Desert (38 page)

The old fox had been betrayed, abandoned by his own people. One after the other, the tribes parted ways with him, because the chieftains realized that it was impossible to stop the advance of the Christians, in the north, in the south, they even came from the sea, they crossed the desert, they were at the gates of the desert in Tindouf, in Tabelbala, in Ouadane, they even occupied the holy city of Chinguetti, where Ma al-Aïnine had given his first teachings.

Perhaps the last great battle had taken place at Bou Denib, when General Vigny had crushed Moulay Hiba’s six thousand men. That’s when Ma al-Aïnine’s son fled into the mountains, disappeared to hide his shame undoubtedly, because he’d become a lakhme, a spineless being, as they say, defeated. The old sheik was left alone, prisoner to his Smara fortress, not understanding that it hadn’t been the arms but the money that had defeated him: the money of the bankers who had paid for Sultan Moulay Hafid’s soldiers and their handsome uniforms; the money that the soldiers of the Christians came to exact in the ports, taking their part of the customs duties; the money from the plundered lands, usurped palm groves, forests given over to those who knew best how to take them. How could he have understood that? Did he know what the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas was? Did he know what a loan for the construction of railroads was? Did he know what a company for mining nitrates from Gourara-Touat was? Did he even know that while he was praying and giving his blessing to the people of the desert, the governments of France and Great Britain were signing an agreement that gave to one of them a country named Morocco, and to the other a country named Egypt? While he was giving his word and his breath to the last free men, to the Izarguen, the Aroussiyine, the Tidrarin, the Ouled Bou Sebaa, the Taubalt, the Reguibat Sahel, the Ouled Delim, the Imraguen, while he was bestowing his powers upon his own tribe, the Berik Allah, did he know that a banking consortium, whose principal member was the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas, was granting King Moulay Hafid a loan of sixty-two million five hundred thousand gold francs, with a five percent interest rate guaranteed by the proceeds of customs duties from the ports on the coast, and that the foreign soldiers had entered the country to ensure that at least sixty percent of the daily intake of customs was paid to the Banque? Did he know that upon the signing of the Act of Algeciras, which put an end to the holy war in the North, King Moulay Hafid was indebted to the tune of two hundred and six million gold francs, and that it was already evident that he could never reimburse his creditors? But the old sheik didn’t know all of that, because his warriors weren’t fighting for gold, but simply for a blessing, and the land they were defending didn’t belong to them, or to anyone, because it was simply the free open spaces over which their eyes swept, a gift from God.

“... A wild man, a fanatic, who tells his warriors before the battle that he will render them invincible and immortal, who sends them charging against rifles and machine guns armed only with their spears and their sabers...”

Now the troop of black infantrymen is occupying the whole valley of the Tadla River, at the ford, while the officials from Kasbah Tadla have come to acknowledge their submission to the French officers. Curls of smoke from the campfires rise into the evening air, and the civilian observer, as he does at every halt, watches the lovely night sky slowly unveiling. Again he thinks of Ma al-Aïnine’s gaze, mysterious and profound, the gaze that fell upon Camille Douls disguised as a Turkish merchant, and scrutinized him to the very depths of his soul. Perhaps at the time he had guessed what the foreign man dressed in rags brought with him, the first image-stealer who wrote his travel log every evening on the pages of his Koran. But now it’s too late, and nothing can stop destiny from being fulfilled. On one side, the sea, on the other, the desert. The horizons are closing in on the people of Smara, the last nomads are surrounded. Hunger, thirst are hemming them in, they are beset with fear, illness, defeat.

“We could have put an end to your sheik and his ragpickers long ago if we’d wanted to. A 75-millimeter cannon in front of his cob palace, a few machine guns, and we would have been rid of him. Maybe they thought he wasn’t worth the trouble. They told themselves it was best to wait for him to fall on his own, like a worm-eaten fruit... But now, after Coppolani’s assassination, it’s no longer a matter of war: it’s a police operation against a band of brigands, that’s all.”

