*This song was originally part of the list I compiled to kick start my Speed Learn French for Dummies by Grooving to Gallic Pop Ballads regime. Still in transit but it’s way more fun to do than repeat inane phrases back and forth in livemocha.com and get oogled by pimpy Turkish dudes or acne-d Chinese adolescents from the backwoods of Shang Simla. Enjoy!

Désert (Emilie Simon)

Oh mon amour, mon âme-soeur

Je compte les jours je compte les heures

Je voudrais te dessiner dans un désert

Le désert de mon coeur

Oh mon amour, ton grain de voix

Fait mon bonheur à chaque pas

Laisse-moi te dessiner dans un désert

Le désert de mon coeur

Dans la nuit parfois, le nez à la fenêtre

Je t’attends et je sombre

Dans un désert, dans mon désert, voilà

Oh mon amour, mon coeur est lourd

Je compte les heures je compte les jours

Je voudrais te dessiner dans un désert

Le désert de mon coeur

Oh mon amour, je passe mon tour

J’ai déserté les alentours

Je te quitte, voilà c’est tout

Dans la nuit parfois, le nez à la fenêtre

J’attendais et je sombre

Jetez au vent mes tristes cendres, voilà

Desert (Emilie Simon)

Oh my love, my heart-sister

I count the days I count the hours

I would like to draw you into a desert

The desert of my heart

Oh my love, a grain of your voice

Forms my happiness with each step

Let to me draw you into a desert

The desert of my heart

In the night sometimes, nose at the window

I await you and I sink

Into a desert, my desert, here

Oh my love, my heart is heavy

I count the hours I count the days

I would like to draw you into a desert

The desert of my heart

Oh my love, I pass my turn

I have deserted all around me

I leave you, here, that is all

In the night sometimes, nose at the window

I waited for you, and I sink

Throw my sad ashes to the wind, here

Desert (English Version)

Where is the sea ?

I don’t know why I was just looking for the sea,

But the only thing I found was the desert,

A desert around me…

What can I see ?

You closed my eyes when I just need to go and see…

If you want me to be blind, I will stay here,

With this desert around me…

They world I can see is a nowhere land

Without you, I’m a nowhere girl

In the desert, in the desert

With you

Where is the sea ?

I don’t know why I was just looking for the sea,

But the only thing I found was the desert,

A desert around me…

Where is the sea ?

I am alone, I am dreaming of the sea,

But you’re not here, next to me…

(Break)

The world I can see is a nowhere land

Without you, I’m a nowhere girl

In the desert, in the desert,

With you

The first copy of his books I ever read, “River God”, was actually my sister’s. This shames me very much, as my sister actually has rather…no…taste in good literature, and it is supposedly I who is the family erudite…

We were on a family vacation to the once pristine (but now just very crowded and deplorably commercialized) island of Boracay in December of 2007 . This is, of course, the best time to frequent beaches in the tropics if one is native to them and has naturally golden brown skin that needs no tanning and anyway only flakes off in unattractive sunburnt patches during the unbearably hot–and twice as expensive–summer months.

I digress. It was after a night of much revelry, in which we had gorged on prodigious amounts of delicious–and by cynically local standards undoubtedly ridiculously overpriced–lechon kawali. The next morning, after a splashy romp (face it, nobody really swims in saltwater…) in the shallow, translucently aqua water irridiscent with striped silver fish that one is forever paranoid of ever accidentally stepping on–our stomachs started grumbling.

…And so we went in search of cheap fare upon which to take our repast and gorge some more. Walking along the beach, we unwittingly stumbled into a charmingly flow-y–and unbeknownst to us just as ridiculously overpriced (take it from a local, everything in Boracay is 5 times more expensive than on the Panay mainland)–Indian food restaurant.

The beachside wood and bamboo hut was bedecked with billowy yellow cloth and huge, rather squishy looking pillow seats, thrown haphazardly around low wooden tables laden with lotus flowers and pink candles floating on bowls of water. The cloying, curry smell of India permeated the air.

We were utterly enchanted, both by the display and the very pretentious chance to dine à la Romaine, and so promptly shrugged off our sand-crusted sandals and plopped our bedraggled, famished selves down.

