Let It Come Down

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Let It Come Down Page 24

by Paul Bowles


  “… Then through the trees you see that the path leads up a hill. ‘But there is no hill!’ you exclaim, probably aloud by this time, you’re so excited and muddled. So you hurry on, climb the hill, which is rather high, and when you get to the top you see the countryside, perfectly familiar on all sides. You can identify every detail. And there’s your house below, just where it should be. Nothing is wrong. It’s not a dream and you’ve not gone mad. If you hadn’t seen the house, of course, you’d know you’d gone mad. But it’s there. Everything is all right.” She sighed deeply, as if in relief. “It’s just upsetting to find that grove of trees and that strange hill in the middle of your land. Because it can’t be there, and yet it is. You’re forced to accept it. But it’s how you think once you’ve accepted it that makes what I call the forbidden way of thought. Forbidden, of course, by your own mind, until the moment you accept the fact of the hill. That’s majoun for you. You find absolutely new places inside yourself, places you feel simply couldn’t be a part of you, and yet there they are. Does what I said mean anything at all to you, or have I been ranting like a maniac?”

  “Oh, no. Not at all.” All his effort was going to giving a sincere ring to the words. An intense silence followed, which he felt he was also making, as he had uttered the words, only it went on for an endless length of time, like telegraph wires across miles of waste land. A pole, a pole, a pole, a pole, the wires strung between, the flat horizon lying beyond the eyes’ reach. Then someone said: “Not at all” again, and it was he who had said it.

  “What the hell is this?” he asked himself in a sudden rage. He had promised himself not to get drunk; it was the most important thing to remember while he was at the Villa Hesperides this evening. “I’m not drunk,” he thought triumphantly, and he found himself on his feet, stretching. “It’s stuffy in here,” he remarked, wondering if she would think he was being rude.

  She laughed. “Come, now, darling. Admit you’re feeling the majoun at last.”

  “Why? Because I say it’s stuffy? Nope. I’m damned if I feel anything.” He was not being obstinate; already he had forgotten the little side-trip his mind had made a moment ago. Now that he was standing up the air in the room did not seem close. He walked over to a window, pulled the heavy curtain aside, and peered out into the dark.

  “You don’t mind being alone here at night?” he said.

  “Sometimes,” she answered vaguely, wondering if his question would be followed by others. “Stop thinking like that,” she told herself with annoyance.

  He still stood by the window. “You’re pretty high up here.”

  “About six hundred feet.”

  “Have you ever been down to the bottom?”

  “Over those rocks? God, no! Do you think I’m a chamois?”

  He began to walk around the room slowly, his hands behind him, stepping from one zebra skin to the next as if they were rocks in a stream. There was no doubt that he felt strange, but it was not any way he had expected to feel, and so he laid it to his own perturbation. The evening was going to be agonizingly long. “I’d like to be saying good night right now,” he thought. Everything he took the trouble to look at carefully seemed to be bristling with an intense but undecipherable meaning: Daisy’s face with its halo of white pillows, the light pouring over the array of bottles on the table, the glistening black floor and the irregular black and white stripes on the skins at his feet, the darker and more distant parts of the room by the windows where the motionless curtains almost touched the floor. Each thing was uttering a wordless but vital message which was a key, a symbol, but which there was no hope of seizing or understanding. And inside himself, now that he became conscious of it, in his chest more than anywhere else, there was a tremendous trembling pressure, as though he were about to explode. He breathed in various ways to see if he could change it, and then he realized that his heart was beating too fast. “Ah, hell,” he said aloud, because he was suddenly frightened.

  “Come and sit down, darling. What’s the matter with you? You’re as restless as a cat. Are you hungry? Or has the majoun got you?”

  “No,” he said shortly. “Nothing’s got me.” He thought that sounded absurd. “If I go and sit down,” he thought, “I’ll get up again, and she’ll know something’s the matter.” He felt he must make every effort to prevent Daisy from knowing what was going on inside him. The objects in the room, its walls and furniture, the air around his head, the idea that he was in the room, that he was going to eat dinner, that the cliffs and the sea were below, all these things were playing a huge, inaudible music that was rising each second toward a climax which he knew would be unbearable when it was reached. “It’s going to get worse.”

