Back of Beyond

by David Yeadon

  “My sister,” said Julio in slow English. “She is named Maria.”

  “Maria, this is Senor David.” Now my wife, Anne, tells me I have a “soft spot” for the beauty of youth, particularly female beauty, and although I think she exaggerates, I can occasionally be touched by open-eyed innocence and the unlined face. Nothing insidious you understand, just fascination of things unspoiled. But this amazing creature…

  I couldn’t speak. Literally. My mouth sagged and stayed sagged. My smile must have seemed a terrible grimace. A gurgly sound was meant to be “Buenos dias” but was just that, a gurgle. Julio pulled my hand.

  “Please sit. Sit here,” he gestured to an elephantine armchair by the window, and I made a lot of motion getting in, trying to regain composure.

  “Maria. Cognac, por favor.”

  He was the young master of the house even though much younger than his sister.

  She smiled, proud of her brother’s performance. Then she smiled at me and was gone.

  “This is a beautiful house—your casa.” I tried a bit of light conversation to see if my tongue was working.

  “Oh yes,” said Julio, sitting in another equally enormous chair beside me.

  “Yes—beautiful.” Well I got those words out. I was recovering fast.

  “And my sister?” He looked very directly at me. (So he had noticed my reaction. A perceptive boy.)

  “Your sister?”

  “She is beautiful?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes. Beautiful also.”

  “Yes. All people says so.” Well I was relieved to hear that. At least I was among like-minded company. Maybe she had this effect on everyone. Quite the princess no doubt. Smiling and blinking those long black eyelashes at anyone who comes around. Spoiled too, I suppose. Maybe devious—innocence is rarely as innocent as it seems. A real little Lolita. Oh yes. I’ve seen it before. People all googly-eyed over a pretty girl. And they look so stupid, gibbering inanities and falling head over heels in instant infatuation. Well I’m wise to all that, Julio m’boy. Just let her come with the brandy and I’ll show you how to handle that kind of nonsense.

  “Please, Mr. David.”

  She was back, offering me a glass of brandy on a small silver tray and, damn it, I was doing it again. One look at that utterly perfect porcelain face framed in long black hair and those big black eyes and that aquiline nose and I was lockjawed again, trying desperately to shape a sensible smile that said “thank you for your courtesy” and nothing more….

  The door opened and the room suddenly became much smaller. A great bear of a man entered, hands as big as frying pans and fingers like thick bananas. A bushy moustache covered most of his mouth and curved down, walruslike, at either side. His hair was as black and bushy as his moustache. A long scar, reaching from forehead to jawbone, gave him a dangerous look, but his eyes were the gentlest blue, shining, exuding welcome without words. Julio stood up, rake straight, Maria gave one of her curtsies and vanished again, and I rose to meet the man.

  “Papa, this is Senor David.”

  Somewhere under the moustache a grin grew. A gold tooth flashed in the sunlight, and one of his enormous hands engulfed mine completely. He stood for a long time boring into me with those eyes, then he released me and gestured me to sit. He lifted one of those gigantic carved chairs at the table with two fingers, twisted it around, and sat down facing us both with his arms folded.

  Tomas Feraldes could speak no English (his words rumbled from deep in his chest, like boulders tumbling down a ridge) but during the next half hour or so I enjoyed one of the richest conversations I have ever had with a stranger. His son acted as interpreter, and we talked in baby language of everything—the village, the banana plantation upon which all the villagers depended for their livelihood, the ocean, the wonderful variety of fish you could catch by a simple hook from the promontory cliffs, the history of Gran Canaria, and the great pride of the islanders in their little green paradise. I remember one of Julio’s translations: “We are of Spain but we are not of Spain. We are Canary people. This is our land. This is our country.”

  The brandy flowed. Little dishes came—calamari in lemon and garlic, big fat fava beans that we squeezed to pop out of the soft flesh, spicy mixes of tomatoes and garlic with chunks of lime-marinated fish, sardines, island cheese, and more brandy.

  Then Tomas motioned to Julio and spoke softly and firmly. Julio looked very intense and then smiled. He turned to me.

