Two gold merchants come into the hotel, VIPs in slippers, simply but well clothed, and with an air of great gravitas. They disappear behind a door into a room. The air-conditioning drowns out the low murmur of voices as they conduct their transactions.
News travels fast round these parts. That evening, a succession of men turn up in the hotel courtyard to try and do business with us as they’ve supposedly heard that we were asking about this or that item, or how far away something was, or some hotel or other, or some mode of transport. So it is that a whole string of them appear and sit at our table: a man selling silver crosses from various clans (he’s heard that I purchased a neck chain for Anna); a lad with cassette tapes, who I bought a couple from the day before, and who’s now replenished his stock; a guy who’s quit the local taxi syndicate and set up on his own, and who calls our attempt to get to Bobo Dioulasso under our own steam ‘cheating’. He starts haggling, offering us prices the like of which we’d never get from the syndicate, but undermines his own negotiating position by drinking like a fish the whole time. Before long, he’s completely drunk and is becoming quite abusive.
No sooner have we got rid of him than an oriental carpet salesman finishes his prayers and comes over to warn us about the crazy taxi driver.
‘You’d be better off investing your fare in a rug.’
Okay, the carpet he has with him isn’t a flying one but, the man tells us, it can be unrolled. And so it is duly unrolled. The next one, a disc jockey, assures us that he doesn’t want to sell us anything, but he still has ‘sales representative’ on his card. And by and by his entourage turn up in the courtyard, variously offering us Tuareg jewellery, postcards and dried fruit. They’re all dismayed to find so few foreigners in the hotel.
‘Monsieur, moins cher!’; ‘Monsieur, half price!’
The Western separation of work and leisure, of earning money and recreation, doesn’t apply here. You just spread out a cloth on the pavement and start selling your wares. Everyone’s a family member, it’s all family business. Talking about games, laughing, exchanging money, hounding tourists: it’s all one, along with buttonholing someone and recounting stories while stringing pearls. These are all just formulaic ways of attaining a state, so to speak, which constitutes work but at the same time transcends work – and in reaching this state, you’ve arrived at a different way of spending your time.
Africa also demands that you shift your perspective on space; it organizes life on the plain and requires – whether you’re on a low hill, or in a depression, or in sparse scrubland, or a village – that you orient yourself toward the horizontal. Canaries are chattering in the bushes. A group of boys are crouching by a ditch and using a dead fish as bait to try and lure something larger. The stream flows into a muddy pond, where a brawny man in his mid-thirties is teaching a tiny white girl to swim and dive. Her father is sitting on the bank and painting the creek and pond in lurid acrylic colours. Two car mechanics in overalls, rubbing their oily hands with rags, step round the side of the artist’s easel and start criticizing the daub on the canvas. Orange-blossomed trees line the bank, alternating with hibiscus. Two women are hitting coconuts with sticks so violently that it looks like they’re trying to punish them.
The way to appropriate this reality is to steep yourself in its monotony. Everything seems both isolated and nullified in the harmony of ponderous, synchronous events, into which only the children suddenly irrupt, emerging from the water with their eyes frantically struggling for survival with that mixture of terror and delight.
I went down to the Niger, knelt down and dipped both hands in the water, just so I could say I’d done it. I noticed an old man sitting on his haunches nearby. He seemed to understand what I was about and nodded and smiled, while the women, who were sitting on the ground roasting corn cobs on an open fire, beckoned me over and gave me a cob to celebrate the occasion. They cover the roofs of their huts with trash to hold them down and stop them flying off in high winds.
In front of a cactus a pelican was settling down in the detritus, preening its breast with its beak. Next to it, a young goat had found something to eat in a cardboard box, but was soon forced to share it with four other kids. A child picked up a goat’s skull by the horn and hurled it into the river, while a man in a deep violet-coloured bubu appeared and, with a tiny silver pipe clenched between his cracked lips, started telling me about his lover, who he referred to as ‘my ninth’.
Now I’m sitting in the hotel courtyard again, and the lad with his box full of cassette tapes sidles up to my table once more. The hotel owner with the women’s spectacles observes me from a distance, but doesn’t want to come over and disturb me when I’m busy writing. The kids on the street corner wave at me, but they don’t pester me anymore.
I walk over an embankment down to a pond where three oxen are being watered. There are also three naked giantesses striding down to the pond, but they’re naked for social rather than ethnic reasons. As a child, whenever I came across those specious documentary pieces about, say, the ‘Mating Rites of the Mursi’ in magazines, these natives never struck me as naked; after all, they were still wearing their skin colour.
Time and again when I’m underway, I catch sight of the vast plain, where goats are gazing between huts and sheds. A boy is keeping pace alongside me, knocking a holed bucket along the road with a stick. He stays with me until we reach a branch of the river, where another lad calls me over to his dugout canoe, and he takes me over to a sandbank in the middle of the stream. No sooner have I made land than I’m approached by the people who have set up home there:
‘Where’s our medication?’
At the sight of my empty hands, they just grow more agitated:
‘My head’s splitting,’ says one of them, putting his hand to his head. ‘I’ve got a stomach ache’, says another, clutching his midriff.
