Let It Come Down

by Paul Bowles

  The first Dyar knew of his presence was when Thami grudgingly responded to his greeting in Arabic. He glanced up, saw the young man looking down at him in a vaguely predatory fashion, and immediately took a dislike to him.

  “Hello, mister.” The youth grinned, widely enough to show which of his teeth were of gold and which were not.

  “Hello,” replied Dyar apathetically.

  Thami said something in Arabic; he sounded truculent. The youth paid no attention, but seized a chair and drew it up to the table, keeping his eyes fixed on Dyar. “Spickin anglish you like wan bleddy good soulima yah mister?” he said.

  Thami looked around the bar uncomfortably, relaxing somewhat when he saw no one watching the table at the moment.

  “Now,” said Dyar, “just start all over again and take your time. What was that?”

  The youth glared at him, spat. “You no spickin anglish?”

  “Not that kind, buddy.”

  “He wants you to go and see a film,” explained Thami. “But don’t go.”

  “What? At this hour?” cried Dyar. “He’s nuts.”

  “They show them late because they are forbidden by the police,” said Thami, looking as though the whole idea were highly distasteful to him.

  “Why? What kind of movies are they?” Dyar was beginning to be interested.

  “Very bad. You know.” Since Thami had the Arab’s utter incomprehension of the meaning of pornography, he imagined that the police had placed the ban on obscene films because these infringed upon Christian doctrine at certain specific points, in which case any Christian might be expected to show interest, if only to disapprove. He found it not at all surprising that Dyar should want to know about them, although he himself was as totally indifferent as he would have expected Dyar to be had they treated of the question as to whether the pilgrim at Mecca should run around the Kaâba clockwise or counter-clockwise. At the same time, their being prohibited made them disreputable, and he was for having nothing to do with them.

  “They are very expensive and you see nothing,” he said.

  The young man did not understand Thami’s words, but he knew the drift of his argument, and he was displeased. He spat more vehemently and carefully avoided turning his head in his direction.

  “Well, you must see something, at least,” objected Dyar with logic. “Let’s get this straight,” he said to the youth. “How much?” He got no reply. The youth looked confused; he was trying to decide how far above the usual tariff he could safely go. “Ch’hal?” pursued Thami. “How much? The man says how much. Tell him.”

  “Miehtsain.”

  “Achrine duro,” said Thami sternly, as if he were correcting him. They argued a while. Presently Thami announced triumphantly: “You can go for one hundred pesetas.” Then he glanced about the bar and his face darkened. “But it’s no good. I advise you, don’t go. It’s very late. Why don’t you go to bed? I will walk with you to your hotel.”

  Dyar looked at him and laughed lightly. “Listen, my friend. You don’t have to come anywhere. Nobody said you had to come. Don’t worry about me.” Thami studied his face a second to see if he were angry, decided he was not, and said: “Oh, no!” There was no question of leaving the American to wander off into Benider with the pimp. Even though he would have liked more than anything at the moment to go home and sleep, and despite the fact that the last thing he wanted was to be seen in the street at this hour with a foreigner and this particular young man, he felt responsible for Dyar and determined not to let him out of his sight until he had got him to his hotel door. “Oh, no!” he said. “I’ll go with you.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  They rose and the youth followed them out onto the terrace. Dyar’s clothes were still wet and he winced when the wind’s blast struck him. He asked if it were far; Thami conferred with the other and said that it was a two-minute walk. The rain had lessened. They crossed the Zoco, took a few turnings through streets that were like corridors in an old hotel, and stopped in the dimness before a high grilled door. Thami peered uneasily up and down the deserted alley as the youth hammered with the knocker, but there was no one to see them.

  “When you were only startin’ to go to kindergarten——” sang Dyar, not very loud. But Thami gripped his arm, terrified. “No, no!” he whispered. “The police!” The song had echoed in the quiet interior of the street.

