ALBERTO MORAVIA
397
was still soft, the builder, with a pointed tool or spatula, marked furrows
which also give a wave-like impression. These wall-waves, devoid of any
opening, hermetic, with that rare small door or window here and there,
form narrow and deserted streets in which the life of the African city
reveals all its terrible poverty: dust, an occasional naked child, a woman
crouched on the steps of a doorway pounding something into a mortar,
a man cowering in the sun and the flies. The silence is profound; the
sun that glitters among the red battlements of the walls, in the im–
maculately blue sky, is a vertical, a hard and burning sun and explains
the hermetic quality of the city, Arab in feeling, although the Arab
cities are white and Kano, instead, is all red, of exactly the color that
the earth in Africa often has.
But Kano is a market city, that is, a city to which, from the farthest
comers of Africa, both east and west, people flock, those who want to
buy and those who want
to
sell. At fifty kilometers from Kano we were
informed that on precisely that day a market was being held. We went
there. After an hour speeding along jerkily on a sandy track through
the swarming of the bush and the acacia of the savanna, there were
the first signs of the market: groups of Negroes dressed in wide
fluttering gowns of white cotton walking with that gay capricious step
of theirs across the heath, headed toward an unimaginable goal. At
first, there were only a few individuals, then some families, finally small
strolling crowds; they walked quickly, chattering, laughing, gesticulating,
with that anticipated enthusiasm and that premeditated promiscuity
that are peculiar to those who are on their way to a gathering place in
which they know they will be swallowed up by an even vaster multitude.
In short, all these Negroes who were running a few at a time toward
the market seemed to have already a foretaste of the moment when
they would plunge themselves into the crowd, and confused with so
many others in the dust, sweat and noise, they would find a compensa–
tion for that weak, irritating, and superfluous individual separateness.
But there is the market: an immense plain scattered with large trees
of loose spreading foliage, and under the trees, a multitude all dressed
in
white like the crowds of an ancient Roman and Greek city. The
plain was so flat that the crowd with its white gestures and movements
stood out against the blue sky as if they were not standing on a plain
but on a mountain top; this crowd, even from a distance one could
see, was shaken by a violent confusion like that of different currents
crossing in the sea during a storm. It swayed, it opened, closed again,
