Tom Robbins - Tibetan Peach Pie - A True Account of an Imaginative Life

Tawny, low, and organic; hermetic, bare, crumbling in places, Timbuktu seemed made of cookie dough and starlight; rising like rough ginger popovers out of the magmatic ovens of the underworld, open only to the incandescent carousel of the whirly night, a city simultaneously earthy and unearthly. Antique races had fashioned it from the very desert they’d dreamed upon, enriched it with gold and salt, elevated it with wisdom (holy and astronomic) from near and far — and now must look on silently from beyond the grave as the desert takes it back.

Down narrow, unmarked, sandy streets, devoid of neon or billboards; past closed doors and shuttered windows, past an outdoor community oven whose bread, never entirely free of sand, crackless — and sometimes sparks — when bitten into, Pasquale and his entourage of teenage boys led Alexa and me to a Western-style, single-story hotel. Clean and comfortable (which is not to say it wasn’t sandy), the hotel had forty rooms, thirty-nine of which would remain unoccupied throughout our stay.

Why Pasquale had a posse was never explained. Perhaps the teenagers were apprentices of a sort, interns trying to learn the guide business; perhaps they were just attracted to the older fellow’s knowledge, his cheery personality. Or maybe it was because he had us in tow and we were the only action in town. In any case, the boys were intelligent, sweet, and thoughtful. They followed us everywhere we went and helped protect us from the constant — constant — onslaught of ambulatory entrepreneurs (mostly Tuareg) trying to sell us “ancient” artifacts that I suspected (and Pasquale, with some embarrassment, confirmed) had been made no earlier than the day before yesterday. Like Pasquale, the boys spoke — in addition to French (Mali’s official tongue) and native Koyra Chiini — a fair amount of English, as well as a smattering of Italian, Spanish, German, and even Japanese. They’d become multilingual not in school but at the movies.

The Timbuktu cinema, we soon discovered, was a thirty-six-inch TV set that rested atop a table in the sandy (obviously) courtyard of a private residence. The owner charged patrons a small fee to sit on wooden benches before the set, which had no antenna, no satellite dish: broadcast signals didn’t know the way to Timbuktu. What it did boast was a VCR player, and its owner had a connection in Bamako who had a connection in Paris, so periodically a rented batch of taped films in various languages would make its way there via Air Mali to be exchanged for an earlier batch that, by the time of the exchange, had been watched multiple times by our boys, picking up foreign words and phrases all the while.

Cinema’s influence on one of our boys was both amusing and touching: he was known to everyone in town by his preferred name, “John Travolta.” Slight and black, he looked nothing at all like his actor namesake, but he did own a leather jacket with the skyline of New York City painted on its back. He wore that heavy jacket all day, every day despite temperatures that routinely reached 110 degrees, a heat so dry it could cause the body to lose two quarts of water just sitting still in the shade. This “John Travolta’s” ambition was to go to medical school and I love to think he might have made it.

Despite the December gunfight in Timbuktu, despite being the only people in town genetically disposed to sunstroke, we felt safe enough with Pasquale, “John Travolta” (who, had he any inclination toward Scientology, must have expressed it in Koyra Chiini), and the gang as we trudged slowly from ancient mosque to ancient library; and one day to the bank, where the manager, once he’d reluctantly agreed to redeem my traveler’s check, opened a cabinet loaded with shoes and tried hard to sell Alexa a pair of sandals. On our last full day, however, something occurred that put the lot of us to the test.

In the relative cool of morning, Alexa and I had expressed casual interest in an offer of a camel ride to a Tuareg encampment a mile or two beyond the town. The nomadic Tuareg, who are related to Berbers, do not reside in Timbuktu or any other city, but from their temporary camps out in the desert, certain members will not hesitate to venture into town on matters of financial interest. Well, as the day progressed and the heat intensified; we came to realize that if the Tuareg got us two pigeons in their sun-broiled camp, we would not be let go until they’d plucked every last one of our feathers: we’d be charged for the camel ride, for food, water, entertainment (dancing girls), and every week-old “ancient” artifact they could foist upon us. So, as we heated up and wised up, we changed our minds. The Tuareg camel wrangler, however, had taken our offhand interest as a binding contract. When he returned later in the day with an extra camel, only to be spurned, he became furious.

Tuareg men wear blue veils, a unique fashion statement that adds considerably to their mystique (their women go unveiled, though are rarely seen in public), and this gentleman was so worked up that his veil was fluttering like the spastic wing of a dying jay. Finally, to shut him up, I just paid him the price of a camel ride. He took the money and stomped away, only to come back a second time as we were finishing our hotel dining room supper of Niger River perch and sand-crackly bread, and this time his anger had been jacked up so high all four legs were off the ground. Though it was growing dark, he was insisting, demanding, that we accompany him to his camp. Alarmed, we sent for Pasquale.

As indicated, perhaps, by which sex wears the veils, the animistic Tuareg, alone in that part of the world where three aggressively patriarchal religions were born, are a matriarchal society, and Pasquale’s assessment was that when our emissary returned to camp a second time without the two rich infidels in tow (for the fleecing of which the women had been preparing all afternoon), the ladies had promised to deprive him of certain rights and maybe cut his balls off if he didn’t go back and fetch us. Whatever the threat, it left an impression, because the fellow remained outside of our hotel room all night long — all night! — ranting and raving (in French and Hassaniya Arabic), pacing back and forth and brandishing his long sword. There were several pieces of heavy old French colonial furniture in our room, and we used them to barricade our door.

Even barricaded, we didn’t get much rest — and neither did poor Pasquale. When sometime after dawn I opened the door just a crack, I saw that the raging assailant had finally departed and that our game-saving “Magic Johnson,” having stood guard through the night, lay fast asleep (at least his head was attached and I didn’t notice any blood) on a narrow wooden bench. It was enough to temper, however briefly, my hatred of the Lakers.

Due to depart later that morning, we packed and left for the little airport right away, partially for fear that the sword-wielding solicitor would stage another encore, but also to ascertain if someone from the airfield would remember to go out on the runway and flag down our plane, as the scheduled flight from Gao to Bamako would only stop in Timbuktu if the pilot could spot someone below waving his arms.

In what passed for the waiting room, we were soon joined by a half-dozen Tuareg, resolutely intent on selling us more souvenirs (I’d previously purchased a hunk of desert rock salt and a carved gourd) before we got away. They hustled, hassled, and harangued, interfering with our attempt to hold a farewell conversation with Pasquale, to copy correctly a postal address where we might send him a pair of Nike athletic shoes like my own. Finally, annoyed to a level of inspiration, I stood up and announced in a loud voice, “I don’t want souvenirs. I want hashish.”