Travels: Collected Writings, 1950-1993

by Paul Bowles

  IF I DWELL upon Spain here, it is because I think Spain has the most to offer the American in Europe. Since this is an opinion and not a provable thesis, I can only fall back upon personal reactions to its surpassing beauty in order to fortify my statement. It is an easy country to “get into,” the people are friendly and hospitable, and, which is quite as important, exceedingly conscious and proud of their cultura hispánica. Visually it is the most dramatic country in Western Europe. Contrasts are always easy to seize and remember; almost every aspect of Spain owes its character to a contradiction. The most important single element in the landscape is an impression of fertility in the midst of barrenness, the architecture is both an agreement and a clashing of Western and Eastern concepts of proportion and form, the people are in general either very rich or very poor, and since there have been relatively few changes wrought in the economic and social fabric of the nation between the era of Spain’s glory and the present century, the past is still powerfully alive in the land today. Just turn off the main road and drive over the hill, and you are in a country whose spirit has not yet been broken by the mechanical age.

  Since childhood I had admired the music of Manuel de Falla, the great latter-day Spanish composer. Thus, on my second trip to Spain (I have since made seventeen exploratory journeys through the country, every one fully rewarding) I determined to catch sight of him at the very least. In Cádiz I had already seen the house where he was born. It seemed right that he should have chosen Granada as his home – a little house with a shady garden on the sun-baked hill of the Alhambra, almost within hearing distance of the fountains of the Generalife, where across the narrow valley were the caves of Sacro Monte to which he could go and listen to the gitanos make their magnificent music. I did see him, several times, a thin little figure in black, hurrying along the narrow back lanes of the village under the high trees, on his way to noonday Mass. He would be respectfully pointed out to me by the citizens: “Ahí va el maestro.” One day I decided to call on him. He and his sister lived alone in the house. They were solemn and hospitable. We sat a long while in a small patio eating fruit and discussing music. At the end of the afternoon when I left I promised to return, but somehow I never did.

  In Elche, which with its palm groves looks exactly like a Saharan oasis, the proprietor of the hotel set a new low in undistinguished behavior. After I had paid the bill and tipped the porter, my host dashed out into the street in his long black mohair duster and began to run along behind the carriage, for a while almost able to keep up with the horses’ gait, calling piteously after me: “Una propinita para mí tambien, señor!” (“A little tip for me, too, sir!”).

  Of Barcelona I remember the gloomy Cathedral, Gaudi’s mushroom apartment house on the Paseo de Gracia, the improbable façade of the Sagrada Familia, and the beautiful black-and-gold interior of the little church of Nuestra Señora de Belén (now, alas, less beautiful as a result of Mussolini’s bombs). I remember all these things, yes, but I have a far more vivid picture of the little plaza into which I stumbled one hot afternoon to find fifty or more serious-faced people in a circle, dancing a stately sardana to the strident sounds of the fluviol and the gralla; or of the cable car in which I swung, high over the harbor spread out below, to be transported to Montjuich for lunch; or of the fair at twilight up on Tibidabo, with the silly music going, to the east the million lights of the city being lighted one by one, and to the west the pine-covered hills losing their green and falling back into silence and darkness.

  For sheer experience, pure as music, there is the night I found a small door, left open by an oversight, in the west wall of a vegetable garden attached to the Alhambra. There was a full moon; no one was in sight. I stepped in. The vegetable garden led to formal gardens, patios, into the palace itself. The sound of a fountain dribbling into its basin in the Hall of the Two Sisters was strangely loud, releasing tiny liquid echoes that played overhead in the dark. Young frogs chirped hopefully from the shadows in the Court of Myrtles. Descending stairways, tiptoeing along grilled passageways, I stopped to listen to the sound of the running water which is everywhere in the palace grounds, and leaning from a window in the Hall of the Ambassadors I heard, coming up from somewhere below in the darkness of the Albaicin, a lone voice, fragments of a song. “Tu misma tienes la cu-u-u-u-ulpa.” The Spaniard singing the words might have been addressing them to the entire vanquished race of the Moors. I had been to the Alhambra before, and I have been there many times since, but the two hours or so I passed there that night have nothing to do with all the other visits; they are apart, in another category, to be evaluated by other units of weight.

