The Stories of Paul Bowles

by Paul Bowles

  “Ay, Dios!” she cried when she saw Doña Faustina lying with her clothing partially ripped away and her hands lashed together. “Oh, God! Oh, God!”

  But Doña Faustina was calm. As Carlota undid the rope, she said: “He did no harm. But I had to give him the heart.”

  Carlota looked at her sister with horror.

  “You’re mad?” she cried. “The police will be here any minute.”

  “No, no,” Doña Faustina reassured her, and she was right: no police arrived to search the house again. Nothing happened. At the end of two weeks they made another trip, and a little while later still another. Two days after they had returned from this one, Doña Faustina called Carlota into her room and said to her: “There will be a child.”

  Carlota sat down slowly on the bed.

  “How terrible!”

  Doña Faustina smiled. “No, no. It’s perfect. Think. It will have the power of thirty-seven.”

  But Carlota did not seem convinced. “We don’t know about those things,” she said. “It may be a vengeance.”

  “No, no, no,” said Doña Faustina, shaking her head. “But now we must be more careful than ever.”

  “No more trips?” said Carlota hopefully.

  “I shall think about it.”

  A few days later they were both in the rose garden sitting on a bench.

  “I have thought,” said Doña Faustina. “And there will be no more trips.”

  “Good,” replied Carlota.

  Toward the end of the year Doña Faustina was confined to bed, awaiting the birth of the child. She lay back comfortably in the crooked old bed, and had Elena come and sweep out the room for the first time in many months. Even when the floor was clean, the room still reeked of the garbage that had lain there for so long. Carlota had bought a tiny crib in the town; the purchase had awakened interest in their activities on the part of the townspeople.

  When the time arrived, Elena and Carlota were both in the room to assist at the birth. Doña Faustina did not scream once. The baby was washed and laid beside her in the bed.

  “A boy,” said Elena, smiling down at her.

  “Of course,” said Doña Faustina, beginning to nurse him.

  Elena went down to the kitchen to tell José the good news. He shook his head gloomily.

  “Something bad in all his,” he muttered.

  “In all what?” said Elena sharply.

  “Who is the father?” said José, looking up.

  “That is Doña Faustina’s secret,” Elena replied smugly, rather as if it had been her own.

  “Yes. I think so too,” said José meaningfully. ‘I think there is no father, if you want to know. I think she got the child from the Devil.”

  Elena was scandalized. “Shameless!” she cried. “How can you say such a thing?”

  “I have reasons,” said José darkly. And he would say no more.

  Things went smoothly at the inn. Several months passed. The baby had been named Jesus Maria and was in perfect health—“un torito,” said Elena, “a real little bull.”

  “Of course,” Doña Faustina had replied on that occasion. “He has the power of thirty-seven…” Exactly then Carlota had been taken with a violent fit of coughing which managed to cover the rest of the sentence. But Elena had noticed nothing.

  The rainy season had finished again, and the bright days of sunlight and green leaves had come. José went in search of fruit once more, wandering down through the garden, crouching over most of the time to creep beneath the hanging walls of vines and tendrils. Again one day he cut his way to the tank, and stood on the edge of it looking toward the ramp, and this time he saw the monster just as it slid forward and disappeared beneath the surface of the water. His mouth dropped open. Only one word came out: “Caimán!”

  He stood still for several minutes looking down at the dark water. Then he edged along the side of the tank to the place where the path had been the year before. It had completely disappeared. No one had been to the tank in many months; there was no indication that such a corridor had ever existed there in the mass of vegetation. He returned the way he had come.

  It was a scandal, thought José, that such a beast should be living on Doña Faustina’s property, and he determined to speak to her about it immediately. He found her in the kitchen talking with Elena. From his face she saw that something was wrong, and fearful perhaps that he was going to say just what he did say a moment later, she tried to get him out of the room.

  “Come upstairs. I want you to do something for me,” she said, walking over to him and pulling him by the arm.

  But José’s excitement was too great. He did not even notice that she was touching him. “Señora!” he cried. “There is a crocodile in the garden!”

  Doña Faustina looked at him with black hatred. “What are you saying?” she said softly and with a certain concern in her voice, as if the old man needed to be treated with gentleness.

  “An enormous caimán! I saw it!”

  Elena looked at him apprehensively. “He’s ill,” she whispered to Doña Faustina. José heard her. “Ill!” he laughed scornfully. “Come with me and wait a little. I’ll show you who’s ill! Just come!”

  “You say in the garden?” repeated Doña Faustina incredulously. “But where?”

  “In the great tank, señora.”

  “Tank? What tank?”

  “The señora doesn’t know about the tank? There’s a tank down below in the orchard. Sí, sí, sí,” he insisted, seeing Elena’s face. “I’ve been there many times. It’s not far. Come.”

  Inasmuch as Elena seemed to be on the point of removing her apron and, accepting his invitation, Doña Faustina changed her tactics. “Stop this nonsense!” she shouted. “If you’re ill, José, go to bed. Or are you drunk?” She stepped close to him and sniffed suspiciously. “No? Bueno. Elena, give him some hot coffee and let me know in an hour how he is.”

