SETTLING AT BÉNI ABBÈS
I began my third trip to the Sahara—now on my own—with a mistaken approach: I returned to the places that I had visited during the previous expedition. Inevitably, the experience didn’t work out. I should have foreseen that no desert is the same today as yesterday, that no one can ever say that they know a desert. Furthermore, Shasu had grown up: in just a year he had gotten older. And I didn’t see him atop any ruins, pointing at the horizon and bathed in the sun. My young guide delightedly accepted my proposal that I spend another night at his home; but his father—who looked to me as if he had aged considerably—was visibly less hospitable (he explained to me that some of his businesses hadn’t worked out). What’s more, there were only two adolescents dancing around the table during dinner and breakfast. The third one, his sister Blue, had moved to the capital to pursue her studies. Despite the fact that the girls’ dresses offered me their unforgettable rustling again, none of them locked eyes with me (in that nothing had changed at all!). To my disappointment, neither his sister Lilac nor Rose came to my bedroom that night and, certainly, neither the oldest nor the littlest (it was the middle one that had left) quenched their love’s thirst with my mouth. I concluded that the woman of my dreams, the one that I had lost forever when the door to Shasu’s house closed behind me, was his sister Blue. But I didn’t travel to Algiers to look for her.
At that beginning, so deceiving, I also witnessed a sandstorm; however, I wasn’t outdoors, with my shirt hiding my face and an agitated beat in my heart. Protected against the inclement weather, I considered it from a tent. What’s more, I was alone, without the Friends. It wasn’t the same, it couldn’t be: no boy embraced my body, as if fearful that I might escape; and no one, absolutely no one, told me “It’s over, it’s over” again, as would a mother wanting to soothe her child, woken from a nightmare. So, on that trip to the Sahara there were neither storms nor breakdowns; there were no shining guides perched on ruins; nor were there—and I felt the absence—mysterious women in search of love.
I wasted the first month of my solitary expedition on constant, stupid movements from place to place. Today I know that in the desert it isn’t necessary to move, given that it is the desert itself that moves beneath the feet of those who dare to visit it. What sense does it make to travel if the landscape itself is doing so? So far as I know, the desert is the only place in the world where something like this happens. The people who live in the Sahara are nomads because they imitate the earth beneath their feet. In other words, only when I quit traveling from one place to another and when I settled in at Béni Abbès, where I rented a small house, did my trip truly begin. It is curious that it was in the country of nomads that I learned to be still. If I had some desire to travel and visit other countries and cultures, this trip entirely snuffed it out. In the desert sand, all the same to eyes that don’t know how to see it, hide all the countries of the world and every landscape on earth.
Thus, it was there that I learned that the desert cannot be sought, but only waited for; and that this waiting must be approached as if you had all the time in the world and as if you are entirely indifferent to the advent of its rewards or gifts—as precious as they can be.
It was soon after arriving at Béni Abbès that I noticed how much the desert had given me, veiled and discretely. Did I perhaps feel that I had reached my homeland? Not exactly. I was in my homeland, yes; but as a sojourner. It proves very strange to feel like a guest in your own home. So, the desert reminded me that I was an exile, and that with independence to choose where to go and how to live. Of course, none of this stopped me from feeling proud that I had arrived at that town where I would have to start an adventure that, as small as it might seem to others, I knew was huge.
“What’s your name?” they asked me soon after I had arrived.
“Shasu,” I answered without thinking about it.
And that’s how I started calling myself by my guide’s name.
Perhaps because of this name—or because of my determination to become a child of the desert—despite being a foreigner, the people I met in Béni Abbès never looked at me with distrust, but rather with something resembling indulgence or commiseration.
“What have you come here to do?” the more interested ones asked.
“He won’t last long among us,” some said among themselves.
For my part, I managed not to bother them at their work and certainly not to meddle in their lives. I didn’t even know myself if I was among them to rest, to rediscover my roots, or to invent a new life for myself. Curiously, all those questions—which were the ones that my friends in Europe thought that I needed to answer—had lost my interest. My only answer, and it wasn’t an answer, was this: “I am here.” That was enough for me.
What could be seen from the small house that I rented in Béni Abbès was much like the landscape one imagines of the day after a great war: an empty horizon, a mirror of the nothingness that man consists of, as much as he labors to appear to the contrary. Well, I felt that from that nothingness that surrounded me something new and authentic could be born. That only from that nothingness, effectively, could something be born; and that—be what it may—it was worth the trouble to know a nothingness as physical as the one that that place offered me. Because that was what was exciting: that nothingness, that concept, found there, in the space I had before me, a certain visibility and consistency. Nothingness exists, I can now write—I found it.
