by Paul Bowles
In the air was the sound of many songbirds: an invisible brook murmured nearby. It was impossible to give him a satisfactory explanation. I shrugged, and said: “The exchange,” doubting that this would satisfy him.
His expression became even more serious. “The exchange. Of course.” We had begun to walk slowly down the road, and we stopped in front of the first cottage. I asked him how long the thatch lasted. Three or four years, he told me, adding that when it began to leak the owner called in his neighbors to help him repair it. “And do they always come?” I inquired.
His eyes grew large with surprise. “Of course they always come!” he exclaimed.
A refusal to help in such work is obviously unthinkable. There was the lowing of a cow nearby, but no cow was visible. I held out my box of State Express to him, and he took another cigarette.
“These are not made in Madeira. They’re from Portugal, aren’t they?”
“No, from England. I got them on the ship from Lisbon.”
“Is your father in Lisbon?”
“No, no. My father is in America.”
“But it was your father who taught you to speak Portuguese.”
It was too much work to explain that not only was my father not Portuguese but that in any case I was not speaking Portuguese. So I said, “Yes”. (I had been through this language routine before. I had discovered that most Portuguese-speaking people understood Spanish perfectly well; I had also found that if I listened carefully I understood Portuguese. Our dialogues, then, had always been in two distinct languages, with no difficulties on either side. The educated people were aware of this, but the rustics, often illiterate, believed I was speaking a dialectal Portuguese.)
The cow lowed again; she seemed practically beside us, but there was still no sign of her. “Where is that cow?” I demanded. He laughed. “In her house,” he replied, indicating a small cottage across the road. And she was there, and it was one of the curiosities of the country – the fact that the Madeirans keep their cattle in individual animal-sized dwellings rather than allowing them to graze the dangerous mountain-side pastures. Each animal spends its life in its own house which fits over it like the cover on a dish. You can hear and smell them, but you are not likely to see them.
“You’re right,” I said, retrieving a subject of conversation which had been discarded, but which I felt still might prove to have life in it. “No one can save enough money for the round-trip voyage to America.” This, if not quite true, was near enough, since among those who leave Madeira behind, the majority either have their passage paid for by the company about to employ them, or are assisted by relatives already established in the New World.
“No, it is not possible,” he sighed. Then he stopped and stood very straight.
“Welcome to Santana,” he told me.
“Good-by.” We shook hands and he went on his way down the cobbled lane.
IN WINTER Funchal has many rainy nights. Even in good weather the town is deserted by midnight. This means that you can stand for an hour on the main street and not see a single car go by. When the fine rain sweeps in from the sea and the wet wind rushes around corners, outdoor activity is reduced to a minimum. I like to walk through the streets about twelve o’clock. It is like pacing round the deck of a ship during a storm after all the passengers have gone to bed. No one stands on the arched bridges over the ribeiras, even the Avenida Arriaga is empty save for the jacaranda trees that line its central walk, and to left and right up the crooked side streets the vistas are only of cobblestones glistening where the street lamps hit them. Everyone is at home with the blinds shut.
In a small city on a small island people behave. It would be hard to find a less criminal group than the Funchalenses. The size of the police force may have something to do with it; there is an army of them loose in the town at night. They loom up in the recessed doorways, solemn-faced figures in black, just standing, looking at the dead street. I come upon them conscientiously making their rounds along dark lanes in suburban valleys high up the face of the mountain. I see them standing in front of neighborhood chapels or sitting on stone benches in the dark, staring out over the rooftops. No delinquents roam the streets of Funchal. Apart from the police, there is no one at all.
I arrange my itinerary so that I can come out at least once upon the Praça do Municipio. Empty and lighted only by its own lamps, it is surely one of the most elegant little public squares in the world. The splendid asymmetrical building are whitewashed, trimmed with black stone, and the paving of the center is an abstract mosaic of black and white lava. Late at night, shining in the rain, the square has a dramatic and unorthodox beauty. I cross it slowly and plunge into the gloom of a side street. The clock in the cathedral rings an elaborate chime pattern every fifteen minutes. Sometimes, if I am walking along beside one of the ribeiras, the rushing of the water over the rocks down below will partially, but never completely, cover the sound of the chimes.
Or I go down to the Cais, the town’s one pier, that is built out into very deep water. The Cais is where the passenger ship tenders tie up when they bring the visitors ashore, and it is a favorite strolling spot. Not so, of course, on rainy nights, when I have with me only the angry sound of the mid-ocean waves pounding on the steep beach of black stones that roll and strike against each other. Even out at the end of the long Cais I can hear the sullen rumble of the heavy stones rubbing together each time a wave hits the shore.
The land goes down steeply along this coast. A short distance out from the harbor the water is thirteen thousand feet deep. As one guidebook puts it: “The island is really the summit of a steep mountain.” This unreassuring thought has sometimes occurred to me just as I was dropping off to sleep (leaving me with what I remember about the fate of Port Royal in Jamaica, when one night an earthquake knocked part of it into the sea). Then the crowing of a rooster would bring comforting images of farm life, or the familiar chime would ring out and remind me that the cathedral was begun in the late fifteenth century and that, after all, if the island of Madeira had not moved during all the intervening years it was not likely to do so now.
THIS MORNING in the office of the Delegação de Turismo a middle-aged Englishman with a very red face turned to me. “I say,” he began, “do you speak English?” When I said I did, he went on, “I wish you’d explain to this charming young lady that we British don’t come here to gad about the island. We come for sports. Now, I’m interested in bowling, myself, and I’m told there’s a club here with facilities. Would you mind asking her about it? Thanks so much.” The young lady’s English was excellent but he was not trusting it. I got them together on the desired subject and quickly went out.
FEW ENGLISH visiting Madeira have any interest in the place itself. The inhabitants, except for servants and vendors, might as well not be there. The British sojourners are as external to the life of the place as the flower maids in “native” costume who sell orchids in front of the cathedral. Beyond certain material benefits their continued presence has brought the country, they have had little effect on the Madeirans.
How different the island would be today if all this time its tourists had been Americans! For Americans ask questions: How much? Why this? What’s that? The ideas set in motion by their constant interrogations would probably have set in motion a social revolution long ago.
As it is, the old habitués find the island as it always was. Even the various antiquated means of transport have been retained for them: decorated oxsledges that drag along the streets of Funchal, hand-guided toboggans that slide down the face of the mountain, even hammocks from which the tourist can survey the countryside in comfort while his two husky bearers navigate the rough terrain. Go up to Monte and hire one of the toboggans at the top of the long, steep cobbled lane. The two men will run rapidly along beside you, exerting all their strength to hold the contraption back as it gathers momentum, and straining like dray horses to pull it ahead along the flatter portions of the course.
Wh
en they are both streaming with sweat, ask them how they like their work. Probably they will be astonished that a foreigner should be concerned; the ones I interrogated were, but they merely answered, “It’s work like any other which is true, save that it is more strenuous than most, and no better paid. However, there is always the possibility of a one and six pence tip if the senhor is pleased.”
As an “adjacent province” of Portugal, Madeira has been spared, along with the motherland, the accelerated life that so changed European countries which participated in World War II. Nor has there been any social ferment inside Portugal to upset the calm continuation of a nineteenth-century mode of life: there is only the desire of the populace to share what it considers to be the normal existence of its contemporaries. There is consequently a slight dissatisfaction with the status quo.
The other day during lunch at the Hotel Voga I looked up and recognized a man I had known ten years ago in Ceylon, not long after he had given up tea planting. “What are you doing here?” I demanded: had I run into him in Singapore or Hong Kong, or even Nairobi, I should have been so surprised, but here, I was, and I said so.
“I’m living here,” he said, “and I expect to stay. Just a question of finding the right house. I’m seventy now and I want a quiet place.” Certainly Madeira is a quiet place. It is too remote to feel the emotional impact of the world events, and too small to create much agitation of its own. Life on such an island is necessarily tranquil. But the Madeirans somehow manage to get a great deal of pleasure out of that life, in spite of the isolation of which they complain.
There came a holiday and all Funchal went to the mountainside to celebrate. Here and there on the forested slopes, two or three thousand feet above the city, are several parks. One of these is a former private estate which is thrown open to the public on certain days. Here the largest crowd gathered. At noon there a procession of packed buses passes through the main street of Funchal. I got on one and joined the pilgrimage up and around the curves toward the heights. The last mile, being too steep, we had to walk. The roadside was lined with stalls offering food, drink and flowers. The crowd straggled upward, purchasing a little of everything, some playing tambourines and accordions. The park itself was splendid – a great bright cape of stairways and gardens and balustrades spread out across the lap of the mountain. I had the feeling that there were flowers everywhere: on the ground, in the trees, in the arms of the passers-by. Some thirty thousand people were in the park; it was a crowd bent on enjoying itself, full of high spirits. Each face looked entirely happy, and all of them, including the small children and those who had stopped too often at the rustic wine counters along the way, behaved in an exemplary fashion.
Obviously, there is no point in having a car in Madeira. The roads are few, narrow and tortuous, and you are content to leave the driving to men who have spent their lives navigating them. Most of the taxis are small modern sedans, but hedonists will spot a few old Packard touring cars, vintage of the mid-twenties, which, tops down, are ideal for mountain driving. At first I had intended to use one of these to take me to Santana, but then, having used buses for several short trips, I decided that buses were what I really wanted. They are comfortable and they run regularly to all corners of the island. Every vehicle is adorned with fresh flowers, usually roses and jasmine, all over the bus. When a lady of Madeira goes on a trip, it is practically inevitable that she will be handed at least one bouquet (often it is a spray of several dozen orchids) at the moment of departure; upon arriving she presents the flowers to those who meet her.
The Madeirans are fresh-air fiends. The only fault they ever have to find with the temperature is that it is too hot: this critical observation is forthcoming at all times, including mid-winter when no place could be considered hot. But being children of nature, they want to feel the air stirring around them, and so they open all the windows and the winds blow through the bus.
