The Stories of Paul Bowles (60 page)

I asked no questions while he talked; I made a point of keeping my face entirely expressionless, thinking that if he noticed the least flicker of disapproval he might stop. The sun had gone behind the trees and the patio was chilly. I had a strong desire to get up and walk back and forth as he was doing, but I thought even that might interrupt him. Once stopped, the flow might not resume.

Soon Marsh was worse than ever, with racking pains in his abdomen and kidneys. He remained in bed then, and Larbi brought him his food. When Meriam saw that he was no longer able to leave the bed, even to go into the bathroom, she decided that the time had come to get rid of the spell. On the same night that a fqih held a ceremony at her house in the presence of the crippled child, four men from Meriam’s family came up to Djamaa el Mokra.

“When I saw them coming, I got onto my motorcycle and went into the city. I didn’t want to be here when they did it. It had nothing to do with me.”

He stood still and rubbed his hands together. I heard the southwest wind beginning to sound in the trees; it was that time of afternoon. “Come. I’ll show you something,” he said.

We climbed steps around the back of the house and came out onto a
terrace with a pergola over it. Beyond this lay the lawn and the wall of trees.

“He was very sick for the next two days. He kept asking me to telephone the English doctor.”

“Didn’t you do it?”

Larbi stopped walking and looked at me. “I had to clean everything up first. Meriam wouldn’t touch him. It was during the rains. He had mud and blood all over him when I got back here and found him. The next day I gave him a bath and changed the sheets and blankets. And I cleaned the house, because they got mud everywhere when they brought him back in. Come on. You’ll see where they had to take him.”

We had crossed the lawn and were walking in the long grass that skirted the edge of the woods. A path led off to the right through the tangle of undergrowth, and we followed it, climbing across boulders and fallen treetrunks until we came to an old stone well. I leaned over the wall of rocks around it and saw the small circle of sky far below.

“They had to drag him all the way here, you see, and hold him steady right over the well while they made the signs on his feet, so the blood would fall into the water. It’s no good if it falls on the side of the well. And they had to make the same signs the fqih drew on paper for the little girl. That’s hard to do in the dark and in the rain. But they did it. I saw the cuts when I bathed him.”

Cautiously I asked him if he saw any connection between all this and Marsh’s death. He ceased staring into the well and turned around. We started to walk back toward the house.

“He died because his hour had come.”

And had the spell been broken? I asked him. Could the child walk afterward? But he had never heard, for Meriam had gone to Kenitra not much later to live with her sister.

When we were in the car, driving back down to the city, I handed him the money. He stared at it for several seconds before slipping it into his pocket.

I let him off in town with a vague sense of disappointment, and I saw that I had not only expected, but actually hoped, to find someone on whom the guilt might be fixed. What constitutes a crime? There was no criminal intent—only a mother moving in the darkness of ancient ignorance. I thought about it on my way home in the taxi.

(1976)

N
O ONE WOULD HAVE
guessed, from seeing the two villages spread out there, one higher up than the other on the sunny slope of the mountain, that enmity existed between them. And yet, if you looked closely, you would see certain marked differences in the respective designs they made on the landscape. Tamlat was higher, the houses were farther apart, and there were trees between them. In Izli everything was crowded together, for there was not enough space. The entire village seemed to have been built on top of boulders and at the edges of cliffs. Green fields and meadows surrounded Tamlat. It lay above, where the valley was wide, so that there was ample room for farming, and thus the people lived well. But the orchards down in Izli were little more than steep stairways of terraces. No matter how hard they worked trying to raise vegetables and fruit, the villagers never had enough.

What ought to have helped compensate for Izli’s unlucky site was the large spring just outside the village, whose water was the sweetest in the region. The people of Izli claimed great curative powers for it, an idea that was dismissed by the inhabitants of Tamlat, although they themselves often went down and filled their skins and jars with it to take
home with them. There was no way of fencing off the land around the spring, or the natives of Izli long ago would have seen to it that no one else had access to the water. If only the people of Tamlat had been willing to admit that the water was superior to their own, eventually they might have been persuaded to trade a few vegetables for it. However, they were careful never to mention it, and except for going casually to fetch it, behaved as if it did not exist.

