by the marquee, stood watching the cab disappear into the downpour.

On his way to the kitchen he stopped at the cashier’s desk, where he recounted to Udom what he had just seen. He also told him to give Miss Pakun her final paycheck in the morning and to see that under no circumstances was she to get upstairs to his office.

A prostitute, he said with bitter indignation. A common prostitute, masquerading as an intelligent, educated girl.

(1980)