Stories of the Sahara

by Sanmao

  There were no drawers or closets in this home. We kept our clothes in suitcases. Shoes and odds and ends were kept in a big box. To write, we had to find a board to put on our knees. The cold grey-black walls made us feel even chillier at night.

  Sometimes José would catch the night shuttle to work. As soon as he shut the door with a clang, my tears would start to flow without rhyme or reason. If I went up to the roof, I could still see his silhouette. Then I’d rush back down and run out to chase after him. I would run until I caught up with him. Out of breath and wheezing, I would walk by his side, head hung low.

  ‘Can’t you stay? I beg of you. There’s no electricity today. I’m so lonely.’ I would implore him, leaning into the wind, hands shoved in my pockets.

  José always felt really bad when I did this. His eyes would be rimmed in red. ‘Sanmao, I’m filling in for someone’s morning shift. I have to be there by six. If I stayed here, how could I make it on time? I don’t have a bus pass for the morning, either.’

  ‘You don’t need to make more. We have money in the bank. Don’t work so hard.’

  ‘Someday we’ll ask your father to borrow the money in the bank to buy a little house. I’m making extra for your living expenses. We just have to endure it a bit longer. After we get married, I won’t work extra shifts any more.’

  ‘Will you come back tomorrow?’

  ‘I’ll definitely be back in the afternoon. You should go to the hardware store tomorrow morning and find out how much wood costs. Once I’m off work, I’ll get cracking on building a table for you.’

  He hugged me tightly before giving me a push towards home. I ran slowly in that direction while glancing back at him. In the distance, beneath the stars, José was waving at me.

  Sometimes one of José’s colleagues who had a family of his own would drive over at night to pay me a visit. ‘Sanmao, why don’t you come over for dinner and TV? We can bring you back later. Don’t stay here all cooped up by yourself.’

  Knowing there was a touch of pity in their good intentions, I would proudly refuse. I was like a wounded animal during that time, taking offence at the tiniest of things. I was so low in spirits I’d often weep. The Sahara Desert was stunning, yet living here required an unfathomable determination to adapt. It wasn’t that I was tired of the desert; I was just running into little frustrations while acclimatising to it all.

  The next day, I went into town with the slip of paper that José had written for me to investigate prices at the huge hardware store. It took quite a while before the assistants had time for me. After endless calculations, they finally told me it would cost more than 25,000 pesetas. They didn’t even have everything in stock. I thanked them and walked out, thinking I would check for mail at the post office. The money we’d set aside for making furniture wouldn’t even be enough to cover a few boards.

  While walking through the plaza outside the store, I noticed they’d thrown out a pile of long wooden boxes used for shipping. The planks were huge and nailed together. It seemed like nobody wanted them. I rushed back to the store. ‘Can I have the empty wooden cases outside for free?’ I asked. I blushed deeply with embarrassment saying this. I’d never had to beg anyone for a few pieces of wood before.

  The proprietor was very polite. ‘Sure, sure, take whatever you’d like.’

  ‘I want five of them,’ I said. ‘Is that too many?’

  ‘How many people are in your family?’ asked the boss.

  I told him, thinking it was rather beside the point. Once he agreed, I went immediately to the square where the Sahrawi liked to gather and hired two donkey carts. We hoisted up five of the empty wooden cases onto the carts. It occurred to me that I needed more tools, so I bought a saw, a hammer, a tape measure and a couple of kilos of nails in different sizes, as well as a pulley, some rope and coarse sandpaper.

  On the way back, I trailed behind the donkey carts, whistling all the while. I’d changed. Like José, after three months of desert living, the former me had already disappeared. Now, even a few wooden boxes could fill me with glee.

  Once I was home, I couldn’t fit the boxes through the front door. I didn’t feel comfortable leaving them outside, worried that the neighbours would come and snatch my treasures away. For the rest of the day, I opened the door every five minutes to check if the boxes were still there. I remained anxious until sunset when I finally saw José’s silhouette emerge on the horizon.

