Desert (7 page)

She waits a long time for him, sitting in the fine sand of the dune, in the shade of the tall fig tree. She hums a little, holding her arms over her head so she won’t swallow too much sand. She sings the name that she is so fond of, that is long and beautiful, that simply says, “Méditerra-né-é-e...”

She waits, watching the sea that’s beginning to get rough – a grayish-blue, like steel – and a sort of pale mist that masks the line of the horizon. Sometimes she thinks she sees a dark spot dancing amid the reflections between the crests of the waves, and she straightens up a little, because she thinks it’s Naman’s boat coming. But the dark spot disappears. It’s a mirage on the sea, or maybe the back of a dolphin.

Naman was the one who had told her about dolphins. He told her of groups of dark backs leaping joyfully through the waves in front of the boat stems, as if to greet the fishermen, then suddenly they’d be off, disappearing out toward the horizon. Naman likes to tell Lalla stories about dolphins. When he talks, the light of the sea makes his eyes even brighter, and it’s as if Lalla can see the black creatures in the color of his eyes. But as hard as she searches the sea, she never sees any dolphins. They probably don’t like to come too near the coast.

Naman tells the story of a dolphin that led a fisherman’s boat back to the coast one day when he was lost at sea in a storm. Clouds had settled over the sea, covering it like a shroud, and the raging wind had broken the boat’s mast. So the storm had carried the fisherman’s boat far out to sea, so far that he didn’t know where the coast was anymore. The boat drifted for two days through the rough seas that threatened to capsize it at any moment. The fisherman thought he was doomed and was saying his prayers when a large dolphin appeared amidst the waves. It jumped around the boat, playing in the waves as dolphins usually do. But this dolphin was all alone. Then suddenly it started guiding the boat. It was hard to believe, but that’s what the dolphin did: it swam behind the boat and pushed it. Sometimes, the dolphin swam off, disappeared in the waves, and the fisherman thought he’d been abandoned. Then the dolphin came back and started pushing the boat with its head, thrashing the sea with its powerful tail. They continued along in that fashion for one whole day, and at nightfall, during a break in the clouds, the fisherman finally caught sight of the lights on the coast. He shouted and wept with joy because he knew he’d been saved. When the boat neared the harbor, the dolphin turned and swam back toward the open sea, and the fisherman watched it go, the dolphin’s big, black back gleaming in the twilight.

Lalla quite likes that story. She often searches the surface of the sea to find the big black dolphin, but Naman told her that all that happened very long ago, and the dolphin must be very old now.

Lalla is waiting like she does every morning, sitting in the shade of the tall fig tree. She gazes at the gray and blue sea where the pointed crests of the waves bob. The waves break on the beach following a sort of slanted course; first they come rolling in on the eastern side over by the rocky headland, and then from the west, near the river. Last of all they break in the middle. The wind pounces, snatches up piles of foam and flings them out toward the dunes; the foam melts into the sand and dust.

When the sun is very high in the cloudless sky, Lalla goes back to the Project; she doesn’t hurry because she knows she’ll have work waiting for her when she arrives. First she’ll have to go fetch the water at the fountain, carrying an old rusty tin balanced on her head, then wash the clothes in the river, but that – well, that’s rather nice because you can chat with the others and listen to them telling all sorts of incredible stories, especially that girl whose name is Ikikr (which means “chickpea” in Berber) because of the wart on her cheek. But there are two things that Lalla doesn’t like at all: going to gather twigs for the fire and grinding wheat to make flour.

So she goes back very slowly, dragging her feet a little along the path. She doesn’t sing any more then because it’s the time of day when you run into people on the dunes, boys who are going to check the bird traps or men on their way to work. Sometimes the boys make fun of Lalla because she doesn’t know how to walk barefoot very well and because she doesn’t know any curse words. But Lalla can hear them coming from a long way off, and she hides behind a thorn bush near a dune and waits till they’ve passed.

