Stories of the Sahara

by Sanmao

  There was no anger in his face. He lifted the two hands that had been burned to a pulp, looking at one, then the other. Tears streamed from his eyes. Without saying a word, he leapt up and stormed out, running into the dark wilderness.

  ‘Do you think he knows he’s been cheated?’ José asked me softly.

  ‘He’s known ever since the beginning. He just refused to snap out of it. He couldn’t help himself, so who would help him?’ I was certain about Salun’s feelings.

  ‘Saida bewitched him,’ José said.

  ‘Saida was able to bewitch him not just by fulfilling his lust. For Salun, her flesh and blood came to symbolise everything he lacks in life. What he wants is love, affection, family, warmth. When such a stiff and lonely young heart finds a bit of love, even the false kind, it’s no surprise that he would try to hold on to it at all costs.’

  José said nothing. He turned out the lights and sat in the dark.

  We thought Salun wouldn’t come back the next day, but he did show up. I changed the ointment on his hands and said, ‘Alright! This shouldn’t hurt any more when you bake bread tonight. Within a few days, the skin will have completely healed over.’

  Salun was very calm and didn’t speak much. As he was leaving, he seemed like he wanted to say something but couldn’t. He suddenly spun around when he reached the door. ‘Thank you!’ he said.

  I felt there was something strange going on. ‘No need to thank me,’ I replied. ‘Don’t go crazy again. Go on and get to work.’ He gave me an odd smile. My heart prickled when I closed the door. Something was definitely wrong: Salun never smiled.

  The next day, I was opening the door to take out the rubbish when I came face to face with two police officers.

  ‘Are you Señora Quero?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’ Salun’s finally dead, I told myself.

  ‘There’s a Salun Hamid…’

  ‘He’s our friend,’ I said calmly.

  ‘Do you know of his whereabouts?’

  ‘His whereabouts?’ I asked.

  ‘Last night he fled after taking money from his brother’s store, as well as the income from the bakery…’

  ‘Oh…’ I hadn’t thought that Salun was capable of making this kind of decision.

  ‘Has he said anything strange recently?’ the policemen ques­tioned me. ‘Or did he say he was going somewhere?’

  ‘No. If you knew Salun, you would know that he’s a man of few words.’

  After the police officers left, I closed the door and went to take a nap.

  ‘How do you think Salun could bear leaving this desert?’ José asked me during dinner that evening. ‘These are the Sahrawi’s roots.’

  ‘Well, he can’t come home now. They’re looking for him everywhere.’

  After dinner, we sat on the roof. There was no wind that night. José told me to light the lamp. Once it was lit, swarms of flying insects fluttered over, spinning incessantly around the light as though it were the one thing in life that they believed in. The two of us watched the flying insects.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ José asked.

  ‘I was thinking that moths must truly be happiest when they throw themselves into the flame.’

  Nice Neighbours

  On the surface, my Sahrawi neighbours all appear extremely dirty and drab. From their odours and unclean clothes, one might get the false impression that they’re an impoverished and helpless bunch. In reality, not only does every family in the vicinity receive subsidies from the Spanish government, most people also have proper jobs. Some rent out their homes to the Europeans or tend to huge flocks of goats. Others have even opened up shops in town, a stable and considerable source of income. For these reasons, the locals often say that only the Sahrawi of economic means can live in El Aaiún.

  Last year, during my first few months here, I often left town to go travelling in the deep desert because I wasn’t yet married. Every time I came home, I returned totally empty-handed as though I’d been robbed blind. The poverty-stricken Sahrawi who lived in the desert were ready to pry the very stakes from my tent. Needless to say, everything I had on my person also disappeared.

  Shortly after I started living on Avenida Rio de Oro, I heard that my neighbours were considered the wealthy people of the desert. I couldn’t help but rejoice, imagining the myriad advantages of living alongside people who had money.

  All the things that happened next were basically my fault.

