Let It Come Down Read online

  Paul Bowles

  * * *

  LET IT COME DOWN

  With an Afterword by Barnaby Rogerson

  Contents

  Introduction

  Book One: INTERNATIONAL ZONE Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Book Two: FRESH MEAT AND ROSES Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Book Three: THE AGE OF MONSTERS Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Part Four: ANOTHER KIND OF SILENCE Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Afterword

  Follow Penguin

  PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  LET IT COME DOWN

  Paul Bowles was born in Jamaica, New York, in 1910. He began composing music and writing stories at a very early age and at seventeen some of his poetry was published in the French literary magazine transition. At the age of eighteen he began his travels to Europe, North Africa, Mexico and Central America. A student of Aaron Copland, Bowles established his reputation early as a gifted composer. In 1945 he returned to writing short stories, and by 1947, when he went to live in Tangier, fiction had become his major focus. He wrote four novels, The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider’s House and Up Above the World; one hundred short stories; a book of poetry; and many travel essays. He lived in Tangier until his death in 1999.

  As well as running travel classics publisher Eland, Barnaby Rogerson has written A Traveller’s History of North Africa (Weidenfeld, 1998), a biography: The Prophet Muhammad (Little, Brown, 2004) and an account of the early Caliphate, The Heirs of the Prophet (Little, Brown, 2006). He has also put together a collection of Moroccan travel literature, Marrakech, the Red City (Sickle Moon, 2003), a pocket edition of English Orientalist verse, Desert Air, and a collection of contemporary travel writing, Meetings with Remarkable Muslims (Eland 2005). His most recent book is The Last Crusaders: the hundred year battle for the centre of the world – which begins with the Portugese sacking the Moroccan city of Ceuta in 1415 and ends with the death of Dom Sebastian of Portugal at the Battle of Three Kings in 1578.

  BANQUO: It will be Rayne to Night.

  IST. MURD.: Let it come downe.

  (They set upon Banquo.)

  Macbeth Act III, Scene 3

  Introduction

  From the time when I was a boy of eight or nine, I had been fascinated by that brief passage in Macbeth where Banquo comes out of the castle with his son and makes a passing remark to the men outside about the approaching rain, to be answered by the flash of a blade and the admirable four-word sentence, succinct and brutal: “Let it come down.”

  The novel to which I gave that title was first published early in 1952, at the very moment of the riots which presaged the end of the International Zone of Morocco. Thus, even at the time of publication the book already treated of a bygone era, for Tangier was never the same after the 30th of March 1952. The city celebrated in these pages has long ago ceased to exist, and the events recounted in them would now be inconceivable. Like a photograph, the tale is a document relating to a specific place at a given point in time, illumined by the light of that particular moment.

  The book was begun in what was perhaps an unusual manner. In December 1949 I boarded a Polish freighter in Antwerp, bound for Colombo. We entered the Strait of Gibraltar at night, and I stood on deck watching the flashes of the lighthouse at Cape Spartel, the northwestern corner of Africa. As we sailed eastward I could distinguish the lights of certain houses on the Old Mountain. Then when we came nearer to Tangier, a thin fog settled over the water, and only the glow of the city’s lights was visible, reflected in the sky. That was when I felt an unreasoning and powerful desire to be in Tangier. Up until that moment it had not even occurred to me to write a book about the international city. But I went below, got into my hard bunk, and started a scene which took place on the cliffs beneath which we had just passed. This was not the beginning of the book, but it served as a point of geographical contact, from which I was able to work backward and forward in time.

  Notes are useless to me unless there is a portion of the finished text to which they can be applied; I knew I must write enough of that text to serve as an umbilical cord between me and the novel before I landed in an unfamiliar place, otherwise I should lose it all. As the ship drew nearer to Ceylon I found myself recalling Kafka’s well-known aphorism: From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached. I doubt that he meant it to be applied to the writing of a book, nevertheless it seemed relevant to the situation. I strained to pass that crucial point; only then could I be sure of not having to turn back and abandon the book when I tried to continue work on it later.

  Sri Lanka (of which Ceylon is a latter-day mispronunciation) was as counterproductive of further work on the novel as I had anticipated; there was too much to see and learn, and the landscape was too seductive to allow much time for contemplation. I led a nomadic life, seldom staying more than a few days in one place. It was not until I crossed over into India that I was able to get back to work.

  In India the daytimes were devoted to exploration; I wrote at night, and my windowless workroom was far from satisfactory. The air was always several degrees above blood temperature, and the oil lamp felt like a furnace on my face. (The indicated place to work, of course, would have been the bed in the next room, save that no light could be lit there for the thousands of winged insects that would immediately enter. I went to bed in the dark.) But as writers know, intense discomfort often helps to induce intensive work.

  At the end of 1950 I was back in Tangier; it was a memorably stormy winter and I was living in a newly opened pension. It was also newly (read badly) built, so that the rain ran down the walls of my room, across to the door into the corridor, and thence down the stairs into the reception hall below. Since moving around the room meant splashing through cold water, I stayed in bed most of the time while I completed Fresh Meat and Roses. Then I traveled for eight months in Morocco, Algeria and Spain, working sporadically on the third section, The Age of Monsters.

