Paul Bowles - The Delicate Prey - And Other Stories

At the noonday meal they talked about it. After some argument the bets were paid. One of the oilers went to his cabin and brought out a bottle of cognac and a set of little glasses which he put in front of him and filled, one after the other.

“Have some?” he said to Ramón.

Ramón took a glass, and the oiler passed the rest around to the others.

Our civilization is doomed to a short life: its component parts are too heterogeneous. I personally am content to see everything in the process of decay. The bigger the bombs, the quicker it will be done. Life is visually too hideous for one to make the attempt to preserve it. Let it go. Perhaps some day another form of life will come along. Either way, it is of no consequence. At the same time, I am still a part of life, and I am bound by this to protect myself to whatever extent I am able. And so I am here. Here in the Islands vegetation still has the upper hand, and man has to fight even to make his presence seen at all. It is beautiful here, the trade winds blow all year, and I suspect that bombs are extremely unlikely to be wasted on this unfrequented side of the island, if indeed on any part of it.

I was loath to give up the house after Hope’s death. But it was the obvious move to make. My university career always having been an utter farce (since I believe no reason inducing a man to “teach” can possibly be a valid one), I was elated by the idea of resigning, and as soon as her affairs had been settled and the money properly invested, I lost no time in doing so.

I think that week was the first time since childhood that I had managed to recapture the feeling of there being a content in existence. I went from one pleasant house to the next, making my adieux to the English quacks, the Philosophy fakirs, and so on—even to those colleagues with whom I was merely on speaking terms. I watched the envy in their faces when I announced my departure by Pan American on Saturday morning; and the greatest pleasure I felt in all this was in being able to answer, “Nothing,” when I was asked, as invariably I was, what I intended to do.

When I was a boy people used to refer to Charles as “Big Brother C.”, although he is only a scant year older than I. To me now he is merely “Fat Brother C.”, a successful lawyer. His thick, red face and hands, his back-slapping joviality, and his fathomless hypocritical prudery, these are the qualities which make him truly repulsive to me. There is also the fact that he once looked not unlike the way Racky does now. And after all, he still is my big brother, and disapproves openly of everything I do. The loathing I feel for him is so strong that for years I have not been able to swallow a morsel of food or a drop of liquid in his presence without making a prodigious effort. No one knows this but me—certainly not Charles, who would be the last one I should tell about it. He came up on the late train two nights before I left. He got quickly to the point—as soon as he was settled with a highball.

“So you’re off for the wilds,” he said, sitting forward in his chair like a salesman.

“If you can call it the wilds,” I replied. “Certainly it’s not wild like Mitichi.” (He has a lodge in northern Quebec.) “I consider it really civilized.”

He drank and smacked his lips together stiffly, bringing the glass down hard on his knee.

“And Racky. You’re taking him along?”

“Of course.”

“Out of school. Away. So he’ll see nobody but you. You think that’s good.”

I looked at him. “I do,” I said.

“By God, if I could stop you legally, I would!” he cried, jumping up and putting his glass on the mantel. I was trembling inwardly with excitement, but I merely sat and watched him. He went on. “You’re not fit to have custody of the kid!” he shouted. He shot a stern glance at me over his spectacles.

“You think not?” I said gently.

Again he looked at me sharply. “D’ye think I’ve forgotten?”

I was understandably eager to get him out of the house at soon as I could. As I piled and sorted letters and magazines on the desk, I said: “Is that all you came to tell me? I have a good deal to do tomorrow and I must get some sleep. I probably shan’t see you at breakfast. Agnes’ll see that you eat in time to make the early train.”

All he said was: “God! Wake up! Get wise to yourself! You’re not fooling anybody, you know.”

That kind of talk is typical of Charles. His mind is slow and obtuse; he constantly imagines that everyone he meets is playing some private game of deception with him. He is so utterly incapable of following the functioning of even a moderately evolved intellect that he finds the will to secretiveness and duplicity everywhere.

