Six North Africans were playing boules beneath Flaubert's statue. Clean cracks sounded over the grumble of jammed traffic. With a final, ironic caress from the fingertips, a brown hand despatched a metal globe. It landed, hopped to reveal a small moon-crater, and curved slowly in a scatter of hard dust. The thrower remained a stylish, temporary statue: knees not quite unbent, and the right hand ecstatically spread. I noted a furled white shirt, a bare forearm, and a blob on the back of the wrist. Not a watch, as I first thought, not quite a tattoo, but a transfer: the face of a political sage well thought of in the desert.

LRB 18 August 1983 | PDF Download