  The first time José and I were invited over to our neighbour’s home for tea, we returned with goat droppings stuck to our shoes. Hamdi’s little son had drooled over a large patch of my long skirt. The next day, I started teaching Hamdi’s daughters how to mop the floors and hang their mats out to dry. Of course, it was me who supplied the bucket, soap powder, mop and water.

  Since neighbours in these lands were so friendly with one another, my bucket and mop often made the rounds until sunset without ever reaching me. But this was no big deal because they were always returned to me in due course.

  After living on Avenida Rio de Oro for a while, neighbours from near and far came to pay me a visit even though our house didn’t have a doorplate. I didn’t socialise much, apart from opening the door to give out medicine. I abide by the belief that ‘a hedge between keeps friendships green’.

  Eventually the door to our home was constantly opening and shutting. Whenever I opened the door, a crowd of women and children would rush in. And so it was that they got to see our way of life and daily amenities very clearly. Neither José nor I are stingy and we’re relatively polite to others. Thus our neighbours gradually learned how to take full advantage of this weakness of ours.

  Each day, from nine in the morning onwards, there would be an endless parade of children coming to our home to demand things.

  ‘My older brother wants to borrow a lightbulb.’

  ‘My mum needs an onion—’

  ‘My dad wants a can of gas.’

  ‘We need cotton—’

  ‘Give me a hairdryer.’

  ‘Let my sister borrow your iron.’

  ‘I want nails and a little bit of wire.’

  And all sorts of strange things. The worst was that we happened to have all of these objects in our home. We would feel guilty withholding them. But once we gave things away, we were almost certain to never get them back.

  ‘These people are so annoying,’ José often complained. ‘Why don’t they just go into town to buy what they need?’ But when the next child came asking for something, there was no question we’d give it to them.

  I don’t know when it started happening, but our neighbours’ kids started sticking their hands out to us to ask for money. They would surround us as soon as we left the house. ‘Give me five pesetas!’ they’d yell. ‘Give me five pesetas!’ Our landlord’s children were among them, of course.

  I absolutely refused to give out money. In spite of this, they persevered and came to nag me every single day. Eventually I told the landlord’s children, ‘Your father gets ten thousand pesetas from me every month for this crappy house. I might as well move if I have to give you another five pesetas each day.’

  After this, they stopped asking. They demanded bubble gum instead, which I was more than happy to provide. I figured they no longer begged for money because they didn’t want me to move away.

  Labu, a young girl, came knocking one day. I opened the door to find the mound of a camel carcass lying on the ground, its blood dripping everywhere. It was quite a shock. ‘My mum says to put this camel in your refrigerator.’

  I turned my head and glanced at my shoebox-sized refrigerator. Sighing, I knelt down and said to her, ‘Labu, tell your mum that if she gives me your big house to use as my needle box, then you can put this camel in my refrigerator.’

  Immediately she asked, ‘Where are your needles?’

  That camel definitely didn’t get refrigerated, but Labu’s mother shot me dirty looks for almost a month. She said only one thing to me: ‘You
refused me and hurt my pride.’ Every Sahrawi was very proud, it seemed. I was afraid to hurt them too often or decline to lend out my things.

  Another day, a bunch of girls came to ask me for ‘red potion’, which was actually Mercurochrome, an antiseptic. I staunchly refused. ‘Tell whoever cut themselves to come to me for the medicine,’ I said. They insisted on taking it away with them nonetheless.

  A few hours later, I heard the sound of drumming, so I ran out to see what was going on. Only then did I discover that the girls had smeared my Mercurochrome all over their faces and hands. They were currently wriggling on the public rooftop, dancing and singing with enormous glee. Seeing that the Mercurochrome had such a marvellous effect, there was no way I could get angry.

  Even more frustrating was the neighbour who worked as a hospital assistant. He refused to eat with his hands like the rest of his family because he considered himself to be worldly. Every day, whenever it was mealtime, his son would come and knock on our door. ‘My dad wants to eat. I’m here for the knife and fork.’ Those were always his opening remarks.