  HALF THE PEOPLE in Seville are asleep. The color of the few strips of sunlight that fall into the Calle Sierpes between the awnings has changed from the yellow of midday to the gold of midafter-noon. The young American, in a slightly somnolent state from a long and heavy meal, sallies forth into the street, his book once again under his arm, and in his mind hovers the vague project of wandering through the Barrio de Santa Cruz. Whether he will do that or not will depend upon his strength of character, for another image keeps creeping into his head: that of the cool bed back in the dimness of his shuttered hotel room. It would be pleasant to sleep awhile. Ya es la hora de la siesta. It will all go back with him to America, nothing will have been wasted. Each hour he has spent with open eyes and mind will have carried him a little further along the path to understanding the world, and that, after all, is the truest measure for culture we have been able to find.

  A Man Must Not Be Very Moslem

  Holiday, May 1955; Their Heads Are Green, 1963

  Aboard M/S Tarsus, Turkish Maritime Lines

  September 25, 1953

  WHEN I announced my intention of bringing Abdeslam along to Istanbul, the general opinion of my friends was that there were a good many more intelligent things to do in the world than to carry a Moroccan Moslem along with one to Turkey. I don’t know. He may end up as a dead weight, but my hope is that he will turn out instead to be a kind of passkey to the place. He knows how to deal with Moslems, and he has the Moslem sense of seemliness and protocol. He has also an intuitive gift for the immediate understanding of a situation and at the same time is completely lacking in reticence or inhibitions. He can lie so well that he convinces himself straightway, and he is a master at bargaining; it is a black day for him when he has to pay the asking price for anything. He never knows what is printed on a sign because he is totally illiterate; besides, even if he did know he would pay no attention, for he is wholly deficient in respect for law. If you mention that this or that thing is forbidden, he is contemptuous: “Agh! a decree for the wind!” Obviously he is far better equipped than I to squeeze the last drop of adventure out of any occasion. I, unfortunately, can read signs but can’t lie or bargain effectively, and will forgo any joy rather than risk unpleasantness or reprimand from whatever quarter. At all events, the die is cast: Abdeslam is here on the ship.

  Paul Bowles and Ahmed Yacoubi ( the real life Abdeslam of this piece), on his right, on the boat from Tangier to Istanbul, 1953 (PB)

  My first intimation of Turkey came during tea this afternoon, as the ship was leaving the Bay of Naples. The orchestra was playing a tango which finally established its identity, after several reprises, as the “Indian Love Call,” and the cliffs of Capri were getting in the way of the sunset. I glanced at a biscuit that I was about to put into my mouth, then stopped the operation to examine it more closely. It was an ordinary little arrowroot tea-biscuit, and on it were embossed the words hayd park. Contemplating this edible tidbit, I recalled what friends had told me of the amusing havoc that results when the Turks phoneticize words borrowed from other languages. These metamorphosed words have a way of looking like gibberish until you say them aloud, and then more likely than not they resolve themselves into perfectly comprehensible English or French or, even occasionally, Arabic. skoç tuid looks like nothing; suddenly it becomes Scotch Tweed. Tualet, trençkot, ototeknik and se
ksoloji likewise reveal their messages as one stares at them. Synthetic orthography is a constantly visible reminder of Turkey’s determination to be “modern.” The country has turned its back on the East and Eastern concepts, not with the simple yearning of other Islamic countries to be European or to acquire American techniques, but with a conscious will to transform itself from the core outward -even to destroy itself culturally, if need be.

  TARABYA, BOSPORUS

  THIS AFTERNOON it was blustery and very cold. The water in the tiny Sea of Marmara was choppy and dark, laced with froth; the ship rolled more heavily than it had at any time during its three days out on the open Mediterranean. If the first sight of Istanbul was impressive, it was because the perfect hoop of a rainbow painted across the lead-colored sky ahead kept one from looking at the depressing array of factory smokestacks along the western shore. After an hour’s moving backward and forward in the harbor, we were close enough to see the needles of the minarets (and how many of them!) in black against the final flare-up of the sunset. It was a poetic introduction, and like the introductions to most books, it had very little to do with what followed. “Poetic” is not among the adjectives you would use to describe the disembarkation. The pier was festive; it looked like an elegant waterside restaurant or one of the larger Latin American airports – brilliantly illumined, awnings flapping, its decks mobbed with screaming people.

