Desert
Page 15
LALLA IS WAITING for something. She doesn’t really know what it is, but she’s waiting. The days are long in the Project, the rainy days, the windy days, the summer days. Sometimes Lalla thinks she’s simply waiting for the days to come, but when they arrive, she realizes that wasn’t it. She’s waiting, that’s all. People have a lot of patience, maybe they wait for something all their lives, and nothing ever comes.
The men often sit around on a stone in the sunshine, their heads covered with a flap of their coat or a bath towel. They just stare out into the distance. What are they looking at? The dusty horizon, the dirt tracks where the trucks are rolling along, like large multicolored beetles, and the outline of the rocky hills, the white clouds moving across the sky. That’s what they are looking at. They have no desire for anything else. The women are waiting too, over by the fountain, not talking, veiled in black, their bare feet planted squarely on the ground.
Even the children know how to wait. They sit down in front of the store, and wait, just like that, without playing or shouting. Once in a while, one of them will get up and go turn in his coins for a bottle of Fanta or a handful of mints. The others watch him in silence.
There are days when you don’t know where you’re headed, when you don’t know what might happen. Everyone keeps an eye on the street, and by the side of the highway, the ragged children are awaiting the arrival of the blue bus, or the passage of large trucks carrying diesel fuel, wood, cement. Lalla is very familiar with the sound of the trucks. Sometimes she goes and sits with the other children on the new stone embankment at the entrance to the Project. When a truck is coming, all the children turn toward the far end of the road, a long way off, out where the air dances over the asphalt and makes the hills shimmer. You can hear the sound of the motor long before the truck appears. It’s a high-pitched droning, almost like a whistle with, every now and again, a sharp honk that blares out and echoes off the walls of the houses. Then a cloud of dust comes into view, a yellow cloud mingled with the blue exhaust of the motor. The red truck comes barreling down the paved road at top speed. Over the cab of the truck there is an exhaust pipe spitting out blue smoke, and the sun glints brightly off the windshield and the chrome. The tires are devouring the pavement and zigzagging a little due to the wind, and every time the tires of the semi slip off the pavement, a cloud of dust billows into the sky. Then the truck passes in front of the children, honking very loudly, and the earth shakes under its fourteen black tires, and the dusty wind and pungent odor of diesel fumes waft over them like a hot breath.
Long afterward, the children are still talking about the red truck and telling stories about trucks, red trucks, white tank trucks, and yellow crane trucks.
That’s what it’s like when you’re waiting. You often go out and watch the roads, the bridges, and the sea, to see the people who haven’t been left behind going by, those who are getting away.
Some days are longer than others, because you’re hungry. Lalla knows those days well, when there’s not a penny in the house, and Aamma hasn’t found any work in town. Even Selim the Soussi, Aamma’s husband, doesn’t know where to try to find money anymore, and everyone gets gloomy, sad, almost mean. So Lalla stays outdoors all day long; she goes as far out as possible on the plateau of stones, out where the shepherds live, and looks for the Hartani.
It’s always the same; when she really wants to see him, he appears in a dip in the ground, sitting on a stone, his head wrapped up in a white cloth. He’s watching his goats and sheep. His face is black, his hands thin and strong like the hands of an old man. He shares his black bread and dates with Lalla, and he even gives a few pieces to the shepherds who have come forward. But he’s not proud about it; it’s as if what he gives is of no importance.
Lalla glances over at him every once in a while. She loves his imperturbable face, the aquiline profile, and the light that glows in his dark eyes. The Hartani is also waiting for something, but he’s perhaps the only one who knows what he’s waiting for. He doesn’t say what it is since he doesn’t know how to speak the language of human beings. But you can guess from his eyes what he’s waiting for, what he’s looking for. It’s as if part of him had been left behind in the place of his birth, beyond the rocky hills and the snow-capped mountains, in the immensity of the desert, and one day he would have to find that part of himself, in order to really be whole.
Lalla stays with the shepherd all day long, only she doesn’t get too near to him. She sits on a stone, not far away, and gazes out in the distance; she looks at the air dancing and rushing over the arid valley, the white light making sparks, and the slow meandering of the goats and sheep through the white stones.
When the days are sad, anxious, the Hartani is the only one who can be there, and who doesn’t need words. A look is enough, and he knows how to give bread and dates with nothing in exchange. He even prefers for you to stay a few steps away from him, just like the goats and the sheep, who never completely belong to anyone.
All day long, Lalla listens to the calls of the shepherds in the hills, whistling that bores through the white silence. When she goes back to the Project of planks and tarpaper, she feels freer, even if Aamma does scold her because she’s brought nothing home to eat.
