CONJUNCTIONS: A Web Exclusive Tangier Days:
Talking with Paul Bowles, 1984-1988
Richard F. Patteson
Having read somewhere that Paul Bowles did not have, or want, a telephone, I had written him a letter before my first visit, asking if he would mind meeting with me. He graciously wrote back immediately, and I later discovered that many people simply show up at his apartment, introducing themselves on the spot. He is unfailingly courteous to all of them.
The purpose of my own intrusion on his time was to gather what information I could in connection with a book I was writing about his fiction ( A World Outside: The Fiction of Paul Bowles ), and later, a follow-up article on his translations from the Moghrebi ("Paul Bowles/Mohmammed Mrabet: Translation, Transformation, and Transcultural Discourse").
When I found his apartment building, a semi-modern, semi-high rise affair across the street from a large box-like structure that once served as the American Consulate, Mohammed Mrabet was also just arriving. He showed me upstairs to the correct doorsomewhat skepticallyand Bowles explained to him right away that he had been expecting me (though not necessarily on that precise day).
We sat in his cluttered living room and talked for a long time. Periodically Bowles would stop to say something to Mrabet in Spanish or Moghrebi, and several times he rose from his seat to show me something, wandering away from the range of my cheap tape recorder. During the course of the afternoon he offered me a kif cigarette, although he declined to partake himself. I had been an undergraduate in the sixties, so this was certainly not my first experience with cannabis (far from it), but the combination of the kif's strength and my own jet-lag took its toll. I became hopelessly lost on my way back to my hotel, wandering for what seemed like hours through the narrow, labyrinthine streets of old Tangier. Not until the next morning did I recall the warning about hashish, a substance closely akin to kif, in "The Delicate Prey": "Carried along on its hot fumes, a man can escape very far from the world of meaning." | |
|
