A Widow's Awakening

  I take a sip of tea. “What about it?”

  “Do you know what it is?”

  I sigh. “I can’t remember at the moment.”

  He leans back, folding his arms across his chest. “According to Sartre, it means that existence takes priority over essence.”

  “OK.”

  He unfolds his arms again. “Do you believe that?”

  I wipe my forehead with the sleeve of my jelabah. “Do I believe what, sorry?”

  “That a person’s existence is more important than their essence, their fundamental nature…if there is such a thing?”

  “I believe,” I reply, after much mental strain, “that the essence of a person is of equal importance to their actual existence.”

  “Ah hah!” the philosopher cries, clapping his hands. “There is a brain in there.”

  “I’ve been through a lot lately,” I say snottily.

  “You think a person actually has a nature…an essence?”

  I nod. “Absolutely.”

  I take a drink from my water bottle then pour water over my blue sarong, which I’ve taken to draping over my head and neck. Then I stick my straw hat back on top. In case Morocco isn’t dazzled by my men’s jelabah, this ensemble ought to do the trick. The Muslim watches all this with amusement.

  “And does that essence exist before the person is born,” he asks, “or is the person responsible for creating it himself?”

  I wrack my brain for an answer but come up blank. “I dunno.”

  “Well,” he says, clearly disappointed the Canadian delivered to his dusty town is not a particularly bright one, “I think we’re responsible for creating our own selves.”

  Then he asks me if I’ve ever walked through an oasis. I shake my head, hoping the experience involves water. The four of us leave the café and walk the ten minutes into the oasis on the edge of town. I can’t help but notice that walking along, talking (or trying to) philosophy with these men in white robes, feels as if we’ve been transported back to biblical times…or ancient Greece.

  “It doesn’t rain much here, does it?” I ask my Muslim.

  He shakes his head. “The Sahara hasn’t had rain in four and a half years.”

  I sigh, seriously starting to wilt. Then I dip my sarong in the running water and drape it over my head again.

  “That won’t cool your core body temperature,” says the philosopher. “You’re actually bringing heat to the surface.”

  “But the water feels cool on my skin.”

  “That is only temporary.”

  I shrug. “Then I’ll pour more water on.”

  “There might not always be water to waste.”

  I turn to him. “I’m usually pretty good about not wasting water.”

  In fact, my concern over water conservation used to drive Sam crazy. Last summer we’d been on a neighbourhood walk and had come across a sprinkler watering more of the sidewalk than the lawn, so I’d walked across the grass to the tap at the side of the house.

  “What are you doing?” Sam had hollered after me.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “Trespassing! Use your head—there are better ways to get your point across.”

  Funny the things we’d fought over.

  “I guess if you didn’t care about anything but yourself,” says the philosopher, “you probably wouldn’t be traveling through Morocco, let alone Boumaine.”

  Though grateful for this stranger’s faith in my ability to look beyond my own self, the truth is that although I’ve thought about bigger issues since Sam’s death, my lack of action reflects the utter self-absorption that grief tends to demand.

  “Perhaps you are not part of the bewildered herd after all,” he says.

  I stop walking. “Huh?”

  “From Chomsky’s book, What Uncle Sam Really Wants…”

  Another long-lost piece of knowledge clicks into place. “Right.”

  “Although,” he says with a sigh, “I do think you live in Plato City.”

  I frown. “How so?”

  “You live in the world of ideas, not reality. You are very idealistic.”

  This is true. I am living inside my ideas, dreams, hopes, and fantasies because that’s a hell of a happier place to reside than Widowville.

  “But at some point,” he says, “you will be forced to return to reality.”

  I nod, weary. “When I’m ready.”

  “Sometimes the distance between ideas and reality is not so far.”

  I turn to him. “I think it’s as far as we want it to be.”

  The philosopher looks as surprised at my comment as I am at making it.

