The Stories of Paul Bowles

by Paul Bowles

  He stepped ahead several paces and decided to call out. “Hola!” The man wheeled about, jumped over the nearer side of the boat (the water was extremely shallow) and came running up to him.

  Without greeting him, taking him perhaps for someone else, the man said: “Tapiama? Vas a Tapiama?” The photographer, never having heard of Tapiama, stuttered a bit and finally said, “Sí,” whereupon the other seized his arm and pulled him along to the edge of the water. “The tide’s all the way out. We’ll start in a minute.”

  He could see two other people in the craft, lying flat on the floor, one on each side of the fire, as far from its heat as possible. The photographer squatted down and removed his shoes and socks, then waded to the boat. When he stood in the center of it (the fire was still crackling brightly) he turned and watched the naked man loosening the rope that held the craft in place.

  “The whole thing is absurd.” He could only distrust the very naturalness with which all this was coming about—the indifference to his unexpected arrival on the part of the two passengers, and perhaps even more, the highly suspect readiness of the boatmen to take off the moment he had appeared. He told himself, “Things don’t happen this way,” but since beyond a doubt they were doing so, any questioning of the process could lead only in the direction of paranoia. He dropped to the floor of the boat and pulled out his packet of Ovalados. The naked boatman, the coil of dripping rope around his black forearm like a bracelet, sprang aboard, and with his big toe nudged one of the supine passengers who stirred, rose to his knees, and glanced about with annoyance. “Where is it?” he demanded. Without replying, the boatman handed him the shorter of two poles that had lain along the gunwale. Together they began to propel the punt along the invisible surface of the water. The frogs’ canticle and the fire’s flare filled the night.

  Having answered “Sí” to the Tapiama question, the photographer felt he could scarcely take the retrogressive step of asking “What is Tapiama?” or “Where is Tapiama?” And so, much as he would have liked to know, he decided to wait. This shallow body of water beneath them—estuary, lagoon? River more likely, since the boatman had said the tide was out. But not the stream whose troubled passage among the boulders he had heard from his bed.

  They pushed on, now and then passing beneath clumps of high vegetation where the frogs’ song was briefly covered by another sound, inexplicable and brutal, like the sudden tearing of a vast sheet of strong linen. From time to time something solid and heavy splashed nearby, as if a man had fallen into the water. And occasionally the other passenger raised himself on one elbow and without too much effort managed to revive the dying fire with another dry palm-leaf.

  Probably it was less than an hour before they came to a landing in the mud. The two passengers leapt out and hurried away into the darkness. The boatman, after carefully donning a pair of short underpants, tapped the photographer on the arm and asked him for sixty centavos. He gave him seventy-five and clambered out into the soft mud, his shoes in his hand.

  “Wait a minute,” said the man. “I’ll go with you.” The photographer was pleased. When the boatman, looking blacker now in his white shorts, had secured the punt to an upright log driven into the mud, he led the way upward through a tangle of undergrowth, saying casually at one point: “Are you going across tomorrow?”

  “Across? No.”

  “Aren’t you here for the company?” The voice implied that to be here otherwise than for the company laid one open to unnameable suspicion.

  The time had come to be truthful, he feared, although he did not relish the position he knew it would put him in. “I never heard of the company,” he said. “I just arrived in Rio Martillo tonight. What sort of company?”

  “Sugar,” said the other. Then he stood still in the dark and spoke slowly: “Entonces—why have you come to Tapiama? They don’t like millonarios here, you know.” Understanding that this was the contemptuous coastal term for Americans, the photographer quickly lied. “I’m Danish,” he said, but feeling that his voice lacked conviction he immediately added: “Do we go through any more mud, or can I put my shoes on?”

  The man had started up again. “Wash your feet at the cantina, if you like,” he told him over his shoulder. In another minute they were there: all in the dimness an open space, a dozen or so palm-leaf huts at one end of it, at the other a platform which must be a loading dock, the empty night and openness of water behind it; and half-way between the dock and the cluster of dwellings, the cantina, itself only a very large hut without a front wall.