  “My father says you will stay here if you wish.”

  “Here? Where? In this house?”

  “No—in another place. My brother’s home. He is away in Madrid.”

  “Where is this house?”

  “It is very close.”

  Tomas spoke softly to Julio again.

  “My father says you will come to see your house now. If you wish.”

  “My house!?”

  “Yes. Come now. I will take you. You will stay, I think.”

  I now knew I had no control over anything. I’d followed my inner voice and let things happen and they were happening so fast and so perfectly I had no wish to impede the flow.

  We were outside again in the narrow street. The children were still there, waiting patiently as if they knew what would happen long before I did. And off we all went, pied-piper fashion again, wriggling between the houses, right to the end of the promontory, where we all stood on the edge of the cliffs watching huge waves explode fifty feet in the air and feeling the vibrations through the rock.

  Julio nudged me.

  “This is your house.”

  I turned. He was pointing to a small square building, the last house on the rock, white and blue, with a staircase leading up to a red door. On the flat roof I could see plants waving. There were windows everywhere overlooking the beach, the volcano, the broad Atlantic.

  Grinning like an idiot again, I followed him up the stairs. He unlocked the door with a key big enough for a castle dungeon, and we walked into one of the most beautiful rooms I have ever seen. Light filled every niche. On the left was a small propane stove, a sink, a big working table, and four chairs, Van Gogh chairs with straw seats and big unpolished wood uprights.

  The living area was simply furnished—a few scattered rugs, armchairs, low table, lamps, empty shelves hungry for books (my books!). I could see the bathroom, tiled in blue Spanish tiles, and then another staircase leading up and out onto the roof, with views over everything—the whole village, ocean, mountains, bays….

  It was a dream.

  “You like your home?” Julio was watching my face.

  “Julio, this is the best house I have ever seen.” I meant it too. “Yes,” he said simply, “I know. My brother was happy here, but he is away now for a long time.”

  “Your brother has a lovely home.”

  “My brother’s house—now your home.”

  I didn’t know what to do or say. I felt like giggling, weeping, even praying a prayer of thanks (something I do far too infrequently). I shook Julio’s hand and then I hugged him. At first he pulled back, and then he was hugging me as hard as I hugged him.

  Moving in was splendid chaos. Every child in the village came to help me carry my belongings from the camper (she looked so tiny from the top of those 130 steps) to the house at the end of the village—clothes, sleeping bag, books (far too many books), cameras, food (far too many useless cans), fishing rod, cushions, towels—and my guitar. When the children saw that they went wild. Compared to the island timpales, this was a brute of an instrument, a battered Gibson with a deep tone. They were all shouting something at me. Indispensable Julio stepped in again.

  “They say play, Senor David. Please.”

  But what? Which of my English and American folk songs could make any sense—Baez, Dylan, Guthrie, Paxton, Hank Williams, Pete Seeger, Donovan? Pete Seeger! Good old Pete always had a knack with kids. He could get them to sing in the middle of a tornado. I’d never sung much with kids before, but what the heck, everything on this isla
nd was new to me anyway and all I had to do was flow with the flow….

  “Skip, skip, skip to m’Lou…” I’d used the same song before on one of my journeys, and it had worked wonders. The chorus is simple, the melody obvious, and even if you couldn’t get the words straight you could hum and la-la all the way through it. Which is precisely what they did.

  Twenty-three little voices “Skip to m’Lou-ing” it up at the bottom of El Roque’s steps, bouncing around in the hot afternoon sun, making the dust rise in golden haloes, singing faster and faster, “Skip, skip, skip to m’Lou.” High above, a crowd of villagers gathered by the wall at the top of the rock, began clapping, and then the kids started clapping—“skip, skip”—and the whole bay rang to the sound of this crazy ditty that was utterly meaningless to them and perfect for this impromptu getting-to-know-you celebration on this, my first day in El Roque.