The old man had been betrayed by the same people he was trying to defend. It was the men from the Souss Valley, from Taroudant, Agadir, who had spread the news: “The great sheik Moulay Ahmed ben Mohammed al-Fadel, he who is called Ma al-Aïnine, Water of the Eyes, is marching northward with his warriors of the desert, those from the Drâa, the Saguiet al-Hamra valley, and even the blue men from Oualata, from Chinguetti. There are so many of them they cover an entire plain. They are marching northward toward the holy city of Fez, to overthrow the sultan and have Moulay Hiba appointed in his place, he who is called Sebaa, the Lion, the eldest son of Ma al-Aïnine.”

But the general staff at headquarters hadn’t believed the rumors. It gave the officers a good laugh.

“The old man of Smara has gone mad. As if he could, with his troop of ragpickers, overthrow the sultan and drive out the French army!” That’s what I thought: the old fox is backed up against the sea and the desert, and he’s chosen to commit suicide; it’s his only way out now, to get himself killed along with his whole tribe.

Therefore, today, June 21, 1910, the troop of black infantrymen is en route with three French officers and the civilian observer at the head. They have veered south to meet up with the other troop that left from Zettat. The jaws of the pincers are closing in, to seize the old sheik and his ragpickers.

The light of the sun, mingled with the dust, burns the soldiers’ eyes. In the distance, on the hill overlooking the stone-strewn plain, an ochre village suddenly appears, barely distinguishable from the desert. “Kasbah Zidaniya,” the guide simply says. But he pulls his horse up short. In the distance, a group of warriors on horseback are galloping along the hills. The black foot soldiers take position while the officers move their horses aside. Scattered shots crash out, without a single bullet whistling or hitting a mark. The observer thinks it sounds more like hunters out in the brush. A wounded man is taken prisoner, an Arab from the Beni Amir tribe. Sheik Ma al-Aïnine isn’t far; his warriors are marching on the al-Borouj trail, to the south. The troop sets out again, but now the officers stay close to the soldiers. Everyone is watching the brush closely. The sun is still high in the sky when the second skirmish takes place, on the al-Borouj trail. Shots ring out again in the torrid silence. General Moinier gives the order to charge toward the valley bottom. The Senegalese shoot, their knees to the ground, then run, with bayonets fixed. The Beni Moussa tribe has killed twelve black soldiers before fleeing through the bush, leaving scores of their dead on the ground. Then the Senegalese troops continue their charge toward the valley bottom. The soldiers flush out blue men everywhere, but they are not the invincible warriors everyone expected. They are men in rags, disheveled, weaponless, who run limping away, who fall on the stony ground. More like beggars, thin, scorched from the sun, consumed with fever, who run into one another, letting out cries of distress, while the Senegalese, gripped with a murderous desire for vengeance, fire their rifles into their midst, nail them to the red earth with their bayonets. In vain, General Moinier calls for them to fall back. Before the black soldiers, the men and women run helter-skelter, fall to the ground. The children run through the shrubs, speechless with fear, and the herds of goats and sheep run into one another bleating frantically. Everywhere the bodies of blue men are strewn over the ground. The last shots echo out, then there is nothing more to be heard; once again, the torrid silence weighs heavily over the landscape.

From atop a hill, motionless on their horses, which are pacing nervously, the officers watch the great expanse of brush into which the blue men have already disappeared, as if they had been swallowed up by the earth. The Senegalese foot soldiers come back, carrying their dead companions, without a glance at the hundreds of men and women in rags who are lying on the ground. Somewhere on the slopes of the valley, amidst the thorn bushes, a boy is sitting next to the body of a dead warrior, staring very hard at the bloody face whose eyes have grown dark.

I
N THE STREET lit with the rising sun, the boy walks unhurriedly alongside the parked cars. His lean body glides past the shiny hulls, his reflection slips over the windows, the polished fenders, the headlights, but that’s not what he’s looking at. He leans slightly toward each automobile, and his eyes search the interior of the cab, the seats, the floor under the seats, the rear window, the glove compartment.

He moves silently forward, all alone in the wide empty street where the sun is lighting the first glimmer of morning, clear and pure. The sky is already very blue, limpid, without a cloud. The summer wind is blowing in from the sea, rushing through the streets, along the straight avenues, whirling about the small parks, shaking the palm trees and the tall araucarias.