  The customs house was the epitome of confusion for a half-hour or so; when eventually an inspector was assigned us, we were fortunate enough to be let through without having to open anything. The taxis were parked in the dark on the far side of a vast puddle of water, for it had been raining. I had determined on a hotel in Istanbul proper, rather than one of those in Beyoglu, across the Golden Horn, but the taxi driver and his front-seat companion were loath to take me there. “All hotels in Beyoglu,” they insisted. I knew better and did some insisting of my own. We shot into the stream of traffic, across the Galata Bridge, to the hotel of my choosing. Unhappily I had neglected, on the advice of various friends back in Italy, to reserve a room. There was none to be had. And so on, from hotel to hotel there in Istanbul, back across the bridge and up the hill to every establishment in Beyoglu. Nothing, nothing. There are three international conventions in progress here, and besides, it is vacation time in Turkey; everything is full. Even the M/s Tarsus, from which we just emerged, as well as another ship in the harbor, has been called into service tonight to be used as a hotel. By half past ten I accepted the suggestion of being driven twenty-five kilometers up the Bosporus to a place, where they had assured me by telephone that they had space.

  “Do you want a room with bath?” they asked.

  I said I did.

  “We haven’t any,” they told me.

  “Then I want a room without bath.”

  “We have one.” That was that.

  Once we had left the city behind and were driving along the dark road, there was nothing for Abdeslam to do but catechize the two Turks in front. Obviously they did not impress him as being up-to-the-mark Moslems, and he started by testing their knowledge of the Koran. I thought they were replying fairly well, but he was contemptuous. “They don’t know anything,” he declared in Moghrebi. Going into English, he asked them: “How many times one day you pray?”

  They laughed.

  “People can sleep in mosque?” he pursued. The driver was busy navigating the curves in the narrow road, but his companion, who spoke a special brand of English all his own, spoke for him. “Not slep in mosque many people every got hoss,” he explained.

  “You make sins?” continued Abdeslam, intent on unearthing the hidden flaws in the behavior of these foreigners. “Pork, wine?”

  The other shrugged his shoulders. “Moslem people every not eat pork not drink wine but maybe one hundred year ago like that. Now different.”

  “Never different!” shouted Abdeslam sternly. “You not good Moslems here. People not happy. You have bad government. Not like Egypt. Egypt have good government. Egypt one-hundred-percent Moslem.”

  The other was indignant. “Everybody happy,” he protested. “Happy with Egypt too for religion. But the Egypts sometimes fight with Egypts. Arab fight Arabs. Why? I no like Egypt. I in Egypt. I ask my way. They put me say bakhshish. If you ask in Istanbul, you say I must go my way, he can bring you, but he no say give bakhshish. Before, few people up, plenty people down. Now, you make your business, I make my business. You take your money, I take my money. Before, you take my money. You rich with my money. Before, Turkey like Egypt with Farouk.” He stopped to let all this sink in, but Abdeslam was not interested.

  “Egypt very good country,” he retorted, and there was no more conversation until we arrived. At the hotel the driver’s comrade was describing a fascinating new ideology known as democracy. From the beginning of the colloquy I had my notebook out, scribbling his words in the dark as fast as he spoke them. They express the average uneducated Turk’s reaction to the new concept. It was only in 1950 that the first completely democratic elections were held. (Have there been any since?) To Abdeslam, who is a traditionally minded Moslem, the very idea of democracy is meaningless. It is impossible to explain it to him; he will not listen. If an idea is not explicitly formulated in the Koran, it is wrong; it came either directly from Satan or via the Jews, and there is no need to discuss it further.

