At first I had intended going only as far as Morocco. But, while staying in Granada, I had met a man from Timbuktu called Ismael Diadié Haïdara. He was of distant Spanish Muslim origin, and would later be in charge of the Timbuktu’s major library of manuscripts from al-Andalus. He persuaded me that I would find in this desert town the ultimate destination to which my ever broader researches seemed to be leading. He also promised to be there himself should I ever decide to visit his birthplace. He wanted me to stay in his family palace.
Instinct and an implicit trust in others have so often guided my steps as a traveller. After my brief encounter with Ismael, I decided unhesitatingly to take up his invitation, and to set off as soon as I could to Timbuktu. I was drawn by the idea of its being the furthest outpost in Africa where Spain’s exiled Muslims had settled. And I genuinely sensed that something of great consequence would result from the journey.
In the meantime I realised that a visit to Timbuktu was no longer as easy or safe as I had imagined. The town, so famously remote that nineteenth century explorers had competed for the honour of being the first westerner to get there, was becoming once again cut off from the outside world. It was the spring of 1992, and the nomadic Tuaregs were still at war with the Mali government. A combination of army blockades and severe drought had made the town almost unreachable by road and river. Aid workers and missionaries had already evacuated the place, and barely any other foreigners were left. The unlit streets were said to be dangerous after six in the evening, and the desert surroundings had become lawless at all times. A Swiss consular official, on a recent visit to a community fifty miles away, had been kidnapped and killed.
UNDETERRED IN MY DESIRE to visit Timbuktu, I realised that my only option was to trust my luck to Air Mali, whose tiny fleet of ancient planes had been reduced by half following the crash a few weeks earlier of one of them. The surviving plane, as far as I could gather, ran a once-weekly service that connected the country’s four major towns along the Niger valley. The problem was that there was no way of reserving this flight from abroad, nor indeed any certainty that the service would run at all.
I flew from London to Mali’s capital of Bamako, unsure if I would be able to travel on any further. But an English friend staying at Bamako was waiting for me late at night at the airport to say that there was a plane leaving for Timbuktu shortly after dawn, and that she had managed to reserve for me one of the last available tickets.
I had time for just a few hours’ sleep before setting off again. My tiredness was soon dissipated by a sense of mounting exhilaration. I had never been anywhere in Africa other than Morocco, and I was absorbed at first by everything, beginning with the dawn taxi ride back to the airport, through the city’s outer fringe of tall, dusty trees, alongside gaudily painted shacks and peeling billboards, into a flat expanse of scrubland illuminated by an intensifying pink glow.
The ticket that was handed over to me, in a terminal more like a bus station than an airport, was a poorly printed scrap of discoloured paper. Yet it had the name Timbuktu on it, which persuaded me that this most notoriously elusive of places was almost within my grasp. We were due to arrive at Timbuktu at midday, after a stop at Mopti, an important commercial hub on the Niger. My worries about last-minute hitches gradually disappeared after the plane had begun its near imperceptible ascent, to fly at a low altitude over shanty settlements, a stony wasteland, mud hut communities, baobab trees, until the horizon was transformed into a crumpled band of orange, my first glimpse of the Sahara. I was euphoric.
The few other tourists on the plane did not noticeably share my excitement. These were mostly Japanese pensioners, whose reasons for travelling to Timbuktu were as perplexing to me as their expressionless faces. The remaining foreigner was a sweating and disgruntled-looking New Yorker coming to the end of a ‘six-country tour of West Africa’. He travelled, he confessed, largely to notch up countries (he had been to seventy-nine so far), and to record on video all that he saw. Africa, for him, was a lazy and unhygienic continent where everyone was conspiring to rob him, rip him off, and confront him with bureaucratic obstacles.
On touching down at Mopti, we were told that even those continuing to Timbuktu were obliged to get off the plane and pass through customs and security control. The American cursed loudly, and was still moaning as we walked in the now blinding sunlight towards a concrete block, eventually to be let out again onto the runway. A handful of new passengers had preceded us there, and were standing waiting outside the plane while a couple of unhurried technicians tightened some of its bolts.
