Stories of the Sahara

by Sanmao

  The Desert Bathing Spectacle

  One day around dusk, José had a sudden impulse to shave off his wild mane of hair. Upon hearing this, I immediately went into the kitchen to fetch the shears we use for gutting fish, thinking I would also tie a dishrag around his neck.

  ‘Please sit still,’ I said.

  He started in fright. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Cutting your hair,’ I said, grabbing a big tuft.

  ‘Don’t you get enough of a kick from cutting your own?’ He took another step back.

  ‘The town barber is no match for me. Let’s save you the money. Come here!’ I tried to nab him again.

  José grabbed hold of his keys and fled. I set the shears down and chased after him. Five minutes later, we were sitting in that dirty, stuffy barbershop. José, the barber and I were all arguing over what to do with his hair, each of us unwilling to concede. The barber was very unhappy and scowled at me.

  ‘Sanmao, can you just go outside?’ José said impatiently.

  ‘Give me some money and I’ll go.’

  I burrowed into José’s pocket and found a blue banknote, then strode outside. The small road behind the barbershop led out of town. It was dirty and filled with piles of rubbish, flies buzzing about in swarms. A herd of skinny goats were foraging for things to eat.

  I had never been to this area before. I walked past a decrepit house with no windows and a mound of withered thorny plants at the doorstep. Curious, I paused to take a closer look. There was a sign by the door that read: ‘Hot Spring’. I was astounded. How could there be a spring inside this house atop a pile of rubbish? I decided to walk to the wooden door, which was ajar, and poke my head in.

  Standing in the bright sun and looking into the dark interior, I could barely make anything out. I just heard an exclamation of surprise, someone yelling, ‘Ah… ah…’ along with people shouting in Arabic at each other. I turned and ran back a few steps, my head in a fog. What were the people in there doing? And why would they be so afraid of me?

  Abruptly a middle-aged man in a long Sahrawi gown dashed outside. Seeing that I still hadn’t run off, he rushed over as though he were about to grab me.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he questioned me angrily in Spanish. ‘Why are you peeping at people taking baths?’

  ‘Baths?’ I was confounded.

  ‘Shameless woman. Get out! Shoo, shoo. . .’ He waved his hands about as though he were chasing away a chicken.

  ‘Stop your shooing and wait a moment,’ I yelled back at him. ‘Hey, so what exactly are people doing inside there?’ I walked back towards the house again.

  ‘Baths. Taking. Baths. No more looking.’ He shooed me once more.

  ‘You can take baths here?’ Curiosity welled in my heart.

  ‘Yes!’ The man was getting impatient.

  ‘How does it work? How do you do it?’ I was very excited. This was the first time I heard that the Sahrawi took baths, so I had to get to the bottom of it.

  ‘You will know when you come bathe,’ he said.

  ‘I can take a bath here, too?’ I asked, flattered.

  ‘Women between eight in the morning and noon. Forty pesetas.’

  ‘Many thanks, many thanks. I’ll come back tomorrow.’

  I immediately rushed back to the barbershop to tell José about this new discovery.

  The next morning, I grabbed a big towel and trod through thick mounds of goat droppings back to the ‘hot spring’. It stank the whole way. Truly turned my stomach, to be honest. Pushing open the door, I entered and saw a middle-aged Sahrawi woman who looked shrewd but aggressive. I assumed she was the proprietress.

  ‘You want to take a bath? Pay first.’

  I gave her forty pesetas, then looked at my surroundings. Apart from a pile of rusty buckets filled with water, there was nothing else in this room. The light was very dim. A naked woman came out to fetch a bucket before going back inside.

  ‘How do you wash?’ I was gawping left and right like a yokel.

  ‘Come, come with me.’ The proprietress grabbed me by the hand and escorted me to another room that was only about the size of three or four tatami mats. There were a few steel wires from which hung Sahrawi women’s underwear, skirts, fabric for wrapping the body and so on. A pungent odour assaulted my nostrils. I stopped breathing.

  ‘Here, take off your clothes,’ commanded the proprietress.

