The “grand taxi” in Tiznit’s hot, dry, dusty, sand choked parking lot was an old blue and yellow Benz. The lot was littered with them as drivers waited for passengers.
It was high noon. He yelled out, “Sidi Ifni!”
The local lot director left his friends in the shade of a solitary tree and gestured to a battered car in the throng of vehicles.
“Thanks.”
The driver was crashed in the back.
Knowing it might be hours, days, weeks, months, years, or centuries until they had a full load, he wandered off for bottled water and bananas. Yellow peels raised dust as he released skin from a fresh skeleton. Locals did not eat bananas in public. He wasn’t interested in local dietary protocol.
They departed Tiznit when the car was full of smiling toothless benevolent Berbers returning to stone homes far away. They zoomed through barren scrub desert, past rocky hills and distant menacing adobe fortresses.
He sat smashed between the window and a friendly French speaking young gendarme en route to his garrison in Sidi Ifni. The gendarme protected a worn crumpled green canvas satchel.
It was empty but the stories inside were real.
It’d survived invasions, foreign legions, armed bandits, salt and slave caravans moving north across the Sahara returning south with gold. It held letters to mistresses locked in harems, declarations of intrigue, suspense, tension, conflict and treaties.
It revealed bilingual conversations about moral ambiguities between characters in comedies and dramas. It revealed wild tales about distant mirages, instruction manuals for training hunting falcons, intentions, meditations, plans for aqueducts, fountains and extensive existential agricultural necessities inside tiled adobe fortresses on hilltop positions overlooking a vast emptiness of silence.
The gendarme dozed off and the stranger peeked into the bag of tricks.
It contained irrefutable evidence.
“Dear Commanding Officer of the Garrison,” began one report. "My first secret hostel was buried deep in Wicklow mountains, an old bare bones mountain hut without running water or electricity tucked up a long nearly inaccessible canyon at the base of Lugnaquilla Mountain.
"The two story house was built in 1955 and donated to An Oige by a woman doctor. The view is excellent, down a long sloping valley surrounded by mountains. To the left is a roaring 10-15’ wide river suitable for drinking and bathing, full of trout, wild water rushing and roaring downhill gathering speed trailing moss and polishing stones passing ferns, wild hedges and rock walled paths, left over from glacier activity and gravitational force of time and pressure.
It’s a small hostel catering to travelers on foot or bike with an upstairs warden sleeping room and women’s room suitable for six. The men’s room is out back with 16 bunk beds and outdoor toilets. Plenty of extra blankets and mattresses. The small intimate common room has an old fireplace and kitchen with gas cookers. Refined elegance.
"It’s a mixed bag of visitors; students, older holiday makers, city workers, mercenaries, poets, playwrights, hardy hikers and a mishmash of European and Arabic languages. I keep it open all day long, register arrivals at 5 p.m., making sure there are enough beds to go around, managed cookers, gas and toilet paper supply.
"It’s the perfect repository for extended day hikes. I explore high glens in thick forests with dark brown pine floors full of dark shadows surrounded by thousands of trickling brooks, rivers and streams cascading from mountains high near feeding deer flashing their soft golden rust brown with white markings bounding away as I stumble through soaked green moss. I traverse to Glendalough through fields and pastures and way back and beyond.
"I entertain visitors, fish the river in complete solitude, peel potatoes and carrots for stews, paint, write, discuss road adventures with vagabonds and play chess by firelight.
"Pawn takes pawn as players attempt to control the middle of the board attacking and defending positions simultaneously. It’s about position and material. We make the necessary sacrifices from the beginning game through the middle game to the end game."
Andy, a German visitor, said “India was once lost in a chess game between two kings.”
“Chess provides an outlet for hostile impulses in a non-retalitory way. The therapeutic value is enormous.”
“Chess gives me discipline, direction and power.”
“That’s the price of creativity.”
“I have recoiled from the emotional discomfort of my life through transference and make myself master of the situation through games.”
“Yes, it’s a drive for perfection and it’s irrationality.”
“Every game is a challenge I must meet.”
“Do you know Capablanca?” I asked.
“Yes, of course. His accuracy was pure position and logic. His play was accurate, tenacious, patient, with a disciplined imagination.”
“Excellent. Your move.”
I reminded him of Queen Isabela’s passion for conquest. "I suggest you read, "The Royal Game," by Stefan Zweig."
We played in the illuminated dark of night as peat fires roared up the flue. Quick moving violent storms pummeled the place.
“That’s a dangerous move,” he said as my knight escaped a pin.
“Yes, but it’s elegant.”
“We destroy ourselves eventually,” he said.
“Yes, as long as we enjoy the process. Your move.”
One clear day sitting near the river doing her nails Susan related a literary dream from a poem by Brian Merriman she was reading.
“Have you heard about the Midnight Court?”
“No,” someone said. “Tell us.”
“It’s about a fellow who falls asleep and has a dream where he’s taken before a court of women who condemn him to be punished for all the men in their knowledge. How women should have the right to marriage and sex but often meet with disappointment and rejection by men who could easily have become their lovers and husbands.”
