Markets

I was at the book market today looking for English books. The actual bookshops here are almost always Catholic-run and only sell educational books (on school, agriculture, or general health), guides and maps, and Christian literature. The stalls in the book market mostly hold tiers of identical textbooks in French for students preparing for their Baccalaureate, or seeking reference books for university courses. There are also racks of second-hand magazines carefully wrapped in plastic, and some odd nooks with tiers of very dirty and well-thumbed pocket French novels. Here and there I came across some old leather-bound French Encyclopedias, Don Quixote and the ever-present Larousse dictionaries. I’ve noticed that there are variations in the stallholders’ voracity. It depends on whether the market attracts many tourists or not, but also how deep you are. On the outskirts the stallholders are keen and watchful; “madam-a !”, or urgently asking “dictionnarie?”, “livre en anglais?”, “magazine?”. The deeper you go, the calmer it becomes. The sounds of car horns, engines and crowds become a distant murmur, and are replaced by the bubbling of soup and drowsy conversations.

In these markets, and especially at Andravoahangy (an enormous market not far from the house), there are babies everywhere. Fortunately, it’s rarer to see kids at school age than toddlers and babies, though I don’t know that this necessarily means that they are at school. The toddlers are always underfoot, growing up in the noisy bustle of this heaving place, crawling about on the hard-packed earth and playing with bottle-caps and bits of unwanted string. The place is often silly with fathers gurgling or whooping at an upheld baby.