There’s also that scary woman. She’s not old, but she’s very dirty, with tangled black and red hair, clothing torn from the thorns. When she appears on the path in the dunes you have to be very careful because she’s mean and doesn’t like children. People call her Aïsha Kondisha, but that’s not her real name. No one knows her real name. They say that she kidnaps children to hurt them. When Lalla hears Aïsha Kondisha coming along the path, she hides behind a bush and holds her breath. Aïsha Kondisha goes by muttering incomprehensible phrases. She stops a moment, lifts her head because she senses that someone is there. But she’s almost blind and can’t see Lalla. So she strikes out again, hobbling and shouting out insults in her hideous voice.

On certain mornings there is something in the sky that Lalla really loves: it’s a big white cloud, long and stringy, that crosses the sky right in the bluest spot. At the end of the white trail, you can see a little silver cross moving slowly through the sky with its head pointing upward. She loves to watch the cross moving across the huge blue sky, without a sound, leaving behind the long white cloud made of little cottony puffs that blend in with each other and spread out like a road, then the wind brushes over the cloud and washes the sky clean.

Lalla thinks she would love to be up there, in the tiny silver cross, above the sea, above the islands like that, heading out to the most distant of lands. She remains for a long time looking up at the sky after the airplane disappears.

The Project comes into view after a bend in the path when you’re far from the sea and you’ve walked for half an hour in the direction of the river. Lalla doesn’t know why it’s called the Project, because in the beginning there were only about ten plank and tarpaper cabins on the other side of the river and the vacant lots that separate it from the real town. Maybe they called it that to make people forget they were living with dogs and rats in the dust.

This is where Lalla came to live when her mother died, so long ago that she doesn’t remember very well when she came. It was very hot because it was in the summer, and the wind blew clouds of dust up over the plank shacks. She’d walked with her eyes shut behind the form of her aunt until they reached the windowless cabin where her aunt’s sons lived. Then she’d felt like running away, taking off along the road that leads to the high mountains and never coming back.

Every time Lalla comes back from the dunes and sees the roofs of tarpaper and sheet metal, her heart sinks and she remembers the day she came to the Project for the first time. But that was so long ago now, it’s as if everything that had come before didn’t really happen to her, as if it were a story that she’d heard someone tell.

It’s like her birth, in the mountains to the south, where the desert begins. Sometimes in winter, when there’s nothing to do outside and the wind blows hard over the plain of dust and salt, whistling between the poorly fitted planks in Aamma’s house, Lalla sits down on the floor and listens to the story of her birth.

It’s a very long and very strange story, and Aamma doesn’t always tell it the same way. In her slightly singsong voice, her head nodding as if she were going to fall asleep, Aamma says: “When the day you were to be born came, it was just before summer, before the dry season. Hawa could feel you were coming, and since everyone was still asleep, she left the tent silently. She just bound up her belly with a piece of cloth and walked out as best she could until she reached a spot with a tree and a spring, because she knew that when the sun came up she would need shade and water. It’s the custom down there, everyone must always be born near a spring. So she walked there and then she lay down near the tree and waited for the night to end. No one knew that your mother was outside. She could walk without making a sound, without making the dogs bark. Even though I was sleeping right next to her, I hadn’t heard her moan or get up to leave the tent...”

“Then what happened, Aamma?”

“Then it was daybreak, so the women woke up and we saw that your mother wasn’t there and we realized why she’d left. So I went looking for her by the spring and when I arrived she was standing against the tree with her arms hanging onto a branch and she was moaning softly to avoid alarming the men and the children.”

“What happened after that, Aamma?”

“Then you were born, right away, just like that, in the dirt between the roots of the tree, and we washed you in the spring water and wrapped you in a cloak because the night chill had not yet lifted. The sun rose, and your mother went back to the tent to sleep. I remember there was nothing to wrap you in, and you slept in your mother’s blue cloak. Your mother was happy because you came very quickly, but she was sad too, because of your father’s death; she thought she wouldn’t have enough money to raise you, and she was afraid she would have to give you to someone else.”

Sometimes Aamma tells the story differently, as if she doesn’t really remember very well. For example, she says that Hawa wasn’t clinging to the branch of the tree, but she was hanging from the rope of a well, and she was pulling with all her might to fight the pain. Or else she says that a passing shepherd delivered the baby and wrapped it in his woolen cloak. But all of that is veiled in an incomprehensible fog as if it had happened in another world, a world on the other side of the desert, where a diVerent sun shines in a diVerent sky.