  But in her room Doña Faustina began to worry.

  6

  THEY GOT OUT just in time. Carlota was not sure they ought to leave. “Where shall we go?” she said plaintively.

  “Don’t think about that,” said Doña Faustina. “Think about the police. We must go. I know. What good does it do me to have the power of thirty-seven if I pay no attention to what they tell me? They say we must leave. Today.”

  As they sat in the train, ready to pull out of the station, surrounded by baskets, Doña Faustina held Jesus Maria up to the window and made his tiny arm wave good-by to the town. “The capital is a better place for him in any case,” she whispered.

  They went to a small fonda in the capital, where the second day Doña Faustina conceived the idea of applying at the nearest comisaría for employment as police matron. Her physical build, plus the fact that, as she told the lieutenant, she was afraid of no human being, impressed those who interviewed her, and after various examinations, she was accepted into the force.

  “You’ll see,” she said to Carlota when she returned that evening in high spirits. “From now on we have nothing to worry about. Nothing can harm us. We have new names. We are new people. Nothing matters but Jesus Maria.”

  At that very moment the inn was swarming with police. The news of the caimán, which José in his obstinacy insisted was really there, first to Elena and then to others in the market, had reached them and awakened their curiosity once again. When it was found that there was not one, but a pair of the beasts, in the hidden tank, the police began to look more closely. No one really believed even now that it was Doña Faustina and her sister who were responsible for the disappearance of the dozens of infants who had vanished during the past two or three years, but it was felt that it would do no harm to investigate.

  In a dark corner of the laundry, under one of the washtubs, they found a bundle of bloodstained rags which on closer inspection proved beyond a doubt to be the garments of an infant. Then they discovered other such rags stuffed in the windows to fill the spaces left by broken panes. “They must be J
esus Maria’s,” said the loyal Elena. “The señora will be back in a day or so, and she will tell you.” The police leered.

  The jefe came and looked around the laundry. “She was not stupid,” he said admiringly. “She did the work here, and they”—he pointed out toward the orchard—“took care of the rest.”

  Little by little all the stories from roundabout concurred to make one unified mass of evidence; there was no longer much doubt as to Doña Faustina’s guilt, but finding her was another matter. For a while the papers were full of the affair. Indignant articles were spread across the pages, and always there was the demand that the readers be on the lookout for the two monstrous women. But it turned out that no picture was available of either of them.

  Doña Faustina saw the newspapers, read the articles, and shrugged her shoulders. “All that happened long ago,” she said. “It has no importance now. And even if it had, they could not catch me. I have too much power for them.” Soon the papers spoke of other things.

  Fifteen years passed quietly. Jesus Maria, who was unusually bright and strong for his age, was offered a position as servant in the home of the Chief of Police. He had seen the boy about with his mother for several years, and liked him. This was a great triumph for Doña Faustina.

  “I know you will be a great man,” she told Jesus Maria, “and will never bring dishonor upon us.”

  But eventually he did, and Doña Faustina was inconsolable.

  After three years he grew bored with his menial work, and went into the army, carrying with him a recommendation from his employer to a close friend, a certain colonel who saw to it that Jesus Maria was pleasantly treated in the barracks. Everything went well for him; he was constantly promoted, so that by the time he was twenty-five he had become a colonel himself. It may be observed that to be a colonel in the Mexican army is not so great an attainment, nor is it necessarily a sign of exceptional merit. However, there is little doubt that Jesus Maria’s military career would have continued its upward course, had he not happened to be in Zacatecas at the time of the raids on the villages thereabout by Fermin Figueroa and his band. As one more privilege in the endless chain of favors granted him by his superiors he was put in charge of the punitive expedition that was sent out in pursuit of Figueroa. Jesus Maria could not have been completely without ability, nonetheless, since on the third day out he succeeded in taking the leader prisoner along with thirty-six of his men.

  No one ever really knew what happened in the small mountain village where the capture took place, save that Figueroa and the bandits had all been tied up in a sheep corral, ready to be shot, and when a few hours later a corporal had arrived with six soldiers to carry out the execution, the corral was empty. And it was even said, after Jesus Maria had been stripped of his rank, that a sheepherder had seen him enter the corral in the bright afternoon sunlight when everyone else was asleep, loosen the ropes that bound Figueroa, and then hand him his knife, whereupon he turned his back and walked away. Few believed the sheepherder’s story: colonels do not do such things. Still, it was agreed that he had been inexcusably careless, and that it was entirely his fault that the thirty-seven bandits had escaped and thus lived to continue their depredations.

  The evening Jesus Maria arrived back at his barracks in the capital, he stood alone in the latrine looking at himself in the fly-specked mirror. Slowly he began to smile, watching the movements of his facial muscles. “No,” he said, and tried again. He opened his eyes wider and smiled with all his might. The man’s face had looked something like that; he would never be able to get it exactly, but he would go on trying because it made him happy to recall that moment—the only time he had ever known how it feels to have power.