  Without making a sound, I took off all my clothes except for the bikini that I’d put on at home. I hung up the discarded clothes on the steel wire.

  ‘Take it off!’ urged the proprietress again.

  ‘I’m done.’ I gave her a dirty look.

  ‘How can you wash while wearing this strange thing?’ she asked, reaching out a hand to rudely grab at my flower-print bikini.

  ‘How I wash is my business.’ I pushed aside her hand and glared at her again.

  ‘Fine. Now go out and get buckets.’

  I obediently went to get two empty buckets.

  ‘You can start washing through here.’ She opened another door. We went deeper into the house, each segment connected to the next like a loaf of brioche. The hot spring finally appeared. It was the first time I’d seen water well up from the ground in the desert. I felt very emotional. Here it was in a deep well in the middle of a house. Quite a few women were drawing water and laughing amongst themselves. It was a lovely and charming scene. With a bucket in each hand, I stared like an idiot at the women. When they saw that I was wearing clothes, everyone stopped what they were doing.

  We looked at each other with small smiles. These women didn’t know too much Spanish. One of them came over, helped me fill the bucket with water and spoke to me in a very good-natured tone. ‘Like this, like this.’ Then she poured an entire bucket of water onto my head. As I hurriedly wiped my face, another bucket of water came down on me.

  I ran away to a corner, thanking her profusely. I didn’t dare ask for more guidance.

  ‘Cold?’ asked another woman. I nodded, extremely embar­rassed. ‘If you’re cold, then go in.’ They pulled open the next door. Who knew how many segments there were in this bread-loaf of a house? I was taken deeper into yet another room. A blast of heat hit my face. It was so foggy I couldn’t see anything in here. I waited a few seconds, struggling to discern the four walls around me, and reached out a hand to feel my way around. I treaded cautiously until I felt somebody’s leg beneath me. Bending down, I noticed for the first time that there were rows and rows of women sitting in this tiny room. On the opposite wall, a large tank bubbled with hot water. The fog was coming from there. It looked a lot like a Turkish bath.

  Somebody opened the door for a few minutes. The air cooled down and I could finally see clearly again. Each of these women had a bucket or two by their side, all of them filled with cold well water. The temperature was so high here that the ground was steaming and hot to the touch. I couldn’t keep my feet in one place. I had no idea how those women seated on the ground could tolerate it.

  ‘Come sit here,’ said a naked woman by the wall, moving aside to make space for me.

  ‘I’m fine with standing. Thanks!’ Glancing at the muddy ground, I honestly wouldn’t have been able to sit even without the heat. I noticed all the women had little flat stones that they were dipping in water and scraping their bodies with. With every scrape, a black trail would appear in the thick grime. They didn’t use any soap, nor much water. They scraped all over their bodies to loosen up the dirt before washing.

  ‘Four years, I haven’t bathed in four years,’ one woman said to me cheerfully. ‘I live in a khaima, in the desert far, far away…’ I stopped breathing while she spoke to me. She lifted the bucket over her head and poured the water onto herself. Through the steam, I saw that the thick black water was slowly trickling onto my clean bare feet. My stomach churned. I stood still, biting my lower lip.

  ‘Why aren’t you washing? I’ll lend you my stone to scrape with.’ She kindly handed her stone to me.
>
  ‘I’m not dirty. I bathed at home.’

  ‘Why would you come here if you’re not dirty? I wash once every three, four years.’ She still looked pretty filthy even after washing. This room was very small and windowless and steam rose continuously from the tank. My heart was racing, sweat beading on my skin like raindrops. On top of that, there were so many people, the stench of their bodies intermingling. I felt like I might vomit. Moving over a bit, I leaned on the damp wall until I realised that it was coated in a thick layer of something slippery like snot. A good portion of my back was already drenched. I gritted my teeth and furiously wiped my back with my towel.

  According to the aesthetics of the desert, plump women were considered the most beautiful, so average women would do anything they could to gain weight. Usually when women went out, besides wearing a long gown, they would wrap a large piece of fabric over their heads and bodies until they were tightly sealed. The more fashionable ones might throw on a pair of sunglasses. Then you really couldn’t tell what they looked like any more. I was used to seeing women wrapped up like mummies. Seeing their huge naked bodies all of a sudden was both striking and frightening.

