Desert
Page 16
So Lalla stays on the beach for a long time, with only the sound of the wind and the sea in her ears.
The following days, no one said a word about anything in Aamma’s house, and the man with the gray-green suit didn’t come back. The little transistor radio was already demolished, and the cans of food had all been eaten. Only the plastic electric mirror remained where it had been placed, on the tamped earth near the door.
Lalla hadn’t slept well any of those nights, trembling at the slightest sounds. She remembered stories she’d been told about girls who had been taken away by force, in the night, because they didn’t want to get married. Every morning at daybreak, Lalla went out before anyone else, to wash herself and fetch the water at the fountain. That way, she could keep an eye on the entrance to the Project.
Then came the wind of ill fortune, which blew over the land for several days in a row. The wind of ill fortune is a bizarre wind that only comes once or twice a year, at the end of winter or in the fall. The strangest thing about it is that you don’t really feel it at first. It doesn’t blow very hard, and sometimes it stops altogether, and you forget about it. It’s not a cold wind like those of the midwinter storms, when the sea unleashes its furious waves. It’s not a hot desiccating wind either, like the one that comes from the desert and lights the houses with a red glow, the one that makes sand hiss over the metal and tarpaper roofs. No, the wind of ill fortune is a very mild wind that swirls around, tosses a few gusts about, and then settles heavily on the roofs of the houses, on people’s shoulders and chests. When it’s here, the air gets hotter and heavier, as if there were a gray veil over everything.
When that slow, mild wind comes, people fall sick, almost everywhere, especially small children and elderly people, and they die. That’s why it’s called the wind of ill fortune.
When it began to blow on the Project that particular year, Lalla recognized it right away. She saw the clouds of gray dust moving over the plain, blurring the sea and the mouth of the river. Then people only went out muffled up in their cloaks in spite of the heat. There were no more wasps, and the dogs went off to hide in the hollows at the feet of the houses, with their noses in the dust. Lalla was sad, because she thought of the people the wind would sweep away in its path. So when she heard that Old Naman was sick, there was a pang in her heart and she couldn’t breathe for a minute. She’d never really had that feeling before, and she had to sit down to keep from falling.
Then she walked and ran all the way to the fisherman’s house. She thought there would be people with him, helping him, caring for him, but Naman is all alone, lying on his straw mat, his head resting on his arm. He is shivering so hard that his teeth are chattering, and he can’t even raise himself up on his elbows when Lalla comes into the house. He smiles a little, and his eyes shine brighter when he recognizes Lalla. His eyes are still the color of the sea, but his thin face has turned a white, slightly gray color that is frightening.
She sits down next to him and talks to him, almost in hushed tones. Usually he’s the one who tells stories, and she listens, but today all that has changed. Lalla just talks to him about any old thing, to soothe her anxiety and impart a little human warmth to the old man. She talks to him about things that he used to tell her of in the past, things about his trips to the cities in Spain and France. She talks about it all as if she’d been the one who had seen those cities, who had taken those long journeys. She talks to him about the streets of Algeciras, narrow winding streets near the port, where you can smell the sea wind and the odor of fish, and the train station with blue tiled platforms, and the big railroad trestles straddling ravines and rivers. She talks to him about the streets of Cádiz, gardens with multicolored flowers, tall palm trees lined up in front of white palaces, and about all of those streets with crowds, with black automobiles, buses, coming and going amid mirrored reflections, past buildings as tall as marble cliffs. She talks about the streets of all the cities, as if she had walked through them, Sevilla, Córdoba, Granada, Almadén, Toledo, Aranjuez, and about the city that is so big, you could get lost for days on end – Madris, where people come from all corners of the earth.
Old Naman listens to Lalla without saying anything, without moving, but his clear eyes shine brightly, and Lalla knows he loves hearing those stories. When she stops talking, she can hear the old man’s body trembling and his breath wheezing: so she quickly resumes to avoid hearing those terrible sounds.
