Paul Theroux - The Pillars of Hercules

“Mister Bowles is very ill,” a Moroccan told me.

It was not surprising. Bowles was in his mid-eighties. The weather was terrible — first the six-day Levanter, and now this rain. It was cold enough for me to be wearing a jacket and a sweater. I needed the radiator in my hotel room. But I dreaded Bowles’s illness too, his being sick. I did not want to pester a sick man, and it also seemed to me that any illness in this damp cold city could have serious consequences. Besides, I had no introduction to him. I did not know where he lived.

This Moroccan, Mohammed, who claimed to know Bowles, said, “He has no telephone.”

Would he deliver a letter for me? He said yes. I wrote a note, telling him that I was in Tangier, and asking him whether he was well enough to have a visitor. I handed it over to Mohammed for delivery.

“We meet tomorrow at three o’clock,” Mohammed said. “I will tell you the answer.”

The rain continued to crackle all night on the cobblestones, blackening the narrow streets of the Kasbah, and emptying the Medina of pedestrians or else forcing them to shelter in doorways, and giving the city an air of mystery: in the rain Tangier was gleaming and unreadable. In such bad weather all Moroccans pulled their hood up over their head and it looked like a city of monks.

I could understand why certain foreigners might gravitate to Tangier. It was full of appealing paradoxes. The greatest was that it seemed so lawless and yet was so safe. It was also superficially exotic but not at all distant (I could see solid, hardworking Spain from the top floor of my hotel). Tangier had an air of the sinister and the illicit, yet it was actually rather sedate. Except for the touts, the local people were tolerant towards strangers, not to say utterly indifferent. Almost everything was inexpensive, and significantly, everything was available — not just the smuggled comforts of Europe but the more rarefied pleasures of this in-between place, that was neither Africa nor Europe.

If you decided to stay in Tangier there were other people just like you, writing books, composing music, chasing local boys or foreign girls. The city was visually interesting but undemanding. I realized that as I waited for a response from Paul Bowles. It was an easy city to kill time in. Its religion was relaxed and its history was anecdotal. The rough real Morocco was behind it, beyond the Rif Mountains. A foreigner might have to be careful there. But everyone belonged in Tangier. “Cosmopolitan, frowsy, familiar Tangier,” Edith Wharton wrote in her travel book In Morocco (1925), “that every tourist has visited for the last forty years.”

From 1923 until 1956 Tangier had been officially an International Zone, run by the local representatives of nine countries, including the USA. But even its absorption into Morocco at independence in 1956 did not change Tangerine attitudes nor its louche culture. In addition to the Casbah and the drugs, and the catamites that hung around the cafes, Tangier had the lovely Anglican cathedral of St. Andrews and the Grand Mosque. It seemed to me not Moroccan but Mediterranean — a place that had closer links to the other cities on the Mediterranean than it did to its own country. The great Mediterranean cities had much in common, Alexandria and Venice, Marseilles and Tunis, and even smaller places like Cagliari and Palma and Split. Their spirit was mongrel and Mediterranean.

I met Mohammed at the Hotel El-Minzah, one of the landmarks of Tangiers, an elegant place but untypical in being rather expensive.

“Mr. Paul Bowles is ill,” he said.

“You told me that yesterday. Is he sicker now?”

“Perhaps,” Mohammed said.

“Did you deliver my letter?”

“Yes.”

“No answer?”

“You can ask Mr. Paul Bowles.”

“And how will I do that?”

“You can meet him.”

The problem was finding him. And it was odd that everyone knew him and yet no one could say exactly where he lived. Even odder was the fact that he had been living in the same apartment block for almost forty years. He did not get out much. He had sought exile in Tangier; he had also sought exile in his apartment. Mohammed knew the name of the building in which Bowles lived, and the street, but no one seemed to recognize these names. My taxi driver had to ask directions. The street had been renamed — it was no longer Imam Kastellani. The building had no number. It was about a mile from the center of Tangier, in what counted as a suburb. And it was not much of a building — four nondescript stories, you entered by the back, and the ground floor was occupied by two shops.

A small girl playing in the foyer told me in French, “The American Bowles is upstairs in number twenty — the fourth floor.”

I went up and rang the bell and waited. I rang it four times, standing in the semidarkness of the hallway. Except for the jangling of the bell, there was no other sound inside. The afternoon was cold and damp, the building smelled gloomily of stewed meat. I thought: If I am spared, if I attain the age of eighty-five, I do not want to live in a place like this. Give me sunshine.

“One time I visited Bowles and when I entered his apartment he was being thrown into the air by an Arab,” my friend Ted Morgan had told me.

Historian and biographer (Maugham, Churchill and FDR, as well as William Burroughs), Morgan had lived in Tangier in his previous incarnation as Sanche de Gramont. His descriptions of Tangier in his Burroughs biography, Literary Outlaw , had rekindled my desire to visit the city, which he regarded as lurid but fun. But what was this about Bowles being thrown into the air?

“The Arab was muscular and had a very serious expression, and he was bouncing Bowles the way you might throw a baby in the air to make it laugh. That was what struck me. Bowles was giggling madly as he went up and down.”

But there was no answer from Bowles’s apartment. I turned to buzz the elevator when the door of number twenty opened and a dark and rather tough-looking Moroccan in a black leather jacket stood facing me.

“Yes?”

I said, “I would like to see Mr. Bowles.”

The Arab stared at me. Why had it taken so long for him to answer the door?

I said, “I want to ask him if he received my letter.”

It seemed a lame excuse, but the man nodded. “Wait here. I will ask him.”

He had left the door ajar, so I could see into the shadowy apartment, to a room with cushions and low chairs, a sort of Moroccan parlor, with shelves but not many books. There was a small kitchen to the right, a stove with a blackened kettle on it; but it was cold — nothing cooking. I nudged the door with my foot, and as I did so the Arab returned.

“You can go in,” he said. He was abrupt, neither polite nor rude. And he was strong. I could just imagine this Arab as the man in Ted Morgan’s story, tossing the distinguished writer in the air and making him giggle. The Arab vanished, leaving me to find my own way.

The parlor was dark — I could not read the titles of the few books on the shelves. Another small room beyond it was darker still, but its shadows were an effect of the brightness in the last room, where Paul Bowles lay in a brown bathrobe, on a low pallet against one wall, propped up, like a monk in a cell.

My first impression of the room was that it was very warm and very cluttered. The heat came from a hissing blowtorch attached to a gas bottle, a primitive heater shooting a bluey-orange flame at Bowles from a few feet away. The litter of small objects included notebooks and pens, as well as medicine bottles and pills, and tissues. There was an odor of camphor and eucalyptus in the air that gave it the atmosphere of a sickroom.

“Come in, come in,” Bowles said. “Yes, I know your books. Take that chair.”