Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

39. the curse of timbuktu

“Where is Timbuktu?” I’ve posed that question to a good many people over quite a few years, and the most common response — I’d say 95 percent of the time — has been “Timbuktu? Is that a real place?” Even after Islamic jihadists invaded the city in 2012, setting fire to its treasure trove of ancient manuscripts and bouncing Timbuktu night after night onto the evening news, most of the people I’ve queried have had no idea where — or even if — the place actually exists.

Once a center of caravan trade (gold, salt, ivory, slaves) and learning both sacred and secular, it has become through the centuries such a metaphor for “the middle of nowhere” that metaphor has overtaken and supplanted reality. Veiled in sandy layers of fable and mystery, Timbuktu is the farthest of which there is no farther this side of Shangri-la and Mars, it’s our global absolute elsewhere. Is it any wonder then that it was to burn like a danger-scented candle in the daydreams of a romantic such as I?

For most of my life I was content to let Timbuktu glimmer in the recesses of my imagination: after all, few if any of the poets and lyricists who’ve rhapsodized about the moon have actually expressed a desire to board a space shuttle and go up there. In 1991, however, I was practically picked up and swept to Timbuktu by a confluence of esoteric facts and literary ideas, a juncture where, in my mind, the ongoing worldwide disappearance of frogs coincided with and mirrored a simultaneous dwindling of the middle class; amphibious frogs being a living bridge between water and land, between fish and reptiles, and maybe, if the lore of Dogon and Bozo tribes, whose villages lie just to the south of Timbuktu, can be believed, between planet Earth and the stars; much as the middle class, despite its addiction to flaccid jolly ho-ho bourgeois inanities, constitutes a vital bridge between scarcity and abundance, between the pampered lives of the rich and the miserable lives of the poor. One thing every totalitarian state has in common is the absence of a middle class, one thing all of the world’s arid landscapes (whether due to industrial pollution or natural forces) have in common is an absence of frogs.

There are things for which science has no explanation. One such mystery is how the Dogon and Bozo peoples of northwestern Africa were able, with naked eyes, to determine that Sirius is a binary star system, and did so some five hundred years before European astronomers confirmed it with the invention of the telescope. Furthermore, the lensless Dogon went so far as to accurately describe the size, length, and shape of the Sirius sister star’s orbit, which lends a perplexing air of credibility to Dogon cosmology, based as it is on a chronicled visitation from a planet in the Sirius system by a party of amphibious humanoids. (Do I hear the tinkling notes of Twilight Zone?)

The Dogon experience, inexplicable as it is, seems to dovetail (or frog-leg) intriguingly with the commonly ignored fact that we land-stranded primates are essentially, ultimately (from the primordial soup to the waters of the womb) aquatic, a detail upon which I riff from time to time in the novel that resulted from the aforementioned confluence of weird data and creative ideas; its title, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, referring to the current state of human development as we oh so slowly proceed along our evolutionary path.

I elected to set Frog Pajamas, perhaps my most ambitious book, against a backdrop of the financial markets, a configuration of smoke and mirrors that if deconstructed makes scarcely more sense than a tradition based on a social call by amphibians from outer space. So how does Timbuktu fit into the picture? First, as I’ve said, Timbuktu is so close to Dogon and Bozo territory — which research for my novel demanded I visit — that it would have been unthinkable not to include it in my itinerary. Then there is this comparison, this projection: Timbuktu, once (primarily between in the twelfth through sixteen centuries) a wheeling and dealing center of enormous wealth, is now impoverished, suffering from depopulation, and is gradually being buried beneath the advancing Sahara Desert. One need not be a visionary to conclude that in time Wall Street, too, will be desolate and wasted, victim of a failed system, covered not by sand but by water as a poisoned, overheated ocean steals in to bear us oxygen junkies back to “the cradle we all rocked out of.”

There was one other reason, a bonus enticement, for going to Timbuktu: Alexa and I had been warned — twice — by the U.S. State Department not to go there, almost always a good indication that a destination will prove lively enough to suit the tastes of those who haven’t confused travel with tourism or adventure with shopping.

