Let It Come Down

by Paul Bowles

  The sun’s light filtered through his closed eyelids, making a blind world of burning orange warmth; with it came a corresponding ray of understanding which, like a spotlight thrown suddenly from an unexpected direction, bathed the familiar panorama in a transforming glow of finality. The years he had spent in the bank, standing in the teller’s cage, had been real, after all; he could not call them an accident or a stop-gap. They had gone by and they were finished, and now he saw them as an unalterable part of the pattern. Now all the distant indecisions, the postponements and unsolved questions were beyond his reach. It was too late to touch or change anything. It always had been too late, only until now he had not known it. His life had not been the trial life he had vaguely felt it to be—it had been the only one possible, the only conceivable one.

  And so everything turned out to have been already complete, its form decided and irrevocable. A feeling of profound contentment spread through him. The succession of ideas evaporated, leaving him with only the glow of well-being attendant upon their passage. He looked among the pebbles for the beetle; it had disappeared along the path. But now he heard voices, nearby. A group of turbaned Berbers came past, and glancing at him without surprise went on, still conversing. Their appearance served to bring him back from the interior place where he had been. He took the pipe to pieces, put it away. Feeling drunk and light-headed, he rose and followed behind them at a discreet distance. The path they presently chose led over a hill and down—down across a wilderness of cactus, through shady olive groves (the decayed trunks were often no more than wide gnarled shells), over cascades of smooth rocks, through meadows dotted with oleander bushes, becoming finally a narrow lane bordered on either side by high holly. Here it twisted so frequently that he lost sight of the men several times, and eventually they disappeared completely. Almost at the moment he realized they were gone, he came unexpectedly out onto a belvedere strewn with boulders, directly above the rooftops, terraces and minarets of the town.

  XXIII

  Sometimes on friday mornings, Hadj Mohammed Beidaoui would send one of his elder sons to fetch the last-born, Thami, where he was playing in the garden, and the little boy would be carried in, squirming to prevent his brother from covering his cheeks with noisy kisses all the way. Then he would be placed on his father’s knee, his face would momentarily be buried in the hard white beard, and he would hold his breath until his father’s face was raised again, and the old man began to pinch his infant cheeks and smooth his hair. He remembered clearly his father’s ivory-coloured skin, and how beautiful and majestic the smooth ancient face had seemed to him framed in its white silk djellaba. When he thought of it now, perhaps he was referring in memory to one particular morning, a day radiant as only a day of spring in childhood can be, when his father, after sprinkling him with orange-flower water until he was quite wet and almost sick from the sweet smell, had taken him by the hand and led him through the streets and parks of sunlight and flowers to the mosque of the Marshan, through the streets openly, where everyone they met, the men who kissed the hem of Hadj Mohammed’s sleeve, and those who did not, could see that Thami was his son. And Abdelftah and Abdelmalek and Hassan and Abdallah had all been left at home! That was the most important part. The conscious campaign to seek to gain more than his share of his father’s favour dated from that morning; he had waged it unceasingly from then until the old man’s death. Then, of course, it was all over. The others were older than he, and by that time disliked him, and he returned their antipathy. He began to bribe the servants to let him out of the house, and this got several of them into trouble with Abdelftah, master of the household, then, who was short-tempered and flew into a rage each time he learned that Thami had escaped into the street. But it was the street with its forbidden delights that tempted the boy more than anything else, once the world had ceased being a place where the greatest good was to climb into his father’s lap and listen to the flow of legends and proverbs and songs and poems that he wished would never come to an end. There was one song he still recalled in its entirety. It went: Ya ouled al harrata, Al mallem Bouzekri. … His father had told him all the boys of Fez ran through the streets singing it when rain was needed. And there was one proverb which he associated intimately with the memory of his father’s face and with the sensation of being held by him, surrounded by the mountains of brocade-covered cushions, with the great lanterns and high looped draperies above, and no matter how often his father acceded to his pleas to repeat it, always it was fresh with a mysterious, magical truth when he heard it.

  “Tell about the day.”