The man whose land lay nearest to the spring was Ramadi, said to be the most prosperous one in Izli. By the standards of Tamlat he would not have been considered well-off. But his black mare was the only horse in Izli, and his orchard had twenty-three almond trees growing on eight different levels, and on each level he had built a channel that ran with clear water. The mare was a beautiful animal, and he kept her in perfect condition. When he dressed in his white selham and rode the mare through the street out of the village, the people of Izli remarked to each other that he looked almost like Sidi Bouhajja. This was a great compliment, since Sidi Bouhajja was the most important saint in the region. He too wore white garments and rode a black horse, although his was a stallion.

For a long time Ramadi had been on the lookout for a fitting mate for his mare. However, not one stallion among all those he had looked at in the neighboring villages could be called her equal. In fact, the only horse he would have accepted for her was the shining black stallion ridden by Sidi Bouhajja, and this was out of the question, since there was no way of asking a saint for such a favor.

It was assumed by many people that Sidi Bouhajja and his horse were able to converse together. And it was common knowledge, for he had proclaimed it in public on several occasions, that at the moment of his death it was to be the horse that would decide on his burial place. He asked that his body be fastened astride the animal, which was then to be allowed to go where it pleased. Where it stopped, at that spot Sidi Bouhajja was to be interred. This doubtless lent weight to the belief that the old man and his horse had a secret language between them.

It was a subject for much speculation around the countryside as to which region might prove fortunate enough to witness this event, but everything was cut short by Sidi Bouhajja’s sudden collapse one afternoon as he sat outside the mosque at Tamlat.

The saint had ridden up through Izli earlier in the day, passing by
Ramadi’s house as the mare stood in front of it, shaded by an old olive tree. The stallion wanted to stop, and Sidi Bouhajja had some difficulty in getting him to continue. Ramadi watched, fingered his beard, thinking what a great thing it would be if the stallion should suddenly rise up, saint and all, and mount the mare. Then, feeling ashamed, he looked away.

Later in the day Ramadi got onto the mare and rode up to Tamlat. There in a corner of the market he caught sight of an Aissaoui snake charmer from Izli whom he knew, and he sat down to talk with him. It was then that he heard the news of Sidi Bouhajja’s death.

He sat up very straight. The Aissaoui added that soon they would be tying the saint to his horse.

Where do you think it’ll go? Ramadi asked him.

It’ll probably come here and go into the grain market, the Aissaoui said.

Have you got your snakes with you?

The Aissaoui looked surprised. Yes, I have them, he said.

Get them out there to the turn-off and let him see them, Ramadi told him. He’s got to go down the hill instead.

He rose, jumped onto his mare, and rode off.

The Aissaoui ran to the fondouq where he had left his basket of vipers and cobras. Then he hurried up to the corner where the road turned off from the main street and led down the side of the mountain.

Since everyone in Tamlat was watching the elders strap Sidi Bouhajja’s body onto the back of the stallion, Ramadi on his mare passed unnoticed as he galloped down the road to Izli. When he got to his house, he left the mare standing under the olive tree and waited.

Up in Tamlat the Assaoui sat by the edge of the road with his basket. At length he saw the horse come into view, its sacred burden strapped to its back. It cantered down the street toward him, followed at some distance by the elders. He opened his basket and took out two of the larger serpents, holding one in each hand. As the horse approached him, he stood up and made the reptiles writhe in the air. Immediately the horse opened its eyes very wide and turned to the right, down the road leading out of the village.

The Aissaoui put the snakes back into the basket and sauntered out of the bushes which until then had hidden him from the approaching elders.
They paid him no attention, and he set out along the road to Izli. Far ahead of him he could see the black form of the stallion racing down the mountainside, the white bundle it carried flopping in the sunlight. After he had walked along for a while, he turned to look back. The elders stood up there at the corner, shading their eyes as they peered down into the valley.

And as Ramadi sat in his doorway waiting, the stallion stormed into the village, stood quiet for an instant, and then trotted directly to Ramadi’s house. The mare still stood under the olive tree, switching her tail against the flies. Before anyone arrived to watch, the stallion reared himself up to a great height, bursting the straps that had bound Sidi Bouhajja to his back. The body in the white selham dropped to the ground at the same moment the stallion seized the mare. Ramadi ran forward and pulled it out of the way. Then he returned to the doorway to look on.

A little later some neighbors arrived, and they carried Sidi Bouhajja into Ramadi’s courtyard, all the while praising Allah. By the time the men of Tamlat had got down to Izli, the stallion and the mare were standing quietly under the olive tree, and the tolba of Izli chanted inside Ramadi’s house.

