“My people came from one of the oldest mountain ranges in
the world. For over four hundred years,
we have made our home, not in a location, but together. My great-great-great grandfather was said to
have crossed the Great Indian Desert with a caravan of families. As the river was drying up, families were
fighting, food scarce. They would try to
build homes, plant crops, and have livestock, but the great desert winds would
take it all away. Finally, the desert
was consuming them. The desert was
growing around them. Lost for years they
wandered amongst the sand, living off the wind.
They fought the wind for weeks and months. The wind blew sand into everything until it
began to cover the caravans and nothing would move. The day turned to darkness in the sand,
thirst had started to turn the people against each other and food was fading. It has been said that their teeth were worn
flat from eating sand. People began to
steal from each other. They killed each
other. My grandfather, in a tantrum of
ecstasy, stood and yelled. I will find a
way. We must not fight; we must learn to
listen to the wind. We must adapt and
move like the sand does. He started to
sing a haunting song, a song that cries like wind, and he danced and clapped
his hands. Eventually, everyone began to
sing and dance and celebrate the wind, to feel the intimate touch of the sand
against flesh. They removed their
clothes to get closer to the sand, and wove the clothes together into a giant
sail in celebration to the wind, and tied it to the caravans. The wind lifted the caravans from the sand,
and the wagons sailed across the desert to where we came to a river and my
people drank the water until it flushed sand from their bowels. Since then, my people make no homes. They are the wind. We celebrate life and the people who are with
us. In Spain, where I come from, they
call us gitanos…Romani people.”
He pauses with parched mouth to swallow.
“It is a story passed down.
I don’t know if I believe it anymore.”
Manola turns to look down at the blisters around the
shackles. The damp water drips to his
matted hair. A sliver of light comes
through worn wood boards. He stops to
feel the heave of the ship as it crests a swell.
“A storm is approaching”
How can you tell?
“Ah, well, do you want the long version or the short
version.”
The young boy, also shackled, lips cracked, jaundice,
setting in, pale from the puking.
“I am not going anywhere soon.”
“Well then, let me tell you about my childhood friend
William.”
I met William at the port in Seville on the edge of the
Guadalquivir River. Stories were pouring
back into the port about exotic worlds across oceans. When ships would dock and the men would pour
off the ships, rich from the weeks at sea, young men like me, would offer to
help, offer anything for food or gold.
When you are young without food or shelter, you are desperate for
anything.
William was silver tongued. He had a terrible patch over his eye and he would play on the sympathy of sailors. But he was ruthless too. He was hardened by his years on the streets. Knuckles were scarred from fighting; his feet were callused and cracked from running without shoes. But when I first met him, I was still very young. He looked at me with a crooked smile and a brilliant shine in his blue eyes. His eyes were like the ocean. He was the best friend I ever had.
