Desert (9 page)

“Algeciras.”

“Granada.”

“Sevilla.”

“Madrid.”

Aamma’s boys want to know more. They wait for Old Naman to finish eating, and they ask all sorts of questions about life over there, across the sea. They want to know serious things, not names to dream about. They ask Naman about the money that can be earned, the work to be had, how much clothes cost, food, the price of a car, if there are a lot of movie theaters. Old Naman is too old, he doesn’t know those kinds of things, or maybe he’s forgotten them, and anyway, life must have changed since he lived over there, before the war. So the boys shrug their shoulders, but they don’t say anything because Naman has a brother who still lives in Marseille and who might be useful one day.

On certain days Naman feels like talking about everything he’s seen, and Lalla is the one to whom he tells it all because she’s his favorite and because she doesn’t ask any questions.

Even if they’re not exactly true, Lalla loves the tales he tells. She listens carefully to him when he speaks of large white cities by the sea, with all those rows of palm trees, gardens filled with flowers, with orange and pomegranate trees climbing all the way up to the hilltops, and those towering buildings as high as mountains, those avenues that are so long you can’t see the end. She also likes it when he talks about the black automobiles driving along slowly, especially at night, with their headlights turned on, and the multicolored lights of the shop windows. Or the huge white ships that arrive in Algeciras in the evening, slipping slowly along the damp wharves, while the crowd shouts and waves to welcome the newcomers. Or even the railroad leading northward, from city to city, traveling through the misty countryside, over rivers, mountains, going into long dark tunnels, just like that, with all the passengers and their baggage, all the way to the big city of Paris. Lalla listens to all of that and she feels a little fretful shiver, but at the same time she thinks she’d like to be on that railroad, going from town to town, toward unfamiliar places, toward the lands where everyone has forgotten all about dust and starving dogs, about plank shacks through which the desert wind blows.

“Take me with you when you leave,” says Lalla.

Old Naman shakes his head, “I’m too old now, little Lalla, I won’t be going back again, I’d die on the way.”

To console her, he adds, “You’ll go. You’ll see all those cities, and then you’ll come back here, like I did.”

She simply stares into Naman’s eyes to see what he’d seen, like when you stare into the deep sea. She thinks of the lovely names of the cities for a long time, she hums them in her head as if they were the words to a song.

Sometimes it’s Aamma who asks him to talk about those foreign lands. So then, once again, he tells all about his journey through Spain, the border, then the road along the coast, and the great city of Marseille. He talks about all the houses, the streets, the stairways, the endless wharves, the cranes, boats as big as houses, as big as cities, from which trucks, freight cars, stones, cement are unloaded, and which then glide away on the dark waters of the port, blowing their horns. The two boys don’t listen much to that because they don’t believe Old Naman. When Naman leaves, they say that everyone knows he was a cook in Marseille, and they call him Tayyeb, to make fun of him, because it means “he was a cook.”

But Aamma listens to what he says. It doesn’t matter to her that Naman was a cook over there, and a fisherman here. She asks him diVerent questions each time, in order to hear the story of the journey again, the border, and life in Marseille. Then Naman also talks about street battles in which men attack Arabs and Jews in the dark streets, and you have to defend yourself with a knife, or by throwing stones and running as fast as you can to get away from the police vans that pick people up and take them off to prison. He also talks about the people who cross the borders illegally, in the mountains, walking by night and hiding during the day in caves and in the bushes. But sometimes the police dogs follow their trail and attack them when they come down on the other side of the border.

Naman talks about all of that in a gloomy way, and Lalla can sense a cold shadow pass over the man’s eyes. It’s a strange feeling that she’s not very familiar with, but it’s frightening, threatening, like the passage of death, of malediction. Maybe that was something Old Naman had also brought back from over there, from those cities on the other side of the sea.

When he’s not talking about his travels, Old Naman tells stories he heard long ago. He tells them just for Lalla and for the very young children because they’re the only ones who listen without asking too many questions.