  BACK IN Tinerhir, Tamara and I buy corn on the cob and watermelon at the market and eat it in our hotel room. Then we lie on our beds, staring up at the mosaic tile ceiling.

  “I think I had a chat with Sam today,” I say. “The twenty-five-year-old version.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “He’s frustrated with me. I think he’s trying to…wake me up. Again.”

  She sits up. “To what?”

  “I’m not quite sure.”

  “What the heck did you two talk about?”

  “Noam Chomsky…globalism, existentialism…idealism,” I say. “Oh, and water conservation.”

  “In English?” she clarifies.

  “Uh huh.”

  “Wow,” she says and lies back down. “Well, I finally figured something out.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I need to find an antelope with a sense of wonder…a guy who cares that a world exists beyond his own backyard.”

  I sit up. “An antelope?”

  “Yeah. If we’re gazelles then guys are antelopes,” she says, as if this were the logical next step in renaming gender.

  “What the heck did you two talk about today?” I ask.

  She smiles. “Love.”

  I nod and lie back down. “Well, ya know what I want?”

  “What?”

  “To be a pink gazelle again. I want to be the apple of my antelope’s eye…that’s what I was to Sam and now I won’t settle for anything less.”

  “I’ve never been a pink gazelle,” Tamara says softly.

  “You will.”

  “I’m almost forty, Adri.”

  “Your blue antelope just hasn’t appeared yet.”

  We’re both quiet for awhile, thinking our own thoughts, until I leap up. “I see a watering hole!”

  “Huh?”

  “A watering hole,” I say. “On one side, there’s a row of white gazelles and on the other, a row of white antelopes. But there’s one antelope that sticks out because he’s blue—but he only appears that way to you, whereas to everyone else he’ll be white. Same with you: your blue antelope will see you as a pink gazelle, but all the other antelopes will see you as white.”

  “Gazelle,” she says, solemn, “I think we’re on to something here.”

  “Yeah—it’s called the pink gazelle/blue antelope theory!”

  A knock at the door interrupts our laughter. It’s the desk clerk, telling us we have a visitor. That’s odd. All three of us traipse downstairs to see our guide from the day before waiting in the lobby. He hands me a piece of paper.

  “This is the name of the guide,” he says, “who will take you into the Sahara tomorrow. He’s expecting you.”

  WE CATCH the morning bus to Erfoud, the city nearest the Sahara. On the outskirts of Erfoud, the bus stops and a man wearing a khaki vest gets on. He quickly scans the passengers and upon spotting our faces, breaks into a brown-toothed grin. Waving a piece of paper in my face, he says something in French that I don’t understand.

  I shrug. “Non merci.”

  Tamara takes the paper and reads aloud our names. She asks him a few questions in French as I smile and wave at the staring passengers.

  “Apparently,” she says to me, “this is our Sahara guide.

  I frown. “Just plucking us off the bus in the middle
of nowhere?”

  “He’s expecting us, remember?”

  WE CLIMB off the bus and into a waiting Land Rover. Introductions are made, the price for a three-day camel trek negotiated and agreed upon, and then off we go in the non-air-conditioned vehicle. An hour later, we pull up in front of a concrete compound. Tamara and I exchange glances. Our guide walks us to the building, where he stops briefly to kick awake a man sleeping on a mat, then leads us to the dining room.

  “He said we can rest here for a while,” Tamara translates to me, “because we won’t be going into the desert until later.”

  My eyes widen. “It’s not even noon and it’s already stifling in here.”

  She relays this to the guide.

  He smiles at me with enormous teeth. “Come with me.”

  We follow him out of the dining room, past a swimming pool with no water in it, and into a room with no fan or air-con; just a small window through which the scorching wind blows straight off the desert.

  “I’m going to shower to cool down,” I tell Tamara once the guide has left.

  But the shower only runs hot water and when I glance up, bright green algae drips from the showerhead. I return, soaking wet, to our room and lie on the bed, which is where I remain for the next six hours. At one point, I ask Tamara how hot it is.

  “You don’t want to know,” is her reply.

  “Try me.”

  “I overheard them talking in the dining room…”

  “And?”

  “It’s fifty degrees Celsius.”

  I’d cry but I can’t afford to lose the water.

  Tamara sits on the end of my bed. “Why are we here, Adri?”

  “Because Sam loves the heat.”

  “Sam’s dead,” she says. “He can’t feel the heat—but you can.”

  Around dinnertime, we’re relocated to the roof and soon hear the rumbling of a convoy of vehicles. I watch in amazement as half a dozen air-conditioned Land Rovers pull up beside the compound and tourists wearing khaki shorts and crisp white shirts climb out—and onto our waiting camels. We run downstairs and protest to our guide.

  “He said they’re going into the desert to watch the sunset,” Tamara says to me.

  “What the hell does he think we’ve sat around all day waiting for?” I snap.

  Thus we, too, are boarded onto camels to accompany the cheating tourists—the smart ones who brought guidebooks—into the Sahara.

  Back at the compound, Tamara whispers in my ear, “The guy leading my camel asked if we’d like two guides in the desert tonight.”

  I frown, puzzled. “Why would we need two?”

  She folds her arms across her chest.

  “Uh oh,” I say.

  We watch the Land Rovers convoy back to Erfoud, where the occupants will be staying in air-conditioned hotels with pools filled with water. There is, however, one tourist—a guy in his fifties—left behind. He greets us cheerfully with an English accent. I ask him why he didn’t go back with the others.

  “Oh,” he says, “I’ve driven my own vehicle here, all the way from England.”

  I can’t help but laugh. “Why?”

  “A friend of mine knows the owner of this place but unfortunately he’s not here.”

  Ah, the boss is away—that explains why we’re being treated more like captives than customers.

  The Englishman then asks what we are doing out here, all on our own—which is, admittedly, a very good question.

  “We just kinda ended up here,” I say sheepishly. “And we’re going on a three-day camel trek.”

  It’s his turn to laugh. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Yup,” says Tamara.

  “You’re going out into the Sahara Desert,” he clarifies, “for three days in June?”

  “It sounded like a good idea back home,” I say.

  Tamara asks him if he’d like to join us.

  He smiles politely. “Well, as intriguing as that sounds…”

  Perhaps he notices the fear on our faces because he finishes his sentence with, “Oh, why not?”

  Our guide does not appear at all pleased with this last-minute change of plans. After a dinner of shish kebabs wrapped in sheep stomach lining, the four of us head out into the desert beneath the most magnificent night sky I’ve ever seen. For three hours, our camels plod up and down dunes until we come to a Berber tent. The guide asks if we’d like to sleep beneath the stars. We all nod then watch as he places a large carpet on the sand, then arranges bedding. I sit at one end of the carpet, the Englishman sits beside me, and Tamara beside him. The guide sits by my feet and leans back against my legs.

  Shit.

  When the guide goes into the tent a few minutes later, I hiss at the Englishman. “Quick! Trade places.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s putting the moves on me.”

  We swap spots but when the guide comes back out and sees the Englishman in my place, he promptly sits beside me in my new location.

  “I am responsible,” he whispers.

  “Je suis uncomfortable,” I reply.

  He leans back on one elbow and stares at me. I suspect I’m a lovely shade of pink.

  Tamara breaks the silence. “Check out those stars.”

  “Did you know that what we see as a star,” says the Englishman, “is actually just light traveling toward us?”

  “Yeah. And some of those stars don’t even exist anymore,” adds Tamara. “They burnt out millions of years ago so it’s just their light reaching us now.”

  The Englishman nods. “But regardless of whether the stars themselves are dead or alive, we are looking at the past.”

