Desert (8 page)

The people around here don’t know why she goes off alone. Maybe they think she goes over to the shepherds’ houses on the other side of the rocky hills. They don’t say anything.

People here are waiting. In truth, that’s all anyone ever does in the Project. They’ve come to a halt, not far from the seashore, in their plank and zinc shacks, lying motionless in the thick shadows. When day breaks over the stones and the dust, they come out for a minute, as if something were going to happen. They talk a little, the girls go to the fountain, the boys go to work in the fields, or else they go hang around in the streets of the real town across the river, or they go sit on the side of the road to watch the trucks go by.

Every morning, Lalla crosses the Project. She goes to fetch buckets of water from the fountain. As she walks along, she listens to the music coming from the radio sets, perpetuated from one house to another, always the same interminable Egyptian song that comes and goes through the narrow streets of the Project. Lalla enjoys hearing that music, wailing and rasping in cadence, mingling with the sound of the girls’ footsteps and the sound of the water in the fountain. When she gets to the fountain, she waits her turn, swinging the galvanized bucket at the end of her arm. She watches the girls; some are as black as negresses, like Ikikr, others are very white with green eyes, like Mariem. There are old women with veils who come to fetch water in a black pot and hurry away in silence.

The fountain is a brass faucet at the top of a long lead pipe that shakes and groans every time it is turned on and off. The girls wash their legs and faces in the icy jet. Sometimes they splash one another with the buckets, letting out shrill cries. There are always wasps buzzing about their heads, getting caught in their tangled hair.

Lalla brings the bucket of water back to Aamma’s house on her head, walking nice and straight so she won’t spill a drop. In the morning, the sky is lovely and clear as if everything were still completely new. But when the sun nears its highest point, a haze rises near the horizon, like a dust cloud, and the sky weighs more heavily upon the earth.

T
HERE IS ONE PLACE Lalla really likes to go. You have to take the paths that lead away from the sea and head eastward, then you go up the bed of the dried torrent. When the rocky hills come into view, you keep walking over the red stones, following the goat tracks. The sun shines bright in the sky, but the wind is cold because it comes from lands in which there are no trees or water; it’s the wind that comes from the depths of space. This is the dwelling place of the one whom Lalla calls al-Ser, the Secret, because no one knows his name.

So she comes up facing the great plateau of white stones that spreads all the way out to the edge of the horizon, all the way out to the sky. The light is dazzling; the cold wind cuts your lips and brings tears to your eyes. Lalla opens her eyes and stares as hard as she can until her heart starts thudding heavily in her throat and in her temples, until a red veil covers the sky, and she can hear the unknown voices in her ears that are all talking and muttering at the same time.

Then she walks out to the middle of the plateau of stones, to the place where only scorpions and snakes live. There are no more paths up on the plateau. There are only large blocks of broken rock, sharp as knives, upon which the light is glittering. There are no trees or grass, only the wind coming from the center of space.

It is here that the man sometimes comes to meet her. She doesn’t know who he is or where he comes from. At times he is frightening, and at other times he is very gentle and very calm, full of celestial beauty. All she sees of him are his eyes because his face is veiled with a blue cloth, like the faces of the desert warriors. He wears a long white cloak that scintillates like salt in the sun. In the shadow of the blue turban, his eyes burn with a strange dim flame, and Lalla can feel the warmth of his gaze moving over her face and body as if she were nearing a fire.

But al-Ser doesn’t always come. The man from the desert only comes when Lalla wants to see him very badly, when she really needs him, when she needs him just as much as she needs to talk, or to cry. But even when he doesn’t come, there is still a trace of him there on the plateau of stones, maybe it’s that searing look of his that lights up the landscape, that reaches from one end of the horizon to the other. So then Lalla can walk down the middle of the vast stretch of broken stones without paying attention to where she’s going, without thinking about it. On certain rocks there are strange signs that she doesn’t understand, crosses, dots, stains in the shape of suns or moons, arrows carved into the stone. They might be magic signs; that’s what the boys from the Project say, and that’s why they don’t like to come up as far as the white plateau. But Lalla isn’t afraid of the signs, or of loneliness. She knows the Blue Man from the desert is protecting her with his gaze and she is no longer afraid of the silence, or the barrenness of the wind.