  I went up to the roof and started waving my arms to signal to him. He understood and started running. When he reached the doorstep, his eyes widened at the wooden boxes that blocked the window.

  ‘Where did you get this amazing wood?’ He ran his hands all over them.

  ‘I asked for it,’ I told him from my seat on the low ledge of the roof. ‘It’s not dark yet. Let’s make a pulley system so we can get them up here.’

  That evening, we ate four boiled eggs and endured the bone-chilling cold to finish our pulley. The wooden cases were hauled up to the rooftop. We removed the nails and pried apart the boxes. José’s hand was bleeding from the work. I wrapped my arms around a box and pushed my feet against the wall to help him remove each and every thick board.

  ‘I was thinking, why do we even need to make furniture? Why can’t we be like the Sahrawi and just sit on mats all day?’

  ‘Because we’re not them.’

  ‘But why can’t I change?’ I pondered this while holding three planks in my arms. ‘I’m asking you.’

  ‘Why don’t they eat pork?’ José smiled.

  ‘That’s a matter of religion, not lifestyle.’

  ‘Why don’t you like to eat camel? Are Christians forbidden from eating camel?’

  ‘In my religion, camels are for threading through the eyes of needles, not anything else.’

  ‘So we need furniture in order not to live sad lives.’

  This was a poor explanation, but I had made up my mind about wanting furniture. Even if it made me feel ashamed.

  José couldn’t come home the next day. We’d used up all of his salary. He was taking on extra shifts like mad so we could live more stably in the future. The day after, he still couldn’t return. His colleague even had to drive over to tell me.

  The thick planks were stacked up twice as tall as me on the roof. One morning, after returning from town, I noticed that the pile had diminished. Our neighbour had taken some to fence in the goat pen.

  There was no way I could stand guard on the roof all the time. My only option was to go to the landfill across from us and pick up a few empty cans, puncture holes in them and hang them from the corners of the boards. If somebody came to steal these treasures, the cans would make a noise so I could catch them at it. Even so, I was tricked by the wind multiple times. Whenever the wind blew, the cans would rustle.

  One afternoon, I was organising the boxes of books that we’d had shipped in by sea when I stumbled upon a few pictures of myself. In one photo, I was wearing a long gown, a fur coat and dangly earrings. My hair was in an updo. I had just come out of a performance of Rigoletto at the Berlin State Opera. Another photo showed a bunch of friends and me out on a winter’s night in Madrid, all dressed up. We had gone into a hotel in an old part of town to dance and sing and drink red wine. I was very pretty in the picture, long glossy hair resting on my shoulders, a smile on my lips…

  I flipped through the past, one photo at a time. Then I threw the whole stack down and collapsed on the floor in a heap. I felt like I was a spirit looking back at the world of the living; my heart filled with despair and helplessness.

  No time to look back. The empty cans on the roof were rustling again. I had to go and protect my wood. For now, nothing was more important to me than that.

  I wanted a taste of many different lives, sophisticated or simple, highbrow or low. Only then would this journey be worthwhile. (Although perhaps a life plain as porridge would never be an option for me.)

  Nothing special here. How many others have been as lucky as me to see �
��the setting sun on the Yellow River, a plume of smoke rising up into the evening sky of the Great Desert’ in this life?1 (Although there was no Yellow River here, nor does the smoke rise straight up.) Then I thought:

  On an old road, in the autumn wind, a scrawny horse keeps trudging

  The sun, slanting, to the west, setting –

  Heart-torn, lovelorn, the wanderer, to the verge of the sky a-roaming.2

  This was more to my tune. (Even though I had no scrawny horse, just a lean camel.)

  Friday was the day of the week I looked forward to most because José would come home and stay until Sunday night. José wasn’t particularly romantic and, in the desert, my sentimental nature was hardly flourishing either. What occupied our minds the most was how to improve our home and overcome both material and psychological miseries.

  I used to be quite stupid, boiling rice and preparing vegetables one after the other since there was only one pot. Then I came to my senses. I put uncooked rice in with the meat and vegetables and made it all together into a veggie rice medley. Much simpler this way.

