The African Shore

AFTERWORD BY JEFFREY GRAY. RODRIGO REY ROSA AND TANGIER

Most of Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s fifteen books of fiction are set in Guatemala; the exceptions are Ningún lugar sagrado (1998), a collection of nine short stories set in New York City; The Good Cripple (1996, translated into English in 2004), set in Guatemala and Morocco; Que me maten si. . (1996), set in Guatemala, London, and Paris; and this book, The African Shore (La orilla africana, 1999), Rey Rosa’s only novel set in Tangier.

To utter the word “Tangier” in a literary context is to invoke the American writer Paul Bowles, who lived in that city from the 1950s until his death in 1999, and who was Rey Rosa’s mentor and friend, his first translator into English, and of whose literary estate Rey Rosa is heir. Many writers visited or frequented Tangier — Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Djuna Barnes, Alan Sillitoe, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, among them — but only Bowles settled there for a lifetime. (He had first visited Tangier, with Aaron Copland, in the 1930s on the suggestion of Gertrude Stein.) In the context of The African Shore, it is worth reminding ourselves of the Bowles — Rey Rosa relationship and its importance for both writers.

In “Bowles y yo” (a title that alludes to Bowles’s own “Bowles and It” as well as to Borges’s prose poem “Borges y yo”), Rey Rosa tells how, at twenty-one, he saw a poster in the hallway of the School of Visual Arts in New York City advertising a “workshop” in Tangier; he signed up, and with fifty other Americans, most of them New Yorkers and most of them two or three times his age, flew to Tangier to study with Bowles.

Bowles himself recalled that experience:

In the summer of 1980 I was conducting a workshop for “creative writing” at the American School of Tangier. The language used was English, since the students were Americans — with one exception. The youngest of the class was a Guatemalan, who wrote in Spanish. He had a fertile imagination, and used it to invent situations which were generally sinister. His texts were very short, often mere scenes or prose-poems of atmosphere, rather than tales, but all of them showed a power of invention capable of creating truly original situations.

During one of their earliest sessions, Bowles asked the class to name their favorite writers. When Rey Rosa mentioned Jorge Luis Borges, Bowles was pleased; he too had a predilection for Borges and had been the first to translate “The Circular Ruins” into English. After the session, Bowles told him he had traveled in Guatemala and knew Spanish, and advised Rey Rosa to write in Spanish thereafter. He also encouraged him to travel around Morocco; it wouldn’t hurt to miss a few workshops, he said, especially since the discussions with the other students, writing in English, probably wouldn’t be very helpful to his own work. Bowles lent him maps of northern Morocco to take with him, and Rey Rosa set off for the interior.

When Rey Rosa was about to return to New York, Bowles asked him if he would allow him to translate the stories (or prose poems) that the younger writer had handed in as coursework. A New York publisher (Red Ozier Press), specializing in “extravaganzas,” had asked Bowles for a book for its catalogue, but he didn’t have anything to send at the time. Could he translate Rey Rosa’s stories and submit them? Thus began their long collaboration — asymmetrical, Rey Rosa notes, “since the student’s translation of the master can’t be on the same level as the master’s translation of the student.” (Bowles translated Rey Rosa’s first three books, Dust on Her Tongue, The Beggar’s Knife, and The Pelcari Project; Rey Rosa translated into Spanish Bowles’s Too Far from Home, Points in Time, and Selected Stories, among others.)

The African Shore tells two stories, separate and yet so closely intertwined that one would be unintelligible without the other. (Indeed one was written in order to complement and complete the other.) The first is that of an adolescent Moroccan shepherd, Hamsa, who, having come down with a bad cold, is nursed back to health by his grandparents, who work at the villa of a wealthy Frenchwoman. The other concerns a young Colombian tourist who, having lost his passport during a night of drinking, uses this accident as an excuse not to return to his life in Colombia. While waiting for a new passport, buying kif, and courting a French archaeology student named Julie, he writes to and receives letters from his girlfriend in Cali, and we see him, day by day, letting that other life at “home” slip away.

The title La orilla africana could as easily be translated “the African bank,” or “the African side,” as opposed to the European side of the strait — that is, Gibraltar and Spain — or simply the European side of history. The title is not merely geographical. While a critique of empire is not foregrounded in The African Shore, the novel nonetheless touches on postcolonial themes: border crossing, transculturation, local corruption, illegal activity (smuggling), and the yawning chasm between the colonizer (whether tourist or French archaeologist) and the colonized. We know the time frame because “the fate of Pinochet” is a topic at the dinner table chez Mme. Choiseul, and Augusto Pinochet was detained in London between 1998 and 2000. The two “sides” are represented chiefly, as noted, by two characters: the tribal Hamsa, living in an animistic world he never questions, and the cosmopolitan Colombian tourist, unnamed until almost the novel’s end, ready to sever all ties with his former life. The two worlds are not opposed but separate, their points of contact fleeting and incomplete.

