by Paul Bowles
It was growing faintly light. There were camels near where he was lying; he could hear their gurgling and their heavy breathing. He could not bring himself to attempt opening his eyes, just in case it should turn out to be impossible. However, when he heard someone approaching, he found that he had no difficulty in seeing.
The man looked at him dispassionately in the gray morning light. With one hand he pinched together the Professor’s nostrils. When the Professor opened his mouth to breathe, the man swiftly seized his tongue and pulled on it with all his might. The Professor was gagging and catching his breath; he did not see what was happening. He could not distinguish the pain of the brutal yanking from that of the sharp knife. Then there was an endless choking and spitting that went on automatically, as though he were scarcely a part of it. The word “operation” kept going through his mind; it calmed his terror somewhat as he sank back into darkness.
The caravan left sometime toward midmorning. The Professor, not unconscious, but in a state of utter stupor, still gagging and drooling blood, was dumped doubled-up into a sack and tied at one side of a camel. The lower end of the enormous amphitheater contained a natural gate in the rocks. The camels, swift mehara, were lightly laden on this trip. They passed through single file, and slowly mounted the gentle slope that led up into the beginning of the desert. That night, at a stop behind some low hills, the men took him out, still in a state which permitted no thought, and over the dusty rags that remained of his clothing they fastened a series of curious belts made of the bottoms of tin cans strung together. One after another of these bright girdles was wired about his torso, his arms and legs, even across his face, until he was entirely within a suit of armor that covered him with its circular metal scales. There was a good deal of merriment during this decking-out of the Professor. One man brought out a flute and a younger one did a not ungraceful caricature of an Ouled Naïl executing a cane dance. The Professor was no longer conscious; to be exact, he existed in the middle of the movements made by these other men. When they had finished dressing him the way they wished him to look, they stuffed some food under the tin bangles hanging over his face. Even though he chewed mechanically, most of it eventually fell out onto the ground. They put him back into the sack and left him there.
Two days later they arrived at one of their own encampments. There were women and children here in the tents, and the men had to drive away the snarling dogs they had left there to guard them. When they emptied the Professor out of his sack, there were screams of fright, and it took several hours to convince the last woman that he was harmless, although there had been no doubt from the start that he was a valuable possession. After a few days they began to move on again, taking everything with them, and traveling only at night as the terrain grew warmer.
Even when all his wounds had healed and he felt no more pain, the Professor did not begin to think again; he ate and defecated, and he danced when he was bidden, a senseless hopping up and down that delighted the children, principally because of the wonderful jangling racket it made. And he generally slept through the heat of the day, in among the camels.
Wending its way southeast, the caravan avoided all stationary civilization. In a few weeks they reached a new plateau, wholly wild and with a sparse vegetation. Here they pitched camp and remained, while the mehara were turned loose to graze. Everyone was happy here; the weather was cooler and there was a well only a few hours away on a seldom-frequented trail. It was here they conceived the idea of taking the Professor to Fogara and selling him to the Touareg.
It was a full year before they carried out this project. By this time the Professor was much better trained. He could do a handspring, make a series of fearful growling noises which had, nevertheless, a certain element of humor; and when the Reguibat removed the tin from his face they discovered he could grimace admirably while he danced. They also taught him a few basic obscene gestures which never failed to elicit delighted shrieks from the women. He was now brought forth only after especially abundant meals, when there was music and festivity. He easily fell in with their sense of ritual, and evolved an elementary sort of “program” to present when he was called for: dancing, rolling on the ground, imitating certain animals, and finally rushing toward the group in feigned anger, to see the resultant confusion and hilarity.
When three of the men set out for Fogara with him, they took four mehara with them, and he rode astride his quite naturally. No precautions were taken to guard him, save that he was kept among them, one man always staying at the rear of the party. They came within sight of the walls at dawn, and they waited among the rocks all day. At dusk the youngest started out, and in three hours he returned with a friend who carried a stout cane. They tried to put the Professor through his routine then and there, but the man from Fogara was in a hurry to get back to town, so they all set out on the mehara.
In the town they went directly to the villager’s home, where they had coffee in the courtyard sitting among the camels. Here the Professor went into his act again, and this time there was prolonged merriment and much rubbing together of hands. An agreement was reached, a sum of money paid, and the Reguibat withdrew, leaving the Professor in the house of the man with the cane, who did not delay in locking him into a tiny enclosure off the courtyard.