  “The day?” Old Hadj Mohammed would repeat, looking deliberately, cunningly vague, and pulling at his lower lip while he rolled his eyes upward with a vacant expression. “The day? What day?”

  “The day,” Thami would insist.

  “Aaah!” And the old man would begin, and begin at the same time the dovening motion which accompanied the utterance of any words that were not extemporaneous. “The morning is a little boy.” He made his eyes large and round. “Noon is a man.” He sat up very straight and looked fierce. “Twilight is an old man.” He relaxed and looked into Thami’s face with tenderness. “What do I do?” Thami knew, but he remained silent, waiting breathless, spellbound, for the moment when he would take part in the ritual, his eyes unwaveringly fixed on the ivory face.

  “I smile at the first. I admire the second. I venerate the last.” And as he finished saying the words, Thami would seize the frail white hand, bend his head forward, and with passion press his lips against the back of the fingers. Then, renewed love in his eyes, the old man would sit back and look at his son. Abdallah once had spied on this game (of the brothers he was the nearest Thami’s age, being only a year older); and later when he got him alone, he had subjected Thami to a series of tortures which the boy had borne silently, scarcely offering resistance. It seemed to him a small enough price to pay for his father’s favour. “And if you tell Father I’ll tell Abdelftah,” Abdallah had warned him. Abdelftah would devise something infinitely worse—of that they were both certain—but Thami had laughed scornfully through his tears. He had no intention of telling; to bring to his father’s attention the fact that the others could be jealous of his participation in this sacred game would have meant to risk losing his privilege of playing it.

  Later it was the streets, the hidden cafés at Sidi Bouknadel that closed their doors leaving the boys inside sitting on mats playing ronda and smoking kif and drinking cognac until morning; it was the beach where they played football and, pooling their money, would rent a caseta for the season, which they used for drinking competitions and the holding of small private orgies whose etiquette demanded that the younger boys be at the entire disposal of the older ones. And above all it was the bordels. By the time Thami was eighteen he had had all the girls in all the establishments, and a good many more off the street. He took to staying away from home for several days at a time, and when he returned it would be in a state of dishevelment which infuriated his brothers. After his sixth arrest for drunkenness Abdelmalek, who was now the head of the family, Abdelftah having moved to Casablanca, gave orders to the guards of the house to refuse him entrance unless he was in a state of complete sobriety and properly dressed. This meant, more than anything else, that he would no longer receive his daily spending money. “This will change him,” he said confidently to Hassan. “You’ll see the difference very soon.” But Thami was more headstrong and resourceful than they had suspected. He found ways of living—what ways they never knew—without needing to return home, without having to forgo the independence so necessary to him. And since then he never had gone back, save now and then for a moment of conversation with his brothers at the entrance door, usually to ask a favour which they seldom granted. There was nothing basically anti-social about Thami; hostility was alien to him. He merely had expended almost all his capacities for respect and devotion upon his father, so that he could not give the traditional amount of either to his b
rothers. Also he would not agree to pretend. He did not respect them, and he had had too much contact with European culture to believe he was committing a sin in refusing to feign a respect which custom demanded but which he did not feel.

  It was at the annual moussem of Moulay Abdeslam, where serious men go for the good of their souls, that Thami had met Kinza, among the tents and donkeys and fanatical pilgrims. The situation was one with which Moslem tradition is totally unprepared to deal. Young men and women cannot know each other, and if by some disgraceful chance they happen to have managed to see each other alone for a minute, the idea is so shameful that everyone forgets it immediately. But to follow it up, to see the girl again, to suggest marrying her—it would be hard to conceive of more outrageous conduct. Thami did all these things. He went back to Agla at the same time as she did, got to know the family, who were naturally much impressed with his city ways and his erudition, and wrote to Abdelmalek saying that he was about to be married and thought it time he received his inheritance. His brother’s reply was a telegram bidding him return to Tangier at once to discuss the matter. It was then that the two had their serious falling-out, since Abdelmalek refused outright to let him touch his money or his property. “I’ll go to the Qadi,” threatened Thami. Abdelmalek merely laughed. “Go,” he said, “if you think there is anything about you he doesn’t already know.” In the end, after lengthy discussions with Hassan, who thought marriage, even with a shamefully low peasant girl, might possibly be a means of changing Thami’s ways, Abdelmalek gave him a few thousand pesetas. He fetched the whole family from Agla and they had a wedding in Emsallah, the humblest quarter of Tangier, all of which nevertheless seemed magnificent to Kinza and her tribe. In due time all but the bride returned to the farmhouse on the mountain above Agla, where they lived working their fields, gathering the fruit from their trees and sending the children to tend the goats on the heights above.

