The phenomenon that triggered the next episode of my love story with the desert seemed inconsequential: when I was out of the house, I always wanted to return as soon as possible so that, once there, I could place myself in front of my photographs of the desert, which I contemplated for extended periods. When that wasn’t possible—whether because of my job or for some other reason—I turned to the books about the desert that I had bought or borrowed from the library, which in those days I was never without. The mere contact of those volumes with my hands, even when I didn’t read them, was enough to alleviate my crushing nostalgia. Nostalgia? Was it reasonable to feel nostalgia for a place that I had wanted to leave as soon I had seen it? I asked myself. Was it not madness to want to return to a country that I hadn’t liked? But all these questions dissolved into nothing—like the wind blowing the sand—when I sat facing one of those images.
With the same intensity that the real desert had—albeit by way of contrast—pointed me to the one in my photographs (which I had longed to see again with a poisonous melancholy when I was in the Sahara), the desert of my photographs now drew me to the real one. That’s why, two months after my arrival in the Sahara, a land I had sworn not to return to, my obsession with the desert reached its most extreme point. Such a terrible melancholy overcame me that I had to reflect on the cause of the power of seduction that that place exerted on me. The solitude? The vastness of the space? The endlessness of the horizon? Why does the desolate seem beautiful? I wanted to know. Why had I fallen in love with that land full of nothingness and dust? What I had seen in Morocco was, certainly, very different from everything that I had been able to see and experience previously, in my homeland: so different from everything that was mine and, nonetheless, so similar to me. Similar…to me? That question, like so many others, was left hanging in the air.
Those weeks, in front of the desolate landscapes of my photographs, I experienced a solitude unknown to me. Anything that someone might have wanted to tell me when I was before my images would have been totally in vain.
As the process of desertification advances at a pace of two thousand square kilometers per year—according to what I read—that same process advanced, and at the same pace, across the landscape of my soul, which emptied itself day after day until becoming unrecognizable. Stones, mountains, valleys…everything was subjected in my heart, as in the desert, to a relentless erosion. But what would remain of me if that erosion continued? I came to ask myself. If I remained engrossed in that sort of addictive contemplation, any form of life that could flicker inside me would be extinguished; those were the facts. The extraordinary thing about this matter was that that deduction, that devastation, didn’t matter to me. Rather I desired it as I have desired few things in life; I longed for the poverty and necessary nakedness to which the desert seemed to invite me.
Naturally, I kept showing up to work; nonetheless, I must admit that at that time and because of the desert, my fondness for the desert, many of my relationships with family members and colleagues cooled. Such was the time that I wished to be in front of my photos and so great the bliss that this contemplation provided me that, when I was actually before them, everything else—everything without exception—struck me as annoying and expendable.
“You like the desert?!” asked my acquaintances, not without surprise. “We don’t understand it.”
I didn’t try to explain it, I never tried to explain it. To explain the reasons for a love is always a folly.
“Yes,” I restrained myself to answering, adding nothing.
When I say that I love the desert, what is it that I say I am loving? The scorching sands of day and the freezing sands of night? The many different shapes of the dunes? The starry sky and enormous moon, like a living, lost star? The solitude? The emptiness? Perhaps I only loved the concept of the desert, and perhaps I loved it because I wanted to be like it. I love the desert because it is the place of absolute possibility: the place where the horizon has the breadth that a person deserves and needs. The desert: that metaphor for the infinite.
Along with my love for the desert, it seemed strange to my loved ones and acquaintances that I didn’t explain that love; but none of them dared to ask me about that last strangeness. It didn’t matter to me. One of the effects of love for the desert—perhaps of love in general—is that any outside opinion progressively loses any importance. When you love the desert, you have the impression that you are approaching both your origin and your destination.
On the other hand, or at least I said this to justify myself, I had new friends—the Friends of the Desert—but they never called or bothered me, for which, in fairness, it would be difficult for them to meet the conventional definition of friendship.
I have never known what most of the members of the organization devote their free time to, beyond the desert itself. Perhaps that’s why, on some occasions and as the victim of the nostalgia that took me over during that time, I imagined all of them (all three thousand of them) in front of photographs like mine, engrossed in those depicted deserts, given that it was not always feasible for them to travel to the real thing. The idea of all those solitary people, distinct and distant but united by the same act, comforted me.
I use the term “contemplation” to refer to what I did when I positioned myself before my photographs, but I don’t know if that is the most appropriate term. If so, how to explain that, even after having spent so many hours facing these images, I would often conclude with the discovery of some new detail or some new sensation?
In truth, at that time I had still spent very few days in the desert: a derisory amount in the sum of my forty-two years of life. Nonetheless, those few days in Morocco had been so singular and intense that those that came afterward, back in Europe, did not pass without my remembering the days when I had that landscape before my eyes. The desert is, most of all, a type of nostalgia. There are no eyes that fail to remember it if they have seen it even once.
I saw those photographs and, as if it were engraved in them, I also saw—or remembered—the face of Foucauld just as I had seen it in the image that Professor Pecha had projected during his presentation. Charles, with his head gently tilted, seemed to stare at me. He didn’t say anything to me, of course; but I understood that the apparition of that image in the magma of my thoughts complied with a very concrete purpose that I was nonetheless unable to decipher. Now I know that there are men that can be loved before meeting them, and that Charles de Foucauld is, certainly, one of them. There are men who manage to say everything with their faces. Who knows if this is because they never lost their humanity?
“Dear Otla, my friend,” so began the email that, once some time had passed, I couldn’t resist writing. “Over these last weeks, after my return from the Sahara, I have asked myself if you are going to organize another expedition anytime soon. If so, I would like to reserve a place. I also wanted to know,” I concluded, “if I should fill out any sort of form to formalize my membership in the Friends. Affectionately,” and my name.
I sent that email, but not without marveling at how I had been able to change so much in so few days. Was I really willing to again endure those foul hotels, or to encounter Serbal the guide, to travel eight hours down those infamous highways to stay for just a few minutes before those landscapes that I hadn’t even liked? My answer to that question was as simple as it was inexplicable: yes, I wanted it. Anything that wasn’t the desert bored me and left me regretful. The desert, both physical and mental, had taken over me.
“We understand that you wish to return to the Sahara,” said the reply that Otla sent me the next day. “In fact, among those who travel to the desert there are few who have not wanted to return. The vast majority undertake a second journey; but only a few, you should know, remain enchanted to the point of needing many journeys more. I regret to inform you, nonetheless, that you will not be able to accompany us on our next expedition.”
And he specified, perhaps to tease me, the dates and routes. He was going, of course; and so was his charming wife. Petruchová and Benetková with their respective husbands were returning, and, finally, Stubemann and the rest. Why, then, was I excluded?
“If you maintain your interest, perhaps you can participate in the September trip,” Otla’s email continued.
Who did that little man think he was to tell me what I could or could not do? I asked myself, irritated by his unexpected response. Was he going to put me back on a return train again, like he did only a few hours after meeting me?
The email ended by saying that if I truly wanted to take a second trip with them, as I had assured them, I must first partake in the planning of an expedition—which, nonetheless, I could not take an active part in. “You will help out in that way so that the others may live out the experience,” finished Otla. “We are sure that you will understand this measure and that you will accept it willingly.”
So, I wanted to go to the Sahara and they wouldn’t allow me to.
I spent several days angry, without responding, convinced that I didn’t require the approval or consent of those people to travel to any of the deserts in Africa. After all, I could go on my own. Who would stop me?
And I was in that struggle until one night, looking at one of the photographs, my nostalgia for the desert and for its Friends was so irresistible that I wrote a response very different from those that I had planned. It was very brief: “What should I do?” begged my email, followed by a type of farewell.
What should I do? Perhaps this was all that the Friends expected of me.
Can one wish to return to a place where one has never been happy? Do we return to the place of our torments to heal our wounds, or to open them? What exactly was I looking for? The cause of my unhappiness, the happiness that I hadn’t known how to find?