The men from Tamlat hid their chagrin and accepted the will of Allah. The horse had come to Izli and stopped here, therefore this was where Sidi Bouhajja had to be buried. They helped the men of Izli dig the grave, and the news went out to all the villages around, so that tolba came from many places to chant at the tomb.

It was no time before crowds of pilgrims began to arrive in Izli, seeking baraka at Sidi Bouhajja’s tomb. Soon it was necessary to demolish Ramadi’s house and in its place to build a sanctuary where the pilgrims could sleep. At the same time they constructed a domed qoubba over the saint’s resting place by the olive tree, and then built a high wall around it. Ramadi was given another house nearby.

Since the pilgrims all carried away with them water from the spring, the water’s fame soon spread, and it took on great importance. Even those who did not venerate Sidi Bouhajja came to drink it and take it home with them. In exchange they left offerings of food and money in the sanctuary. Before a year was up, Izli had become more prosperous than Tamlat.

Only Ramadi and the Aissaoui knew of the part they had played in bringing about the stroke of good luck that had changed their village, and they considered it of slight importance, since everything is decided by Allah. What mattered to Ramadi was the beauty of the black colt that now followed the mare wherever he rode her, even if it was down to the plain or up to the market in Tamlat.

(1977)

I
SOON LEARNED NOT
to go near the windows or to draw aside the double curtains in order to look at the river below. The view was wide and lively, with factories and warehouses on the far side of the Chao Phraya, and strings of barges being towed up and down through the dirty water. The new wing of the hotel had been built in the shape of an upright slab, so that the room was high and had no trees to shade it from the poisonous onslaught of the afternoon sun. The end of the day, rather than bringing respite, intensified the heat, for then the entire river was made of sunlight. With the redness of dusk everything out there became melodramatic and forbidding, and still the oven heat from outside leaked through the windows.

Brooks, teaching at Chulalongkorn University, was required as a Fulbright Fellow to attend regular classes in Thai; as an adjunct to this he arranged to spend much of his leisure time with Thais. One day he brought along with him three young men wearing the bright orangeyellow robes of Buddhist monks. They filed into the hotel room in silence and stood in a row as they were presented to me, each one responding by joining his palms together, thumbs touching his chest.

As we talked. Yamyong, the eldest, in his late twenties, explained that he was an ordained monk, while the other two were novices. Brooks then asked Prasert and Vichai if they would be ordained soon, but the monk answered for them.

“I do not think they are expecting to be ordained,” he said quietly, looking at the floor, as if it were a sore subject all too often discussed among them. He glanced up at me and went on talking. “Your room is beautiful. We are not accustomed to such luxury.” His voice was flat; he was trying to conceal his disapproval. The three conferred briefly in undertones. “My friends say they have never seen such a luxurious room,” he reported, watching me closely through his steel-rimmed spectacles to see my reaction. I failed to hear.

They put down their brown paper parasols and their reticules that bulged with books and fruit. Then they got themselves into position in a row along the couch among the cushions. For a while they were busy adjusting the folds of their robes around their shoulders and legs.

“They make their own clothes,” volunteered Brooks. “All the monks do.”

I spoke of Ceylon; there the monks bought the robes all cut and ready to sew together. Yamyong smiled appreciatively and said: “We use the same system here.”

The air-conditioning roared at one end of the room and the noise of boat motors on the river seeped through the windows at the other. I looked at the three sitting in front of me. They were very calm and self-possessed, but they seemed lacking in physical health. I was aware of the facial bones beneath their skin. Was the impression of sallowness partly due to the shaved eyebrows and hair?

Yamyong was speaking. “We appreciate the opportunity to use English. For this reason we are liking to have foreign friends. English, American; it doesn’t matter. We can understand.” Prasert and Vichai nodded.

Time went on, and we sat there, extending but not altering the subject of conversation. Occasionally I looked around the room. Before they had come in, it had been only a hotel room whose curtains must be kept drawn. Their presence and their comments on it had managed to invest it with a vaguely disturbing quality; I felt that they considered it a great mistake on my part to have chosen such a place in which to stay.

“Look at his tattoo,” said Brooks. “Show him.”

Yamyong pulled back his robe a bit from the shoulder, and I saw the
two indigo lines of finely written Thai characters. “That is for good health,” he said, glancing up at me. His smile seemed odd, but then, his facial expression did not complement his words at any point.

“Don’t the Buddhists disapprove of tattooing?” I said.

“Some people say it is backwardness.” Again he smiled. “Words for good health are said to be superstition. This was done by my abbot when I was a boy studying in the
wat.
Perhaps he did not know it was a superstition.”