AMONG THE NEWCOMERS was a man who immediately cornered my attention. He was a white-haired but youthful-looking Westerner dressed in khaki. He had a bronzed bald forehead, a broad face and smile, and a manner that transmitted curiosity and enthusiasm for all that was going on around him. I was intrigued too by his way of drawing everyone into conversation, and keeping people amused and spellbound, even the hawkers now infiltrating the runway with goods ranging from cassettes to a stuffed monkey’s head. I timidly shuffled my way closer until eventually I was able to read the label on his hand luggage. Large, hand-written letters spelt out a name at which I stared for a while in disbelief.
The crew had already returned to the plane, and the passengers were forming a disorderly queue in preparation for imminent boarding. I realised this might be my last opportunity to talk to the man in khaki, to make absolutely sure he was the person I presumed he was, the Kapuscinski – Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish reporter whose novelistic eye for detail, and deep sympathy for the downtrodden, had made him memorably begin his book about the emperor Haile Selassie with a description of the servant whose only job is to clear up the urine left by the imperial dog. I eventually plucked up the courage to speak to him.
Encountering authors you admire, if only as photos on a dust jacket, can be deeply disillusioning. Yet the warm, charismatic, and modest-seeming man in front of me lived up exactly to the image I had formed of him from his writings. He appeared genuinely surprised and pleased to be recognised. And he wanted to know all about me, and why I was travelling to Timbuktu. He himself was researching the book later to be titled The Shadow of the Sun, a work about his lifetime of African journeys, his current one being planned as one of the last. He had only secured his plane ticket to Timbuktu after bribing the manager at Mopti airport.
He spoke to me at first in poor English, switched for a while to Spanish, and ended up speaking a far from perfect French. His linguistic limitations were surprising for a foreign correspondent who had spent long periods in Africa and Latin America. But they clearly did not impede his extraordinary ability to communicate, and to make others feel empathy with him. In a matter of minutes I was convinced a great bond was developing between us.
We had at least one thing in common: neither of us had been before to the Sahara. When we got onto the plane he sat down at the window seat directly in front of mine, and kept on turning round to exchange with me his thoughts and emotions. The two of us became like excited children as the plane headed into a sandy emptiness later characterised by Kapuscinski in terms of mysterious geometrical patterns serving as clues to some ultimately indecipherable mystery.
Suddenly the Niger was once again below us, with its fishing boats and moored rafts, its fringe of reeds and cultivated fields, its banks laid out with rows of drying fish and clothes. The plane swerved violently towards the nearby Timbuktu, inciting dozens of ant-like figures on the ground to start running to meet us at the airport. ‘C’est magnifique!’ shouted Kapuscinski, giving me his final verdict on the scenery as he tore himself for a moment from the window.
I was hoping to see him again once we were in Timbuktu, but he explained that he was only going to stay in the town for little more than two hours. He would catch the same plane as it headed on to Gao and then back again to Bamako by evening. He needed to be in Liberia the next day. But he asked me if I had any plans for visiting Warsaw in the near future. He scribbled d
own his address there just in case.
We did not have the chance to say goodbye. I lost him within minutes of arriving at Timbuktu’s tiny and chaotic airport, where I was delayed at customs by a soldier pumping me with questions and searching through my luggage. I was half-anticipating being met afterwards by Ismael Diadié Haïdara, but was confronted instead by a mass of waving arms, desperate to catch my eyes, offering me Tuareg rings and bracelets, attempting to grab me by the hand. In the far distance, lit up by the midday sun, a large van drove off, stirring up a cloud of dust that obscured everything. I thought I saw some Japanese faces, I thought I spotted Kapuscinski. Then I found myself staring into nothingness.
THE REST OF THE DAY was spent in a trance-like state. Timbuktu has so often disappointed travellers, who have expected more for their troubles than scarred adobe walls spreading out formlessly into the desert. Yet I was seduced by the town the moment I left the airport to enter its sandy labyrinth. Ismael may not have been there to meet me (he was rumoured to be still in Spain), but I was able to stay all the same in his rambling adobe home, looked after by his tall, beautiful wife and a bewildering array of brothers and cousins. I was greeted by the news that I had arrived at Timbuktu on a very special day, and that nights of music and dancing lay ahead. A peace treaty had just been signed with the Tuaregs.
