The flotsam around the airport: Europeans never emerge from a state of permanent waiting here, whereas natives have never entered such a state. For instance, there’s Fatima with the sensual mouth, the yearning eyes and a white, half see-through blouse, which is gathered around a great swelling belly. Now and then, enthroned, she glances down to check on her breasts, and if a foreigner walks by, she motions with them.
In a corner, someone has set up a television showing videos. Boys hang around it in clusters and can’t decide what’s more fascinating, the film – Bertrand Blier’s Tenue de soirée – or the white couple, namely Anna and me.
But when the film suddenly shows two naked men lying in bed, it gets the boys’ full attention, whereupon an old man wades into them waving his umbrella and shouting:
‘Ce n’est pas pour vous!’
The boys smirk, scatter and regroup some distance away. There’s one older lad with arrogantly curved eyebrows, a small one in a sleeveless girl’s top, a rabid gum-chewer clad completely in sports gear, and the diminutive clown of the group, who keeps sliding up and down a metal pole and pulling faces: the gang on standby.
A magnificently dressed old man comes up and puts his hand on my shoulder:
‘Good day to you, young man!’
‘Young?’
‘Well, I was born in 1926.’
Saying this, he takes a biro and writes the date three times, one under the other, on the palm of his hand and holds it right under my nose.
‘Look how hale and hearty I am. I’ve already lived three times longer than expected!’
The boy Indigo’s drifting around the airport concourse as well, very shyly, a silent companion. He keeps looking in from outside, wrapped in his cloak, a sand-coloured piece of linen. Sometimes, he gets shooed away, but he just circles around the periphery of his group before slowly making his way back to me. If anyone speaks to him, he answers them in halting French. His charm is subtle but irresistible. He has no self-awareness, and knows nothing of his own grace, which is only accentuated when he opens his mouth to laugh and shows his higgledy-piggledy teeth. But the next minute, he’s sitting there like that famous Ancient Greek bronze sculpture of a boy pulling a thorn from his foot, with his flayed legs and his wrist with the barely healed puncture wound, sometimes lost in his own world and sometimes looking to establish a rapport like that of a pupil to his mentor, a secret bond, a discreet relationship based on submission and respect.
His eyes are always one step ahead. Whenever I glance over, he’s already looking at me. Sometimes he’ll arrange his boy’s face into the wrinkled countenance of a grown man and rub his bare soles as he sits. Unlike all the rest, he doesn’t offer his services to anyone, doesn’t ask us where we’re from, doesn’t try and court ‘Madame’ and doesn’t want to know anything about our country or our sports teams. Just once, he shrugs his shoulders apologetically: Yes, the gesture seems to say, these begging children are a nuisance, aren’t they? But he doesn’t mean it in any disparaging way to them, but rather in sympathy with me, because I might be finding them a pain.
It’s our last day here. Just before we got to the airport, we drank tea on the sand with a Tuareg. His two camels were already saddled up.
‘So where are you off to?’ we ask. ‘Back to my oasis.’
‘How long will that take you?’
‘Three weeks.’
‘And what will you find there?’
‘My four wives.’
‘And what do you do there of an evening?’
‘We tell each other stories.’
In my mind’s eye, I picture the Horror vacui of a German husband forced to spend every evening regaling his wife with stories.
We take our leave of him by taking his withered hand and letting it lie there limply in ours for a moment. Then, just with Mohammed, the boy Indigo, I amble off to get our plane, taking a circuitous route. Now he’s simply put his hand in mine, like Muslim men do in alleyways. We walk towards the turboprop aircraft: Anna surrounded by a pack of yelling children, and me with the boy serious and silent by my side. He’s used to walking barefoot on the sand, though I can feel its intense heat even through the soles of my shoes, and keeps a firm hold of my hand. In my left hand, I’ve already got a banknote ready to give him, a note that to him will be big, very big indeed, the sole opportunity in this moment to alter the course of his life, to effect some lasting change. I hold out my hand to him to say goodbye and then press the note into his palm.