  He swallowed with difficulty. “Something’s got to happen in a minute. Something’s got to happen.” He reached the chair and stood behind it, his hands on the back. Daisy looked at him distraughtly. She was thinking: “Why have I never dared tell Luis about majoun?” She knew he would disapprove, if only because it was a native concoction. But that was not why she had kept silent. She had never told anyone about it; the taking of it was a supremely private ritual. The experience was such a personal one that she had never wanted to share it with another. And here she was, undergoing it with someone she scarcely knew. All at once she wanted to tell him, so that he might know he was the first to be invited into this inner chamber of her life. She took a deep breath, and instead, said petulantly: “For God’s sake, sit down. You look like a Calvinist rector telling his flock about Hell.”

  He laughed and sat in the chair. Under the table in the shadow he saw his briefcase. The tremulous feeling inside him suddenly expressed a great elation; it was still the same sensation, but it had changed colour. The relief made him laugh again.

  “Really!” exclaimed Daisy. “You may as well admit you’re feeling the majoun. Because I know damned well you are. At least admit it to yourself. You’ll have more fun with it. You’ve been fighting it for the past ten minutes. That’s not the way to treat it. Just sit back and let it take its course. It’s in you, and you can’t get rid of it, so you may as well enjoy it.”

  “How about you?” He would not admit it.

  “I told you long ago I was feeling it. At the moment I’m about to take off on a non-stop flight to Arcturus.”

  “You are, are you?” His voice was unfriendly. “Personally, I think the stuff is a fake. I’m not saying it has no effect at all, but I don’t call feeling jumpy and having my heart beat twice too fast, I don’t call that a kick, myself.”

  She laughed commiseratingly. “You should have drunk your whisky, darling. You’d have felt more at home with it. Mais enfin ….” She sat up and rang the bell. “I expect the kitchen is in a turmoil because we’re taking so long with our tea.”

  XIX

  All during the dinner Daisy talked unceasingly; often Dyar found himself replying in monosyllables, not because he was uninterested, although occasionally he had very little idea what she was saying, but because half the time he was off somewhere else in a world of his own. He did not know what he was thinking about, but his brain was swarming with beginnings of thoughts fastened on to beginnings of other thoughts. To receive so many took all his attention; even had they not been incommunicable he would have had no desire to impart them to Daisy. It was as if his mind withdrew to a remote, dark corner of his being. Then it would come out into the light again, and he would find himself actually believing that he sat having dinner at a small table in a quiet room while a woman lay in bed nearby eating the same food from a tray.

  “You’re awfully untalkative,” Daisy said presently. “I’d never have given the majoun to you if I’d known it was going to make a statue out of you.”

  Her words made him uncomfortable. “Oh,” he said. And what seemed to him a long time later: “I’m all right.”

  “Yes, I daresay you are. But you make a goddam unsatisfactory dinner partner.”

  Now he became fully present, began to stammer apo
logies more florid than the occasion warranted.

  “I couldn’t feel worse,” he said finally, “if I’d kicked you. I don’t know what was the matter with me. It must be that stuff that did something crazy to me.”

  “It’s all my fault. Don’t give it another thought, poor darling.”

  He would not have it that way. “No, no, no,” he said. “There’s no excuse.” And in an access of contrition he rose and sat down heavily on the bed beside her. The tray tipped perilously.

  “Be careful, darling!” she exclaimed. “I shall have peas and wine all over me in another moment.” But he had already seized her hand and was covering it with quick kisses. He was floating in the air, impelled by a hot, dry wind which enveloped him, voluptuously caressed him. For the space of two long breaths she was silent, and he heard his own breathing, and confused it with the sound of the wind that was blowing him along, above the vast, bare, sunlit valley. The skin of her arm was smooth, the flesh was soft. He pulled her further toward him, over the balancing tray.

