Alexander Ulanov. Strangers in the desert

Strangers in the desert
Paul Bowles. Under the Cover of Heaven: Novel, stories. St. Petersburg, "Symposium", 2001. - 408 p.

Alexander Ulanov

Publication date: May 22, 2001

"The only way to travel... is to go when you want to go, and to stay where you want to stay." This movement, guided by instant desires, is meaningless - but is there much more meaning behind any of our other actions? The tourist is in a hurry to return home after several weeks or months; “a traveler, without staying anywhere for long, moves slowly, over many years, from one part of the earth to another” - because he cannot have a home. There are people who are strangers everywhere - and perhaps they strive to go where this strangeness will be more obvious, even demonstrative. Another language, another culture, another standard of living. Two from America, Port and Keith, husband and wife, are moving deeper into the Sahara, replacing small towns, indistinguishable from each other and equally dirty. "Pieces of rags; the dried remains of a strange gray lizard; burnt out, broken matchboxes; and heaps of white chicken feathers stuck together with black blood." Hunting falcons, proud Arabs - and babies with sores. And blinding light. “There was nothing but sparkling white walls, motionless sand under her feet and a bottomless blue sky above her head.”

This is not a search for the primordial wisdom of the East or primordial life. The prejudice has disappeared that some kind of truth should be sought from ordinary people - because “their way of thoughts and speeches is as limited and dependent... as the thoughts and speeches of a person from any other class.” This is a path into the void, throwing Port into the outskirts of Tangier, where they can offer a woman or cut his throat, Keith - from a cozy first-class compartment into a fourth-class carriage, where Arabs stand in a crowd. And the dissatisfaction of an instant desire is a disaster. Port lost the blind dancer who delighted him: “now that she had disappeared, he was convinced that he had lost not just a little pleasure, but had lost love itself... he was alone - abandoned, lost, devoid of hope, cold as ice.”

Port and Keith are strangers to each other. Those who want to restore intimacy - and those who are distant, who do not take a step towards. To avoid being rejected? or misunderstood? so as not to disturb the loneliness - someone else's or your own? Love of loneliness - and the desire for someone to share this love. “Everything happened as if he clung invariably to the hope that she, too, would be touched, like him, by loneliness and proximity to infinite things.” Understanding that a person cannot be brought back by any means - “and to fail would be even worse for her than not to try at all.” It is impossible to rely in love only on reason - and intuition is weak. Next to it is the belief that the world sends signs to a person, and the inability to interpret them, or rather, the awareness of how many of these interpretations there can be and how little reason to choose one of them. And Port returns to look at the surroundings from the hill again - without Keith, alone. But the view is alien. “The landscape did not disappear anywhere, it remained in place, and Port felt more acutely than ever that he could not reach it.”

People around you burden themselves with obligations; but it binds them to life. The traveler is light - and the slightest breath can move him towards death. “We are dangling from the side, hanging overboard with all our weight, confident that we will fall at the next push.” This is Porto and Keith "there is never enough time to enjoy the details; you tell yourself: some other time, but you are always aware that every day is the only and last one, that there will be no return, no another time." And the days of an Arab are always equal to each other. A viscous environment where any involuntary movement - interrupting the conversation and saying that you are cold - is regarded as unforgivable rudeness. Life is beautiful, but those who live are disgusting. And nothing will happen to them - to the smiling friend of Port and Keith Tanner, to the practical colonial officers, to the swindlers Leila, especially to the Arabs. And Port and Keith are sitting in a cafe before leaving for the Sahara "with the air of people who have eternity left." They will get eternity. The port falls ill with typhus in a village where there is no medicine, no doctor, and a thousand kilometers from cities and the sea. But illness is also a continuation of the journey, a deepening of alienation and loneliness. "So alone that I can't even remember what it means to not be alone." Illness brings Kit closer, but it doesn’t matter anymore. "I have so much to tell you. But I don't know what. I forgot everything." Become a stranger to words, to any speech . “Words entered his head like the wind blowing into a room, and extinguished the fragile flame of thought that arose in the darkness that reigned there. He turned less and less to them for help when he thought.” But there is still an attempt to stay in the world, a memory. “He looked at the line formed by the connection of the wall and the floor, trying his best to fix it in his memory, so that he would have something to grab onto when his eyes closed.”

And the movement of the deceased Port continues in Kit, lost in the desert without language and protection. Become a stranger to yourself. "She did only what - unexpectedly for herself - she found herself already doing." Be delighted by swimming in the spring and the refreshing water. To the rhythm of drums in the village square. In the monotonous movement of the caravan that picked up Keith: new dunes and plains, “and each next one was further than the last, at the same time completely indistinguishable from it.” In seclusion in the Arab's house, when only the hours of his caresses matter, and everything else is empty time spent in semi-oblivion. Here it is: eternity, sky, blinding grayness, African-style bathhouse with spiders. “The chaos of cubic buildings with their flat roofs seemed to stretch into infinity, and because of the dust and haze trembling from the heat, it was completely difficult to determine where the sky began. Despite the bright shine, the landscape was gray - dazzling in its radiance, but gray."

And absolute alienation is a refusal of reason. Self-indifference. “She lost all sense of where she was or who she was, as if the gray matter in her brain had become frozen over.” Refusal to open your eyes, refusal to face your memory, your past - yourself. This refusal is already irreversible; its violation is not even death, but the end. "They'll put her in front of a big mirror and say, 'Look!' And she'll be forced to look, and then it'll be over."

Because each personality is alienation, departure, a path along the edge and beyond (or otherwise - existence in a room that was furnished for you - and for you - by a cozy beloved). The characters from Bowles’s other stories also disappear into the void: the professor from “A Distant Case,” the girl from “Under the Sky.” Pending alarm states. “In the fireplace she heard the crumbly, slightly metallic sound of ash cooling and falling.” People with something else shining through. “It would be worth asking yourself why he needed all these completely unjustified actions, but he was smart enough to understand that if he did all this, then it was not so important to explain.” So Bowles himself left. Acquaintance of Gertrude Stein, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote. Composer. Dandy. He moved from America to Morocco and died there two years ago at 89 years old. A distant voice, an invisible observer. “He was somewhere, he came back through the immense masses from nowhere; the confidence of boundless sadness nestled at the bottom of his consciousness, but this sadness was encouraging, because it was the only thing he knew.”