‘Did you bring any iodine? I’m itching all over.’
As Tuareg, they never leave their island, and never cross to the far side of the river. Even so, the sound of children shrieking drifts up from the other bank.
‘Don’t worry, that’s just kids who are swimming over here for the first time, they’re still a bit frightened.’
A corpulent woman with a glass eye that’s set slightly skewwhiff fixes me with an intent gaze. There’s a kind of madness in her face, like when an illness turns the body into the object of a great lassitude, chooses its own design, adds its own ornaments, shuts down certain functions, robs a person of one particular expression while magnifying another. That’s how she looks at me – unstable, yet unwavering.
I evade her grasping spider fingers and eventually find myself at the end of a spit of land. A man blocks my path:
‘Right out on the point here, just a few metres away, we’re growing salad leaves. If you want to come and see it … I can do you a special price.’
Where there’s no formal market, everything becomes a market, even inspecting greens. I tell the man that I’ve seen salad leaves before. He acts amazed, then turns his back on me disdainfully.
The kids are playing by the riverbank, the women are sitting on the steps of their huts and sorting through vegetables, and the men are ensconced like kings high up on roofs and walls. The rubbish tip here teems with life stories. For instance, over there is a kid who’s poking around in a pile of mussel shells with an aluminium crutch, while above him, with their tattered and frayed wings, the vultures circle. The young girls, on the other hand, have withdrawn to the bluff above the lagoon to perform their ablutions, washing their feet and plaiting their hair, while the boys attempt a game of football with two balls. All the smells waft above a base note of fish guts and excrement. To the mournful cry of the vultures in the trees, shorn-headed children look on, wearing the expression of old people, as a shadow of indigo lengthens over the grove.
In the crown of the palm tree above us, a bird is busy building its fourth nest in a row. It takes it a day, and by the end of a week a new chick’s hear
t could already be beating in the nest. When dusk falls, the waiter from Mali serves us Senegalese wine from a bulbous amphora of clouded glass. The wine is as heavy as apricot juice and a golden-yellow colour, but it’s as astringent as resin, and Anna looks at me like the chakra on the crown of her head is just opening up to the desert sky.
The next day the road takes us out into the Sahel zone. The Sahara lies there like one of the earth’s body parts, pulsating, blushing and blanching. The desert rises and stretches, sometimes sending a shower of scrub bushes across the plain, and the dead trees by the side of the road are full of screeching iridescent blue and yellowy-black birds. Squirrels and geckos encounter one another on the tree trunks, and vultures hop across the collapsed skeletons of goats that they have picked clean. Occasionally you see a scrap of fibrous tendon dangling from the birds’ beaks. But at least they have it easier than the goats and the long-eared cattle, which stand panting in the shade of some breadfruit trees. Nearby, other trees project their crowns into the sky like clenched fists, and on the road people pass by carrying the greyish-brown half-carcasses of slaughtered animals.
The sky, the desert and the dusty air have all taken on the same colour, a sort of grey rubbed in beige, with reddish, yellowish and milky hues. Standing out against this overwhelmingly monochrome picture are the garish colours of people’s clothes, like the deep indigo kaftans, as though nature was nothing more than a contrasting backcloth for humans, the medium that brings people to the fore in the first place. There will come a time when all you’ll see here will be sand and haze, and over the foundation walls and adobe-bricks, over the bast-fibre roofs of the huts, there will stand a lowering sky that sucks up all the colour. Then the huts will blend into the landscape, and when everything’s been reduced to desert, suddenly a single child will appear, just a silhouette approaching through a sandstorm, until it is swallowed up like a wraith.
That’ll be the fate of Mohammed, for instance, the little Tuareg boy with the worldly wise eyes of a veteran, a lad maybe ten years old who also goes by the name of Indigo, and who suddenly disappears in the wall of desert sand whipped up by the wind. Then there’s the old man carrying a couple of baguettes wrapped in a cloth, who raises his hand in a conciliatory gesture as he gets into our car and gives off a powerful smell of plant dye. He rides with us for a bit until we drop him off again somewhere or other. Or the young woman, who we pull up to give a lift to, but who refuses to get in because she’s suspicious of our strangely accented French; she looks at us like we’re slave traders. Or the little girl with the feather-light handshake and the basket full of warm food, who gets out and disappears into the dunes, where there’s nothing. Or those men who are waiting in the roadside ditch when we stop. The first indication of their social class are their flip-flops: the upmarket ones are hand-painted, and the leather punched or appliquéd, or even plaited, whereas the ones that poor people wear are glued together and are frayed; they look like calloused skin and almost seem to become part of the wearer’s body.
Outside all the villages here are extensive plots full of rubbish, and then heaps of scrapped cars looking like skulls, and, looming over these plots, there’s always the same advertising hoarding, set way up high, showing two Marlboro cowboys on horseback in their desert, a different desert far away. But their desert is paler and more orderly and less theatrical. Even so, can you really advertise on a desert road with the image of a desert? What do the people living here make of the poster? The ambience it exudes isn’t one of remoteness or purity; what it shows isn’t some exotic backdrop, but their everyday reality. What’s so desirable about that?