  “Be careful!” she cried again in alarm, as the tray tilted in his direction. “No, no!”

  The wine glass went over first; the icy stain on his thigh made him jump convulsively. Then, very slowly it seemed to him, plates slid and tumbled toward him as the tray overturned and buried the lower part of his body in a confusion of china, glassware and warm food. “Oh!” she cried. But he held her more tightly with one arm, sweeping the tray and some of the dishes onto the floor with the other. And he scrambled up to be completely near her, so that there were only a few thicknesses of wet cloth, a fork and a spoon or two between them, and presently, after a short struggle with pieces of clinging clothing, nothing but a few creamed mushrooms.

  “For God’s sake, no! Not like this!” she was on the point of shouting, but as if she sensed how tenuous was the impulse that moved him, she thought: “At this very moment you’re hoping desperately that nothing will happen to stop this. So you did want it to happen. Why wouldn’t you admit it? Why can’t you be frank? You wanted it; let it happen, even this way. Even this way.” And so she said nothing, reaching out and turning off the light beside the bed. A word, she told herself, could have broken the thread by which he hung suspended from the sky; he would have fallen with a crash into the room, a furiously embarrassed young man with no excuse for his behaviour, no escape from his predicament, no balm for his injured pride. “He’s very sweet. And a little mad. So compact. Not at all like Luis. But could I really love any man I don’t respect? I don’t respect him at all. How can one respect an impersonal thing? He’s scarcely human. He’s not conscious of me as me. As another natural force, perhaps, yes. But that’s not enough. I could never love him. But he’s sweet. God knows, he’s sweet.”

  The soft endless earth spread out beneath him, glowing with sunlight, untouched by time, uninhabited, belonging wholly to him. How far below it lay he could not have said, gliding soundlessly through the pure luminous air that admitted no possibility of distance or dimension. Yet he could touch its smooth resilient contours, smell its odour of sun, and even taste the salt left in its pores by the sea in some unremembered age. And this flight—he had always known it was to be made, and that he would make it. This was a corner of existence he had known was there, but until now had not been able to reach; at present, having discovered it, he also knew he would be able to find his way back another time. Something was being completed; there would be less room for fear. The thought filled him with an ineffable happiness. “Ah, God,” he murmured aloud, not knowing that he did so.

  Beyond the windows the rising wind blew through the cypresses, bringing with it occasionally the deeper sound of the sea below. Regularly the drawn white curtains on one side of the room glowed white as the lighthouse’s beam flashed across it. Daisy coughed.

  “You’re a slut,” she said to herself. “How could you ever have allowed this to happen? But it’s ghastly! The door’s not locked. One of the servants may knock at any minute. Just collect yourself and do something. Do something!”

  She coughed again.

  “Darling, this is dreadful,” she said softly, smiling in the dark, trying to keep her voice free of reproach. He did not answer; he might have been dead. “Darling,” she said again hesitantly. Still he gave no sign of having heard her. For a moment she drifted back into her thoughts. If one could only let go, even for a few seconds, if only one could cease caring about everything, but really everything, what a wonderful thing it would be. But that would probably be death. Life means caring, is one long struggle to keep from going to pieces. If you let yourself have a really good time, your health goes to pieces, and if your health goes, your looks go. The awful part is that in the end, no matter what you have done, no matter how careful you may have been, everything falls apart, anyway. The disintegration merely comes sooner, or later, depending on you. Going to pieces is inevitable, and you haven’t even any pieces to show when you’re finished. “Why should that be a depressing thought?” she wondered. “It’s the most obvious and fundamental one there is. Man muss nur sterben. But that means something quite different. That means we are supposed to have free will ….”

  Far in the distance, out over the Atlantic, she heard the faint hum of a plane as the dark mountain and the Villa Hesperides were included briefly within the radius of its sound. Northward to Lisbon, southward to Casablanca. In another hour Luis might be hearing that same motor as it circled above the airport.