“I haven’t time to listen to that sort of nonsense,” I said, preparing to leave the room.

But he shouted, “You don’t want to listen! No! Of course not! You just want to do what you want to do. You just want to go on off down there and live as you’ve a mind to, and to hell with the consequences!” At this point I heard Racky coming downstairs. C. obviously heard nothing, and he raved on. “But just remember, I’ve got your number all right, and if there’s any trouble with the boy I’ll know who’s to blame.”

I hurried across the room and opened the door so he could see that Racky was there in the hallway. That stopped his tirade. It was hard to know whether Racky had heard any of it or not. Although he is not a quiet young person, he is the soul of discretion, and it is almost never possible to know any more about what goes on inside his head than he intends one to know.

I was annoyed that C. should have been bellowing at me in my own house. To be sure, he is the only one from whom I would accept such behavior, but then, no father likes to have his son see him take criticism meekly. Racky simply stood there in his bathrobe, his angelic face quite devoid of expression, saying: “Tell Uncle Charley good night for me, will you? I forgot.”

I said I would, and quickly shut the door. When I thought Racky was back upstairs in his room, I bade Charles good night. I have never been able to get out of his presence fast enough. The effect he has on me dates from an early period of our lives, from days I dislike to recall.

Racky is a wonderful boy. After we arrived, when we found it impossible to secure a proper house near any town where he might have the company of English boys and girls his own age, he showed no sign of chagrin, although he must have been disappointed. Instead, as we went out of the renting office into the glare of the street, he grinned and said: “Well, I guess we’ll have to get bikes, that’s all.”

The few available houses near what Charles would have called “civilization” turned out to be so ugly and so impossibly confining in atmosphere that we decided immediately on Cold Point, even though it was across the island and quite isolated on its seaside cliff. It was beyond a doubt one of the most desirable properties on the island, and Racky was as enthusiastic about its splendors as I.

“You’ll get tired of being alone out there, just with me,” I said to him as we walked back to the hotel.

“Aw, I’ll get along all right. When do we look for the bikes?”

At his insistence we bought two the next morning. I was sure I should not make much use of mine, but I reflected that an extra bicycle might be convenient to have around the house. It turned out that the servants all had their own bicycles, without which they would not have been able to get to and from the village of Orange Walk, eight miles down the shore. So for a while I was forced to get astride mine each morning before breakfast and pedal madly along beside Racky for a half hour. We would ride through the cool early air, under the towering silk-cotton trees near the house, and out to the great curve in the shoreline where the waving palms bend landward in the stiff breeze that always blows there. Then we would make a wide turn and race back to the house, loudly discussing the degrees of our desires for the various items of breakfast we knew were awaiting us there on the terrace. Back home we would eat in the wind, looking out over the Caribbean, and talk about the news in yesterday’s local paper, brought to us by Isiah each morning from Orange Walk. Then Racky would disappear for the whole morning on his bicycle, riding furiously along the road in one direction or the other until he had discovered an unfamiliar strip of sand along the shore that he could consider a new beach. At lunch he would describe it in detail to me, along with a recounting of all the physical hazards involved in hiding the bicycle in among the trees, so that natives passing along the road on foot would not spot it, or in climbing down unscalable cliffs that turned out to be much higher than they had appeared at first sight, or in measuring the depth of the water preparatory to diving from the rocks, or in judging the efficacy of the reef in barring sharks and barracuda. There is never any element of bragadoccio in Racky’s relating of his exploits—only the joyous excitement he derives from telling how he satisfies his inexhaustible curiosity. And his mind shows its alertness in all directions at once. I do not mean to say that I expect him to be an “intellectual.” That is no affair of mine, nor do I have any particular interest in whether he turns out to be a thinking man or not. I know he will always have a certain boldness of manner and a great purity of spirit in judging values. The former will prevent his becoming what I call a “victim”: he never will be brutalized by realities. And his unerring sense of balance in ethical considerations will shield him from the paralyzing effects of present-day materialism.