Footsteps in the sand
Created | Updated Jul 8, 2005
The stretch of white sand on the beach was very wide at ebb tide. The ocean sparkled where the light of the full moon reflected. The crests of the waves gleamed with an eery phosphorescent light. From far out, behind the reefs, came the roar of the ocean.
The woman walked alone. She walked rapidly into the wind, swinging her arms and sometimes lifting them above her head. She felt good in the knowledge that she was alone on the beach. There was the moon above her and the wet sand smooth beneath her bare feet and it was cool and not raining.
Janet looked at the rainbow-colored halo around the moon and thought: this means more rain. It had been raining for the last three days and each evening, as she walked, she had had to hurry back to the hotel as the first drops fell heavily on the beach.
I can shout if I feel like it, she thought and aloud she said, “I love being here alone.” She stopped walking and looked up at the many stars in the Southern Hemisphere. The stars always reminded her of all the dear people she had lost over the years and she said their names, one by one. “Father, grandmother, grandfather, aunt Mary, uncle Fred, Paul. Dear Paul, who loved me so much for more than twenty years.”
Iemanjá, the African Queen of the sea, came to her mind and she thought she might as well talk to her. She walked toward the shallow water until her feet got wet. She stretched out her arms horizontally in front of her and said, “Iemanjá, please keep on protecting me and I shall always love your sea.” She walked backwards counting ten paces, said, “Amen,” and continued along the beach feeling not at all silly. Ever since a gipsy had told her some weeks ago that Iemanjá was her protector and that she should pray to her, she had asked the Queen of the sea to look after her whenever she remembered.
The same gipsy had also made the prophecy that a five-star hotel would invite her to work there and that the people in it would like her and respect her work. She had not mentioned her connection with hotels to the gipsy, not even that she was looking for a new job. She had pretended surprise and asked, “A five-star hotel, are you sure?” The gipsy had closed her eyes dramatically and ansered, “Yes, I can see you there among many people. They all like you.”
A month later the invitation had come. She had driven for three hours out to the resort hotel, but only remembered the gipsy when she saw the five stars painted on the sign at the entrance.
Now she was living and working hard at the hotel by the lonely beach. Janet had found her department, the reception desk, in a huge disorder. The six local girls who worked there in shifts had no notion of the workings of a hotel as a whole, but they worked cheerfully and were friendly.
Janet loved to organize and after two weeks of long working hours and no time off for herself, she had established some order. She herself had easily fallen into a daily routine of pleasure and work. Pleasure were her walks on the beach early in the mornings and after dinner in the evenings. On the beach she relaxed.
She walked along the beach in the moonlight and watched for falling stars. The Southern Cross was to the right in front of her and by it she knew in which direction lay her homeland in Europe. The clouds were about to cover the bright star on her left. Some nightbirds cried out. Black clouds passed in front of the full moon, left the beach dark and wiped out Janet’s shadow.
At the mouth of the river she sat down on the dry sand away from the water and listened to the different night sounds. There was the constant roll of the ocean waves in front. There were the gurgling sounds from the river behind her and an occasional splash as a fish broke the surface. Frogs were croaking further inland and, far away, on the other side, a dog barked twice. It began to drizzle.
After a few minutes, the rain turned into a steady downpour and Janet ran back to the hotel and on to her room. She took a hot shower, put on her pyjamas and climbed into bed. She settled back against the pillows and switched on the television set. There was a soap opera with long shots of beautiful scenery accompanied by soothing new age music. Janet watched the undersea photography, listened to the short undemanding dialogues during scenes of mermaids with beautiful red tails swimming among shining green fish and seaweed. Janet relaxed as the fairy tale on the screen unfolded.
When Janet started walking on the beach in the morning, she saw that the high tide at night had washed the sand clean and obliterated all traces of the day before. The yellow sand was still wet and the light blue sea was going out. There was a set of footprints going in the direction of the mouth of the river. Someone has gone that way and not come back, thought Janet, now I wonder if it is a man or a woman!
She followed the steps, first putting her own feet in the prints in the sand, but the prints made much larger steps than was comfortable for her and they were bigger than her feet. Must be a man, she thought. The footprints led her right to the mouth of the river and stopped there. They were going into the river! Has someone swum across it? The river was not very wide.
