The Stories of Paul Bowles (71 page)

The truth is that for two or three decades I haven’t thought of her at all. I thought of her this morning only because I was trying, from what I knew of your life, to imagine possible causes of a cerebral lesion. I admit that after the fact it’s of purely academic interest. The autopsy doesn’t cure the patient.

AFTER I WOKE UP
this morning I recalled a silly song I heard as a child, when it was sung to me by a woman named Ethel Robb. (I don’t know who she was, but I seem to remember that she was a schoolteacher.) The words struck me as so strange that I learned them by heart.

In der vintertime ven der valley’s green

And der vind blows along der vindowsill

Den der vomen in der vaudeville

Ride der velocipedes around der vestibule.

(The melody was a variant of “Ach, du lieber Augustin.”) Surely you never heard the song. I wonder if anyone ever did, outside Miss Robb’s circle of acquaintances.

The early twenties was the time for absurd lyrics: witness “Oh by Jingo,” “The Ogo Pogo,” “Lena was the Queen of Palestina,” “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” “Barney Google” and God knows what else. There was also a Fanny Brice song called “Second-Hand Rose,” which got me into trouble with the mother of my hostess when I sang it at a party here
in the sixties. She paid no attention to: “Even the piano in the parlor Papa bought for ten cents on the dollar.” But when I got to “Even Abie Cohen, that’s the boy I adore, had the nerve to tell me he’d been married before,” the lady jumped up and ran across to the divan where I was sitting. She seized my face between her thumb and fingers and squeezed, crying: “Even you, Paul Bowles, even you?” It was all so sudden and dramatic that I felt I’d committed a major solecism. Fortunately there were other guests who knew the song, and they were able to convince her that I hadn’t been extemporizing for the occasion, although she didn’t seem completely mollified.

I think the most important characteristic you and I have in common (although you’d be within your rights in claiming that we have no points at all in common) is a conviction that the human world has entered into a terminal period of disintegration and destruction, and that this will end in a state of affairs so violent and chaotic as to make any attempts at maintaining government or order wholly ineffective. I’ve always found you excoriating the decay of civilization even more vehemently than I. This of course was when the worst we could imagine was destruction by nuclear warfare. But now we can imagine conditions under which sudden death by fire might be a welcome release from the inferno of life; we might long for a universal euthanasia. Can we
hope
for nuclear war—I mean ethically—or are we bound out of loyalty to wish for the continuation of the human species at no matter what costs in suffering? I used the word “ethical” because it seems to me that unethical desires are bound to engender false conclusions.

I suppose what is at the bottom of my mind in all this is that I’m curious to know whether being totally incapacitated has altered your point of view in any way. Has it left you angrier, more resigned, or entirely indifferent? (Although that you never were, under any circumstances, so that I doubt the likelihood of such a major alteration in personality.) I have a feeling that you may consider these things a purely private matter, and as a result may resent my prurient probing.

I CAN SEE THAT
you don’t really remember the weekend you referred to earlier. There’s nothing shameful about not having total recall: still, it seems doubly unfortunate that you should have been deprived of both
external
and
internal mobility: I mean the freedom to wander in the past, to explore the closets of memory. I know, it was forty years ago and you say you don’t remember, that all three of us were so drunk none of us could possibly recall the details of that absurd excursion. But neither you nor I was drunk when we arrived in the village (and had to get off the train because that was as far as they’d built the railroad). It was still daylight, and we crossed the river on that unfinished bridge to get to the so-called hotel. Surely you remember that there was nothing to drink but mescal; you kept saying that it smelled like furniture polish, which as I recall it did. Have you ever drunk any since? And what a night, with Bartolomé sitting there getting drunker and drunker and giggling his head off. And at one point (search well—you
must
remember this) the mosquito net over my bed collapsed onto my head so that I was swathed in folds of netting, and the dust made me sneeze, and Bartolomé in his chair pointed at me while I struggled, and cried:
Pareces al Niño Dios!
And you and he laughed interminably while I sneezed and flailed my arms, trying to find an opening in the net. By then there was nothing to do but send Bartolomé down for another bottle of Tehuacan and go on drinking our mescal. I think it was he who finally extricated me from the netting. I admit that you were more or less intoxicated, but certainly not enough so to have drawn a blank. All that was fun, and belongs on the credit side of the ledger. As usual, however, I was more conscious of the unpleasant details than of all the amusement. The next day was eternal. It was agony to be on that plunging rattletrap little train, and I looked with loathing at the miles of cactus on the parched hillsides. Each jolt of the train increased the pounding in my head. Bartolomé slept. You seemed to have no hangover, for which I felt some bitterness; but then, you were used to alcohol and I was not. But since you say you don’t remember, I’m left alone with the memory; I might as well have dreamed it all.

