Paul Theroux - The Pillars of Hercules

Talking about the Beats, Bowles mentioned Allen Ginsberg. “Ginsberg is a rabbi manqué,” he said. “He looks like a professor of chemistry. I read Howl. I didn’t love it. I read Kaddish , his next, and liked it more.”

“What about Naked Lunch?”

“Burroughs had a sense of humor,” Bowles said. “No jokes in the others.”

“What do you read for pleasure?”

“Recently I reread Victory. It is very sinister when those three men show up. And Passage to India. I reread that. I didn’t like it as much as the first time.”

“You said a moment ago that you had a place in Sri Lanka,” I said.

“It was an island,” Bowles said. “I loved it. I happened to be visiting the Duke of Pembroke at Wilton—”

“David Herbert’s father,” I said.

“Yes, and I met Sybil Colfax. I told them I wanted to go somewhere warm. They suggested Ceylon. It was an awful trip on a Polish ship. I went to Colombo and then down to Galle and then on to this island. It was small, not more than an acre, but covered with wonderful plants that a Frenchman had brought from all over the world. When the island was put up for sale I wired my bank and bought it.”

And now in this small hot room, with the shades drawn, he was on another island. No living space could have been smaller than this back room where he obviously lived and worked; he ate here, he wrote here, he slept here. His books, his music, his medicine. His world had shrunk to these walls. But that was merely the way it seemed. It was another illusion. His world was within his mind, and his imagination was vast.

I said I ought to be going. He said, “You’re welcome to stay,” and opened a flat tobacco can and took out a hand-rolled cigarette and offered me one.

“Go on. It’s a kif cigarette,” he said. Kif was marijuana, majoun was hashish jam. He added, “I always have my tea at four. And look, it’s almost five-thirty.”

We puffed away, Bowles and I, and now I recognized one of the odors in the room that earlier I had not been able to put a name to. We smoked in silence for a while, and then my scalp tightened and a glow came on in my brain and behind my eyes.

“I take it for health effect,” Bowles said. “They should legalize it, of course.”

“Of course,” I said. “I was going to bring you a bottle of wine.”

“I don’t drink. Next time bring me chocolates.”

We kept puffing, companionably, saying nothing. Then I saw what Bowles’s real strength was: he was stubborn. People came and went. Bowles stayed. People started and abandoned their symphonies and novels. Bowles finished his own. People got sick and neglected their work. Bowles took to his bed and kept working. His life was a masterpiece of non-attachment, of a stubborn refusal to become involved in anyone else’s passions. I could just imagine his blue eyes narrowing and his thin lips saying, I’m not moving.

Bowles said, “People come every day. There are film and TV people. The équipe take over. Some Germans stayed for eleven days and dropped food and sandwiches everywhere. Some people want me to sign their books. The ones with the most chutzpah say to me, ‘Since we were in Tangier we didn’t want to leave until we saw what you looked like.’ ”

“I suppose because you keep to yourself, people seek you out.”

But another reason that people sought him out was that he had no telephone.

“I work all the time,” Bowles said. “Malraux said to me, ‘Never let yourself become a public monument. If you do, people will piss on you.’ ”

“That’s good.”

Bowles leaned over, snatched at the blackout curtains, missed, and then gathered his bathrobe again.

“Is it dark?”

“It must be — it’s after seven,” I said. “I ought to be going.”

“I don’t know whether I’ll go anywhere with this leg,” he said, staring at his thin shanks under the blanket. He looked up at me. “We’ll meet again, Inshallah. Are you staying in Tangier?”

“I might leave tomorrow.”

He took a puff on his kif cigarette and kept the smoke in his lungs.

“Everyone is always leaving tomorrow.”

Darkness had fallen. I had to grope my way out of Bowles’s apartment, and I stumbled down the stairs — the elevator was not working. But I was elated. I had met Bowles, he had been friendly and he seemed to typify a place that had been something of a riddle to me.

Pleased with myself for this pleasant encounter, I kept walking, down Bowles’s road, that had once been called Imam Kastellani, up to the main road and past the Spanish consulate, and into town, about a twenty-minute walk. I needed to find a quiet place to write everything down, the whole conversation. I entered a bar, The Negresco, and ordered a glass of beer and began writing.

“You’re a writer,” the bartender said. His name was Hassan. He asked to see the page, and smiled at my handwriting. “Do you know Mohammed Choukri? He is a writer. He is over there.”

I was introduced to a small smiling man with a big mustache. He was slightly drunk, but he was alert and voluble. His books, he said, had been translated by Bowles. His best-known novel was For Bread Alone. But he had published other books, in Arabic and French. One was a diaristic account of his meetings with Jean Genet.

“Genet preferred me to Bowles,” Choukri said, a twinkle in his eye, as though defying me to guess the reason. He was small, fine-featured, smoking heavily, in his late fifties or early sixties. He wore a tweed jacket and a tie and seemed almost professorial.

“Why?”

“Because I am marginal,” Choukri said. “Bowles is from a great family. He has money. He has position. But I am a Berber, from a little village, Nador. Until I was twenty I was illiterate.” He licked his thumb and pretended to stamp a document with it. “I had thirteen brothers and sisters. Nine of them died of poverty — tuberculosis and other diseases.”

“How long have you known Bowles?”

“Twenty-one years,” Choukri said. “He is a miser. In twenty-one years he has not bought me even one cup of coffee.”

You’re not difficult; you’re simply mean , a friend of Bowles once said to him. Bowles reflected: I’ve thought about it for some years, and have decided he was probably right. The meanness however is not personal; it’s just New England parsimony, and I’ve never questioned its correctness.

“Do you think he’s happy here?”

“You can’t ask that question now,” Choukri said. “You should have asked him that thirty years ago.”

We stood at the bar, drinking beer. The beer slopped on my little notebook. I had been interrupted writing about Bowles. Now there was more — this sudden encounter with one of Bowles’s oldest friends in Morocco. It was dreamlike, too. All those names: Gertrude Stein, Aaron Copland, the Duke of Pembroke, William Burroughs, Jean Genet — familiar and intrusive and unreal in this smoky Tangerine bar, another unlikely interlude in the hello-good-bye of travel.

“He is a nihilist,” Choukri said.

That seemed to sum him up, the man who had once owned an island and visited Wilton Manor; who now stubbornly lived in one room, warmed by a blowtorch.

“Did Tangier do that to him?”

“Tangier is a mysterious city,” Choukri said. “When you solve the mystery it is time to leave.”

I could not have imagined a better exit line to serve my departure — from Tangier, from Morocco, from the Mediterranean. But the line vanished from my mind the next morning as I boarded the ferry Boughaz for the trip across the Straits.

I was thinking of how there was an aspect of Mediterranean travel that was like museum-going, the shuffling, the squinting, the echoes, the dust, the dubious treasures. You were supposed to be reverential. But even in the greatest museums I had been distracted, and found myself gazing out of museum windows at traffic or trees, or at other museum-goers; places like that were always the haunt of lovers on rainy Sundays. Instead of pictures, I often looked at the guards, the men or women in chairs at the entrances to rooms, the way they stifled yawns, their watchful eyes, their badges. No museum guard ever resembles a museum-goer, and my Mediterranean was like that.