  (1950)

  The Successor

  IN THE MIDDLE OF the afternoon, lying on his mat, Ali sneezed. A hen that had been drowsing near him screeched and rushed out of the room to a circle of bare dusty ground under the fig tree, where she settled. He listened a while to the distant intermittent thunder in the mountains to the south of the town; then, deciding that he would be able to sleep no more until night, he sat up.

  Beyond the partition of upright reeds his brother was talking to El Mehdi, one of the drivers of the carriages that brought people up from the town. From the terrace of the café the eye could wander over the tortured red earth with its old olive trees to the dark caves that lay just below the walls of the town.

  The view was something visitors usually considered worth seeing. They would take one of the ancient carriages that waited down in the town and be driven up along the winding road that baked all day in the sunlight; it took less than an hour to reach the café. There they would sit under the trellis in the shade of the vines and drink their tea or their beer. The driver would give the horses water and before twilight they would start back.

  On Sundays many carriages and cars came; the cafe was full all day.

  His brother, who owned the café and kept the accounts and the money, claimed that he made more on a Sunday than during all the rest of the week. Ali was skeptical of that, not because the statement seemed incredible, but simply because his brother had made it. There was the overwhelming fact that his brother was older than he and therefore had inherited the café from their father. In the face of such crushing injustice there was nothing to be done. Nor was anything his brother had to say of interest to him. His brother was like the weather: one watched it and was a victim of its whims. It was written, but that did not mean it could not change.

  He leaned against the wall matting and stretched. His brother and El Mehdi were drinking beer; he was certain of it by the way their voices died down when there was any sound outside the room. They wanted to be able to hide the glasses swiftly if someone should come near the door, so they were listening as they talked. The idea of this childish secrecy disgusted him; he spat on the floor by his feet, and began to rub his bare toe back and forth in the little white mass of saliva.

  The thunder rolled in the south mountains, no louder but longer than before. It was a little early in the season for rain, but the rain might come. He reached for the water jug and drank lengthily. Then he sat quite still for a while, his eyes fixed on the framed portrait of the Sultan that hung on the opposite wall.

  The thunder came again, still scarcely any louder, but this time unmistakably nearer, the sound more intimate in its movements. It was like a person taking pains to cǫnceal his approach. There was a clapping of hands on the terrace, and a man’s voice called: “Garçon!” His brother went out, and he heard El Mehdi gulp the rest of his beer and follow him. Presently a woman’s voice remarked that it was going to rain. Then El Mehdi shouted, “Eeeeee!” to his horses, and the carriage began to creak as it started down the road.

  After the customers had left, his brother remained outside. Ali went silently to the door, saw him standing by the parapet, his hands behind him, looking out over the town. At the other end of the terrace squatted the boy who washed the glasses and swept the floor. His eyes were closed. There was very little sound from the town below. Occasionally a bird flew out from the hill behind and let itself drop down toward the lower land. The sky was dark. His brother turned and saw him standing in the doorway.

  “You slept?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s going to rain.”

  “Incha’ Allah.”

  “Listen.” His brother’s hand went up and he turned his face sideways. Very faintly from the town came the sound of the small boys’ voices as they ran through the streets chanting the song to Sidi Bou Chta, the song they always sang just before the rain.

  “Yes.”

  Now the thunder was over the nearest mountains. His brother came toward the door and Ali stepped aside to let him pass.

  “We’ll close up,” said his brother. He called to the boy, who began to carry the chairs and tables into the room where they were kept piled. Ali and his brother sat on the mattress and yawned. When the boy had finished he closed the door, snapped the padloc
k and came into the front part of the room, where he set to fanning the fire with the bellows. Presently he brought them each a glass of tea.

  “Go to the house. We’ll eat early,” said his brother. The boy went out.

  A crash of thunder directly above them made them look at each other. Ali said: “I’ll close the house. The boy is an idiot.”

  The little house was behind the café, built against the low cliff, just beneath the road. When he got to the fig tree he heard his brother talking to someone. Surprised, he stopped and listened. Great drops of rain began to fall here and there onto the dust. It was hard to hear what his brother was saying. He went on to the house.

  No one lived there but the two of them and the boy, who slept outside. It was never very clean. If only his brother had been willing to get married, Ali would have had an excuse for going away. Until then, it would be impossible, because his father had told him to stay and help his brother with the café. All he got for staying was a dirty room and the bad food the boy cooked for them.

  On the other hand, when his brother walked through the Moulay Abdallah quartier he was greeted by the women of every house. The money went on bracelets for them, and on wine and beer for his friends. Besides these women, with whom he spent most of his nights, there was always a young girl of good reputation whom he had hopes of seducing; usually he failed in these endeavors, but his setbacks only increased his interest.

  At the moment it was Kinza, the daughter of a shopkeeper from Taza, whose favors he sought. She had granted him short conversations in unfrequented alleys, with a maidservant standing a few feet away; he had met her one twilight outside Bab Segma and put his arm around her (after persuading the servant to stand facing in the other direction), and he even had had a tête-à-tête alone with her in a room behind a café, when he had lifted her veil and kissed her. But she had refused any further intimacies, threatening, if he used force, to call the servant who was outside the door. After accepting a good many gifts she had promised him another such rendezvous, so he still had hopes.