Rubber ducky

The other day I took a bath out in the open, near the well, under the date palm trees and the sun. Since then, I've done it three more times, though the weather has been progressively cooler so the bath becomes more than anything a battle between my wish to be not-filthy and my wish to be not-freezing. You never know how quickly you can get clean until the wind is blowing on your wet and naked hiny. Brrrr...

The bath itself is nothing to write home about (ironically) but if you want to be just like me, and take one Mauritanian style, first go out and find your nearest water-well. Then fill up a bucket (the cut-off bottom half of a plastic ten liter jug) Don't fall in! Find a secluded spot, away from the sheep, and soap up with your handkerchief and the brownest soap you can find. Then rinse, and jump back into your clothes as fast as you can. Yikes!

Unfortunately, the last time, as I was performing that final step, hopping around one-footed trying to put my pants on, I came down hard on a woody plant stem, still stuck in the ground, and it went straight through my sandal and 1/2 inch into my foot. I couldn't believe it!

Anyway, there I was, like a scene out of an old western, trying to pull the stick from my foot, like when they pull the arrow out of some cowboy-hatted ruffian. And because I couldn't grab it well enough with my fingers, I even had to yank it out with my teeth ( I know, right?!) By the way, it does hurt more coming out, in case you were wondering. I realized afterward when the wound began spewing blood, that it hadn't been such a grand idea to do that in the middle of the fields at 2 o clock, with no one around, but I didn't pass out or anything that dramatic, so crisis averted. Still, I've got to start looking where I put my toesies - every other day I run into the huge rocks on the ground everywhere and slice gaping holes in my feet. What a tool.

Later that day, Sidi Mohamed stopped by with his crappy boombox which played horrible dubs of Arabic dance music, and hung out for a while. He's been doing this a lot lately - I think he got the notion from somewhere that I don't have any music to listen to, or at least nothing with the entertainment value of his squealing jams in Arabic. 'Should I leave the boom-box?' he asks, when rising to go, 'No, you take it' I say generously, 'what will you listen to'

He has a repertoire of about five tapes, dusty cassettes with opaque plastic covers, which he keeps in the jiggling kangaroo pouch of his bou-bou. A few of them are recordings of authentic Mauritanian music, which I actually love. It's austere and acoustic, rhythmic and complex and mournful.

He has another one, filled with American hip-hop and club songs from about 3 years ago. He has M&M, and 50-cent and other soulful crooners, all playing at about twice their speed, and the other night he, a head-bobbing Lemrobbit and I listened to the thumping beats as the sunlight faded. It's strange to hear this blue-worded, sexualized music with such strict and pious people, but of course they can't understand a word of it. So whatevs.

Dancing is a limited sport here. Lemrobbit's adorable head-bobbing aside, most people dance, when they do, (in short, giggling bursts) like awkward eighth-graders. That is to say, when they try to imitate the way they think Westerners dance (how would they know? There are no televisions here. It's all heresay) When they dance the way they're supposed to, the way that comes naturally, the way that's evolved in the desert, it's lovely and sensuous and subtle and sexy (though they would never think it). All that extra cloth from their bou-bous and muleffas suddenly makes sense, it's like two more arms. But that's just me anthropologistizing. Mostly, they couldn't find the beat in a bucket.

What I like much better than the transplanted boombox tunes, is Sidi Mohameds one-string guitar, called a gimbra. It's not so much a guitar as it is an old metal bowl, covered with a calf-skin, stretched and hardened like a drum, with a stick jutting out. It's hideous; it's makeshift and marvelous. I can't believe that is produces any sound worth listening to but it does - Sidi Mohamed plays a whining and hypnotic ostinato, his fingers sliding the octave (finding harmonics - for real) tapping the brittle cowskin drum in rhythmic counterpoint. The tuning is maybe just an interesting accident - it's some sort of odd octagonic scale (for you theory geeks) The music is repetative, he plays five minutes of the same two bars, but the voice would twist and wind over top of it, if it were there. He doesn't sing, because he's too shy, but I can hear it anyway.

This inevitably brings up all of those questions, even if I don't know it, about what place music has in my life still, and what place it's going to have when I come back. Oh goodness. Luckily, all of that can wait a few years. Along with sodapop, plumbing and the rest of civilization.