Sometimes I suspect you of exaggerating your present deficiencies, not, certainly, to evoke pity, since that would be unlike you, and besides, the desire to exaggerate is probably unconscious in its origin. Nevertheless, you do emphasize your unfortunate situation, so that one can’t help feeling sorry for you. The question is: Why do you italicize your misfortune? My feeling is that it’s simply out of bitterness. I feel you thinking: Now I’m in a wheelchair. That’s that, and that’s what the world wanted. In other words,
they
have done it to you. If only you were religious you could blame it on God, or wouldn’t that be any more satisfactory?

AS I REMEMBER
,
you’re not particularly fond of animals. I’ve always been an ailurophile myself as opposed to a dog-lover. It seemed to me there’d be time enough later to make friends with the canines. Here there’s not much likelihood of that. At night they’re out in packs, and sometimes attack passersby in the street. A sextet of them chased an American friend for a quarter of a mile one evening along the new road that goes from the foot of the Old Mountain to the new section of Dradeb. When one particular dog gets to be a continuous sleep-disturber I’ve twice resorted to drastic measures. It would be better to describe the drastic measures, I realize, than let you think that I poisoned the beasts. Naturally that was the first thing that occurred to me, but I decided against it because of the suffering it causes. Also, the symptoms of death from rat poison (the only lethal product I’d have been able to find here) are so classical that the owner of the animal would immediately suspect that his watchdog had been poisoned. My system with the first brute, which used to bark all night from the garden next door, was time-consuming but effective. It involved my staying up half the night for a week in my wait for a completely deserted street. About half past one I would go to the kitchen and prepare the half pound of raw hamburger. One night I would mix Melleril and Largactyl with the meat, the following night I would grind up several tablets of Anafranil. I continued the alternation until the dog’s owner decided it was rabid, and had it shot. There was no more barking after the first night of treatment. This seemed the most humane way of getting rid of the animal.

Another year a bitch whelped in the garage, which is always open. The night watchman gave her a carton to lie in with her pups. When these had been given away, she remained in the garage, encouraged by an eccentric Ethiopian woman who sent her maid at all hours with food for her. As soon as she felt thoroughly at home in the garage, she began to engage in long-distance conversations with friends in Ain Hayani and Dradeb. I complained about this to Abdelouahaïd; I thought he might have a solution. He had a very simple one. He picked up the bitch and put her into the boot of the car. We drove to the Forêt Diplomatique, to the edge of the beach, where there’s a restaurant run by a Moroccan with a crew of dogs. Before letting her out of the boot, Abdelouahaïd turned the Mustang around, to be able to start up quickly. She stood on the
beach for a second, bewildered; the other dogs saw her and came to investigate. While they surrounded her Abdelouahaïd started up, and we escaped, even though I saw her running behind the car for a good distance as we drove through the woods. She wasn’t stupid: as soon as she heard the motor she pushed the other dogs aside and rushed toward the car.

Something has happened to the Moroccans. Fifty years ago dogs were execrated. Only people living in the country owned them. Too dirty to live in the city. Somehow they noticed that practically all French women went into the street accompanied by dogs on leashes, and gradually began to imitate them. At first it was boys leading curs by ropes which they tied tightly around the animals’ necks. French ladies passing by would be indignant.
Mais ce pauvre chien! Tu vas l’étrangler!
Now every Moroccan child in neighborhoods such as mine has a canine pet. Most are German shepherds: fathers think they provide better protection.