The plinths of the gravestones in the town’s main cemetery have enamelled photos of the deceased attached to them. Ancient wild men with sexless features stare out of the matt glaze of the enamel, faces from which either age or work has washed every last sexual characteristic. Underneath are legends like ‘Fourth King’ or ‘Subject of such-and-such a king’. Gnarled, knobbly faces with so many scars it almost looks like they’ve been crossed out, and so that there should be no doubt in times of tribal conflict, their faces are tattooed as clearly as if they were the picture of a flag.
The kids take me by the hand and lead me to a spot where they’ve killed a rat with a catapult. There’s blood on its head, but apart from that it looks clean and appetizing – cleaner in any event than the little stream they’ve laid it out in. In fact, it looks for all the world like it’s gone out in a fur coat and is a cut above their station in life. But the children are merciless and load up their slingshots again to try and galvanize the tenacious rat into one last act of defiance. The boy Indigo is among them, too, but he shakes his head disapprovingly, because he senses I’m not impressed.
In the shadow of the mosque, a Swiss woman puffs and blows and says to her own personal Tuareg:
‘Would you like a Ricola Orange and Mint sweet?’
‘No thank you,’ he replies, rubbing his stomach like he’s anticipating dyspepsia.
Put out, the woman remains rooted to the spot like a mummified king, and photographs a poster with the slogan: ‘Enfants du Monde. Venez nous voir.’
The roadside verge is strewn with the outline shapes of snakes and lizards and geckos that have been squashed flat by cars. The reptiles’ bodies have dried out until they appear like watermarks in the sand. There’s a dead goat there as well, with a neck so long that it seems the head was trying to stretch away from the animal’s body to reach safety. Now I’m feeling more at home.
From the sand of the desert we return to the colour of the desert: the air is cankerous, the walls sunburned and hardened, dusted with desert sand. The people here are clean, in the same way that sand is clean. No trace of refuse anywhere. Accustomed to decay, everyone here lives by consigning their waste products to the wind, which carries them all off into the Sahara. But social life here concentrates around a few institutions: the market, the mosque, the police station, the school and the university.
Everything is built of sand, of history, of resistance against the distant government, and everything exists as an embodiment of one great name: Timbuktu, home of the Indigo-men, the Tuareg. But those who go around with their faces covered, the armed men, cripples, beggars, flying merchants, priests, indeed everyone who lives here, does so because they can still survive here, not least because they’ve found a way of making a living from the traveller. The traveller is all too familiar with the faces of policemen, officials and civil servants, but he instantly finds everything to do with the Tuareg noble.
The Tuareg is a mysterious nomad. For just a single paltry coin, he’ll don his traditional garb, strike just the pose and pull just the expression you’re after. Even the sons of the desert have to be brought into line, after all, even they can’t just be left as they are. We all know what that would lead to. No, far better to provide them with a bit of direction, for when all’s said and done every glance leads to an outstretched arm, and at the end of every arm there’s a begging hand performing a grasping motion, and sometimes, quite rarely, your own gaze unexpectedly meets that of a person who’s just sitting there and displaying a kind of sympathy for you, which you’re exposed to.
And then you withdraw through the transfixed gazes of veiled Muslim women, who passively greet you, as if they wanted to press you deeper into the hordes of children, the throngs of crutch-carriers with their waving leg stumps, and it occurs to you that you can’t conceive of a history for a single one of these faces. Your only option is to give yourself over to incomprehension, and any sympathy, fellow feeling or commiseration you might show can only be translated into the mimicking idiom of your own cultural milieu, which isn’t always understood here.
You walk through the gaze of beggars. They no longer need to lower their eyes to look at their palms to know what sort of coin has been placed there. The tourists dimly sense that these creatures are somehow ennobled through contact with them, these visitors from far-off lands; one woman, who has done the Tuareg
the great honour of donating her sweet wrapper, tells her friends:
‘What’s the matter? For them, a wrapper’s something really wonderful and unusual.’
It’s evidently enough that the gesture of giving should be authenticated by the presence of the foreigner, but ultimately the flash in the pan of euphoria about being in this desert location quickly burns itself out, and things become troublesome, annoying and onerous instead. Or you catch the eye of one of these squatting people, a glance that wasn’t meant for you personally and which even conveys some measure of condolence, condolence for the life that you’ve dragged here with you and will take away with you again when you leave.
The omnipresent boy Indigo also looks at me from out of a life that I can’t begin to marvel at, because I simply know nothing about it. In the languid beam of this gaze, poverty is certainly evident once more, but it’s purged of all the neediness and begging, it’s more like a state of renunciation, of dignity in abstinence, which your own lifestyle is light years removed from. In places where all sense of entitlement is already extinguished, poverty is even more hopeless than elsewhere and is without any means of expression, and even if it does begin to speak, there is no true, proper and genuine way of responding.
The Ends of the Earth Page 14