by Paul Bowles
He flushed. “You’re goddam right.”
She leaned toward him. “Why do you think I came up here, you bloody, bloody fool, you conceited idiot? God!”
“I don’t know. I’m wondering, myself,” he said, tossing his cigarette into the fireplace.
“I came …” She paused. “Because I’m the biggest fool of all, because through some ghastly defect in my character, I—because I’ve somehow—let myself become fond of you. God knows why! God knows why! Do you think I’d come all the way here only to help Ronny get his money back?” (“Yes, you would,” he thought.) “He’s better equipped for a man-hunt than I am, with his gang of cut-throats from the Marsa.” (“She doesn’t believe any of that. She thinks she can do the job better,” he told himself.) “I’m here because Ronny’s a friend of mine, yes, and because I should like to help him get back what belongs to him, what you’ve stolen from him.” (Her voice trembled a little on the word stolen.) “Yes, of course. All of that. And I’m here also because what will help him happens to be the only thing that’ll help you.”
“Do my soul good. I know. Walk in and make a clean breast of it.”
“Your soul!” she snapped. “Bugger your soul! I said help you. You’re in a mess. You know damned well what a mess you’re in. And you’re not going to get out of it without some help. I want very much to see you through this. And if I must be quite frank, I don’t think anyone else can or will.”
“Oh, I know,” he said. “I don’t expect anybody to take up a collection for me! Nobody can help me. Fine. So how can you?”
“Don’t you think Luis knows a few people in Tangier? It’s a question of getting you and your money across the frontier. In any case, I’ve borrowed a diplomatic car. With the CD plates one goes right through, usually. Even if we don’t, it’s all seen to. You run no risk.”
“No risk!” he repeated, with a brief laugh. “And in Tangier?”
“Ronny? What can he do? I assure you he’ll be so delighted to see his money, he’ll——”
He cut her short. “Not that,” he said. “I’m not worried about that. I’m just thinking.”
She looked puzzled an instant. “You don’t mean the cheque you accepted from that hideous little Russian woman?”
He stood up. “Oh, Jesus,” he groaned. “Is there anything you don’t know?”
“In the way of Tangier gossip, no, darling. But everyone knows about that. She’s been ordered to leave Tangier. Probably has already gone. The only useful thing Uncle Goode’s done since she arrived in Tangier. I don’t know what the official American attitude would be toward your sort of stupid behaviour. But that’s a chance you’ll have to take. I think we’ve talked about enough, don’t you?”
“I guess we have,” he said. It was a solution, he thought, but it was not the right one, because it would undo everything he had done. It had to be this way, he said to himself. He knew what the other way was like.
“Do you think we could have some tea before we leave?” Daisy inquired suddenly. “It would help.” (“She doesn’t understand,” he thought.)
“I’m not going,” he said.
“Oh, darling, don’t be difficult.” He had never seen her eyes so large and serious. “It’s late. You know goddam well you’re going. There nothing else you can do. The trouble is you just can’t make up your mind to face Jack and Ronny. But you’ve got to face them, that’s all.”
“I tell you I’m not going.”
“Rot! Rubbish! Now come! Don’t disgust me with your fear. There’s nothing more revolting than a man who’s afraid.”
He laughed unpleasantly.
“Come along, now,” she said in a comfortable voice, as though each sentence she had uttered until then had succeeded in persuading him a little. “Make some good hot tea and we’ll each have a cup. Then we’ll go back. It’s that simple.” As a new idea occurred to her, she looked around the room for the first time. “Where’s the Beidaoui boy? Not that I can take him; he’ll have to get back by himself, but I daresay that offers no particular problem.”
Because what had been going on for the past half-hour had been in a world so absolutely alien to the one he had been living in (where the mountain wind blew and rattled the door), that world of up here, like something of his own invention, had receded, become unlikely, momentarily effaced itself. He caught his breath, said nothing. At the same time he glanced swiftly over her shoulder toward the kitchen door, and felt his heart make a painful movement in his chest. For an instant his eyes opened very wide. Then he looked into her face, frowning and not letting his eyelids resume their natural position too quickly. “I don’t know,” he said, hoping that his expression could be interpreted as one of no more than normal concern. With the wind, the door had swung outward a little, and a helpless hand showed through the opening. “I haven’t seen him all day. He was gone when I woke up.”