Not all my days in Timbuktu would have the intensity of the first, and, as the town’s heady exoticism became increasingly familiar, I ended up playing heated games of Scrabble on pirate Tuareg sets. Nonetheless the trip proved profoundly influential, if not in the way that Ismael had led me to expect. Instead of uncovering dazzling enclaves of the Hispano-Moorish past, I discovered the pleasures of living in a traditional isolated community, which encouraged me three years later to settle in a quiet Spanish village. At the same time I was inspired to undertake a series of ever more ambitious journeys, driven by a growing belief that the traveller’s life is as full of strange and marvellous coincidences as the pages of Don Quixote.
For a long time afterwards I kept on thinking back to my encounter with Kapuscinski. I wanted to tell everyone about it, but failed at first to find anyone who was aware of Kapuscinski’s importance, not even a well-read Scottish couple whom I ran into on my return to Bamako, and who told me they had shared a train compartment with him all the way from Nigeria to Mali. They said how friendly and helpful he had been, and that he made a living as a journalist. They had no idea that he was one of the greatest reporters of his generation.
I held on for ages to the scrap of paper on which Kapuscinski had written his address, intending one day to visit him there, or at least send him a letter. But these intentions were lost to other projects, and the address, stored in my wallet, became so creased and worn as to be illegible. In the meantime his fame continued to grow, until he was tipped for the Nobel Prize for literature.
The news of his early death reached me at the start of a journey in the Andes and I read the subsequent revelations about his life: about his notorious womanising, his close ties to the Polish Communist Party, and his later fears that these would be exposed. I learnt that he took great liberties with the truth, that he claimed to be an eyewitness when he was not, and that Haile Selassie’s dog never pissed on the shoes of courtesans. None of this really mattered. He would always remain for me the compassionate, wonder-struck observer whom I had met for little more than an hour, on the way to a place that did not seem quite real.
Big Yellow Taxi
TIFFANY MURRAY (born Rustington, West Sussex, 1970) studied at New York University and the University of East Anglia and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Wales. She is the author of two novels – Diamond Star Halo (2010) and Happy Accidents (2005) – both of which were shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. She has been called ‘the glam rock Dodie Smith’ and lives in Wales and Portugal. www.tiffanymurray.com
Big Yellow Taxi
TIFFANY MURRAY
When I first saw one it was driving over Queensboro Bridge, the iron cradle of the bridge throwing shadows; Manhattan in the distance. I was eight. I knew what a ‘big yellow taxi’ was because my mother played Joni Mitchell as she cooked. I didn’t know that what I was seeing was a bridge called Queensboro – the bridges I knew had the names Kerne and Severn – and I didn’t know that somehow, nothing in my life would be the same again.
My childhood was spent in landlocked countryside in Wales, in England, and in woodland gardens that breached both borders. If there was a remote house on an isolated pocket of boggy ground, my mother plumped for it. When I first saw that yellow cab on a small TV screen we were renting a house on an ancient estate – an English, feudal type, with a landowner. The estate was the flat top of a hill with one looping road that either ran up or back down, depending on point of view. It was a single country lane with a mission of monks at one end and a cattle-grid at the other. While the monks travelled the world, I rode my Raleigh bike around and around the looping lane until I was dizzy: that was my thrill. The estate was ruled by a gamekeeper who had a habit of stringing up quarry on the fences that lined this only road and hence every journey we made. If we lost cats they would eventually appear in his garish line-up. My mother would accelerate on the ride to school, ‘Don’t look, just don’t look,’ she’d say. I’d press my nose up against the back seat window and wail, ‘Jenny! Tramp! Meissen!’