  That Friday night, José sketched out all sorts of furniture diagrams by candlelight and asked me to pick one. I chose the simplest. On Saturday morning, we put on our heavy sweaters and set to work.

  ‘First, let’s cut it to size. You sit on the wood so I can saw.’

  José worked unceasingly; I wrote numbers on all the freshly sawn wood.

  Hours flew by. The sun rose high above us. I put a wet towel on José’s head and rubbed sunscreen on his bare back. His hands became blistered from the work. I couldn’t help much, but I could at least sit on the wooden planks. I also brought him cold water to drink and shooed away any goats or small children who came by.

  The sun poured down like molten iron. I’d been outside so long that the ground and sky seemed to spin slowly. José didn’t speak at all, like Sisyphus pushing his huge rock. I was enormously proud to have a husband like this. Before I’d seen only his neatly printed documents and love letters. Now I was getting to know a whole new side to him.

  José lay on the ground after we ate our veggie medley. He was already asleep by the time I came in from the kitchen. I couldn’t bear to wake him, so I crept up to the roof and moved down the planks he’d sawn up, separating them into piles for our table, bookshelf, wardrobe and coffee table. It was sunset by the time he awoke. He leapt to his feet. ‘Why didn’t you wake me up?’ he asked angrily.

  I lowered my head and said nothing. Silence is a woman’s greatest virtue. No point in arguing that he was sapped of strength, that I had wanted him to rest. José is as hard-headed as they come. But he worked until eleven and lo and behold, we had a table.

  The next day was the Sabbath. We should have been resting, but José couldn’t sit still with the work unfinished, so he was hammering away up on the roof. ‘Give me more rice now and I won’t need to eat later tonight. Still have to build the wardrobe against the wall. This one is complicated and will take some time.’

  While eating, José looked up suddenly as if remembering something and smiled at me. ‘Do you know what these wooden boxes used to hold? Martín the truck driver told me the other day.’

  ‘Maybe freezers? They’re so big.’

  José couldn’t stop chuckling after I said this. ‘Do you really want to know?’

  ‘Could it have been for machinery?’

  ‘For coffins,’ he said slowly. ‘The hardware store bought fifteen coffins from Spain.’

  The grand epiphany made me think back to the boss at the hardware store, who had kindly asked how many people were in my family. So this was what he was getting at.

  ‘Are you telling me that the two of us living people are building furniture from coffin boxes? For our home in the Cemetery District…? How do you feel about this?’

  ‘It’s all the same to me.’ José wiped his mouth, stood up and went back to the roof to continue working.

  This piece of unexpected news got me very excited. It wasn’t all the same to me; I loved my new table even more.

  A few days later, the courthouse contacted us to let us know we could get married. After we tied the knot, we took a detour to José’s office to ask for his early shift bus pass, marriage subsidy, rent allowance, tax break, my health insurance…

  By the time we got married officially, our home had a bookshelf, a table and a long hanging wardrobe in the bedroom. There was a small coffee table under the cooking station where we put our bottles of oil and sugar. We also had colourful striped curtains made of desert linen.

  When guests came over, they had to sit on mats. We didn’t buy a metal bed frame. The walls were still made of concrete blocks. We didn’t bother to plaster them, so of course we couldn’t whitewash them.

  José’s company agreed to grant us 20,000 pesetas as a furniture subsidy after our marriage. His salary increased by more than 7,000 pesetas. His taxes were decreased. The rent allowance was 6,500 per month and he also got two weeks off for marriage leave. So it turned out there were significant economic gains to be had from signing our names on a slip of paper. Because of this, I decided not to be an iconoclast any more. There was some good in marriage, after all. Friends volunteered to take on José’s shifts and so we ended up having an entire month to ourselves.

  ‘The first order of business is taking you to see the phos­phate rocks.’