  A faint light came from within; there was no sound but the frogs on all sides, and the occasional tearing rasp in the branches high overhead. “Why is the place open at this hour?” demanded the photographer. The boatman stopped in the middle of the clearing and adjusted his shorts briefly. “Don Octavio runs it from six in the morning until six at night. His brother runs it from six at night until six in the morning. The company lets the men off from work at different hours. They come here with their pago and spend it. They like it better here than at home. Not so many mosquitoes.” It could have been the photographer’s imagination that made the man’s voice sound bitter as he spoke the last words. They continued across the clearing and stepped into the cantina.

  There was no floor; the ground was covered with white sand. A counter of boards had been built diagonally across a far corner. Here an oil lamp smoldered and two men stood drinking. Wooden packing-cases were scattered here and there, some standing on end with empty beer bottles on them, and others on their sides, to be used as seats. “Muy triste,” commented the boatman, glancing around. Then he went behind the bar and disappeared through a small door in the wall there. Apart from the two at the bar, who had ceased their conversation and now stood staring at the photographer, there was no one else in the place. “When in doubt, speak,” he told himself, advancing toward them, although it occurred to him that he might just as well have made it, “When in doubt, keep quiet,” even as he opened his mouth to say, “Buenas noches,” for their expressions did not alter in any manner that he could detect. For a full three seconds they continued to gaze at him before they replied, which they then did more or less simultaneously. These two had nothing in common, he noted: one was a soldier in uniform, an Indian boy of perhaps eighteen, the other a tired-looking mulatto civilian of indeterminate age. Or perhaps—the idea came to him as he put his elbow on the bar with a show of casualness—they did have at least a common antagonism, now that he had entered the cantina. “Oh, well, I’m barefoot and my shoes are covered with mud,” he thought.

  “Hay alguien?” he said aloud to the palm-leaf wall behind the bar. The two neither resumed their conversation nor spoke further with him, and he did not turn his head again toward them. Presently the small door opened and a fat man pushed through. He stood with his hands outspread on the bar, his eyebrows raised in anticipation. “I’ll have a cumbiamba,” said the photographer, remembering the name of the coastal region’s favorite drink, a herbal concoction famous for its treacherous effects.

  It was foul-tasting but strong. The second one seemed less objectionable. He walked across to the open side of the cantina and sat down on a packing-case, looking out at the formless night. The two at the bar were talking again in low tones. It was not long before five men appeared from the platform end of the clearing; they straggled in and stood at the bar, laughing as they waited for their drinks. All of them were black, and wore only underpants, like the boatman. Now a mulatto girl with gold teeth came through the little door behind the bar and joined them. Almost immediately, however, she became aware of the photographer sitting by himself, and with her hands on her hips, half dancing, she made her way across the open space toward him. When she arrived, she squatted down beside him grinning and with one thin yellow hand reached out to unfasten his fly. His reaction was instantaneous and automatic: he drew back his leg and kicked her full in the breast, so that she toppled over backward in silence onto the sand. The noise of the resu
lting laughter at the bar was not sufficient to cover her thin voice, made sharp by rage: “Qué bruto, tú! Pendejo!” Hands on hips again, she retreated to the bar and was given a beer by one of the workmen. Although the photographer had not meant to kick her, he felt no regret at the turn the incident had taken. The cumbiambas seemed to be having their effect; he was beginning to feel very well. He sat still a while, tapping rhythms on the side of his empty glass. Soon more Negro workmen came in and joined the others at the bar. One carried a guitar on which he set to work strumming a syncopated chordal accompaniment for a melody which failed to appear. However, it was music of a sort, and everyone was pleased with it. Perhaps awakened by the sound, the dogs of the village had now started an angry chorus of barking; this was particularly audible to the photographer who sat at the entrance, and it bothered him. He rose and moved over to an empty crate alongside the opposite wall, resting his head against a rough-hewn pole that was one of the supports of the roof. A foot or so above his head there was a strange object dangling from a nail. Now and then he rolled his eyes upward and studied it.