On certain days, he sits down facing the sea in the shade of his fig tree and repairs his nets. That’s when he tells the most beautiful stories, those that take place out on the ocean, on boats, in storms, those in which people are shipwrecked and end up on desert islands. Naman can tell a story about almost anything, that’s what’s so great. For example, Lalla is sitting next to him in the shade of the fig tree and she’s watching him repair his nets. His long brown hands with broken nails work swiftly, know how to tie knots nimbly. At one point there is a big tear in the mesh of the net, and Lalla of course asks, “Did a big fish do that?”

Instead of answering, Naman thinks for a while and says, “I didn’t tell you about the day we caught a shark, did I?”

Lalla shakes her head, and Naman starts a story. As in most of his stories, there is a storm, with lightning flashing from one end of the sky to the other, waves as high as mountains, torrential rain. The net is heavy, so heavy to pull up that the boat is leaning to one side and the men are afraid of capsizing. When the net comes up, they see that a gigantic blue shark is caught in it and is thrashing around and opening its jaws full of terrifying teeth. So the fishermen must fight against the shark that is trying to swim away with the net. They hack at it with gaffs, with hatchets. But the shark bites the edge of the boat and tears it apart as if it were just crate wood. Finally the captain manages to kill the shark with a club, and they hoist the beast onto the deck of the boat.

“Then we cut him open to see what was inside, and we found a golden ring set with a deep-red precious stone that was so beautiful no one could take his eyes from it. Naturally we each wanted the ring for ourselves, and soon everyone was ready to kill one another to possess that cursed ring. That was when I suggested we throw dice for it because the captain had a pair of bone dice. So we played dice on the deck in spite of the raging storm that threatened to turn the boat over at any minute. There were six of us, and we tossed the dice six times, the winner being the one who threw the highest number. After the first round, only the captain and I remained because we had both thrown eleven, six and five. Everyone was pushing close around us to see who would win. I threw, and I got a double six! So I was the one who won the ring, and for a few minutes I was happier than I’d ever been in my life. But I looked at the ring for a long time, and its red stone shone like the fires of hell, with a lurid glimmer, like blood. Then I saw that the eyes of my companions were glowing with that same evil light, and I realized the ring was cursed, as was the person who had worn it and had been eaten by the shark, and I knew that whoever kept the ring would be cursed in turn.

“After I had looked at it well, I took it off my finger and threw it into the sea. The captain and my companions were furious and wanted to throw me into the sea as well. So I asked them, ‘Why are you angry with me? That which came from the sea has returned to the sea, and now it’s as if nothing happened.’ At that same moment the storm suddenly subsided and the sun started shining on the sea. So then the sailors also calmed down, and the captain himself who had so coveted the ring forgot about it at once and told me I had done the right thing in throwing it back into the sea. We threw the body of the shark overboard as well and returned to port to repair the net.”

“Do you really think the ring was cursed?” asks Lalla.

“I don’t know if it was cursed,” answers Naman, “but what I do know is that if I hadn’t thrown it back into the sea, one of my shipmates would have killed me that very day in order to steal it, and we would have all died in the same way, right down to the very last.”

They’re stories that Lalla loves to hear, sitting next to the old fisherman like that, facing out to sea, in the shade of the fig tree, when the wind is blowing and making the leaves rustle. It’s sort of as if she could hear the voice of the sea, and Naman’s words weigh on her eyelids and cause drowsiness to well up in her body. So then she curls up in the sand, her head against the roots of the fig tree, while the fisherman continues repairing his red twine nets, and the wasps hum above drops of salt.

H
EY-O
H
ARTANI!”

Lalla shouts very loudly into the wind as she nears some rocky, briar-filled hills. Out here, there are always a fair number of lizards that go skittering off between the stones. Sometimes there are even snakes that dart away with a swish. There are tall grasses as sharp as knives and lots of those dwarf palms that are used for making baskets and mats. You can hear insects chirping everywhere because there are tiny waterholes between the rocks and great deep wells hidden in the sinkholes where cold water sits. In passing, Lalla throws stones into the crevices and listens to the sound echoing deeply into the darkness.

