by Paul Bowles
The sun had gone behind the high buildings on the hill, but it still shone on the freighters at anchor in the harbour; all their white paint was turning faintly orange in its light. Beyond them on its cliff stood the whitewashed tower of the lighthouse at Malabata.
At the hotel he had Thami wait in the cab. With his parcel he jumped out and went into the lobby. There was no sign of Wilcox. That was all right, but the more dangerous moment would be when he came back downstairs. Even then he could still say he had thought of locking it in one of his valises, then he had decided to give it to the management to put into the hotel safe. The boy gave him his key and a telephone message, which he put into his pocket without reading. He ran upstairs. The air in his room was dead, colder by several degrees than the air outdoors. He laid his briefcase on the bed, quickly put into it his razor, shaving cream, blades, toothbrush, toothpaste, comb and four handkerchiefs. Then he unwrapped the box and laid the bundles of bills in among the toilet articles. There was still room for a pair of shorts. The door was locked; if Wilcox rapped on it at this moment he would have time to take out the money and throw the briefcase into the closet. He felt in his pocket to see if his passport, wallet and express cheques were all there. He stuffed a woollen scarf and a pair of gloves into the pocket of his overcoat and slung it over his arm, closed the briefcase, spun its Sesamee lock to triple zero, and looked once more around the room. Then, with a caution which he felt was absurd even as he used it, he unlocked the door and opened it. The corridor was empty. Through the window at the end he saw the distant dunes behind the beach; their shadows reached out along the flat sand toward the harbour. A radio upstairs was playing Flamenco music, but there was no sound in the halls or stairway.
“Let’s go,” he whispered, and he went quietly downstairs. Wilcox was not in the lobby. The taxi outside had not moved. He handed his key to the boy and walked out. “Goodbye, Playa,” he said under his breath.
“Now give that address to the driver.”
“The Jilali?” Thami was mystified, but knowing something was in the air he had every intention of playing along until he satisfied his curiosity, both as to what Dyar was doing and as to whether there might be some money in it for him. He leaned forward and began to give the man complicated instructions.
“Come on! Let’s get started!” Dyar cried, glancing anxiously down the Avenida de España. “You can do that on the way.”
The cab backed and turned up the road that went over the hill. Now the setting sun shone directly into their faces; Dyar put on a pair of dark glasses, turned to Thami. “What did you pay for your boat?”
Thami gulped and floundered, saying: “Who, me?” which is what any Arab would have said under similar circumstances; then, remembering that such an answer was calculated to infuriate any American, he quickly told him the only price he could think of, which was the true one.
“How’s this?” said Dyar. “You rent the boat to me tonight for twenty-five hundred pesetas, and I’ll give you another twenty-five hundred to come along and see that I get where I want to go. You’ll have your boat and your five thousand.”
The emotions engendered in Thami by the unfamiliar situation caused him further to abandon his European habits of thought. Good luck, like bad luck, comes directly from Allah to the recipient; the intermediary is of little importance save as a lever to help assure the extraction of the maximum blessing. “I have no money for gasolina,” objected Thami.
By the time they got to the crowded main street of the suburb that was Dradeb, they had reached an agreement on all the main points of finance; the Jilali remained an uncertain factor, but Thami was optimistic. “I’ll tell him seven hundred fifty and then we can go up to one thousand if we have to,” he said, figuring on a fifty per cent split (which might not be so easy to get, he reflected, considering that with his five thousand pesetas the Jilali was not immediately in need of money).
The cab drew up to the kerb and stopped in front of a grocery store. Thami leapt out, disappeared down one of the twilit alleys, was back to make inquiries at the shop, and hurried ahead up the main street. The driver got out and walked in the other direction.
Left alone in the taxi, oblivious of the inquisitive stares of passersby, Dyar relaxed voluptuously, savouring the first small delights of triumph. It was already a very pleasant thing to have Thami rushing around out there, intent on helping him.
