Around the heart in eleven years. Epp Petrone

met.

      Sometimes, though, I listened to a CD Djellah gave me of her songs – she was a travelling musician. Weeks went by, then months, then years; new trips came along, new people, new crises, new searches and discoveries…

      How did ten years manage to go by so fast?

      “Have you heard anything from Djellah?” I ask Jorge after he’s dealt with some tourists that wandered into his store.

      “Djellah? But Djellah is dead! They discovered she had cancer, a few years ago. She left us in a matter of weeks. Before that she lived here for a couple of stretches. For a while she left, to go somewhere else, and then ended up, coming back, you know!”

      Yes, that’s right, Djellah had kind of adopted a girl in this village, the daughter of a prostitute that worked down at the port. Of course, she’d come back here, and repeatedly, unlike me.

      I can’t think any further than that.

      But what did Jorge just say about her being dead? It had to be some kind of a sick joke.

      Suddenly, I remember sharing another thing with Djellah. We were both just a bit over twenty when our mothers died of cancer. And just like me, Djellah also said that she still hadn’t gotten over it (she was forty-eight when we met) and, just like me, she was afraid that it, the disease, could happen to her.

      “Dead? But she was still so young!” My eyes tear up. My children are fighting at the other end of the store while loud German tourists are passing the supermarket’s open front… Daily life and the past have mixed together. I’m crying. I’ve finally made it back here, but it’s too late.

      The tale of a woman without a homeland

Ten years earlier. May 1999Arguineguin, Gran Canaria

      I’m sitting in the market dust and writing. Today is one of those days when nobody seems to be interested in what I’m selling. I’ve completely run out of money and I have no idea where I’m spending the night if nobody buys anything from me today! Maybe one of the magazines will give me an advance if I write a story about Djellah’s wondrous life and send it to them?

      “She was walking around the local market: a tall gangly woman, with a strangely weathered stare, a pony tail bleached by the sun to all the different shades of blond, dropping phrases left and right in many different languages,” I start putting down on paper the moment that happened close to here just a few weeks ago. “I asked her, “Where are you from?” like you’re supposed to do when starting conversations with strangers you meet in touristy places. “I’m from everywhere and nowhere,” she answered, with a crooked smile, as if she was joking.

      Later on I understood that she really was telling the truth. She was born into a family of diplomats and they’ve always been on the move from one country to the next, so instead of having one native language, she has five, or maybe six.. Her mother and father are both of mixed blood, so Djellah ended up being a cocktail of the whole world: she’s got some French, English, German, Dutch, Jewish, and Gypsy blood running through her veins. The first years of Djellah’s life were spent in Pakistan. As a toddler, she was constantly getting lost somewhere and found again, for example, half a day later wondering in the woods a few miles away. Her parents were scared that a girl with curly blond hair and green eyes would fall prey to child abduction because of her exotic beauty…”

      I lift up my head for a moment. Yes, that does remind me of something. The desire to run away. Specific images: the touch of the coat fabric in my hand, sticking my hands in the sleeves, searching for button holes with clumsy fingers, the crunching snow, the glow on the horizon, and then someone running after me, irritated and restraining me, “Come back, you can’t leave!” Or a moment from springtime, my cheek pressed against the soil, the sound of the stream, the smell of the cherry tree, the green light that the low foliage of the tree cast around me. And the sweet knowledge that I had ran off. Why? For no compelling reason.

      I continue writing, “Following a few years in a convent school in Italy, she returned to the safety of her parents’ home – what a weird word for another ambassadorial residence! For a few years their temporary home was in Hong Kong. Receptions, mingling, small talk, and cocktail dresses, Djellah went along dutifully with her parents’ life until she turned nineteen. That’s when she announced to her father, “This life is too superficial and hypocritical for me. I need to go out into the real world!”

      Djellah still gets well along with her father. She just mentions that from that day, his financial support ceased. With the same briefness she also talks about discontinuing her classical music studies in Germany – it was too constraining. She felt that she needed room for inspiration. Djellah says things like that with no pretence, only slight apprehensiveness: I’m different, she tells herself, and I’ll have to manage with who I am.”

      Someone is coming. A shadow falls on my notebook and I set it down quickly next to my feet, to wait for the next opportunity.

      Looks like a Spanish woman. “Look,” I use what little Spanish I have on her and gesticulate as much as could possibly be appropriate. “Have you ever seen Tibetan mantra boxes before? And these little silver bottles, also from Tibet, you can wear them as a pendant and put perfume in them!” Djellah has taught me sentences about my products, word for word, and Harri has taught me to trust my intuition and offer each customer something based on that first immediate flash of recognition, because in these first moments people are absolutely infallible, according to Harri.

      But no luck this time. The woman with a dark ponytail bares her white teeth for a moment in a weird smile, and walks off.

      It’s now noon and I still haven’t sold anything!

      I didn’t know before how easily pride and self-respect could slip away. Their price is about as high as a bunch of bananas, a box of tampons, or a night at a hotel… If you can’t get any of these – even in dire need – you get this disgusting feeling of humiliation, worthlessness.

      I’m thinking that I need to ask Djellah how to manage these feelings that a lack of money creates. You can always suppress a stomach from growling by drinking water, but what are you supposed to do when it’s your spirit making the same noise? Will I eventually be proud of not making money at some point? How does it work?

      Or, am I going to learn to swallow my pride? Marco is rich, he’s right here on this island and we have some kind of a “relationship” going on, but for some reason it would seem like the worst desecration of my pride if I admitted my money problems to him. I do realize that by behaving like this I am building walls between us. I also realize that Djellah has never learned how to quash her pride.

      “Djellah hasn’t asked a man for help with money in her whole life,” I continue writing my story. “At times this independence has meant quite literally starving. Her rich boyfriend, a German named Rolf, is somewhere sailing around the world, because he has enough money to never work again… But at the same time our tough Djellah is looking for a job so that she can eat, taking odd jobs around the market. “Rolf has always been offended by this pride. He says that self-confidence also means having the courage to ask a man for help if needed. Unfortunately, I don’t have that kind of confidence. When we lived on Rolf ’s boat, of course, I’d eat the food that he bought for us, but at the same time I also did a lot of work on the boat. If he’d only had a box for money on board and said, “We’ll both put in what we have and take some whenever needed.” But no, he was always waiting for me to turn to him and ask for help, he still is…”

      I put the pencil down.

      Yes, why is it so hard to ask for help? You can see this problem much more clearly in other people than in your own life. It’s hard to say whether Djellah’s skewed views are a sign of naivete or life experience, when she talks about her relationships. For the past thirty years she has been an incredibly beautiful woman who has never dropped anchor anywhere in the world: she has sailed on almost all the great world seas, living a life at sea with different men, but sooner or later she’s always been the one to leave.

      “I want to be with a man only if I’m a hundred percent sure of