So where is Timbuktu? Geographically, it’s located in the upper reaches of Mali, a nation in northwestern Africa, that vast continent that Sarah Palin thought was a country. Even today, the town is not particularly easy to get to: were it more readily accessible it wouldn’t be Timbuktu. Alexa and I had to fly first to Paris (not exactly a hardship) and wait a few days (loving every minute of the delay) for an Air France flight to Bamako, the capital of Mali. Paris in the morning, Bamako in the afternoon: talk about culture shock. Bamako’s earth was red and dense, it’s air smoky, humid, and thick; and with its slow-moving jitneys, its sprawl of single-story shacks bursting with produce and cheap goods, the city seemed weighted down beneath a heritage of juju. When we deplaned, we’d had to be cleared by security. The Bamako airport had an X-ray machine, and although it was broken and inoperative, we’d been made to load our bags onto its conveyor belt and run them through anyway. Was that senseless protocol — or was it juju? Who needed X-rays or telescopes? Welcome to Mali.

From our hotel, I booked, by phone, reservations on one of Air Mali’s twice-weekly flights to the city of Gao, a transaction conducted entirely in French, a language I cannot profess to actually speak. (Gao-bound flights, I learned, would land briefly in Mopti or Timbuktu if there happened to be passengers aboard so inclined.) Our plane, Russian built and rather decrepit, flew at an altitude of no more than a thousand feet, which seemed okay because the land beneath us was one giant sandbox, flat except for the occasional dune. The plane’s interior had been painted with a green household enamel, and I mean all of it: the cabin walls, the ceiling, the floor, even the seats; every square inch (I wondered about the instrument panel), green, green, green. It could have been Muammar Gaddafi’s private jet. Our fellow passengers included four or five Tuareg males, each, as is customary among these non-negroid nomads, with a full-length sword in his sash. Swords apparently don’t set off alarms in juju security.

Upon landing in Timbuktu, I saw through our conveniently unpainted window dozens of eager-seeming men (not Taureg but black Malians) lined up against the wire fence that separated the terminal area from the tarmac. I’d been in Mali long enough to know that each and every one of them wished to be hired as our guide, and that we’d be practically pulled limb from limb as they competed in a near frenzy for our business. What I didn’t know was that ten tourists had been killed in Timbuktu in December (it was now February), caught in cross fire between Malian government troops and separatist Tauregs (which would have explained the State Department warning), or that for the next eight days we would be the only Westerners, which is to say the only source of income, in the city.

At any rate, I told Alexa that we’d be wise to choose a particular guide even before we left the tarmac, zero in on one guy and walk straight up to him as if it had been prearranged. She agreed, and surveying the throng, I settled on a twentysomething individual, selecting him because he looked exactly like Magic Johnson: shorter, to be sure, but with the same happy eyes and a grin so wide and so bright it could have turned a night shift in a lead mine into a three-week vacation. Now, as a Seattle Sonics fan I despised the Los Angeles Lakers, but I wanted this Magic look-alike on my team, loyalty be damned, and as it turned out, Pasquale was to serve us splendidly, above and beyond the call of duty.

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.”

The Tuareg looked stunned, so I said it again. “No, no,” they cried, “Hashish bad. Hashish bad.” Plainly, my request had rattled them, so pushing the envelope, I now commenced to dance around wildly, like a mandrill with its butt on fire, waggling my arms as if I were one of those extraneously limbed Hindu gods directing the orchestra of the spheres or the traffic in downtown Calcutta. The hawkers moved away. In Mali, it’s considered very bad juju to make eye contact with the mentally ill, and the more I carried on, the more distance they put between themselves and me; until finally, in the middle of a particularly paroxysmic pirouette — “Hashish! Hashish!” — they bagged their imitation artifacts, slipped out of the terminal, and did not return.

Successfully signaled, an Air Mali plane did eventually land and take us aboard. We’d get off in Mopti, from where we’d call on the Sirius-minded Dogon and Bozo, but we were done with Timbuktu. Alas, as it turned out, Timbuktu was not done with us.

The first symptoms tagged us in Paris, where we’d stopped for a few days of joie de vivre before traveling on to the U.S. We were dining in an Alsatian restaurant on rue de Buci when both Alexa and I experienced a simultaneous hot flash. I say “flash,” but the feeling that we were standing against our will before the open door of a blast furnace lasted for ten or fifteen minutes. No one else in the room appeared similarly affected, and the source of the heat seemed definitely internal. The next day on the plane home we experienced an identical episode. Our faces turned strawberry red and the jet might have borrowed our plasma for extra fuel.

Back in Seattle, we were tested for malaria. The results were negative, but our relief was short-lived. During the next ten months — that’s how long we were ill — we would be host to a peculiar panoply of symptoms, including chronic fatigue and spontaneous panic attacks, often coming on in the middle of the night. The hot flashes continued periodically, Alexa experienced hair loss, her ovaries hurt and so did my testicles. The most persistent and unsettling feature, however, was the ache that racked every joint in our bodies and led us to be temporarily diagnosed with dengue, an ailment known colloquially for that very reason as “bonebreak fever.” However, when the tropical disease unit at the University of Washington Hospital, where we’d become familiar faces, sent samples of our blood to the Center for Tropical Diseases in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the experts there found no evidence of dengue. Stumped, the UW even tested us for HIV.

