Desert Divers (3 page)

‘Is it true that the tribes shot at the French planes?’

‘Of course.’ He smiles inwardly as though lost in happy memories.

‘Why?’

This causes a certain confusion. Naturally they shot, but why?

Gradually the intellectual explanation appears: we were defending ourselves against colonialism. Then comes the current opportune explanation: we were acting on the orders of the Sultan of Morocco. Anyhow, they lived off taking prisoners and demanding ransoms. Why then shouldn’t they shoot?

The aristocrat Saint-Ex has a tendency to ennoble everything that arouses his admiration.

He ennobles the airline pilots as a new aristocracy of the air. He ennobles their opponents, ‘the Moor’, as knights of an exotic realm of pride.

He romanticizes the bearers of a new and unknown technology and a distant unknown people – and so defends old familiar feudal values, rejected by capitalist Europe.

Saint-Ex could not have known about the invisible treasures the desert does in fact contain, for phosphates, iron ore and oil had still not been found in the Sahara. But that it was their freedom the Saharans were defending – he ought to have known that.

He had done his military service in conquered Morocco. He had travelled in conquered Algeria. He knew that freedom is not something the desert automatically provides. ‘The Moors’ on the African Atlantic coast in 1927 were in fact the last unsubjugated Saharans – a result of the outstanding weakness of the Spanish colonial powers and the Moors’ own bitter resistance.

Perhaps it was natural that Saint-Ex could not support this struggle for freedom, as it was at him and his friends the Saharans were shooting with their German Mauser rifles.

But he never even realized what the struggle was about. It all became romanticism.

White garden furniture dazzles my eyes. I recognize it from previous dreams. Why does it keep coming back? The table and chairs are not spray-lacquered, but their wide boards are painted with layer after layer of thick oil paint. They are not ‘creamy white’, for there is no tinge of yellow, but the colour has the fat puffiness of whipped cream. The light is reflected from the gleaming white surfaces with a force that makes my eyes smart and everyone squint. Which everyone? Don’t know. Their faces are empty, obliterated, wiped out like my whole childhood.

There is no one to ask. They are all dead. But from the depths of the past, this table throws out a sunspot strong enough to wake me up.

The next morning while I sit warming up outside the hotel, the garbage cart comes past, drawn by a mule. The garbage pails are emptied into the open cart, just as used to happen in Älvsjö when I was a child. On the corner they are selling yellow dates on stems, gathered in bunches like the birch sprigs and coloured feathers of Lent at home.

Today’s old man points out the exact place where the Frenchman’s house stood: right next to the fortress wall on the side facing the airfield. They used to hear music from there at night, notes from an old gramophone he wound up by hand.
For company he had four animals: cat, dog, a chimpanzee and a hyena.

In the evenings I carefully transfer this information from my tape recorder into my notebook. I think I can at last see Saint-Ex fairly clearly in front of me as he sits at his desk, surrounded by his animals.

The light flows from the lamp like oil. I see him dipping his pen into the inkwell, which I used to do when I was learning to write. The sea roars out there in the darkness, the cries of the guards on duty echoing between the walls. A light rain appears to be falling – the sound of the moist night air condensing on the metal roof. Sand crunches between the papers on the desk. Saint-Ex is writing.

When he leaves Cap Juby eighteen months later, he has with him the manuscript of his first novel,
Southern Mail
. And within him he is carrying what are the as-yet-unwritten desert stories in
The Little Prince
and
Wind, Sand and Stars
.

What fascinated me as a boy when I read those books was their belief that the airman was a new kind of man.

A person taking off from the ground also elevated himself above the trivialities of life into a new understanding, created by the particular experiences modern technology made possible.

The airman was not yet a captain in the routine trade between tax-free shops of the world’s cities. Like the astronaut now, the airman was the most modern man of his day, a representative of the future on a temporary stopover in what was soon to be the past.

