The Stories of Paul Bowles by Paul Bowles

Author:Paul Bowles [Bowles, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Short Stories (Single Author), Literary
ISBN: 006093784X
Google: irL5zRL0JZQC
Amazon: B003WJRDX8
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2010-12-28T05:00:00+00:00

A Friend of the World

SALAM RENTED two rooms and a kitchen on the second floor of a Jewish house at the edge of the town. He had decided to live with the Jews because he had already lived with Christians and found them all right. He trusted them a little more than he did other Moslems, who were like him and said: “No Moslem can be trusted.” Moslems are the only true people, the only people you can understand. But because you do understand them, you do not trust them. Salam did not trust the Jews completely, either, but he liked living with them because they paid no attention to him. It had no importance if they talked about him among themselves, and they never would talk about him to Moslems. If he had a sister who lived here and there, getting what money she could from whatever man she found, because she had to eat, that was all right, and the Jews did not point at her when she came to visit him. If he did not get married, but lived instead with his brother and spent his time smoking kif and laughing, if he got his money by going to Tangier once a month and sleeping for a week with old English and American ladies who drank too much whisky, they did not care. He was a Moslem. Had he been rich he would have lived in the Spanish end of the town in a villa with concrete benches in the garden and a big round light in the ceiling of the sala, with many pieces of glass hanging down from it. He was poor and he lived with the Jews. To get to his house he had to go to the end of the Medina, cross an open space where the trees had all been cut down, go along the street where the warehouses had been abandoned by the Spanish when they left, and into a newer, dirtier street that led to the main highway. Halfway down was the entrance to the alley where he and his brother and fourteen Jewish families lived. There were the remains of narrow sidewalks along the edges of the wide gutter, full of mounds of rotten watermelon-rind and piles of broken bricks. The small children played here all day. When he was in a hurry he had to be careful not to step on them as they waded in the little puddles of dishwater and urine that were in front of all the doors. If they had been Moslem children he would have spoken to them, but since they were Jews he did not see them as children at all, but merely as nuisances in his way, like cactuses that had to be stepped over carefully because there was no way of going around them. Although he had lived here for almost two years, he did not know the names of any of the Jews. For him they had no names.

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