  I thought—maybe a week or two here and then off to new places. But it didn’t happen that way. It was four months before I left that island. I even managed to tempt Anne to put aside her work for a while and join me in my island home. The villagers were delighted. Once they realized I was married, all attempts had been abandoned to match me up with one of the many eligible females in El Roque. (No, Julio’s sister, Maria, was already spoken for.) And on the day Anne arrived I invited the whole village to the house for a celebration. I had no idea what a Pandora’s box I’d opened with this innocent little gesture.

  Very casually I’d asked everyone to come over in the evening after their long workday in the banana plantation. Come anytime after six, I said. Anne and I had prepared some platters of bread and cheese and opened bottles of island wine and rum. Then at 6:30 P.M. precisely, there was a knock on the door. It was Julio (he’d long since appointed himself as my social secretary and general factotum).

  “Please. Come. We are all welcoming your Mrs. David.”

  Anne and I walked out on the platform at the top of our steps and looked down. Faces! Scores of laughing, smiling Canary faces staring up at us, clapping, singing. And everyone was carrying something—we could see cakes, pans of broiled fish, a bucket of live crabs, banana branches, straw baskets of tomatoes, bottles of wine, more cakes…

  “Everyone who comes to the house must bring present,” Julio told us. “It is our custom.” I have no idea how we got the whole village of El Roque into our tiny house, but we did. The kitchen, the living room, even the roof was jammed with villagers—many of them we’d never met. Anne and I were buoyed like froth ahead of the surge onto the roof, and we never made it back to the kitchen to serve the simple dishes we’d prepared. At one point Julio went to check for us.

  “They’ve gone. They’ve eaten them. I’ve told them to bring the cakes for you to cut.”

  One by one, six brightly iced cakes made the journey over the heads of guests from kitchen to rooftop where we ceremoniously sliced them and sent them back downstairs for instant consumption. Then someone carried up the timpales and the guitar and off we went into a spree of folk songs that set the whole house bouncing long into the night….

  What had been intended as a one-time “Welcome to Anne” occasion became a regular weekly event for the rest of our stay. Every Thursday evening there’d be a “folk-fest” gathering at the house, which would leave our voices hoarse and our kitchen table bowed with food. The problem was actually getting rid of all the fish, sausages, tomatoes, bananas, cakes, and wine before the next session on the following Thursday. The most difficult items were the bananas. They’d bring whole branches with as many as 150 firm green bananas hanging from them. We tried every way we could think of to use them—banana bread, banana cake, banana crêpes, banana omelet, banana purée, banana souffle, fried bananas, banana with garlic (interesting experiment there), and even fish with baked whole bananas. And we still ended up with huge surpluses, which we invariably had to heave over the roof wall into the surfing Atlantic, one hundred sheer feet below.

  We were living a virtually cash-free life. We insisted on giving Julio’s father something for the house he’d so generously provided. He refused to take more than $20 a month, including all the electricity and even two bottles of Canary rum, which he left outside our door on the first Monday of each month.

  We were utterly happy in our village and had no real desire to go anywhere else on the island. I found great satisfaction in painting again, something I’d let slide for months, and Anne discovered a previously unknown gift for knitting enormous shawls in bright wool colors with one-inch-diameter needles!

  Every couple of weeks we’d pack a box of these new creations, leap into the camper, and drive thirty or so bumpy miles back into Las Palmas to sell our work to bored tourists with lots of money and very little to spend it on. Not that we needed the money, but it was rewarding to see people willing to pay real cash for our rooftop creations. And it somehow justified our return to the village for another two quiet weeks.

  The residents of El Roque were a hard-working bunch. Up by five o’clock every morning, the men moved off quietly to tend the banana plantations on the surrounding hillsides, while the women cleaned every part of their houses (even the outdoor steps and the cobblestones on the main path through the village) before baking, washing, cooking, buying from the peddlers and fish vendors who passed through the village every day. No soap operas or siestas here. No meeting at the mall for a brioche and a bitch. Just the solid, daily, dawn-to-dusk ritual that should have left everyone worn out, but in fact seemed to have just the opposite effect. Our village had dignity, pride, and constant pep. If there were family problems, we never saw them. If there was malicious gossip or backbiting it must have been taking place well off the main path that we walked every day. If there was infidelity or illicit romance, it was done with such craft and guile as to be unnoticeable.

