Egypt, Chapter III — Marsa Alam at Night, Beyond the Vacation Fence
A tourist town always has two nights.
One is lit for those who paid.
The other goes on for those who live there.
The first has pools lit from below, cocktails that cost a day’s wages, buffets large enough to feed a small army, and tanned people complaining that the Wi-Fi does not reach their lounge chair properly.
The second has shops still open, motorcycles, old cars, food cooking behind fogged glass, men talking at the roadside, and children turning whatever piece of the world adults have left them into somewhere to play.
That evening, I wanted to see the second one.
Not to feel braver than the tourists who stayed inside the resort.
I was not crossing into a war zone, and no one would make a documentary about my heroic expedition beyond the all-inclusive wristband.
I was simply curious.
A sincere curiosity, though not an entirely innocent one.
I wanted to know what Marsa Alam was like when it stopped serving other people’s vacations.
I wanted to see the streets, faces, shops, and daily life beyond that part of Egypt designed to convince me the whole world could be a swimming pool facing the Red Sea.
And I wanted to take photographs.
Naturally.
Photographers possess this annoying deformity: they want to be present for life, but they also want to carry a piece of it away.
I entered town with my camera and little time.
It was the off-season.
The evening felt restrained.
There was none of the crowd I had imagined, no human river to cross, no cinematic chaos willing to offer me, free of charge, the definitive portrait of authentic Egypt.
The city was sparse.
Some streets nearly empty.
Few people.
Lights separated by broad stretches of darkness.
Marsa Alam had no intention of staging a show merely because I had arrived with a fast lens and the expectations of an emotionally hungry Westerner.
It offered me what was there.
It wasn’t much.
But it was real.
The first passage looked like a corridor left unfinished.
Warm lamps on the walls.
Boards stacked together.
Fabric resting along the sides.
At the far end, a shop exploded with light, color, souvenirs, stuffed animals, and enough little objects to make its entrance resemble the aftermath of capitalism having an epileptic seizure.
A woman studied the merchandise.
The rest of the passage remained in shadow.
The city seemed to work that way.
Not continuous illumination.
Islands.
A lit shop.
A doorway.
A face.
Then darkness again.
At the resort, light was used to erase the night.
There, it carved out just enough room for something to continue.
Selling.
Cooking.
Meeting.
Waiting.
A man stood inside a small shop crowded with bottles, essences, and containers.
He wore a light jacket over his shirt and spoke with his hands in motion. He held a glass or small metal vessel, intent on explaining something I could not understand.
Perhaps perfume.
Perhaps oil.
Perhaps a drink.
Or perhaps he was simply trying to sell me a substance capable of curing headaches, hair loss, impotence, and that general sense of having wasted half your life.
In Egypt, if a bottle is small enough and the man selling it persuasive enough, it can probably do all four.
The shop was narrow.
Every surface held something.
There was no empty space.
Emptiness is an aesthetic luxury invented by people with enough money to buy an enormous house and fill it with a table, a sad plant, and a four-thousand-dollar lamp designed to resemble a pipe forgotten by a plumber.
There, every inch had to work.
One shelf held bottles.
Another, boxes.
The counter divided seller from customer and, at the same time, forced them close.
A little farther on, an old man stood beside a display of watches.
He pointed to one.
Or perhaps he was explaining something to me.
His gesture remained suspended near the glass.
Behind him, the watches were lined up, motionless and perfectly visible.
Dozens of little faces busy measuring time in a city where I would remain only a few hours.
It struck me as a rather elegant way of taking the piss.
I was short on time, and he sold it.
I would have liked to buy a week.
Stay.
Walk without hurrying.
Return to the same streets often enough to stop being the stranger with the camera.
Learn who opened the shops, who closed them, which people returned every evening, and which were merely passing through that piece of the city.
But time does not work that way.
You can buy a watch.
Not the hours you have already promised someone else.
Photography helped.
Or at least pretended to.
A hundredth of a second preserved forever.
A magnificent fraud.
It convinces you that you saved time when all you did was embalm its surface.
Inside another window, a lamp made from small fragments of colored glass glowed.
Yellow.
Orange.
Irregular.
Light passed through every piece and made even the cracks beautiful.
I stopped.
The glass had been broken, arranged, and assembled again.
Someone had taken different fragments and forced them to cooperate in producing light.
It was a good metaphor.
Perhaps too good.
Writers should be fined whenever they encounter a broken object and immediately decide it represents the human soul.
That evening, however, the glass would return.
In a less poetic form.
For now, it was still inside a lamp.
Protected.
Displayed.
For sale.
Motorcycles passed outside.
A boy sat astride a black motorcycle, sandals on the ground and a light robe gathered across his legs. He looked at me directly, neither hostile nor particularly interested in making the photograph easier for me.
Behind him, two men crossed the street.
Old cars moved beneath the streetlights.
Small three-wheeled vehicles stood near the shops, half motorcycle and half truck bed, as if two different vehicles had gotten drunk, fucked, and nine months later Egyptian urban transport was born.
Everything seemed to be moving without being in a hurry.
A sand-colored car was parked before a row of lit storefronts.