Significantly, the moment that we finally learn the name of the Colombian protagonist is the very moment that he breaks out of the passivity that has enveloped him up to this point, eludes mortal danger, and starts, we imagine, a new life, one we will never know, though we sense that he stands on the first step of a long journey. The story of Hamsa is equally incomplete, though we suspect that the exotic possibilities placed in his mind by his uncle Jalid will remain there, not to be realized materially. Only the story of the owl — through whose eyes and ears we sometimes see and hear the world, both sides of it — offers a kind of closure. Only the owl, coveted by both sides— Christian and Muslim — achieves escape velocity.

From the beginning of his career, Rey Rosa diverged from the realist path taken by his fellow Guatemalan writers. His first books (especially the three that Paul Bowles translated) were written under the sign of Borges — cryptic, perhaps mystical (“Like many young men I was or thought I was a mystic,” he remarks in an interview), economical, if not ascetic, and diaphanous. Of the stories in Dust on Her Tongue, Bowles said, “[They] are as compact and severe as theorems, eschewing symbol and metaphor, making their point in terse, undecorated statements which may bewilder the reader unaccustomed to such bareness of presentation.” When asked how he shifted from this asceticism to the style and concept of his later fictions, Rey Rosa says that “it was a simple matter of writing longer works that made me try a different style. . The very brief stories tend toward prose poems, and in many cases benefited from a certain obscurity or hermeticism. On the other hand, in longer works obscurity becomes a defect. The urge toward clarity becomes an obligation.” By the late 1990s he was moving toward realism, especially the subgenres of noir.

The African Shore seems to lie somewhere between these poles — telegraphic but grounded in material place and time, indeed based on concrete experience, hardly obscure but nevertheless ambiguous. (In common with the stories of Roberto Bolaño, the action in Rey Rosa’s novel seems often to portend something that in fact may not occur.) Rey Rosa has said on this topic that one works to get precision and clarity, whereas complexity and ambiguity are matters more of the personality of the narrator, of the subjectivity. They are spontaneous or inevitable.

During the months prior to Bowles’s death, Rey Rosa stayed in the Hotel Atlas. It was “an art deco building,” he says, “and that’s where I started to write the only one of my novels that takes place in Tangier, La orilla africana. It was winter and the heating in the Atlas never worked properly, so that when I was invited to spend the rest of my stay in a big 19th-century European house with large gardens in Monte Viejo, and with views of the cliffs that span both pillars of Hercules and the city of Tarifa set into the Spanish coast, I counted myself the luckiest Guatemalan in all Africa.” Setting this account beside the novel, one sees immediately how much the latter owes to such lived details, which frame the situation of the Colombian protagonist: the big European house and its garden, Monte Viejo, the Marshan, the European residences on the outskirts, Sidi Mesmudi, even the eucalyptus in the fireplace. La orilla africana is saturated in the atmosphere of Tangier and its environs — not in the layered way of a Graham Greene novel or a Bruce Chatwin travel book, but in Rey Rosa’s signature blend of rigor, ellipsis, and specificity.

Rey Rosa spent his last long residence in Tangier in 1998. “Hassan II had just died,” he writes, “and his son was going to bring many changes, most of them purely cosmetic. But changes in the outside world had also affected Tangier — one saw women police in the streets, shanty towns of Moroccans from the interior had sprung up, along with ghettos of immigrants from other parts of Africa, who made Tangier their last stop before launching their assault on the fortress of Europe. The city had changed so much compared to the Tangier of the 1980s that one might repeat what Bowles wrote comparing the city he’d known in the ’30s with that which came to be in the ’50s: ‘the only thing that remains is the wind.’”

Rey Rosa ends his memoir of Bowles as he began it, with a dream: it is after the American writer’s death, and his books are being burned. Rey Rosa thinks it’s a cremation, but then he and Abdelouahaid, Bowles’s long-time assistant, hear a scream, coming from a metal bust of Bowles. They run into the fire and push some buttons on the neck and back of the bust, which opens up to reveal the old and frail Bowles himself. They carry him through the flames, out through the lobby, “where one can see the Tangerine night full of stars and the ghostly roman cypresses beyond the big gate of the Monte Viejo mansion with its Moorish arch standing wide open.”

In its cadence and mystery, as well as in its final image (with that mixture of “clarity and enigma” that the Catalán writer Pere Gimferrer has noted in La orilla africana), this record of the end of a dream may remind one of the ending of the novel itself, set as it is on a fault line between cultures and continents: the owl flying through the now open door, seizing the long-awaited chance to circle beyond the African and European sides, and to find its perch in a distant and undetermined place.