  Talk about a bathhouse unmasked. I was like a slender stalk of dog’s-tail grass growing next to a big fat dairy cow, completely eclipsed in comparison. One woman had scraped her body all over until black grime was everywhere. Before she could rinse off, one of her children started crying from the other room. Naked, she ran over and came back with a baby in her arms. She plopped down on the ground and began to breastfeed. The dirty water from her chin, neck, face and hair all trickled down to her chest, which her kid just drank in with the breastmilk.

  I was stupefied at this horrifically filthy sight. My stomach fluttered again. I couldn’t take it any more. I turned around and ran. Once I got to the outermost room, I gulped down the fresh air before going back to the steel wire to retrieve my clothes.

  ‘They said you didn’t bathe, just stood around staring. What is there to look at?’ The boss lady seemed bemused in asking me.

  ‘Just seeing how you bathe,’ I replied with a smile.

  Her eyes widened. ‘You spent forty pesetas just to look?’

  ‘Not too bad. It was worth it.’

  ‘This place is for washing the outside of the body,’ she added. ‘You must wash inside, too.’

  ‘Wash inside?’ I didn’t get what she meant by that. She made a colon-cleansing gesture with her hands. I was taken aback. ‘Where do you do that? Please tell me.’ I was so scared and excited, I buttoned my clothes up wrong.

  ‘By the sea. You go see at Cabo Bojador. There are many khaima. Everyone goes to stay there in the spring and bathe for seven days.’

  That night I told José about it as I was fixing supper. ‘She said you have to wash inside, too, next to the sea at Bojador.’

  ‘Are you sure you heard right?’ José was also shocked.

  ‘Yes, no doubt. She even made a gesture. I want to take a look.’ I begged José. It wasn’t too far to the Atlantic Coast from our small town of El Aaiún, less than four hundred kilometres round trip. We could go and come back in one day.

  We’d heard before that there was a bay at Bojador. The nearly 1,000 kilometres of shoreline of the Spanish Sahara was almost completely rocky, with no beaches. We followed the tyre tracks of the cars before us, driving all the way without once getting lost. Once we reached the shore, we spent another hour driving along the rocky coast looking for Cabo Bojador.

  ‘Look, down there,’ José said. We parked the car next to a cliff. A few dozen metres below, the blue sea lapped gently at a semicircular bay. Countless white tents were set up all along the beach. There were men, women and children running about. Everyone looked serene and at ease.

  ‘Who’d have known you could live like this in this crazy world?’ I sighed with envy. It looked like paradise down there.

  José went to survey the cliff and report back. ‘We can’t go down from here. I already looked around and didn’t find any footholds. The people below must use a secret path.’

  He came back to the car and got out a rope, tying it to the bumper. Then he placed a large rock behind the tyres so they were secured in place. Once the rope was fastened, he threw it down the face of the cliff.

  ‘Let me show you. Don’t throw your entire weight onto the rope. You have to get a firm foothold on the rock. The rope is just to stabilise you. Afraid?’ I stood at the edge of the cliff listening to him explain, shivering in the wind. ‘Are you scared?’ he asked again.

  ‘Very scared,’ I said truthfully. ‘Very.’

  ‘Well, let me go first, if that’s the case. You follow.’ José slung his camera equipment over his shoulder and headed down. I took off my shoes and went barefoot after him. About halfway down, a strange bird began circling around me. I was afraid it would peck my eyes out so I hurried my way towards the bottom. In my distraction, I managed to reach the ground without too much trouble.

  ‘Shh! Over here.’ José was behind a large rock.

  He told me not to make a sound. It turned out there were several completely naked Sahrawi women fetching seawater. These women were taking their buckets up the beach and pouring the water into a very large jar. At the bottom of the jar was a hose for the water to flow out. As one woman lay on the sand, another inserted the hose into the reclining woman’s body like an enema, lifting the jar in her hands. The water flowed down the hose and into the recumbent woman’s bowels. I shook José, pointing at the scene unfolding in the distance. I wanted him to ready his equipment, but he was too shocked to remember to take photos.