The pillows, upon closer inspection, turned out to be rather forlorn and noticeably excessive in lumpiness; the dishes were a little bit chipped and rather the worse for wear, with similarly unmatched utensils with bent tines and literally bendy spoons (isn’t that trick ancient Indian?). The cloying curry smell only succeeded in making our stomachs complain louder, and the ridiculously long waiting time was matched only by the ridiculous bill. (Never mind that the food was later sumptuous, or that I discovered chapati dipped in marker yellow curry sauce there).

But indeed it was the wait.

It was the wait, that inexorably drew my sister and I over from the gnawing of our intestinal walls to a quiet corner of the resto, to experience something heretofore foreign and completely unknown to our wide-eyed adolescences: namely, second-hand book exchanges.

And it was there, that my sister found and bought (for less than P100) her very worn, very yellowed and very ancient-looking copy of “River God”. Which she never read (until now, I believe), and which I luckily discovered, to much pleasure and delight, later that night as I was lounging on the generically cheap white linen sheets of the bed in our discount-rented-from-a-friend-of-dad’s island bungalow right on the beach.

Above me were the characteristically uneven, dark wooden beams of all beach bungalows, hewn and hammered cheaply by local carpenters for that unsymmetrical, rustic appeal. About the floor were scatterings of sand and discarded beachwear and towels, one or two wet puddles, and beach combing treasures of hermit crabs and chipped seashells. A fuzzy TV set tuned in to the Disney Channel, and two siblings were starting the traditional fight for one the bed’s only two pillows.

We were all tired out from a day of gorging and swimming. I–being the family erudite–was typically bored and longing for intellectual stimulation (someone had taken the duyan outside and was hogging it, cheating me of a hour or two of contemplating the profundities of the heavens while gently rocking with my big toe in the balmy evening breeze, until the mosquitoes drove me back to the solace of my mesquite-laced bungalow).

And then I spotted it. My sister’s by then forgotten copy. Purple and black, edged in fading gold and blue and red, the corners eroded to stubs and the pages slightly spotty and crinkly to the touch.

They smelled faintly of curry, and that subtler mellow smell of libraries and dust. The kind book lovers feel butterflies in their tummies for.

The next day we went banka-riding to the neighboring islands. Ponka shell beach is always my favorite, because it’s always where I strain my neck and abandon everyone else to their splashing in the shallows to go on lonely combing treks all along the beachside to gather my favorite pebble shells (you’re probably lucky if you can still find some anywhere near Boracay today).

They’re pretty special, pebble shells. My grandfather Ernie showed them to me as a kid. They’re button-sized (and come in all the sizes that buttons do), and look like completely stalkless mushroom heads, a burnished mushroom-y brown at the very top fading to a creamy, ocean-worn beige color at the base. They’re very smooth; I used to always forget them in my jeans pockets after holding them all day and absentmindedly rubbing the pad of my thumb over their surface. If you flip one over, you can see the swirls that mark the shell’s age before it died, curving always inward and disappearing to a point that’s always somewhere lopsidedly to the edge.

I loved them because they held a secret. They were technically dead shells, but if you placed them in a bowl of vinegar and waited for about a minute, they would suddenly rise up from the bottom about a millimeter (like veritable miniature UFO’s) and mysteriously start moving across the bowl (from the dissolving calcite in the shells, I suppose). My 3rd grade self was always acutely delighted to see them zooming around in plastic bowls or cups.

Anyway that day on the banka is very vivid to me, because I distinctly remember doing nothing but read “River God” on it. It was heavenly, the smell of the ocean mixing with the flapping pages of the book in front of me, sunlight sparkling on the water and warming the skin with the ebulliant, unprickly heat that only comes after a nice dip in the ocean. The salt water was perhaps slowly dissolving and disintegrating the parchment, and I was perhaps missing wonderful views around and below me as we zoomed along rocky island cliffsides and crystalline waters.

But I couldn’t stop reading, because I had been plunged into a world of man-chomping hippopotamuses and murky crocodiles, spoiled and beguiling khol-eyed princesses, and the humorously strutty, brilliant, sine qua non personage of the devoted slave Taita.

It was the first chapter of “River God”, and in my memory, the sights and smells and tastes of all these remembered textures will always mark my first time reading it, and first learning the words of the master storytelling of Wilbur Smith.