It was the scrag-end of darkness: the time when there is still no edge of dawn, but the night is unmistakeably dead and the earliest of the day’s risers are beginning to crawl over its carcass. In England they used to be milkmen; in Indonesia it was fat Chinese businessmen jogging slowly and walking backwards around middle class compounds. In Cairo I only remember a pair of men on bicycles.
As the taxi sped over roads worn smooth and cracked and edged with yellow dirt I peered, as always, through the window.
An Ottoman-style mosque on a hilltop, minarets rocketing into a sky that now was showing a faint white stain on its eastern edge; the long sprawl of yellow-brown gravestones, crooked under orange street lamps, in the City of the Dead; figures in twisted head -cloths standing in the roadside dust, and by the time I arrived where I was going, somewhere in the southern suburb of Maadi the flat light that runs before heat had made its break across the city, and there was a skinny white cat mincing along a red wall with a tangle of creepers behind it.
All I wanted was to go to bed.
It doesn’t take long for the tender skin of your feet to thicken into great callused pads when the summer comes and you stop wearing shoes to walk over the yellow stones of the yard and to clamber over warm granite beside the clear-sharp water. It seems the same thing can happen to your eyes, and you ears and your nose – and almost as quickly.
***
The first foreign country I visited was Spain when I was sixteen – not very long ago. I still think that Spain is the most exotic country I’ve ever seen, though it’s impossible to explain why without tumbling hopelessly among clichés. I came down the good way, from the ferry in Santander. It was morning – and you should always arrive in the morning. There was smooth-purple water outside the porthole in the first light, and strips of white sand with green trees behind and then the sun came up and there was a chaos of traffic and they didn’t check our passports and the streets were laid out in a grid and then we were all on a bus going west, along the coast to Galicia.
That was my first long bus ride, and I think it was where my perverse love of road journeys with a big window to look out of at a new countryside started.
This was the first time I’d seen anything foreign. I think I took only shallow, quickened breaths the whole day, and scarcely stopped blinking, rapidly, urgently. And I had a cramp in my neck from twisting it to the right for hours (it was dusk when we rolled into the bleak industrial suburbs of el Ferrol. The others (we were a team of watersportsmen) lolled their heads back or threw up in sandwich boxes, but I looked out of the window.
Little farmsteads with flat roofs and a patch of maize with limp leaves, and a small tractor parked beside the door, or sometimes a wooden cart with the timbers grey and scored with deep cracks; thin-needled pine trees and the sun on the high cliff faces when the road cut through a tight range of mountains with thin green grass and yellow flowers and goats on the lower slopes, and the way there was real coffee from a silver machine and baguettes stuffed with ham the colour of lovebites wrapped in thin cling-film in the service station, and there were two policemen in military-green sitting on high stools at the counter, drinking coffee, and I couldn’t stop staring at the pistols in the holsters that hung loose at their hips. There were openings of narrow water, and sometimes broad, wind-touched bays under a yellow sky. In the afternoon when the light was long and turning to copper and time was slowing down a little there was high country and empty villages with white walls and a village square full of trees with trunks as thick around as a small car, but scarcely taller than the little one-storey houses. There were benches painted blue under the trees, and when it was growing darker there was broken country with quarries and railway lines running uphill and a train with open trucks, each carrying a great roll of steel, fresh from the foundry, and there were bleak towerblocks in the gloaming when we came to Ferrol. And there were other things I saw in the five days I spent there, which was probably all Arrival if you think about it: two men in blue jeans riding great muscular horses along the edge of the road beside the flat water of the docks, near the tower blocks. It was evening and they wore no helmets and rode western-style and the horses moved like they were wild. There was wine and pilsner beer and white cheese and olives; and being able to smell the pine trees even when you were in the water, out beyond the line of the breaking surf at the beach at Doniňos, and the sand hot underfoot and the way the ground looked so soft and green between the trees that ran back from the road and how I wanted to get off the bus and go and sleep there at night. The little pilgrims’ parade and how it looked like they would drop the statue of the Virgin from its pall as they turned into the courtyard of the tiny chapel beside the great deep-water harbour where I came third in the sea kayak race, and the waiter in the little bar that was called the Table of the Six Pines who gave us burning liquor with three coffee beans floating in it for free after we ate the fried pork and good fresh bread… and the girl with black eyes and hair in ringlets and the high old buildings with their fine windows and the straight alleyways around the slab-stone square and the crooked alleyways near the harbour lined with dark little bars that someone told us were brothels and the sound of cicadas… and I didn’t stop breathing in short, urgent gasps.