  “Jesus Christ! So we’re going to see a dirty movie. So what?” But he did not sing again.

  They waited. Eventually there were faint sounds within. A muffled voice spoke on the other side of the door, and the youth answered. When the grill opened there was nothing at all to see but the blackness inside. Then a figure stepped from behind the door, and at the same time there came an odour which was a combination of eau-de-Cologne, toothpaste and perspiration. The figure turned a flashlight in their faces, ordered the young man with them, in broken Spanish, to fetch a lamp, and shut the grill behind them. For a moment they all stood without moving in complete darkness. Thami coughed nervously; the sharp sound reverberated from wall to wall. When the young man appeared carrying the lamp, the figure in white retired silently into a side room, and the three started up a flight of stairs. At the top, in a doorway, stood a fat man with a greyish complexion; he wore pyjamas and held a hand that was heavy with rings in front of his mouth to cover his yawns. The air up here was stiff with the smell of stale incense; the dead smoke clogged the hall.

  The fat man addressed them in Spanish. Between words he wheezed. When he discovered that Dyar spoke only English he stopped, bowed, and said: “Good night, sir. Come these way, please.” In a small room there were a few straight-backed chairs facing a blank wall where a canvas screen hung crookedly. On each side of the screen was a high potted palm. “Sit, please,” he said, and stood above them breathing heavily. To Dyar he said: “We have one off the men with ladies, one from prists-nuns, and one boys altogether, sir. Very beautiful. All not wearing the clothing. You love, sir. You can looking all three these with one combination price, yes. Sir wishing three, sir?”

  “No. Let’s see the nuns.”

  “Yes, sir. Spanish gentleman liking nuns. Taking always the nuns. Very beautiful. Excuse.”

  He went out, and presently was heard talking in an adjoining room. Dyar lit a cigarette; Thami yawned widely. “You ought to have gone to bed,” said Dyar.

  “Oh, no! I will go with you to your hotel.”

  Dyar exploded. “Goddam it, I’m not going to my hotel! Can’t you get that through your head? It’s not so hard to understand. When I get through here I’ll go somewhere else, have another drink, maybe a little fun, I don’t know. I don’t know what I’ll be doing. But I won’t be going to the hotel. See?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Thami calmly.

  They were quiet for a moment, before Dyar pursued in a conciliatory tone: “You see, I’ve been on a ship for a week. I’m not sleepy. But you’re sleepy. Why don’t you go on home and call it a night?”

  Thami was resolute. “Oh, no! I can’t do that. It would be very bad. I will take you to your hotel. Whenever you go.” He sat as low as the chair permitted and closed his eyes, letting his head fall slowly forward. The projector and film were brought and installed by another man in pyjamas, equally fat but with a full, old-fashioned moustache. By the time the whirring of the machine had started and the screen was lighted up, Thami’s immobility and silence had passed over into the impetuously regular breathing of the sleeper.

  IV

  There had been a minor volcanic eruption in the Canaries. For several days the Spanish had been talking about it; the event had been given great prominence in the newspaper España, and many of those who had relatives there had been receiving reassuring telegrams. On the disturbance everyone blamed the sultry weather, the breathless air and the greyish yellow light which had hung above the city for the past two days.

  Eunice Goode had her own maid whom she paid by the day—a slovenly Spanish girl who came in at
noon and did extra work the hotel servants could not be expected to do, such as keeping her clothes pressed and in order, running errands, and cleaning the bathroom daily. The girl had been full of news of the volcano that morning and had chattered on about it, much to Eunice’s annoyance, for she had decided she was in a working mood. “Silencio!” she had finally cried; she had a thin, high voice which was quite incongruous with her robust appearance. The girl stared at her and then giggled. “I’m working,” Eunice explained, looking as preoccupied as she could. The girl giggled again. “Anyway,” she went on, “this bad weather is simply the little winter arriving.” “They say it’s the volcano,” the girl insisted. There was the little winter first, thus termed only because it was shorter, and then the big winter, the long rainy season which comes two months or so afterward. They both made dim days, wet feet and boredom; those who could escaped southward, but Eunice disliked movement of any kind. Now that she was in contact with what she called the inner reality, she scarcely minded whether the sun shone or not.

