Paul Bowles was the quintessential tr~veler. He was also the writer of macabre short
stories and novels, tales of other travelers who venture too far from their safe conventional lives and f ind themselves in deep, deep trouble: crazy or tortured or dead. For 30 years Bowles was at the center of Tangier's expatriate glitterati. He was reinvented by each succeeding generation in its own image: existential novelist and darling of the Beats in the 1950s, pothead guru of the 1970s, interviewed by Rolling Stone. He was also a composer. They're playing his music in New York these days. In later life, Bowles was a translator of Moroccan ta les, a poet, a lyrical historian. When I visited him in Tangier in 1993, I passed mountains of suitcases in his hallway.
As we talked, we were two travelers, telling the stories that travelers always tell one another, of the heat, of the cockroaches, of the one last place in Morocco where there aren't any tourists. Paul Bowles went slowly and stayed long. He once dismissed a six or seven
week trip to the Sahara Desert as too short. "I could do no more than reconnoiter, with an eye to later and more leisurely visits." His trips to Mexico in the 1930s and 1940s lasted six months. He
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