Now she’s talking about the big city of Marseille in France, about the port with immense wharves where boats from all the countries in the world are docked, freighters as big as citadels with incredibly high forecastles and masts thicker than trees, very white ocean liners with thousands of windows that have strange names, mysterious flags, names of cities, Odessa, Riga, Bergen, Limassol. In the streets of Marseille, the crowd hurries along, endlessly going in and out of giant stores, jostling in front of the cafés, restaurants, movie theaters, and the black automobiles drive down the avenues leading who knows where, and trains fly over the roofs on suspended bridges, and airplanes take off and circle slowly in the gray sky above the buildings and the vacant lots. At noon, the church bells ring, and the sound reverberates through the streets, over the esplanades, deep down in the underground tunnels. At night, the city is lit up, lighthouses sweep the sea with their long pencils, automobile headlights glitter. The narrow streets are silent, and thieves armed with jackknives hide in doorways waiting for late-night stragglers. Sometimes there are terrible battles in vacant lots, or on the wharves in the shadows of the sleeping freighters.
Lalla talks for such a long time and her voice is so soft that Old Naman falls asleep. When he is asleep, his body stops trembling, and his breathing becomes more regular. Then Lalla can leave the fisherman’s house at last, her eyes stinging from the light outside.
Many people are suffering from the wind of ill fortune, poor people, infants. When she passes by their houses, Lalla can hear their laments, the moaning voices of women, children crying, and she knows that there too, perhaps, someone will die. She is sad; she wishes she were far away, across the sea, in those cities she invented for Old Naman.
But the man with the gray-green suit has come back. He probably doesn’t know that the wind of ill fortune is blowing on the plank and tarpaper Project; in any case he wouldn’t really care, because the wind of ill fortune doesn’t affect people like him. He’s a stranger to ill fortune, to all of this.
He’s come back to Aamma’s house, and he passes Lalla in front of the door. When she sees him, it startles her and she lets out a little shriek, because she knew he would come back and felt apprehensive about it. The man in the gray-green suit gives her a funny look. He has a hard steady gaze, like people who are used to giving orders, and the skin on his face is white and dry with the blue shadow of a beard on his cheeks and chin. He’s carrying other bags containing gifts. Lalla steps aside when he passes her and looks at the packages. He mistakes her glance and takes a step toward her, holding out the gifts. But Lalla leaps back as fast as she can; she runs away without turning back until she can feel the sand of the path that leads up to the plateau of stones under her feet.
She doesn’t know where the path ends. Eyes blurred with tears, a knot in her throat, Lalla is walking as fast as she can. Up here the sun is always hotter, as if you were closer to the sky. But the heavy wind is not blowing on the brick- and chalk-colored hills. The stones are hard, broken and sharp-edged, jagged; the black shrubs are covered with thorns upon which, here and there, tufts of sheep’s wool have snagged; even the blades of grass are sharp as knives. Lalla walks for a long time through the hills. Some are high and steep, with cliffs like sheer walls; others are low, hardly more than a pile of stones, and you’d think they’d been made by children.
Every time Lalla enters this land, she feels as if she no longer belongs to the same world, as if time and space had expanded, as if the ardent light of the sky had penetrated her lungs and dilated them, and her whole body
had taken on the proportions of a giant who would live for a very long time, very slowly.
Taking her time now, Lalla follows the bed of a dry torrent up toward the vast plateau of stones, where the one she calls al-Ser dwells.
She doesn’t really know why she’s heading in that direction; it’s sort of as if there were two Lallas, one who didn’t know, blinded with anxiety and anger, fleeing the wind of ill fortune, and the other who did know and was making her legs walk in the direction of al-Ser’s dwelling place. So she’s climbing up to the plateau of stones, her mind blank, not understanding. Her bare feet find the ancient traces that the wind and the sun weren’t able to erase.
She is slowly climbing up toward the plateau of stones. The sun is burning her face and shoulders, burning her hands and legs. But she can barely feel it. It’s the light that is liberating, that erases memories, that makes you as pure as a white stone. The light cleanses the wind of ill fortune, burns away sickness, evil spells.
Lalla is moving forward, eyes almost closed against the reverberating light, and sweat is making her dress stick to her abdomen, to her chest, to her back. Never, perhaps, has there been so much light on earth, and never has Lalla so thirsted after it, as if she had come from a dark valley in which death and shadows prevailed. The air up here is still, it is hovering, it flickers and pulsates, and you think you can hear the sound of light waves, the strange music that resembles the song of bees.
