At Paso Rojo

Last updated
"At Paso Rojo"
by Paul Bowles
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Published in The Delicate Prey and Other Stories
Publication date1950

At Paso Rojo is a short story by Paul Bowles, written in 1947 and first appearing in a collection of his short fiction The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (1950) published by Random House. [1]

Contents

Plot

The story is set in Costa Rica at a fictional cattle ranch, Paso Rojo, closely resembling one that Bowles had visited in Guanacaste Province. The point-of-view is in the omniscient third-person.

Two well-to-do and unmarried sisters, Lucha and Chalia, visit their younger brother Don Frederico, a prosperous rancher, in the countryside shortly after their mother's funeral. Don Frederico has embraced his role as benevolent patriarch of Pasa Rojo [Translation], and developed a genuine appreciation for the character of the peasants who live and work on his estate. He has no interest in returning to the upper-class social life in which he was reared. Lucha expresses disapproval at his lifestyle, and considers her peasant servants "animals with speech." Don Frederico gently chides her: "They are good people" and remarks that their sister, Chalia "has changed." Lucha dumurs, assuring him that their younger sister "has always been crazy." Chalia has defiantly refused to wear mourning attire, and is dressed casually as an equestrian. Her makeup is meretricious. She chastens Don Frederico for being overly generous to his workers, and warns him that they are naturally thieves. Her brother responds emphatically: "No one here has ever stolen anything from me" and walks out.

Chalia accompanies Don Frederico and his ranch hands on a tour of the estate. A young cowboy, Roberto, remains with her when her horse falls behind. She begins to flirt with the boy, and insists on dismounting under a tree. She initiates a seduction, and Roberto, apprehensive and shy, misapprehends her efforts to remove his clothing. He stands up and accidentally shoves her away. His innocent response "changed her mood instantly." Believing herself scorned, she leaps on her horse and gallops recklessly into the forest in hopes of ending her life. She arrives back at the ranch unscathed.

That evening, emboldened by the older woman's attempted seduction, Roberto disrobes and bathes in the creek within sight of Chalia's bedroom window. His audacity outrages her and "the idea of vengeance upon the boy filled her with a delicious excitement."

She purloins a handful of banknotes from Don Frederico's office. During a dance that evening, Roberto lurks nearby in the darkness, and Chalis approaches him. He has been drinking rum. She caresses the boy and presents the bank notes to him: "Roberto, I love you. I have a present for you" and places these in his hand and departs. Before daylight, Chalia dresses and goes in search of Roberto; she discovers him passed out in the dark along the road. She pushes the boy's senseless body into a shallow ravine.

The next morning Don Frederico discovers the missing funds. Roberto, bruised and hungover, tells him that he received the money from Chalia. When Don Frederico questions his sister, she says she only gave Roberto a single centavo, and disingenuously calls for leniency. Don Frederico feels compelled to immediately dismiss Roberto. The boy departs Paso Rojo. though he is allowed to keep the money.

Chalis secretly revels in the success of her scheme, in particular the disillusionment that her brother has suffered concerning his idealized view of the peasants.

Publication History

"At Paso Rojos" was written in 1947 while Bowles was at Ocho Rios, Jamaica., but the setting is based on Bowles's "precise description" of a ranch in Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica, that he visited in 1938 during his honeymoon with spouse and author Jane Bowles. [2] [3]

The story was first published in the collection of Bowles's short fiction The Delicate Prey and Other Stories in 1950. [4]

Critical Assessment

One measure of the high regard that Random House held for "Paso Rojo" is its placement as the first of the 17 stories published in The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (1950). Literary critic Allen Hibbard compares the story favorably to "Marie Concepcion" by Katherine Ann Porter. He writes: "The psychological dynamics of the story are taut, and as often the case in good stories, we are never given full explanations for why characters act the way they do. We simply see them acting…" [5] [6]

Novelist and critic Gore Vidal offers this praise for "Paso Rojo":

Bowles notes the sadism that sexual frustration can cause in "At Paso Rojo". But where the ordinary writer would leave it at that, Bowles goes deeper into the human case and, paradoxically, he achieves his greatest effect when he concentrates entirely on surfaces. Although he seldom describes a human face, he examines landscapes with the precision of a geologist…He records weather with all the solemnity of a meteorologist. As for his human characters, he simply lets them reveal themselves through what they say or do not say. [7] [8]

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Hibbard, 1993 p. 20, p. 256
  2. ↑ Hibbard, 1993 p, 20, p. 183: Quote is Bowles, from his Introduction to his short fiction collection The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (1950).
  3. ↑ Pulsifer, 1999: "On February 21, 1938, Paul and Jane were married…honeymoon in Costa Rica… they stayed at a cattle ranch…"
  4. ↑ Hibbard, 1993 p. 20, p. 256
  5. ↑ Hibbard, 1993 p. 20: "'At Paso Rojo' (1947) stood at the head of The Delicate Prey and Other Stories and is one of the best of the lot. Inviting comparisons with Katherine Ann Porter's "Marie Concepcion." And p. 22: See here for quote.
  6. ↑ Tóibín, 2007: "...the first story in Bowles's first book of stories, The Delicate Prey and Other Stories, published in 1950.
  7. ↑ Vidal, 1979 Introduction
  8. ↑ Tóibín, 2007

Sources

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Bowles</span> American composer and writer (1910–1999)

Paul Frederic Bowles was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. He became associated with the Moroccan city of Tangier, where he settled in 1947 and lived for 52 years to the end of his life.

