Dancing with the Blue Men: Notes on Freedom and Ageing #1

Rhonda loses herself to gnaoua music around a campfire in Morocco's Agafay Desert.

I'm a fountain of blood,

In the shape of a girl

You're the bird on the brim

Hypnotised by the whirl

Drink me, make me feel real…

Björk, Bachelorette

In the glittering, guttering candlelight of the tented pavilion, they move slowly, nobly, like indigo ghosts – these traditionally clad Berbers, ‘blue men’ from the desert of southern Morocco.

But they seem like boys, really, not men – late teens, early twenties, I guess: the age of my eldest son.

Carefully they place fish chermoula, meat tagine and couscous before us, their guests. The startling depth of their dark eyes is exaggerated by the Covid masks they wear, yet their pupils refuse to accept my fascinated gaze. Like one-way glass, they return my reflection to me, keeping what’s inside them locked-down.

The belly dancers at the end of the long communal table gyrate on, to a cadence ever-more frenzied. Is it my imagination, or is one of them paying me undue attention? Conversely to the boys’, the dancer’s eyes seem to penetrate my own, to flirt or even to goad. Or was it me looking too hard, too greedily, and is she only sending my attention back to me like a mirror?

I look away. I already know my libido can lead me astray. Sex is a bomb I carry around with me, ready to explode in my face. That so many women do. And now that I have freed myself from all the claims – the claims of men, some of whom seem to see something in me that might succour them for their compromises in life – it ranges freely, the fuse waiting to be lit. 

Certainly, I can see myself sleeping with the dancer if the circumstances were right. But I doubt this woman wants me. She’s surely just playing up to the question she can read in my eyes: what if? She’s enjoying her power – and so she should.

When the dancers stop and the meal is finished, we diners are ushered outside, to where the blue men wait. The musicians from nomadic Berber groups have already begun playing their traditional instruments around the crackling campfire, unable to wait for the audience to gather. I feel they would be making music even were it not for we visitors, so joyful and uninhibited is their dancing, their drumming, their chanting.

I stand and watch, letting myself be carried by the tempo of this gnaoua music. There is something hypnotic about it, something ritualistic. I feel my body start to move as if bidden by some power against which it has no defences. 

I slide my hands down my hips. My dress is cream, floor-length, lace effect, made in Turkey. It fits snugly around my torso then falls away to the ground. There’s a chastity to it. In a hotel room with someone else’s husband, I called it, with huge irony, my ‘Turkish wedding dress’. I was being a dick. I remember trying to dance with him in it, and him up-ending me onto the bed like a doll. But I really did only want to DANCE…

But he’s gone now, and I’m here, swaying beside fat tongues of flame shooting up towards a sky pregnant with planets and stars, far from anyone. And the feeling of being free and untethered from it all, from them all, makes me bunch my dress up by my thighs with my hands and throw myself into the dance. Eyes closed, head back, spinning, I become pagan, something wild and uncontained. I lose all sense of myself.

It could be minutes, it could be hours, but at some moment the rhythm changes and the music slows, expelling me from the trance. And that’s when I see the blood – a big bloom of it on the front of my dress, in my groin area. I’m shocked, having not bled in so long. I had thought I was well on the way to a new era of life.

But I’m also somehow pleased by it, by this eruption of my womanhood here, in the middle of primeval nature, surrounded by these beautiful Berber boys with their enigmatic eyes. All these young men radiating a virility and soul I feel I no longer have any claim to, any need for.

The other guests filter off, back to their tents. Couples turn in for the night. I am alone, in need of distance from my life. When the rich, older Swiss man on the plane gave me his phone number, unbidden, scribbling it on a sick bag from the pocket in front of him after telling me about the venality of his wife in their horribly protracted divorce settlement, I saw that as a sign of some sort – confirmation that I needed to stay out of all that messy relationship stuff.

One of the Berbers walks me back to my tent by lanternlight. I wouldn’t see the way otherwise. He’s been asking me lots of questions about myself all night. I feel it would take just one word or glance for things to tip over, for the night to become something fully other. 

He points at the sky. ‘Daughters of the night,’ he says. I look and think it’s the Pleiades he’s showing me. I think that the Berber nomads must know the stars well, in order to navigate the desert.

He gestures at my tent, takes a hesitant step towards it.

I smile and thank him for seeing me home. I think that at my age I should probably take it as I can get it, regardless of the blood. The blood doesn’t embarrass me anyway. It’s just another bodily fluid.  

But I don’t take it. I don’t know why. 

The man – the boy – vanishes into the darkness.  I lie on the lounger on my wooden deck, watching the night sky wheel around me in its own ages-old dance that speaks of a different level of time, something deeper, something looping, Möbial. I don’t cry and I don’t wish anybody was here with me to share all this. I’m not longing for or lacking anything. I just am.

Sometime later, waking on my deck, feeling ageless as a universe without beginning or end, I walk back down to where we danced, slip off my bloodied faux wedding dress and throw it onto the dying fire. The flames seize it and the pyre comes back to life. Then I go, naked, to the pool and slide inside its cool green depths. 

I remain there for some time, feeling cradled by something, as if I’m in some cosmic womb. Feeling like both child and mother and daughter of the night and also future corpse – nourishment for the Earth. This is ageing. This is freedom.