Katharine Hepburn said once, “Men and women weren’t meant to live together. They should live across the street from one another.” For the first few years of our relationship, before we bit the sugarcoated bullet of matrimony, Alexa and I did exactly that. In the late eighties and early nineties, I had an apartment adjacent to Seattle’s famed Pike Place Market (spending just two days a week at my house in La Conner). Alexa lived a clam’s throw away on Western. Our symptoms were sporadic yet remained strangely coordinated. When an episode would visit me, I’d ring up Alexa across the street and ask, “Are you feeling…?” Invariably, she’d respond, “Yeah, it just started.” It was like synchronized swimming in a pool of pathology.

About six months into the disease, I consulted the pope’s doctor. The offices of Dr. Kevin Cahill were in Manhattan, where he served the health needs of the cardinals, bishops, priests, and lay holy mackerels of the New York Diocese, and had been medical consultant to John Paul during the pontiff’s visit to America. Dr. Cahill also happened to be the world’s leading authority on West African diseases. Although I was never examined or diagnosed by Cahill, he informed me during a telephone conversation that “We have names and medical profiles for only about one-eighth of the viruses one can contract in West Africa.” Since Alexa and I apparently had one of the anonymous seven-eighths, I decided to name it, christening it “djiggiebombo” after the village where we had rested, half dead from heat exhaustion, before climbing down the Bandiagara escarpment into Dogon country. Once named, the virus was a bit easier to deal with: I could talk to it, flatter it, encourage it to take a hike of its own.

Djiggiebombo lingered on, nevertheless, and three more months would pass before another phone conversation with another New Yorker led to a startling resolution. This time I’d been speaking with Jonathan Cott, a senior writer for Rolling Stone. Jon had recently returned from Niger, a neighboring country to Mali, where he’d been reporting on the location filming of The Sheltering Sky, Bernardo Bertolucci’s big-screen adaptation of Paul Bowles’s harrowing novel. While in Niger, Jon had unintentionally offended a local witch doctor, who cast a spell that caused him — a gentle, sophisticated, worldly fellow — to roll around in the hot sand off and on for three days, begging Tuareg extras to chop off his head with one of their long swords: big bad juju. Jon assured me that in West Africa black magic is a flourishing reality at which only fools scoffed, and encouraged me to consider it as a possible cause of our so-called djiggiebombo.

Consider I did, and at one point in the deliberation my memory bank, like a constipated slot machine, expelled a single tarnished but negotiable coin. I turned it over and over and slowly the hairs on the back of my neck stood in their follicles and looked around in vain for an exit. A particular occurrence in Timbuktu, previously filed under the label “Interesting but Insignificant Local Color,” was now petitioning for a front-page headline in my mnemonic tabloid.

The moon had been full that night — and believe me, Timbuktu under a full moon lives up to its billing as a metropolis of mystery. All around us the mystique was so thick you could have sliced it with a Tuareg sword. With nary a mountain, a skyscraper or even a tree to impede its ascent, the desert moon seemed to pop up fast, like a flat-faced rabbit some magician has pulled from a hat, and earth’s phantom lover was already high-beaming its sweet, fey mischief when Pasquale and the boys interrupted our early supper to invite us to a dance. On such a night, only a wimp would have refused.

As the moon would have it, the dance was an open-air affair, the dance floor itself a concrete slab the size and shape of a tennis court. On its right side, a band of musicians was warming up, their instruments consisting of a couple of Western-style acoustic guitars and an array of strange African contraptions, both wind and percussive; made from gourds, goat bones, wires, bottles, and sticks; all polished, painted, played with expertise and accorded utmost respect. Next to the band there sat on wooden benches the eligible bachelors of Timbuktu. Across the court from the men, twenty or twenty-five young women had gathered, exuding all the poise and assurance the males appeared to lack. Tall, stately, fine-featured, garbed head to toe in those West African fabrics that could make a rainbow blush, the women looked like fashion models, each and every one. Small wonder the men were intimidated.