The next day was an important one in the Professor’s life, for it was then that pain began to stir again in his being. A group of men came to the house, among whom was a venerable gentleman, better clothed that those others who spent their time flattering him, setting fervent kisses upon his hands and the edges of his garments. This person made a point of going into classical Arabic from time to time, to impress the others, who had not learned a word of the Koran. Thus his conversation would run more or less as follows: “Perhaps at In Salah. The French there are stupid. Celestial vengeance is approaching. Let us not hasten it. Praise the highest and cast thine anathema against idols. With paint on his face. In case the police wish to look close.” The others listened and agreed, nodding their heads slowly and solemnly. And the Professor in his stall beside them listened, too. That is, he was conscious of the sound of the old man’s Arabic. The words penetrated for the first time in many months. Noises, then: “Celestial vengeance is approaching.” Then: “It is an honor. Fifty francs is enough. Keep your money. Good.” And the qaouaji squatting near him at the edge of the precipice. Then “anathema against idols” and more gibberish. He turned over panting on the sand and forgot about it. But the pain had begun. It operated in a kind of delirium, because he had begun to enter into consciousness again. When the man opened the door and prodded him with his cane, he cried out in a rage, and everyone laughed.
They got him onto his feet, but he would not dance. He stood before them, staring at the ground, stubbornly refusing to move. The owner was furious, and so annoyed by the laughter of the others that he felt obliged to send them away, saying that he would await a more propitious time for exhibiting his property, because he dared not show his anger before the elder. However, when they had left he dealt the Professor a violent blow on the shoulder with his cane, called him various obscene things, and went out into the street, slamming the gate behind him. He walked straight to the street of the Ouled Naïl, because he was sure of finding the Reguibat there among the girls, spending the money. And there in a tent he found one of them still abed, while an Ouled Naïl washed the tea glasses. He walked in and almost decapitated the man before the latter had even attempted to sit up. Then he threw his razor on the bed and ran out.
The Ouled Naïl saw the blood, screamed, ran out of her tent into the next, and soon emerged from that with four girls who rushed together into the coffeehouse and told the qaouaji who had killed the Reguiba. It was only a matter of an hour before the French military police had caught him at a friend’s house, and dragged him off to the barracks. That night the Professor had nothing to eat, and the next afternoon, in the slow sharpening of his consciousness caused by increasing hunger, he walked aimlessly about th
e courtyard and the rooms that gave onto it. There was no one. In one room a calendar hung on the wall. The Professor watched nervously, like a dog watching a fly in front of its nose. On the white paper were black objects that made sounds in his head. He heard them: “Grande Epicerie du Sabel. Juin. Lundi, Mardi, Mercredi…”
The tiny ink marks of which a symphony consists may have been made long ago, but when they are fulfilled in sound they become imminent and mighty. So a kind of music of feeling began to play in the Professor’s head, increasing in volume as he looked at the mud wall, and he had the feeling that he was performing what had been written for him long ago. He felt like weeping; he felt like roaring through the little house, upsetting and smashing the few breakable objects. His emotion got no further than this one overwhelming desire. So, bellowing as loud as he could, he attacked the house and its belongings. Then he attacked the door into the street, which resisted for a while and finally broke. He climbed through the opening made by the boards he had ripped apart, and still bellowing and shaking his arms in the air to make as loud a jangling as possible, he began to gallop along the quiet street toward the gateway of the town. A few people looked at him with great curiosity. As he passed the garage, the last building before the high mud archway that framed the desert beyond, a French soldier saw him. “Tiens,” he said to himself, “a holy maniac.”
Again it was sunset time. The Professor ran beneath the arched gate, turned his face toward the red sky, and began to trot along the Piste d’In Salah, straight into the setting sun. Behind him, from the garage, the soldier took a potshot at him for good luck. The bullet whistled dangerously near the Professor’s head, and his yelling rose into an indignant lament as he waved his arms more wildly, and hopped high into the air at every few steps, in an access of terror.
The soldier watched a while, smiling, as the cavorting figure grew smaller in the oncoming evening darkness, and the rattling of the tin became a part of the great silence out there beyond the gate. The wall of the garage as he leaned against it still gave forth heat, left there by the sun, but even then the lunar chill was growing in the air.
(1947)
Call at Corazón
BUT WHY WOULD YOU want a little horror like that to go along with us? It doesn’t make sense. You know what they’re like.”
“I know what they’re like,” said her husband. “It’s comforting to watch them. Whatever happens, if I had that to look at, I’d be reminded of how stupid I was ever to get upset.”
He leaned further over the railing and looked intently down at the dock. There were baskets for sale, crude painted toys of hard natural rubber, reptile-hide wallets and belts, and a few whole snakeskins unrolled. And placed apart from these wares, out of the hot sunlight, in the shadow of a crate, sat a tiny furry monkey. The hands were folded, and the forehead was wrinkled in sad apprehensiveness.
“Isn’t he wonderful?”
“I think you’re impossible—and a little insulting,” she replied.
He turned to look at her. “Are you serious?” He saw that she was.
She went on, studying her sandaled feet and the narrow deckboards beneath them: “You know I don’t really mind all this nonsense, or your craziness. Just let me finish.” He nodded his head in agreement, looking back at the hot dock and the wretched tin-roofed village beyond. “It goes without saying I don’t mind all that, or we wouldn’t be here together. You might be here alone…”
“You don’t take a honeymoon alone,” he interrupted.