Even so, the gamekeeper’s daughter was my best (and only) friend. Because of this my bedroom smelled of gristle. This is no reflection on Annie, we simply both believed that we were Robin Hood and after school meant running off into the bracken with our knives to check the snares we’d set in the woods. It was grisly. Our habit was to cut the tail off any poor creature that had the unfortunate luck to be caught in a child’s badly set wire. I remember being particularly confused at what to do with a hedgehog: no tail, you see. Annie had gifted me deer legs, cut off at the knee (or whatever the deer equivalent for a knee is) and my bedroom was littered with these and the tails of grey squirrel, stoat, weasel, polecat, and fox, at various points of decay. I was a feral only child.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that I turned to the imaginary worlds I found in books. But as I knew that I couldn’t truly go to Never Never Land or Wonderland, and Ratty’s Riverbank seemed as damp as our house, I turned to American TV. It was the time in Britain when US comedy was shown late at night, and it was smart and funny. I had laissez-faire parents who believed a child was quite capable of looking after itself; I also had parents who were kind, and though down on their luck, generous. That Christmas they gave me a tiny colour TV with one button that controlled everything. My father fixed it up in my bedroom, with the obligatory coat hanger aerial, and my love for the appendages of small woodland creatures waned: my mother got out the bin liners and cleared my room.
This TV gave me Rhoda; it gave me Soap and WKRP in Cincinnati. Finally it gave me my favourite: Taxi, the show with the opening credits where a yellow cab rumbles across Queensboro Bridge to the sound of that mournful flute. I was transfixed by the adventures of the Sunshine Cab Company. I fell in love with the Reverend Jim Ignatowski (Christopher Lloyd), I was soothed by Alex Rieger (Judd Hirsch) and I lost bladder control over Latka Gravas (the great Andy Kaufmann). I laughed and cringed at Louie De Palma (Danny DeVito) and I marvelled at Elaine’s perpetually bouncy hair. Like the Empire State, the Chrysler Building and Miss Liberty herself there is so much that a NYC yellow cab symbolises, but for me at eight years old – transported from a damp bedroom on a feudal estate – it was simply a colourful car that could take me somewhere magical and funny; like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang could.
Soon, yellow cabs were popping up everywhere. Late one night sometime between Christmas and New Year, I watched Midnight Cowboy and I thrilled at the moment Ratso Rizzo bashes his fist on a NYC cab and yells, ‘Hey, I’m walking here!’ I cried my eyes out that Christmas and Midnight Cowboy became my favourite film. It was then that I started to collect pictures.
I would tear pages from magazines and Blu-tack them to my walls next to the gymkhana rosettes that always said ‘3rd’. ‘Bloody hell, Tiff, can’t you get another obsession?’ Mum asked as she gazed at my wall of yellow cabs crowding out the pony rosettes.
I couldn’t. I was a feral and obsessive child.
I FIRST TRAVELLED to New York when I was eleven. I went on my own but stayed with a friend of my mother’s in early 1980s SoHo. Unfortunately this friend picked me up from the airport, but I do remember my first glance at a long line of yellow cabs: the classic Checker cabs and the new Chevrolet Caprice and Ford Crown Victoria models roared in the morning air; my stomach flipped. My dreams had literally become reality. I wanted to play the mournful flute; I wanted the Reverend Jim to drive me over the Queensboro Bridge.
I spent my first few days in Manhattan walking around SoHo, watching steam rise from grills and manhole covers as cabs speeded past. My first trip in one was uptown. I remember floating up the Westside Highway, I remember the generous bounce of the seats, the thrill of being thrown about, almost crashing into the bullet-proof partition with the full force of a yellow cab that wants to get there. I remember the little payment hatch and the scratched perspex. And the smell; I remember the smell. You could say it was hot-dogs, incense: maybe the Little Tree that dangled from the rearview mirror, or the lingering scent of old West Side ladies draped in fur. I’d hate to think it was the stuff Travis Bickle had to wipe off his seats after a Saturday shift.
My mother’s friend soon moved me to the West Village to stay with her stepchildren. They were rather wild. I bought a Dracula cape and a pirate hat and a green spiral earring. I thought I was a New York City punk. Of course, I was an eleven-year-old country girl. One night these stepchildren took me to the Mudd Club. A man said, ‘Hey baby, let’s hit the floor,’ so I went upstairs to sleep. These stepchildren sat in Washington Square Park in the afternoons, and while they smoked I skipped about the fountain watching the grey and black squirrels. I remember standing under the Arch in Washington Square and staring up Fifth Avenue in awe. 42nd street was magical then, dangerous certainly, but not a Disney store. I watched the streets for Ratso Rizzo, because to me he was as real as Smike from Nicholas Nickleby.
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