  Once the full jar of water had been emptied, the woman at her side poured more seawater into the jar, continuing to pump it into the one who was lying down. The woman on the ground couldn’t stop herself from moaning and groaning after three rounds of this. While getting filled with yet another bucket of water, she started screeching as though she were in great agony. We were scared shitless, watching from behind the rocks.

  When the hose was finally pulled out, it was inserted into another woman’s body for the next cleansing. Meanwhile, the woman who’d already been pumped full of water was getting even more water through the mouth. According to what the proprietress of the ‘hot spring’ had said, they had to do this three times a day for seven days before they finished. This was truly what you would call a spring cleaning. It was unbelievable that a person could accommodate so much water in her body.

  A short while later, the woman who was full of water staggered to her feet and slowly made her way over in our direction. She squatted over the sand and began to excrete. All sorts of horrible stuff from her bowels came gushing forth. After excreting a pile, she moved back a few steps to excrete again while using her hands to cover up her waste with some sand. Just like that, excreting and burying at the same time, she repeated this ten or more times without stopping. When this squatting woman suddenly started to sing, I couldn’t hold it in any longer and burst into laughter. It was a totally ridiculous sight and I couldn’t help myself.

  José jumped up to cover my mouth, but it was already too late. The naked woman had turned her head and spotted us behind the rocks. Her face contorted in surprise, mouth open. She dashed far away before she started to shriek. We stood up when we heard this. Then we saw many people running towards us from the cluster of tents. The woman was pointing a finger at us. The angry mob flew at us with brutal intention.

  ‘Run, José!’ I yelled and ran off. I wanted to laugh but I was too nervous. Looking behind me, I cried out, ‘Don’t forget to grab your camera!’

  Once we scrambled to where our rope was dangling, José pushed me up with great effort. I don’t know where I found the capability, but I made it to the top of the cliff in no time. José came up not long after. Although there was clearly no path leading to this precipice and our pursuers didn’t follow us up the rope, they still managed to surface from some secret byway, giving us a real fright. We pushed aside the rock t
hat was blocking our car tyre. There was no time to untie the rope. Just as soon as I threw myself into the car, we sped off like we had been shot out of a cannon.

  More than a week later, I was still mourning the beautiful sandals I’d left at the cliff, but I didn’t dare drive back there to look for them. When José came home from work, I heard him talking to a Sahrawi friend outside the window. ‘I heard recently there is an Oriental woman who likes to watch everyone take baths,’ the guy was sounding out José. ‘People say your—’

  ‘I’ve never heard of this,’ José replied. ‘My wife has never been to Cabo Bojador.’

  My God, I thought when I heard this. This fool’s about to give us away! I ran outside in a huff. ‘I have! I know about the Oriental woman watching people bathe,’ I said, face full of smiles. José looked astonished. ‘Didn’t you hear about the plane full of Japanese tourists that came last week? The Japanese love studying how others wash, especially Japanese women. They like to ask where people bathe. . .’

  José pointed a finger at me, his mouth wide open. I shoved his hand back down. Upon hearing what I’d said, our Sahrawi friend had an epiphany. ‘So it was a Japanese. I thought, I thought…’ He looked at me, his face reddening.

  ‘You thought it was me, right? I actually don’t have any interests besides cooking and washing clothes. You got it wrong.’

  ‘Sorry, I was mistaken,’ he said, blushing again. ‘Sorry.’

  After this guy had walked off far into the distance, I stood there leaning against the doorframe, my eyes shut and a small smile on my face. ‘No more daydreaming, Madame Butterfly.’ José gave me a smack on the head out of the blue. ‘Time to make dinner!’

  Looking for Love

  A tiny little grocery store opened up near our home about seven or eight months ago. With almost anything you could imagine available to purchase, life suddenly became much more convenient for us residents living some distance from town. No longer did I need to make a long journey under the blazing sun with my bags large and small.