The Pillars of Hercules

“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.”

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.”