Desert (19 page)

Old Naman and the Hartani are the only ones who haven’t changed. Naman the fisherman still tells incredible stories as he repairs his nets on the beach, or when he comes to eat corn cakes at Aamma’s house. He hardly ever catches fish anymore, but people really like him and continue to invite him over. His pale eyes are as transparent as water, and his face is stitched with deep wrinkles like scars from ancient wounds.

Aamma listens to him talk about Spain, about Marseille, or Paris, and about all the cities where he has been, where he’s walked, where he knows the names of the streets and the people who live there. Aamma asks him questions, asks him if his brother can help her find work over there.

Naman nods his head. “Why not?”

That’s his answer to everything, but he promises to write his brother all the same. Leaving the country is complicated though. You need money, papers. Aamma remains pensive, a faraway look in her eyes; she’s dreaming of white cities with so many streets, houses, automobiles. Maybe that’s what she’s waiting for.

Lalla doesn’t think about that very much herself. It’s all the same to her. She’s watching Naman’s eyes, and it’s a little bit as if she had known those seas, those countries, those houses.

The Hartani doesn’t think about it either. He’s remained like a child still, even though he’s as tall and strong as an adult. His body is slim and elongated, his face is pure and smooth like a piece of ebony. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t know how to speak the same language others do.

He still sits down on a rock, staring out into the distance, wearing his homespun robe, with the white cloth on his head drawn over his face. Around him there are still black shepherds just like him, wild, dressed in rags, whistling as they leap from rock to rock. Lalla likes coming out where they live, out to the place which is filled with white light, the place where time stands still, where you can’t grow up.

T
HE MAN WALKED into Aamma’s house one morning in the beginning of summer. He was a man from the city, wearing a gray suit with a green sheen, black leather shoes that were as shiny as mirrors. He came with a few gifts for Aamma and her sons, an electric mirror framed in white plastic, a transistor radio no larger than a box of matches, pens with gold-colored caps, and a bag full of sugar and canned food. When he came into the house he passed Lalla at the door but hardly looked at her. He lay all the presents on the floor; Aamma told him to sit down, and he looked around for a seat, but there were only cushions and Lalla Hawa’s wooden trunk that Aamma had brought back from the South with Lalla. The man chose to sit on the trunk after having tested it a little with the palm of his hand. The man waited for tea and sweet cakes to be brought to him.

When she learned a little later that the man had come to ask for her hand in marriage, Lalla felt very frightened. It made her head spin, and her heart started beating wildly. It wasn’t Aamma who told her about it, but Bareki, Aamma’s eldest son.

“Our mother decided to have you marry him, because he is very rich.”

“But I don’t want to get married!” Lalla shouted.

“You have nothing to say about it, you must obey your aunt,” Bareki said.

“Never! Never!” Lalla ran off shouting, her eyes filled with angry tears.

Then she went back to Aamma’s house. The man with the gray-green suit was gone, but the gifts were there. Ali, Aamma’s younger son, was even listening to music, holding the tiny transistor radio against his ear. When Lalla walked in, he gave her a knowing look.

“Why did you keep that man’s gifts? I won’t marry him,” Lalla said to Aamma coldly.

Aamma’s son snickered, “Maybe she wants to marry the Hartani!”

“Get out!” said Aamma. The young man went out with the transistor.

“You can’t force me to marry that man!” Lalla says.

“He will be a good husband for you,” responds Aamma. “He’s no longer very young, but he’s rich, he has a big house in the city, and he has lots of powerful relations. You must marry him.”

“I don’t want to get married, ever!”

Aamma remains silent for a long time. When she speaks again, her voice is softer, but Lalla stays on her guard.

“I raised you as if you were my own daughter, I love you, and today you would affront me in this way?”

Lalla looks angrily at Aamma, because for the first time she’s seeing her dishonest side.

“I don’t care,” she says. “I don’t want to marry that man. I don’t want these ridiculous gifts!”

She motions toward the electric mirror on its stand on the dried mud floor. “You don’t even have electricity!”