When she reaches the vast, deserted plateau, the wind blows against her again, making her stagger. It is a cold, hard, unrelenting wind that pushes against her and makes her shiver in her damp, sweaty clothing. The light is blinding; it explodes in the wind, glinting in starbursts off the peaks of the rocks. Up here, there is no grass, no trees, no water, only light and wind for centuries on end. There are no paths, no human traces. Lalla is moving forward aimlessly, in the middle of the plateau, where only scorpions and scolopendras live. It is a place where no one comes, not even the desert shepherds, and when one of their animals strays up here, they jump up and down, whistling and throwing stones to make it come running back.
Lalla is walking slowly along, eyes almost closed, putting the tips of her bare toes down on the burning rocks. It’s like being in another world, near the sun, balancing precariously, ready to fall. She’s moving forward, but the essence of her is absent, or rather, her whole being is preceding her, her vision, her acutely tuned senses, only her body remains behind, still hesitating on the sharp-edged rocks.
She’s waiting impatiently for the one who is bound to come now, she’s sure of it, he must come. As soon as she’d started running to escape the man with the gray-green suit, escape Old Naman’s death, she knew someone was waiting for her up on the plateau of stones, up where there are no people. It is the desert warrior veiled in blue, of whom she knows only the razor-sharp gaze. He was watching her from high up in the deserted hills, and his eyes reached all the way out to her and touched her, pulled her straight up here.
Now she is standing still in the middle of the vast plateau of stones. Around her there is nothing, only the mounds of stones, the powdered light, the cold hard wind, the intense sky with not a cloud, not a trace of mist.
Lalla remains motionless, standing up on a large, slightly inclined slab of stone, a hard dry slab of stone that no water has ever polished. The sunlight is beating down upon her, pulsating on her forehead, on her chest, in her belly, the light which is a gaze.
The blue warrior will certainly come now. It won’t be long. Lalla thinks she hears the soft tread of his feet in the dust, her heart is pounding hard. Whirls of white light envelop her, curling their flames around her legs, tangling in her hair, and she can feel the rough tongue of light burning her lips and her eyelids. Salty tears stream down her cheeks, run into her mouth, salty sweat runs down drop by drop from under her arms, stinging her ribs, trickles down the length of her neck, down between her shoulder blades. The blue warrior must come, now, his gaze will be white-hot like the light of the sun.
But Lalla remains alone in the middle of the deserted plateau, standing on her sloping slab of rock. The cold wind is burning her, the dreadful wind that shuns human life, it’s blowing to abrade her, to pulverize her. The wind that blows up here hardly even cares for the scorpions and the scolopendras, the lizards or the snakes; it might have a slight penchant for the foxes with their burnt coats. Yet Lalla isn’t afraid of it, because she knows that somewhere between the rocks, or maybe up in the sky, there is the gaze of the Blue Man, the one she calls al-Ser, the Secret, because he is hidden. He is surely going to come, his eyes will look straight into the deepest part of her being and give her the strength to fight against the man in the suit, against the death hovering over Naman, will transform her into a bird, throw her up into the center of space; then maybe she could at last join the big white gull who is a prince, and who flies untiringly over the sea.
When the gaze reaches her, it makes a whirlwind in her head, like a wave of light unfurling. The gaze of al-Ser is brighter than fire, a light that is blue and burning at once, like that of the stars.
Lalla stops breathing for a few moments. Her pupils are dilated. She squats down in the dust, eyes closed, head thrown backward, because there is a terrible weight in that light, a weight which is entering her and making her as heavy as stone.
He has come. Once again, without making a sound, slipping over the sharp stones, dressed like the ancient warriors of the desert, with his ample cloak of white wool, and his face veiled with a midnight-blue cloth. Lalla watches him moving forward in her dream with every fiber of her being. She sees his hands tinted with indigo, she sees the light pouring from his dark eyes. He doesn’t speak. He never speaks. It is with his eyes that he speaks, for he lives in a world where there is no need for the words of men. There are great whirls of golden light around his white cloak, as if the wind were raising clouds of sand. But Lalla can hear only the beat of her own heart, pounding very slowly, far away.