Radicz quite likes the summer wind; it’s not a malevolent wind like the one that tears up the dust, or the one that goes into your body and chills you to the bone. It’s a mild wind, laden with sweet smells, a wind that smells of the sea and of grass, that makes you sleepy; Radicz is happy, because he slept out under the stars, in an abandoned garden, with his head between the roots of a tall parasol pine not far from the sea.

Before sunrise, he woke up and knew instantly that the summer wind had begun. So he rolled around in the grass a little, the way dogs do, and then he ran without stopping all the way to the edge of the sea. He looked at it for a long time from up on the road, so lovely and so calm, still gray with night, but already splashed in places with the blue and pink of dawn. For a second even, he almost felt like climbing down on the rocks – still cold with night – taking off all his clothes, and diving into the water. It was the summer wind that had called him out to the sea, had shown him the water. But he remembered he didn’t have much time left, that he had to hurry because people would be getting up soon. So he went back up into the streets, looking for cars.

Now, he’s nearing a large complex of buildings and gardens. He walks along the alleys of the park, where the cars are stopped. There isn’t a soul in the gardens for as far as you can see. The shades on the buildings are still down; the balconies are empty. The summer wind is blowing on the façades of the buildings, making the shades snap. There’s also the soft sound in the branches of the mimosas and the oleanders, and the tall palm trees rustling as they sway.

The light appears slowly, first up in the sky, then on the tops of the buildings, and the streetlamps grow pale. Radicz really likes this time of day because the streets are still silent, the houses closed up, without a soul, and it’s as if he were alone in the world. He walks slowly along the alleys around the building, and he thinks the whole city is his, there’s no one else left. Maybe, as in the aftermath of a catastrophe, while he was sleeping in the abandoned garden, the men and women had fled, had already left, running for the mountains, abandoning their houses and their cars. Radicz moves along beside the still hulls, looking inside, the empty seats, the motionless steering wheels, and he has the strange feeling that someone is observing him, threatening him. He stops, looks up in the direction of the high walls of the buildings. The dawn light has already lit the tops of the façades with its pink hue. But the shades and the windows remain closed, and the large balconies are empty. The sound of the wind passing is a very soft sound, very lazy, a sound which isn’t meant for humans, and again Radicz feels the void which has hollowed out over the city, which has replaced human sounds and movements.

Maybe while he was sleeping, his head between the roots of the old parasol pine, the summer wind, as if coming from some other world, mysteriously put all the men and all the women in town to sleep, and they’re lying in their beds, in their apartments with closed shutters, deep in a magical sleep that will never end. So now the city can rest at last, breathe, the wide empty streets with stopped cars, the closed shops, the darkened streetlamps and traffic lights; so now the grass will be able to grow peacefully in the cracks of the pavement, the gardens will start looking like forests again, and the rats and birds will be able to go wherever they want fearlessly, as they did in the days before humans.

Radicz stops for a minute to listen. The birds just happen to be awakening in the trees, starlings, sparrows, blackbirds. It’s the blackbirds especially that are calling out very loudly, and flying heavily from one palm tree to another, or else hopping along on the wet tar in the big parking lots. The boy really likes blackbirds. They have a lovely black coat and a bright yellow beak, and they have that peculiar way of hopping, with their head turned slightly to one side, keeping an eye out for danger. They look like thieves, and that’s why Radicz likes them. They’re like him, a bit careless, a bit crooked, and they know how to whistle shrilly to warn that danger is near; they know how to laugh, with a kind of resonant chuckling in their throats that really makes him laugh too. Radicz moves slowly through the parking lots, and from time to time, he whistles to answer the blackbirds. Maybe while the boy was sleeping in the abandoned garden, his head between the roots of the tall parasol pine, the men and women left the big city, just like that, without making a sound, and the blackbirds have taken their place. That idea really pleases Radicz, and he whistles even louder, using his fingers, to tell the blackbirds he’s with them, that it’s all theirs, everything, the houses, the streets, and even the shops and everything inside them.

The light in the park, around the buildings, is rapidly increasing. Dewdrops are glistening on the roofs of the cars, on the leaves of the shrubs. Radicz has to force himself not to stop and look at all those drops of light. In the emptiness of the big parking lot, with those high white walls, those shades rolled down, those empty balconies, they shine with heightened intensity, as if they were the only real and living things. They quiver a little in the wind from the sea, they look like thousands of unblinking eyes watching the world.