Then he remembered the message the boy at the hotel had given him. He took it out of his pocket and snapped on the overhead light. “Llame Vd. al 28–01”, it said, and he knew that was Daisy de Valverde’s number. The briefcase in his hand, he got out and stepped into the grocery store. By now it was fairly dark in the street, and there was only one candle in here to add to the failing blue daylight that still came through the door. A placid Soussi sat behind the counter, his eyes almost closed. Dyar saw the telephone on a crate behind the broken Coca-Cola cooler. It was a dial phone: he was thankful for that. He had to strike a match to see the numbers.
Surprisingly, Daisy herself answered. “You villain,” she said. “You just got my message? I called hours ago. Can you come to dinner? All very informal, all very private, I might even add. Luis is in Casa. I’m in bed. Not really ill. Only sciatica. Just you and I, and I should love it if you could come. About seven? So we can talk? It’ll be wonderful to see you, darling.”
He laid the money for the call on the counter; the Soussi nodded his head once. When he got to the taxi, the driver was back at the wheel, opening a pack of cigarettes. He got in, slammed the door, and sat waiting. It seemed a perfect solution to the problem of dinner; it would keep him completely out of the streets, out of the town.
Presently he saw Thami coming along toward the cab. He had someone with him. He came up, opened the door and leaned in. “I found him,” he announced, pleased with the financial arrangements he had just completed, on the way from the Jilali’s house.
“Fine. Now we go to your house,” said Dyar. “Stick him in front and let’s go.”
The Jilali’s name was Zaki; he was a man of thirty-five (which meant that he looked fifty), unkempt in his attire and very much in need of a shave, so that to Dyar his appearance suggested an extra in a pirate film.
“Does he understand any English?” he asked Thami.
“That man? Ha! He doesn’t even understand Spanish!” Thami sounded triumphant. “Verdad, amigo?” he called to the one in front.
“Chnou?” said the Jilali, not turning around.
The street where Thami lived became increasingly bumpy and full of puddles whose depth it was impossible to judge: the driver suddenly stopped the car and announced that he would proceed no further. There ensued an argument which promised to be lengthy. Dyar got out and surveyed the street with distaste. The houses were ramshackle, some with second stories still in construction, and their front doors gave directly on to the muddy lane, no room having been left for a future laying of sidewalks. Impatiently he called to Thami. “Have him wait here, then. Hurry up!” The driver, however, after locking the car, insisted on accompanying them. “He says we owe him sixty-five pesetas already,” confided Thami. Dyar grunted.
Thami entered first, to get his wife out of the way, while the others waited outside in the dark.
“You stay here,” Dyar said to the driver, who appeared satisfied once he had seen which house they were going to enter.
Soon Thami came to the door and motioned them in, leading the way through the unlit patio into a narrow room where a radio was playing. The mattress along the wall was covered with cheap green and yellow brocade; above it hung a group of large gilt-framed photographs of men wearing gandouras and fezzes. Three alarm clocks, all going, sat atop a hanging cupboard at the end of the room, but each one showed a different hour. Ranging along a lower shelf beneath them was a succession of dusty but unused paper cups which had been placed with care so as to alternate with as many small red figurines of plaster, representing Santa Claus; below and to both sides, th
e wall was papered with several dozen coloured brochures, all identical, each bearing the photograph of an enormous toothbrush with a brilliant blue plastic handle. DENTOLINE, LA BROSSE A DENTS PAR EXCELLENCE, they said, over and over. The radio on the floor in the corner was turned up to its full volume; Om Kalsoum sang a tortured lament, and behind her voice an orchestra sputtered and wailed.
“Sit down!” shouted Thami to Dyar. He knelt and reduced the force of the music a little. As Dyar stepped over to the mattress, the electric light bulb which swung at the end of a long cord from the centre of the ceiling struck him on the forehead. “Sorry,” he said, as the light waved crazily back and forth. The Jilali had removed his shoes at the door and was already seated at one end of the mattress, his legs tucked under him, swaying a bit from side to side with the music.
Dyar called across to Thami: “Hey! Cut off the funeral! Would you mind? We’ve got a lot to talk about, and not much time.”
Out of the silence that followed came the sound of the baby screaming in the next room. Dyar began to talk.
