Chapter 2

‘Abird cannot be angry at atree.’

(What Ismael said at night, on the other side of the mosquito net)

It’s not that in the desert I miss things – the Chagall girl, Millais’s stained-glass windows, Bach fugues – but there are things I don’t know how to see. Things in a tree, in the air, at the edge of a house.

I brought a chair from the hotel room and put it under a tree. The receptionist and I had reached a compromise. She showed me a fridge where I could keep my yogurt and a bottle of mineral water. Some time had passed since I last saw Ismael. Meanwhile, things happened that we didn’t share. For instance, I called my father and told him I wouldn’t be back anytime soon. That I intended to rent a house and sit on the roof, where I’d watch the grass in flames, the burning birds, whose wings were licked by the fire when they flew too close to the ground, or at least I’d see whirlwinds. Some people here believe that a woman will be born from the whirling wind if you throw a boiled egg in its eye. But I didn’t tell my father that, I mean, I didn’t tell his answering machine. A deep, well-tempered voice came on, sporting dark hair with just a dash of silver at the temples, and said he was out at the moment. Not, I hope, because of the key turned in the latch.

The night before had been unbearably hot, so we all expected a downpour. I arranged myself so I could see half the building and half the avenue. Something static and something moving. Some people were riding motorcycles and creating exhaust fumes, while others merely walked on foot, their light sandals making a clop-clop sound. I looked at my own feet. Here I liked to go barefoot, liked to feel the hot red earth ooze between my toes, liked how, as evening approached, when the landscape grew still, when even the clouds stopped moving and the trees for a time lost meaning, the coolness would touch my ankles and travel up through my body. I might have gone on with this description of the loneliness that had settled in me if a white woman in a narrow printed skirt hadn’t then been approaching from the direction of the hotel entrance. We smiled at each other sourly – she tucked her hair behind her ears, from embarrassment, I suppose; I looked at the ground bashfully, although from the corner of my eye I caught the slight thrust of her hips against the batik, which made me think she wanted to be somebody else. Not a woman walking past me, but somebody else.

I poked at the ground with my foot, as if looking for something, as if some time earlier I’d lost something there, something I longed for, although in fact I was longing to run into Ismael again. He’d be standing across the street, tall, slender, and would be studying me with his eyes. Should he approach, or not? Should he smile, or say simply, you were looking at me? And I wouldn’t say what I said then, but something entirely different.

But maybe it would be better to admit something at this point. Ismael knew the hotel, knew the city like the back of his hand; he would know how to find me. So the ritual with the chair was just a momentary scene, and at the same it wasn’t. It was a good thing the electricity went out in the room, in the whole building in fact. That way my barefoot set-up under the tree was more legitimate. Although I think a few people had