Travels

by Paul Bowles

  Even in the heart of the city a surprising amount of space is devoted to private gardens. As he follows the winding, shut-in streets, the passer-by cannot divine the presence of the pleasure spots behind the high walls. But they are there, and for those who are lucky enough to possess them, they add immeasurably to the charm of living in Fez.

  From the street a house is a high wall with a door somewhere along its uneven length and possibly a handful of tiny grilled peepholes sprinkled in a haphazard design across its surface. Some thirty feet above the ground there may be a huge cedar beam sprouting from the façade at a forty-five-degree angle and supporting a triangular bay that juts out high above the street, providing the raison d’être for that vast expanse of virtually empty wall below it. With the exception of the door, which is usually studded in a mosaic of brass nail-heads, there is no suggestion of decoration or even of a preoccupation with the kind of surface given to the adobe or plaster that covers the wall.

  Fez El Bali, 1947 (PB)

  The inside of the house is another matter. When you step into the glittering tile and marble interior of a prosperous Fez dwelling, with its orange trees and its fountains, and the combined pastel and hard-candy colors glowing from the rooms around the courtyard, you are pleased that there should be nothing but the indifferent anonymity of a blank wall outside -nothing to indicate the existence of this very private, remote and brilliant world within. A noncommittal expanse of earthen wall in the street hides a little Alhambra of one’s own, a miniature paradise totally shielded from the gaze of the world.

  In the less sumptuous homes, the door necessarily opens directly upon the patio. Nevertheless, even here from the street nothing is visible but a short blind corridor that makes a right-angle turn before opening into the courtyard. This is invariable. Whether the women are visible or hidden, their presence and collective personality are constantly suggested by the diaphanous curtains of white muslin that hang across the doorways and around the canopied beds; it is impossible to imagine the color schemes in the rooms, either, save in relation to the women who live in them. The men are in and out of the house, day and night – but the women literally pass their lives inside the house, and this is evident.

  A courtyard may have as many as three galleries that go part or all the way around it; the rooms can be reached only by going along the galleries. Stairways are steep, inlaid with mosaics of very small titles, and sometimes tipped with white marble treads. The house looks in upon itself; the focus of attention is the stone basin of water in the center. The women must have total protection from the world without. The architect, having provided this, is then free to become decorator, and can concentrate his attention upon the delights of applied geometric design in plaster filigree, carved wood and paint. A large house may have several separate patios, each one multiple-storied and with many rooms; a humble house has a central open space with two or three rooms giving onto it. The very poor sometimes live in rooming-houses, each family occupying one room and having the use of that section of the gallery outside the door, conditions which necessarily give rise to disputes about rights to space and violation of private property.

  Fez is still a relatively relaxed city; there is time for everything. The retention of this classic sense of time can be attributed, in part at least, to the absence of motor vehicles in the Medina. If you live in a city where you never have to run in order to catch something, or jump to avoid being hit by it, you are likely to have preserved a natural physical dignity that is not a concomitant of contemporary life; and if you still have that dignity, you want to go on having it. So you see to it that you have time to do whatever you want to do; it is vulgar to hurry.

  For all their religious orthodoxy and outward austerity, the people of Fez are not ashamed to be hedonists. They love the sound of a fountain splashing in the courtyard; on the coals of their braziers they sprinkle sandalwood and benzoin; they have a passion for sitting on a high spot of ground at twilight and watching the slow change of light, color and form in the landscape. Outside the ramparts are innumerable orchards, delightful little wildernesses of canebrake, where olive and fig trees abound. It is the custom of families to out there on a late afternoon with their rugs, braziers and tea equipment. One discovers groups of such picnickers in the most secluded corners of the countryside, particularly on the northern slopes above the valley. Not long ago on one of my walks I came across a family spread out in the long grass. They were sitting quietly on their reed mats, but something in their collective attitude made me stop and observe them more closely. Then I saw that surrounding them at a radius of perhaps a hundred feet was a circle of bird cages, each supported by a stake driven into the ground. There were birds in all the cages and they were singing. The entire family sat there happily, listening. As urbanites in other places carry along their radios, they had brought their birds with them from the town, purely for entertainment.