“Sounds like a real Greek tragedy,” someone said before they jumped into the wild river after a fish fighting on a hook, line and sinker.
Another wise traveler remarked, ”Yes, for those who think, life is a comedy; for those who feel, it is a tragedy.”
Fish blood flowed downstream.
Every misty day I dragged a table outside and rolled thin parchment paper into and through my trusty old Smith Corona portable. The irony and simple joy of working under the table and on a table at the Smith. Pure simultaneous rapture. It was not a job, it was a joy because I did it in an artistic way. New paper, same machine, different day, different energies, new and improved attitudes.
One late fall day while walking down the valley enjoying moist air and kicking a rock past waterfalls in the rain with Andy on our way to check mail and have a pint two miles away, Joe Murphy, the area manager, arrived in his little dark blue Morris Minor chugging along the narrow road.
“We’re closing you down for the winter.”
“Fine. Gotta new place?”
“Yeah.”
It took thirty minutes to get the pack, word machine and Evidence sheets together. We slammed the wooden shutters closed from the inside, bolted them, turned the gas cookers off, secured the place, locked the door and left. Quick and painless.
“We need you to go to Donegal.” Murphy said driving the rocky road to Dublin, one, two, three.
“We’re having a problem up there with the locals.”
“What kind of problem?”
“It’s a big place, gets a lot of visitors. Mr. Johnson, the warden, is from somewhere in the north and married to a girl from the south. The locals don’t take kindly to him being from across the water if you know what I mean, so there’s been some trouble.”
“What kind of trouble? Is it spelled with a capital T?”
“Well, I heard someone may have spray painted some words on the house,” he said. “You’ll have to see for yourself and if so get it cleaned up will ya’? Besides, you may want to pay a visit to the neighbors. Smooth things out ya’ know.”
”Sure. What happened to the manager?”
“They left after almost three years. She has family in Mayo although I heard they went to Glasgow, London and Iceland.”
Floating images.
We evolved out of Wicklow mist covered mountains leaving the river’s long song behind us, melting our perception of primitive nature as tires hummed and reflected sound exchanging high wild rivers and mountains for overgrown suburbs full of estate houses and manicured lawns, chip shops, pubs, and the ever present church steeples of humming humanity.
Bless me father for I have traveled.
We passed Sandymount and Martello Tower where Joyce lived to swim, write and stare at his unknown future exile in Italy with silence and cunning.
“There’s Martello,” I said.
“Aye, Joyce was a strange bird,” Joe said shifting gears and hitting the gas.
“Yes. But man could he write. He said, ‘Wipe your glasses with what you know.’”
“There’s some truth in that,” Joe replied.
“Do you know what an epiphany is?”
“Sure. Isn’t it some kind of insight?”
“It’s something quickly revealed. Joyce wrote tight short scenes where something happened to a person.”
“Maybe it’s like getting hit by lightning.”
“He once commented,” I continued, “to a friend when they asked him about his daily writing after seeing Joyce was agitated.”
“’I wrote seven words today,’” Joyce said and his friend replied, “’What’s the problem then?’” and James said, “’but I don’t know what order they are supposed to be in.’” I laughed.
“I never heard that,” Joe said.
How’s that for troubled? I thought.
“I thought it rather clever of him to have a character named Dedalus,” I said. “Figured it out he did. Broke it down into the heroic manifestation of human frailty he did, Dedalus.
“You know what I think?” as the Mini blasted around corners plowing a path along asphalt, “Joyce was a great word trickster he was, like he loved language so much he invented new language. He made it up. It was consciousness without the editors, minus the critic. He left them stewing in Ireland. You know the name Dedalus? Well, if you pronounce it really slowly and enunciate it out it sounds like die day lie us, or some such thing. We die day by day. Fascinating. What do you think?”
Joe gripped his small black wheel. “It’s possible. Joyce said a lot of things.”
“Yes!” I shouted sticking my head out the window feeling sharp Irish sea wind lash my face.
I turned to Joe, changing the subject. “Yes, Chief Joseph of the Nez Pierce tribe said, “My heart is sick and tired. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.”
“I never heard of him,” Joe said.
“White people discovered gold on their territory in 1863 and moved them off their land. It’s everybody’s land. That’s what the native Americans told them. We’re only caretakers of Mother Earth.
“In 1877 he tried to lead his people to a reservation in Idaho. Seven hundred warriors battled 2,000 U.S. soldiers across 1,400 miles in a beautiful tactical retreat.
“They got massacred by the white soldiers. His people froze to death near the Canadian border. They took survivors to a concentration camp in Oklahoma. It was pure genocide. On the reservations soldiers gave the Indians corn to eat and they fed it to their livestock.
“Chief Joseph was finally allowed to return to the Pacific Northwest in 1885 where he died of a broken heart.”
“I see,” Joe said when I took a breath. We traveled along the rocky road to Dublin in silence. One, two, three, four, five down the rocky road all the way to Dublin leaving them broken hearted.
The gendarme shifted in his sleep and he slipped the papers back into the green satchel.
07.15.2009