“After a few days your mother was able to walk out to the well for the first time to wash herself and comb her hair. She carried you wrapped in the same blue cloak that she tied around her waist. She walked cautiously because she wasn’t yet as strong as before, but she was very happy that you had come and when we asked her your name she said it was the same as hers, Lalla Hawa, because you were the daughter of a sharifa.”

“Please, tell me about the one who was called al-Azraq, the Blue Man.”

But Aamma shakes her head.

“Not now, another day.”

“Please Aamma, tell me about him.”

But Aamma shakes her head without answering. She stands up and goes to knead the bread in the large earthen platter near the door. Aamma’s like that; she never wants to talk for very long, and she never says very much about the Blue Man or Moulay Ahmed ben Mohammed al-Fadel, who was called Ma al-Aïnine, Water of the Eyes.

The odd thing here in the Project is that everyone is very poor, but no one ever complains. The Project is mostly this heap of plank and sheet metal shacks with those large sheets of tarpaper held down with stones that serve as roofs. When the wind blows too hard in the valley, you can hear all the planks banging and the sheet metal clanging, and the snapping of the tarpaper tearing in a strong gust. It makes a funny music that rattles and clatters, as if everyone were in a big, old, broken-down bus on a dirt road, or as if there were a bunch of animals and rats galloping over the roofs and through the alleys.

Sometimes the storm is very violent, it whisks everything away. The next day the whole town needs to be rebuilt. But the people laugh as they do it because they are so poor they aren’t afraid of losing what they have. Maybe they’re happy too, because after the storm the sky is even vaster, bluer, and the light even more lovely. In any case, all there is around the Project is very flat land, and the dusty wind, and the sea so huge that you cannot see the whole of it.

Lalla loves to look at the sky. She often goes over by the dunes to the place where the sand path leads away in a straight line. And she flops down on her back right in the middle of the sand and the thistles with her arms outspread. Then the sky opens out over her smooth face, it shines like a mirror – peaceful, so peaceful, not a cloud, not a bird, not a plane.

Lalla opens her eyes very wide, she lets the sky come inside of her. It makes a swaying motion, as if she were on a boat, or as if she’d smoked too much and her head were spinning. It’s because of the sun. It burns down very brightly despite the cold wind from the sea: it burns so brightly that its warmth enters the little girl’s body, fills her belly, her lungs, her arms and legs. It hurts too, hurts her eyes and her head, but Lalla remains motionless, because she so loves the sun and the sky.

When she’s there, sprawled out on the sand, far from other children, far from the Project filled with its noises and smells, and when the sky is very blue like today, Lalla can think about what she loves. She thinks of the one she calls al-Ser, the Secret, he whose gaze is like the sunlight that envelops and protects you.

No one here in the Project knows him, but sometimes when the sky is very beautiful and the light sparkles on the sea and on the dunes, it’s as if the name of al-Ser were everywhere, vibrating everywhere, even deep within her. Lalla believes she can hear his voice, hear the faint sound of his footsteps, she feels his burning gaze that sees all, penetrates all, on the skin of her face. It’s a gaze that comes from across the mountains, beyond the Drâa, from the heart of the desert, and it shines like a light that can never die.

No one knows anything about him. When Lalla talks to Naman the fisherman about al-Ser, he shakes his head because he’s never heard the name, and he never mentions him in his stories. Yet Lalla thinks it must surely be his true name, since it was the one she had heard. But maybe it was only a dream. Even Aamma probably doesn’t know anything about him. Nevertheless, it’s a very handsome name, thinks Lalla, a name that makes you feel good when you hear it.

It’s in order to hear his name, to catch a glimpse of the light in his eyes, that Lalla always walks far into the dunes till she reaches the place where there is nothing but the sea, the sand, and the sky. For al-Ser cannot make his name heard, or let the warmth of his gaze be felt when Lalla is in the plank and tarpaper Project. He’s a man who doesn’t like noise or strong smells. He needs to be alone in the wind, alone like a bird hanging in the sky.