  The girl was in the bathroom laundering some underthings; she sang shrilly as she sloshed them about in the washbasin. “Jesus!” moaned Eunice after a moment. “Conchita,” she called. “Mande,” said the girl. “I want you to go and buy a lot of flowers in the market. Immediately.” She gave her a hundred pesetas and sent her out in order to have solitude for a half-hour. She did not go out herself much these days; she spent most of her time lying in her bed. It was wide and the room was spacious. From her fortress of pillows she could see the activity of the small boats in the inner port, and she found it just enough of a diversion to follow with her eyes when she looked up from her writing. She began her day with gin, continuing with it until she went to sleep at night. When she had first come to Tangier she had drunk less and gone out more. Daytimes she had sunbathed on her balcony, evenings she had gone from bar to bar, mixing her drinks and having eventually to be accompanied to the entrance of her hotel by some disreputable individual who usually tried to take whatever small amount of money was left in the handbag she wore slung over her shoulder. But she never went out carrying more than she minded losing. The sunbathing had been stopped by the hotel management, because one day a Spanish lady had looked (with some difficulty) over the concrete partition that separated her balcony from the adjoining one, and had seen her massive pink body stretched out in a deckchair with nothing to cover it. There had been an unpleasant scene with the manager, who would have put her out if she had not been the most important single source of revenue for the hotel: she had all her meals served in bed and her door was always unlocked so the waiters could get in with drinks and bowls of ice. “It’s just as well,” she said to herself. “Sun is anti-thought. Lawrence was right.” And now she found that lying in bed she drank more evenly; when night came she no longer had the urge to rush through the streets, to try to be everywhere at once for fear she would miss what was going to happen. The reason for this of course was that by evening she was too drunk to move very much, but it was a pleasant drunkenness, and it did not stop her from filling the pages of her notebooks with words—sometimes even with ideas.

  Volcanoes angered her. The talk about this one put her in mind of a scene from her own childhood. She had been on a boat with her parents, going from Alexandria to Genoa. Early one morning her father had knocked on the door of the cabin where she and her mother slept, calling excitedly for them to go immediately on deck. More asleep than awake they arrived there to find him pointing wildly at Stromboli. The mountain was vomiting flames and lava poured down its flanks, already crimson with the rising sun. Her mother had stared an instant, and then in a voice made hoarse by fury she had cried out one word: “Dis—gusting!” turned on her heel and taken Eunice below. In retrospect now, although she still could see her father’s crest-fallen face, she shared her mother’s indignation.

  She lay back, closed her eyes, and thought a bit. Presently she opened them and wrote: “There is something in the silly human mind that responds beautifully to the idea of rarity—especially rarity of conditions capable of producing a given phenomenon. The less likely a thing is to happen, the more wonderful it seems when it does, no matter how useless or even harmful it may be. The fact of its having happened despite the odds makes it a precious event. It had no right to occur, yet it did, and one can only blindly admire the chain of circumstances that caused the impossible to come to pass.”

  On reading over the paragraph she noted with a certain satisfaction that although it had been meant with reference to the volcano, it also had a distinct bearing upon her personal life at that moment. She was still a little awed by what seemed to her the incredible sequence of coincidences which had made it suddenly possible for her to be happy. A strange thing had happened to her about a fortnight back. She had awakened one bright morning and made a decision to take daily exercise of some sort. (She was constantly making decisions of one sort or another, each of which she was confident was going to revolutionize her life.) The exercise would be mentally stimulating and would help her to reduce. Accordingly she had donned an old pair of slacks which were too small around the waist to be fastened, and set out for the top of the Casbah. She went through the big gate and, using her cane, climbed down the steep path to the long dirty beach below where only Arabs bathed.

