back in, and the wide beach is crowded, mostly with men and boys in their long djellabas, sitting in the sand, playing soccer, standing in small groups talking, smoking, walking with companions or alone. The many stray dogs mimic the humans, sitting in the sand, scampering after the soccer players, milling in groups or loping along alone. If she gets her camel ride, she’ll forgive me; my lie will be erased. She’ll never cut me any slack but she won’t for anyone else either. She’s a hydra of explosive nerves; the key to being with her is learning how to avoid lighting those fuses. I want to explain to her how well I understand her, but I know it’s impossible, she doesn’t really know how to assimilate and respond to what I usually don’t know how to express anyway, not on the spot, when it’s the moment such things need to be expressed. You can’t make Gisela feel loved without also making her feel that you’re trying to change her in some unacceptable way, and somehow I’m the same; we’re unlovable. Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped her from letting me try to love her and even hoping I’ll succeed. I say to her: Trust me, I’ll protect you. But she answers: And who’s going to protect me from you? We still have a little more than an hour. The air is warm, sticky, and fetid with smells of fish rot, garbage, excrement. What seem like sewage pipes abruptly emerge here and there from the sand, releasing fluids that run through shallow narrow ditches to the sea. I can’t leap or skip over them the way Gisela must have, I’m too weighed down with luggage, so I take zigzagging detours. The light is darkening; our ferry is leaving in an hour and ten minutes. I keep my eyes fixed on the mist-blurred horizon for some sign of a camel or of the bright white of her blouse. Now it’s an hour. If we miss the ferry, we’ll have to stay the night in Tangier, and we’ll lose our flight home from Madrid too. Tangier’s cosmopolitan bohemian glamour seems far in the past, though the old tourist guidebook she once bought in a Mexico City used bookstore says to keep an eye out for Jean Genet. On the avenue separated from the beach by a long wall, streetlights have come on, and I can see the tops of illuminated busses passing. Evening is falling fast now; people are streaming off the beach. Forty-five minutes. If we run all the way, we can make it to the ferry dock in ten. She must have been unable to catch up to her camel and will soon come walking back alone, crestfallen. I strain my eyes for any white speck that might be her blouse. Reality, to Gisela, is a symbolic tapestry that unspools in time, the image of a girl walking alone on a dark beach to be interpreted by herself like a tarot card just flipped over. Her not getting her camel ride today, on her birthday, will be the fatal last judgment on our relationship.
But I can stop worrying about that because here she comes, yay. Even through the fog I can make out the distinct shape of a camel, its Q-tip risen head and neck. And isn’t that a rider? If I can’t see the white of her blouse, that’s because it’s too dark now, the mist too thick, and they’re probably still too far away. The camel’s owner must be on foot, leading it by a halter or leash. I’m so relieved, so happy that she got her camel ride that I don’t care if we miss our ferry. Maybe there’s a night flight from Tangiers to Madrid. But wait, why is the camel diagonally crossing the beach, toward the city side, seemingly headed toward an exit in the wall? I can make out the camel’s undulating neck and bobbing head as it mounts the balustraded tiled steps leading off the beach, and even though I’m loudly shouting Gisela, the camel proceeds through the gate into the city and its noise, out of sight. Are they taking a shortcut to the ferry port? Does she think I’m waiting for her there? Twenty-five minutes. Under the weight of the loaded backpack, a heavy bag in each hand, I run through the sand toward those steps. A squalid moat of rank water separates the bottom step from the beach. The people leaving the beach splash through, some hiking the hems of their djellabas. I roll up my pants and wade through in my boots, holding our bags high, and scramble up the steps to the well-lit sidewalk and look both ways up and down the avenue at busses, cars, taxis, pedestrians—no sign of a camel. I frantically ask passersby in Spanish and English if they’ve seen a woman in a white blouse atop a camel. Nobody has. From the sidewalk the beach below is a vast blackness. I carry our bags back down to the bottom step. From there you can still see across the beach to the silver-flashing waves, moonlight and the streetlamps above infusing the fog with a nearly purplish glow. Twenty minutes. I go back up the steps, back down. Less than fifteen minutes now. Coming toward me through the fog, swiftly as if in speeded-up film, are three camels. They look covered in gold dust. She sits atop her camel, grinning ear to ear, looking so happy and proud. The owner of the camels dismounts, lifts our luggage onto the back of his camel, and helps me seat myself atop the third camel, and we go galloping over the sand to the ferry port and back into our scheduled future.
About three years ago in the Condesa, in El Centenario, on a night when the cantina was booming with drunks, a friend of Gisela’s spotted me from her table and gestured for us to step outside for a smoke.
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