  The changes brought about during the past fifty-three years since I first saw Fez are relatively superficial; none has been so drastic as to alter its image. The Medina is protected by the form of the land on which it is built; its topography is roughly funnel-shaped, and it is not likely to be bulldozed like so much of Cairo in the time of Abdel Nasser. Yet with the increasing poverty in the region the city clearly cannot continue much longer in its present form. Those of the original inhabitants who can afford it are moving to Casablanca, leaving the Medina at the mercy of the impoverished rustics replacing them. A house which formerly sheltered one family now contains ten or twelve families, living, it goes without saying, in unimaginable squalor. The ancient dwellings are falling rapidly into disrepair. And so at last, it is the people from outside the walls who have taken over the city, and their conquest, a natural and inevitable process, spells its doom. That Fez should still be there today, unchanged in its outward form, is the surprising phenomenon.

  An Island of My Own

  San Francisco Chronicle, 1985

  LIKE MOST PEOPLE, I have always been certain there was a place somewhere on this planet that could provide the necessary respite from all reminders of present-day chaos and noise, a place to which one could escape and, having escaped, shut the figurative door, there to breathe pure air and hear only the sounds provided by natural forces. So it was with tremulous excitement that I first saw the little island of Taprobane, in Weligama Bay off the south coast of Sri Lanka. Here was a site that seemed to have all the requisite qualities: it was scarcely more than a hummock of black basalt rising above the waves of the Indian Ocean, yet was heavily covered with high trees that left visible only a glimpse of the house at its summit. I had never seen a place that looked so obviously like what I was searching for. And I felt that it was aware of me, that it silently beckoned, sending forth a wordless message that meant: come, you’ll like it here.

  Three years later, I signed the necessary documents and became the owner of this tiny parcel of paradise. The erstwhile proprietor, a rubber planter named Mr. Jinadasa, also bred racehorses and bet on them. When a horse in which he had great confidence failed to justify his hopes, he found himself in immediate need of cash. My informant in Sri Lanka wired me in Madrid, and as soon as the news arrived I rushed out to cable the money.

  I inherited a couple who were resident gardener and maid, and who continued their work as if they were still in the employ of Mr. Jinadasa. In aspects they had worked for several owners, scarcely knowing them apart, and were aware only that their employer must be addressed as Master. The island had belonged to various people in the recent past, and none of them had kept it very long. It was a pleasure dome, a place they used for weekend parties. The only person who had actually lived there was the Comte de Mauny Talvande, who had built the house and furnished it after reclaiming the island from its former status as the local cobra-dump. (All cobras found in the region were put into sacks, carried across to the island and left there, since in Sri Lanka one doesn’t kill snakes.) In order to settle in, I needed to buy only new mattresse
s for the beds, and lamps and kitchenware. The furniture, made of the heaviest kinds of tropical wood, was well-nigh immovable.

  Finding a good cook was the greatest initial challenge, but eventually, in the nearby town of Matara, I unearthed a man who had been chef in a hotel. At the same time I discovered that no cook would work without an assistant, so I was obliged to take on two men. The cook cooked; the extra man served at table and washed dishes. Indeed, each employee in the house had a very precise idea of what his work involved, and it was impossible to get any of them to perform an act he considered to be outside his domain. The maid polished the furniture and filled bowls with orchids. The gardener fetched things from the market in the village on the mainland. Another man, a Hindu, came twice a day to empty the latrines, as there was no running water on the island. Life moved like clockwork; there were no complications.

