Love and Desire

I had dinner last night with Mohamed, a 29 year old student of Biology and the Environment with a lot of interest in global warming and nuclear waste. We talked trash. He told me recycling was just beginning to become an accepted concept in Algeria, but that the predominant attitude remained simply to toss everything into the desert. It pains him, and he speaks of the desert in animate terms, as a thing alive.

'Hamed

Hamed might be in love with a Swiss girl who works in the Zurich post office and shares an apartment with a girlfriend, and who may or may not love him. They have known each other for 15 years, and every year she has come to Ghardaia and Tamanrasset for vacation to see him. This year, however, she and her girlfriend decided to go to Guatemala instead, a turn of events potentially fraught with meaning.

When asked if they had slept together, he said “Yes, but only in Switzerland. Never here”. He showed me her picture, a wonderfully normal looking girl in T shirt and jeans with dyed red hair sitting on a hay wagon on a summer day in Switzerland. She is looking away.

We are listening to Nina Simone on the stereo, her version of “I’ll Put a Spell on You” reducing us to silence. ‘Hamed pokes a bit at the fire and says finally, “The girls around here just don’t understand this kind of music”. He is haunted by the possibility of a life in Switzerland, haunted by his love for the desert and the fact that she will not live here, haunted even by the possibility that his life will always be thus: haunted by “what ifs” and “wouldn’t it be wonderfuls”; haunted, I suppose, by his own desires.

We are joined by a friend of Said, a 47 year old guy in sports management who organized the 6th annual “Marathon des Dunes” here in Ghardaia. He has been married 22 years and has 4 kids and speaks openly of his very occasional affairs with younger women, showing me proudly on his “portable” the picture of a 29 year old professor in Algiers who isn’t his latest conquest, but who remains in his heart. His latest girlfriend is 19, he says.

I ask him how this is all arranged, with so many women closed off and protected. “Ahhh…”, and his eyes alight and he offers a secret smile to communicate his command of the issue. “One simply needs an emissary”.

“A man has a wide open heart, and a woman’s heart is closed very tightly: this is nature. So it is that the man invites into his heart so many people: to fill his heart. Think into the past, of a time when you loved more than one woman, and you will understand that it is true”. My admission that I had once juggled two girlfriends in college satisfied him immensely.

Example of Mohammed's carving

“What about divorce”, I asked.
“Very uncommon. Here, a man and a woman agree to a marriage but might spend years arranging for a house, and for the ceremony and so forth, and they will do so without physical contact in all this time. Thus their desire grows slowly to an incredible fire, and the first night together is an incredible experience. This is not the fast food of the United States, you understand. This is for an eternity”.

'Hamed

Frank Sinatra followed Nina Simone, the fire dimmed, the tea was finished. Three guys sitting around a table on a cold night, shooting the breeze. It was 4pm in Boston and Mia was just getting home from school and I hadn’t talked to her in days, so I got up for the call on the satellite phone and said “Bon nuit”.

Ghardaia, Algeria