XVII
What did it mean, reflected Daisy, to be what your friends called a forceful woman? Although they intended to mean it as such, they did not manage to make it a flattering epithet; she knew that. It was adverse criticism. If you said a woman was forceful, you meant that she got what she wanted in too direct a manner, that she was not enough of a woman, that she was unsubtle, pushing. It was almost as much of an insult as to say that a man had a weak character. Yet her closest friends were in the habit of using the word openly to describe her; “even to my face,” she thought, with mingled resentment and satisfaction. It was as if, in accepting the contemporary fallacy that women should have the same aims and capacities as men, they assumed that any quality which was a virtue in a man was equally desirable in a woman. But when she heard the word “forceful” being used in connection with herself, even though she knew it was perfectly true and not intended as derogation, she immediately felt like some rather ungraceful predatory animal, and the sensation did not please her. There were very concrete disadvantages attached to being classified that way: in any situation where it would be natural to expect an expression of concern for her well-being on the part of the males in the group it was always the other women about whom they fretted. The general opinion, often uttered aloud, was that Daisy could take care of herself. And how many other husbands went off and left their wives for five or six days, alone in the house with the servants? It was not that she minded being alone; on the contrary, it was rather a rest for her, since she never entertained when Luis was away. But the fact that he took it so much as a matter of course that she would not mind, for some reason this nettled her, although she could not have found a logical explanation for her annoyance. “I suppose one can’t have one’s cake and eat it too,” she would say to herself at least once during each of his absences. If you had spent your childhood astride a horse, riding with your four brothers around the fifty thousand acres of an estancia, it was natural that you should become the sort of woman she had become, and you could hardly expect men to feel protective toward you. As a matter of fact, it was often quite the reverse: she sometimes found her male friends looking to her for moral support, and she always gave it unhesitatingly, even though she was aware as she did so that at each moment she was moving further from the privileged position modern woman is expected to occupy vis-à-vis her male acquaintances.
The majority of Daisy’s friends were men; men liked her and she prided herself on knowing how to handle them. Yet her first two husbands had died, the one leaving her with a child and the other with a considerable fortune. The little girl she had more or less abandoned to the care of her father’s family in Buenos Aires; the fortune, however, she had kept. At loose ends in London, and for want of anything better to do, she had decided to set out in leisurely fashion around the world. The trip took three years; she ended up in the south of France during the autumn of 1938, where she took a small house at Saint Paul du Var, intensely conscious of her solitude and with the feeling that somehow her life had not yet begun.
It was at the Palm Beach in Cannes that she had first met Luis, a thin and dramatically dark Spaniard who wore an opera cape and handled it as arrogantly as a matador his muleta, who was rude to everyone without being actually offensive, who used incredibly obscene language and yet managed to remain very much a gentleman. He was the owner of several vast estates in Andalucía which he had very little hope of recovering, even assuming that Franco were able to put an end to the Republican resistance. “They are all eediot!” he would bellow to the entire casino. “All thee Spaniard can eat sheet!” Little by little Daisy found herself thinking with admiration of this strange man who bragged that he had never read a book and was unable to write more than his own signature. He managed horses as well as the most seasoned gaucho, was as good a marksman as she, and had not a trace of sentimentality or condescension in his character. He was as dry, hard and impersonal as a rock, and she once told him that he reminded her of certain Andalucian landscapes. She was scarcely prepared, however, for his reaction, which came immediately and with astonishing force. Turning to her with the violence of one who has just been insulted, he shouted: “That is a declaration of love!” seized her in his arms, and began to make love to her with such brutality that she cried out and struck him in the face. The incident had taken place in the bar of the Carlton, in front of several people, and after a few moments of shame and fury in the ladies’ room, to which she had retired when he had released her, she had come out and apologized to him for her behaviour, expecting him, naturally enough, to do likewise. But he had laughed, paid the barman, and walked out.
Afterwards, each time they met (since meetings were unavoidable in Cannes) he inquired if she still admired the Andalucian landscape as much as ever. It would have been a violation of her code to do anything but admit that she did. Her answers gave him immense satisfaction, “Aaah!” he would cry delightedly. “Ya ves?” for they had fallen into the habit of speaking Spanish together. He had a small villa at Le Cannet, packed with furniture and paintings he had succeeded in getting out of Spain, and she used to drive down sometimes in the late afternoon and visit him. Since it was well known that he sold a picture from time to time in order to go on living, she did not hesitate, when one day she saw a Goya she particularly admired, to ask him its price. The Marqués de Valverde went into a rare fury. “Andalucía is not for sale!” he yelled. “Don’t be absurd,” said Daisy. “I’ll give you a good price for it. You need the money.” But her host continued to rail, saying that he would rather put his foot through the Goya than let her have it, whatever sum she might be prepared to give him for it. Understanding that all this vehemence, although perfectly sincere, was merely a part of the abnormally developed pride which governs the behaviour of the Spanish peasant or aristocrat, Daisy made an audacious suggestion. “I like that picture,” she said, “and if you won’t sell it to me you must give it to me.” The Marqués had smiled with delight. “Anything in my house is yours for the asking,” he had replied. Their friendship had begun at that moment. The man was magnificent, she decided, and it was not surprising that from being inseparable friends they soon turned to being passionate lovers. Daisy was slightly over thirty, her face radiant with a healthy, strident kind of beauty that perfectly suited her statuesque figure. It was inevitable that a man like Luis should fall in love with her, that having done so he should perceive much more in her character than he had suspected, and thus determine to marry her, in order to own her completely. It was also inevitable that once having added her to his list of possessions he should cease to be in love with her, but Daisy knew this beforehand and did not care, because she also knew that she would never cease to admire him, whatever he might do, and she was sure she would be able to keep him, which for her, an eminently practical woman, was after all the main consideration.
And so to Daisy there was nothing surprising about Luis’s first infidelities. After a
very small wedding in the church at Saint Paul du Var they had closed their respective houses and shipped Luis’s more valuable belongings to Rio, on the advice of Daisy’s banker. “Jewish bankers always know when there’s going to be a war,” said Daisy. “You can trust them implicitly.” They went off to Brazil, the war came, and they stayed there until it was over. Luis had begun with a nightclub dancer, had continued with chambermaids, and eventually had moved on to one of Daisy’s own friends, a certain Senhora da Cunha, and Daisy never had said a word to show that she knew. Luis was perceptive enough to realize that she could not help being aware of his indiscretions, but whether she minded or not, he was bound to continue them, and they both knew this, so that the matter remained forever unmentioned, as if by mutual agreement. For a while, when they had first come to Tangier at the end of the war, there had been no one. Daisy knew this was merely a quiet interval; soon enough it would end. When his business trips to Casablanca had begun, she understood. Even now she had no idea who it was, nor, she kept telling herself, did she care too much. Still, somehow she always found herself making an effort to find out who the woman was, and if possible to meet her, because she felt each time that the knowledge gave her the key to yet another chamber of Luis’s mysterious personality. The more she could learn about his mistresses, the more she would know about him. Having been brought up in a world of Latins, Daisy believed that promiscuity was as proper for men as it was improper for women. She would have thought it shocking for her even to consider the idea of having a lover. For a decent woman there was no possibility of anyone but her husband, and since she was so firmly decided on this score, she allowed herself to follow a pattern of behaviour which to women of less resolute character often seemed highly questionable. Her reputation among the feminine members of the English colony was not all that it might have been, precisely because she knew where she stood and could allow herself liberties that would have proven disastrous in the case of most of the others. Knowing herself, she had respect for herself; knowing the others, she had none for them, and thus it was of little importance to her what they whispered about her. What, she wondered, could they think but the very worst, if they heard that she had invited this young American to the Villa Hesperides during Luis’s absence? And now as she lay in her bed and methodically searched to unearth her motives, she felt a tiny chill of apprehension. Was she completely safe from herself with regard to this young man? He was harmless enough. (She smiled as she remembered his ingenuousness, his apparent innocence of the world, and the impression she had of his utter helplessness in the face of it.) But even the most innocuous element by itself could prove to be dangerous in its meeting with a different element. She thought about it, and felt small doubts rising. “Or am I really hoping that something will happen, and is this just my way of punishing myself?” It was hard to say. She reached for the wall button that lay on the table among a welter of perfume bottles and medicines, and pushed it. A maid knocked at the door. “Have Hugo come up,” she told her.