  For me, much of the joy of living on Taprobane had to do with lying in bed at night listening to the sound of the big waves booming against the cliffs below, and the more distant, subdued sound of the same waves breaking on the sand along the great curved beach. I couldn’t conceive of a greater luxury then, nor can I now. The subsidiary luxuries consisted of early tea along with an assortment of fruit (served in bed), a real English breakfast at nine and, at midday, a curry the like of which I’ve not eaten elsewhere. The cook provided twenty side dishes for each meal (including marunga leaves which, sprinkled over coconut cream, gave the food an irresistible flavor). At night the men would go down to the rocks and catch enough lobsters for the next day’s curry. When the lobsters were too few, we made do with spearfish, the local equivalent of pompano, and equally delectable.

  Only once was this tranquil existence significantly disrupted. What happened was that the government of Sri Lanka came to an agreement with Peking whereby China would receive the totality of Sri Lanka’s rubber crop in return for specified quantities of China’s rice. The rice arrived, but it had been lying in damp warehouses for so long that it was rancid. When one tried to cook it, it gave off an unbelievably powerful stench; it was inedible. All the Sinhalese were complaining, but there was no help for it. The only solution was to comb the shops in all towns along the coast for boxes of English rice and hoard them and, when the shops were empty, which they soon were, to go more than a hundred miles to Colombo and bring back all one could find. Only thanks to such efforts did the curry continue to be as good as ever.

  For the most part, however, life on Taprobane was trouble-free. The ocean was languorously warm, and the sharks left alone. You could see them a few hundred feet away as they patrolled the reef, but they never ventured inside. Occasionally a gigantic tortoise that lived among the rocks on the south-west side of the island would rise to the surface and remain there, a floating boulder. If one swam toward it, it quickly submerged, ‘Old’ Benedict the gardener told me one day, indicating its domed back.

  The catamarans bearing fishermen streamed past the island before sunrise and returned en masse at sunset, oars and sail giving them speed. And just as regularly, each daybreak flocks of crows arrived to chase away the hordes of bats that spent each night hanging from the trees outside the windows. The bats were surprisingly big, often with a wingspread of three feet. Their bodies were covered with dark, russet-colored hair and their teeth looked very sharp when you flashed a light into a tree and saw them hanging above you. They were fruit-eating animals and entirely innocuous, even with respect to the vegetation; the big trees on the mainland where they gathered in daytime were burned white by their dung, and nothing grew in the immediate vicinity, but for some reason they did not excrete at night.

  Paul Bowles at work on The Spider’s House, his third novel, on Taprobane, 1955.

  It was the crows that saved my trees. They came in great numbers at dawn for no purpose that I could discern other than to drive away the bats. Once they had done that and remarked about it with each other for a while, they flew back to the mainland. But the bats never returned until dark.

  The central room of the house was 30 feet high, with a cupola at the top that let the wind blow in from all sides, so that even though the air was hot there was always a breeze moving through the room. The voluptuous breeze and the sounds of the sea made an after-lunch siesta inevitable. I missed two or three hours of the afternoon, but how fine it was when the cook’s assistant arrived from behind the curtains at five o’clock saying, “tea, Master,” and put the tray down on the bed, and I drank the tea still listening to the pounding waves.

  Then it was time for a late-afternoon dip in the sea, when Benedict would return with provisions from the village along with two men who waded through the waves carrying tanks of water on their heads. Benedict did not like to be out after dark. Although he claimed to be a Catholic, he shared some of the superstitions of the uneducated Buddhist coastal population. He was particularly afraid of meeting a black dog on the road. According to him, all black dogs were evil spirits and should be avoided. I knew that the island had been cleared of snakes several decades earlier, and I had never seen a sign of the presence of venomous spiders or scorpions. Nevertheless, one evening the cook on his way to the kitchen stepped barefoot on a large centipede. He cried out, dropped the tray he was carrying and fell to the floor unconscious. Benedict, having been called from below, came with a “cobra stone,” made an incision in the foot and rubbed the stone over it for some minutes. When the cook had revived, I asked to see the stone, but Benedict did not want me to touch it. In his hand it looked something like a sponge, light and porous. This miniature drama became in retrospect a major event, so uneventful was the passage of the days and weeks.