  In the autumn of 1951 when I returned to Tangier, I went up to Xauen to write the final section. Here in the absolute silence of the mountain nights, I accomplished what I had hoped to be able to do when I reached this place in the book. I shut off the controls and let Another Kind of Silence guide itself, without supplying any conscious direction. It went as far as it could go, then stopped, and that was the end of the book.

  The hero is a nonentity, a “victim,” as he describes himself, whose personality, defined solely in terms of situation, elicits sympathy only to the extent to which he is victimized. He is the only totally invented character; for all the others I used as models actual residents of Tangier. Some of these people have moved away and the rest have died. The sole character whose model remains here is Richard Holland, and this is because I am still here and he is a caricature of myself.

  The theft of the money as it actually occurred was so improbable that I had to modify it to give it credibility. About three years after the end of World War II the son of a famous English writer came to Tangier with his wife and decided to buy a piece of land and build a house. There was a ban on removing sterling from the United Kingdom, so, like many others, he went to see an Indi
an merchant in Gibraltar, to whom he gave a check on his London bank. The Indian was to instruct his son in Tangier to deliver the money in pesetas to Mr. X. But Mr. X was a grand gentleman who employed an English secretary to attend to such matters. When the secretary went to fetch the money from the younger Indian, he found the cash waiting for him, but it was in sterling rather than in pesetas, and sterling could not be spent in the International Zone because of the financial restrictions. The Indian put him in touch with a money-changer around the corner, who agreed to buy the sterling. The money-changer filled a box with pesetas and took it to the Indian, saying that he was on his way to lunch and did not want to carry it with him, and that he would call by in the afternoon on his way back to his office and pick up the pounds.

  In the afternoon the secretary called at the Indian’s shop to say that he had just left the money-changer in the Zoco Chico and that he had asked him to do him the favor of taking the pounds around to his office immediately. He went out with the box, and was back five minutes later. There, that’s done, he said. Then he picked up the pesetas, thanked the Indian, and stepped out into the throng passing through the Siaghines. An hour later he was on a plane bound for Madrid, with both pesetas and pounds. The last report on him, which I heard a year or so later, was from Buenos Aires, where he was playing the races.

  P.B.

  Book One

  * * *

  INTERNATIONAL ZONE

  I

  It was night by the time the little ferry drew up alongside the dock. As Dyar went down the gangplank a sudden gust of wind threw warm raindrops in his face. The other passengers were few and poorly dressed; they carried their things in cheap cardboard valises and paper bags. He watched them standing resignedly in front of the customs house waiting for the door to be opened. A half-dozen disreputable Arabs had already caught sight of him from the other side of the fence and were shouting at him. “Hotel Metropole, mister!” “Hey, Johnny, come on!” “You want hotel?” “Grand Hotel, hey!” It was as if he had held up his American passport for them to see. He paid no attention. The rain came down in earnest for a minute or so. By the time the official had opened the door he was uncomfortably wet.

  The room inside was lighted by three oil lamps placed along the counter, one to an inspector. They saved Dyar until last, and all three of them went through his effects very carefully, without a gleam of friendliness or humour. When he had repacked his grips so they would close they marked them with lavender chalk and reluctantly let him pass. He had to wait in line at the window over which was printed Policia. While he was standing there a tall man in a visored cap caught his attention, calling “Taxi!” The man was decently dressed, and so he signalled yes with his head. Straightway the man in the cap was embroiled in a struggle with the others as he stepped to take the luggage. Dyar was the only prey that evening. He turned his head away disgustedly as the shouting figures followed the taxi-driver out the door. He felt a little sick, anyway.

  And in the taxi, as the rain pelted the windshield and the squeaking wipers rubbed painfully back and forth on the glass, he went on feeling sick. He was really here now; there was no turning back. Of course there never had been any question of turning back. When he had written he would take the job and had bought his passage from New York, he had known his decision was irrevocable. A man does not change his mind about such things when he has less than five hundred dollars left. But now that he was here, straining to see the darkness beyond the wet panes, he felt for the first time the despair and loneliness he thought he had left behind. He lit a cigarette and passed the pack to the driver.

  He decided to let the driver determine for him where he would stay. The man was an Arab and understood very little English, but he did know the words cheap and clean. They passed from the breakwater on to the mainland, stopped at a gate where two police inspectors stuck their heads in through the front windows, and then they drove slowly for a while along a street where there were a few dim lights. When they arrived at the hotel the driver did not offer to help him with his luggage, nor was there any porter in sight. Dyar looked again at the entrance: the façade was that of a large modern hotel, but within the main door he saw a single candle burning. He got down and began pulling out his bags. Then he glanced questioningly at the driver who was watching him empty the cab of the valises; the man was impatient to be off.

