“I want to go to Meknès,” he said in a low voice.
“No, no, no!” cried the man, laughing jovially and pumping Amar’s hand up and down. “No, Amar, that won’t do. Even here it’s a long way for you to walk back, you know.”
“Back to where?” said Amar evenly, neither shifting his gaze from the man’s eyes nor letting go of his hand, which the man moved up and down again violently, trying to withdraw it. His face was changing: he was embarrassed, annoyed, growing angry. “Good-bye, Amar,” he said firmly. “I can’t take you to Meknès. There’s no time.” If he had said, “I won’t take you with me,” Amar would have understood.
Without the motor going, the one endless rasping note of the cicadas overhead was very loud.
“My mother’s there,” murmured Amar, scarcely knowing what he said.
The woman, who seemed not to understand anything, smiled at him, raised her arms, pretending to aim a gun, and cried: “Boom! Bam!” She shifted her position and was behind an imaginary machine-gun. “Dat-tat-tat-tat-tat!” she said very quickly. When she had finished, she pointed her forefinger at Amar. The man nudged her, raising an eyebrow at the back of the driver’s head. Then he said something to the driver, who reached in front of Amar and opened the door for him, looking at him expectantly.
Amar let go of the man’s hand and stepped into the road, his head lowered. He saw his sandals sinking slightly into the hot sticky tar, and he heard the door slam beside him.
“B’slemah!“ called the man, but Amar could not look up at him.
“B’slemah!” echoed the woman. Still he could not raise his head. The motor started up.
“Amar!” the man cried.
The car moved ahead uncertainly, then it gathered speed. He knew they were looking out the rear window, waving to him, but he stood still, seeing only his feet in their sandals, and the black tar beside them. The driver turned into the highway, shifted gears.
Amar was running after the car. It was still there, ahead of him, going further away and faster. He could never catch it, but he ran because there was nothing else to do. And as he ran, his sandals made a terrible flapping noise on the hard surface of the highway, and he kicked them off, and ran silently and with freedorn.
Now for a moment he had the exultant feeling of flying along the road behind the car. It would surely stop. He could see the two heads in the window’s rectangle, and it seemed to him that they were looking back.
The car had reached a curve in the road; it passed out of sight. He ran on. When he got to the curve the road was empty.
—Taprobane, Weligama
16/iii/55
About the Author
PAUL BOWLES was born in 1910 and studied mu-ron Copland before moving to th his wife, Jane. His first novel, The Sheltering Sky, was a bestseller in the 1950s and was made into a film by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1990. Bowles’s prolific career included many musical compositions, novels, collections of short stories, and books of travel, poetry, and translations.
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BOOKS BY PAUL BOWLES
NOVELS
The Sheltering Sky
Let It Come Down
The Spider’s House
Up Above the World
NOVELLA
Too Far from Home
SHORT STORIES
The Delicate Prey
A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard
The Time of Friendship
Pages from Cold Point and Other Stories
Things Gone and Things Still Here
A Distant Episode Midnight Mass and Other Stories
Call at Corazón and Other Stories
Collected Stories, 1939–1976
Unwelcome Words
A Thousand Days for Mokhtar
The Stories of Paul Bowles
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Without Stopping
Days: A Tangier Diary
LETTERS
In Touch: The Letters of Paul Bowles (edited by Jeffrey Miller)
POETRY
Two Poems Scenes
The Thicket of Spring
Next to Nothing: Collected Poems, 1926–1977
NONFICTION, TRAVEL, ESSAYS, MISCELLANEOUS
Yallah! (written by Paul Bowles, photographs by Peter W. Haeberlin) Their Heads Are Green and
Their Hands Are Blue
Paul Bowles: Photographs (edited by Simon Bischoff)
PAUL BOWLES (1965) BY LE GAUNT
Copyright
THE SPIDER’S HOUSE. Copyright © 1955 by Paul Bowles. Preface copyright © 1982 by Paul Bowles. Introduction copyright © 2003 by Francine Prose.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2011 ISBN: 978-0-062-11936-0
First Ecco paperback published 2003.
FIRST HARPER PERENNIAL EDITION PUBLISHED 2006.
The Library of Congress has catalogued a previous edition as follows:
Bowles, Paul, 1910–1999.
The spider’s house.
Reprint. Originally published : New York : Random House, 1955.
ISBN 0-87685-546-X
ISBN 0-87685-545-1 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS3552.0874S6 1982 813’.54 82-4195
AARC2
ISBN-10: 0-06-113703-0 (pbk.)
ISBN-13: 978-0-06-113703-7 (pbk.)
10 RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4
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