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  Let it come down

  by Paul Bowles

  Banquo: it will be rain tonight

  First murderer: let it come down

  (stabs Banquo)

  Macbeth, Act iii scene 3

  1

  International Zone

  I

  It was night by the time the little ferry drew up alongside the dock. As Dyar went down the gangplank a sudden gust of wind threw warm raindrops in his face. The other passengers were few and poorly dressed; they carried their things in cheap cardboard valises and paper bags. He watched them standing resignedly in front of the customs house waiting for the door to be opened. A half-dozen disreputable Arabs had already caught sight of him from the other side of the fence and were shouting at him. «Hotel Metropole, mister!» «Hey, Johnny! Come on!» «You want hotel?» «Grand Hotel, hey!» It was as if he had held up his American passport for them to see. He paid no attention. The rain came down in earnest for a minute or so. By the time the official had opened the door he was uncomfortably wet.

  The room inside was lighted by three oil lamps placed along the counter, one to an inspector. They saved Dyar until last, and all three of them went through his effects very carefully, without a gleam of friendliness or humor. When he had repacked his grips so they would close, they marked them with lavender chalk and reluctantly let him pass. He had to wait in line at the window over which was printed Policia. While he was standing there a tall man in a visored cap caught his attention, calling: «Taxi!» The man was decently dressed, and so he signaled yes with his head. Straightway the man in the cap was embroiled in a struggle with the others as he stepped to take the luggage. Dyar was the only prey that evening. He turned his head away disgustedly as the shouting figures followed the taxi-driver out the door. He felt a little sick anyway.

  And in the taxi, as the rain pelted the windshield and the squeaking wipers rubbed painfully back and forth on the glass, he went on feeling sick. He was really here now; there Was no turning back. Of course there never had been any question of turning back. When he had written he would take the job and had bought his passage from New York, he had known his decision was irrevocable. A man does not change his mind about such things when he has less than five hundred dollars left. But now that he was here, straining to see the darkness beyond the wet panes, he felt for the first time the despair and loneliness he thought he had left behind. He lit a cigarette and passed the pack to the driver.

  He decided to let the driver determine for him where he would stay. The man was an Arab and understood very little English, but he did know the words cheap and clean. They passed from the breakwater onto the mainland, stopped at a gate where two police inspectors stuck their heads in through the front windows, and then they drove slowly for a while along a street where there were a few dim lights. When they arrived at the hotel the driver did not offer to help him with his luggage, nor was there any porter in sight. Dyar looked again at the entrance: the façade was that of a large modern hotel, but within the main door he saw a single candle burning. He got down and began pulling out his bags. Then he glanced questioningly at the driver who was watching him empty the cab of the valises; the man was impatient to be off.

  When he had set all his belongings on the sidewalk and paid the driver, he pushed the hotel door open and saw a young man with smooth black hair and a dapper moustache sitting at the small reception desk. The candle provided the only light. He asked if this were the Hotel de la Playa, and did not know whether he was glad or sorry to hear that it was. Getting his bags into the lobby by himself took a little while. Then, led by a small boy who carried a candle, he climbed the stairs to his room; the elevator was not working because there was no power.

  They climbed three flights. The hotel was like an enormous concrete resonating chamber; the sound of each footstep, magnified, echoed in all directions. The building had the kind of intense and pure shabbiness attained only by cheap new constructions. Great cracks had already appeared in the walls, bits of the decorative plaster mouldings around the doorways had been chipped off, and here and there a floor tile was missing.

  When they reached the room the boy went in first and touched a match to a new candle that had been stuck in the top of an empty Cointreau bottle. The shadows shot up along the walls. Dyar sniffed the close air with displeasure. The odor in the room suggested a mixture of wet plaster and unwashed feet.

  «Phew! It stinks in here,» he said. He looked suspiciously at the bed, turned the stained blue spread back to see the sheets.

  Opposite the door there was one large window which the boy hastened to fling open. A blast of wind rushed in out of the darkness. There was the faint sound of surf. The boy said something in Spanish, and Dyar supposed he was telling him it was a good room because it gave on the beach. He did not much care which way the room faced: he had not come here on a vacation. What he wanted at the moment was a bath. The boy shut the window and hurried downstairs to get the luggage. In one corner, separated from the rest of the room by a grimy partition, was a shower with gray concrete walls and floor. He tried the tap marked caliente and was surprised to find the water fairly hot.

  When the boy had brought the valises, piled them in the wrong places, received his tip, had difficulty in closing the door, and finally gone away leaving it ajar, Dyar moved from the window where he had been standing fingering the curtains, looking out into the blackness. He slammed the door shut, heard the key fall tinkling to the floor in the corridor. Then he threw himself on the bed and lay a while staring at the ceiling. He must call Wilcox immediately, let him know he had arrived. He turned his head and tried to see if there was a telephone on the low night table by the bed, but the table lay in the shadow of the bed’s footboard, and it was too dark there to tell.

