“The city was the final hope of those who truly needed to hide.”
As was — and is — New Orleans.
The hiding place to which George fled from the noise and stress of New York in the early seventies; the place where he returned after the final disaster of his last marriage in Los Angeles.
We see a day in the life of the Budayeen, through the eyes of lost, shabby, and hopeless expatriate Ernst Weinraub (or Weintraub). We meet, for the first time, Monsieur Gargotier, proprietor of the Fee Blanche; see Sandor Courane in one of his few nonfatal roles; hear tell of Marîd’s favorite hangouts, the Solace and Chiriga’s. We see the ubiquitous Arab boy, here called Kebap (“Roast Beef), though he has other names in other tales, coming and going like a troublesome little ghost.
Weinraub himself like Sandor Courane, was one of George’s generic recurring heroes, appearing in a number of early stories before he was supplanted by Courane. In most of them, Ernst is the ultimate square-jawed hero, but without Courane’s doomed and hapless charm; maybe that was Ernst’s point. In this tale he has been sawed and filed down to being a legend in his own mind: aloof in his self-conscious dreams, mocked at by the street folk, losing himself deeper and deeper into his alcoholic fantasies. He wants to be a writer and wants desperately to be noticed, but he only pretends to write — a fate that befalls and befell many writers who get seduced by the “New Orleans lifestyle.”
I suspect George had met a number of Ernsts in New Orleans — I know he was friends with Tennessee Williams’s houseboy, to whom he lived next door for many years. (I still have the smudged and blotted napkins bearing the outlines of trilogies never written, in George’s spiky block-print hand, including the outline of the fourth Budayeen novel, Word of Night.)
Weinraub has tried — as George tried for so many years — “to write…short, terse essays about the city…” But “he couldn’t seem to capture the true emotions he experienced…the pervasive sense of isolation, of eternal uncleanness, of a soul-deep loss of personality….”
But where poor Ernst failed, George succeeded dazzlingly. This is very much a Budayeen night: a night on which nothing in particular takes place. The nameless city simply winds its accustomed way through another turning of the sterile Earth. Everyone in it goes about their own obscure business like the characters in the Dylan song “Mr. Tambourine Man,” observed by a failed poet who has nowhere left to go.
— Barbara Hambly
The City on the Sand
IN EUROPE, THERE WERE ONLY MEMORIES OF GREAT cultures. Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, England, Carbba, and Germany had all seized control of the world’s course and the imagination of the human race at one time or another. But now these great powers of the past were drifting into a cynical old age, where decadence and momentary pleasures replaced the drive for dominance and national superiority. In Asia, the situation was even worse. The Russias struggled pettily among themselves, expending the last energies of a once-proud nation in puerile bickerings. China showed signs of total degeneration, having lost its immensely rich heritage of art and philosophy while clinging to a ruthless creed that crushed its hopeless people beneath a burden of mock-patriotism. Breulandy was the only vibrant force east of the Caucasus Mountains; still, no observer could tell what that guarded land might do. Perhaps a Breulen storm would spill out across the continent, at least instilling a new life force in the decaying states. But from Breulandy itself came no word, no hint, as though the country had bypassed its time of ascendancy to settle for a weary and bitter mediocrity.
Of the rest of the world there was nothing to be said. The Americas still rested as they had in the few centuries since their discovery: huge parklike land masses, populated by savages, too distant, too worthless, too impractical to bother about. None of the crumbling European governments could summon either the leadership or the financial support to exploit the New World. The Scandinavian lands were inhabited by skin-clad brutes scarcely more civilized than the American cannibals. Farther east, beyond the teeming Chinese shores, between Asia and the unexplored western reaches of the Americas, no one was quite certain just what existed and what was only myth. Perhaps the island continent of Lemarry waited with its untold riches and beautiful copper spires.
And then, lastly, there was Africa. One city sat alone on its fiery sands. One city, filled with refugees and a strange mongrel population, guarded that massive continent. Beyond that single city, built in some forgotten age by an unknown people for unimaginable purposes, beyond the high wooden gates that shut in the crazy heat and locked in the citizens, there was only death. Without water, the continent was death. Without shade, the parching sharaq winds were death. Without human habitation, the vast three thousand miles of whispering sands were death for anyone mad enough to venture across them. Only in the city was there a hollow travesty of life.
Ernst Weinraub sat at a table on the patio of the Cafe de la Fee Blanche. A light rain fell on him, but he did not seem to notice. He sipped his anisette, regretting that the proprietor had served it to him in such an ugly tumbler. The liqueur suffered. M. Gargotier often made such disconcerting lapses, but today especially Ernst needed all the delicacy, all the refinement that he could buy to hold off his growing melancholy. Perhaps the Fee Blanche had been a mistake. It was early, lacking some thirty minutes of noon, and if it seemed to him that the flood of tears was rising too quickly, he could move on to the Cafe Solace or Chiriga’s. But as yet there was no need to hurry.
The raindrops fell heavily, spatting on the small metal table. Ernst turned in his chair, looking for M. Gargotier. Was the man going to let his customer get drenched? The proprietor had disappeared into the black interior of his establishment. Ernst thought of lowering the striped canopy himself, but the shopkeeper-image of himself that the idea brought to mind was too absurd. Instead, he closed his eyes and listened to the water. There was music when the drops hit the furnishings on the patio, a duller sound when the rain struck the pavement. Then, more frequently, there was the irritating noise of the drops hitting his forehead. Ernst opened his eyes. His newspaper was a sodden mess and the puddle on his table was about to overflow onto his lap.
Ernst considered the best way to deal with the accumulating water. He could merely cup his hand and swipe the puddle sideways. He dismissed that plan, knowing that his hand would be soaked; then he would sit, frustrated, without anything on which to dry it. He would end up having to seek out M. Gargotier. The confrontation then, with the proprietor standing bored, perhaps annoyed, would be too unpleasant. Anyway, the round metal top of the table was easily removed. Ernst tipped it, revealing the edges of the white metal legs, which were sharp with crystal rust. The water splashed to the paved floor of the patio, loudly, inelegantly. Ernst sighed; he had made another compromise with his manner. He had sacrificed style for comfort. In the city, it was an easy bargain.
“It is a matter of bodies,” he said to himself, as though rehearsing bons mots for a cocktail party. “We have grown too aware of bodies. Because we must carry them always from place to place, is that any reason to accord our bodies a special honor or affection? No, they are sacks only. Rather large, unpleasant, undisciplined containers for meager charges of emotion. We should all stop paying attention to our bodies’ demands. I don’t know how….” He paused. The idea was stupid. He sipped the anisette.