After a pleasant afternoon on the beach, I make my way to Burgau. The village is tiny: white houses tumbling down the hill toward the sea, blue shutters, red flowers, green doors left open to the afternoon breeze. For a moment, I think of Greece.
We have lunch at a restaurant called Mia, overlooking the water, and everything is delicious: the fish, the goat cheese, even the red meat. Yet my attention keeps drifting to the table opposite ours, where four elderly women are sitting, elegant, one of them taking a small mirror from her handbag to touch up her lipstick.
I smile. In Mauritania, elderly women are different; they grow quieter with age, less visible, as though beauty belonged to youth and wisdom to old age. These women seem to refuse the bargain, and I like that. The women back home have their own kind of elegance, more discreet perhaps, less concerned with appearance.
I watch the four of them laughing together, the sea sparkling behind them, and just then they seem to belong to the landscape as much as the boats and the cliffs. Then they leave, and the table remains. Empty.
I am surprised by the sadness that settles over me. They are strangers; I do not know their names; I never spoke to them; at most I discreetly copied their food order. And yet something has disappeared. A little warmth. A little life. For the first time in my life, I find myself mourning the departure of people I never even spoke to.
The Japanese have a word for this feeling: mono no aware. It is the gentle sadness of knowing that nothing lasts, the beauty of a thing and its passing felt at the very same moment. They speak of it watching cherry blossoms, lovely not in spite of falling but because they fall. You do not need to know the blossoms. You do not need to know the women. The feeling is for the impermanence itself.
Travel is so often sold as a search for extraordinary places, and yet sometimes what stays with us is only a table of strangers, and the small ache of watching them go.
A few minutes later, an enormous baby arrives at the next table (a magnificent baby, round cheeks, serious eyes), and I cannot stop smiling. This immediately becomes a debate with my friend. Are all babies beautiful? I will let you decide.
The strange sadness begins to fade. The baby sits at the table next to ours, not at the empty one the four women left behind. And yet my eyes keep returning to that empty table.
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