  I am still pondering this when the guide finally gets up and goes into the tent to sleep. Relieved, I stare up at the sky and find Orion’s Belt. The three stars all in a row remind me of the three moles on Sam’s forearm. What if my one and only blue antelope had been Sam? Will I spend the rest of my life staring at the past…living with the memory of a man who himself no longer exists?

  Or does he still exist?

  A bright light streaks across the sky. “A shooting star!” I cry.

  Tamara laughs. “That’s just Sam saying hello.”

  IN THE morning, we get back on our camels and head further into the desert. By 9:00 a.m., the heat is excruciating. Watching the wind-rippled lines in the sand as our camels slowly bump along is mesmerizing and when I do lift my head, all I see is red dunes, the occasional clump of grass and bright blue sky. Around 11:00 a.m., we stop at a cluster of palm trees—the only shelter we’ve seen since breakfast—and we climb off our camels.

  “Soon,” says our guide, “too hot to move.”

  He’s not kidding. For the next seven hours, we all fade in and out of consciousness. It’s technically an oasis but since there hasn’t been rain in nearly five years, it’s a waterless one. Our only form of movement is to inch around the palm trees, following the scraps of shade as the sun passes overhead.

  Around hour three, Tamara asks me what I’m thinking.

  I’ve just poured a small amount of water onto my sarong and am draping it over my body for the two minutes of comfort. “That there must be a reason,” I say, “why the four of us are napping in the middle of the Sahara Desert at an oasis with no water in it.”

  “And what do you think it is?”

  “I haven’t got that far yet,” I reply groggily.

  “Do let me know when you figure it out.”

  “Me too,” mumbles the Englishman as the guide snores on.

  Since we have limited water and my coping mechanisms clearly aren’t working, I finally try the Boumaine philosopher’s suggestion to not cool my skin with water.

  “Gazelle?” I say, an agonizing hour later.

  Tamara slowly turns her head. “Uh?”

  “I think water is connected to the soul.”

  “Of course it is,” she says. “We are 70 percent water.”

  “So is the earth,” adds the sleepy Englis
hman.

  I look over at the poor guy sprawled out on his back, starfish-style.

  “Are ya glad you came along?” I ask.

  He winks, gives me a very slow thumbs-up then closes his eyes. “I think I once read somewhere that water symbolizes consciousness.”

  Then we all doze off again.

  BY HOUR seven, I’m actually getting used to the heat. Around 6:00 p.m., we board our camels and the guide leads us back to the Berber tent. He prepares beef tagine for dinner while we visit a nomadic Berber woman and her children living a couple of dunes over. That we’ve been away from any form of refrigeration for more than twenty-four hours does not bode well with the reality that we’re eating beef for dinner. I spend much of the night squatting in the sand. By morning, my stomach is a gurgling balloon.

  “Tu es très malade,” the guide says, taking my hand and rubbing the skin between my thumb and index finger.

  I nod forlornly, disgusted by his touch yet also partially comforted.

  “When we get back,” he whispers, “I’ll give you a special Berber massage.”

  Over the dunes I go…a gazelle headed for slaughter and too weak to care.

  At the compound, the Englishman returns to his room and Tamara leaves ours to wash her feet. This means I’m alone when the guide arrives. I am a lone gazelle, wounded and away from the herd…perfect prey for a predator. It’s a special massage all right—more conducive to increasing the Berber population than healing a stomach ailment. When the guide’s hand brushes my bra, I realize he’s expecting participation from me. When his fingers touch my panties, I suspect dehydration will soon be the least of my worries. Yet I don’t say anything because being intimately touched by a man again—even one that repulses and frightens me—seems better than no touch at all.

  Besides, this is a medicinal massage. I close my eyes and hear him panting.

  “Just one kiss?” His hand slips inside my bra.

  Shaking my head, I swat his paw away. And besides, Sam wouldn’t let this man hurt me. But the hand comes back and begins moving slowly down my stomach.

  My eyes fly open. “No,” I hear myself say and watch as my finger points to the door. “Get the fuck out.”