There’s no one up in that place, not a soul. Only the Blue Man of the desert who is constantly watching her, without talking to her. Lalla doesn’t really know what he wants, what he’s asking for. She needs him, and he comes silently, with his powerful gaze. She is happy when she’s up on the plateau of stones, in the light of that gaze. She knows that she shouldn’t talk to anyone about it, not even to Aamma, because it’s a secret, the most important thing that’s ever happened to her. It’s also a secret because she’s the only one who isn’t afraid to come up to the plateau of stones often, in spite of the silence and the barrenness of the wind. Except maybe the Chleuh shepherd, the one they call the Hartani, he also comes up on the plateau sometimes, but that’s when one of the goats from his herd gets lost running along the ravines. He isn’t afraid of the signs on the stones either, but Lalla never dared to talk to him about her secret.

That’s the name she’s given the man who sometimes appears on the plateau of stones: al-Ser, the Secret, because no one should know his name.

He doesn’t speak. That is to say, he doesn’t speak the same language as humans. But Lalla hears his voice inside her ears, and in his language he says very beautiful things that stir her body inwardly, that make her shudder. Maybe he speaks with the faint sound of the wind that comes from the depths of space, or else with the silence between each gust of wind. Maybe he speaks with the words of light, words that explode in showers of sparks on the razor-edged rocks, with the words of sand, the words of pebbles that crumble into hard powder, and also the words of scorpions and snakes that leave tiny indistinct marks in the dust. He knows how to speak with all of those words, and his gaze leaps, swift as an animal, from one rock to another, shoots all the way out to the horizon in a single move, flies straight up into the sky, soaring higher than the birds.

Lalla loves coming up here, on the plateau of white stones, to hear those secret words. She doesn’t know the man she calls al-Ser; she doesn’t know who he is or where he comes from, but she loves to encounter him up here, because in his eyes and words, he bears the heat of the land of dunes and of sand, of the South, a treeless, waterless land.

Even when al-Ser doesn’t come, it’s as if she could see through his eyes. It’s difficult to understand, because it’s a bit like in a dream, as if Lalla weren’t exactly herself, as if she’d entered the world that lies behind the Blue Man’s eyes.

That’s when beautiful and mysterious things appear. Things that she’d never seen elsewhere, that trouble and worry her. She sees the immense expanse of gold- and sulfur-colored sand, as vast as the sea, with huge still waves. There is no one on the stretch of sand, not a tree, not a wisp of grass, nothing but the shadows of the dunes growing long, touching one another, creating lakes of twilight. Here everything looks the same, and it’s as if she were here and at the same time a little farther away, over where her eyes happen to fall, then still elsewhere, right out on the edge between the earth and the sky. The dunes move under her gaze, slowly, spreading their fingers of sand. There are golden brooks that run along the torrid valley bottoms. There are ripples, cooked hard in the relentless heat of the sun, and huge white beaches with flawless curves standing perfectly still before the sea of red sand. Light glistens and streams down everywhere, light coming from all sides at once, the light of the earth, the sky, and the sun. In the sky, there are no limits. Nothing but the dry haze shimmering out near the horizon, distorting reflections, dancing like wispy grasses of light – and the ochre and pink dust vibrating in the cold wind that rises up toward the very center of the sky.

All of this is strange and remote, and yet it seems familiar. As if Lalla is seeing, directly in front of her, the huge desert with the gleaming light through someone else’s eyes. She can feel the south wind blowing on her skin, the burning sand of the dunes under her bare feet. Most of all she can feel, overhead, the immensity of the blank sky, the sky with not a single shadow in which the pure sun is shining.

Then, for a long time, she stops being herself and becomes someone else, someone far away, forgotten. She sees other shapes, silhouettes of children, men, women, horses, camels, herds of goats; she sees the outline of a city, a stone and clay palace, mud ramparts from which troops of warriors are coming. She sees all of that because it is not a dream, but a remembrance from another’s memory that she has unknowingly entered. She hears the sound of men’s voices, the chanting of women, music, and maybe she even dances too, spinning around, beating the earth with the tips of her bare toes and her heels, making her copper bracelets and heavy necklaces jangle.

