by Paul Bowles
She faced him, there in the burning sunlight. “If he were white, he’d have a different face. After all, it’s the features that give a face expression. And I’m willing to bet anything that if he keeps the men in order he does it through fear.”
“I don’t think it’s likely,” he said. “But even so, why not?”
She went inside and stood in the doorway to her room. The maid had changed the position of her rug and mattress, so that they both lay at a ninety-degree angle to the way they had been arranged before. This disturbed her, although she did not know why.
II
My Dear Dorothy:
I was shocked to read the letter you wrote after your accident. Lucky you weren’t going fast. By the time you get this your leg will probably be in good condition. I hope so. I’m always surprised that any mail at all can get here, as it’s really the end of the world. When I think that the nearest town to the town where we are is Timbuctoo, I get a sort of sinking feeling. It’s only momentary, however. What I have to remember is that I’m here because at the time it seemed an ideal solution, and all things considered, really the only thing to do. What else would have got me out of that depression that came over me after the divorce, except a long stay in a sanatorium. And who knows? Even that might not have done the trick. And financially it would have been ausgeschlossen, in any case. With Tom coming on his Guggenheim this seemed perfect. The idea was to get away from everything that could remind me in any way of what I’d been going through. This is certainly the antithesis of New York and of any place you can think of in the U.S.A. I was worried about food, but so far neither of us has been sick. Probably the important thing is that the cook is civilized enough to believe in the existence of bacteria, and is very careful to sterilize whatever needs sterilizing. The Niger River Valley is no place to come down with any disease. Fortunately we can get French mineral water for drinking. If its delivery should be cut off, or if it should not arrive in time, we’d have to drink what there is here, boiled and with Halazone. All this may sound silly, but living here makes one into a hypochondriac. You may wonder why I don’t describe the place, tell you what it looks like. I can’t. I don’t believe I could be objective about it, which would mean that when I finished you’d have less of an idea what it’s like than before I started. You’ll have to wait until you see what Tom does with it, although he hasn’t yet painted any landscapes at all—only what he sees in the kitchen: vegetables, fruit, fish, and a few sketches of natives bathing in the river. You’ll see it all when we get back.
Elaine Duncan is such a nut. Imagine her asking me if I don’t miss Peter. How does a mind like that work? At first I thought she was pulling my leg, but then I realized she was perfectly serious. I suppose it’s just her kind of sentimentality. She knows what I was going through and what it cost me to make the final decision. She also knows me well enough to realize that once I’d decided to get out of it, it was because I understood I couldn’t stay any longer with Peter, and most assuredly wasn’t of two minds about it. It’s clear she’s hoping I regret having got out of the marriage. I’m afraid she’s in for a big disappointment. At last I feel free. I can have my own thoughts, without anybody offering me a penny for them. Tom works all day in silence, and doesn’t notice whether I talk or not. It’s so refreshing to be with somebody who pays no attention to you, doesn’t notice whether you’re there or not. All feelings of guilt evaporate. This is all very personal, of course. But in a place like this you become autoanalytical.
I do hope you’re completely recovered from the effects of the accident, and that you’ll keep warm. Here it’s generally just a little over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. You can imagine how much energy I have!
Devotedly,
Anita
III
NIGHTS WERE SLOW in passing. Sometimes as she lay in the silent blackness it seemed to her that the night had come down and seized the earth so tightly that daylight would be unable to show through. It could already be noon of the next day and no one would know it. People would go on sleeping as long as it remained dark, Tom in the next room, and Johara and the watchman whose name she never could remember, in one of the empty rooms across the courtyard. They were very quiet, those two. They retired early and they rose early, and the only sound she ever heard from their side of the house was an occasional dry cough from Johara. It bothered her that there was no door to her room. They had hung a dark curtain over the doorway between Tom’s room and hers, so that the light of his roaring Coleman lamp would not bother her. He liked to sit up reading until ten o’clock, but immediately after the evening meal she was always somnolent, and had to go to bed, where she would sleep heavily for two or three hours before she awoke to lie in the dark, hoping that it was nearly morning. The crowing of cocks near and far was meaningless. They crowed at any time during the night.
In the beginning it had seemed quite natural that Johara and her husband should be black. In New York there had always been two or three black servants around the house. There she thought of them as shadows of people, not really at home in a country of whites, not sharing the same history or culture and thus, in spite of themselves, outsiders. Slowly, however, she had begun to see that these people here were masters of their surroundings, completely at home with the culture of the place. It was to be expected, of course, but it was something of a shock to realize that the blacks were the real people and that she was the shadow, and that even if she went on living here for the rest of her life she would never understand how their minds worked.
IV
Dear Elaine:
I should have written you ages ago when I first got here, but I’ve been under the weather for the past few weeks—not physically, really, except that the spirit and the flesh aren’t separated. When I’m depressed, everything in my body seems to go to pieces. I suppose that’s normal, perhaps it isn’t. God knows.