Saint-Exupéry and his best friend, Henri Guillaumet, standing in front of their plane. (
Musée d’Air France
)

That gave him tremendous authority, which Saint-Ex used to ask yet again the great questions.

What is man? What are we for?

Man makes himself, he said.

We aren’t born man, we become that.

We become that through solidarity with each other.

We become that by taking responsibility.

I loved his gravity when he said such things, quite shamelessly, with the same endless trust in his reader as the airman had in the empty air. In that solemnity, he was so close to me, I could lean forward and touch him.

He taught me to demand of a writer not just excitement and adventure, but also knowledge, seriousness and presence. Presence most of all.

If the writer is not there himself in his writing, how can he demand that you should be?

‘Like a pearl-diver, I must immediately return,’ wrote Michel Vieuchange in his diary.

Michel read
Southern Mail
when it was published in 1928. He was four years younger than Saint-Ex. He had also read Nietzsche and Rimbaud, and had done his military service in Morocco, and he, too, had dreams of the desert. One September day in 1930, disguised as a woman, he disappeared into the unsubjugated tribal area some miles north of Tiznit. He was on his way to Smara.

Saint-Ex never got that far.

But every morning he did fly one of the off-duty Cap Juby planes to drive the condensation out of the cylinders – planes at that time had to be rested like horses – and sometimes he diverged from the flight path along the coast. Once he flew
right into ‘the mysterious Smara with its virginal ruins, as forbidden to the white man as Timbuctoo’.

In actual fact, Timbuctoo had been occupied by the French in 1893, and Smara was no more forbidden than that. It was destroyed by French troops in 1913. But the ruins were still defended by the Saharan tribes. Just flying over Smara was a bold, almost foolish act.

Vieuchange was now heading that way. On foot.

I go by car.

It is a peculiar day. All week the wind has blown in off the sea but now it is coming from the desert, hot as a hairdryer. The runway in Tarfaya has been shrouded in wet sea mist; today it is shrouded in the hot dry haze of pure dust.

I scrape the sand off the car just as one scrapes snow off a car in a Swedish winter, and as I drive into the white haze it is like driving into a snowstorm. Only slowly does it occur to me that because I am in the desert, this must be a sandstorm.

Twilight descends in the early morning and my field of vision shrinks so that I can see only a few metres ahead. When I stop and get out of the car, I find it difficult to keep my balance. The sand stabs like icy pins at my unprotected face. It is impossible to breathe into the wind. I hurry back into the car and drive on as fast as I dare through the mounting drifts.

The sand is not slippery, but occasionally it is treacherously loose, and sometimes as hard-packed as stone. The dust is finer than snow and penetrates the car so that the air is thick
to breathe. The smell is sharply mineral, quite unlike the euphoric fragrance of snow.

Most of all, the physical feeling is different. The body suffocates when it sweats without sweat. Moisture vanishes immediately off the skin, leaving a crackled layer of salt which encloses the body as if in a mould.

When I was small, I often fantasized about sandstorms. Before falling asleep, I surrounded myself with the whistling, biting haze. To be able to breathe, I walked backwards, into the wind. My watch filled with sand and stopped. I drank the last drops from my crumpled water-holder and knew I had to die.

In these sandstorm dreams, there was always a mirror-like lake of clear fresh water which saved my life just before I slipped into sleep.

To believe in water in the desert is not as crazy as it seems. Sometimes it actually rains. At this moment my childish dreams come true, the dreams of desert pools glimmering in hollows and a green veil thrown over the sand. I drive through a green desert gleaming with moisture – although the whole of the Sahara is heading towards me and I am almost suffocated.

No traffic comes towards me. At a turn-off to Boucraa, I am stopped by a military column: open vehicles, dark snow-goggles, on full alert. The Polisario, the Saharan liberation movement, usually strike in the shelter of a sandstorm.

I turn back and spend the night in El Aaiun. Two tank battles are fought that night, one near Boucraa, between Moroccan troops and the still-unconquered Saharans.