Then suddenly, she’s had enough. She leaves Aamma’s house and goes out to the sea. But this time she doesn’t run along the path; she walks very slowly. Today, nothing is the same. It’s as if everything has been dulled, worn down from being looked at so much.

“I’m going to have to leave,” Lalla says out loud to herself. But she immediately thinks that she doesn’t even know where to go. So then she crosses over to the other side of the dunes and walks along the wide beach, looking for Old Naman. She would so like for him to be there, as usual, sitting on a root of the old fig tree, repairing his nets. She would ask him all sorts of questions about those cities in Spain with magic names, Algeciras, Málaga, Granada, Teruel, Zaragoza, and about those ports from which ships as big as cities sail, about the roads upon which automobiles drive northward, about trains and airplanes departing. She’d like to listen to him talk for hours about those snow-capped mountains and those tunnels, those rivers that are as vast as the sea, those wheat-covered plains, immense forests, and most of all about those fragrant cities where there are white palaces, churches, fountains, stores glittering with light. Paris, Marseille, and all of those streets, houses so tall you can barely see the sky, the gardens, the cafés, the hotels, and the intersections where you meet people from all corners of the world.

But Lalla can’t find the old fisherman. There is only the white gull gliding slowly along facing the wind, wheeling over her head.

“Hey-o! Hey-o! Prince!”

The white bird swoops over Lalla a few more times, then, caught up in the wind, flies quickly away in the direction of the river.

So Lalla stays on the beach for a long time, with only the sound of the wind and the sea in her ears.

The following days, no one said a word about anything in Aamma’s house, and the man with the gray-green suit didn’t come back. The little transistor radio was already demolished, and the cans of food had all been eaten. Only the plastic electric mirror remained where it had been placed, on the tamped earth near the door.

Lalla hadn’t slept well any of those nights, trembling at the slightest sounds. She remembered stories she’d been told about girls who had been taken away by force, in the night, because they didn’t want to get married. Every morning at daybreak, Lalla went out before anyone else, to wash herself and fetch the water at the fountain. That way, she could keep an eye on the entrance to the Project.

Then came the wind of ill fortune, which blew over the land for several days in a row. The wind of ill fortune is a bizarre wind that only comes once or twice a year, at the end of winter or in the fall. The strangest thing about it is that you don’t really feel it at first. It doesn’t blow very hard, and sometimes it stops altogether, and you forget about it. It’s not a cold wind like those of the midwinter storms, when the sea unleashes its furious waves. It’s not a hot desiccating wind either, like the one that comes from the desert and lights the houses with a red glow, the one that makes sand hiss over the metal and tarpaper roofs. No, the wind of ill fortune is a very mild wind that swirls around, tosses a few gusts about, and then settles heavily on the roofs of the houses, on people’s shoulders and chests. When it’s here, the air gets hotter and heavier, as if there were a gray veil over everything.

When that slow, mild wind comes, people fall sick, almost everywhere, especially small children and elderly people, and they die. That’s why it’s called the wind of ill fortune.

When it began to blow on the Project that particular year, Lalla recognized it right away. She saw the clouds of gray dust moving over the plain, blurring the sea and the mouth of the river. Then people only went out muffled up in their cloaks in spite of the heat. There were no more wasps, and the dogs went off to hide in the hollows at the feet of the houses, with their noses in the dust. Lalla was sad, because she thought of the people the wind would sweep away in its path. So when she heard that Old Naman was sick, there was a pang in her heart and she couldn’t breathe for a minute. She’d never really had that feeling before, and she had to sit down to keep from falling.

Then she walked and ran all the way to the fisherman’s house. She thought there would be people with him, helping him, caring for him, but Naman is all alone, lying on his straw mat, his head resting on his arm. He is shivering so hard that his teeth are chattering, and he can’t even raise himself up on his elbows when Lalla comes into the house. He smiles a little, and his eyes shine brighter when he recognizes Lalla. His eyes are still the color of the sea, but his thin face has turned a white, slightly gray color that is frightening.

