the children of boat-dwellers follow her around, “Hey, let’s go make sandcastles! Let’s go play with your synthesizer for a little bit!”
But there’s one special girl, who is almost always at Djellah’s side, even if it’s a salsa party that lasts until dawn. “She’s better off with me than with her grandparents, they pay absolutely no attention to her,” Djellah says. This girl is Salma, a thirteen-years old love child born to a local woman.
Djellah met the two-year-old girl when she was living in a boat at the port with her Portuguese boyfriend. “We noticed this little curlyhaired girl running around the port and nobody was ever looking after her,” Djellah recalls. She started feeding the girl, playing with her, taking her in their boat to sleep. By that time, Salma’s mother had become a prostitute in the harbor and a junkie to boot, so she had nothing against having a babysitter.
A few years later, Djellah came back full circle to the same place and started living in a commune of musicians in the mountains near the village. Salma remembered her! Once again Djellah took the girl in almost as her own. Her travels found her coming back to Gran Canaria more and more often.
Salma’s mother is dead now. The teenage girl looks like an angel, but she’s prone to wild mood swings. “The things she’s seen,” Djellah sighs. “Her own mother having sex with different men. Junkies in stupors… She has a heavy burden on her heart. I try to help her as best as I can. We talk and discuss the ways of the world. Sometimes when I see her get downtrodden by it all, we go into the woods together and sing in Spanish at the top of our lungs, “La bella vida!2”
Djellah smiles. There are times when she speaks with a maternal pride about Salma, like how she finally learned to use a knife and fork.
“Djellah, why don’t you adopt this girl?”
Her face becomes somber. “Her grandparents have nothing against that. But I don’t have a place to live. I live in hotels, one day at a time. Where would I go with her? Soon enough I’ll roll my dresses up again, pack my synthesizer and head off… Where to, I don’t know, but I’ll be back and I’ll see her then.”
I listen to her explaining this to Salma as well. The girl pleads: “I’ll come anywhere in the world, as long as I can be with you!” – “No, you have to go to school. Anyway, I’ll write to you this time!” Djellah promises.
“Everything has its price,” she says to me later in that dry way the British Djellah speaks. “My sister is jealous of me because I can travel and move around, go wherever I want. Many of my female acquaintances have said: “Oh, our Djellah’s life is a never-ending vacation! She gets to sunbathe all day!” They don’t think about the fact that all I have in this world amounts to about twenty kilos of clothes and books, and a musical instrument. I’d say that’s not much for a middle-aged woman. What do you think?” She squints her eyes as if she’s about to break out laughing. And then she adds, “But that’s all you need to live. Some clothes, books, an instrument, air and freedom… Or maybe there is a little girl missing from that list, huh?”
I put the notebook aside and stare off into the distance. Children, that topic again. How much did my own “unborn children” push me into coming here? And where is Djellah pushing me now?
The bus is coming!
On flying here and in space
I like sitting in a plane that has just taken off – even though I know that this is precisely the moment when this miracle machine is most liable to explode and even though I know that flying is environmentally the most harmful pastime that a single person can undertake.
There’s nothing I can do about it: leaving the ground and heading for the skies is a kind of addiction. I think I know what Leonardo da Vinci felt while drawing people and machines in flight. He must have had an especially strong longing pulsating within him, something that jolts you up from sleep at times, something that must reside in each person. You wake up fully knowing that you could fly, but then the harsh truth of it comes back to you: you’re not a bird, you’re human. Leonardo could physically never feel what most people today have experienced: the force of the plane upon lift off, the energy in your body that tugs at you like a giant swing propelled towards the sky.
Each time I hope that once we get above the clouds, I’ll see that same strange atmospheric phenomenon I saw with Harri one morning, when we were flying from Riga, Latvia to Warsaw, Poland to catch a flight to Tel Aviv, Israel. It was late winter, a humid and foggy time of the year. Clouds covered the surface of the earth, as they mostly do around that time along this latitude. The plane shot through the clouds and…
A pink field spread out below us, as far as the eye could see. For the first time in my life, I fully experienced what it really means when people say, “Above the clouds, it’s always sunny.”
I’m sure meteorologists have a name for that pink phenomenon and I’m sure they can calculate exactly the necessary humidity and temperature required for something like that to occur. But for me, those colourful rays reflecting off humidity in the air was a reward for not losing faith during the long, cold, dark February, a sign of better things to come. At that moment, I was glued to the window. I wasn’t surprised, just full of joy: the bleakness under those clouds won’t get me now, I thought, a pink desert surrounds me, I could open up the window and just go jump around in it if I only wanted to!
Through blind faith, urged on by a strange inner force, I had arrived at that seat in the plane. The bearded man next to me smelled so strongly that I’m sure everyone around us wondered why it smelled like an Indian temple or an exotic incense shop. And when further investigation lead them to the source, I’m sure they asked themselves: who is that odd couple, that bearded, long-haired old man and that wild-eyed, young, blond woman? Where are they going?
I stare out at the clouds behind my window today. They’re just regular clouds, no pink. The energy of the ascent is starting to dissolve and wear off now bit by bit, at a height of ten kilometres. The familiar sounds ring out, the hollow dings, the clicking seat belts and a steadily humming motor in which we all have to trust. One of my children has fallen asleep and the other is dangling in the aisle, neck craned to see when the “plane lady” is coming to bring us food and drinks. Justin is sitting next to our daughter, his dark hair covering his eyes. I can’t tell if he’s asleep or just thinking. In any case, he doesn’t look like he’s up for a conversation. At the moment, I don’t have anything to do. Nothing depends on me right at this moment. The main thing has been done – getting us on this plane, so that we could fly into the past and through it arrive at the future.
The past and the future are always connected, even though sometimes it would be nice to unravel them and think: what if…? What would my life have been like, if I had never met Harri? Is it possible that my first marriage wouldn’t have broken up in that case? Is it possible that I wouldn’t have become a vegetarian and an an environmentalist? Is it possible that I wouldn’t have become the homeless cosmopolitan that I am in my soul at this moment? Would I see the world altogether differently?
Harri was “crazy”, but he got inside my head and changed me.
The time when Harri came into my life – or rather when I stepped into his and demanded to be taken along – was in hindsight one of the most terrible times I’ve ever gone through. On the surface, everything was fine and that, in turn, made me feel even guiltier: why can’t I be satisfied with my secure and nicely bolstered world? I had money, a husband, free time, a prestigious job, but… something was wrong and I felt it every morning when I woke up and looked
“The beautiful life!” in Spanish.