  This was the danger point, he felt. At this moment it was almost as though he did not exist. He had renounced all security in favor of what everyone had assured him, and what he himself suspected, was a wild goose chase. The old thing was gone beyond recall, the new thing had not yet begun. To make it begin he had to telephone Wilcox, yet he lay still. His friends had told him he was crazy, his family had remonstrated with him both indignantly and sadly, but for some reason about which he himself knew very little, he had shut his ears to them all. «I’m fed up!» he would cry, a little hysterically. «I’ve stood at that damned window in the bank for ten years now. Before the war, during the war, and after the war. I can’t take it any longer, that’s all!» And when the suggestion was made that a visit to a doctor might be indicated, he laughed scornfully, replied: «There’s nothing wrong with me that a change won’t cure. Nobody’s meant to be confined in a cage like that year after year. I’m just fed up, that’s all». «Fine, fine,» said his father. «Only what do you think you can do about it?» He had no answer to that. During the depression, when he was twenty, he had been delighted to get a job in the Transit Department at the bank. All his friends had considered him extremely fortunate; it was only his father’s friendship with one of the vice-presidents which had made it possible for him to be taken on at such a time. Just before the war he had been made a teller. In those days when change was in the air nothing seemed permanent, and although Dyar knew he had a heart murmur, he vaguely imagined that in one way or another it would be got around so that he would be given some useful wartime work. Anything would be a change and therefore welcome. But he had been flatly rejected; he had gone on standing in his cage. Then he had fallen prey to a demoralizing sensation of motionlessness. His own life was a dead weight, so heavy that he would never be able to move it from where it lay. He had grown accustomed to the feeling of intense hopelessness and depression which had settled upon him, all the w
hile resenting it bitterly. It was not in his nature to be morose, and his family noticed it. «Just do things as they come along,» his father would say. «Take it easy. You’ll find there’ll be plenty to fill each day. Where does it get you to worry about the future? Let it take care of itself». Continuing, he would issue the familiar warning about heart trouble. Dyar would smile wryly. He was quite willing to let each day take care of itself — the future was furthest from his thoughts. The present stood in its way; it was the minutes that were inimical. Each empty, overwhelming minute as it arrived pushed him a little further back from life. «You don’t get out enough,» his father objected. «Give yourself a chance. Why, when I was your age I couldn’t wait for the day to be finished so I could get out on the tennis court, or down to the old river fishing, or home to press my pants for a dance. You’re unhealthy. Oh, I don’t mean physically. That little heart business is nothing. If you live the way you should it ought never to give you any trouble. I mean your attitude. That’s unhealthy. I think the whole generation’s unhealthy. It’s either one thing or the other. Overdrinking and passing out on the sidewalk, or else mooning around about life not being worth living. What the hell’s the matter with all of you?» Dyar would smile and say times had changed. Times always change, his father would retort, but not human nature.

  Dyar was not a reader; he did not even enjoy the movies. Entertainment somehow made the stationariness of existence more acute, not only when the amusement was over, but even during the course of it. After the war he made a certain effort to reconcile himself to his life. Occasionally he would go out with two or three of his friends, each one taking a girl. They would have cocktails at the apartment of one of the girls, go on to a Broadway movie, and eat afterward at some Chinese place in the neighborhood where there was dancing. Then there was the long process of taking the girls home one by one, after which they usually went into a bar and drank fairly heavily. Sometimes, not very often, they would pick up something cheap in the bar or in the street, take her to Bill Healy’s room, and lay her in turn. It was an accepted pattern; there seemed to be no other to suggest in its place. Dyar kept thinking: «Any life would be better than this,» but he could find no different possibility to consider. «Once you accept the fact that life isn’t fun, you’ll be much happier,» his mother said to him. Although he lived with his parents, he never discussed with them the way he felt; it was they who, sensing his unhappiness, came to him and, in vaguely reproachful tones, tried to help him. He was polite with them but inwardly contemptuous. It was so clear that they could never understand the emptiness he felt, nor realize the degree to which he felt it. It was a progressive paralysis, it gained on him constantly, and it carried with it the fear that when it arrived at a certain point something terrible would happen.

  He could hear the distant sound of waves breaking on the beach outside: the dull roll, a long silence, another roll. Someone came into the room over his, slammed the door, and began to move about busily from one side of the room to the other. It sounded like a woman, but a heavy one. The water was turned on and the wash basin in his room bubbled as if in sympathy. He lit a cigarette, from time to time flicking the ashes onto the floor beside the bed. After a few minutes the woman — he sure it was a woman — went out the door, slammed it, and he heard her walk down the hall into another room and close that door. A toilet flushed. Then the footsteps returned to the room above.

  «I must call Wilcox,» he thought. But he finished his cigarette slowly, making it last. He wondered why he felt so lazy about making the call. He had taken the great step, and he believed he had done right. All the way across on the ship to Gibraltar, he had told himself that it was the healthy thing to have done, that when he arrived he would be like another person, full of life, delivered from the sense of despair that had weighed on him for so long. And now he realized that he felt exactly the same. He tried to imagine how he would feel if, for instance, he had his whole life before him to spend as he pleased, without the necessity to earn his living. In that case he would not have to telephone Wilcox, would not be compelled to exchange one cage for another. Having made the first break, he would then make the second, and be completely free. He raised his head and looked slowly around the dim room. The rain was spattering the window. Soon he would have to go out. There was no restaurant in the hotel, and it was surely a long way to town. He felt the top of the night table; there was no telephone. Then he got up, took the candle, and made a search of the room. He stepped out into the corridor, picked his key off the floor, locked his door and went downstairs thinking: «I’d have him on the wire by now if there’d only been a phone by the bed».