And then you grow those thick, leathery calluses and all that slips past them is the outline of an Ottoman mosque and the image of a thin cat on a red wall, and the man behind the formica-topped counter in the narrow, shabby hallway who is thumbing your passport with thick brown thumbs might as well be a Pakistani or an Indonesian or a Maghrebi or a Bengali or a Spaniard as an Egyptian Arab and all you want to do is sleep…
The first foreign country I visited was Spain when I was sixteen – not very long ago. I still think that Spain is the most exotic country I’ve ever seen, though it’s impossible to explain why without tumbling hopelessly among clichés. I came down the good way, from the ferry in Santander. It was morning – and you should always arrive in the morning. There was smooth-purple water outside the porthole in the first light, and strips of white sand with green trees behind and then the sun came up and there was a chaos of traffic and they didn’t check our passports and the streets were laid out in a grid and then we were all on a bus going west, along the coast to Galicia.
That was my first long bus ride, and I think it was where my perverse love of road journeys with a big window to look out of at a new countryside started.
This was the first time I’d seen anything foreign. I think I took only shallow, quickened breaths the whole day, and scarcely stopped blinking, rapidly, urgently. And I had a cramp in my neck from twisting it to the right for hours (it was dusk when we rolled into the bleak industrial suburbs of el Ferrol. The others (we were a team of watersportsmen) lolled their heads back or threw up in sandwich boxes, but I looked out of the window.
Little farmsteads with flat roofs and a patch of maize with limp leaves, and a small tractor parked beside the door, or sometimes a wooden cart with the timbers grey and scored with deep cracks; thin-needled pine trees and the sun on the high cliff faces when the road cut through a tight range of mountains with thin green grass and yellow flowers and goats on the lower slopes, and the way there was real coffee from a silver machine and baguettes stuffed with ham the colour of lovebites wrapped in thin cling-film in the service station, and there were two policemen in military-green sitting on high stools at the counter, drinking coffee, and I couldn’t stop staring at the pistols in the holsters that hung loose at their hips. There were openings of narrow water, and sometimes broad, wind-touched bays under a yellow sky. In the afternoon when the light was long and turning to copper and time was slowing down a little there was high country and empty villages with white walls and a village square full of trees with trunks as thick around as a small car, but scarcely taller than the little one-storey houses. There were benches painted blue under the trees, and when it was growing darker there was broken country with quarries and railway lines running uphill and a train with open trucks, each carrying a great roll of steel, fresh from the foundry, and there were bleak towerblocks in the gloaming when we came to Ferrol. And there were other things I saw in the five days I spent there, which was probably all Arrival if you think about it: two men in blue jeans riding great muscular horses along the edge of the road beside the flat water of the docks, near the tower blocks. It was evening and they wore no helmets and rode western-style and the horses moved like they were wild. There was wine and pilsner beer and white cheese and olives; and being able to smell the pine trees even when you were in the water, out beyond the line of the breaking surf at the beach at Doniňos, and the sand hot underfoot and the way the ground looked so soft and green between the trees that ran back from the road and how I wanted to get off the bus and go and sleep there at night. The little pilgrims’ parade and how it looked like they would drop the statue of the Virgin from its pall as they turned into the courtyard of the tiny chapel beside the great deep-water harbour where I came third in the sea kayak race, and the waiter in the little bar that was called the Table of the Six Pines who gave us burning liquor with three coffee beans floating in it for free after we ate the fried pork and good fresh bread… and the girl with black eyes and hair in ringlets and the high old buildings with their fine windows and the straight alleyways around the slab-stone square and the crooked alleyways near the harbour lined with dark little bars that someone told us were brothels and the sound of cicadas… and I didn’t stop breathing in short, urgent gasps.
And then you grow those thick, leathery calluses and all that slips past them is the outline of an Ottoman mosque and the image of a thin cat on a red wall, and the man behind the formica-topped counter in the narrow, shabby hallway who is thumbing your passport with thick brown thumbs might as well be a Pakistani or an Indonesian or a Maghrebi or a Bengali or a Spaniard as an Egyptian Arab and all you want to do is sleep…
***
The thickening on the soles of your feet goes away after a winter on soft carpets in socks and shoes, but until then it’s always there so you can walk upright without flinching over the sharp black gravel of the lane when the tar is melting in the August heat. The other thickenings – the calluses that numb your sense of Arrival – are not a problem once you know they are there; you just have to learn to keep yourself looking, actively, because you will no longer do it automatically… I remember thinking that as I went down like a drowning man into a leaden sleep, still wearing my clothes, on my back on a hard bed in a shabby bedroom with a broken sink in the southern suburbs of Cairo: keep looking, keep looking…
The thickening on the soles of your feet goes away after a winter on soft carpets in socks and shoes, but until then it’s always there so you can walk upright without flinching over the sharp black gravel of the lane when the tar is melting in the August heat. The other thickenings – the calluses that numb your sense of Arrival – are not a problem once you know they are there; you just have to learn to keep yourself looking, actively, because you will no longer do it automatically… I remember thinking that as I went down like a drowning man into a leaden sleep, still wearing my clothes, on my back on a hard bed in a shabby bedroom with a broken sink in the southern suburbs of Cairo: keep looking, keep looking…
© Tim Hannigan 2007
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