We were about to go with them to visit the
wat
where they lived. I pulled a tie from the closet and stood before the mirror arranging it.

“Sir,” Yamyong began. “Will you please explain something? What is the significance of the necktie?”

“The significance of the necktie?” I turned to face him. “You mean, why do men wear neckties?”

“No. I know that. The purpose is to look like a gentleman.”

I laughed. Yamyong was not put off. “I have noticed that some men wear the two ends equal, and some wear the wide end longer than the narrow, or the narrow longer than the wide. And the neckties themselves, they are not all the same length, are they? Some even with both ends equal reach below the waist. What are the different meanings?”

“There is no meaning,” I said. “Absolutely none.”

He looked to Brooks for confirmation, but Brooks was trying out his Thai on Prasert and Vichai, and so he was silent and thoughtful for a moment. “I believe you, of course,” he said graciously. “But we all thought each way had a different significance attached.”

As we went out of the hotel, the doorman bowed respectfully. Until now he had never given a sign that he was aware of my existence. The wearers of the yellow robe carry weight in Thailand.

A few Sundays later I agreed to go with Brooks and our friends to Ayudhaya. The idea of a Sunday outing is so repellent to me that deciding to take part in this one was to a certain extent a compulsive act. Ayudhaya lies less than fifty miles up the Chao Phraya from Bangkok. For historians and art collectors it is more than just a provincial town; it is a period and a style—having been the Thai capital for more than four centuries. Very likely it still would be, had the Burmese not laid it waste in the eighteenth century.

Brooks came early to fetch me. Downstairs in the street stood the three bhikkus with their book bags and parasols. They hailed a cab, and
without any previous price arrangements (the ordinary citizen tries to fix a sum beforehand) we got in and drove for twenty minutes or a half-hour, until we got to a bus terminal on the northern outskirts of the city.

It was a nice, old-fashioned, open bus. Every part of it rattled, and the air from the rice fields blew across us as we pieced together our bits of synthetic conversation. Brooks, in high spirits, kept calling across to me: “Look! Water buffaloes!” As we went further away from Bangkok there were more of the beasts, and his cries became more frequent. Yamyong, sitting next to me, whispered: “Professor Brooks is fond of buffaloes?” I laughed and said I didn’t think so.

“Then?”

I said that in America there were no buffaloes in the fields, and that was why Brooks was interested in seeing them. There were no temples in the landscape, either, I told him, and added, perhaps unwisely: “He looks at buffaloes. I look at temples.” This struck Yamyong as hilarious, and he made allusions to it now and then all during the day.

The road stretched ahead, straight as a line in geometry, across the verdant, level land. Paralleling it on its eastern side was a fairly wide canal, here and there choked with patches of enormous pink lotuses. In places the flowers were gone and only the pods remained, thick green disks with the circular seeds embedded in their flesh. At the first stop the bhikkus got out. They came aboard again with mangosteens and lotus pods and insisted on giving us large numbers of each. The huge seeds popped out of the fibrous lotus cakes as though from a punchboard; they tasted almost like green almonds. “Something new for you today, I think,” Yamyong said with a satisfied air.

Ayudhaya was hot, dusty, spread-out, its surrounding terrain strewn with ruins that scarcely showed through the vegetation. At some distance from the town there began a wide boulevard sparingly lined with important-looking buildings. It continued for a way and then came to an end as abrupt as its beginning. Growing up out of the scrub, and built of small russet-colored bricks, the ruined temples looked still unfinished rather than damaged by time. Repairs, done in smeared cement, veined their façades.

The bus’s last stop was still two or three miles from the center of Ayudhaya. We got down into the dust, and Brooks declared: “The first thing we must do is find food. They can’t eat anything solid, you know, after midday.”

“Not noon exactly,” Yamyong said. “Maybe one o’clock or a little later.”

“Even so, that doesn’t leave much time,” I told him. “It’s quarter to twelve now.”

But the bhikkus were not hungry. None of them had visited Ayudhaya before, and so they had compiled a list of things they most wanted to see. They spoke with a man who had a station wagon parked nearby, and we set off for a ruined
stupa
that lay some miles to the southwest. It had been built atop a high mound, which we climbed with some difficulty, so that Brooks could take pictures of us standing within a fissure in the decayed outer wall. The air stank of the bats that lived inside.

