The man with a suitcase

The salty dry sand cracked under our feet, just like dry, frosty snow. It was December and the sun was high above us, spreading an immense, hot and humid light over our heads.

Dakar was far to the north. From here to civilisation we had to take a boat from the island we were to the next village. And from there, it was still a long journey back to the big city. I had found myself in such a predicament thanks to good Asturian friends, Juana and Javi.

Mar Lodj, an island in the northern tip of the Sine Saloum was our host for some days, in western tip of Africa.

The landscape was immense and barren, a plain cut by tall palm trees, small bush, and the mangrove in the distance. We could hear the birds and two wild dogs that followed us all the way from the village, had become our watchful companions.

We walked for hours under that humid, African heat. There weren’t many trees to seek a shade and the only constructions to be seen were empty termites’ hives.

So far away from mankind, we were free. We walked as we pleased and enjoyed that meridional landscape, so strange to my eyes.

The life and turmoil of Dakar seemed an old forgotten memory… Home was just a word that I had forgotten to say. I felt I was becoming Mar Lodj and Mar Lodj was becoming me… It seemed as though I had come back to some ancestral, unknown origins…

As we wandered across the tall grass, we saw a surprisingly, strange character. In the middle of that landscape, like a somber specter, we saw the man with a suitcase.

He was simply dressed, on some old clothes, carrying a leather case. We walked towards him and my friends engaged in a conversation with him in Wolof – language from Senegal, The Gambia, and Mauritania – which content, I ignored, given the fact I had barely arrived in the country.

He was very surprised, for finding three toubab ­– white folk – in there, wandering alone, and who could speak the language.

He showed us the content of his brown leather suitcase: very small items of all sorts, I cannot fully recall, but I think it were wrist bands for watches, stamps, envelopes, needles, sharpening rocks, and a vast range of tiny, little, shiny apparatuses.

They spoke for a while, and later Juana and Javi, told me he was heading towards a village beyond the mangrove, where he would sell his goods to some village folk. He was going to take a small rowing boat through the mangrove canals and would reach the village in no time.

When the conversation was over, the old man shook our hands firmly and gave us a long, simple, and true smile. We parted ways, he followed a sandy path, and we kept walking towards nowhere.

When I turned around, the man with the case had already disappeared, swallowed by the green, wild, unknown mangrove.