The French are unpredictable. Last month a young photographer from Paris was here taking pictures for
Libération.
The only thing which moved him to exclamations of surprise was the size of a peanut-butter jar full of birdseed. Is that authentic? he wanted to know. Do they really sell such large jars of peanut butter? When I said yes, I’m not sure he didn’t suspect me of pulling his leg, as he went across the room and examined it carefully. Merry Christmas.

SOMEONE SENT ME
a box of American chocolate creams last week. On the cover are the words
Home Fashioned.
On another facet of the same cover is a list of ingredients included in the home-fashioning. Among these are: invert sugar, partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, sorbitol, lecithin, butylated hydroxytoluene, butylated hydroxyanisole, propyl gallate, potassium sorbate, sulphur dioxide and benzoate of soda. Even the most modern home isn’t likely to have all these delicacies in its kitchen. Although I haven’t been in an American kitchen in many years, I know that they’re inclined to look more and more like laboratories. Perhaps by now they have chemical cabinets stocked with everything from triethylene glycol to metoclopramide.

The kitchens in farmhouses at the time of the First World War were not too pleasant to be in either, as I remember, in spite of all the propaganda
romanticizing them. There were mingled odors of sour milk, dill and iron from the well water. Spirals of flypaper hung from every convenient hook, and the flies still buzzed on all sides. If there were dogs, they smelled. If there were children, they smelled. It was unbelievable that serious people should want to live that way. What’s the matter with them? Nothing. They just don’t know any better, that’s all. This answer never satisfied me. It implied a double standard that made it possible for my parents to overlook these people’s shortcomings. But they never forgave
me
for not knowing something I ought to know, and the severity was applied precisely because I was not a farm boy. Seventy years ago there existed that class difference between those brought up in the city and those brought up on the farm. Now there seems to be very little distinction made. The concept of class has been carefully destroyed. Either you have money or you don’t. The result of democracy, I suppose, when it’s misunderstood to mean similarity rather than equality.

You couldn’t have known the typical small, medium-priced hotel of Paris in the twenties. (By the time you got to Paris, after the Second World War, things had changed somewhat.) There were only three or four rooms per floor, the staircases and corridors were heavily carpeted and the windows were hidden by two sets of curtains. Normally there were two lights in the room, one hanging from the center of the ceiling and the other above the bed’s headboard. Both were affixed to a system of pulleys, so that they could be propelled upward or downward according to the needs of the moment. The wallpaper was always dark with wide stripes in colors which might at one time have been garish, although there was no way of knowing, since the patina of age had long since darkened them. It was easy to feel encased and protected in those rooms, and I often dream about them even now. Such dreams however aren’t pleasant, since I seem always to be on the point of having to leave in order to let someone else move in. No dream without at least subliminal anxiety.

Incidentally, you have no reason to upbraid me for not giving my specific reactions to your most recent tale of woe. Such reactions can only be emotional in content, and there’s never any point in expressing emotions in words, it seems to me. I assure you, nevertheless, that I experienced a feeling of profound chagrin when I read your letter and realized that you were undergoing further torments, and I thought I’d conveyed that impression earlier.

You may remember (although probably not, since you never crack a book written in our century) a phrase used by the Castor in
La Nausée: “Je me survis.”
(Ineptly translated in the American edition as “I outlive myself.”) I understand the Castor’s feeling of being her own survivor; it’s not unlike my feeling, save that I’d express mine as:
“Ma vie est posthume.”
Do you make sense of that?

I’ve often wished that someone would rewrite the end
of Huckleberry Finn,
delivering it from the farcical closing scenes which Twain, probably embarrassed by the lyrical sweep of the nearly completed book, decided were necessary if the work were to be appreciated by American readers. It’s the great American novel, damaged beyond repair by its author’s senseless sabotage. I’d be interested to have your opinion, or do you feel that the book isn’t worth having an opinion about, since a botched masterpiece isn’t a masterpiece at all? Yet to counterfeit the style successfully, so that the break would be seamless and the prose following it a convincing continuation of what came before—that seems an impossible task. So I shan’t try it, myself.