When we got back to the bus stop, the subject of food arose once again, but the excursion had put the bhikkus into such a state of excitement that they could not bear to allot time for anything but looking. We went to the museum. It was quiet; there were Khmer heads and documents inscribed in Pali. The day had begun to be painful. I told myself I had known beforehand that it would.

Then we went to a temple. I was impressed, not so much by the gigantic Buddha which all but filled the interior, as by the fact that not far from the entrance a man sat on the floor playing a
ranad
(pronounced
lanat).
Although I was familiar with the sound of it from listening to recordings of Siamese music, I had never before seen the instrument. There was a graduated series of wooden blocks strung together, the whole slung like a hammock over a boat-shaped resonating stand. The tones hurried after one another like drops of water falling very fast. After the painful heat outside, everything in the temple suddenly seemed a symbol of the concept of coolness—the stone floor under my bare feet, the breeze that moved through the shadowy interior, the bamboo fortune sticks being rattled in their long box by those praying at the altar, and the succession of insubstantial, glassy sounds that came from the
ranad.
I thought: If only I could get something to eat, I wouldn’t mind the heat so much.

We got into the center of Ayudhaya a little after three o’clock. It was hot and noisy; the bhikkus had no idea of where to look for a restaurant, and the prospect of asking did not appeal to them. The five of us walked aimlessly. I had come to the conclusion that neither Prasert nor Vichai understood spoken English, and I addressed myself earnestly to Yamyong.
“We’ve got to eat.”
He stared at me with severity. “We are searching,” he told me.

Eventually we found a Chinese restaurant on a corner of the principal street. There was a table full of boisterous Thais drinking
mekong
(categorized as whiskey, but with the taste of cheap rum) and another table occupied by an entire Chinese family. These people were doing some serious eating, their faces buried in their rice bowls. It cheered me to see them: I was faint, and had half expected to be told that there was no hot food available.

The large menu in English which was brought us must have been typed several decades ago and wiped with a damp rag once a week ever since. Under the heading
SPECIALITIES
were some dishes that caught my eye, and as I went through the list I began to laugh. Then I read it aloud to Brooks.

“Fried Sharks Fins and Bean Sprout

Chicken Chins Stuffed with Shrimp

Fried Rice Birds

Shrimps Balls and Green Marrow

Pigs Lights with Pickles

Braked Rice Bird in Port Wine

Fish Head and Bean Curd”

Although it was natural for our friends not to join in the laughter, I felt that their silence was not merely failure to respond; it was heavy, positive.

A moment later three Pepsi-Cola bottles were brought and placed on the table. “What are you going to have?” Brooks asked Yamyong.

“Nothing, thank you,” he said lightly. “This will be enough for us today.”

“But this is terrible! You mean no one is going to eat
anything
?”

“You and your friend will eat your food,” said Yamyong. (He might as well have said “fodder.”) Then he, Prasert, and Vichai stood up, and carrying their Pepsi-Cola bottles with them, went to sit at a table on the other side of the room. Now and then Yamyong smiled sternly across at us.

“I wish they’d stop watching us,” Brooks said under his breath.

“They were the ones who kept putting it off,” I reminded him. But I felt guilty, and I was annoyed at finding myself placed in the position of the self-indulgent unbeliever. It was almost as bad as eating in front of Moslems during Ramadan.

We finished our meal and set out immediately, following Yamyong’s decision to visit a certain temple he wanted to see. The taxi drive led us through a region of thorny scrub. Here and there, in the shade of spreading flat-topped trees, were great round pits, full of dark water and crowded with buffaloes; only their wet snouts and horns were visible. Brooks was already crying: “Buffaloes! Hundreds of them!” He asked the taxi driver to stop so that he could photograph the animals.

“You will have buffaloes at the temple,” said Yamyong. He was right; there was a muddy pit filled with them only a few hundred feet from the building. Brooks went and took his pictures while the bhikkus paid their routine visit to the shrine. I wandered into a courtyard where there was a long row of stone Buddhas. It is the custom of temple-goers to plaster little squares of gold leaf onto the religious statues in the
wats.
When thousands of them have been stuck onto the same surface, tiny scraps of the gold come unstuck. Then they tremble in the breeze, and the figure shimmers with a small, vibrant life of its own. I stood in the courtyard watching this quivering along the arms and torsos of the Buddhas, and I was reminded of the motion of the bô-tree’s leaves. When I mentioned it to Yamyong in the taxi, I think he failed to understand, for he replied: “The bô-tree is a very great tree for Buddhists.”