Paul Theroux - The Pillars of Hercules

He had a genteel American voice, rather soft, with one of those patrician East Coast accents that is both New York and New England — but in fact placeless, more a prep school than a regional accent.

“I’m not well at the moment. I had a blocked artery in my leg. The doctor operated immediately, and I think it worked. But here I am. I can’t walk. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to.”

Yet, apart from lying there on his pallet, he did not look ill and he certainly did not seem elderly. His face was almost boyish, his hair was white but there was a lot of it — he had the look of a parson or a schoolmaster. What he had just said was precise. He spoke carefully, sometimes ironically, and was responsive. His hearing was excellent, his mind was sharp. Only his posture — supine — and his thinness, indicated that he might be ill. Otherwise he looked like someone whom I had disturbed in his nap, which was possibly the case.

Everything he might need was within reach. He was surrounded by books and papers and medicine, by a teapot and spoons and matches; and the wall facing him was divided into shelves and cubbyholes, in which there were stacks of sweaters and scarves and manuscripts. Some of the manuscripts were typed, and others were musical scores.

On the low table near where Bowles lay there was a large metronome, and bottles of capsules and tubes of ointment, and cassette tapes and a tin of Nesquik and cough drops and a partly eaten candy bar and a crumpled letter from the William Morris Agency and another note folded and jammed into an envelope scribbled, Paul Bowles, Tanger, Maroc , a vague address but it had obviously found him, as I had, with little more information than that.

That metronome reminded me of something Bowles said in a letter to Henry Miller. The letter is in his collection In Touch , and it relates to his choosing to live in Tangier. “I agree with you about doing things slowly,” he wrote. “Now that I think of it, it’s one of the reasons why I’m still here. One can set one’s life metronome at the speed that seems convenient for living. In the States the constant reminder that time is passing, that one must be quick, removes all the savor of being in the midst of living.”

Blackout curtains covered the window. That impressed me. You would not know in this small back room whether it was night or day, nor what country you were in.

“I am very sorry to disturb you,” I said. “It was kind of you to see me. I won’t stay long.”

He had blue piercing eyes. His thin hands were folded over his brown robe, and some papers lay on his lap. The blowtorch hissed and fizzed.

“I’m glad you came,” he said.

“But I can see you’re working. I know I’m interrupting.”

“I wish I could get up,” Bowles said. “I’m doing a translation — Roderigo Rey Rosa, a Guatemalan. And I have some work to do on a piece of music. What brings you to Tangier?”

“I’ve been traveling in the Mediterranean, trying to make some sense of it. Going to places I’ve never been before,” I said. “But you’ve been here since — when?”

“I first came here in 1931,” Bowles said, tugging his robe closer to his throat. “I was planning to go to Villefranche. Gertrude Stein said, ‘Go to Tangier.’ I didn’t know Tangier from Algiers. She had been here. She was very interested in a local painter.”

Gertrude Stein — hadn’t she also sent Sir Francis Rose and Dorothy Carrington to Corsica? And Robert Graves to Mallorca? And Hemingway to Spain? My impression of her now was of a big bossy lesbian, queening it in her salon in Paris, directing literary traffic, sending writers to unlikely destinations in the Mediterranean.

“I came with Aaron Copland,” Bowles said. “He hated it. There is often drumming at night here — you must have heard it. Aaron couldn’t sleep. He used to hear these drums and say, ‘The natives are on the warpath.’ He was very worried. He went away, but I stayed.”

“But you must have traveled a great deal. I love your Mexican stories, especially ‘Pastor Dow at Tacaté.’ Pastor Dow and his wind-up phonograph, playing jazz so that the Indians will stay and listen to his sermon.”

“I was in Mexico from ’36 until — when was Pearl Harbor?”—I reminded him—“Yes, until 1941,” he said. And he smiled. “My favorite part of ‘Pastor Dow’ is the little girl with the small alligator dressed up as a doll.”

“Have you done any traveling lately?”

“I went to Madrid last June to hear a performance of my music.”

“What about the United States — do you have a hometown?”

“New York is my hometown, if New York can be called a hometown,” Bowles said. “But I haven’t been back to America for twenty-seven years. I’m not afraid of flying. It’s just that it’s a lot of trouble — all the delays and waiting. And you can only bring one suitcase. I liked traveling in the great days, by ship, when I could bring half a dozen trunks — two of them might be filled with books. Now that is impossible.”

“How long has this been home for you?”

“I moved to this apartment in 1957, if that’s what you mean.”

“I meant Tangier.”

“Years,” Bowles said. “I had a house in Sri Lanka for a while. But I like it here. I like Islamic countries. It’s very corrupt here, but not as corrupt as some of these Central American countries.”

“Has it changed you, living here so long?”

“Living here, among Muslims, I suppose I’ve become more patient and fatalistic,” Bowles said. “You have no control over things, so what can you do? Muslims live their faith, they are seldom hypocrites. But hypocrisy is part of Christianity.”

“What is it about Tangier that attracts so many foreigners?”

He shrugged. The question did not provoke him. He had perhaps heard it ten thousand times. He said, “They don’t stay. The Beats came here twice, first in ’57, and then in ’61. Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg.”

“And William Burroughs?” I said, prompting him.

“Burroughs was here,” Bowles said. “For a long time he didn’t know where he was. Then he was writing Naked Lunch. He’d finish a sheet of foolscap and drop it on the floor. Allen gathered them and put them in order.”

It was well known that Bowles kept his distance from the Beats. These people were simply passing through. But Bowles was a respectable exile — superficially, at least. He was married, for one thing. Jane Bowles was another famous figure of Tangier. Her novel Two Serious Ladies was one of the strangest books I had ever read; accomplished, but odd. They kept an alligator as a pet. They had no children. Jane was frankly lesbian and towards the end of her life had been confined to a wheelchair. Daniel Farson wrote in his biography of Francis Bacon, “She drank; he preferred drugs like majoun. She called herself, with self-lacerating cruelty, ‘Crippie the Kike dyke.’ ” Bacon said Jane “died in a madhouse in Málaga, it must have been the worst thing in the world. Looked after by nuns, can you imagine anything more horrible?”

“Sex, for Bowles, appears to have been an embarrassment rather than a relief or a consummation of more delicate feelings,” the poet Iain Finlayson was quoted as saying in Farson’s book. “His fondness for young men can perhaps be better viewed as somewhat pedagogic and paternal.”

But that was obviously the past — and probably the distant past. He seemed to me a man who masked all his feelings; he had a glittering eye, but a cold gaze. He seemed at once preoccupied, knowledgeable, worldly, remote, detached, vain, skeptical, eccentric, self-sufficient, indestructible, egomaniacal, and hospitable to praise. He was like almost every other writer I had known in my life.