  To them Thami was a glamorous, important figure, and they had been overjoyed to see him come knocking at the door the previous evening. They were not so pleased, however, to learn that he had a Nazarene with him, up in the other house, and although he had managed last night to slide over it by talking of other things and then leaving suddenly, he could see that his father-in-law had not finished expressing his views on the subject.

  At the house they told him that the men were down in the orchard. He followed the high cactus fence until he came to a gate made of sheet tin. When he knocked, the sound was very loud, and it was with a certain amount of mild apprehension that he waited for someone to come. One of the sons let him in. An artificial stream ran through the orchard, part of the system which irrigated the entire valley with the spring water that came out of the rocks above the town. Kinza’s father was watering the rose bushes. He hurried back and forth, his baggy trousers hitched above his knees, stooping by the edge of the channel to fill an ancient oilcan that spouted water from all corners, running with it each time, to arrive before it was empty. When he saw Thami he ceased his labours, and together they sat down in the shade of a huge fig tree. Almost immediately he brought up the subject of the Nazarene. Having him in the house would make trouble, he predicted. No one had ever heard of a Spaniard living in the same house with a Moslem, and besides, what was the purpose, what was the reason for such a thing? “Why doesn’t he stay at the fonda at Agla like all the others?” he demanded. Thami tried to explain. “He’s not a Spaniard,” he began, but already he foresaw the difficulties he was going to meet, trying to make the other understand. “He’s an American.” “Melikan?” cried Kinza’s father. “And where is Melika? Where? In Spain! Ah! You see?” The oldest son timidly suggested that perhaps the Nazarene was a Frenchman. Frenchmen were not Spaniards, he said. “Not Spaniards?” cried his father. “And where do you think France is, if it’s not in Spain? Call him Melikan, call him French, call him English, call him whatever you like. He’s still a Spaniard, he’s still a Nazarene, and it’s bad to have him in the house.” “You’re right,” said Thami, deciding that acquiescence was the easiest way out of the conversation, because his only argument at that point would have been to tell them that Dyar was paying him for the privilege of staying in the house, and that was a detail he did not want them to know. The old man was mollified; then, “Why doesn’t he stay at the fonda, anyway? Tell me that,” he said suspiciously. Thami shrugged his shoulders, said he did not know. “Ah! You see?” the old man cried in triumph. “He has a reason, and it’s a bad reason. And only bad things can happen when Nazarenes and Moslems come together.”

  There was a halfwit son who sat with them; he nodded his head endlessly, overcome by the wisdom of his father’s utterances. The other sons looked at Thami, slightly embarrassed at hearing these ideas, which they supposed he must consider ridiculously old-fashioned. Then they talked of other things, and presently the old man returned to watering his flowers. Thami and the sons retired to a secluded part of the orchard where they could not be seen by him, and smoked, Thami feeling that under the circumstances he could not very well insult the family by returning to the house on the mountain solely to take food to the Christian. They passed the day eating, sleeping and playing cards, and it was twilight when he took his leave, not having dared to suggest that they give him food again, nor even finding the courage to ask for the use of the blanket. But he could not go back up to the house without food, for Dyar would be ravenous by now, and this meant that he must go into Agla and buy supplies for dinner. “Yah latif, yah latif,” he said under his breath as he followed the path that led downward to the village.