That’s the kind of day it is when Aamma takes Lalla to the house of the woman who sells carpets. It’s on the other side of the river in a poor part of the city, in a big white house with narrow screened windows. When she enters the room used as a workshop, Lalla hears the sound of weaving looms. There are twenty of them, maybe more, lined up one behind the other in the milky half-light of the large room where three neon tubes are flickering. In front of the looms, little girls are squatting or sitting on stools. They work rapidly, pushing the shuttle between the warp threads, taking the small steel scissors, cutting the pile, packing the wool down on the weft. The oldest must be about fourteen; the youngest is probably not yet eight. They aren’t talking, they don’t even look at Lalla when she comes into the workshop with Aamma and the merchant woman. The merchant’s name is Zora; she is a tall woman dressed in black who always holds a flexible switch in her pudgy hands with which to whip the little girls on the legs and shoulders when they don’t work fast enough or when they talk to their workmates.
“Has she ever worked?” she asks, without even glancing at Lalla.
Aamma says she’s shown her how people used to weave in the old days. Zora nods her head. She seems very pale, maybe because of the black dress, or else because she never leaves the shop. She walks slowly over to a free loom, upon which there is a large dark red carpet with white spots.
“She can finish this one,” she says.
Lalla sits down and starts to work. She works in the large dim room for several hours, making mechanical gestures with her hands. At first she has to stop, because her fingers get tired, but she can feel the eyes of the tall pale lady on her and starts working again right away. She knows the pale woman won’t whip her with the switch because she is older than the other girls working there. When their eyes meet, Lalla feels something like a shock deep inside, and a glint of anger flares in her eyes. But the fat woman dressed in black takes it out on the smaller girls, the skinny ones who cower like she-dogs, daughters of beggars, abandoned girls who live at Zora’s house year-round and who have no money. The minute their work slows down, or if they exchange a few words in a whisper, the fat pale woman descends upon them with surprising agility and lashes their backs with her switch. But the little girls never cry. All you can hear is the whistling of the whip and the dull whack on their backs. Lalla clenches her teeth; she looks down at the ground to avoid seeing or hearing it, because she too would like to shout and lash out at Zora. But she doesn’t say anything because of the money she’s supposed to bring back to the house for Aamma. To get even, she just ties a few knots the wrong way in the red carpet.
Still, the following day Lalla just can’t stand it anymore. When the fat pale woman resumes whipping Mina – a puny, thin little gir
l of barely ten – with the switch because she’s broken her shuttle, Lalla stands up and says coldly, “Stop beating her!”
Zora looks at Lalla incredulously for a minute. Her pale flabby face has taken on such an idiotic expression that Lalla repeats, “Stop beating her!”
Suddenly, Zora’s features screw up in hatred. She strikes out vehemently at Lalla’s face with the switch, but only grazes her left shoulder, as Lalla manages to dodge the blow.
“You’ll see the beating I’ll give you!” Zora screams, and now there’s some color to her face.
“You bully! You wicked woman!”
Lalla grabs Zora’s switch and breaks it over her knee. Then it is fear that twists the fat woman’s face.
She backs away stuttering, “Get out! Get out! Right now! Get out!”
But Lalla is already running across the large room; she leaps outside into the sunlight; she runs without stopping all the way back to Aamma’s house. Freedom is beautiful. You can watch the clouds floating along upside down again, the wasps busying themselves around little piles of garbage, the lizards, the chameleons, the grasses quivering in the wind. Lalla sits down in front of the house, in the shade of the wall of planks, and listens eagerly to all the minute sounds.
When Aamma comes home around evening time, she simply says, “I’m not going back to work at Zora’s, ever again.”
***
Since that day, things here in the Project have really changed for Lalla. It’s as if she’d grown up all of a sudden, and people have started noticing her. Even Aamma’s sons aren’t like they used to be, cold and scornful. Sometimes she sort of misses the days when she was very young, when she had just arrived in the Project, and no one knew her name, and she could hide behind a shrub, in a bucket, in a cardboard box. She really enjoyed that, being like a shadow, coming and going without being seen, without being spoken to.
Old Naman and the Hartani are the only ones who haven’t changed. Naman the fisherman still tells incredible stories as he repairs his nets on the beach, or when he comes to eat corn cakes at Aamma’s house. He hardly ever catches fish anymore, but people really like him and continue to invite him over. His pale eyes are as transparent as water, and his face is stitched with deep wrinkles like scars from ancient wounds.
Aamma listens to him talk about Spain, about Marseille, or Paris, and about all the cities where he has been, where he’s walked, where he knows the names of the streets and the people who live there. Aamma asks him questions, asks him if his brother can help her find work over there.
Naman nods his head. “Why not?”
