Desert Divers Read Free Page B

at the end are devoted to other world news.
    Then the screen goes blank. Everyone waits patiently. The landlord gets up, climbs onto a chair and puts in a video.
    After ten minutes, the tape breaks. Everyone goes on calmly watching. The landlord runs the tape back and starts it again,the volume higher this time – rather like trying to get through a sandy stretch of road by backing the car, revving the engine and trying it faster.
    But it’s no use. The tape gives up at exactly the same place in the action.
    No one moves a muscle. Everyone stays seated, full of confidence. The landlord goes to fetch another video. This time we go straight into the middle of a quite different story, the beginning missing. No one reacts. Everyone gratefully goes on watching.
    All night the door slams violently in the wind blowing off the sea.
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    A man has gasped all his life, then draws his first really deep breath. After ‘a life of gasping’, as he calls it, he at last, slowly, with great enjoyment, drinks a large glass of cold air.
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    A tall yellow building behind the main street dominates the town. The walls are crowned with watchtowers, with open fields of fire in all directions. This is where Colonel Bens resided in 1925. Now it is the Moroccan mayor’s office.
    The mayor sits below a preternaturally large photograph ofHassan and wears an Italian ‘camel-hair ulster’ made of nylon. With him are some old people in real, smelly camel-hair clothes, among them the son of the interpreter who accompanied Saint-Ex on his flights.
    He tells me about an emergency landing in the desert. His father kept the ‘bandits’ at a distance with his rifle while Saint-Ex repaired the engine. They took off at dusk with bullets whistling round their ears.
    ‘That man saved my life,’ said Saint-Ex. Afterwards it was all made into a film so that the whole world could see it.
    ‘Were you there yourself?’
    ‘Not me. But Ahmed was.’
    The mayor promises to summon Ahmed the next day.
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    I know which tiles are loose on the steep hotel stairs. Even in the darkness, I can find the footrest of the squatting-toilet. Life in Tarfaya is becoming familiar.
    In the mornings, I breakfast on bread and water. Decades old, the bed I am sitting on still has the plastic covering it had been transported in. That probably increases its second-hand value. The bottom sheet is the kind that only goes as far as your knees. There is no top sheet.
    Through the little window I can see across the constantly windswept headland to the island with its dark, abandoned prison. Some boys are playing football on the shore, in the wind coming off the sea.
    The mayor’s office opens at eight-thirty, but there is nopoint going there until half-past ten. I sit in the sun outside the hotel and warm up as I wait. The greengrocer puts his wooden boxes out on the pavement. You buy bread from a blue hatch. A Saharan in a white jibba walks past. They are a rare sight here. Uniformed Moroccans are in the majority.
    A small girl with a school bag buys some carrots. A man walks past with a large bunch of fragrant mint. His feet are cracked. Fish are being weighed on the corner – some a type of perch, vertically striped or long and silvery with horizontal stripes, glittering in the morning light.
    At about half-past ten, I meet Ahmed, aged eighty-five.
    ‘Saint-Ex was different. He tried to learn our language. None of the Spaniards did that. He studied with a teacher of the Koran called Sidi l’Hussein Oueld n’Ouesa. The Spaniards just sat in their fort. They didn’t fly. But Saint-Ex was a travelling man, so he had to be able to speak languages. He was a man who knew how to negotiate and often did so over men held for ransom.’
    ‘Is it true that the tribes shot at the French planes?’
    ‘Of course.’ He smiles inwardly as though lost in happy memories.
    ‘Why?’
    This causes a certain confusion. Naturally they shot, but why?
    Gradually the intellectual explanation appears: