Desert (6 page)

The names came and went from mouth to mouth, the names of stars, the names of grains of sand in the desert wind, the names of the endless days and nights, beyond death.

“God, O God, bestow upon us the blessing of all the lords of the earth, those who have known the secret, those who have known life and forgiveness, the true lords of the earth, the sea, and the sky, Sidi Abderrhaman, he who was known as Sahabi, the prophet’s companion, Sidi Abdelqâdir, Sidi Embarek, Sidi Belkheir who drew milk from a he-goat, Lalla Mansoura, Lalla Fatima, Sidi Ahmed al-Haroussi, who repaired a broken jug, Sidi Mohammed, he who was known as al-Azraq, the Blue Man, who showed the great Sheik Ma al-Aïnine the path, Sidi Mohammed al-Sheikh al-Kaamel, the perfect one, and all the lords of the earth, the sea, and the sky...”

Silence fell once again, filled with ecstasy and glimmers of light. From time to time the pipe music would start up again, slip along, then cease. The men and women stood up and walked toward the gates of the city. Left alone, Ma al-Aïnine did not move, bowing over the earth, staring at the same invisible spot on the ground lit with white moonlight.

When the dance began, Nour stood up and joined the crowd. The men were stamping the hard ground under their bare feet, without moving forward or backward, closed into a tight crescent that reached across the square. God’s name was exhaled forcefully, as if all the men were suffering and wrenching their insides at the same time. The earthen drum punctuated each cry – “Houwa! Him!” – and the women cried out and made their voices quaver.

It was music that seeped into the cold earth, that rose into the deepest reaches of the dark sky, that mingled with the halo of the moon. There was no more time then, no more suffering. The men and women were striking the ground with the tips of their toes and with their heels, repeating the invincible cry:

“Houwa! Him!... Hayy!... Living!”

Their heads turned to the right, to the left, right, left, and the music inside their bodies came up through their throats and leapt out to the farthest reaches of the horizon. The hoarse, jerky breaths carried them along on the night as if in flight, lifting them up over the immense desert, toward the light patches of dawn on the other side of the mountains, to the land of the Souss, to Tiznit, toward the plain of Fez.

“Houwa! Him!... God!” shouted the deep voices of the men, drunk with the dull sound of the earthen drums and the strains of reed flutes, as the squatting women rocked their torsos and slapped their heavy silver and bronze necklaces with the palms of their hands. Their voices trembled at times like those of the flutes, on the very threshold of human perception, then suddenly stopped. Then the men took up their thudding again and the harsh sound of their heavy breathing echoed in the square: “Houwa! Him!... Hayy!... Living!... Houwa! Hayy! Houwa! Hayy!” Eyes half closed, head thrown backward. It was a sound that went beyond natural forces, a sound that split open reality and was soothing at the same time, the coming and going of a giant saw devouring the trunk of a tree. Each painful and deep exhalation widened the wound in the sky, the wound that tied the men to open space, that mingled their blood and their lymph. Each singer called out the name of God, faster and faster, head craned upward like that of a bellowing ox, the arteries of the neck like ropes under the strain. The light from the braziers and the white glow of the moon struck their swaying bodies as if lightning were flashing repeatedly through the clouds of dust. Breaths were panting faster and faster, letting out almost mute cries, lips unmoving, mouths half opened, and in the square, in the barren desert night, nothing could be heard now save the forgelike sound of labored breathing in the men’s throats:

“Hh! Hh! Hh! Hh!”

Now there were no more words. It was like that, linked directly to the center of the sky and the earth, united by the heavy wind of the men’s breath, as if, when accelerated, the rhythm of their breath abolished the days and nights, the months, the seasons, even abolished the hopelessness of space, and brought the end of all journeys, the end of all time, closer. The suffering was intense, and the drunkenness from their breathing made their limbs tingle, their throats open wider. In the center of the half-circle of men, the women danced with only their bare feet, not moving their bodies, their arms – held slightly out from their bodies – shaking almost imperceptibly. The dull beat of their heels penetrated the earth, making an unbroken rumble like that of an army passing. Near the musicians, the warriors from the south, faces veiled with black, were leaping up and down in the air raising their knees up very high, like great birds attempting to take flight. Then, little by little, as night went on, they stopped moving. One after the other the men and the women squatted down on the ground, arms outstretched before them, palms turned skyward; only their hoarse whispers echoed in the silence, endlessly repeating the same syllables:

“Hh! Hh! Houwa! Hayy!... Hh! Hh!”

The wrenching sound of breathing was so great, so powerful that it was as if they had all already traveled very far from Smara, through the sky, on the wind, mingling with the moonlight and the fine desert dust. There was no such thing as silence, or solitude. The sound of breathing had filled the entire night, covered all of space.

Sitting in the dust in the center of the square, Ma al-Aïnine wasn’t looking at anyone. His hands were holding the beads of the ebony chaplet, letting one bead fall at each exhalation of the crowd. He was the center of the breathing, he who had shown the people the path in the desert, he who had taught them each rhythm. He expected nothing more now. He had no more questions for anyone now. He too was breathing, along with the rhythm of the prayer, as if he and the other men had but one throat, one chest. And their breathing had already cleared the way leading north, to new lands. The old man no longer felt his age, or weariness, or anxiety. Breath passed through him, coming from all of those mouths, the breath that was both harsh and sweet, that increased his life. The men were no longer looking at Ma al-Aïnine. Eyes closed, arms outstretched, faces turned toward the night, they were soaring, gliding along the path to the north.

When day broke in the east, above the rocky hills, the men and women began to walk toward the tents. Despite all of those days and all of those nights of exaltation, no one felt tired. They saddled the horses, rolled up the large woolen tents, loaded the camels. The sun was not very high in the sky when Nour and his brother began to walk along the trail of dust, heading northward. They carried bundles of clothing and food on their shoulders. Before them, other men and other children were also walking on the trail, and the cloud of gray and red dust began to drift up into the blue sky. Somewhere near the gates of Smara, surrounded by blue-clad warriors on horseback, with his sons at his side, Ma al-Aïnine watched the long caravan stretching out across the deserted plain. Then he pulled his white cloak closed and nudged his camel’s neck with his foot. Slowly, without looking back, he rode away from Smara toward his end.

T
HE SUN RISES over the earth, the shadows stretch over the gray sand, over the dust in the paths. The dunes stand motionless before the sea. The small succulent plants quiver in the wind. In the cold, deep blue sky there’s not a bird, not a cloud. There’s the sun. But the morning light wavers a little, as if it weren’t quite sure.

Along the path sheltered by the line of gray dunes, Lalla walks slowly. From time to time she stops, looks at something on the ground. Or she picks a leaf from a fleshy plant, squishes it between her fingers to smell the sweet peppery odor of the sap. The plants are dark green, shiny, they look like seaweed. Sometimes a big golden bumblebee is sitting on a clump of hemlock, and Lalla runs to chase it. But she doesn’t get too close because she’s a little frightened all the same. When the insect flies away, she runs after it, hands outstretched, as if she really did want to catch it. But it’s just for fun.

Out here, that’s all there is: the light in the sky, as far as you can see. The dunes quake with the pounding sea that can’t be seen but can be heard. The little succulent plants are shiny with salt, as if from sweat. There are insects here and there, a pale ladybug, a sort of wasp with such a narrow middle it looks like it is cut in two, a centipede that leaves tiny marks in the dust, and louse flies, the color of metal, that try to land on the little girl’s legs and face to eat the salt.

Lalla knows all the paths, all the dips in the dunes. She could go anywhere with her eyes closed and she’d know where she was right away, just from feeling the ground with her bare feet. At times the wind leaps over the barrier of dunes, throwing handfuls of needles at the child’s skin, tangling her black hair. Lalla’s dress clings to her moist skin, she has to pull at the cloth to make it come loose.

Lalla knows all the paths, the ones that follow the gray dunes through the scrub as far as the eye can see, the ones that curve around and double back, the ones that never go anywhere. Yet every time she walks out here, there is something new. Today it was the golden bumblebee that led her so far away, out beyond the fishermen’s houses and the lagoon of stagnant water. A little later, in the brush, that sudden carcass of rusted metal with its threatening claws and horns uplifted. Then, in the sand on the path, a small tin can with no label and with two holes on either side of the lid.

Lalla keeps walking, very slowly, searching the gray sand so intently that her eyes are a little sore. She looks for things on the ground, without thinking of anything else, without looking up at the sky. Then she stops under a parasol pine, sheltered from the light, and she closes her eyes for a minute.

She clasps her hands around her knees, rocks slightly back and forth, then from side to side, singing a song in French, a song that says only, “Méditerra-né-é-e...”

Lalla doesn’t know what it means. It’s a song she heard on the radio one day, and she only remembers that one word, but it’s a word that pleases her. So every now and again, when she’s feeling good, when she doesn’t have anything else to do, or when on the contrary, she’s a bit sad without really knowing why, she sings the word, sometimes in a whisper just for herself, so faintly that she hardly hears herself, or sometimes very loudly, almost at the top of her lungs, to make echoes and drive the fear away.

Now she’s singing the word in a whisper, because she’s happy. The large red ants with black heads walk over the pine needles, hesitate, scale up twigs. Lalla nudges them away with a dead branch. The smell of the trees drifts over on the wind mixed with the acrid taste of the sea. Sometimes there are spurts of sand that shoot up into the sky, forming wobbly spouts that balance on the crest of the dunes and then suddenly break, sending thousands of sharp needles into the child’s legs and face.

Lalla remains in the shade of the tall pine until the sun is high in the sky. Then she goes leisurely back toward town. She recognizes her own footprints in the sand. They seem smaller and narrower than her feet, but, turning around, Lalla checks to make sure they are really hers. She shrugs her shoulders and starts to run. The thorns on the thistles prick her toes. Sometimes after limping a few steps she has to stop to pick the thorns from her big toe.

There are always ants, wherever you stop. They seem to come out from between the stones and scurry over the gray sand burning with light, as if they were spies. But Lalla is quite fond of them anyway. She also likes the slow centipedes, the golden-brown June bugs, the dung beetles, stag beetles, potato beetles, ladybugs, the crickets – like bits of burnt wood. The large praying mantises scare her, and Lalla waits for them to go away, or else she makes a detour without taking her eyes from them while they pivot, brandishing their pincers.

There are even gray and green lizards. They skitter off toward the dunes, thrashing their tails widely to help them run faster. Sometimes Lalla succeeds in catching one, and she plays at holding it by the tail until it comes loose. She watches the piece of tail twisting around by itself in the dust. One day a boy told her that if you waited long enough, you’d see the legs and head grow back onto the lizard tail, but Lalla doesn’t really believe that.

Mostly there are flies. Lalla likes them too, despite their noise and their bites. She doesn’t really know why she likes them, but she just does. Maybe it’s because of their delicate legs, their transparent wings, or maybe because they know how to fly fast, forwards, backwards, in zigzags, and Lalla thinks it must be great to know how to fly like that.

She lies down on her back in the sand on the dunes, and the louse flies land on her face, her hands, her bare legs, one after another. They don’t all come at once because in the beginning they’re a little afraid of Lalla. But they like to come and eat the salty sweat on her skin, and they soon grow bold. When they walk on her with their light legs, Lalla starts laughing, but not too loudly, so as not to scare them off. Sometimes a louse fly bites Lalla’s cheek and a little angry cry breaks from her lips.

Lalla plays with the flies for a long time. These are louse flies that live in the kelp on the beach. But there are also black flies in the Project houses, on the oilcloths, on the cardboard walls, on the windows. The buildings in Les Glacières have big blue flies that fly over the garbage bins making a noise like bomber planes.

Suddenly Lalla stands up. She runs as fast as she can toward the dunes. She climbs up the slope of sand that slips down and shifts under her bare feet. The thistles prick her toes, but she ignores them. She wants to get to the top of the dunes to see the sea, as quickly as possible.

As soon as you’re at the top of the dunes, the wind hits you hard in the face, and Lalla nearly falls over backward. The cold wind from the sea contracts her nostrils and burns her eyes, the sea is immense, blue-gray, dotted with foam, it rumbles quietly as the short waves fall on the flat expanse of sand where the vast, deep blue, almost black sky is mirrored.

Lalla is leaning forward into the wind. Her dress (in truth it is a boy’s calico shirt that her aunt cut the sleeves off of) is clinging to her stomach and thighs, as if she’d just come out of the water. The sound of the wind and the sea is screaming in her ears, first the left, then the right, mixed with the faint sound made by little twists of her hair snapping against her temples. Sometimes the wind picks up a handful of sand and throws it at Lalla’s face. She has to shut her eyes to keep from being blinded. But the wind ends up making her eyes water anyway, and there are grains of sand in her mouth that grit between her teeth.

So when she is good and giddy from the wind and the sea, Lalla goes back down the rampart of dunes. She squats for a minute at the foot of the dune, just long enough to catch her breath. The wind doesn’t reach the other side of the dunes. It goes over them, heads inland, till it reaches the blue hills hung with mist. The wind doesn’t wait. It does what it wants, and Lalla is happy when it’s there, even if it does burn her eyes and ears, even if it does throw handfuls of sand in her face. She thinks of it often, and of the sea too, when she’s in the dark house in the Project, and the air is so heavy and smells so strong; she thinks of the wind that is huge, transparent, that leaps endlessly over the sea, that crosses the desert in an instant, goes all the way to the cedar forests and then dances over there at the foot of the mountains, amidst the birds and flowers. The wind doesn’t wait. It crosses the mountains, sweeping away dust, sand, ashes, it knocks over boxes, sometimes it comes all the way to the town of planks and tarpaper and plays at ripping off a few roofs and walls. But it doesn’t matter. Lalla thinks it’s beautiful, as transparent as water, quick as lightning, and so powerful it could destroy all the cities in the world if it wanted to, even those that have tall white houses with high glass windows.

Lalla knows how to say its name, she learned it all by herself when she was little, and she used to listen to it coming through the planking of the house at night. It’s called whoooooohhh, just like that, with a whistle.

A little farther on, in amongst the shrubs, Lalla meets back up with it. It draws the yellow grasses aside like a hand passing over them.

A hawk hovers almost motionless above the grassy plain, its copper-colored wings spread in the wind. Lalla looks at it, she admires it, because it knows how to fly in the wind. The hawk barely moves the ends of its quill feathers, slightly fans out its tail, and glides effortlessly along with its cross-shaped shadow rippling over the yellow grass. From time to time it pules, saying only, kaiiiik! kaiiiik! and Lalla answers it.

Then it suddenly dives toward the earth, wings drawn in, skims interminably over the grass, like a fish slipping over seaweed swaying on the ocean floor. That’s how it disappears into the distance between the tousled blades of grass. Even though Lalla calls out many times with the plaintive cry, kaiiiik! kaiiiik! the bird doesn’t come back.

But it remains in her eyes for a long time, a shadow in the shape of an arrow skimming over the yellow grass like a stingray, soundlessly, in its tide of fear.

Lalla stands still now, her head thrown back, eyes opened on the white sky, watching the circles swimming there – cutting into one another, like when you throw stones into a water tank. There are no insects or birds or anything of the kind, and yet thousands of specks can be seen moving in the sky, as if there were ant peoples, weevil peoples, and fly peoples up there. They aren’t flying in the white air; they’re walking around in all directions, animated with a feverish haste, as if they didn’t know how to get away. Maybe they are the faces of all the people who live in the cities, cities so big you can never get out, where there are so many cars, so many people, and where you never see the same face twice. Old Naman talks about all that and at the same time he also says strange words, Algeciras, Madrid (he says: Madris), Marseille, Lyon, Paris, Geneva.

Lalla doesn’t always see those faces. It’s only on certain days, when the wind blows and drives the clouds over toward the mountains, and when the air is very white and quivering with sunlight; that’s when you can see them, the people-insects, the ones that move, walk, and run and dance way up there, barely visible, like very young gnats.

Then the sea calls to her again. Lalla runs through the scrub till she reaches the gray dunes. The dunes are like cows lying down, heads low, spines curved. Lalla likes to climb up on their backs, making a path just for herself with her hands and feet and then roll head over heels down the other side to the sandy beach. The ocean unfurls on the hard sand making a loud ripping sound, the water recedes, and the foam melts in the sun. There is so much light and so much noise here that Lalla has to shut her eyes and mouth. The sea salt burns her eyelids and lips, and the gusting wind makes her breath catch in her throat. Yet Lalla loves being by the sea. She enters the water, the waves knock against her legs and her stomach, making the blue shirt cling to her skin. She feels her feet sinking into the sand like two wooden poles. But she doesn’t go any farther out, because every now and again the sea will catch children up – just like that, without paying attention – and then bring them back a couple of days later, leaving them on the hard beach, their bellies and faces swollen with water, their noses, lips, fingertips, and genitals eaten by crabs.

Lalla walks on the sand along the ruff of foam. Her dress – drenched all the way up to her chest – dries in the wind. The wind braids her jet black hair, but only on one side, and her face is the color of copper in the sunlight.

Scattered about on the sand are beached jellyfish with their tendrils spread out around them like tresses. Lalla watches the holes that form in the sand each time a wave recedes. She also runs after the tiny gray crabs, like spiders, with their pincers raised, and it gives her a good laugh. But she doesn’t try to catch them like the other children do; she lets them run off into the sea, disappear in the sparkling foam.

Lalla walks a little farther down the shore, singing that same song that says only one word, “Méditerra-né-é-e...”

Then she goes over to sit down at the foot of the dunes facing the beach, her arms around her knees and her face hidden in the folds of the blue shirt to avoid breathing in the sand that the wind throws at her.

She always goes to sit in the same place, right where a rotten wooden pole sticks out of the water in the hollows of the waves, and a large fig tree grows in the stones amid the dunes. She waits for Naman the fisherman there.

Naman the fisherman isn’t like everyone else. He’s a fairly tall, thin man, with wide shoulders, a bony face, and brick-colored skin. He always walks around barefoot, wearing blue cotton pants and a white shirt that’s too big for him that flares in the wind. But even like that, Lalla thinks he is very handsome and very elegant, and her heart always beats a little faster when she knows he’s going to come. He has a face with distinct features, leathered from the sea breeze; the skin on his forehead and cheeks is very dark and drawn tight from the sun out at sea. He has thick hair, the same color as his skin. But most of all, his eyes are an extraordinary color – a blue-green mixed with gray, very pale and transparent in that dark face, as if they had captured the light and transparency of the sea. It’s in order to see his eyes that Lalla loves to wait for the fisherman on the beach near the tall fig tree and also to see his smile when he catches sight of her.