  Riding in the company Jeep, we followed the path of the conveyor belt from the quarry’s excavation area until we reached the causeway where the phosphate was loaded for export. This was where José worked.

  ‘Oh my God! This is like a James Bond flick! You’re Double-Oh-Seven and I’m the evil Oriental woman in the movie—’

  ‘Pretty impressive, no?’ José said.

  ‘Who set up this massive project?’

  ‘A German company called Krupp,’ José muttered under his breath.

  ‘Spanish people probably couldn’t build something so magnificent.’

  ‘Sanmao, could you be a darling and shut your mouth?’

  For our honeymoon we hired a guide and rented a Jeep to drive westward. We went into Algeria from Al Mahbes, then turned around and went back into the Spanish Sahara, passing Semara to enter Mauritania. We drove all the way to the border of Senegal before doubling back on another route, heading back up to Villa Cisneros in the Spanish-controlled desert. We finally went back to El Aaiún after all this.

  Crossing the Sahara this time, we both fell deeply in love with the land, so much so that we felt we could never again leave this desolation without flowers.

  By the time we got back to our home sweet home, there was only one week of our holiday left. We started fixing up our hovel like mad. We asked our landlord to patch up our walls, but he refused. We went into town to enquire about other homes for rent, but everything was too expensive.

  José made some calculations one evening, and the next day he went to buy lime and cement. He also borrowed a ladder and some tools and set to work himself.

  We worked day and night, eating plain white bread with milk and multivitamins to sustain our physical strength. Toiling without pause after such long and arduous travels, we quickly became very thin, our eyes large and shining, our steps uneven.

  ‘José, I’ll have time enough to rest soon. You have to go back to work next week. Why don’t you take a break for a few days?’

  Standing on the ladder, José didn’t even bother to look at me.

  ‘Really, there’s no need for us to be so thrifty. Besides, I. . . I have money in the bank.’

  ‘Don’t you know that masons in these parts are paid by the hour? Plus, my handiwork is just as good as theirs.’

  ‘You jerk, do you just want to save until we’re old so we can let our children waste our money?’

  ‘If we have a child one day, he’ll have to get a part-time job when he turns twelve. I won’t give him any money.’

  ‘So how are you going to spend your money in the future?’ I asked softly from benea
th the ladder.

  ‘Taking care of my parents in their old age. And once we leave the desert and settle down, we’ll bring your parents over.’

  My eyes welled up hearing him talk about my parents, who were separated from us by innumerable mountains and seas. ‘My mother and father are understanding when it comes to us, but they’re quite proud deep down. My father, in particular, would never agree to live overseas—’

  ‘Who cares if he agrees or disagrees? You just go home and kidnap him. It’ll be a long while before they can escape back to Taiwan.’

  So I had no choice but to focus on mixing lime and cement for the castle in the sky of my husband, this exemplary son-in-law. Occasionally little wet chunks would fly from the ladder and land on my head or nose.

  ‘Hurry up and learn Chinese, José.’

  ‘Can’t learn. I refuse.’

  José could do nearly anything, but languages weren’t his forte. He still couldn’t speak French after learning for nearly ten years. Forget about Chinese. I wouldn’t force him.

  By the last day of our honeymoon, the house had been thoroughly whitewashed inside and out. We really stood out in the Cemetery District, like a crane among chickens. Even without a house number posted, there was really no need to apply for one at the municipal government.

  In July, we received an extra month’s salary. Our marriage subsidy and rent allowance were fully paid out. After work, José ran home by way of steep slopes and shortcuts. As soon as he was through the door, he began pulling out wads of cash from every pocket, throwing them into a huge green pile on the floor.

  The sight of it wasn’t a big deal to me, but for José, who was still wet behind the ears, it was his first time making such a huge amount of money. ‘Look, look, now we can buy a foam mat and a blanket and some sheets, a pillow, we can eat out, we can buy a bucket for water storage, get some new pots, a tent…’

  We two money worshippers knelt on the ground in front of the banknotes in reverence. After we counted it all, I cheerfully set aside 8,000 pesetas.