The Boy Indigo
There it lies, the land of the Sahara with its layers of scurf in yellow, light pink, blood-red; its settlements penned in, surrounded by some kind of nature which could at any moment dispatch dangers out of sparse woodlands, low-lying mountains or arid plains, while the Niger flows broad and dour, populated in one of its luxuriously wide basins by little islands with postage-stamp fields on them. Then come the marshes, and after them the broad flat expanses containing nothing, and then the hut of a recluse – but what has he withdrawn from, and to where? Has he gone into quarantine, say? Then you encounter small oases with clay buildings made from adobe-bricks grouped around a yellow pool. Yes, that’s how it keeps growing stronger, this overwhelming superiority of landscape, which isn’t exactly beautiful, but rather comes across like weatherbeaten skin, like a person’s well lived-in face.
You won’t find any modern physiognomy hereabouts. People here have the facial features of ancient prophets or idols, with their light grey eyes surrounded by a watery corona, and even the river isn’t blue or green, but rather flows in a greenish- yellow stream between banks that look like chapped and calloused skin. The fields are dusty, and the huts the colour of dust, while the ground appears scuffed and eroded because here the elements – the sun, the heavily pattering tropical rain, the heat, the desert wind and the sandstorms that arise in the summer months – degrade everything. Sometimes the water in the pools stagnates, and sometimes it’s evaporated by the sun so that only caked, baked mudflats remain.
The life cycle here is a swift affair; an abrupt blossoming, a speedy wilting sweep over the depressions of the desert floor: everything is in a state of meander – the ridges of the sand dunes, the overflow channels by the river, the margins of the fields, the bright sandbanks and the roads, all on a colour scale that has dirt as its basic shade.
Time and again, the Niger, a delta comprising countless rivulets, individual watercourses, streams, channels and outlet bays, becomes a line of demarcation between wetlands and the red desert. And then its influence suddenly wanes again, and it carries the green of its banks just a few metres inland at best. Places like desert cemeteries line its route. They appear like an irritation of the proper order of things, a wrinkle, or like fossil imprints in the sand. The airport at Timbuktu is guarded by five soldiers holding their guns at the ready. We’re meant to crouch down and make a dash, flanked on both sides by the military, for the terminal building.
Timbuktu is surrounded by a ring of woes, a ring of heat, of deprivation, of thirst, and of war, and if all that weren’t enough, there are also signs that the city’s dying from within, degenerating, wasting away. Its symptoms are in evidence everywhere: all-but-extinct nomadic peoples encamped in their rags in the shade of adobe-brick walls, lines of peasant women at poor markets, each of them offering for sale three fruits, three tubers and a small bundle of vegetables. On the fringes of the markets are scavengers, and ill and mentally disturbed people roaming free, and the war wounded hobbling about on homemade crutches or wheeling themselves along on little trollies.
But here, in this legendary location, in the midst of all this desolation, indigo is traded. It’s as if this blue is the colour of this city’s lifeblood, and even its inhabitants seem blue-skinned. Why don’t they get away from this place? Elsewhere they’d find water, healthcare, support, security. But to get there means crossing the desert, running the gauntlet of heat, massacres and ambush – in effect, making your way through an inferno with yourself as the live quarry.
Dog-tired, we stumble into a hotel room flooded with the grubby light of dawn. We’re too exhausted even to think straight. Just dumb observers, we take in the whitewashed walls, the rugs and the room decoration. On the wall there’s a picture of a bamboo hut, with a couple of half-naked natives squatting in front of it like in one of those casually racist old travel documentaries. It’s an instant snapshot, whose subjects weren’t seeking to attract the world’s attention. Look, the image seems to proclaim, here are a few Blacks we’ve caught on film. Apart from this, there’s no other decoration in the room.
Timbuktu, this city in the Southern Sahara that’s steeped in myth and which lies at the point where the Niger Delta and the Sahara meet, was once a politically important centre of learning, inhabited by scholars. Founded in the twelfth century, the town, as the seat of Qur’anic scholars and philosophers, played a key role in spreading Islam across Africa. It was also a vital trading post, with the continent’s gold being ferried here across the Niger, as well as a transport hub. Even nowadays, the caravan routes still fan out from here to the oases in the North; latterly they have been joined by the routes taken by migrants fleeing their homelands and heading for Europe.
Anna shucks off her blue and red African batik-pattern dress and, wearing just her pants, flakes out on the hard bed, which is covered with a stiff, coarse-weave throw. Her entire body – her stomach, legs, shoulders, and arms – is glistening with beads of sweat. She doesn’t move a muscle and yet still her skin keeps on perspiring frantically.
I take a look inside the bedside table, which has been occupied by a colony of ants, before stepping out onto the balcony and gazing down at the lazy pool. Two figures are moving around in it, a woman in a black bathing suit and a little girl who’s holding the woman’s hand as she wades through the murky water. Then the mother starts swimming on her back, watching her own splashing feet as she moves along. Her thrashing, trampling and trembling motions look like nothing so much as some kind of clumsy yet erotic choreography. Idly, I imagine a man grasping hold of her and making love to her. Meanwhile, Anna’s dozed off; in temperatures like this, sex seems a far-off prospect.
Timbuktu is sand, sand first and foremost, everything sinks into the sand, is made of sand, or takes on the colour of sand, and even its smell. The sand reflects back the sun’s heat, and the sand reclaims the city like it’s destined to return to sand. The only object that’s clearly exempted from this general decay is the bronze plaque on the façade of a building reading: ‘Former home of the African explorer Heinrich Barth. German president Heinrich Lübke visited this house in 1956.’
This will endure.
Deep in contemplation, holy men wander through the streets with the muthala root clenched between their teeth, the chewing stick which, with its natural antibacterial plant extracts, still plays a major role in dental hygiene in Africa. In a rear courtyard we watch men breaking rocks. The dust this produces is mixed into food for pregnant women as a nutritional supplement. Pissing men stand, their legs akimbo, on the riverbank or the hillsides. On griddles, bananas are transformed into something that tastes like chestnuts. The town’s cinema is nothing but a chilly garage with a few loose wooden benches and a U-matic projector. When a crudely animated trick snake appears on the screen, a woman in front of me leaps up screaming and jumps back two rows.
The bald, gold-chained, short-trousered, gay French hotelier is standing with his arms folded across his chest and is berating his simple-minded bellboy, a lad with a dull-witted, prematurely aged face. The owner is telling the boy to make sure the shutters on the hotel’s windows are closed before ten in the morning, to shut out the heat, and to get a new mosquito net and hang it without delay. The lad just stands there defiantly; the boss is getting nowhere with his orders. The next thing the bellboy’s supposed to do is to go and get some provisions in. The owner stands there, pleading and wheedling with his employee in a high-pitched whine like a woman mourner, but the boy just stares at him with undisguised contempt. Realizing that he can’t penetrate through to the boy’s consciousness, the boss suddenly grabs him by the collar, forcing him to make a slight bow. The lad looks up at him angrily, and makes out like the owner’s hurting him, squealing like a rat in a pile of garbage. Finally, the owner offers him his bicycle to go and run the errand, telling him ‘it’s better than the minister’s!’ The bellboy just scoffs at this. Their argument tails off.
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 heart 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 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.