That’s his answer to everything, but he promises to write his brother all the same. Leaving the country is complicated though. You need money, papers. Aamma remains pensive, a faraway look in her eyes; she’s dreaming of white cities with so many streets, houses, automobiles. Maybe that’s what she’s waiting for.
Lalla doesn’t think about that very much herself. It’s all the same to her. She’s watching Naman’s eyes, and it’s a little bit as if she had known those seas, those countries, those houses.
The Hartani doesn’t think about it either. He’s remained like a child still, even though he’s as tall and strong as an adult. His body is slim and elongated, his face is pure and smooth like a piece of ebony. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t know how to speak the same language others do.
He still sits down on a rock, staring out into the distance, wearing his homespun robe, with the white cloth on his head drawn over his face. Around him there are still black shepherds just like him, wild, dressed in rags, whistling as they leap from rock to rock. Lalla likes coming out where they live, out to the place which is filled with white light, the place where time stands still, where you can’t grow up.
THE MAN WALKED into Aamma’s house one morning in the beginning of summer. He was a man from the city, wearing a gray suit with a green sheen, black leather shoes that were as shiny as mirrors. He came with a few gifts for Aamma and her sons, an electric mirror framed in white plastic, a transistor radio no larger than a box of matches, pens with gold-colored caps, and a bag full of sugar and canned food. When he came into the house he passed Lalla at the door but hardly looked at her. He lay all the presents on the floor; Aamma told him to sit down, and he looked around for a seat, but there were only cushions and Lalla Hawa’s wooden trunk that Aamma had brought back from the South with Lalla. The man chose to sit on the trunk after having tested it a little with the palm of his hand. The man waited for tea and sweet cakes to be brought to him.
When she learned a little later that the man had come to ask for her hand in marriage, Lalla felt very frightened. It made her head spin, and her heart started beating wildly. It wasn’t Aamma who told her about it, but Bareki, Aamma’s eldest son.
“Our mother decided to have you marry him, because he is very rich.”
“But I don’t want to get married!” Lalla shouted.
“You have nothing to say about it, you must obey your aunt,” Bareki said.
“Never! Never!” Lalla ran off shouting, her eyes filled with angry tears.
Then she went back to Aamma’s house. The man with the gray-green suit was gone, but the gifts were there. Ali, Aamma’s younger son, was even listening to music, holding the tiny transistor radio against his ear. When Lalla walked in, he gave her a knowing look.
“Why did you keep that man’s gifts? I won’t marry him,” Lalla said to Aamma coldly.
Aamma’s son snickered, “Maybe she wants to marry the Hartani!”
“Get out!” said Aamma. The young man went out with the transistor.
“You can’t force me to marry that man!” Lalla says.
“He will be a good husband for you,” responds Aamma. “He’s no longer very young, but he’s rich, he has a big house in the city, and he has lots of powerful relations. You must marry him.”
“I don’t want to get married, ever!”
Aamma remains silent for a long time. When she speaks again, her voice is softer, but Lalla stays on her guard.
“I raised you as if you were my own daughter, I love you, and today you would affront me in this way?”
Lalla looks angrily at Aamma, because for the first time she’s seeing her dishonest side.
“I don’t care,” she says. “I don’t want to marry that man. I don’t want these ridiculous gifts!”
She motions toward the electric mirror on its stand on the dried mud floor. “You don’t even have electricity!”
Then suddenly, she’s had enough. She leaves Aamma’s house and goes out to the sea. But this time she doesn’t run along the path; she walks very slowly. Today, nothing is the same. It’s as if everything has been dulled, worn down from being looked at so much.
“I’m going to have to leave,” Lalla says out loud to herself. But she immediately thinks that she doesn’t even know where to go. So then she crosses over to the other side of the dunes and walks along the wide beach, looking for Old Naman. She would so like for him to be there, as usual, sitting on a root of the old fig tree, repairing his nets. She would ask him all sorts of questions about those cities in Spain with magic names, Algeciras, Málaga, Granada, Teruel, Zaragoza, and about those ports from which ships as big as cities sail, about the roads upon which automobiles drive northward, about trains and airplanes departing. She’d like to listen to him talk for hours about those snow-capped mountains and those tunnels, those rivers that are as vast as the sea, those wheat-covered plains, immense forests, and most of all about those fragrant cities where there are white palaces, churches, fountains, stores glittering with light. Paris, Marseille, and all of those streets, houses so tall you can barely see the sky, the gardens, the cafés, the hotels, and the intersections where you meet people from all corners of the world.
But Lalla can’t find the old fisherman. There is only the white gull gliding slowly along facing the wind, wheeling over her head.
“Hey-o! Hey-o! Prince!”
The white bird s
woops over Lalla a few more times, then, caught up in the wind, flies quickly away in the direction of the river.