The Eye of the Wolf by Daniel Pennac

Author:Daniel Pennac [Pennac, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781406384543
Publisher: Walker Books
Published: 2018-01-04T05:00:00+00:00

Saucepans unfolds his legs and stands up against the orange sky.

The sun rises. Toa the trader swears and spits and curses Africa. The dromedary and the boy chuckle. They learned how to laugh on the inside a long time ago. Seen from the outside, they are both as smooth and serious as sand dunes.

IV

So that was the first chapter of his life. Even if he’d scoured all of Africa, Toa the trader would never have found a boy faster at loading and unloading the dromedary. He’d never have found someone better at arranging the merchandise in front of the Bedouin tents, someone who understood the camels more deeply, or, most importantly, someone who could tell such incredible stories at night, around the fires, when the Sahara becomes as cold as a desert of ice and you feel all alone in the world.

“He tells them well, doesn’t he?”

“He’s a good storyteller, isn’t he?”

“It’s the way he tells them!”

His stories attracted customers from the nomad camps. Toa was happy.

“Eh! Toa, what do you call your boy?”

“Haven’t had time to give him a name – too busy working.”

The nomads didn’t like Toa the trader. “Toa, you don’t deserve this boy.” They would offer the boy a seat near the brazier, feed him with boiling tea, dates and milk curds (they thought he was too thin), and they would say, “Tell us a story.”

So the boy would tell them stories he had made up in his head while he was sitting on Saucepans’ hump. Or else he would tell them the dromedary’s dreams, because the dromedary dreamed every night and sometimes he even dreamed while he was walking in the sunshine. They were stories about Yellow Africa, about the Sahara, about an Africa filled with sands and sunshine and solitude and scorpions and silence. And when the caravans set out again under the blazing sky, those who had listened to the boy’s stories saw a different Africa from high up on their camels. In this new Africa the sand was gentle underfoot, the sun was a fountain, and they were no longer alone: the young boy’s voice followed them wherever they went in the desert.

“Africa!”

It was during one of these nights that an old Tuareg chief, who was at least a hundred and fifty years old, declared, “Toa, we’ll call this boy Africa!”

Toa stayed back and sat on his coat while Africa was telling his stories. But he would get up at the end of each story and hold out a tin bowl to collect bronze coins or old notes.

“He’s even got the nerve to charge us for the boy’s stories.”

“Toa the trader, you’d sell yourself if someone was willing to pay for you.”

“I’m a trader,” Toa would grumble. “It’s my job to sell things.”

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