From the moment I boarded the bus that drove us to Prague—where we would board our plane—I regretted that absurd, horrible trip to the Sahara. As if someone had warned me of it—like a bad omen tirelessly circling the heart—just before boarding the bus I understood that I shouldn’t do so and, at the same time, that it was already too late to turn back. Could I refuse to fly once I was in Prague? I asked myself. Would it still be possible to back out of the expedition? “You must go back,” said a voice within. “Go back home,” it insisted. But I didn’t want to hear that voice, and I wanted even less to bow to such vehement orders.
Except for one, all of the members of that ridiculous expedition were known to me: Professor Pecha was among them; also Plicková and Petruchová, Otla and Jan. A few seats behind me, the unforgettable paná Benetková evaded my gaze and avoided my company during the entire journey. Unexpectedly, none of the Friends considered the fact that this was my first trip to the African continent to be especially important. No one paid me any special attention and I was nothing more than just another one of them. The only courtesy they gave me was, soon after arriving at the airport, to introduce me to the new person: he was Austrian, the last of those officially admitted to the organization. He spoke Czech with small errors, as much in grammar as pronunciation, and he had been a Friend of the Desert for just a few months.
“Do you also belong to the Friends?” he asked me when we were alone.
His name was Stubemann. Everyone called him by his last name.
“Mr. Stubemann,” I answered, “if you want me to be sincere with you, I do not know.”
He broke out laughing. For some reason, my answer struck him as very funny. And I had to get used to it, since many of my statements, as brief and neutral as they were, caused great hilarity among my travel companions.
“It’s your first expedition with us, if I’m not mistaken. Right?” said Stubemann, between laughs.
Stubemann, who sat beside me on the plane, had square-framed glasses. He was an optician and he assured me that, if I wished it, he could make me a new pair of glasses for free once we returned. He had such a shrill voice that, if one didn’t see that it was him talking, his timbre could have been confused with a woman’s. At every moment he was polite and cordial with me. For the ease with which he spoke with each of them, you would never guess he was the last of the members to join; who knows why, I felt that his presence threatened me and that, if he was present, nothing would be the same for me in the organization any longer.
Stubemann laughed again, and heartily, when he saw my luggage at the check-in counter. Despite my suitcase not being at all special, I couldn’t help but notice that it was bulkier than my companions’. Of course, it was just an eight-day expedition, but it seemed obvious that any other more conventional group of tourists would have taken larger, heavier baggage to Morocco.
I pretended to be asleep so that Stubemann would stop pestering me, and it was then that I noticed the disconcerting silence that prevailed among the Friends. In reality, it isn’t that the passengers did not talk amongst themselves (I myself had done the same with Stubemann), but I think I can say that all of us conversed in a much lower voice than normal. Moreover, the tone of the conversations wasn’t the type that tends to characterize those undertaking an adventure—full of joy and ease—but rather that of someone returning from that adventure, tired by the many emotions and the lack of sleep. I took advantage of that respite to go over again all that I had lived through over the last weeks: the knowledge of the organization by means of the back cover of a book; my first visit to Brno with Otla’s meeting me at the train station; the departure from that same station the next morning; Plicková’s mischievous laughter at the foot of my bed; the repeated and frustrating correspondence with her husband and, later, with the professor himself. I couldn’t deny that everything was quite strange. But what awaited me on that trip to the Sahara—and most of all afterwards—was going to be even more astonishing than my participation in the two meetings at Hoggar, than Petruchová’s hand on my back (whose simple recollection turned me on) or, even, than the threatening warning given me by paná Benetková, who evaded me during that entire trip.
I spent my first night in Africa overwhelmed by an immense and incomprehensible nostalgia for my country. “It was so nice in Kroměříž!” I told myself every few moments or, to be more exact, said a voice inside me, the same one that had advised me against boarding the bus that would take me to Prague. “Who made me join this trip?” I lamented in secret.
As soon as I entered my room at the hotel, I hurled myself onto my bed in the midst of a strange nausea. I was slow to fall asleep, imprisoned by a searing thirst that wasn’t soothed when I drank. On the bed in that dingy room, I was like a shipwreck: covered or uncovered, with the sheets spread over me or balled up and crumpled at my feet. The folds of the sheets made me think, inevitably, of the desert that I would see a few hours later. So that night I made my first tormented trip to the desert by means of a simple sheet. Because of the movement of my feet—voluntarily or not—the sheet changed shapes, and with this change the contours of that white desert shifted too, inciting me to keep on tossing and turning until I found a gentler or more calming landscape among the folds. I woke up with my limbs frozen and, once I was fully awake, I stared apprehensively at the sheet. Would those white deserts visit me on every night of my expedition? Would I be able to fall asleep even once during my stay in Morocco? Would new mountains or valleys always appear and disappear with the simple but dangerous movement of my legs?
During the second meeting at Hoggar, an old Arab proverb had been mentioned that promised that the true taste of water can only be known in Morocco. Well, the thirst I suffered my first night in the desert country could not be sated by water. In an informal conversation during the meeting, they had assured me that one discovers the true value of ordinary things in the desert, especially water. At the Hotel Tetuán, in Tangiers, I suffered from a thirst that I wouldn’t hesitate to characterize as erroneous. Or perhaps it was something similar to thirst—with the same physiological symptoms—but which wasn’t exactly what we Westerners mean when we use that term. I have read that the Tuareg say that God made some lands with water so that man could be sated, and that he also created lands without water so that man could experience thirst. In Tuareg wisdom it is said that, in the same way, God created the desert so that man could find himself. Clearly, I was then very far from that discovery.
The Moroccan Sahara entirely disappointed me, that’s the first thing I have to say. My impression of Morocco, moreover, was that of a dirty, hostile country, with a quite inhospitable people. In fact, almost all the Moroccans we bumped into spoke French fluently, but none of them ever stooped to answer us in that language. They answered our questions with prevarication and, if we pushed, they restrained themselves to smiling and, finally, to disrespecting us and turning their backs on us. I was outraged.
If the sensation I felt when I boarded the bus that took us to Prague was that of a total mistake, what I felt when stepping off the plane in Tangiers—with Stubemann always at my side—was a deep, uncharted despair.
“Who could live here?” I asked with great surprise, the victim of the desert’s first smack of heat.
For some reason, my commentary again provoked the hilarity of my companions.
“Don’t be fooled,” the old professor warned me. “The desert isn’t barren,” he also pronounced, and then left me mopping the sweat that had started to bead on my face.
Along with the suffocating heat, another sensation that overtook me on arriving in Africa was anxiety. It was enough for me to set foot on the African continent to begin to feel worried and sad, as if there were a looming tragedy that I could not emerge from unscathed. There was a reason for this bothersome anxiety: I didn’t know what to expect, the novelty bred in me a particular anguish and worry. But the sadness? Why that sensation of sorrow and helplessness that debilitated me until I was listless and exhausted? Should I blame the climate? The atmospheric pressure?
Since our landing in Tangiers, Stubemann began to respond to my questions and comments—always with his high-pitched voice—with answers about matters very different from those I asked about (as is customary among the Sahrawi). When he heard me reproach him for how his manner of answering resembled that of the natives, Stubemann took off his glasses and calmly cleaned them. When I think of Stubemann, I always see him with his square glasses in his hands, unnecessarily cleaning them with exaggerated care.
It would be difficult to decide if the worst thing about that trip was the rooms at the hotels where we stayed (mostly tiny and putrid), the impertinence of the Moroccans (who behaved at all times as if they were superior to us), or (I don’t want to forget) the interminable and incredibly uncomfortable van trips to visit the deserts that were part of our itinerary.