and you, a young mistress

Here in Nouakchott we have a stadium (actually we have two, supposedly, though I have serious doubts about the second's existence). It's not far at all from my house, and was named the "Olympic Stadium" Stade Olympique, by some cruel, if prescient, official in the past, or by some digruntled architect, because of course, to quote a friend, "it will never play host to the olympics" .

Mostly it just sits there, hulking and derelict, its tall poles of clumped flood-lights, dark, and visible from afar, and in that way it serves a sort of passively-helpful purpose as a landmark, like a shipwreck, given the fact that addresses in the city consist of phrases like 'two streets past the boutique with the Marlboro sign turn left and go until you hit the giant pile of tires'.

I suppose once in a while they must surely hold a soccer game or two, though I've never heard of one happening, and somehow the image of stands full of fist-shaking men in crumpled bou-bous, though amusing, seems to jar with my experience of reality.

Then again, again, the other day I found a couple of jujube seeds on the ground which I am 100% certain is the snack that Mauritanians would be eating, instead of pocorn and hotdogs, if the aforementioned situation were true. Anything's possible.

Lately, (okay, three times, and counting) I've taken to running on the track in the early morning when the air is cool and when the entire place is hauntingly empty, save for a fit, speedy Chinese lady in black shorts and her balding companion. Like any two or more parties of westerners in Africa, we religiously participate in the fiction that the other does not exist, ignoring them completely, which is no skin off my nose because I just pop in my ill-fitting earphones and listen to Pharoahe Monch.

This, along with stuffing myself with as many fruits and vegetables as my body (and wallet) can handle, represents my sad little attempt at reparing some of the surely irreversable shit that Mauritania has done to my body (um, what vitamin is good for UV damage?) because, while having the endurance and muscle-tone of a dead twelve-year old was fun while it lasted, you know...all good things......

Something about the Stade is very beautiful to me in the way that all my favorite parts of Maurtania are beautiful, but it resists explaining. It's a giant symbol (sorry, you knew that was coming) of the country's, I don't know... cluelessness? naivete? predictability? None of those things sound very flattering when listed like that, and I guess they aren't, actually, but nevertheless I think of them warmly. Okay, luke-warmly. They are the only things that still (sometimes) make me smile, after all this time, when someone does the exact, tactless, hillbilly-like thing I knew they were going to do a moment before. Life here is scripted. In fact, the script was written so long ago its authors have been forgotten and though additions have been inserted here and there by clumsy colonists and malcontents, the plot chugs on. I can't believe I just wrote that extended metaphor, but listen...

This is a perfectly adequate stadum with an absolutely average oval of track surrounding a shock of green astroturf. The stands are little cement shelves with neatly painted numbers on the front. There are offices for the Olympic Committee, there are dormitories for visiting teams under a giant clock face which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. There are locker-rooms. There are box seats. I mean, are you kidding? There are box seats? Oh M..... wake up! And somehow the whole place feels like a slightly used, out-dated and transplanted high-school gymnasium from Ohio.

It's all perpetually locked too, btw, to even further stymie its use by would-be, athletic upstarts, so to get to the track you have to make a little hop-slide over a guard-rail (not hard) whose white paint is worn to black in patches by the actions of previous delinquents who had the same idea.

As of yet, no one's tried to kick me out, but there is a white Moor man who appears in his slept-in bou-bou every morning, and makes no attempt at any form of exercise but rather sits on the edge of the rust-colored track, quite plainly watching me, Chinese woman and baldy go around and around in circles.

Since I don't know, I am forced to give him the benefit of the doubt and say it is possible that he is an important stadium personage, supervising the arena. Though much, much more likely he is just an average, naughty, Joe, lured there by nothing more, and nothing less, than the promise of seeing, as Ginger puts it "ladies' legs".
 
Oh dear. Oh poor, stunted, creepy, dear. I supposed we all have a need to see ladies' legs, but just do us all a favor and keep it in your pants. Em....I mean, sirwaal....