the imagined hazard of watching; part 2 of 6

she was not a young woman, but she carried the baby on her hip as though it belonged to her. she carried the baby on her hip as though it had once lived and fed among the soft pink tissues of her body. i studied it as well as i could from this distance, wrapped in a blue cloth whose intensity fought for dominance with the sky, and wondered if she lived well inside of it, or if it were a losing battle against time. the details were fuzzy at this distance, but age - hers and the baby's - she carried well.

i smiled at her furtive, quizzical glances from where i sat in a soft scrabble of sand, holding my book and sipping precious bottled water too warm for home but delicious in the necessity created by the incessant heat of being here. my feet would dangle of the edge of the cliff, too far from the ocean to feel its spray, for several hours but she would never respond to my advances.

it could have been my skin, so white in the light of day except where it was burnt pink from the same. or it could have been my clothes, shabby and secondhand though they were, bursting with songs about the world i came from which we both knew was about as far from hers as intangible distance allows. my tshirt with its holes and my jeans with their frayed seams were still different, nicer somehow, than anything she could have laid hands on. i doubted she would want to, envying the way the wind ruffled up underneath her skirts and must even as i watched be laying soft hands against the smooth skin of her thighs.

maybe it was the men nearby.

her men, they had to be. men rough and drunken and possibly disapproving of any contact with me. i watched disappointed but never found the courage to stand and bridge the gap between where i sat with one foot looped in my bag strap for safety and the child beat awkward searching hands against the sand. the men - long grass, they would be called - were behind us several hundred yards in the shade of a picnic shelter but their presence, like i'd come to realize about most strange men, was electrifying in its pervasion.

i sat in my disappointment for what felt like hours, craving the feeling of that little girl's eyes on me, the smooth skin as yet unscarred by whatever hard work her life would be. plane rides and gambling, relinquished paychecks, liquor, petrol, the racism she would take for granted by grace of birth. i wanted that baby, wanted to taste her as pure and undiluted, another young possiblity. she could be one who broke the endless cycle of heartbreak, of thievery, of disuse. she could sweep into the streets the dust of empty, disheveled lives.

it was my own heart that was breaking, that day i sat reading on the cliff. where the trees failed to shade me, the sun beat against my back and my legs. i was acutely aware of these things: the crease between thigh and buttock, the bend of a knee, a downed upper lip, the bridge of my nose. cool points to take pleasure in against the heat of my body.

i watched hungrily the woman and the baby without ever swallowing what it was that held me back, two decades of my mother's voice in my ear, telling me never to talk to strangers, her fear when i told her i would span continents alone. the woman and her baby were safe enough, she would suppose, but what about the men?

what about them? did i fear their distinct foreignness, or that they were clearly intoxicated on an early sunday afternoon? why could i not leave my book behind and lay a hand on that little girl's brow? i would never know, because i would never try. the woman continued to glance back at me, but i returned to my book and hoped for the best of possible futures for all of them. my work was to study, not interfere. the trials of an anthropologist in training. somewhere compassion ends and observation begins. my guess is that i could find some etymological link between emperical and imperial, and it would allow for night after sleepless night.

behind us a man walked barefoot in a purple tshirt that hurt my eyes in the contrast to his skin, burnished to the bare shine of a roasted coffee bean. he wandered through the park a little dumbfounded, cupped hands held to his mouth as he shouted the inexplicable, "sean connery!" over and over again. his accent was so thick, so broad that i felt it slide down the back of my throat and thought i would never be able to stretch open my white-girl jaws to accomodate it. i would be forever meek.

i felt nothing but self loathing as i wrapped my foot more tightly in the strap of my bag and turned back to an afternoon of dispassionate reading, black words on a white page describing the plight of the people whose true stories walked all around me.