Deep in the unbuilt industrial district of this city, we sit at a terrace bar that shares a wall with an unfinished hotel. We listen to music at a dark table, my friend closing his eyes and shaking his head in his quiet way. I do not know how to describe the music here, the amplified kora, the melancholy cry. We stay for hours. Sometime near midnight, an airplane passes in the near distance, heading north. My friend looks at his watch and says Ah. The Air France flight is late. The singer pauses to smoke his cigarette; the tip of it glows against the red wall behind him, and the cinder scatters across the tiled ground.
I come home in an impossibly broken taxi, watching from the window the nighttime tailors working the ancient foot-pedaled Singer machines on the old colonial balconies. I’m a little bit drunk, exhausted, wondering if there is space enough in my heart to love another place that I will leave.
The sun these mornings is pale yellow and blotted by dust, dulled and suspended high over the half-paved streets. I carry an old Malian coin like a talisman, I take it all in.