Calmly, he looks me straight in the eye with that creamy look which appears so unwavering that it looks like it’s going to linger forever. But then his eyes break out of their reverie for the length of a blink, and he glances quickly down at his hand and then back up at me: Do I really mean it? Have I made a mistake and am I about to recant on my generosity?
Then he lets go of my hand, the note clutched tight in his fist, and runs – not back to where the other passengers are still milling around with their companions and their families, but out over the tarmac, past the aircraft steps, underneath the plane, across the runway, and up to the embankment on the far side and then down again into the sand dunes. He runs and runs, and never once looks back. The soles of his feet dig lightly into the desert sand; every time he lifts them up, he kicks up bright little clouds. And now his two minions are hard on his heels, but he doesn’t turn around, he just keeps on running and running.
I let Anna and the other passengers go ahead of me up the steps, and stay looking at him until he’s just a distant speck in the landscape, receding ever more slowly now, across the dunes and into the depressions. It’s only when I’m seated at my window, and the plane’s taken off and gained some height that I notice that he’s running off into a wilderness, with no house, no hut, no settlement in sight. In this entire zone of the Sahara, there’s nothing but his movement, the movement of a flight without a vanishing point, which is driven by nothing except the sheer possibility of fleeing.
Bombay
The Oracle
From the treetops high above the crossroads, parrots flew up in a green swarm; monkeys were balancing above the washing lines strung from the balconies; transistor radios were contradicting one another; and the cantankerous blaring of the car horns in traffic jams had an arrhythmic sound, like an Indonesian gamelan orchestra. The boy running alongside our car, so long as it kept crawling along at a walking pace, delivered his patter through the car window in several languages. He wasn’t trying to beg or demand anything from us, nor did he want to sell us anything. No, this city warrior wanted nothing except to have a conversation with us, to chat and have us respond, and to get to know strangers. We stopped, and I got out and went over to sit with the lad in a small park by the roadside. He had tattooed ear lobes and asked me:
‘So how much milk does your family’s cow produce?’
On this particular matter, I couldn’t really enlighten him, so the boy sat there hunched over, digesting what little I could tell him, while not grasping everything. Motionless, we looked at one another, two landscapes in conversation.
‘I’m a street kid,’ he announced, like it was his title.
‘Right,’ I replied. What else would you be? I thought.
‘I’ve seen things that a kid my age shouldn’t see.’
‘Right,’ I said.
‘So when you’re with your family, do you speak German English or English English?’
German German, I told him.
‘What do you say when you’re impressed by something, then?’
‘We say: Nicht schlecht, Herr Specht.’
He repeated it, and then asked me to teach him some more phrases, but I told him I had to go into the house opposite, where I was due to interview two eunuchs.
‘I know a transsexual, too,’ he piped up. ‘He was born a woman, but forced his ovaries to burst through sheer force of will. I’ll wait.’
‘What for?’
‘For you.’
‘How do you know what ovaries
are?’
He gestured toward the street and said: ‘University of Life.’
I’d only got halfway across the street when it was suddenly filled with the cacophony of whores soliciting my custom. Their calls sounded curt and challenging, like they were trying to draw my attention to something:
‘Hey! Come here! Hey! Look here!’
They made it sound like I’d dropped something.
‘Sir! Watch out!’
I found myself gazing up the steep slope of a large, brown upper thigh, which had been thrust forward out of a sarong and was now being waggled to and fro on a bench like a kilo of liver.
‘Thank you,’ I shouted, and tried to arrange my face into an expression of frustrated desire. The woman responded by covering her naked wares with a theatrical sweep of her hand, as her face took on a look of wounded pride. She went all coy, making like she had been stripped naked against her will. I dived into the dark entrance behind where she was sitting.