Vieuchange tried to get to Smara disguised as a woman. His posthumous journal shows him preoccupied with the actual disguise and the conditions his female rôle forces him into.

He shaves his legs. He learns not to show his hands. He always lies curled up like a dog, never on his back – only a Jewess lies on her back. He sits with his knees wide apart, never close together. When he rides, he keeps his heels lower than his toes.

Michel Vieuchange, dressed as a Berber woman.

In daytime, he is bathed in sweat inside the blue garment which envelops him like a tent. He longs in vain to feel the wind
on his face, to be able to move freely. He wants to know where he is. He wants to see the great expanses of desert. He wants to see the men coming and going. But all he sees is the ground.

Few accounts of the Sahara deal so much with the actual ground in the desert, the small broken stones, the gravel, the stony riverbeds, the dark tormented soil. That is all he sees.

He doesn’t see the sunrise, only a golden wave of light sweeping over the ground, leaving behind it small lakes of night in the hollows.

In the towns, he sees nothing but the room in which he is imprisoned like a criminal: the rough walls that crumble at his touch, the low sooty ceiling and the light let in by deep holes so narrow he can’t see out.

In the heat, he pours water over his veiled head so the evaporation will provide him with a little cool. The meat hanging from the ceiling is invisible beneath its carpet of flies. He doesn’t eat any of it. He hardly eats anything at all, but lives off sweet mint tea.

On cold damp nights, the women press their bodies against his to seek warmth – or perhaps with other intentions which simply fill him with distaste. Frozen and soaked through, he waits for the golden wave of sunrise finally to sweep over the ground, this ground which is all he sees.

I am living in a stable together with a naked gnarled old woman with long breasts hanging down below her waist. She is kind to me. It’s only her horse that’s pigheaded.

She has the horse up in a hayloft with the railing missing. Nothing but its own instinct for self-preservation keeps the horse from falling down.

When I come up to the hayloft, the horse eagerly starts nuzzling my hand and pockets for the sugar it is used to being given. I try to get down again, but the horse bars my way as it nuzzles through my clothes and my body more and more intimately and insistently. Not until the woman comes up and gives the horse some lumps of sugar can I leave.

It strikes me when I see her breasts that perhaps she is my mother and that it is my own greed, greater than the horse’s, that has made them so long.

The sky is clear again the next morning. The sand-sweeper is already busy sweeping away the drifts. Every tuft has a small train of sand pointing away from the wind.

A few miles outside El Aaiun, a gang of Saudi falconers have their caravan camp. They hunt for partridges over great distances with the aid of sophisticated radar equipment, pursuing them in four-wheel-drive vehicles, then, taking the hood off the specially trained falcons, for a few exhilarating moments experience their own power as the falcon cruises above its prey, strikes, kills and brings back the meat.

‘The price per kilo will have been considerable,’ say my Saharan hitchhikers dryly.

They are elegant young men with knife-edge creases in their trousers and smart briefcases. At their destination some miles
further on, I go with them to two tents by the roadside. The tents smell of milk. Some women live an outfield life there with their goats.

They splash us with lavender water from a litre bottle and call out to the retired soldier in the tent next to them. My hitchhikers and the old man begin the usual ping-pong game of courtesies and mutual exchanges of information. The smart town lads are transformed into scions of herdsmen, and with surprising expertise they carry out the traditional tea ceremony.

‘If you were staying any longer, I would have slit the throat of a goat for you,’ says the old man.

He is lying on a plaited mat, kneading a large cushion on his stomach. The air is fresh and pleasant under the sky-blue tent, the roof shutting off the sun but giving free rein to the wind. The charcoal glowing in the chafing dish ticks metallically and there is a strong smell of mint and goat’s milk.

After the obligatory three cups, I drive on towards Smara through vast flat countryside, punctuated by odd tussocks and groups of heroic tamarisks.