Lalla has no need for words. She has no need to ask questions, or even to think. Eyes closed, squatting in the dust, she can feel the eyes of the Blue Man upon her, and the warmth penetrates her body, pulses through her limbs. That is the extraordinary thing. The warmth of the gaze finds its way into the smallest recesses of her body, driving out the pain, the fever, the blood clots, everything that can obstruct and cause pain.
Al-Ser does not move. Now he’s standing in front of her, while the waves of light slip and swirl around his cloak. What is he doing? Lalla is no longer afraid, she can feel the warmth growing inside of her, as if it were radiating out through her face, illuminating her whole body.
She can see what is in the eyes of the Blue Man. It is all around her, out into infinity, the shimmering, undulating desert, showers of sparks, the slow waves of dunes inching into the unknown. There are towns, large white cities with towers as slender as palm trees, red palaces adorned with foliage, vines, giant flowers. There are vast lakes of sky-blue water, water so lovely, so pure that it exists nowhere else on earth. It is a dream that Lalla is having, eyes closed, head thrown backward in the sunlight, arms wrapped around her knees. It is a dream that has come from afar, that existed up here on the plateau of stones long before her, a dream in which she is now partaking, as if in sleep, and its realm is unfolding before her.
Where does the path lead? Lalla doesn’t know where she’s going, drifting along in the desert wind that is blowing, burning her lips and eyelids at times, blinding and cruel, and at other times cold and slow, the wind that obliterates people and makes rocks tumble to the foot of cliffs. It’s the wind that is leading out to infinity, out beyond the horizon, beyond the sky, all the way out to the frozen constellations, to the Milky Way, to the sun.
The wind carries her along on the endless path, the immense plateau of stones where the light is whirling. The desert unfurls its empty, sand-colored fields, strewn with crevasses, as wrinkled as dead skin. The gaze of the Blue Man is everywhere, all the way out in the
farthest reaches of the desert, and it is through his eyes now that Lalla is seeing the light. She can feel the burn of his gaze, the wind, the dryness on her skin, and her lips taste of salt. She sees the shapes of the dunes, large sleeping animals, and the high black walls of the Hamada, and the immense dried-up city of red earth. This is the land where there are no humans, no towns, nothing that stops and unsettles. There is only stone, sand, wind. Yet Lalla feels happy because she recognizes everything, each detail of the landscape, each charred shrub in the large valley. It’s as if she had walked there, long ago, the ground scorching her bare feet, eyes trained out on the horizon shimmering in the air. Then her heart starts beating harder and faster and she sees signs appear, lost traces, broken twigs, bushes quivering in the wind. She waits, she knows she will get there soon, it is very near now. The gaze of the Blue Man guides her over the fissures, the rockslides, along dry torrents. Then all of a sudden she hears that strange, uncertain, nasal song, quavering way off in the distance; it seems to be coming up from the sand itself, mingling with the constant swish of wind over stones, with the sound of the light. The song makes Lalla’s insides flutter; she recognizes it; it’s Lalla Hawa’s song, the one that Aamma sang, the one that went, “One day, oh, one day, the crow will turn white, the sea will go dry, we will find honey in the desert flower, we will make up a bed of acacia sprays...” But now Lalla can’t understand the words anymore because someone is singing in a very distant voice, in the Chleuh language. Yet the song goes straight to her heart, and her eyes fill with tears, despite her holding them closed with all her might.
The music lasts for a long time; it lulls her for such a long time that the shadows under the stones stretch out on the desert sand. Then Lalla can also make out the red city at the end of the immense valley. It’s not really a city like those with which Lalla is familiar, those with streets and houses. It’s a city of mud, wasted by time and worn with the wind, like the nests of termites or wasps. The light is beautiful over the red city, forming a clear pure dome of tranquility in the eternal dawn sky. The houses are grouped around the mouth of the well, and there are several trees, white acacias, standing stock-still like statues. But what Lalla notices most of all is a white tomb, as simple as an eggshell set down upon the red earth. That is where the light of the gaze is coming from, and Lalla realizes it is the dwelling place of the Blue Man.