  •••••

  There was little doubt in Dyar’s mind, as he stumbled along the cobbled road that led through the town gate, that the place was Agla. He had merely come down by a very wide detour, by going around to the back of the mountain, and then returning to the steep side once again. Thus there was a real possibility of his running into Thami, who, it now occurred to him, would be convinced he had run away in order to avoid having to pay him what he owed him. Or no, he thought, not at all. If Thami were after everything, such a detail would naturally be of no importance. In that case the meeting would bring matters to a head very quickly. The men he had chosen to help him would be nearby; by some casual gesture as they walked along the street together, he and Thami, in full view of the populace, the signal would be given. Or they might even be with him. The only hope would be to defend the briefcase as though his whole life were locked inside. Then, when they got it open and found it empty, he might possibly be far enough away to escape.

  The tiny streets and houses were smothered with whitewash, which glowed as if all during the day it had been absorbing the sunlight and now, at dusk, were slowly giving it off into the fading air. It all looked, he thought, as though it had been made by a pastry-cook, but probably that was only because at the moment he did not need much imagination for things to look edible. With infallible intuition he chose the streets that led to the centre of town, and there he saw a small native restaurant where the cooking was being done in the entrance. The cook lifted the covers of the various copper cauldrons for him; he looked down into them and ordered soup, chickpeas stewed with pieces of lamb, and skewered liver. There was a small dim room behind the kitchen with two tables in it, and, beyond that a raised niche covered with matting where several rustics squatted with enormous loaves of bread which they tore into pieces and put into the soup. For Dyar the assuaging of his appetite was a voluptuous act; it went on and on. What he had ordered at first proved to be completely inadequate. Thami had told him that the desire for food after smoking kif was like no other appetite. He sighed apprehensively. Thami and his kif. How would he feel when he realized his prisoner had escaped, taking with him even Thami’s own pipe and mottoui? He wondered if perhaps that might not be considered a supreme injury, an unforgivable act. He had no idea; he knew nothing about this country, save that all its inhabitants behaved like maniacs. Maybe it was not Thami himself of whose reactions he was afr
aid, he reflected—it might be only that Thami was part of the place and therefore had everything in the place behind him, so to speak. Thami in New York—he almost laughed at the image the idea evoked—he was the sort no one would even take the trouble to look at in the street when he asked for a dime. Here it was another matter. He was a spokesman for the place; like Antaeus, whatever strength he had came out of the earth, and his feet were planted squarely upon it. “So you’re afraid of him,” he remarked to himself in disgust. He looked through the bright kitchen out into the black street beyond. “Afraid he might walk in that door.” He sat perfectly still, somehow expecting the idea to conjure up the reality. Instead, an oversized Berber appeared in the doorway, his djellaba slung loosely over one shoulder, and ordered a glass of tea. While he waited the five minutes it always took to prepare the tea (because the water, while hot, was never boiling, and the mint leaves had to be stripped one by one from the stalk), he stood staring at Dyar in a manner which the other at first found disconcerting, then disturbing, and finally, because he had begun to ask himself the possible reason for this insolent scrutiny, downright frightening. “Why does he block the door like that?” he thought, his heart beginning to beat too fast in a sudden wave of desperate conjecture. For the moment there was only one answer: one of Thami’s henchmen had arrived to keep watch, to prevent his escape. They were probably posted in every café and eating-place in the town. For the first time it occurred to him that they might do their work on him in Thami’s absence, with Thami conveniently seated in some respectable home, laughing, drinking tea, strumming on an oud. And this possibility seemed in a way worse, perhaps because he had never been able to see Thami in the role of a brutal torturer, the tacit understanding with his own imagination having been that things would somehow be done with comparative gentleness, painlessly. He looked up once again at the Neanderthal head, the deep furrows in the slanting forehead and the brows that formed a single ragged line across the face, and knew that for such a man there were no half-way measures. Yet he could not see any baseness in the face, nor even any particular cunning—merely a primal, ancient blindness, the ineffable, unfocused melancholy of the great apes as they stare between the cage bars.