  This hotel, built at the edge of the lapping Bosporus, is like a huge wooden box. At the base of the balustrade of the grand staircase leading up from the lobby, one on each side, are two life-sized ladies made of lead and painted with white enamel in the hope of making them look like marble. The dining room’s decorations are of a more recent period – the early ‘twenties. There are high murals that look as though the artist had made a study of Boutet de Monvel’s fashion drawings of the era; long-necked, low-waisted females in cloches and thigh-length skirts, presumably picnicking on the shores of the Bosporus.

  At dinner we were the only people eating, since it was nearly midnight. Abdeslam took advantage of this excellent opportunity by delivering an impassioned harangue (partly in a mixture of Moghrebi and Standard Arabic and partly in English), with the result that by the end of the meal we had fourteen waiters and bus boys crowded around the table listening. Then someone thought of fetching the chef. He arrived glistening with sweat and beaming; he had been brought because he spoke more Arabic than the others, which was still not very much. “Old-fashioned Moslem,” explained the headwaiter. Abdeslam immediately put him through the chehade, and he came off with flying colors, reciting it word for word along with Abdeslam: “Achhaddouanlaillahainallah. . . .” The faces of the younger men expressed unmistakable admiration, as well as pleasure at the approval of the esteemed foreigner, but none of them could perform the chef’s feat. Presently the manager of the hotel came in, presumably to see what was going on in the dining room at this late hour. Abdeslam asked for the check, and objected when he saw that it was written with Roman characters. “Arabic!” he demanded. “You Moslem? Then bring check in Arabic.” Apologetically the manager explained that writing in Arabic was “dangerous,” and had been known on occasion to put the man who did it into jail. To this he added, just to make things quite clear, that any man who veiled his wife also went to jail. “A man must not be very Moslem,” he said. But Abdeslam had had enough. “I very very Moslem,” he announced. We left the room.

  The big beds stand high off the floor and haven’t enough covers on them. I have spread my topcoat over me; it is cold and I should like to leave the windows shut, but the mingled stenches coming from the combined shower-lavatory behind a low partition in the corner are so powerful that such a course is out of the question. The winds moving down from the Black Sea will blow over me all night. Sometime after we had gone to bed, following a long silence during which I thought he had fallen asleep, Abdeslam called over to me: “That Mustapha Kemal was carrion! He ruined his country. The son of a dog!” Because I was writing, and also because I am not sure exa
ctly where I stand in this philosophical dispute, I said: “You’re right. Allah imsik bekhir.”

  SIRKECI, SEPTEMBER 29

  WE ARE INSTALLED at Sirkeci on the Istanbul side, in the hotel I had first wanted. Outside the window is a taxi stand. From early morning onward there is the continuous racket of men shouting and horns being blown in a struggle to keep recently arrived taxis from edging in ahead of those that have been waiting in line. The general prohibition of horn-blowing, which is in effect everywhere in the city, doesn’t seem to apply here. The altercations are bitter, and everyone gets involved in them. Taxi drivers in Istanbul are something of a race apart. They are the only social group who systematically try to take advantage of the foreign visitor. In the ships, restaurants, cafés, the prices asked of the newcomer are the same as those paid by the inhabitants. (In the bazaars buying is automatically a matter of wrangling; that is understood.) The cab drivers, however, are more actively acquisitive. For form’s sake, their vehicles are equipped with meters, but their method of using them is such that they might better do without them. You get into a cab whose meter registers seventeen liras thirty kuruş, ask the man to turn it back to zero and start again, and he laughs and does nothing. When you get out it registers eighteen liras eighty kuruş. You give him the difference – one lira and a half. Never! He may want two and a half or three and a half or a good deal more, but he will not settle for what seems equitable according to the meter. Since most tourists pay what they are asked and go on their way, he is not prepared for an argument, and he is likely to let his temper run away with him if you are recalcitrant. There is also the prearranged-price system of taking a cab. Here the driver goes as slowly and by as circuitous a route as possible, calling out the general neighborhood of his destination for all in the streets to hear, so that he can pick up extra fares en route. He will, unless you assert yourself, allow several people to pile in on top of you until there is literally no room left for you to breathe.