Now his heart was pounding violently, and the inside of his head pushed against his skull as if it would break through the fragile wall. He tried to play the old game with himself. “It’s not true. He’s not lying there.” It would not work. He knew positively, even without looking again; games were finished. He sat in the room, he was the centre of a situation of whose every detail he was aware; the very presence of the hand gave him his unshakable certainty, his conviction that his existence and everything in it was real, solid, undeniable. Later he would be able to look straight at this knowledge without the unbearable, bursting anguish, but now, at the beginning, sitting beside Daisy in the room where the knowledge had been born, it was too much. He jumped to his feet.
“Tea?” he cried crazily. “Yeah, sure. Of course.” He stepped to the front door and looked out: the chauffeur and the guide were still sitting down there in the gathering gloom, on opposite sides of the path. “I don’t know where he is,” he said. “He’s been gone all day.” It was still raining a little, but in a moment it would fall harder. A dense cloud was drifting down from the invisible peaks above. In the wet grey twilight everything was colourless. He heard a sound behind him, turned and stood frozen as he watched Daisy rise slowly, deliberately, walk into the patio, her eyes fixed on the bottom of the kitchen door. She pulled it all the way open, and bent down, her back to him. He was not sure, but he thought he heard, a second later, a slight, almost inaudible cry. And she stayed crouching there a long time. Little by little the dead, flat sound of the falling rain spread, increased. He started to walk across the room toward the patio, thinking: “This is the moment to show her I’m not afraid. Not afraid of what she thinks.” Because of the rain splattering from the eaves into the patio she did not hear him coming until he was almost in the doorway. She looked up swiftly; there were tears in her eyes, and the sight of them was a sharp pain inside him.
He stood still.
“Did——?” She did not try to say anything more. He knew the reason; she had looked at his face and did not need to finish her question. She stood only a second now in front of him, yet even in that flash many things must have crossed her mind, because as he stared into her eyes he was conscious of the instantaneous raising of a great barrier that had not been there a moment before, and now suddenly was there, impenetrable and merciless. Quickly she walked in front of him into the room and across to the door. Only when she had stepped outside into the rain did she turn and say in a smothered voice: “I shall tell Ronny I couldn’t find you.” Then she moved out of his vision; where she had paused there was only the rectangle of greyness.
He stood there in the patio a moment, the cold rain wetting him. (A place in the world, a definite status, a precise relationship with the rest of men. Even if it had to be one of open hostility, it was his, created by him.) Suddenly he pushed the kitchen door shut and went into the room. He was tired, he wanted to sit down, but there was only the mat, and so he remained standing in the middle of the room. Soon it would be dark; stuck onto the floor was the little piece of candle the other had blown out last night when the fire was going. He
did not know whether there was another candle in the kitchen, nor would he look to see. More to have something to do than because he wanted light, he knelt down to set the stub burning, felt in his pocket, in all his pockets, for a match. Finding none, he stood up again and walked to the door. Out in the murk there was no valley, there were no mountains. The rain fell heavily and the wind had begun to blow again. He sat down in the doorway and began to wait. It was not yet completely dark.
