|
With the low tide water
reaches your waistline. Seventy years ago the Casa del Mar was on the
beach, the ocean in front, the desert behind. The extension of the harbour
and the action of the currents have stressed its characteristic of little
island, a ruin heap, a refuge for seagulls. Arisen as a jail, the Spanish
turn it into a fortress, but the inside in ruins recalls a perimeter
that with its loop-holes and hopper lights reconfigures a frequency
of cells and not rooms.
Latécoere was the name
of the French company of transports, and the black-varnished writing
is still there. Here airplanes, the 130 kilometres per hour slight biplanes
Breguet, landed and took-off; here the radio station received and transmitted.
Between the lands of Africa and the sea of the Americas, Cap Juby was
the last European outpost, two hundred people that turned into two thousand
whereas the Moor tribes halted here chasing water. Nowadays it calls
Tarfaya, and around the ancient military fortifications it has developed
a few thousand inhabitants village. Notwithstanding, that name, Cap
Juby, encloses a vocation and its consecration: Antoine de Saint-Exupery
got there as a pilot to leave this place as a writer. From a South carrier
to the 'Little Prince', to 'Citadel', the whole work of his is marked
by that stage that changed his life by revealing him to himself. Along
the frame that faces the Casa del Mar, a little iron airplane reminds
him. At a century from his birthing, this modest sculpture that makes
red-hot under the sun, witnesses the fragile grandeur of whom that tried
to embroil time with writing.
"But do you really want
to stop at Tarfaya?" The chief of the Gendarmerie royale is a little
perplex and a little worried.
Here, until twenty years
ago there was the Spanish Sahara, tribes felt Saharan before Moroccan,
they opposite colonialisms but were too much independent to accept without
striking a blow the Rabat's government and monarchy. Here it arose the
Polisario (Seguia-El-Hamra and Rio de Oro liberation Popular front),
there are still rebel ,more heterodirected by Algeria than corresponding
to a real resistance by the local population, and the United Nations
troupes stand in order to ensure order waiting for a referendum for
the self-determination that over last ten years has been postponed and
nobody can say neither if it will be carried out nor when. In brief,
the warrior aristocracy families of the past times are put under control
by who fairs that the old prerogatives could stop or contrast the nationalization
and integration carried out over last years.
At Tarfaya there's
nothing, the two little hotels hosting travellers passing through are
two hovels, with a cam bed, a jug and a blanket, the evening stresses
the stifling heat, during the night the silence regains possession of
the dust of vehicles. "Really do you want to stop at Tarfaya?", he asks
me astonished.
When, at the umpteenth
time I tell him about Saint-Exupery, he shakes his head: "Mais Tarfaya
c'est un petit village oublié dans le desert. N'est pas important...".
|