  “Darling, please!” She struggled a little to free herself from his embrace. Since he still held her, she squirmed violently and managed to sit up, bathed in sweat, wine and grease. The air of the room suddenly seemed bitter cold. She ran her hand tentatively over her stomach and drew it back, disgusted. Quickly she jumped out of bed, locked the door into the corridor, drew her peignoir around her, and disappeared into the bathroom without turning on any light.

  She stayed in the shower rather longer than was necessary, hoping that by the time she came out he would have got up, dressed, and perhaps cleared away some of the mess around the bed. Then she could ring, say: “I’ve had a little accident,” and have coffee served. When she opened the bathroom door the room was still in darkness. She went over to the night-table and switched on the light. He lay asleep, partially covered by the sheet.

  “But this is the end!” she told herself. And with an edge of annoyance in her voice: “Darling, I’m sorry. You absolutely must get dressed immediately.” He did not stir; she seized his shoulder and shook it with impatience. “Come along! Up with you! This little orgy has gone on long enough ….”

  He heard her words with perfect clarity, and he understood what they meant, but they were like a design painted on a wall, utterly without relation to him. He lay still. The most important thing in the world was to prolong the moment of soothing emptiness in the midst of which he was living.

  Taking hold of the sheet, she jerked it back over the foot of the bed. Then she bent over and shouted in his ear: “You’re stark naked!” Immediately he sat upright, fumbling ineffectively around his feet for the missing cover. She turned and went back into the bathroom, calling over her shoulder: “Get dressed immediately, darling.” Looking into the mirror, arranging her hair, she said to herself: “Well, are you pleased or displeased with the episode?” and she found herself unable to answer, dwelling rather on the miraculous fact that Hugo had not walked in on them; the possibility of his having done so seemed now more dreadful each minute. “I must have been quite out of my senses.” She closed her eyes for an instant and shuddered.

  Dyar had pulled on his clothing mechanically, without being fully conscious of what he was doing. However, by the time he came to putting on his tie, his mind was functioning. He too stood before a mirror, smiling a little triumphantly as he made the staccato gestures with the strip of silk. He combed his hair and knelt by the bed, where he began to scrape up bits of food from the floor and put them on the tray. Daisy came out of the bathroom. “You’re an angel!�
� she cried. “I was just going to ask if you’d mind trying to make a little order out of this chaos.,” She lay down on a chaise longue in the centre of the room and pulled a fur coverlet around her, and she was about to say: “I’m sorry there was no opportunity for you to have a shower, too,” when she thought: “Above all, I must not embarrass him.” She decided to make no reference to what had occurred. “Be a darling and ring the bell, will you, and we’ll have coffee. I’m exhausted.”

  But apparently he was in no way ill at ease; he did as she suggested, and then went to sit cross-legged on the floor at her side. “I’ve got to get going,” he said to himself, and he was not even preoccupied with the idea of how he would broach the subject of his departure; after the coffee he would simply get up, say goodbye, and leave. It had been an adventure, but Daisy had had very little to do with it, beyond being the detonating factor; almost all of it had taken place inside him. Still, since the fact remained that he had had his way with her, he was bound to behave in a manner which was a little more intimate, a shade on the side of condescension.

  “You warm enough?” He touched her arm.

  “No. It’s glacial in this room. Glacial. God! I can’t think why I didn’t have a fireplace installed when they were building the house.”

  Hugo knocked on the door. For ten minutes or so the room was full of activity: Inez and another girl changing the sheets, Mario cleaning up the food from the floor, Paco removing grease spots from the rug beside the bed, Hugo serving coffee. Daisy sat studying Dyar’s face as she sipped her coffee, noting with a certain slight resentment that, far from being embarrassed, on the contrary he showed signs of feeling more at ease with her than earlier in the evening. “But what do I expect?” she thought, whereupon she had to admit to herself that she would have liked him to be a little more impressed by what had passed between them. He had come through untouched; she had the uneasy impression that even his passion had been objectless, automatic.

 

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