“You might.” She laughed shortly.
He reached along the rail for her hand, but she pulled it away, saying, “I’m still talking to you. I expect you to be crazy, and I expect to give in to you all along. I’m crazy too, I know. But I wish there were some way I could just once feel that my giving in meant anything to you. I wish you knew how to be gracious about it.”
“You think you humor me so much? I haven’t noticed it.” His voice was sullen.
“I don’t humor you at all. I’m just trying to live with you on an extended trip in a lot of cramped little cabins on an endless series of stinking boats.”
“What do you mean?” he cried excitedly. “You’ve always said you loved the boats. Have you changed your mind, or just lost it completely?”
She turned and walked toward the prow. “Don’t talk to me,” she said. “Go and buy your monkey.”
An expression of solicitousness on his face, he was following her. “You know I won’t buy it if it’s going to make you miserable.”
“I’ll be more miserable if you don’t, so please go and buy it.” She stopped and turned. “I’d love to have it. I really would. I think it’s sweet.”
“I don’t get you at all.”
She smiled. “I know. Does it bother you very much?”
After he had bought the monkey and tied it to the metal post of the bunk in the cabin, he took a walk to explore the port. It was a town made of corrugated tin and barbed wire. The sun’s heat was painful, even with the sky’s low-lying cover of fog. It was the middle of the day and few people were in the streets. He came to the edge of the town almost immediately. Here between him and the forest lay a narrow, slow-moving stream, its water the color of black coffee. A few women were washing clothes; small children splashed. Gigantic gray crabs scuttled between the holes they had made in the mud along the bank. He sat down on some elaborately twisted roots at the foot of a tree and took out the notebook he always carried with him. The day before, in a bar at Pedernales, he had written: “Recipe for dissolving the impression of hideousness made by a thing: Fix the attention upon the given object or situation so that the various elements, all familiar, will regroup themselves. Frightfulness is never more than an unfamiliar pattern.”
He lit a cigarette and watched the women’s hopeless attempts to launder the ragged garments. Then he threw the burning stub at the nearest crab, and carefully wrote: “More than anything else, woman requires strict ritualistic observance of the traditions of sexual behavior. That is her definition of love.” He thought of the derision that would be called forth should he make such a statement to the girl back on the ship. After looking at his watch, he wrote hurriedly: “Modern, that is, intellectual education, having been devised by males for males, inhibits and confuses her. She avenges…”
Two naked children, coming up from their play in the river, ran screaming past him, scattering drops of water over the paper. He called out to them, but they continued their chase without noticing him. He put his pencil and notebook into his pocket, smiling, and watched them patter after one another through the dust.
When he arrived back at the ship, the thunder was rolling down from the mountains around the harbor. The storm reached the height of its hysteria just as they got under way.
She was sitting on her bunk, looking through the open porthole. The shrill crashes of thunder echoed from one side of the bay to the other as they steamed toward the open sea. He lay doubled up on his bunk opposite, reading.
“Don’t lean your head against that metal wall,” he advised. “It’s a perfect conductor.”
She jumped down to the floor and went to the washstand.
“Where are those two quarts of White Horse we got yesterday?”
He gestured. “In the rack on your side. Are you going to drink?”
“I’m going to have a drink, yes.”
“In this heat? Why don’t you wait until it clears, and have it on deck?”
“I want it now. When it clears I won’t need it.”
She poured the whisky and added water from the carafe in the wall bracket over the washbowl.
“You realize what you’re doing, of course.”
She glared at him. “What am I doing?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing, except just giving in to a passing emotional state. You could read, or lie down and doze.”
Holding her glass in one hand, she pulled open the door into the passageway with the other, and went out. The noise of
the slamming door startled the monkey, perched on a suitcase. It hesitated a second, and hurried under its master’s bunk. He made a few kissing sounds to entice it out, and returned to his book. Soon he began to imagine her alone and unhappy on the deck, and the thought cut into the pleasure of his reading. He forced himself to lie still a few minutes, the open book face down across his chest. The boat was moving at full speed now, and the sound of the motors was louder than the storm in the sky.
Soon he rose and went on deck. The land behind was already hidden by the falling rain, and the air smelled of deep water. She was standing alone by the rail, looking down at the waves, with the empty glass in her hand. Pity seized him as he watched, but he could not walk across to her and put into consoling words the emotion he felt.
Back in the cabin he found the monkey on his bunk, slowly tearing the pages from the book he had been reading.
The next day was spent in leisurely preparation for disembarking and changing of boats: in Villalta they were to take a smaller vessel to the opposite side of the delta.
When she came in to pack after dinner, she stood a moment studying the cabin. “He’s messed it up, all right,” said her husband, “but I found your necklace behind my big valise, and we’d read all the magazines anyway.”
“I suppose this represents Man’s innate urge to destroy,” she said, kicking a ball of crumpled paper across the floor. “And the next time he tries to bite you, it’ll be Man’s basic insecurity.”