  The man was not at the desk. «I’ve got to make a call,» he said to the boy who stood beside a potted palm smirking. «It’s very important. — Telephone! Telephone!» he shouted, gesturing, as the other made no sign of understanding. The boy went to the desk, brought an old-fashioned telephone out from behind and set it on top. Dyar took the letter out of his pocket to look for the number of Wilcox’s hotel. The boy tried to take the letter, but he copied the number on the back of the envelope and gave it to him. A fat man wearing a black raincoat came in and asked for his key. Then he stood glancing over a newspaper that lay spread out on the desk. As the boy made the call Dyar thought: «If he’s gone out to dinner I’ll have to go through this all over again». The boy said something into the mouthpiece and handed Dyar the receiver.

  «Hello?»

  «Hotel Atlantide».

  «Mr. Wilcox, please». He pronounced the name very carefully. There was a silence. «Oh, God,» he thought, annoyed with himself that he should care one way or the other whether Wilcox was in. There was a click.

  «Yes?»

  It was Wilcox. For a second he did not know what to say. «Hello?» he said.

  «Hello. Yes?»

  «Jack?»

  «Yes. Who’s this?»

  «This is Nelson. Nelson Dyar».

  «Dyar! Well, for God’s sake! So you got here after all. Where are you? Come on over. You know how to get here? Better take a cab. You’ll get lost. Where are you staying?»

  Dyar told him.

  «Jesus! That»— Dyar had the impression he had been about to say: that dump. But he said: «That’s practically over the border. Well, come on up as soon as you can get here. You take soda or water?»

  Dyar laughed. He had not known he would be so pleased to hear Wilcox’s voice. «Soda,» he said.

  «Wait a second. Listen. I’ve got an idea. I’ll call you back in five minutes. Don’t go out. Wait for my call. Just stay put. I just want to call somebody for a second. It’s great to have you here. Call you right back. O.K.?»

  «Right».

  He hung up and went to stand at the window. The rain that was beating against the glass had leaked through and was running down the wall. Someone had put a rag along the floor to absorb it, but now the cloth floated in a shallow pool. Two or three hundred feet up the road from the hotel there was a streetlight. Beneath it in the wind the glistening spears of a palm branch charged back and forth. He began to pace from one end of the little foyer to the other; the boy, standing by the desk with his hands behind him, watched him intently. He was a little annoyed at Wilcox for making him wait. Of course he thought he had been phoning from his room. He wondered if Wilcox were making good money with his travel agency. In his letters he had said he was, but Dyar remembered a good deal of bluff in his character. His enthusiasm need have meant nothing more than that he needed an assistant and preferred it to be someone he knew (the wages were low enough, and Dyar had paid his own passage from New York), or that he was pleased with a chance to show his importance and magnanimity; it would appeal to Wilcox to be able to make what he considered a generous gesture. Dyar thought it was more likely to be the latter case. Their friendship never had been an intimate one. Even though they had known each other since boyhood, since Wilcox’s father had been the Dyars’ family doctor, each had never shown more than a polite interest i
n the other’s life. There was little in common between them — not even age, really, since Wilcox was nearly ten years older than he. During the war Wilcox had been sent to Algiers, and afterward it never had occurred to Dyar to wonder what had become of him. One day his father had come home saying: «Seems Jack Wilcox has stayed on over in North Africa. Gone into business for himself and seems to be making a go of it». Dyar had asked what kind of business it was, and had been only vaguely interested to hear that it was a tourist bureau.

  He had been walking down Fifth Avenue one brilliant autumn twilight and had stopped in front of a large travel agency. The wind that moved down from Central Park had the crispness of an October evening, carrying with it the promise of winter, the season that paralyzes; to Dyar it gave a foretaste of increased unhappiness. In one side of the window was a large model ship, black and white, with shiny brass accessories. The other side represented a tropical beach in miniature, with a sea of turquoise gelatin and tiny palm trees bending up out of a beach of real sand. BOOK NOW FOR WINTER CRUISES, said the sign. The thought occurred to him that it would be a torturing business to work in such a place, to plan itineraries, make hotel reservations and book passages for all the places one would never see. He wondered how many of the men who stood inside there consulting their folders, schedules, lists and maps felt as trapped as he would have felt in their place; it would be even worse than the bank. Then he thought of Wilcox. At that moment he began to walk again, very fast. When he got home he wrote the letter and took it out to post immediately. It was a crazy idea. Nothing could come of it, except perhaps that Wilcox would think him a god-damned fool, a prospect which did not alarm him.

  The reply had given him the shock of his life. Wilcox had spoken of coincidence. «There must be something in telepathy,» he had written. Only then did Dyar mention the plan to his family, and the reproaches had begun.