It’s true, when I first looked out at the flat land that went on and on to the horizon, I felt my depression dissolving in all that brightness. It didn’t seem possible that there could be so much light. And the stillness that surrounded each little sound! You feel that the town is built on a cushion of silence. That was something new—an amazing sensation, and I was very conscious of it. I felt that all this was exactly what I needed, to get my mind off the divorce and the rest of the trouble. There was nothing that had to be done, no one I had to see. I was my own master, and didn’t even have to bother with the servants if I didn’t want to. It was like camping out in a big empty house. Of course in the end I did have to bother with the servants, because they did everything wrong. Tom would tell me: Leave them alone. They know what they’re doing. I suppose they do know what they mean to do, but they don’t seem to be able to do it. If I find fault with the food, the cook looks bewildered and aggrieved. This is because she knows she’s famous in the Gao region as the woman whose cuisine pleases the Europeans. She listens and agrees, but in the manner of one soothing a deranged invalid. I suspect she thinks of me in just such terms.
By being completely aware of, and focusing his attention on the smallest details of the life going on around him, Tom manages to objectify the details, and so he remains outside, and far from them. He paints whatever is in front of his eyes at any moment, in the kitchen, or the market, or the edge of the river: vegetables and fruit being sliced, often with the knife still embedded in the flesh, bathers and fish from the Niger. My trouble is that this life sweeps me along with it in spite of me. I mean that I am being forced to participate in some sort of communal consciousness that I really hate. I don’t know anything about these people. They’re all black, but nothing like “our” blacks in the States. They’re simpler, more friendly and straightforward, and at the same time very remote.
Something is wrong with night here. Logic would have it that night is only the time when the sky’s door is open and one can look out on infinity, and thus that the spot from which one looks out is of no importance. Night is night, no matter from wher
e perceived. Night here is no different from night somewhere else. It’s only logic that says this. Day is huge and bright and it’s impossible to see farther than the sun. I realize that by “here” I don’t mean “here in the middle of the Sahara on the banks of the River Niger” but “here in this house where I’m living.” Here in this house with the floors of smooth earth where the servants go barefoot and you never hear anyone coming until he’s already in the room.
I’ve been trying to get used to this crazy life here, but it takes some getting used to, I can tell you. There are many rooms in the house. In fact, it’s enormous, and the rooms are big. And they look even larger, without furniture, of course. There is no furniture at all except for the mats on the floors of the rooms where we sleep and our suitcases and the wardrobes where we hang the few clothes we have with us. It was because of these wardrobes that the house was available, because they made it count as a “furnished house,” and that made the rent so high that no one wanted to take it. By our standards, of course, it’s very cheap, and God knows it should be, with no electricity and no water, without even a chair to sit in or a table to eat at, or, for that matter, a bed to sleep in.
Naturally I knew it was going to be hot, but I hadn’t imagined this sort of heat—solid, no change from day to day, no breeze. And remember, no water, so to take even a sponge bath is an entire production number. Tom is angelic about the water. He lets me have about all we can get hold of. He says females need more than men do. I don’t know whether that’s an insult or not, and I don’t care as long as I can get the water. He also says it’s not hot. But it is. I don’t know how to convert Centigrade into Fahrenheit, but if you do, change 46° C into F., and you’ll see that I’m right. 46° was what my thermometer registered this morning.
I don’t know which is worse, day or night. In the daytime, of course, it’s a little hotter, although not much. They don’t believe in windows here, so the house is dark inside, and that gives you a shut-in feeling. Tom does a lot of his work on the roof in the sun. He claims he doesn’t mind it, but I can’t believe it’s not bad for him. I know it would be the end of me if I sat up there the way he does, hours at a time and with no break.
I had to laugh when I read your question about how I felt after the divorce, whether I “still cared” a little for Peter. What a crazy question! How could I still care for him? The way I feel now, if I never see another man it will be too soon. I’m really fed up with their hypocrisy, and I’d willingly send them all to Hell. Not Tom, of course, because he’s my brother, even though trying to live with him under these conditions isn’t easy. But trying to live at all in this place is hard. You can’t imagine how remote from everything it makes you feel.
The mail service here is not perfect. How could it be? But it’s not impossible. I do get letters, so be sure and write me. After all, the post office is this end of the umbilical cord that keeps me attached to the world. (I almost added: and to sanity.)
I hope all is well with you, and that New York hasn’t grown any worse than it was last year; although I’m sure it has.
Much love, and write.
Anita
V
AT FIRST there would be memories—small, precise images complete with the sounds and odors of a certain incident in a certain summer. They had not meant anything to her at the time of experiencing them, but now she strove desperately to stay with them, to relive them and not let them fade into the enveloping darkness where a memory lost its contours and was replaced by something else. The formless entities which followed on the memories were menacing because indecipherable, and her heartbeat and breathing accelerated at this point. “As though I’d had coffee,” she thought, although she never drank it. Whereas a few moments earlier she had been living in the past, she was now fully surrounded by the present instant, face to face with a senseless fear. Her eyes would fly open, to fix on what was not there in the blackness.
She was not fond of the food, claiming that it was much too hot with red pepper and at the same time without flavor.
“And you realize,” he said, “that we’ve got the most famous cook in these parts.”