  Even though this kid never failed to return the knife and fork, I still got fed up. I decided I might as well just buy a set and give it to him, rather than have him come every day. Lo and behold, he was back on our doorstep two days later.

  ‘Why are you back?’ I asked him with a pout. ‘What hap­pened to the set I gave you?’

  ‘My mum says she must put the knife and fork away because they are new. Now my dad wants to eat—’

  ‘Not my problem if your dad wants to eat!’ I yelled. The kid shrank into himself like a little bird. I couldn’t bear it. I had no choice but to lend him the knife and fork. Eating is important business, after all.

  Desert houses always have the ceiling partially open to the sky. Whether we were eating or sleeping, our neighbours’ children were always able to look down into our home through the hole in its roof. Whenever fierce winds arose, sand rained down through it. Living in such an environment, José and I were forced to play the role of the quicksand river-dwelling monk in Journey to the West. We had no leeway to pick other parts.

  José asked the landlord several times, but he wouldn’t cover that part of the roof. So we bought our own materials. After working on it for three Sundays, José succeeded in laying a piece of yellow frosted glass as the ceiling there. Light could still shine down, making the room feel super clean and beautiful. I put the nine bonsai plants that I’d painstakingly raised beneath the new roof, a swathe of fresh greenery. My life improved tremendously because of this.

  One afternoon, I was in the kitchen, deeply engrossed in a cake recipe and listening to music. Suddenly I heard what sounded like somebody walking across the glass ceiling. I stuck my head out to take a look and saw quite clearly the silhouette of a large goat above me. This horrible animal was making its way up our slanted roof as if it were a mountain slope. Grabbing a cleaver, I ran up the stairs that led to the rooftop. I hadn’t even made it all the way up when I heard the sound of splintering, followed by an earth-shaking crash. Wood and broken glass rained down. Of course, this goat also fell from the heavens and landed in our tiny home. In extreme agitation, I chased the goat out with a broom. Then, fuming, I looked up at the blue sky through the hole in the ceiling.

  We didn’t know who we could ask to pay for the hole in the ceiling, so we got materials to fix it up ourselves. ‘How about making it from asbestos this time?’ I asked José.

  ‘No way, this house only has one window facing the street. We’d block out all the light if we used asbestos tiles.’ José was miserable because he hated working on Sundays. We soon had a new ceiling in place, this time with a sheet of white translucent plastic. José also made a low wall, several feet high, to separate the neighbours’ rooftop from ours. This wall was for keeping goats out, but it also kept the neighbours’ daughters at bay. They often snatched the undergarments I’d hung out to dry on our roof. They weren’t stealing because they’d throw the clothes back onto the roof after a few days, making it look as though the wind had blown them down.

  Even though we had this new plastic roof, a total of four goats still managed to fall down into our home in half a year. We were completely fed up and told the neighbours when we next caught a goat that fell through the roof, we would kill it and eat it and certainly not return it to them. We asked them to please secure their goat pens properly.

  Our neighbours were smart people. We clamoured; they didn’t respond at all. They just hugged their goats close and smiled at us with narrowed eyes.

  Even though the flying goat in peril was a recurring spectacle around here, José was never home to witness it. He never got a chance to experience what a stir this scene caused.

  One Sunday around dusk, a flock of mad goats jumped over the wall and, believe it or not, got onto our ceiling again.

  ‘José!’ I cried. ‘José! The goats are coming—’

  José threw down his magazine and rushed into the living room. But it was already too late. A gigantic goat broke through the plastic sheet, dropping its entire weight onto José’s head. The two of them lay moaning on the concrete floor. José crawled upright. Without a word, he got a piece of rope and tied the goat to a post. Then he went up to the roof to see which jerk had just released their flock.

  There was nobody on the roof.

  ‘Fine, we’ll slaughter and eat it tomorrow,’ José said through gritted teeth.