Amrah, Tangier
Afterword
Let It Come Down is a classic exposition of Paul Bowles’s most insistent literary theme. Time and again, whether it is in his three other completed novels, The Sheltering Sky, The Spider’s House and Up Above the World, in his unpublished notebooks or in his many published short stories, he is drawn to chronicle the foreign travels of citizens of a rich, highly successful western nation—such as the USA—who due to the remorseless commercial rationality of their homeland, find themselves spiritually and morally adrift. They search abroad for some form of enlightenment, some direction, some learning, some redeeming experience but instead of profiting from their searches, they find themselves physically degraded and their characters disintegrating through terror into madness. In the process of this adventure, the well advertised superiority of their western culture is exposed as so much useless baggage, especially before the ferocity, cunning and belief systems of a so-called primitive culture. This theme was established by Paul Bowles in one of his first short stories, “A Distant Episode”, which was written in 1946, some five years before Let It Come Down. It tells the story of a French professor of linguistics travelling into the Sahara in order to study the spoken dialect of a group of isolated nomads. All his learning, all those peer reviews, published articles and bibliographic cross-references, are of no earthly use in the desert. Instead, his mean and acquisitive spirit leads him to stumble in the camp of some Reguibat nomads whose guard dogs savage the intruder. He is beaten and bound and, just before dawn, his tongue is cut out. The nomads then bundle their captive into a camel panier and transport him south to the obscure grazing grounds of their homeland. There he is taught to perform as a dancing buffoon to amuse the women and children, and to earn his daily bread from the clan. After a year of this degrading captivity he is sold on to an oasis merchant and further brutalized, before finally making his escape. In the last scene we observe that the professor, instead of running to a French military post for help, hops back off into the desert like some holy fool. Some literary critics trace the origins of this story back to a drug-influenced daydream (which may well have contributed to Bowles’s powerful evocation of the delirium of the captive) but there is another possibility. It may have been true. For in the late ’30s there was a demented westerner, of unknown origins, who was known to cavort amongst the professional entertainers in Marrakech’s Djemma el Fna square. His charitably minded Moroccan neigbours kept him alive with gifts of food and knew him as the “professor.” Nor is this the only example in which a strong nugget of factual observation lies at the core of a Paul Bowles’ short story. By chance I once borrowed a house in Tangier for three months, which I later found to have been the subject of a chilling Bowles story. To a casual reader, Bowles’ tale might have seemed yet another piece of orientalist gothic, as much inspired by one of the short stories of Poe or Saki as anything else. However I found that his rendering of the strange misadventures of this house had been depicted with an almost clinical accuracy, and the events once again fitted in with a classic Bowlesian theme, of innocent western strangers being (nearly) destroyed by native rapacity. In the creation of fiction, the balance between imagination and reality, even in Bowles’s extreme vision, is always difficult to quantify.
This is also true of Let It Come Down. It clearly contains strong autobiographical elements. Indeed Bowles was pefectly honest about this. “I think one is always writing about oneself … writing is, I suppose, a superstitious way of keeping the horror at bay, of keeping the evil inside.” This is a valuable way of understanding the distorted portraits within Let it Come Down—not as an aggressive attack on either himself or his friends, but as a magical propitiation to fend off a feared outcome. Dyar, the central character of the book, an amoral, drifting, bored suburban American-boy who is both dreaming of adventure but incapable of any self-motivation, is based on many of his own experiences and fears. In later life Paul Bowles used to remember how Gertrude Stein had described him (at a similar age to the fictional Dyar) as “the most spoiled, insensitive and self indulgent young man she had ever seen”. He recalled how she was appalled by “my colossal complacency in rejecting all values” and how she had concluded her character summary, “if you were typical, it would be the end of our civilization … for you are a manufactured savage.” Dyar is what Bowles could have been, and feared that he might become, though his own life of constant travel and creativity as a poet, composer, writer, publisher, journalist and translator would progressively dispell these charges.
Dyar’s correspondence with his vacuous mother back home, full of the tedium of his father’s health concerns, is based on Bowles’s own need to escape the banalities of his parents life—especially his controlling, health-obssessed dentist of a father. And Dyar’s experience as a bored bank clerk follows Paul Bowles’s own youthful experience of a summer job adding up columns of figures for the Bank of Manhattan Company. This job, undertaken in the year between high school and university, also involved occasional duties as a courier, and on one occasion Bowles was responsible for a large sum of money which briefly went missing, one of the cornerstones of the plot of Let It Come Down. Like his fictional Dyar, Bowles escaped from America, though in his case it wasn’t from a dead-end job but from the tedious, uncultured minds of his fellow students in the hallowed halls of the old University of Virginia. In Bowles’s fiction, the young American Dyar meets an extravagant, fragrant and life-enhancing aristocratic personality, La Marquise de Valverde, with whom he has an affair. When Bowles ran away from university, he took a cheap passage to Europe in an old Dutch steamer making its last Atlantic crossing in the spring of 1929. Amongst the eight other passengers was Christine, a French countess, sister to the Duke de Saint-Simon and wife of Comte de Guendulaine who lived on an estate in southern Mexico. The shared experience of the boat journey was the start of a lifelong friendship, even though Paul Bowles was just a penniless Yankee student.