I find myself climbing the stairs of a tenement block. Inside, the building’s core has been shot through with corridors, stairways, fire escapes, catacombs – a whole labyrinthine system of passageways opens up, in which I quickly lose my bearings. You dive deeper and deeper into it without getting anywhere; you take a turn and find yourself back where you started. The only light that penetrates the interior is the dim blue haze that filters through the tracery of the aerated concrete blocks that have been used to divide the external corridors from the courtyard and render the catacombs invisible from the outside. There’s a glow of a small lamp from inside, while far-off in the depths of the building, a coloured light bulb dangles on a cord; an eternal flame lighting the way for all the pilgrims to this place.
I latch onto a man carrying a plastic bag; its light colour acts as a beacon for me in the gloom. When he turns round, he turns out to be a woman, who isn’t exactly delighted at being followed. She quickly ducks under the washing hanging on the lines and disappears into a side passage. I keep following her, crouching low, but all of a sudden there’s a matronly woman blocking my path, holding a shovel, and a man with the eyes of a drug addict, who stares sullenly at me. At first he just stands there in his white shirt, leaning back as though propping himself against a wall, and then he lifts his hand – not to strike me, but to show me the way.
I turn off into the next corridor. It leads through a tiled, sanitary environment that’s long since ceased to be sanitary: the grouting between the tiles is covered in mould, and organisms have taken root in the cracks, bursting out from the stonework beneath. At a table to one side, two eunuchs sit eating a watery lentil soup; a couple of plastic chairs are pushed out of the way. An empty bed has shrugged off its pillows, but, as I draw closer, I see that it’s not empty at all; instead, a monstrous, naked woman is stretching her feet out towards me, the joints of her toes covered with black hairs. A fan installed in the top third of a window pane is running, stirring up the air but not cooling it. Another woman keeps tossing her thick mane of hair this way and that.
I sit myself down beside the eunuchs with their lentil soup. One of them has got his hair in a mud-pack, but the heat and humidity in the room is making the dye trickle down his face in long runnels; I’m reminded of the dying Gustav von Aschenbach at the Lido in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. One of the eunuchs is a sly ferret of a man, with the complexion of a pastrami roll and darting eyes. The other is a fair-skinned diva with the fleshy physiognomy of a boy in a Caravaggio painting and a broad, high forehead; he’s a whole assemblage of round shapes, and would be quite beautiful but for the mud-pack oozing its contents down his face.
As village lads from the south of India, he explains, he and his boyfriend of the time castrated themselves to make it easier for them to find clients in the big city. But his friend died of his self-mutilation. He, though, the glamorous one, earns a reasonable living because he looks after himself, only uses the best beauty products, and always wears perfume … he shifts closer to me. And it’s true, all the fragrances of the Orient waft up from him. Plus, he’s often invited to weddings as a good-luck talisman, and then, of course, there’s all the love.
Surely he means the great lovelessness, otherwise called prostitution. He can’t really mean love, can he?
‘I’m not useful for much anymore,’ he says. ‘But I do still know how to host a gentleman.’
He gives a smutty chuckle at this, then starts talking about how, in love, giving is more important than … I’ve heard all this before, but in a context where the next part of the sentence was about an inner beauty. And as he goes on about the giving aspect of love, the teardrop, which has for some time been welling up in the inner corner of his eye, yields to gravity and, swollen with mascara, trembles down his pale cheek. The queen lets its run, even though it leaves a dirty trail behind it.
As I step out into the hallway again, the shadows on both sides disappear. I grope my way down the dingy corridor, towards some glimmer of light or other. Blue plaster crumbles, or rather sloughs off in great scales, to the ground. Now the wall looks like a map of the ocean floor, with continents made of mortar, concrete, and exposed bits of stonework and tile. As I feel my way along, the wall opens up into cavities beneath my fingertips, through which I can see images of deities, snake-armed beings with calves’ heads, illuminated and charged with energy.
After a few steps down, a well-trodden staircase opens out – scarcely identifiably, like in a faded photo – into an openplan suite of rooms. Its separate compartments all lead off this single passageway, and each little niche is fitted out with a bed. People sit around in the darkness, staring like they’re customers, whores, children, fathers, relatives. In one booth, a wooden ladder leads up to a bunk bed, and even up there, all wrapped in ruffed fabric, sin waits, a great sin to judge by the ruffs, which tremble of their own accord, while from the abyss of darkness, punctuated by snatches of laughter, an old lady, who they call ‘the mother’, starts to cry.