  Once we got down from the roof and took another look at the goat, not only was this prisoner of war not bleating, it looked like it was smiling. I lowered my head to take a closer look – and my God! The nine bonsai plants, twenty-five leaves in all, that I had worked meticulously to cultivate over the past year, had been eaten clean away.

  I was shocked and angry and heartbroken. I raised my hand, mustering all the force in my body, and gave the goat a good beating. ‘Look, look!’ I cried to José. Then I rushed into the bathroom and hugged a big towel as tears came pouring out of me. This was the first time that desert living had discouraged me to the point of tears.

  Of course we didn’t slaughter the goat.

  Our relations with our neighbours continued onwards in harmony, still with all the borrowing, the door opening and closing continuously.

  Once when I ran out of matches, I went to our landlord’s next door to ask for some. ‘I do not have any,’ giggled the landlord’s wife.

  I went to the kitchen of another neighbour’s house.

  ‘I will give you three,’ Khadija said to me with a stern expression. ‘We do not have many ourselves.’

  ‘This box of matches is the one I gave you last week. I’ve given you five boxes. How could you forget?’ I was growing angry.

  ‘Yes. Now there is only one box. How can I give it to you?’ She seemed even unhappier.

  ‘You hurt my pride,’ I said to Khadija, taking a lesson from their own book.

  I took three matches home, thinking to myself that it must not have been easy to be Albert Schweitzer.1

  In the year and a half that we’ve lived here, José has become the neighbours’ electrician, carpenter and plasterer. As for me, I’ve become a scribe, nurse, teacher and seamstress. These skills were all honed through helping our neighbours, anyhow.

  Young Sahrawi women usually have pale skin and lovely features. In their daily lives, they have to keep their faces covered in front of their own people, but the veils come off when they’re in our home. Around here there’s a girl named Mina who looks sweet and pretty. She liked me, but she liked José even more. Whenever José was home, she would dress up very nicely and come over to hang out. She eventually decided our house was boring, so she found excuses to ask José to go to her house.

  One day she dropped in on us yet again. ‘José!’ she called from outside the window. ‘José!’

  We were in the middle of eating. ‘What do you want from José?’ I demanded.

  ‘Our door is broken,’ she said. ‘We need José to fix it.’r />
  Upon hearing this, José set down his fork and made to stand up.

  ‘You’re not going anywhere. Keep eating.’ I dumped the food from my plate onto his.

  People around these parts can have four wives. I certainly didn’t like the idea of four women sharing José’s pay cheque.

  Mina didn’t budge from the window. José glanced at her again. ‘Don’t look again,’ I snapped. ‘Pretend she’s a mirage.’

  When this beautiful mirage finally got married, I was overjoyed and sent her a large bolt of fabric.

  The water we use for washing and cleaning is managed by the municipal government. They send over one large bucket each day and that’s it. So when we bathe, we can’t wash our clothes. If we wash our clothes, then we can’t do the dishes or mop the floor. To manage all these things, you have to keep careful track of how much water is left in the bucket on the roof. The bucket of water on the roof is very salty and can’t be drunk. You have to buy drinking water separately from the store. Water is very precious around here.

  Last week, to participate in a camel-racing competition in town, we rushed the few hundred kilometres home from a camping trip in the great desert. It was an incredibly windy day. My whole body was covered in sand and dust by the time I got home. I looked awful. As soon as I entered the front door, I ran to the bathroom to rinse off. I wanted to look nice because Televisión Española’s desert correspondents had agreed to shoot me riding a camel for their newsreel. After I was all lathered up in soap, the water wouldn’t come. I urged José to go and take a look at the bucket on the roof.

  ‘It’s empty,’ José said. ‘No water.’

  ‘That’s not possible! We haven’t been home for two days so not a drop of water has been used.’ I started getting worried.

  Wrapping myself in a towel, I ran up to the roof in my bare feet. Like something out of a bad dream, the water bucket was indeed empty. I looked across at the neighbours’ roof and saw a dozen or more empty flour sacks drying in the sun. It dawned on me then how the water must have all been eaten up.