So that the travelers to the desert could concentrate on the essential (but what could “the essential” be? I still didn’t understand it), all the organization’s expeditions were prepared by a small committee charged with the purchase of the tickets, the contracting of a local guide, the design of the route, and the preparation of the folders of information that each traveler typically took with them. I was invited to become a part of one of those committees and, against all odds, I greatly enjoyed preparing that trip that I never took. It wasn’t just because Jan and his wife were on the committee (such that my relationship with paná Petruchová reached a point that I should mention), but because I discovered that the only way to capitalize on a trip to the desert—perhaps on a trip to anywhere—was by preparing it as well as possible.
I was saddened only that Otla Plícka hadn’t said anything about my petition for admission to the Friends; of course I hadn’t asked him about it either, supposing that—my desire being known—he himself would pose that question at the appropriate time.
During the preparation for that new trip, which would take place during the spring of that same year, paná Petruchová did not slip her cold, mischievous hand beneath my shirt again. Who placed their hand on my shoulder, instead—not on my back, and as a symbol of his friendship, not as an erotic provocation—was her husband Jan. The act happened during one of our preparatory sessions, when we were around a large table before a spread map of Saharan Africa. I was explaining one of the routes I had designed over long hours of study and consultation. Jan, who had brought up some beers from the cellar, was to my right, standing with his legs wide open. Vaclav, the previous president, to my left. Their wives, Petruchová and Benetková, had sat opposite us: the first blinking constantly; the second moving her long, curly hair from one side of her face to the other with brusque movements of her head. With my index finger on that great map of the Algerian Sahara, while I explained the possibilities and drawbacks of the routes that I had designed, I felt for the first time like an authentic Friend of the Desert. That feeling of belonging—so unknown to me until then—made me feel, for an instant at least, very happy. Because it wasn’t just that, after so much resistance on its part, I finally belonged to this strange group; it was—how can I say it?—that I finally belonged to the human race. Yes, to the human race: as ill-founded as this feeling might appear to those who have never experienced it, at that moment I felt like the member of a community and the heir to an ideal. Yes, to an ideal. I felt co-responsible: something like the part of a whole or the limb of an organism without which it would suffer and be damaged. Now that I know them well, I can say that the Friends of the Desert don’t idealize solitude: they have suffered it too much in the flesh to idealize it. The Friends of the Desert are—this is, by my judgement, the best definition of them—a congregation of singularities. Only to something like this, so paradoxical, could a man as rootless and independent as me belong.
It was while I gave my report that I felt how Jan had propped his hand on my shoulder. It was a simple display of affection, no doubt, but what is certain is that it made me feel guilty, despite the fact that there was nothing in my conduct with his wife that I should have been ashamed of. With that hand on my shoulder, I continued explaining the route I was proposing, and I kept doing so for a good while (although with growing awkwardness) until I felt how Petruchová’s hand perched, unmistakably seductive, on my right leg. I looked at her with terror: her hair was quite disheveled and she was more beautiful than ever. A wave of heat colored my face and I had to breathe purposely.
Besides this disconcerting episode, the preparation for the trip to the deserts of Adrar and Wadi, like their later execution, was a complete success. As I have said, that was the situation that made me understand that I had finally become a Friend of the Desert; childless and wifeless, I had found in that group a family with whom to share a mission. And I felt so joyous during the preparation of that trip that I had not been permitted to participate in that, if Otla had proposed it to me—even if he had just insinuated it to me—I would have been willing to prepare as many trips as necessary in the same way. That wasn’t the case: on the second trip that I made to the Sahara I understood well what had happened to me on the first. I saw clearly that the desert, that land of death that can transform into a fertile garden, is an empty space only to those who know not how to see it. Permanently threatened and under very adverse conditions, life—my life—was expressed in the desert in all of its fullness. No, I don’t think that what I was about to experience there could have happened to me in any other place. Between the desert and me, and perhaps between the desert and all people—I don’t know—there exists a secret bond that is not transferable to any other natural landscape.