  I know I’m a naïve romantic at heart and maybe I wanted my village to be a little too perfect, but, at least for the two of us, it brought a peace and a pace of creative energy that we had never experienced before and only rarely since. El Roque was a true home and we became as close to the villagers as our natures could allow. We went fishing and crab hunting with the men (the latter at night with huge torches of reeds dipped in tar that drew the crabs from the rocks like magnets). We worked in the banana plantations, we picked minimountains of tomatoes, we painted portraits of the villagers and gave them as gifts, we learned how to prepare the aromatic sauces for Canary Island fish dishes, and we even learned to love bananas in all their culinary variations!

  El Roque is still a touchstone for us both—a place we have vowed to return to one day, a place that will remain with us forever and a place, in hindsight, where we perhaps should have stayed longer…

  5. MOROCCO—THE LAST CARAVAN

  Travels with the Blue People

  I lie wrapped in blankets on the warm sand, looking up at the star-filled sky. I can’t sleep. The moon is full and throws silver-edged shadows across the desert. The camels are restless too. They know their days of lazy grazing in the hills outside Goulimine are at an end. They have been watching our long preparations—filling the goatskins with water, packing the rugs and boxes of silver jewelry and all the other trading items, sorting the sacks of flour and sugar, cleaning the saddles and harnesses. They know today is departure day. We are finally off across the Sahara with the “Blue People” nomads.

  I smile under those stars and the camels burp and fart in sympathy.

  Say Sahara slowly and it’s the hot sergi that blows for days on end across the deserts of Western Africa. Say it fast and loud and it’s the sharp, knife-blade ridges that rise from endless gravel plains. Whisper it and you’ve got the vast nothingness of wind-skimmed sand stretching fifteen hundred miles south from Morocco’s Atlas Mountains to the steamy tropics of Nigeria, Senegal, and the Ivory Coast.

  Sahara. A vast empty world as big as the United States and hardly known at all. It’s the epitome of desertness; a place everyone has dreamed of exploring with the nomads a
nd their camel caravans—to go wherever they go and see the infinities through their eyes.

  So, after years of musings and procrastinations I finally come to Marrakech, Morocco’s northern gateway to the High Atlas and the desert. I expect Saharan overtures here but instead find a lovely rose-red city of minarets, broad boulevards, and a mazelike older quarter, the medina, couched in a bowl of palm groves and orange orchards. No sign here of any “Blue People” nomads.

  Founded as a tent city way back in 1062 by Yusef ibn-Tash-tin, a ferocious leader of Saharan nomads, the city has experienced the inevitable periods of invasion, cultural demise, and dramatic renaissance, most recently following the proclamation of Moulay Hassan as king here in 1873. At that time the country was known as the Kingdom of Marrakech, and the city, with its ornate palaces and shaded gardens, was reestablished as the great cultural crossroads of this powerful nation. Today, under King Hassan II, it retains that role.

  “So where’s the desert?” I ask.

  “Far away, behind the Atlas,” I am told by the locals who point proudly at the snow-capped peak of J’bel Toubkal (12,720 feet), the highest mountain in Northern Africa. “First enjoy our city, then go to your desert.”

  I am restless, impatient for the Sahara. But then I find the Djemaa el Fna, the nation’s tribal meeting place and market, right in the middle of Marrakech. To many Moroccans the Djemaa is still the center of the world, and after two days held in its hullabaloo, I begin to understand why. It’s a tumultuous prelude to my desert journey.

  Surrounded by a scrabble of seedy hotels, arcaded teahouses, and lean-to stores piled high with Moroccan trinkets, the Djemaa is a raggedy space as big as three football fields and about as charmless. The name translates as “Place of the Dead” (the severed heads of rebels and traitors were once proudly displayed here), and for a few hours a day it feels that way. But shortly after dawn the magic comes—even as early as 5:00 A.M., life begins to leech into the space from the dozens of little alleys that feed in from the souks (markets) and medina. The eerie cry of the muezzin echoes from the minaret of the Koutoubia mosque, which rises over the Djemaa like Allah’s warning finger.