In Paul Bowles’ short story, “Tapiama,” a European photographer wanders away from his hotel in a river port somewhere in South America late on a hot night. He enters a native bar, drinks two “cumbiamba” and begins to feel odd:
‘A very peculiar sensation,’ he said to himself. ‘Very peculiar,’ he repeated aloud under his breath as he started toward the bar to order another. It was not that he felt drunk so much as that he had become someone who was not he, someone for whom the act of living was a thing so different from what he had imagined it could be, that he was left stranded in a region of sensation far from any he had heretofore known. It was not unpleasant: it was merely indefinable.
He meets a soldier in the bar and there is trouble. The photographer finds himself lying in the bottom of a punt drifting in the tidal river. In mid-morning, “from among the leaves high above, a talking bird remarked casually, over and over again: ‘Idigaraga. Idigaraga. Idigaraga.’” Eventually people seize the boat and several climb in with him: “Five young men, all of whom looked remarkably alike, surrounded him. Water dripped down upon him from their naked bodies.” The young men begin poling him somewhere, but not back to the town. They affirm that they are brothers, “Hermanos.”
His mind took him back to the quiet
region by the riverbank where the small bird had spoken, high up in the trees,
and he heard again the conversational tone.
‘Idigaraga,’ he said aloud, imitating perfectly its voice and
intonation. There was an explosion of
mirth around him. One of the youths
took his arm, shook it lightly. ‘You
know that bird?” he said. ‘It is a very comic bird. It goes to the nests of other birds and wants to sit there, and
when the other birds fight with it and drive it away, it sits down in the same
tree there and says: “Idigaraga.”
That means: “Iri garagua, nadie me quiere, nobody likes me.” And it says it over and over, until they
make it go farther away so they can’t hear it any more. You said it just right. Say it again.’ ‘Si, si,’ the others agreed, ‘otra vez!’
But the photographer “had no intention of saying it again.”
“Tapiama” may be found in the Penguin Classics edition of Paul Bowles, Stories, 2000, or in Ecco Press, The Stories of Paul Bowles, 2001. Bowles wrote four novels and one hundred short stories. He lived in Tangier until his death in November 1999.