<i>The Golden Bowl</i>

The Golden Bowl is a 1904 novel by Henry James. Set in England, this complex, intense study of marriage and adultery completes what some critics have called the "major phase" of James's career. The Golden Bowl explores the tangle of interrelationships between a father and daughter and their respective spouses. The novel focuses deeply and almost exclusively on the consciousness of the central characters, with sometimes obsessive detail but also with powerful insight.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Colm Tóibín</span> Irish novelist and writer

Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, critic, playwright and poet.

A Distant Episode is a short story by Paul Bowles. Written in 1945, it was first published in the Partisan Review and republished in New Directions in Prose and Poetry, #10 in 1948. It is also the title piece in a 1988 collection of Bowles's short stories, A Distant Episode: Selected Stories by Ecco Press.

<i>Up Above the World</i>

Up Above the World is a novel by Paul Bowles first published in 1966 by Simon and Schuster and in Great Britain by Peter Owen Publishers in 1967. Up Above the World was the last of Bowles’s four novels.

Allal is a short story by Paul Bowles written in Tangiers in 1976 and first published in the January 27, 1977, issue of Rolling Stone. It appeared in his short fiction collection Things Gone and Things Still Here (1977) published by Black Sparrow Press.

<i>The Delicate Prey and Other Stories</i>

The Delicate Prey and Other Stories is a collection of 17 works of short fiction by Paul Bowles, published in 1950 by Random House.

The Delicate Prey is a piece of short fiction by Paul Bowles, written in 1949 and first published that year in Paris by the small literary journal Zero. In 1950, Random House presented the story in the collection of Bowles’s short fiction, The Delicate Prey and Other Stories. This short story is considered one of Bowles' most outstanding and controversial works of fiction.

Tapiama is a short story by Paul Bowles first published in the collection of his short fiction in The Hours After Noon by the Heinemann press in 1959. The story was subsequently published in A Distant Episode: The Selected Stories by Ecco Press in 1988.

The Echo is a short story by Paul Bowles written in 1946 and first published in the September 1946 issue of Harper's Bazaar magazine. It was later published in a collection of his short fiction, The Delicate Prey and Other Stories, published by Random House in 1950.

You Are Not I is a short story by Paul Bowles written in 1948 and first published the collection of his short fiction The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (1950) by Random House.

<i>The Spiders House</i> (novel) Novel by Paul Bowles

The Spider’s House is a novel by Paul Bowles and first published by Random House in 1955.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Time of Friendship</span> Short story collecction by Paul Bowles

The Time of Friendship is a collection of 13 works of short fiction by Paul Bowles published in 1967 by Henry Holt and Company. A number of the stories included in this volume appeared earlier “in various places during the 1950s and 1960s.”

<span class="mw-page-title-main">A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard</span>

A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard is a collection of short fiction by Paul Bowles published by City Lights Books in 1962. The volume was the first collection of his works published in the United States since The Delicate Prey and Other Stories (1950).

Tea on the Mountain is a short story by Paul Bowles. Written in 1939, the story first appeared in the 1950 collection The Delicate Prey and Other Stories published by Random House.

The Hours After Noon is one of 13 works of short fiction by Paul Bowles included in The Time of Friendship (1967) by Henry Holt and Company.

The Garden is a short story by Paul Bowles written 1950. It was first published in the Autumn–Winter 1964 issue of Art & Literature (Lausanne). It later appeared in his short fiction collection The Time of Friendship (1967) published by Henry Holt and Company. Bowles completed the story in Asilah, Morocco. At only three pages The Garden, the briefest of Bowles’s short fiction, is one of three fables that appear in the volume. The other two are “The Hyena” and “The Successor”. The story serves to challenge “the moral legitimacy of established religion, in this case Islam.”

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Things Gone and Things Still Here</span>

Things Gone and Things Still Here is a collection of nine works of short fiction by Paul Bowles, published in 1977 by Black Sparrow Press. The volume is the sixth collection of Bowles’s work, much of which is re-published material.

"You Have Left Your Lotus Pods on the Bus" is a short story by Paul Bowles written in Tangiers in 1971 and first published in his short fiction collection Things Gone and Things Still Here (1977) by Black Sparrow Press.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.