Then suddenly, as if in a breath of wind, everything is gone. It’s just that al-Ser’s eyes are no longer upon her, they have glanced away from the plateau of white stone. Then Lalla is looking through her own eyes again, can feel her heart again, her lungs, her skin. She can make out each detail, each stone, each crack, each tiny little pattern in the dust.

She turns back. She climbs down toward the bed of the dry torrent, avoiding the sharp rocks and the thorn bushes. When she gets to the bottom, she is very weary from all of that light, from the barrenness of the incessant wind. Slowly, she walks along the sand paths till she reaches the Project where the shadows of men and women are still moving around. She walks over to the fountain and bathes her face with her hands, kneeling on the ground, as if she were returning from a long journey.

W
HAT’S ALSO NICE are the wasps. They’re all over the town with their long yellow bodies with black stripes and their transparent wings. They go everywhere, flying about heavily without paying any attention to people. They’re hunting for food. Lalla really likes them, she often watches them hanging in the sunbeams over heaps of garbage, or around the meat stalls at the butcher’s market. Sometimes they come close to Lalla when she’s eating an orange; they try to land on her face, on her hands. Sometimes too, one of them stings her on the neck or on the arm, and it burns for several hours. But it doesn’t matter, Lalla really likes the wasps anyway.

The flies aren’t as nice. First of all they don’t have that long yellow and black body, or the waist that is so slender when they’re standing on the edge of a table. The flies go fast, they alight suddenly, all flat with their big red-gray eyes goggling on their heads.

In the Project, there’s always a lot of smoke hanging over the plank shacks, along the alleys of tamped earth. There are women cooking meals on clay braziers, there are fires for burning garbage, fires for heating tar to put on the roofs.

When she has time, Lalla likes to stop and look at the fires. Or sometimes she goes over to the dried torrents to gather acacia twigs, she ties them together with a piece of string and brings the bundle back to Aamma’s house. The flames flare up joyfully among the twigs, making the stems and thorns burst open and the sap boil. The flames dance in the cold morning air, making fine music. If you look into the flames, you can see genies, at least that’s what Aamma says. You can also see landscapes, cities, rivers, all sorts of extraordinary things that appear and then hide, sort of like clouds.

Then the wasps come out, because they smell the odor of mutton cooking in the iron pot. The other children are afraid of the wasps, they want to drive them away, they try to kill them by throwing stones. But Lalla lets them fly around her hair and tries to understand what they are singing when they make their wings buzz.

When it’s mealtime, the sun is high in the sky, burning hotly. Whites are so white that you can’t look directly at them, shadows are so dark that they seem like holes in the ground. So first Aamma’s sons come. There are two of them, one who is fourteen, named Ali, and the other who is seventeen, whom everyone calls Bareki, because he was blessed on the day of his birth. Aamma serves them first, and they eat rapidly, greedily, without speaking. They always shoo the wasps away with the backs of their hands as they eat. Then Aamma’s husband comes; he works in the tomato fields, to the south. His name is Selim, but he’s called the Soussi, because he is from the Souss River region. He’s very small and thin, with lovely green eyes, and Lalla really likes him, even though it’s rumored almost everywhere that he’s a little lazy. He doesn’t kill the wasps; on the contrary, he sometimes holds them between his index finger and thumb and plays at making their stingers come out, then he sets them delicately back down and lets them fly away.

There are always people who are far from their homes, and Aamma puts a piece of meat aside for them. Sometimes Naman the fisherman comes to eat at Aamma’s house. Lalla is always very pleased when she knows he’s going to come, because Naman likes her too, and he tells her nice stories. He eats slowly, and from time to time he says something funny just for her. He calls her little Lalla because she’s the descendent of a true sharifa. When she looks into his eyes, Lalla feels as if she were looking at the color of the sea, going across the sea, as if she were on the other side of the horizon, in those big cities where there are white houses, gardens, fountains. Lalla loves to hear the names of the cities, and she often asks Naman to say them for her, just like that, just their names, slowly, to have time to see the things they hide: