THE ILLUSTRATOR OF DESERTS

“And what do you do over the course of the day?” asked the few people I still periodically exchanged mail with.

“Nothing in particular,” I responded. “I study Arabic,” I also told them, to calm them down.

This laconic manner of mine, however, didn’t satisfy young Vlk, who was very interested, judging by his comments, in the little that I wrote and the much that, according to him, I must be living. I still keep some of the messages that I sent him during those days, always in response to his questions and inquiries. He seemed very interested to know how I spent my time and if I felt very alone. To that I responded:

“Anyone would say that time here must be particularly dense. It’s just the opposite, but not because one has the impression that the hours go by more quickly or more slowly, but because the concept of time itself disappears.”

And regarding my loneliness: “Away from everyone, here I feel united to my fellows, if not in an emotional or sentimental manner. My unity with the world, with others, is philosophical, if I can use that word without it being understood as a synonym for something cold or distant. Despite my forty-two years, I have the impression of having withdrawn from the world before having truly lived in it. That I didn’t know anything about the world, what is called ‘the world,’ and it’s now—from a distance—that I am disposed to open myself and know it. I have never loved my country as much as I do now that I have left it behind and am far away; I have never loved my language as much as I do now that I haven’t been able to speak it. Nonetheless, my love for my homeland and for my language—if those things are so different—isn’t a painful love: I don’t experience suffering from their loss. Loss is—as I understand it now—the condition of love.”

And to conclude: “Contrary to my expectations, in this little house in Béni Abbès I have never felt alone. I was much more alone and abandoned in my apartment in Kroměříž, despite its being the place where I was born and where the people I ought to care for live. Forthwith I will consider that this solitude is the natural state that—without knowing it—I have always aspired to reach.”

“Natural state?” he answered me.

“I wish to live in a simple manner, like a primitive man would,” I replied. “I wish to reduce my necessities to the essential and renounce all pretension. I wish to recognize the animal that exists inside of me, to love it, to offer it an opportunity. The animal that exists in me: I have never felt so human as in this small bedroom.”

We exchanged eight or ten messages, perhaps more. And it was during those days that I decided to shape my notes and draft my African experience in a more organized manner. I originally wrote this account for young Vlk, with whom my communication faded little by little, like a dune is erased. In one of the last messages, in response to his idea of meeting up with me, at least for a few weeks, I wrote:

“They say that only exiles flee to the desert, and always to escape enslavement and in search of a promised land. There is no desert without exodus, that may be true, but my desert time is not to prepare me for a later promised land, as in the case of the Jewish people. No, my desert is already in and of itself the promised land; and that is what makes me look at it with very different eyes than those who look at it and experience it as a means to achieve some other end. Like the people of Israel, I also have the impression that one comes to the desert to be reborn. So, I don’t discount that humanity has its origins in these lands, and it’s even possible that, as we were told as children, man was truly made from water and clay.”

On that occasion, moved by what it seemed could develop into friendship, I dared to send him some of my drawings. But he didn’t understand that all of those lines were the outlines of the dunes and labeled them abstract.

“They would be more expressive if you colored them,” he proposed.

It could be that Vlk wasn’t so mistaken and that I am—as he thought—an abstract illustrator. Because isn’t this an abstraction?

An abstraction? At noticing the many lines that cross the palm of the hand—and that there are those who claim to know how to interpret them—I thought that the many drawings of the desert that I was making could represent those mysterious lines that nature draws on man’s hands with such thoroughness. Yes, the lines in the sand and that shape the dunes greatly resemble the small furrows, rivers and tributaries, that make up a fingerprint. Sometimes I have had the impression, almost the certainty, of drawing an immense fingerprint. Is this not a good example?

When I see this drawing, which I also sent to young Vlk, I think that I am a line, that I want to be a line. That all men are lines: sometimes straight, but almost always crooked. And I think that my drawings are my form of inner nomadism: an abstract and at the same time immensely precise nomadism.

While I drew these lines, which no one, not even I, would make out from any others, I experienced the same thing as when I walked through the desert. I was in motion, alright, but I also seemed to have stopped. Vlk commented that that would be exasperating for him; for me, by contrast, it reflects my condition with great precision.

Our divergences widened, our messages grew farther apart and, with time, Vlk stopped writing me. Perhaps a few words and two drawings had been enough to satisfy his curiosity, so that my story—still unfinished, but now titled Friend of the Desert—no longer had its original recipient. Or perhaps it was that the desert had taken over him, closing him—just like me—in the labyrinth of its lines. As for me, I had reached what, without knowing it, I was seeking: perfect absence.

The first thing I did upon waking was to draw what I saw from my window, which one morning, three weeks after my settling at Béni Abbès, had more or less this look.

Satisfied with this result—more enigmatic than my previous drawings—I left the house, having decided to buy a turban at one of the numerous tents at the bazaar. I promptly found one that I liked and I tried it on in front of a mirror; on confirming how well it fit me, I decided to wear it. It is incredible how a simple turban can come to transform our vision of the world: soon the women seemed more beautiful to me, the merchandise more attractive, the spices displayed in sacks and baskets more brightly colored, more varied. Since I acquired that turban, since I became accustomed to not leaving the house without it on my head, I saw myself in another way, and the meaning of my third trip to the Sahara changed completely. I had finally understood that that land that we call the desert was necessary for me, perhaps for everyone. That we all—or at least that I—need to set our sights and hearts on an ample space and an endless horizon. That’s the only way to rest the sight, I believe; that’s the only way for man to rest, I’m sure. The breadth of the desert healed wounds whose existence I had ignored. And my soul expanded like the sails of a boat on a windy day at high sea.

How to explain in any other way the pride that assailed me—that dumb pride—when I walked through the desert dressed in the attire of a Muslim? What was I really proud of? Of walking? Of the puerile satisfaction brought me by wearing a turban, which was for me a declaration of love for the town where I had decided to settle? Of being a man? Yes, it was of that, just of that: finally, I had found a place in the world tailor-made to my needs. Everything that isn’t infinite or, at least, everything that doesn’t have the appearance of the infinite, will never be able to satisfy me. The infinite—I have seen it!—is a necessity.

Upon returning to my little rented house, just two hours later, the panorama offered me from the window had changed.

It was this transformation, so sudden and complete, that awakened my interest and compelled me to draw. Because of the constant movement of the dunes, the same point in the desert offers very distinct panoramas; that is the reason, surely, why no one who has seen my drawings has noticed that most of them were made from the same place. But I should say that I no longer search for anything: that I confine myself to contemplating the landscape and to reproducing the essence of what I’ve contemplated in a few lines, convinced that in this contemplation and creation lies the only success possible from any search. But I’m not searching, I repeat: I’m waiting for a revelation, passively when I contemplate and actively when I draw.

Of course, on my morning outings, always at dawn, or on the evening ones, when the sun was less violent, I saw men and women that lightened the weight of the voluntary solitude that I had decided to submit myself to: my neighbors, for example, or the salespeople at the places I shopped, or the taxi and van drivers…. I also saw, occasionally, a wayfarer who—perhaps like me—had gone out just to stretch his legs and fill his nose with scents and his eyes with colors. Those wayfarers (or was it always the same one?) seemed not to go anywhere and not to come from any place. They were one more element of the landscape: people interchangeable with any others—all with their sandals, with their turbans. People, ultimately, who could very well have been defined simply as wayfarers.

Why are all of these people so happy, if they live among so much poverty? I asked myself. Because external poverty redirects them toward their interior, and because it is there, within, that they discover that there is a richness that cannot wither. Beauty and poverty: the most mysterious, the most essential duality. The poorer and more desolate the landscape that surrounded me, I concluded, the richer and fuller I felt inside. The wiser I was the fewer thoughts I had or, to be more precise, the farther I could get from the very act of thinking.

That was how I felt during those brief treks through Béni Abbès and its surroundings, generally just after dawn, when the nocturnal wind still hadn’t hidden itself who knows where: not as Pavel, which is how I was known in Kroměříž; not even as Shasu, the foreigner, as the Berbers called me, but simply as a man: one among so many, just a man who could be substituted for any other man without anyone noticing. Because therein lies the pleasure of walking through the desert: in that you aren’t anyone, in that you are everyone, in that finally you are what you have been in another life and what you will come to be, also in another life. Walking through the desert is enough, just walking through the desert, to become someone different.

They say that some monks from ancient times, to flee from idleness, would spend the day weaving baskets that they would unweave at night. The baskets weren’t important to them, as useful or beautiful as they could be. The manual labor was important. Their hands were active and their minds rested. That is how I was with my treks through the desert and with my line drawings, which aren’t even useful and, probably, aren’t beautiful either. That’s why I don’t need to destroy my drawings, like the old monks did their baskets. My activity was not headed toward any end: neither did the desert seem to head toward any end; it also seems stripped to me of all purpose. The elimination of that finality—that indifference before everything that constitutes, I believe, freedom—is probably what seduces me about this place.

In the desert one can walk for days, weeks, and even months without seeing anything but sand; that said, the moment always arrives when a wonderful oasis appears, inviting you to pause and refuel. As difficult as the journey that takes one to an oasis may be, any oasis is always worth the wayfarer’s effort. Such is the satisfaction and joy obtained there that the traveled path, the memory of the traveled path, does not seem so arduous. With strength restored in the oasis, the path is undertaken again, and it is not infrequent that the wayfarer again grows impatient. And that’s what it’s like until suddenly, when it is least expected—when the wayfarer has almost given up—another oasis appears. Well, this is precisely what the desert teaches: to walk across the land and stop where there is water, and to do so day after day until the moment comes when you discover that not only do you love the oasis but also the walk itself. That you love the sand, the difficulty. Only on that day—it happened to me in Béni Abbès—can we rightly define ourselves as “friends of the desert.” This drawing I titled just that, Friend of the Desert.

I spent many hours contemplating this other drawing.

If I look at my drawings upside down, or sideways, sometimes it looks to me like my lines represent the wrinkles on an ancient face or, even, the rivers and mountains of an imagined land. That’s why, without knowing it, perhaps I am drawing the geography of my own country, or an unknown cartography. Perhaps all the painters in the world are drawing the desert without even knowing it. Every path on this earth—the mountain paths, the highways—is not, in the end, when seen from a certain perspective, anything more than a simple line.

At night, when the real desert is very dark and I have only the consolation of my imaginary desert, I very slowly flip the pages in my notebook and marvel at having drawn so much. On these occasions I trace each of the drawn lines with my finger, as if I want to make certain that this too, the tracing of my finger, will lead me to the same place. Where? I don’t know and, best of all, I don’t care to know. Am I drawing a labyrinth so that I will never be able to leave the Sahara? What had to happen to a man so that he aspires only to the fundamental: to sleep and walk, to open the window, to draw some lines, to look at things without pretending to do anything more than look at them? Who says that this is an insignificant way to fill a life?

When I tire of these questions, when I don’t even want to hear the music of the desert—which is that of not going back—I imagine myself inside some of my drawings. But I don’t do so to wander between one line and another, as I did at the beginning, but to be a line: a simple point that moves.