Read Online The Stories of Paul Bowles by Paul Bowles - Free Book Online

clothes; small children splashed. Gigantic gray crabs scuttled between the holes they had made in the mud along the bank. He sat down on some elaborately twisted roots at the foot of a tree and took out the notebook he always carried with him. The day before, in a bar at Pedernales, he had written: “Recipe for dissolving the impression of hideousness made by a thing: Fix the attention upon the given object orsituation so that the various elements, all familiar, will regroup themselves. Frightfulness is never more than an unfamiliar pattern.”
    He lit a cigarette and watched the women’s hopeless attempts to launder the ragged garments. Then he threw the burning stub at the nearest crab, and carefully wrote: “More than anything else, woman requires strict ritualistic observance of the traditions of sexual behavior. That is her definition of love.” He thought of the derision that would be called forth should he make such a statement to the girl back on the ship. After looking at his watch, he wrote hurriedly: “Modern, that is, intellectual education, having been devised by males for males, inhibits and confuses her. She avenges…”
    Two naked children, coming up from their play in the river, ran screaming past him, scattering drops of water over the paper. He called out to them, but they continued their chase without noticing him. He put his pencil and notebook into his pocket, smiling, and watched them patter after one another through the dust.
    When he arrived back at the ship, the thunder was rolling down from the mountains around the harbor. The storm reached the height of its hysteria just as they got under way.
    She was sitting on her bunk, looking through the open porthole. The shrill crashes of thunder echoed from one side of the bay to the other as they steamed toward the open sea. He lay doubled up on his bunk opposite, reading.
    “Don’t lean your head against that metal wall,” he advised. “It’s a perfect conductor.”
    She jumped down to the floor and went to the washstand.
    “Where are those two quarts of White Horse we got yesterday?”
    He gestured. “In the rack on your side. Are you going to drink?”
    “I’m going to have a drink, yes.”
    “In this heat? Why don’t you wait until it clears, and have it on deck?”
    “I want it now. When it clears I won’t need it.”
    She poured the whisky and added water from the carafe in the wall bracket over the washbowl.
    “You realize what you’re doing, of course.”
    She glared at him. “What am I doing?”
    He shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing, except just giving in to a passing emotional state. You could read, or lie down and doze.”
    Holding her glass in one hand, she pulled open the door into the passageway with the other, and went out. The noise of the slamming door startled the monkey, perched on a suitcase. It hesitated a second, and hurried under its master’s bunk. He made a few kissing sounds to entice it out, and returned to his book. Soon he began to imagine her alone and unhappy on the deck, and the thought cut into the pleasure of his reading. He forced himself to lie still a few minutes, the open book face down across his chest. The boat was moving at full speed now, and the sound of the motors was louder than the storm in the sky.
    Soon he rose and went on deck. The land behind was already hidden by the falling rain, and the air smelled of deep water. She was standing alone by the rail, looking down at the waves, with the empty glass in her hand. Pity seized him as he watched, but he could not walk across to her and put into consoling words the emotion he felt.
    Back in the cabin he found the monkey on his bunk, slowly tearing the pages from the book he had been reading.
    The next day was spent in leisurely preparation for disembarking and changing of boats: in Villalta they were to take a smaller vessel to the opposite side of the delta.
    When she came in to pack after dinner, she stood a moment studying the cabin.