  All at once he jumped up and began violently to brush the back of his neck and head. The pole behind him was swarming with tiny ants, thousands upon thousands of them: someone had hung a small crushed coral snake over the nail, and they had come to eat the flesh. It took him a good while not to feel any more of the insects running over his back; during that time two other individuals had come into the cantina (whether from the outside or through the door behind the counter, he had not noticed), and now sat between him and the bar in such a fashion that both of them faced him. The old man looked Nordic, the innocent-looking one-legged boy with him could be Spanish; the old man was telling the boy a humorous story, leaning toward him with great interest, occasionally poking his arm with a forefinger to drive home a point, but the boy was distraughtly making designs in the sand with the tip of his crutch.

  The photographer stood up; he had never before had such an effect from two drinks. “A very peculiar sensation,” he said to himself. “Very peculiar,” he repeated aloud under his breath as he started toward the bar to order another. It was not that he felt drunk so much as that he had become someone who was not he, someone for whom the act of living was a thing so different from what he had imagined it could be, that he was left stranded in a region of sensation far from any he had heretofore known. It was not unpleasant: it was merely indefinable. “Dispénseme,” he said to a tall Negro in pink and white striped BVD’s and he handed his empty glass to the fat man. He wanted to see what went into a cumbiamba, but the barman did everything quickly beneath the counter and handed him back the glass, brimming with the slightly frothy mixture. He took a good swallow of it and set it down, turning a little to his right as he did so. Standing beside him was the Indian soldier, his cap at an angle atop a pre-Columbian face. “Why does the army put such big visors on them?” he wondered.

  He saw that the soldier was about to speak. “Whatever he says is going to turn out to be an insult,” he warned himself, in the hope that this would help him to avoid possible anger later.

  “Do you like this place?” the soldier said; his voice was silken.

  “Es simpático. Yes, I like it.”

  “Why?” The dogs outside had come nearer; he could hear their yapping now above the laughter.

  “Can you tell me why they hung that dead snake on the wall there?” he found himself asking, and supposed it was to change the subject. But the soldier was going to be even more boring than he had feared. “I asked you why you like this cantina,” he insisted.

  “And I told you it was simpático. Isn’t that enough?”

  The soldier tilted his head back and looked down his nose.

  “Far from being enough,” he replied, his manner pedantic, his expression infuriating.

  The photographer returned to his drink, picked it up, slowly finished it off. Then he pulled out his cigarettes and offered one to the other. With exaggerated deliberateness the soldier reached for the cigarette, took it, and began to tap it on the counter. The man playing the guitar at last had started to sing in a small falsetto voice along with it, but most of the words were in a dialect the photographer could not understand. When the cigarettes were lighted, he found himself wondering who had lighted them—he or the soldier.

  “Just where did you come from?” asked the soldier.

  He was not bothering to answer, but the soldier misunderstood even this. “I can see you’re inventing something,” he said, “and I don’t want to hear it.”

  The photographer, disgusted, exclaimed, “Aaah!” and ordered another cumbiamba. This most recent one had done something extraordinary to him: he felt that he had become very precise, thin and hard, an object made of enamel or some similar material, something other than a living being, but intensely conscious all the same. “Four ought to do the trick,” he thought.

  The empty glass was in his hand, the fat barman was staring at him, and at that point he had not the slightest idea whether he had already drunk the fourth one or whether it was still the moment just after he had ordered it. He felt himself laughing, but he could not hear whether any sound was coming out or not. The mangled snake, seething with ants, had upset him a little; recognizing it, he had then been made aware of its smell, which he was not sure he had escaped even now. Here at the bar the kerosene lamp smoked heavily; its strong fumes choked him. “Gracias a Dios,” he confided to the barman, handing him the glass.