“Harta-a-ni!”

He often hides, to make fun of her, simply stretching himself out at the foot of a thorn bush. He’s always wearing his long homespun robe, frayed at the sleeves and at the hem, and the long white cloth that he wraps around his head and neck. He is long and thin like a vine, with lovely brown hands and ivory-colored fingernails, and feet made for running. But it’s his face that Lalla likes most of all because it doesn’t resemble any of the people who live here in the Project. It’s a very thin, smooth face, a rounded forehead and very straight eyebrows, and large dark eyes that are the color of metal. His hair is short, almost frizzy, and he doesn’t have a mustache or a beard. Yet he seems strong and sure of himself, with a very direct way of looking at you, fearlessly examining you, and he knows how to laugh when he wants to, with a laughter that rings out and makes you happy right away.

Today Lalla finds him easily because he isn’t hiding. He’s simply sitting on a large rock, staring straight ahead in the direction of the herd of goats. He’s not moving. The wind lightly flares his brown tunic away from his body, lifts the end of his white turban. Lalla walks over to him without calling out because she knows he heard her coming. The Hartani has a sharp ear, he can hear the leap of a hare on the far end of a hill and he will point out planes in the sky to Lalla long before she has detected the sound of their motors.

When she’s very near to him, the Hartani stands up and turns around. The sun shines on his black face. He smiles and his teeth also shine in the light. Even though he’s younger than Lalla, he’s just as tall as she is. He’s holding a small blade with no handle in his left hand.

“What are you doing with that knife?” Lalla asks.

Feeling tired from her long walk, she sits down on the rock. He remains standing in front of her, balancing on one leg. Then all of a sudden he leaps backward and starts running over the rocky hill. A few minutes later he brings back a handful of reeds that he cut in the swamps. Smiling, he shows them to Lalla. He’s panting a little, like a dog who has run too fast.

“They’re lovely,” says Lalla. “Are they for making music?”

She doesn’t really ask that. She murmurs the words, making gestures with her hands. Every time she speaks, the Hartani stands still and looks at her intently because he’s trying to understand.

Lalla might be the only person he understands and she the only one who understands him. When she says “music,” the Hartani jumps up and down, holding out his long arms as if he were going to dance. He whistles between his teeth so loudly that the goats and their buck startle on the slope of the hill.

Then he takes a few of the cut reeds and joins them between his hands. He blows into them, and it makes a strange, slightly husky music, like the call of nighthawks in the dark, a sad sort of music, like the chant of Chleuh shepherds.

The Hartani plays for a moment without catching his breath. Then he holds out the reeds to Lalla, and she plays in turn, while the young shepherd stands still, his dark eyes bright with pleasure. They continue playing like that, taking turns blowing into the reed tubes of diVerent lengths, and the sad music seems to be stemming from the land, drenched in white light, from the holes of the underground caves, from the sky itself in which the slow wind is stirring.

From time to time they stop, breathless, and the young boy bursts out with his ringing laughter, and Lalla starts laughing too, without knowing why.

Then they walk across the fields of rocks, and the Hartani takes Lalla’s hand, because there are so many sharp rocks that she doesn’t know about between the tufts of brush. They jump over the little drystone walls, zigzagging through the thorn bushes. The Hartani shows Lalla everything there is in the fields of stones and on the slopes of the hills. He knows all the hiding places better than anyone: those of the praying mantises and of leaf insects. He also knows all the plants, the ones that smell good when you crinkle their leaves between your fingers, the ones with roots filled with water, the ones that taste like anise, like pepper, like mint, like honey. He knows which seeds are crunchy, the tiny berries that dye your fingers and lips blue. He even knows the hiding places where you can find small petrified snails, or tiny star-shaped grains of sand. He leads Lalla far away with him, beyond the drystone walls, along paths she doesn’t know, all the way out to the hills from where you can see the beginning of the desert. His eyes shine brightly; the skin on his face is dark and glistening with sweat when he gets to the top of the hills. Then he shows Lalla the way leading southward, toward the place of his birth.