her absence hung in the summer dusk

Okay so here's what happens when you're sort of a complete moron like me, and wait too long to get a visa.

Mauritanian embassy crazy/foolishness. 8:30 in the morning a rather neat, patient line of visa seekers of various sort and origins waiting for the embassy to open. When it does, the suited handsome sadist with applications papers destroys this be standing in on location and handing out papers in random order. The line disintegrates, a mod form,s.

I walk back the five kilometers to the city center back breaking pack on back. On the way  stop at a little boutique with 3 plastic tables and few chairs inside its doorway. I order a coffee from the man behind a counter and small loaf of moon bread. Its just nescafe and milk powder which equals cheap which equals I love it.

The route back isn't complicated, mostly just a straight shot back along the road to Casablanca. It's tiring but the 15 dirhams I'm saving energized me.

The visa man tells me, after taking my application, my cash and my passport, to come back after a week. "A week??" I balk. My heart sinks, but he has already dismissed me. The wrangler/assistant/grounds-keeper, maybe - an older pulaar man named Daouda who tries to be pushy and assertive with our rude mass of people, but can't do it very convincingly - tells me to come back the next day at 3 o clock. I determine to come back today at 3 instead to see what I can see.

Having virtually nothing to do in the meantime, and deciding to investigate hostels in the possibility that I'll have to stay in one, I walk up Mohamed il Khamis and into the medina. Everything I find is just an old converted riad, but the one I'm looking for -the youth hostel- is A) So generically named that I'm always surprised when only one exists in a given city and B) apparently not extant at all. No one seems to know where it is, though everyone gives me their random, confusing and contradictory guess.
*****
I eat lunch in a part of the old city called the municipal medina, which sounds like, and is the place where actually Rabatans go to buy their everyday junk- baby toys, hardware, dollies, furniture, pots and pans, not just tourists
 responsible
There is maybe just one cyber in the whole damn city, a fact which seems puzzling considering how many pepper the streets of virtually every other African city I've been in.

*****
In the afternoon I return to find a quieter scene, just two grouped gaggles of  travelers p0loppe on the dust tiles of the embassy's patch of sunny sidewalk. They were speaking English though non of them as a first language, something which always makes me feel awkward.

There was a young Moroccan man with medium cappuccino skin which looked slightly darkened by the sun, his hair was shoulder length and curly and luxurious, though doubtless very dirty, he had it gathered together in a n impromptu ponytail with a length of leather string looped through itself but not really tied. He had bright and youthful features and soft drown eyes rimmed with lashes, a black, faded, illegible band shirt, grey jean short that stopped only six inches above the ankle and checkered, flat skateboard shoes with black socks. Everything was really very filthy but he looked young and charming. Who knows when was the last time they had been washed though.

I only see these details bit by bit I don't talk to them but only eavesdrop on their conversation Moroccan man and young Spanish woman a bout the same age with a raspy aggressive voice and dark eyeliner, and a slightly older blond plain, heavy and wart-on-the- nose Russian lady, all of whom speak English very well and who seem quite comfortable joking and teasing each other about being unshowered despite the feeling I have that they've not known each other for very long at all.

A group of 40s-ish Mauritanian fells crouch off to the side along the wall like hyena and talk about the group in Hassaniya. Mostly though they just make fun of the Moroccan man's long hair, saying its Ella kiiv Nsara or just like a white persons hair. It's not surprising to me at all that the men are talking about this group, who, though a little irritatingly in love with their own affected free-youthfulness, aren't really doing anything besides sitting on the ground talking amongst themselves and being a little young and eye roll inspiring. But Mauritanians cannot mind their own damn business ever. Either Moroccans are a little better at this or I just get that impression from no knowing what the hell they are saying.

After two hours of waiting on the sidewalk having to pee, Daouda comes out and says "No visas today. Simple as that."

*****

On the way back I decide to walk part of the way and shave a few dirhams off of my inevitable taxi ride. I get maybe a kilometer or two down the road when I stop at a bust stop. I almost don't, there are buses galore but no way for someone like me to ever tell where they are going - but there was a lady standing near the bench and I asked her "Does this bus go to Centre Ville??"

*****
I'm not quite sure how to behave with women here, I know the norms are not nearly as finicky as in the RIM but I still try to avoid talking to women if at all possible (no terrible hardship-that, honestly)I don;t want to make anyone uncomfortable or insult their purity, god knows, by making them talk to some strange white person who resembles Voldemort more that a little (was that tongue in cheek? Hard to say.....)

Anyway she happened to be not at all reticent and quite nice, and French speaking and a little plump, and mid twenties and veiled. She was actually going exactly where I was going so when the bus came 5 minutes later we got on it together. As we waited she had told me the pass was 3. 6 dirhams which seems a little unnecessarily uneven, and since I only had 3 and two half dirham pieces she gave me a twenty centime piece. I tried to refuse but she was adamant. "Not the person who takes the fare is not nice.

She needn't have bothered though., The lady who took the fare had a whole jangling zip bag of coin pieces. She was fat-ish and wore jeans and a ball cap and sat backwards in the front bus window next to the driver laughing and talking with him in a masculine way. She wore a little eye makeup and had highly plucked eyebrows, wide lip liner lined lips and matte lipstick. She looked to be a bit out side the societal mainstream strictly speaking, but she seemed fine with it. A few minutes after a given passenger entered she's swing her wide behind down the crowded aisle and take their cash and tear them off a little pink slip that said good for one ride.

Anyway, the point is that's I'm really glad I decided to take the bus because not only did I save twelve dirhams but just as we rounded the corner of the Bab il Had, what did I see? "Auberge de Jeune" Merci, madame.