Once the band commenced to play in earnest, a number of women, impatient with the time it was taking the men to get up their nerve, took to the court and began dancing with one another. It reminded me of my junior prom in rural Virginia. We rubberneckers were huddled at one end of the slab, just taking it all in, when one of those statuesque beauties approached us and beckoned me onto the floor. When I looked to Pasquale for guidance, he indicated that I should oblige. So, I danced with her for a while, and then a second woman cut in and took her place. After that, a third. The band just played continuously, there being no individual numbers as such. I asked my third partner why the other women were laughing at us — I thought maybe my moves were awkward, too Western, too white — but she replied that Partner Number 2 had announced that she was going to marry me. (Alexa! Help!)

By this time, the men had overcome their shyness, the floor was packed, and all the while an elderly female was weaving in and out among the couples, not dancing, just wandering, zigzagging — and looking quite mad. No one acknowledged her presence, not even when she got in their way. The dancers behaved as if she were totally invisible. Which, of course, was standard in that part of the world. They just pretended bizarre behavior was not happening. If someone acted nuts, everybody else hit the delete button.

Eventually, I managed to excuse myself from the frolic and made to rejoin my little group of onlookers. As I sat down beside Alexa, I noticed that the old crone had followed me to the end of the court. Regarding the two of us crazily for an instant, she then hissed and made a swift, cryptic gesture with both hands before turning and disappearing into the swaying, swinging throng.

Neither Alexa nor I thought much about it at the time, but we did start to feel increasingly uncomfortable, sensing that we outsiders had intruded long enough on another culture’s private rituals, and when we suggested to Pasquale, “John Travolta,” and the posse that it might be time for us to leave, they concurred. Just as children like to scare themselves, we imagined all sorts of exotic menace — genies, lions, kidnappers, jilted Tuareg promoters, ghosts of long-dead slavers astride pale camels — as we passed through the velvet shadows cast by those ancient clay mosques and libraries in the still more ancient moonlight. We did not, however, think of the gesturing crone, nor would she really come to mind again until the day nine months later when Jonathan Cott had to go and bring up juju.

Since in all those months our disease had gone undiagnosed, since Western medicine had failed to relieve its symptoms, and since we had, indeed, been somewhat vulnerable in a culture where juju was a fact of life, where things occurred that caused science to look the other way (the Dogon’s detailed knowledge of the Sirius star system, for example), it did not seem wholly unreasonable to consider that our “djiggiebombo” might be, in fact, a curse. If so, then how did one proceed in neutralizing it, in getting it lifted?

As Jon’s seed sprouted, and after hours of reflection, I devised a plan of action. Every day, sometimes twice or thrice a day, I would lie down on the earth. In La Conner, I would recline in my backyard, when in Seattle, I’d find a patch of bare soil in Myrtle Edwards Park. Once I’d established what would have to pass for a connection to the earth, once I’d cleared my thoughts of the customary daily debris, I’d close my eyes and focus on the old witch woman. In my mind, I’d try to picture her as a little girl growing up in Timbuktu, imagining her life back then. Next, I’d picture her as a young woman, maybe going to dances such as the one on which we’d intruded, maybe falling in love at such a soiree. I’d picture her as a bride, perhaps a mother, and then I’d try to imagine what turn of events might have wounded her, caused her to begin practicing the black arts. Had she embraced juju only after she’d become mentally unstable? Or, had the juju itself deranged her?

Next, I’d apologize, begging her forgiveness if our presence at the dance had offended her. I’d tell her that my dancing with the women had been all in good fun, conducted with respect, and that the tittering over a potential marriage was just some girlish joke. I’d express admiration for her city and its people, and romantic that I am, this praise was not insincere. I’d congratulate her on Timbuktu’s rich history and express hope for a restorative future. All this I did day after day, and although I must confess I sometimes felt more than a little foolish, none of my séances were in jest. We were a trifle desperate. Djiggiebombo was peeing in our punch bowl. Djiggiebombo was plucking our bluebird.

So what happened? It may have been a result of the macrobiotic diet we’d temporarily but rigorously embraced, it may have been due to the shiatsu treatments we were receiving from a remarkable Seattle healer named Yasuo Mori, the crone in far Mali may actually have sensed somehow my daily appeals and responded favorably thereto; or maybe the damned disease just finally ran out of gas, as viruses, named or unnamed, sometimes do; but for whatever reason, within weeks of my having first launched my psychic missives toward northwest Africa, our symptoms, mine and Alexa’s (in perfect tandem, of course), began to ebb, to fade. And then one fine day — after nearly a year of wreaking havoc in our twin corporal oases — djiggiebombo saddled its dromedary and rode off into the sunset, never to return. Au revoir, motherfucker! And God bless Timbuktu.