Janet walked back. She wanted to see where the footstps had come from. Perhaps they had left from the hotel and so indicated an early riser among the guests. When she came to the gates of the hotel, she saw that the footsteps did not go in but continued straight ahead in the direction of the small village to the North. Curious now, Janet walked at a brisk pace next to the footsteps. In front of the village she lost them among many others that belonged to the fishermen who had left very early to go out to sea. She turned back and her earlier footsteps next to the larger ones she had been following looked as if two people had walked there together.
Janet kept thinking about the steps on the sand and reasoned that they could not belong to a fisherman who lived on the other side of the river because the steps were coming from – and not going to – the village where all the boats wer kept over night. It was time to have breakfast and start work and during the day she forgot the beach and the prints.
All during the last year, Janet had come close to thinking that her time to die had come. She had read somewhere that maturity was equivalent to enough. She had thought she had had enough. Enough of life, enough of people, of love and passion. She had been very tired of waiting and hoping. She was waiting for satisfaction. A year earlier, she had discussed waiting and hoping with her best friend. They had come to the conclusion that all they wanted from life was to be able to say: I am satisfied.
Janet was a widow and her friend was divorced. Both had children to bring up on their own and found it difficult without the help from the fathers. They had both suddenly found themselves thrown into a world hostile to single women. They had had to fight many battles. They had looked for men to substitute the companion they had lost. They had both found men who did not fit the role they had designated them. And they were both still alone. Janet had given up looking for a good man. She had conquered some of her insecurities. She had learned to demand instead of always asking politely. She could spot stupid people from afar and kept away from them. She did not look for friendship with women who lived blindly shut up in their safe housewifely enclosures as she herself had once done.
Janet had loved her husband. He had been a quiet man who used to go out of his way just to please her. He had adored her and taken on many tasks, thus making her more and more unfit for a life alone in this foreign country he had brought her to. When he had died, she had spent an unreal year of going through the motions. She was mother, housekeeper, language teacher and translator, but everything she did was automatic without enjoyment and every evening she was glad another day was over.
After a long time, she had discovered Yoga and had become aware of the pleasures her body could give her. The next step had been to sit down and balance what was left of her life and come to the conclusion that she had to start anew. She had felt a surge of energy. Her humour had come back. She had once again been able to watch herself as if from a distance and laugh at herself.
She began to enjoy being alone. A new world was opening up to her. A world of new emotions and feelings she had not suspected existed. What most surprised her was how blind she had been for so many years.
Complete absorption in being wife, mother and teacher, sharing every moment with her husband, never thinking of the future and living just one day after another had not let her see that millions of people around her lived the lonely life of being single in a totally different reality from hers. It was as if suddenly a paralell existence on earth was being revealed to her. An existence she had not even suspected of being there!
The day was long and Janet had her dinner very late and only began her evening walk on the beach at about ten o’clock. As soon as she left the gates of the hotel, having left her shoes with the night watchman, she noticed a set of footprints going in the opposite direction from the one the early morning footsteps had taken. This time coming from the river. Janet went to the river first and made sure the steps had come out of it. The moon was still very bright and there was not a cloud to be seen. Janet followed the steps to the village, trying to fit her paces to those of the prints. She thought they belonged to the same man as the ones from the early morning. As she came to the village, she again lost the steps among many others.
For a week Janet observed the footsteps in the mornings and evenings and she saw them every day. By now she had begun to dream up a man they belonged to. He loved to walk on the beach, like Janet. He loved the early mornings and late evenings, like Janet. He liked to be alone. He got the same pleasure from being alone like Janet. He had to be sensitive and intelligent and he was methodical. She invented dialogues she would have with him if they ever met. Of course, they would fall in love and live the rest of their lives near this wonderful beach. He would go out on the ocean and fish and she would take care of their little house and wait for him to return in the late afternoon twilight.
The weeks went by and Janet did not meet the owner of the steps. She chided herself for having once again dreamt of finding a man for herself. Wasn’t she well off alone? She did not need anyone; besides, happiness had to come from deep inside oneself, not from another person. But the dreams kept coming back whenever she saw the footsteps.
One evening, as she left her shoes at the gate with the night watchman, he said, “Only two people walk here so late at night.” “Yes,” said Janet, “I and who is the other person?” The watchman came nearer and answered, “It is a man with two families.” Janet looked at him, “What do you mean?” she asked. In a conspirational tone, the man replied, “He is a retired Army man and he has one family with five children in the village over there and another with three children in the village on the other side of the river. “Is that so?” asked Janet and began her nightly walk on the lonely beach with the footsteps of the man with two families.
