Bedouin Woman Takes The Leftovers

He said goodbye to the barber, nodded to the man with silver hair in his chair getting a trim, reconnected with wisdom and daily affirmations passing an old man smoking his Cuban cigar in a shaft of sunlight.

Well heeled fashionable Cadiz women with and without their children in wheeled prams shoveling sweets into their mouths paraded past going to the Iglesia de San Juan de Dios with it’s splendid wide inlaid stones, lined with palms, flanked by cafes with ‘Novelty’ metal chairs holding tired tourists and relaxed natives smoking, drinking coffee, talking in multiple tongues, eating soft hot pastries, studying creased paper maps filled with diagrams of historical reference with their foreign furrowed brows watching humanity find their way in the world.

White shirted waiters scurried from table to table. They placed their orders with women behind counters wearing white laboratory technician coats. The lone plaza resident, a tall black bearded madman with untied tennis shoes roamed the perimeter looking for someone to hustle, looking for Charity’s leftovers.

A crude hand painted sign around his neck read, "I am a gypsy. Our people came here in the 9th century and we're not going away."

He remembered the Bedouin woman covered in black who hovered near him in Marrakech when he had chicken, rice, bread and water on a side street. He sat away from chickens turning on gas fired circles. He was always living on the edge of somewhere else in the world and understood her motivation. Hunger.

She approached him with her hand out. “May you have blessings.”
He answered in Arabic. “May you be well with a long life. I’ll leave food for you.”

She waited across the street trapped between parked cars watching through slits in fabric. Her eyes were the world. He watched her watch people eating. She was calm and silent. Wild cats roamed their malnourished skeletons around eaters’ feet staying away from a waiter’s swift shoe. She watched and waited.

He fed abstract scraps to cats. They fought over bones in the dust hissing and dragging bones to shelter. The Red City was full of dust as caravans full of salt, gold and slaves moved north across the Sahara.

Feeding cats became a ritual in Morocco for him. A passion for the hungry animals. They were all in the same fix, roaming, lost, looking, trying to survive in desperate circumstances. They were everywhere.

He didn’t eat everything. He left the table to pay and she closed in. Her blackness swooped like a dream across the pavement. They were a team. His going off to pay meant the waiter couldn’t clear the table because he had to figure the charges. She was free to collect everything.

Like magic she produced a plastic bag from under her black robe, picked up the plate and dumped everything inside; bones, meat, rice, tomatoes. The works.

She was fast and efficient. She glided away and took up her position across the street in shadows.

He paid and walked past her. They locked eyes. He was naked, she was covered in her belief. Her invisible clear eyes flashed a brief recognition and he nodded. She smiled under her veil. Their relationship of mutual respect ignored verbal language.