  When he had set all his belongings on the sidewalk and paid the driver, he pushed the hotel door open and saw a young man with smooth black hair and a dapper moustache sitting at the small reception desk. The candle provided the only light. He asked if this were the Hotel de la Playa, and he did not know whether he was glad or sorry to hear that it was. Getting his bags into the lobby by himself took a little while. Then, led by a small boy who carried a candle, he climbed the stairs to his room: the elevator was not working because there was no power.

  They climbed three flights. The hotel was like an enormous concrete resonating chamber; the sound of each footstep, magnified, echoed in all directions. The building had the kind of intense and pure shabbiness attained only by cheap new constructions. Great cracks had already appeared in the walls, bits of the decorative plaster mouldings around the doorways had been chipped off, and here and there a floor tile was missing.

  When they reached the room the boy went in first and touched a match to a new candle that had been stuck in the top of an empty Cointreau bottle. The shadows shot up along the walls. Dyar sniffed the close air with displeasure. The odour in the room suggested a mixture of wet plaster and unwashed feet.

  “Phew! It stinks in here,” he said. He looked suspiciously at the bed, turned the stained blue spread back to see the sheets.

  Opposite the door there was one large window which the boy hastened to fling open. A blast of wind rushed in out of the darkness. There was the faint sound of surf. The boy said something in Spanish, and Dyar supposed he was telling him it was a good room because it gave on the beach. He did not much care which way the room faced: he had not come here on a vacation. What he wanted at the moment was a bath. The boy shut the window and hurried downstairs to get the luggage. In one corner, separated from the rest of the room by a grimy partition, was a shower with grey concrete walls and floor. He tried the tap marked caliente and was surprised to find the water fairly hot.

  When the boy had brought the valises, piled them in the wrong places, received his tip, had difficulty in closing the door, and finally gone away leaving it ajar, Dyar moved from the window where he had been standing fingering the curtains, looking out into the blackness. He slammed the door shut, heard the key fall tinkling to the floor in the corridor. Then he threw himself on the bed and lay a while staring at the ceiling. He must call Wilcox immediately, let him know he had arrived. He turned his head and tried to see if there was a telephone on the low night table by the bed, but the table lay in the shadow of the bed’s footboard, and it was too dark there to tell.

  This was the danger point, he felt. At this moment it was almost as though he did not exist. He had renounced all security in favour of what everyone had assured him, and what he himself suspected, was a wild-goose chase. The old thing was gone beyond recall, the new thing had not yet begun. To make it begin he had only to telephone Wilcox, yet he lay still. His friends had told him he was crazy, his family had remonstrated with him both indignantly and sadly, but for some reason about which he himself knew very little, he had shut his ears to them all. “I’m fed up!” he would cry, a little hysterically. “I’ve stood at that damned window in the bank for ten years now. Before the war, during the war, and after the war. I can’t take it any longer, that’s all!” And when the suggestion was made that a visit to a doctor might be indicated, he laughed scornfully, replied: “There’s nothing wrong with me that a change won’t cure. Nobody’s meant to be confined in a cage like that year after year. I’m just fed up, that’s all.” “Fine, fine,” said his father. “Only what do you think you can do about it?” He had no answer to that. Duri
ng the depression, when he was twenty, he had been delighted to get a job in the Transit Department at the bank. All his friends had considered him extremely fortunate; it was only his father’s friendship with one of the vice-presidents which had made it possible for him to be taken on at such a time. Just before the war he had been made a teller. In those days when change was in the air nothing seemed permanent, and although Dyar knew he had a heart murmur, he vaguely imagined that in one way or another it would be got around so that he would be given some useful wartime work. Anything would be a change and therefore welcome. But he had been flatly rejected; he had gone on standing in his cage. Then he had fallen prey to a demoralizing sensation of motionlessness. His own life was a dead weight, so heavy that he would never be able to move it from where it lay. He had grown accustomed to the feeling of intense hopelessness and depression which had settled upon him, all the while resenting it bitterly. It was not in his nature to be morose, and his family noticed it. “Just do things as they come along,” his father would say. “Take it easy. You’ll find there’ll be plenty to fill each day. Where does it get you to worry about the future? Let it take care of itself.” Continuing, he would issue the familiar warning about heart trouble. Dyar would smile wryly. He was quite willing to let each day take care of itself,—the future was furthest from his thoughts. The present stood in its way; it was the minutes that were inimical. Each empty, overwhelming minute as it arrived pushed him a little further back from life. “You don’t get out enough,” his father objected. “Give yourself a chance. Why, when I was your age I couldn’t wait for the day to be finished so I could get out on the tennis court, or down to the old river fishing, or home to press my pants for a dance. You’re unhealthy. Oh, I don’t mean physically. That little heart business is nothing. If you live the way you should it ought never to give you any trouble. I mean your attitude. That’s unhealthy. I think the whole generation’s unhealthy. It’s either one thing or the other. Overdrinking and passing out on the sidewalk, or else mooning around about life not being worth living. What the hell’s the matter with all of you?” Dyar would smile and say times had changed. Times always change, his father would retort, but not human nature.