*****
Standing at the check in window I'm having a close call. Having forked over my passport to the Mauritanian Embassy that morning (a terrifying prospect if one thinks about it too deeply, btw) I didn't have my number of entry into Morocco, something I hadn't even known existed before the previous day. but without which the proprietress does not seem likely to allow me to stay.

She's 50 ish, thin purple veiled, 5'7, a few bad teeth, the kind of person who has a ready smile, but for whom any piece of information of which she does not approve causes that smile to collapse immediately. Before we chatted lightly and warmly,me please with the French sentences I;m making, but now it's all I'm sorry monsieur it's absolutely necessary for me to have this number. Her arms arms are splayed neatly in front of heron the low desk. She sits up primly with excellent posture. The little office is line with square shelves slots along one wall, with papers and pamphlets and brochures posed diagonally in each. The other is plastered with Morocco posters. I t looks neat and well organized and she doesn't seem likely to give anytime soon.

Her son/assistant sits in a chair in the office and looks lazy. He says what do you want to go to Mauritania for? " and I say I used to be in Mauritania, I used to live there, IU have friends there I want to go visit them.

How does Mauritania compare with Morocco. He asks and both his mother and I balk at the question but for different reason.  "What do you mean, how do they compare" she says, drawing herself up and giving him an annoyed look, The are completely different Morocco is much more civilized that Mauritania. I raise an internal eyebrow at this, but agree outwardly. The madam is a little prissy and proud of her little organized turf of well arranged papers. One gets the feeling she speaks French even with her other Moroccan friends and I let her have the point.

Yes it's true but even so there are still things there which I like, which I miss, even"

Such as?" she persists nosily, while she offers over her shoulder to her son " Les noires.......?" and a little smirk. My stomach turns slightly but I ignore this.

"Well, the people" I return evasively, "the music? They have wonderful music...."

She counters immediately. "What are you talking about, Morocco has wonderful music tooo. "

There's no doubt about all of this, and my attachment to Mauritania can in no way be explained by vague allusions to "the people and the music" It's true, they can;t be compared. Morocco is a real country with an ancient rich past, and an architecture, and a train system, and a cuisine, a decorative style, and tables and chairs, and meters in the taxis and big organized cities and a culture, for gods sake. And Mauritania is a wasteland. But even so Madame, can you tell me why I can't wait to get the hell out of your country, and into theirs?"

*****

When we finally resolve the issue of the entry number in a startling piece of technological functioning (we CALL the Youth Hostel in Casablanca where I stayed and get it from their (rather befuddled attendant. She happily accepts my money and shows me to my (solid but unclean) mattress in a dormitory room with 12 bunked beds.

***** In the bathroom I shake out my red silk space blanket which folds up to roughly the size of a quarter and discover about ten thousand ticks inside of it, which I must have picked up from this hostel's counterpart in Casablanca. No wonder now that I slept so poorly there, and in fact closer inspection reveals a polka dot of dark stains on the silk where I must have rolled over during the night and crushed the little demons and their blood meal. I pinch each live on I find between my fingers and they leave a reddish grey mush on my skin. Ew.

*****

The second day I don't bother returning in the morning and at 3 o clock there are crowds of people outside the embassy, literally crowds. It's not like the location is even grand enough to support them, it;s just a regular old strip of sidewalk along a leafy residential side street with a sign that reads "Service de Visas" in French and Arabic.  But every few minutes a new taxi would pull up and deposit its collection of etrangers from one country or another. I;m astonished that there are this many people trying to get into Mauritania in a month, let alone a day. We wait and we wait. People buy or send their envoys (children, spouses) to buy snacks at the TOTAL gas station around the corner, but I'm determined to be as miserable and as cheap as possible so I buy nothing. At intervals rumors leak out that the door is about to open. People stand up, and form a clump to crowd about the entrance. Five minutes pass in silence and nothing happens and people drift back to their shady patches grumbling. This happens at least three times.

Scenes from the visa crowd:

A Japanese couple late 20s man in a checkered blue and red shirt with rolled sleeves, a free-Tibet grocery bag, tribal bracelets, flowy mauve pants purple clogs and dreadlocks which look like the old brush we used to brush our horse with. Who the hell knows how much work it must take to make Asian hair dreadlock.  The woman: white shirt and green pants and orange sun-hat pony tailed, lightly made up beautiful features. In fact the both have fine petite features and look like each other more than vaguely.

A pair of British- cockney motor cyclists, 26 ish, handsome,  esque in motor cycle space aged padded shirts and shiny pants, making them look prepared for gladiator fighting.

A group of portly, balding gruff seeming Spanish guys who speak Spanish in loud voices.

A bunch of random mid 30s or 40s Mauritanian guys mostly in button up shirts and nice ish pants, moderate dark skin, and short slightly doughy but not fat bodies I've come to think of as typically Mauritanian white moor man of a certain age.

Two mid 20s Scandinavian looking men with cute boyish hair cuts and pretty boyish faces (and some dandruff), and designer stubble and polo shirts and khakis who look pleasant but say nothing and walk silently from edge to edge of the sidewalk.

Several European African couplings. One a (dyed) blond maybe French woman in high heels and tight jeans with  shorter ordinary looking but maybe ugly sexy African man.

One and older (late 40s) French woman, thin somewhat horse-faced, thin mouthed, wearing floor length skirt and black button up blouse with an African man, about the same age, slight tummy, not muscular, in jeans and a sleeveless top, and dreadlocks in a Senegal colored head wrap.

A somehow Spanish looking  30 something man, black, short hair, a blunt nose, muscular upper body UN-muscular lower bod, and tummy, talking with a bald and very dark African man, in shorts and a Michigan sports t shirts, removed a bit from the group (and then exchanging #s) for the purpose I imagine of either drugs, or sex.