Portraits from a Floating World: A Passage from Africa to Europe

 

From a 1971 journal – thus the reference to Rhodesia.  This is one of a series of monologues, here a small cluster of voices, heard during the chance encounters of travel.  For others, see “Portraits from a Floating World” in Travel (section 10 of the Index), found under the current month in the Blog Archive on the right of the page.

 

     Once, when the Libyans refused us entry into their country from Tunisia, we turned back toward Europe and booked deck passage to Palermo.  On the route it seemed we were virtually never out of sight of some little island, perhaps just a rock protruding from  the unruly surface of the Mediterranean.  Many of the people we met on board seemed as rootless and itinerant as ourselves which was, at that time, saying something.

     During boarding, before we were sorted into the proper shipboard neighborhood to which our tickets entitled us, we chatted with an older lady traveling alone who looked like something of a lost grande dame.  She told us she had just been on safaris in Kenya and Tanzania and had concluded that she much preferred Rhodesia, saying, “They know how to do things more or less properly there, though  I can’t imagine why.”  We thought we probably knew why she had that impression even if she did not.  She was going next to Russia, then the Balkans, then “the Holy Land,” with further destinations yet  to be settled.  “I read too many books, you see,” she said.  “You begin wanting to see everything, but soon nowhere seems quite right and you always want to move on.”    Every detail of the pre-embarkation formalities confounded her.  When we had to show our passports, she asked rather oddly, ”Do they make you carry one of those, too?”

     Once we had been segregated from the better-off, we encountered a rumpled old Oxonian who was more adrift than the lady.  He was accompanied by a couple of young Swedish travelers who had met him in Libya.  They told us we had been fortunate not to be allowed to enter the country because, apart from the suspicion of Gaddafi’s bureaucrats, the exchange rate was highly artificial, making everything very expensive for foreigners and, besides. the signs were in Arabic only and no one knew English.  They had conducted the British man out of that environment as something of an act of charity and were planning to split from him in Italy.  “We have been with him a week and somehow we don’t know a thing about him.”

     He seemed more communicative with us, saying that he was in the middle of a lifelong quest to learn music.  He had spent years in  Africa, he said, learning drums, then went to Spain for guitar, India for sitar, and so on.  He said that work was to him was ”a tremendously wasteful expenditure of energy . . .Money  is, after all, just pieces of paper,” he went on, “I don’t worry, sometimes I almost starve, but I get along, you know.  Anyway, the government owes me a large sum of money.  Some day that will turn up.  Maybe.”

     He asked Patricia is she would call herself “collegian” or “collegiate,” perhaps curious about some difference in American usage.  “Sometimes I play music,” he said, though he was traveling too lightly to carry an instrument.  He was familiar with Leadbelly and loved jazz.  “I haven’t any idea where I’m going,” he said pleasantly.  He did note that the one place he avoided was the United Kingdom.  “they put you in hospital there.”  He wandered about discussing philosophy with Patricia for half the night.

     One of his Swedish companions gallantly offered Patricia his bunk as we had only deck chairs for the night.  “I prefer the floor or not sleeping at all.  Often I don’t sleep when traveling and it may be two weeks before I get home.  I have had maybe no sleep at all.”  He worked on ships as a service employee.  “People take everything out on waiters.  I shall try to get a job in the engine room next time.”  He was heading back to Sweden to sign on for another voyage, since his purse was nearly empty.  “But people must let me cross no even without money, because I am on my way home.  That is the law, people going home must be allowed to pass whatever their circumstances.  I always travel the cheapest way, sometimes hitching, but I can tell you the only way out of Tripoli is to blow money on a cab.” 

     Two Nigerians whom we met were perhaps even poorer.  In pursuit of their plan to study in the United States, they had applied to American schools and they said they had been accepted by one.  From their home in the Sahel, they had set out to hitchhike across the Sahara.  They had had a rough time persuading the truck drivers who used the sand-covered tracks to take on two passengers, but said any among them who spoke Hausa as they did would be bound by ties of kinship however remote to give them a ride.  They said they still had spent days and nights on their own and had scars on  their hands since the desert, while scorching during the day, became very cold at night, and they had built campfires and burned their hands trying to keep warm.  They told us that their intention was to attend university in Oskaloosa, Oklahoma where they meant to study refrigeration science.  They asked whether Oklahoma was near the coast, and we had to tell them not only that it was in the middle of the country, but that Oskaloosa is in Iowa.