The Echo

The first story in the Paul Bowles anthology and the first I read, maybe sixteen years ago — before I had personal experience of its setting — and the one that has stayed with me the most.

It oozes with almost excruciating tension and much of the author-composer's famous nastiness, though as I re-read it this week, I realised that I had misremembered the ending as actually even nastier than it turns out to be. 

Bowles has been at least partially cancelled by the snowflakes, and it is not hard to see why. 

In a recent post on this platform, I noted how we should practice representing the world as it OUGHT TO BE in our political discourse, but in fiction the reverse is usually the case — and yet  many so-called progressives balk at this, and it would seem that Bowls has lately been found culpable of being a white man in the tropics who often depicted the locals doing startlingly weird and sometimes sinister things to the detriment of his own kind — and specifically when penning tales set in North Africa, also apparently guilty of a crime later to be properly defined by a sharp-suited ‘refugee’: Orientalism.

Yet this story works somewhat differently to the Bowles mean, set over here in a hot country that I am now personally more familiar with. And although there is indeed one ‘native’ within it who performs an act of prickly hostility, the otherness here otherwise remains essentially a backdrop to a dysfunctionality which already prevails within the white people relationships.

There are in a sense four main characters: three American women, mother, daughter, and the mother’s abrasive lesbian lover, and a cantilevered house. 

The location is a spectacular (and spectacularly symbolic) gorge located a short mule ride from a made up Colombian village called Jamonocal, itself a not so short boat and train journey from Barranquilla. 

The fundamental tensions in the relationships are revealed from the start — in a deliciously show don’t tell kind of way — via a letter from mother to daughter, read by the latter as she approaches via plane from Panama. After that, every interaction yanks it up yet further —  even the surrounding vegetation puts in a proper shift in this respect as well.

I was reminded a bit of an Argie film we saw recently, Marea Alta (2020). In native Latin American treatments of these kind of situations ‘otherness’ typically comes into the lives of the blithely affluent and ‘modern’ via the home help — though in Verónica Chen’s movie it was a team of builders.

Bowles makes one or two telling references to the cantilevered house’s staff contingent, but they are less important dramatically than the disconnect between how the American ex-pats envisage their situation and how it actually is.

Bowles’s Guatemalan one-time protégé Rodrigo Rey Rosa — these days also residing in Tangiers — has made a pretty successful career out of writing novellas and stories with a similar sort of bite to them, but I guess that — given his background — he is rather less likely to be censured for it.

Meanwhile…Chispitas here suffered maternal abandonment, and so is very much plot-adjacent to The Echo. 

If he is looking a bit ‘licked’ in pic #1 it is because Eclipse, a juvenile male also ditched by his mum after only a few days — entirely probably the very same mum — has stepped in to handle all the parts of keeping a tiny kitten alive and socialised in a manner beyond what we ourselves could possibly achieve — which is truly a wonder to behold.