  The old man who had been sitting on the crate behind them rose and came vaguely toward the bar. “Where did this come from?” said the photographer, laughing apologetically, looking at the full glass in his hand. The frenzied dogs out in the clearing yapped and howled, an exasperating sound. “Qué tienen esos perros?” he demanded of the soldier.

  The old man had stopped beside them. “Say, Jack, I don’t mean to butt in or anything,” he began. He was bald, sunburned; he wore a fishnet shirt. The furrows between his ribs showed as parallel shadows, and irregular tufts of gray hair waved out from his chest between the meshes of the shirt. He stretched his lips in a smile, showing naked white gums. The soldier’s stance became over-nonchalant; he stared at the newcomer, open hatred suddenly in his eyes, and gently blew the smoke from his cigarette into the old man’s face.

  “You from Milwaukee? Siddown.”

  “In a little while, thanks,” said the photographer.

  “A little while?” the old man echoed incredulously, running his hand over the top of his head. Then he called out in Spanish to the one-legged boy. The photographer was thinking: “This is not going to work out right, at all. It’s just not going to work out.” He wished the Negro would stop singing and the dogs would stop barking. He looked at the glass in his hand, full of what looked like soapsuds. Someone tapped him on the shoulder. “Say, bud, lemme give you a little advice.” The old man again. “There’s money in this country if you know where to look. But the guy that finds it is the guy that sticks to his own kind, if you know what I mean.” He put his face nearer and lowered his voice. Three skeletal fingers touched the photographer’s arm. “You take it from me, from one white man to another. I’m tellin’ you!” The three fingers, dark with tobacco stain, lifted themselves, trembled, and dropped back. “These guys all mean trouble from the word go.”

  The boy having both gathered up his crutch and managed to rise from where he had been sitting, had now arrived at the bar. “Take a look at this, Jack,” the old man said. “Show him,” he told the boy in Spanish, and the boy, leaning on his crutch, bent over and rolled up the right leg of his ragged khaki shorts until he had exposed the stump of his amputated leg. It was not far below the groin; the scar tissue had puckered and wrinkled curiously in countless tiny convolutions. “See?” cried the old man. “Two hundred and sixty tons of bananas went over that. Feel it.”

  “You feel it,” said the photographer, wondering how it was possible for him to go on standing and talking exactly as if he were a person
like the rest of them. (Could it be that what had happened to him did not show?) He turned his head and looked towards the entrance. The mulatto girl was vomiting just outside. With a cry the barman rushed across and furiously pushed her farther away, out into the clearing. When he came back in he was theatrically holding his nose. “That prostitute ape!” he yelled. “In another minute we’d have had the dogs inside here.”

  The boy was still looking expectantly at the old man, to see if it was time to lower his trouser leg. “You think he got a centavo from them?” said the old man sadly. “Hah!”

  The photographer had begun to suspect that something had gone very wrong inside him. He felt sick, but since he was no longer a living creature he could not conceive it in those terms. He had shut his eyes and put his hand over his face. “It’s going around backward,” he said. The undrunk cumbiamba was in his other hand.

  Saying the sentence had made it more true. It was definitely going around backward. The important thing was to remember that he was alone here and that this was a real place with real people in it. He could feel how dangerously easy it would be to go along with the messages given him by his senses, and dismiss the whole thing as a nightmare in the secret belief that when the breaking-point came he could somehow manage to escape by waking himself up. A little unsteadily he set his drink down on the counter. An argument which had arisen a while ago between the Indian soldier and his sad companion had now reached its noisy stage, with the companion attempting to drag the soldier away from the bar against his will, and the soldier, his two booted legs firmly apart, breathing rapidly, noisily in his resistance. Suddenly there was a small, shining knife in his right hand, and his face assumed the look of a little boy about to burst into tears. The old man quickly moved around to the photographer’s other side. “That guy’s bad news in any language,” he muttered, gesturing nervously to the boy with the crutch as he bade him move out of the way.