Right out in the dryness, I again meet a large cloud of grasshoppers coming from the south-east, not so much flying as being blown my way by the desert wind, bowling along the ground like a gigantic wavering wheel of insects, some young and pink-winged, but most mature, well-filled, golden-winged creatures which strike the car with a crashing sound and are crushed.

The Hotel Goldsand, the best in Smara, has been requisitioned by the governor. At the Hotel Erraha across the street, I am given the only room with a window. Two beds, and a hook in the wall. A handbasin outside the privy at the end of the corridor. A pound a night.

I go to bathe after the dusty journey. On my way I see a notice:
Club Saquia el Hamra Musculation
. Bodybuilding in the Sahara! Suddenly I feel my muscles aching with a longing for exertion.

The premises have just opened for the day and are still empty. I hang my clothes on the wall and start warming up.

As I lie in the leg-press, an intellectual Moroccan wearing glasses comes and shows me how I can get greater play by pulling out a peg. He is a bookkeeper in the civilian administration and has been here for three years, his family in Casa, as they call Casablanca. Goes home to see them every third month.

We train together and alternate three times fifteen with light weights. There is – he says, in the winter as well, but most of all in the summer when Smara is turned into a reeking hell – there is a yawning chasm between official rhetoric and the reality of war-weariness and longing for home. The Sahara has been designated ‘their’ country, but it certainly is not their climate or their landscape when they come from northern Morocco …

After the long gap in my training, it is wonderful to feel my muscles working again, at first reluctantly, then more and more delighted at being needed. The ego-experience climbs down from my head and out into my limbs. Bit by bit my body comes back and becomes my own again.

After training, we go on to the bath-house. In the innermost of the steaming rooms, we mix hot water from one tap with cold water from another into our black rubber buckets and spend the rest of the afternoon scooping, soaping and
scrubbing our newly found bodies while listening to the splash of water against tiles and the murmur of voices under the vaulted ceiling.

There is no wind in there. The light doesn’t hurt your eyes. Your nails don’t split. You don’t get sand in your mouth. The air is not prickly dry in your nose. On the contrary, it is thick with steaming moisture and feels soft and smooth in the hollows of your body. Good water flows. In the desert, that is paradise.

The human body has six hundred muscles. You use most of them automatically without experiencing them. The best part of training is finding new muscles which have never been conscious before.

How many muscles has a human life? You’re sure to use most of them automatically, without experiencing them. Particularly in long-term relationships, developing a routine is labour saving, and thus enervating. The best part of suddenly encountering solitude is that it provides training: you discover your life when you have to start using its long-since forgotten and atrophied muscles.

I am living on a hillside, the road meandering past. I wake early and go out for a newspaper.

The news on the front page is criss-crossed with thick black lines which make them invalid and partly illegible. There is only one legible and valid item of news. That is printed in microscopic typescript and says that the country has been invaded by a foreign power. The foreign troops can be expected at any moment to pass along this particular road.

Then I suddenly remember that I had a goat as well as a dog when I left. But the dog is too faithful and the goat too rebellious and unmanageable. So I have tied them up in the forest. I was thinking of fetching them later, but forgot them. Are they still alive? Has anyone found them? Have they died of starvation? I must find out before the foreigners get here. But how shall I get there? My wife is already messing about in the garden. The children will soon wake up. So far, I am the only one who knows about the invasion, about the goat, about the dog – and what shall I do?

I go and ask my father. He has put a piece of white paper in front of him on his desk. He takes out his pocket-knife with its mother-of-pearl inlays, slots a nail into the groove and opens the knife. It is the small sharp blade he opens out. Without a word he starts slowly and carefully cutting away the white on his nails.

He isn’t cutting his nails. He is trimming them. He prunes them, just as you prune a tree or a bush in the garden. He cuts off just that part of the nail which helped him open the knife.

I say nothing. Father is also silent. With a scraping sound, the slice of nail falls onto the white paper.