In a similar manner, his portrait of the Moroccan Beidaoui family, and the schism between the aristocratic brothers is also based on observation. Back in 1931, when he was still an unknown penniless young traveller, Paul Bowles was befriended by Abdullah Drissi, whose family lived in a vast, servant-filled palace in the ancient city of Fez. Bowles returned many times to this hospitable family and these youthful experiences of a noble Moroccan household would later be reinforced by a neighbourly friendship with the hereditary family of governors of Tangier to give texture and credibility to the portrait of the fictional Thami and his elder Beidaoui brothers.
Bowles’s wife, Jane, is the inspiration behind Eunice, the wealthy and possessive lesbian, who writes prodigiously without ever completing a book, and who drinks excessively in part because alcohol fuels her addiction to emotional scenes. At the time that Bowles was writing Let It Come Down, Jane had just launched a passionate play for a charismatic, beautiful, acquisitive and illiterate young Moroccan woman, Cherifa, who sold grain in the Tangier corn market.
Although they had bought a house in the old walled city together and were devoted to each other, Jane and Paul preferred to live apart. It was their habit to take up residence in different hotels in Tangier for a month or more but to meet at least once a day, usually for lunch, after which they would scrupulously divide the bill. Although they might have tried to sleep together during their honeymoon, spent travelling through the republics of Central America, they gradually abandoned an attempt to make sex part of their marriage of minds. Indeed the one cardinal difference between Dyar and Paul Bowles is t
hat his fictional creation desired to make ardent love to women. As a young man living in Paris, one of Bowles’s first sexual encounters was with a Hungarian girl called Hemina whilst out on a country walk. Typically, his abiding memories of the event focused on sunburn, nettle rash and ant bites. A few weeks later, his wealthy adopted cousin, Billy Herbert, seduced his nephew as part of a campaign to get Bowles into his confidence and to persuade him to return home to his parents and to university. Once again, it was the incidentals of the event—the gift of a double-breasted tailored suit, a cane and brand new shoes—that Bowles preferred to remember rather than the sensual activity between the bed sheets. Though drawn to the company and friendship of homosexual men all his life, his sex life remained a source of mystery to most of these friends. Some maliciously speculated that he was asexual or impotent, though the truth seems to have been simple enough. He was discrete. Though a handsome and conspicuously elegant man all his life, with blue eyes and a thatch of blonde hair, he preferred to pay male strangers for sex. He also preferred to keep these casual affairs completely separate from his emotional and intellectual friendships, a private matter that was neither material for conversation nor recorded in his memoirs. In a taped conversation with the film director Simon Bischoff, towards the end of his life in the early 1990s, he was surprisingly frank and straightforward. “All relationships I ever had, from the beginning, had to do with paying. I never had sexual relationships without pay, even when I was much younger. So I took that for granted.” This view is reinforced by a letter to the composer Virgil Thomson, in which he wrote, “how I finally managed to get one of the two who held out for fifty francs … one of the two who came up to us on the quai … I was encouraged by those tactics and used them perfectly elsewhere.” Money matters to all the characters in Let it Come Down, whether it is Eunice using her largesse to attract the love of a young Moroccan girl, whether it is Thami scheming to acquire a motorboat, whether it is the wealthy expatriate scheming to smuggle British pounds into Tangier, or Dyar and his business partner both trying to outwit and defraud one another.