She remarked that it was hard to believe.
They were eating lunch on the roof, not in the sun, but in the vicious glare of a white sheet stretched above them. There was an expression of distaste on her face.
“I feel sorry for the girl who marries you,” she said presently.
“It’s an abstraction,” he told her. “Don’t even think about it. Let her pity herself once she’s married to me.”
“Oh, she will, all right. I can promise you that.”
After a fairly long silence he looked at her.
“What’s making you so belligerent all of a sudden?”
“Belligerent? I was just thinking how hard it is for you to show sympathy. You know I haven’t been feeling too well lately. But have I ever noticed a shred of sympathy?” (She wondered, too late, if she ought to have made this admission.)
“You’re perfectly well,” he said, adopting his gruff manner.
VI
Dear Peg:
It’s evident that Tom is doing everything in his power to keep any day from being exactly like the preceding one. He arranges a walk down to the river or a jaunt into “town,” as he calls the nondescript collection of shacks around the market. No matter where we go, I’m expected to snap pictures. Some of it can be fun. The rest is tiring. It’s quite clear that he does all this to keep me from boredom, which means it’s a kind of therapy, which in turn means that he believes I might become a mental case and is afraid. This I find very troubling. It means that there is something between us that can’t be mentioned. It’s embarrassing and makes for tension. I’d like to be able to turn to him and say: “Relax. I’m not about to crack up.” But I can pretty well imagine the disastrous effect such a straightforward statement would have. For him it would only be proof that I was not certain of my mental stability, and of course, all he needs to ruin his year is a jittery sister. Why should there be any question of my being in anything but the best of health? I suppose it’s simply because I’m terrified that he’ll suspect I’m not. I can’t bear the idea of being a spoilsport, or of his thinking that I am.
We were walking, Tom and I, along the edge of the river yesterday. A wide beach of hard dirt. He tries to get me to walk nearer the water where the ground is softer, saying it’s easier on the bare feet. God knows what parasites live in this water. It seems dangerous enough to me to go barefoot anywhere around here, without going into the water. Tom has very little patience with me when I take care of myself. He claims it’s just part of my generally negative approach to life. Being used to his critical remarks, I let them slide off my duck’s back. He did say one thing which stuck in my mind, which was that extreme self-centeredness invariably caused dissatisfaction and poor health. It’s clear he considers me a paragon of egocentricity. So today when I went up onto the roof I faced him with it. The dialogue went something like this:
“You seem to be under the impression that I’m incapable of being interested in anything besides myself.”
“Yes. That’s the impression I’m under.”
“Well, you don’t have to be so cavalier about it.”
“As long as we’ve started this conversation we might as well push ahead with it. Tell me then; what are you interested in?”
“When you’re asked point-blank like that, it’s hard to pluck something out of the air, you know.”
“But don’t you see that that means you can’t think of anything? And that’s because you have no interests. Apparently you don’t realize feigning interest, kindles interest. Like the old French saying about love being born through making the gestures of love.”
“So you think salvation lies in pretending?”
“Yes, and I’m serious. You’ve never yet looked at my work, much less thought about it.”
“I’ve looked at everything you’ve done here.”
“Lo
oked at. But seen?”
“How do you expect me to appreciate your paintings? I have a poor visual sense. You know that.”
“I don’t care whether you appreciate them, or even like them. We’re not talking about my paintings. We’re talking about you. That’s just a small example. You could take an interest in the servants and their families. Or how the architecture in the town fits the exigencies of the climate. I realize that’s a pretty ridiculous suggestion, but there are a thousand things to care about.”
“Yes, if you care in the first place. Hard to do if you don’t.”
I knew (or felt pretty certain) when I agreed to come here that I was letting myself in for something unpleasant. I realize that I’m writing now as though there had been some dreadful occurrence, when as a matter of fact nothing whatever has happened. And let’s hope it doesn’t.
Lots of love.
Anita
VII
Hi, Ross! The enclosed shows the view looking south from the roof. It certainly is a lot of nothing. Yet it’s strange how one lone man in such a vast landscape takes on importance. It’s not a place I’d recommend to anybody. I didn’t recommend it even to Anita; she just came. I think she’s happy here—that is, as much as she’s ever happy. Some days she’s crankier than usual, but I disregard that. I don’t think she enjoys celibate life. Too bad she didn’t think of that before she came. Myself, I do very little besides work. I can feel it’s going well. It would take a major act of God to stop me at this point.
Tom
VIII
ONE MORNING WHEN she had finished her breakfast and set her tray on the floor beside her bed, she ran up onto the roof for a little sunlight and fresh air. Normally she was careful not to climb up because Tom sat there most of the day, generally not working, merely sitting. When she once had been thoughtless enough to inquire what he was doing, instead of answering “Communing with nature” or “meditating” as more pretentious painters might have replied, he said: “Getting ideas.” This directness was tantamount to expressing a desire for privacy; so she respected that privacy and seldom went up onto the roof. This morning he gave no sign of minding. “I heard the call to prayer this morning for the first time,” she told him. “It was still dark.”