|
"This is the paradise
". Ahmed works at Lanzarote,
and he gets back to Tarfaya when he can, he's another of the Ma El Ainin
spread between the Sahara and the Canary Islands, the last fires of
the last literate tribe emerged from the desert, able to read, to write
and to appreciate books, and that clings to the grandeur of what it
was to support the misery of a present where the pre-modern values that
is the courage and the physical endurance, the pride and not breaking
one's word, the companionship are not anymore enough to justify a role
or a dignity. "Here you can take a walk and meditate. You can pray,
you can appeal your conscience. Surrounded by sea and desert you understand
you are a little thing and which stupid worries you charge yourself
and your life ".
Drinking green tea and
looking at old pictures of Tarfaya of seventy years, you feel the sweet
melancholy that the images of the past, filtered by the outlook of the
present, give you, the comparison between what it was and what it turned
into, the spell of what does not exist anymore and the letdown for what
took its place. From the airport of Laayoune, flying over the cost,
the landscape that Saint-Exupery was so familiar with, catches you again,
turned so alike by distance.
The year spent at Cap
Juby influenced his life by a multiplying effect that the time spent
in an intensive way has in comparison with its chronological duration.
He learned there to
be an ambassador, to save lives, to risk his own life, and his sheets
filled of magnificent images are plenty of piety and poetry: "We've
nourished with the spell of the sands, other people maybe will dig their
oil wells and will enrich by their goods; but they will be in delay.
Since the prohibited
palm groves and the shell dust gave us their most precious side: they
did not have but an hour of fervour, and we were who lived it".
|