You are going across the island to the northern coast, to Faial or Santana. Within three minutes of leaving the bus station you begin a climb withich does not cease for almost two hours. Except for the heart of the city, Funchal is one vast mountainside of terraced gardens, each with its little house. The few roads snake up the steep slope, and at each curve there is the brief vista upwards along an endless stairway for pedestrians, leading to the next curve above. At first, from certain bends in the road, you can look back down upon Funchal spread out along the water: its buildings are a little smaller at each glance, and the passenger ships in the harbor look increasingly like yachts as the Atlantic grows more vast, calm and blue.
The air has been getting constantly cooler; already it is weighted with the somber odor of the forests above – forests whose high trees, blocking the daylight, imprison a dank nocturnal chill. All at once the color goes out of the landscape. The bus has entered the shadow of that great bank of clouds that normally hides the mountaintops. You want to close the window beside you, but the others are taking such evident pleasure in the cold air and wet vegetable smells coming in that you resist.
As the bus swings around one of the hairpin curves, you look up ahead and see skeins of white mist entangled in the branches of the trees. Thick gusts of fog sweep past; the bus is pushing up the lower fringes of the cloud. You try to peer into the forest that you know is brushing past the window, but all you can see is the stone ditch full of swiftly running water and the lilies and ferns that skirt it. Whatever is beyond that is far away. And suddenly you are in the blind gray world of cloud. The crawling bus has its headlights on, but they do no good. The conversation, which has been desultory, now dies altogether, and for a moment there is only the sound of the old motor straining in low gear. Then, as if by common agreement, everyone begins to talk. It is too sad to be silent, moving through this dark place where everything is invisible. And on and on the bus goes, around and upward, as the air grows colder, until even a few of the Madeirans decide to close their windows.
It is only when you are above the tree line and the wind is roaring over the bare tops of the mountains that suddenly there is blinding sunlight overhead. Uncanny clouds are rising up from behind rocks, swiftly taking form before your eyes, and rushing down the mountainside into the abyss behind you. For a moment it looks like a very expensive production of Götterdämmerung. From here on the voyage is down and up, across valleys and along the edges of cliffs. You swing around a curve and are poised above a village some two thousand feet below. A half hour later the bus rocks through its main street; the church bell is clanging in the steeple as you bump across the sunlit praça. There are stops where it is so quiet that from your seat you hear the water gurgling in the levada beside the road. And when you finally arrive, you have a very clear sensation of being somewhere else, not so much in place as in time. For your sixty-two American cents you have traveled a long way back into the past. The birds are singing, people sit in groups beside the brooks weaving baskets out of willow branches, cows call from inside their little houses, and you realize that beyond a doubt you are there, a part of the picture on the calendar.
Soon, probably, you will be returning to Funchal, but that does not matter. You know now that such a place exists and that you can get back to it someday if you want to, and it is satisfying to have that certainty.
The Ball at Sidi Hosni
Kulchur #2, 1961
SIDI HOSNI, EL KASBAH, TANGIER
MRS. BARBARA WOOLWORTH HUTTON REQUESTS THE PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY FOR A BALL ON THE ROOF OF HER HOUSE IN THE KASBAH (WEATHER PERMITTING) AT 10:30 ON THE NIGHT OF THE TWENTY NINTH OF AUGUST. BLACK TIE. R.VS.P IN CASE OF WIND, YOUR HOSTESS REQUESTS YOU TO INDULGE HER BY COMING ANOTHER NIGHT.
INSTEAD OF WIND, the Strait of Gibraltar has provided a thick, cold fog for the evening. We have been invited for dinner on the Old Mountain. Some of the guests are served outdoors by the pool and are soaked by the condensing moisture that drips down on them from the trees above. A little before midnight about twenty of us start out, in a convoy of s
ix cars, to drive down the mountain through the fog into Tangier. I am in my hostess’ car and suggest a shortcut through Hasnona into the Casbah, so that we arrive before the others and have less difficulty finding space in the Plaza in front of the Sultan’s palace, already jammed with scores of erratically parked cars and worried police. Our progress on foot through the ill-smelling alleys and down the broken stairways is slow, because it is difficult terrain for the ladies to navigate. Moroccans stand in the doorways of their tiny houses and shops and watch us file past, as if we were part of a parade.
As long as Tangier was international – that is, until 1955, when it was integrated with the rest of Morocco – there was no question of whether or not it was safe for Europeans to wander in the native quarter at night. Everyone went where he pleased at any hour, with no thought of danger. The reason for this utopian state of affairs was that it was impossible to get into or out of the city without thorough police and customs inspection, and this discouraged whatever criminal elements there were among the Moroccans (almost all of whom were members of the new French-created proletariat in Casablanca) from attempting to invade Tangier, the city of idle rich.
With the arrival of independence the local golden age was abruptly terminated. At the same time that servants began to grumble about working for seven or eight dollars a month, and started to ask for ten, or even fifteen, muggers appeared in the alleys of the Medina, intent upon relieving unwary Europeans of their wallets and handbags. Equally undesirable from the viewpoint of foreign residents was the emergence of a hitherto nonexistent kind of Moroccan: the politically conscious, Marxist-orientated man in the street, in whose eyes those who live on their incomes are evildoers, and to whom all European residents in Morocco, with or without money, are by definition undesirables.