After much thought, I have come to the conclusion that what attracts me to the void is the ecstasy of possibility. It’s true that in the desert one can fall with great ease into the vertigo of the infinite; and it is true, too, that passion for nothingness is much more dangerous than its opposite: the quest for totality. Now, ecstasy—true ecstasy—can only sprout from the detachment and emptying that every desert seems to evoke and call for.
Far from everything, in Béni Abbès I perceived the ridiculousness and insignificance of the strivings that I had so discussed at other times. Finally, I understood that we are born to live, nothing more. That living is our primary task and that to achieve this it isn’t necessary to practice any special activity. The desert was making me discover that there isn’t any excellence in conquest, whatever it may be, but that excellence, if it is worth speaking of, is in life itself, and that living consists simply of discovering what is fundamental.
That’s why it never mattered to me in Béni Abbès if I were forty-two—the age I still am—or sixty-six; it didn’t matter to me if I was Czech or Dutch, white or black, kind or evil. It didn’t even matter to me if I were a man or an animal, if all of my possessions burned, or if my name were erased forever from the records we call History. I even stopped making myself restless about whether I would one day return to Europe. What mattered to me, by contrast, was being there, exactly where I found myself: with the red sun that hid behind a dune, with my new name—Shasu—that I had christened myself with, and with the sand just a few meters away, very quickly growing cold as evening fell. It mattered to me that I had eyes to see and skin for the afternoon breeze to caress.
“You know what?” I said to myself. “I’m really well here.”
In Béni Abbès the vegetation is so scarce that the most insignificant shrub does not pass me by unnoticed. The vegetation is so wispy and poor that each tree—the few that exist—is like a gift to me. In their habitual destitution, the trees of the desert are the most beautiful on the planet. Perhaps because they are so dry and in need of attention, or perhaps simply because of their isolation. The fact is that sometimes, during those first weeks, I approached those trees and touched them, just touched them. It is possible that they appreciate me for it, I don’t know. I wanted to touch them, I experienced that need. I felt that as the most contradictory things, the contradictory things of all, are possible in the desert—arid land with the most splendid oases that glisten on the face of the earth, earth that both burns and freezes—so inside me lived every contrast imaginable. I say this because at that small house in Béni Abbès I sensed inside me the forces of the spiritual and the carnal, the powers of the mind and of the heart, evil and good, life force and the force, just as strong, that drives us to death and destruction.
I came to these small discoveries thanks to the enormous changes in temperature between the day and night, a variation that left me disconcerted. But it wasn’t just my body that was disrupted—as I had supposed when they had warned me of it—but I was mentally and spiritually disconcerted: without reference points to grab on to. Soon I woke up in the middle of the night and didn’t know what time it was, where I was, or what I was doing there. I was ignorant even of what the objects around me were, or I knew them but with a distressing imprecision. The first nights in Béni Abbès I would put on and take off my jacket nonstop. Later my body grew accustomed to always wearing my jacket, as the natives there do every season of the year.
When I couldn’t fall asleep, I took the only chair I had in my bedroom and placed it in front of the window. For some reason the idea of sitting facing the desert excited me.
From that Béni Abbès window, I made many drawings—timid at first, but then more decisive—as the morning’s first light dawned. Here is one of them.
No one taught me to draw these simple lines, of course, but the lines were there, in front of my window, even if I was only able to make them out when I grew accustomed to the intense colors of the Sahara: the red, the yellow, the orange. On my first trips to the African continent I was only able to see colors. Now, finally, in my improvised homeland of Béni Abbès, the desert had also gifted me its lines—which I have drawn with growing pleasure. In such a way that perhaps it could be said that I was something like an artist, given that I exercised the art of drawing. But no, it’s excessive to qualify as artistic work what are, ultimately, just a few lines quickly traced.
While I drew—and perhaps that’s why I did it so often—I perceived that a flower that it was hard for me to name had begun to grow inside me. It was hope. But it wasn’t a concrete hope, with a defined object or determined goal, but a pure hope, to put it this way, of being, the hope of becoming part of a tremendous, fascinating world.
In the morning, before the sun began to beat down, at first I usually walked toward the market square, where they sold fruit, vegetables, clothes, old books, and antiques. I frequently took note of the Tuareg, about whom I had read so much and whom I could then observe—and in good numbers—for the first time. They say that this tribe, distinct from the Berbers and Bedouins, covers their heads and a good part of their face to protect themselves from the sun. But it’s not just for that reason, as we think in the West. The Tuareg also cover themselves so as not to be known immediately and to remind others and themselves that every man is always a mystery. It’s not a symbol of their backwardness, as those who don’t know them claim, nor simply an exotic or folkloric touch, as I myself believed before living alongside them. It is because of their respect for others and because of their love for decency, which is like saying for the process that should exist in every relationship.
In the Béni Abbès market I saw many beautiful women, as the Tuareg—as the books assert and I myself confirmed—are one of the most graceful races: the ratio of their features, the intensity of their gaze, the rare mix of spirituality and sensuality that characterizes them…well, at no moment did I look with desire at any of the many beautiful women that teemed among those stalls, as commonly happens to me in my country. The desert had snuffed out my sexual desire: it wasn’t something that I felt proud of, but it didn’t make me sad, either.
I must say that during those days I never remembered my three graceful Algerians: the sisters Rose, Lilac, and Blue. And I still don’t know for certain if Petruchová, Benetková, and Plicková, the organization’s most beautiful women, were oases or mirages. It’s likely that without them I wouldn’t have persevered among the Friends, that I can assume; it was these women, each in her own way, who helped me remain on my path. Did Benetková’s questions correspond to a strategy? I still ask myself today. Was provocative Petruchová sincere in her art of seduction? What exactly was sweet Plicková laughing at the morning that she served me breakfast in Brno? I don’t know, I no longer care.
It was also in the market that I saw a very slender foreigner—a Suzanne Popherty, of Belgian origin—who had spent more than twenty years living among the Tuareg. I learned that this woman had arrived there very young with the aim of studying this tribe deeply, to earn a doctorate in anthropology; I also learned that she had later decided never to go back to her country. To not go back, to not ever go back. Why, if I was already back in Africa—and without a return date—did those four words keep rattling inside me, and with such force? Did they announce a need or portend a temptation? To not go back. To not go back? But, wasn’t that trip of mine a return to the places I had visited on the previous trips? And weren’t all of my trips to the Sahara the return to a place where I had never been and from which, nonetheless, I never should have left? Still today I don’t know if I will be able to remain in Algeria forever, like that Ms. Popherty, so tall and slender.
There was another European in a neighboring village, and he was also Belgian. His name was Jean-Pierre Dolfieux and, soon after settling there, he had abandoned the study of geology that had taken him there. No one could tell me concretely what he devoted himself to. His compatriot, Suzanne, had settled amidst the Tuareg; Jean-Pierre, by contract, lived alone in a sort of hermitage and in the middle of the most inhumane, radical poverty. The Tuareg didn’t like him; they said that that man, in his youth, had lived in an irresponsible, dirty manner. I never learned what they were referring to, despite how much I would have liked to know something more about Dolfieux. I was able to exchange some words with Ms. Popherty—not so with Dolfieux. He let himself be seen very rarely, as he seldom left his shack. In any case, I thought then—and I still think it—that I could be like either of the two. That their lives are a possibility for my own.
The morning that I met Suzanne and learned about Jean-Pierre, I began to put into writing all that had been happening to me since I learned of the Friends from the back cover of the book that fell fortuitously into my hands. I was compelled to do so by the fear that the day could come when everything that had happened to me with the desert would seem like a mirage. Since my arrival to the Sahara, my thoughts linked together and followed one after the other like the dunes of the desert, without order or coherence. I wrote, then, to impose a little order in the midst of that flow, but also to record that that landscape helped me to stop thinking. The nothingness of the exterior managed to transfer—who knows how?—to my interior, leaving me as volatile and empty as a desert. I was learning to make a desert within myself. I needed to write everything down before the silence stole my words.
Writing was how I realized that the desert is not an appropriate place to make decisions, as so many claim. Rather than resolving problems, what the desert helps with is demonstrating the irrelevance and even the ridiculousness of the problems themselves.
In those first notes, which I soon thereafter used as the basis of this narrative, I wanted to leave written that it was among those people where I learned that I could change, that I had changed. I was finally who I should have been all along, the man I was called to be, so common and, at the same time, so special. I came to this conclusion at taking a handful of sand and letting it very slowly run through my fingers. I liked to see how the sand fell until making a tiny mountain at my feet, I liked the tickling feeling on my skin. Despite feeling very small in the middle of the ocean of sand that surrounded me, I think that it was then that I perceived my dimensions as a human being in their most exact measure. What I most resemble is a grain of sand: a tiny grain that I can hold between my fingers and that, if it slips away, I will be unable to retrieve and differentiate from the rest. That’s how I am: lost and featureless in the immensity of the world and, nonetheless, with a precise, individual identity. “Who am I?” I asked myself. “Just a miserable grain of sand from this terrible and fascinating desert,” I answered myself. And I think that this is the best definition of myself I have ever given.