The damp smell in these rooms seems to say: everything here is alive. Sheets, rags, clumps of dust, cats, bugs, pigeons, rats, even cockroaches gradually appear out of the gloom, and the faces of the people here are like those of ancient sibyls, dark like they’ve clambered out of a pit of history, with saturnine features, oppressed by a burden that’s invisible and which sometimes seems to have nested above their beetle brows. There’s a child with a swollen head sitting on the floor mat, too, groping about and forever clutching at something in front of it which isn’t there.
‘There’s something there,’ its mother says, sobbing. ‘My child can see something, I’m sure.’
Extravagance in misery: here, there’s a superfluity of the superfluous; the sheer extravagance of the malas – the garlands of flowers, the tattoos, the black kohl-lined eyes and twirled women’s beards, the red nail polish, the painted balloons, the checked throws, the scents that waft up from the dark fluff on the women’s cheeks and the devotional pictures of gods in their glass frames. Even the lush, flouncy fabrics of their garments, and the way their flesh billows in soft folds around their waists, are a kind of exuberant opulence. A couple of violet-coloured onions are lying on the ground, but my gaze drifts over them through the torn curtain. These tenement houses with their external corridors full of fans, washtubs, household appliances, rotary clothes lines, bowls and cloths are like a series of crickets’ cages, one inside the other. And the falsetto beeping of moped horns is incessant.
I shy away, heading for the depths of this warren. I still haven’t penetrated to the end of the corridor; I still don’t know what final promises it holds. A strong, hairless arm lies across the passage. It belongs to the barefoot, sleeping pimp, who lies there prone like he was suddenly poleaxed by sleep on the way to see the object of his desire, and because he’s not worth getting up for, the exhausted whore also fell asleep herself, on one of those sagging mattresses stained with the brown sweat rings of past orgies, which left behind their watermark on the sheets.
The fans are still humming away. Everywhere, clothes are moving and billowing in the wind, and everywhere there’s the sound of breathing or snoring. The hollow people are exhaling in the scum wreath of their sweaty deposits. Sandals, mops, plastic cutlery and toys. New, hitherto unseen clefts open up in the walls, out of which more and more people emerge, lurching towards me. Rooms that were ostensibly unoccupied suddenly come alive, with the cockroaches, dogs and rats running out first, followed by people. The pimps drag a curtain aside, rabidly when they arrive and casually when they leave. They’ve all got the same thin moustache and mouths with fleshy lips, and they all seem hung-over, uptight, jaded and listless. Between the bars hang photos of food, naked and shining like grocery pornography. Wet washing drips from the ceiling; all it can do in this humid heat is grow mildew, never actually dry.
And so deeper into Purgatory I go! This is a serious business. None of my greetings are answered, no smile returned, we’re not playing around here, we’re living. Only a Japanese man, amazingly misdirected, comes towards me, wishing everyone ‘Good Day!’
The whores live like troglodytic creatures, like naked mole rats in the smell of moist earth, in the exhalations of the many sleepers, in cubicles that are like coffins. In a puddle, some spilt blood is forming a rainbow; mangy dogs lap at it with their tongues. Even while they’re sleeping on the ground, the women still sport their full whores’ finery. The pimps tread carefully as they step over them, but noticing them the women wake up and rise briefly with a clink of gold jewellery, before slumping straight back down again.
A seventeen-year-old girl with a face that already betrays deep disillusionment lies draped over a bed like the Grande Odalisque by Ingres. She’s not for sale, she announces unbidden. But a year ago, someone whispers in my ear, her mother took her to a rich client, who paid handsomely to have such an innocent girl. Hereabouts, the popular belief is that anyone who can afford it should take a girl’s virginity once a year; it is thought to increase male potency.
The Ends of the Earth Page 15