  Time moved swiftly, imperceptively, on the island. Had it not been for two things, unrelated but equally important, I could have prolonged my sojourn there indefinitely. The first was that at the end of June the south-west monsoons arrived, so that during the high seas of the summer months Taprobane was uninhabitable. The other was the Sri Lankan law that required every foreigner who remained in the country six months or more to pay a high tax on his global income. Since I generally went to Taprobane around Christmas, I had to arrange my return to Europe for mid-June. Taprobane was not a permanent escape, then, but for half of each year it was idyllic.

  Of course, no idyll is without its irony. When I finally did sell the island, the proceeds were impounded by the Finance Control of Sri Lanka, so that I have never seen any of my money. One can’t always win – but one can always remember.

  Tangier

  Independent on Sunday, 1990

  WHEN THE JOURNALIST Robert Ruark spent a weekend in Tangier, his first report in the New York World-Telegram bore the following heading: “Tangier,

  Sinkhole of Iniquity”. With such a flamboyant fanfare, it is not surprising that scores of lesser men of the Press should subsequently come in search of publishable proofs of iniquity. What they couldn’t find, they invented with gusto.

  For a long time, Tangier was enthusiastically dubbed The Sin City of the World. This probably helped the local economy, but at the cost of disappointing thousands of eager tourists. The appraisal in The Rough Guide to Morocco (1987) seems a lot more accurate: “... a tricky place for first arrivals, but once you’ve got the feel of it, can still be a lively and very likeable town ... with an enduring capacity for craziness.”

  The mention of craziness strikes me as apt. People are likely to behave in inexplicable ways. Residents are prone to blame everything on the east wind, just as unaccountable behavior in Provence is explained by the mistral – it is even considered to be a mitigating circumstance in a case of murder.

  Here the wind accounts for undue nervousness and bad temper, but I suspect that whatever murders are committed while it is blowing would have been committed anyway. The month-long fast of Ramadan seems more likely to result in violent behavior than exposure to the wind – even though it can blow with gale force, day and night, for a week without surcease.

  When I first arrived in Tangier, although i
t was primarily a port, there was no breakwater and no dock. The ferry from Gibraltar would cast anchor in the harbor, and passengers were rowed ashore in a dinghy.

  The railway station was outside the town among the sand dunes; you reached it by a boardwalk that ran along parallel to the beach. If it was raining, you could hire a carriage drawn by one weak horse, which you hoped would get you to your train.

  The Medina, a compact collection of buildings enclosed by ramparts, never ceased to fascinate me. Like the sea, it was always there but always different from what it had been the moment before. The dramas played by the Muslims in its labyrinthine passageways were like the inventions of an inspired playwright.

  The town was so small and closely knit that from the Grand Socco, its center, I could walk in a half-hour to my house on the Old Mountain and be completely in the country, where the only sounds were the crickets and the wind in the trees.

  The only Moroccans to be seen on the beach in those years were peasants riding their donkeys, coming into town for the market. The Tangerines considered the sun poisonous and did what they could to keep out of it. It was only later that a few young men were courageous enough to imitate the French, who had no scruples about swimming and lying on the sand in the sunlight. And it was still later that women began to venture (fully dressed) into the waves.

  In the Medina the only sounds were human voices. The radio with its distorting amplifier had not yet arrived. For those who wanted music there were ancient wind-up gramophones to be rented by the hour. They were delivered by small boys who wore the flaring horns over their heads like huge morning glories and were thus often unable to see where they were going.

  The Zoco Chico, in the center of the Medina, surrounded by cafés on all sides, presented a symphony of hundreds of conversations. In the early 1930s the clientele thinned out after midnight, but after the war, in the 1940s – when Tangier was packed with tourists and foreign residents – the cafés were busy until dawn; exhausted party-goers then arrived to take black coffee before retiring.