  From there she had followed the coastline to the west, along the foot of the Casbah’s lower buildings, past the stretch where all the sewers emptied and the stink was like a solid object in the air, to a further rocky beach which was more or less deserted. And here an old Arab fisherman had stopped her, holding forth a small piece of paper, and asked her with great seriousness in his halting Spanish to read him what was written on it.

  It said: “Will the finder kindly communicate with C. J. Burnett, Esq., 52 Ashurst Road, North Finchley, London, England. April 12, 1949.” She translated the request, indicating the address, and could not restrain herself from asking him where he had got the paper.

  “Bottle in water,” he replied, pointing to the small waves that broke near their feet. Then he asked her what he should do. “Write the man, if you like,” she said, about to go on.

  Yes, mused the old man, stroking his beard, he must write him, of course. But how, since he couldn’t write? “A friend,” she said. He looked at her searchingly and in a hesitant voice asked her if she would do it. She laughed. “I’m going for a walk,” she said, pointing up the beach away from the town. “Perhaps when I come back.” And she started walking again, leaving the old man standing there, holding his bit of paper, staring after her.

  She had forgotten the incident by the time she arrived back at the same spot, but there was the fisherman sitting on a rock in his rags, looking anxiously toward her as she approached. “Now you write it?” he said. “But I have no paper,” she objected. This was the beginning of a long episode in which he followed her at a distance of a few paces, all the way back along the shore, up the side hill and through the Casbah from one bacal to another in quest of an envelope and a sheet of paper.

  When they had finally found a shopkeeper able to provide them with the two objects, she tried to pay for them, but the old man proudly laid his own coins on the counter and handed hers back to her. By then she thought the whole incident rather fun; it would make an amusing story to tell her friends. But she also felt in need of an immediate drink, and so she refused his invitation to go into a neighbouring Arab café for tea, explaining that she must sit in a European café in order to write the letter for him properly. “Do you know one near here?” she asked him; she hoped they would not need to resort to one of the cafés in the Zoco Chico, to reach which they would have to go down steep streets and innumerable steps. He led her along several extremely narrow alleys, where the shade was a blessing after the midday sun, to a small dingy place called Bar Lucifer. An extremely fat woman sat behind the counter reading a French movie magazine. Eunice ordered a gin and the old man had a gaseosa. She wrote the letter quickly, in the first person, sayin
g she had found the bottle off Ras el Ihud, near Tangier, and was writing as requested, signing herself Abdelkader ben Saïd ben Mokhtar and giving his address. The fisherman thanked her profusely and went off to post the letter, first having insisted on paying for his gaseosa; she, however, stayed on and had several more gins.

  The fat woman began to take an interest in her. Apparently she was not used to having women come into the bar, and this large foreigner who wore trousers and drank like a man aroused her curiosity. In French she asked Eunice a few questions about herself. Not being of a confiding nature, Eunice answered by improvising falsehoods, as she always did in similar circumstances. Then she countered with her own queries. The woman was only too eager to reply: she was Greek, her name was Madame Papaconstante, she had been eleven years in Tangier, the bar was a recent acquisition and had a few rooms in the back which were at the disposal of clients who required them. Presently Eunice thanked her and paid, promising to return that evening. She considered the place a discovery, because she was sure none of her friends knew about it.

  At night the Bar Lucifer was quite a different matter. There were two bright gasoline lamps burning, so that the posters announcing bulls in San Roque and Melilla were visible, the little radio was going, and three Spaniards in overalls sat at the bar drinking beer. Madame Papaconstante, heavily made up and wearing an orange chiffon dress, walked to welcome her, her gold teeth glowing as she smiled. Behind the bar stood two Spanish girls with cheap permanent waves. Pretending to be following the men’s conversation, they simpered when the men laughed.