It had the age and posture of an animal that had long since stopped expecting veterinary care.
Around it, people bought, talked, and waited.
A young man leaned against a small pickup.
A woman argued with someone.
A child remained near the adults.
Smoke from a kitchen rose above the signs.
The street was not beautiful in the way a tourist destination insists on being.
It was not clean.
It was not coordinated.
It had not chosen a color palette or hidden the wires to improve customer satisfaction.
It had red signs.
Green neon.
Dust.
Asphalt.
Worn bodywork.
Different clothes.
People entering the frame without knowing what role I would assign them later.
It was beautiful because it was not trying to be.
A man cooked behind a structure of glass and metal.
His head bowed.
One hand held the utensil.
Fire was visible beneath the griddle.
Beside him waited plates, vegetables, plastic cups, and nearly empty tables.
There were not enough customers to justify much urgency.
He worked anyway.
Slow evenings must be crossed too.
Food cannot afford existential crises.
It must be cut.
Heated.
Turned.
Served.
Work has this brutal quality: it keeps demanding concrete gestures even when the mind would prefer to devote itself to some elegant form of despair.
Perhaps that is why it sometimes saves us.
It solves nothing.
But it puts something in your hands.
Soon afterward, the children appeared.
First, a group around a motorcycle with a blue cargo bed.
They all talked at once.
One sat atop the vehicle.
The others crowded around, smiling, arguing, and looking at the camera.
They did not seem intimidated.
Curiosity had defeated caution with an ease that usually takes adults three drinks.
One stepped forward.
Another laughed.
Someone tried to enter the frame.
The photograph was no longer a silent theft.
It had become a game.
I aimed the lens.
They decided what to show me.
I liked that part.
It returned a little power to whoever stood before the camera.
A child knows nothing of representation theory, the colonial gaze, or all those phrases adults use at very serious conferences to explain why they photographed someone without asking their name.
He knows something simpler.
There is a camera.
I want to see what happens if I make this face.
One of them put his fingers around his eyes.
Pulled them wide.
Smiled.
He gave me a mask made with his hands, turning the portrait into a small act of mockery.
Perfect.
I was looking for real life.
He reminded me that real life also includes a child who sees a foreign photographer and decides to act like an idiot.
Especially that.
Another child stood beside an unfinished brick wall.
Red T-shirt.
Loose shorts.
One hand resting on the corner.
He was barely smiling.
To the left were signs, shops, and lights.
To the right, the bare wall.
He seemed to stand precisely between two versions of the city.
The one ready to sell.
And the one still waiting to be finished.
The exposed brick made no attempt to hide how the building had been made. No plaster, no decoration, no attempt to suggest that things are born complete.
The child did not seem interested.
It was home.
Or the street.
Or simply the place where he had stopped.
We visitors are the ones looking for symbols.
For someone who lives there, a wall is often just a fucking wall.
Three girls approached me soon afterward.
One wore a pink sweatshirt with a large brand across the chest.
Another wore a red tracksuit covered in logos.
They embraced.
They laughed.
A third stayed behind, just out of focus, curious and cautious.
The brands had traveled well.
Multinational corporations possess an almost moving talent for reaching every corner of the planet. A decent sidewalk may be missing, but the name of an American company will still find its way onto a sweatshirt.
I did not know whether those clothes were genuine.
It did not matter.
Desire does not need a certificate of authenticity.
We wear words, symbols, and distant cities to try, at least for a few hours, to become something larger than the place where we were born.
New York.
Paris.
Levi’s.
Chanel.
Brands capable of crossing borders that people, very often, will never cross with the same ease.
The girls smiled.
But I had already learned the day’s lesson.
The smile belonged to them.
It proved nothing.
It did not say they were happy with little.
It did not certify a simple, pure life free from the complications we Westerners, after accumulating enough bullshit, pretend to envy.
It said only that at that moment they were laughing in front of a stranger.
That was enough.
They had no obligation to represent poverty.
They were children.
Then came the image that stayed with me.
Three children crouched in the middle of the road.
Not on the sidewalk.
Not inside a courtyard.
On the asphalt.
Behind them passed cars, lights, and people. The shops continued operating along the road. A streetlamp shone down and illuminated their bodies.
One was standing.
The other two were bent over.
One of them was barefoot.
In their hands and on the ground were shards of glass.
I did not understand the game.
Perhaps they were collecting them.
Perhaps arranging them.
Perhaps searching for something among those fragments.
Children possess this fierce ability to turn what they find into what they need.
A piece of wood becomes a sword.
A box becomes a house.
A mound of dirt becomes a kingdom.
And shards of glass can become a game.
But it would be bullshit to use their imagination to absolve the world that had left those shards in the road.
A child’s imagination is wonderful.
It should not have to be safety equipment.
I looked at their feet.
The skin.
The sandals.
The toes close to the glass.
A few miles away, other children were probably running through a resort.
Washed floors.
Monitored pools.
Activity leaders.
Playgrounds.
Parents worrying about the corner of a table and asking whether the water had been treated properly.
A few miles were enough.
Perhaps less.
