This chapter shows that the scenes of (in)hospitality found in the writings of Paul Bowles oscillate between orientalism and respect for the unknowability of the other. The analysis addresses the breakdown of language and the disempowerment of the Western guest in Bowles’s travel essay “The Rif, to Music” before turning to the violent dismemberment of hosts and guests in the short stories “A Distant Episode” and “The Delicate Prey.” The discussion then questions the orientalist conditions that frame Bowles’s hospitality as he takes on the role of the repository of Moroccan music in the travel essays “The Rif, to Music” and “The Route to Tassemsit.” The chapter demonstrates that Bowles’s hospitality appears as an uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous situation, forcefully negotiated over an abyss of meaninglessness. During this negotiation, language breaks down and leaves host and guest at risk of being disempowered, dismembered, and consumed by the other. Hospitality as Bowles portrays it reveals the host and guest’s inability to accept their vulnerability in the face of nonverbal chaos. In light of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism and Édouard Glissant’s concept of “opacity,” the chapter contends that Bowles’s hospitality is tied to the acceptance of the unknowability and existentialist mutability of the other and of the self.