She sits down next to him and talks to him, almost in hushed tones. Usually he’s the one who tells stories, and she listens, but today all that has changed. Lalla just talks to him about any old thing, to soothe her anxiety and impart a little human warmth to the old man. She talks to him about things that he used to tell her of in the past, things about his trips to the cities in Spain and France. She talks about it all as if she’d been the one who had seen those cities, who had taken those long journeys. She talks to him about the streets of Algeciras, narrow winding streets near the port, where you can smell the sea wind and the odor of fish, and the train station with blue tiled platforms, and the big railroad trestles straddling ravines and rivers. She talks to him about the streets of Cádiz, gardens with multicolored flowers, tall palm trees lined up in front of white palaces, and about all of those streets with crowds, with black automobiles, buses, coming and going amid mirrored reflections, past buildings as tall as marble cliffs. She talks about the streets of all the cities, as if she had walked through them, Sevilla, Córdoba, Granada, Almadén, Toledo, Aranjuez, and about the city that is so big, you could get lost for days on end – Madris, where people come from all corners of the earth.

Old Naman listens to Lalla without saying anything, without moving, but his clear eyes shine brightly, and Lalla knows he loves hearing those stories. When she stops talking, she can hear the old man’s body trembling and his breath wheezing: so she quickly resumes to avoid hearing those terrible sounds.

Now she’s talking about the big city of Marseille in France, about the port with immense wharves where boats from all the countries in the world are docked, freighters as big as citadels with incredibly high forecastles and masts thicker than trees, very white ocean liners with thousands of windows that have strange names, mysterious flags, names of cities, Odessa, Riga, Bergen, Limassol. In the streets of Marseille, the crowd hurries along, endlessly going in and out of giant stores, jostling in front of the cafés, restaurants, movie theaters, and the black automobiles drive down the avenues leading who knows where, and trains fly over the roofs on suspended bridges, and airplanes take off and circle slowly in the gray sky above the buildings and the vacant lots. At noon, the church bells ring, and the sound reverberates through the streets, over the esplanades, deep down in the underground tunnels. At night, the city is lit up, lighthouses sweep the sea with their long pencils, automobile headlights glitter. The narrow streets are silent, and thieves armed with jackknives hide in doorways waiting for late-night stragglers. Sometimes there are terrible battles in vacant lots, or on the wharves in the shadows of the sleeping freighters.

Lalla talks for such a long time and her voice is so soft that Old Naman falls asleep. When he is asleep, his body stops trembling, and his breathing becomes more regular. Then Lalla can leave the fisherman’s house at last, her eyes stinging from the light outside.

Many people are suffering from the wind of ill fortune, poor people, infants. When she passes by their houses, Lalla can hear their laments, the moaning voices of women, children crying, and she knows that there too, perhaps, someone will die. She is sad; she wishes she were far away, across the sea, in those cities she invented for Old Naman.

But the man with the gray-green suit has come back. He probably doesn’t know that the wind of ill fortune is blowing on the plank and tarpaper Project; in any case he wouldn’t really care, because the wind of ill fortune doesn’t affect people like him. He’s a stranger to ill fortune, to all of this.

He’s come back to Aamma’s house, and he passes Lalla in front of the door. When she sees him, it startles her and she lets out a little shriek, because she knew he would come back and felt apprehensive about it. The man in the gray-green suit gives her a funny look. He has a hard steady gaze, like people who are used to giving orders, and the skin on his face is white and dry with the blue shadow of a beard on his cheeks and chin. He’s carrying other bags containing gifts. Lalla steps aside when he passes her and looks at the packages. He mistakes her glance and takes a step toward her, holding out the gifts. But Lalla leaps back as fast as she can; she runs away without turning back until she can feel the sand of the path that leads up to the plateau of stones under her feet.

She doesn’t know where the path ends. Eyes blurred with tears, a knot in her throat, Lalla is walking as fast as she can. Up here the sun is always hotter, as if you were closer to the sky. But the heavy wind is not blowing on the brick- and chalk-colored hills. The stones are hard, broken and sharp-edged, jagged; the black shrubs are covered with thorns upon which, here and there, tufts of sheep’s wool have snagged; even the blades of grass are sharp as knives. Lalla walks for a long time through the hills. Some are high and steep, with cliffs like sheer walls; others are low, hardly more than a pile of stones, and you’d think they’d been made by children.