The same city.
The same sky.
The same night.
Completely different childhoods.
Not because some children knew how to have fun better.
Not because they were stronger, freer, or more authentic.
Simply because someone had prepared the ground beneath some children’s feet.
Beneath the others, only asphalt remained.
In the previous chapter I had understood that poverty also means having fewer chances to make a mistake.
That night, the difference had become even simpler.
It was the thickness of a sole.
A few millimeters of rubber between a body and something capable of cutting it.
Inequality does not always arrive in the form of numbers.
It needs no charts, statistics, or speeches delivered by a man in a suit at an air-conditioned international conference with complimentary bottled water.
Sometimes you need only look at where children play.
What they find on the ground.
How much space lies between their feet and danger.
I pressed the shutter.
The photograph passed no judgment.
Photographs do not know how.
They do not know a family’s income.
They do not know who broke that bottle, why the children were there, or what happened five minutes later.
They record light.
Distances.
Bodies.
A gesture.
We are the ones who build the case.
And yet choosing where to point the lens already means saying something.
It means interrupting the flow and asking:
Look here.
I am not telling you what to think.
But do not pretend you did not see.
Those photographs were fragments of life.
Life observed.
Life brushed against.
Life stolen for a hundredth of a second and returned as an image.
They did not tell the whole story of Marsa Alam.
That would be ridiculous.
A city cannot fit inside one evening.
It cannot fit inside a thousand photographs either.
Truth requires time.
I had only a few hours and a camera.
I could look through a keyhole.
I could not claim to know the house.
I kept walking.
Two men talked beside a small cargo vehicle.
One leaned against the bed.
The other rested a hand on the frame.
Behind them, an old car occupied nearly the entire sidewalk, with mismatched headlights and a windshield marked by dust.
It looked like a creature built from the memories of other dead cars.
Farther on, a man stood beside baskets filled with spices or dark fruit.
A strip of light wrapped around a column.
The light cut across his face and hand.
He waited.
Perhaps for a customer.
Perhaps for the end of the evening.
Perhaps for nothing.
Night is full of people who seem to be waiting for something even when they are simply standing still.
Balls and small toys hung beside a shop.
Two children talked beneath the blue and yellow light of the entrance.
One watched the other with absolute concentration.
The kind of concentration adults grant only to arguments involving money, sex, or their conviction that they are right.
Perhaps they were discussing a game.
A coin.
Something they had seen in the street.
I did not know.
Soon afterward, one child stood before the blue cargo bed and made that absurd face with his fingers.
Eyes closed.
Teeth showing.
The theatrical, momentary happiness of someone who has discovered he can command the image.
I was no longer photographing him.
He was using me to make his own portrait.
It felt right.
The last scene held another child.
He sat on a small decorated ottoman beside a cascade of stuffed animals, toy cars, and brightly colored toys.
He was not smiling.
He looked toward an adult crossing the frame.
There was something tired in his posture, or perhaps merely bored.
I did not know whether those toys were his.
Whether they belonged to his family.
Whether they were merchandise.
Whether he was waiting for someone.
The photograph did not say.
And I did not want to invent it.
Proximity does not mean possession.
You can spend an evening surrounded by toys without being able to take a single one home.
You can work inside a hotel without being able to sleep there.
You can live beside the sea without spending your days on vacation.
You can live a few miles from someone else’s paradise and never be granted permission to enter.
In the off-season, Marsa Alam had remained nearly empty.
I had not met enough people.
I had not walked enough streets.
I had passed through too quickly.
I regretted it.
I would have liked to stay longer, return the following night, wait until the faces stopped regarding me as a novelty and the city forgot I was there.
It did not happen.
The journey granted me a single crack.
Through it I saw vendors, cooks, motorcycles, exhausted cars, men talking, and children laughing, watching, playing, and occupying the night.
It was not enough to explain how they lived.
It was enough to destroy a convenient illusion.
Marsa Alam was not the resort.
The resort was only a part of Marsa Alam built so that people like me would not have to see the rest.
Inside, window glass protected us from dust, wind, and the reality outside.
In the shops, small fragments of colored glass had been reassembled into lamps for sale.
In the street, other fragments waited beside children’s feet.
The same material.
Three destinies.
Protection.
Decoration.
Danger.
The glass possessed no moral code.
It merely reflected the light it received.
Perhaps photography worked the same way.
It did not fix the world.
It protected no one.
It did not erase the distance between the resorts and that street.
It gathered a little light and returned it later, when the city was already far away and I could finally understand what I had seen.
That evening I did not discover the real Marsa Alam.
Anyone claiming to have discovered the truth of a place during one walk is probably already selling the book, the course, or the complete spiritual package with breakfast included.
I saw only a few moments.
But sometimes you do not need to know the whole story.
You only need to lose the right to tell yourself it does not exist.
The night continued.
Cars passed.
The shops remained open.
Someone sold something.
Someone went home.
The children kept playing until an adult called them, the road emptied, or the game stopped being interesting.
I left.
With a few photographs.
Too few to explain.
Enough to remember.
At night, even shards shine.
That does not make them cut any less.