by Luis Leante
‘Well, you see, about a month ago an army patrol turned up with this half-dead woman.’
‘A patrol, you say?’
‘Two men in a four-by-four. They said they’d left from Smara that morning with a group towards the Wall.’
‘Do you remember any names?’
‘No. I’d never seen them before, and they didn’t identify themselves.’
‘It’s all very strange. No patrol has informed me that they found a woman or brought her to this hospital.’
‘From what they said, they were part of a convoy travelling to the free territories. They didn’t explain much, but I understood they’d left at dawn and, thirty kilometres later, found a woman in the middle of the desert. She was one of us, a Saharawi, and signalled to them from a distance to attract their attention. When they went over, she said another woman had been left for dead about a day’s walk to the north. From what she explained, the woman had been stung by a scorpion.’
‘One of us, alone in the desert?’
‘That’s what they said.’
‘Did you speak to her?’
‘She was not in the vehicle. She stayed where they found her, about thirty kilometres away from Smara. And on her own, as they said, because the convoy continued towards the Wall.’
‘It’s all very strange.’
‘I thought so too. That’s why I sent the letter to the ministry. I thought you’d reply a lot sooner.’
Colonel Mulud ignores the last remark. He’d rather have an explanation. Eventually he asks:
‘Didn’t any of the soldiers give any more details about the women?’
‘They were in a hurry. For them it was just a hassle. I suggested they write a full report, and they gave me a withering look.’
‘But it was their duty.’
The director pours the tea into the glasses. The sound of the falling liquid fills the room. For a moment words are swept aside, and both men are engrossed in the contemplation of the shiny tray.
Aza was convinced she was going to die. As she fled, she was trying to avoid running in a straight line. The sun was in front of her, so she had a slight advantage, but her legs moved more slowly than her mind dictated. She ran in a tortuous zigzag, looking for an elevation on the ground, a little mound, a slope where she could dive for cover. In a daze of anxiety, she ended up going in the worst direction. She was so nervous she couldn’t decide what to do. Before she even realised, she was running on soft sand. Her stride became shorter and clumsier. With each step she sank up to her calf. She knew she only had a very small lead, and didn’t even want to turn round to check on it. She ended up walking with her eyes fixed to the ground, in a straight line. Her shoulders felt weighed down, and her legs were burning; besides, her melfa was getting in the way, although she didn’t want to cast it aside and leave it behind. Then she heard a clear metallic sound that she knew well. Someone was loading a rifle – and was taking his time. She summoned all her strength and ran a bit further. At that moment a gust of wind blew around her, but even in those conditions she heard, as if right next to her, the report of the rifle. The melfa got tangled in her legs and she fell forward onto the sand. It all happened so fast that at first she didn’t know whether it was her own clumsiness or the bullet that brought her down.
All she could hear now was the whistling of the wind as it whipped up huge clouds of dust. Her whole body ached, but her mind was regaining awareness. Lying on the ground she couldn’t see her pursuers, which meant they couldn’t see her either. She moved a bit and touched her back without rising. She was unhurt: the bullet had missed her. Almost instinctively she clung to the ground and started digging into it. The sand was very soft, and the wind helped. Her mind reacted surprisingly quickly. In a frenzy, she started digging with her feet, her legs, her whole body. After a few minutes she had hollowed out a considerable space in the sand. She rolled into it and started to cover herself. She placed the melfa over her face and covered it with some difficulty. The wind took care of the rest. After a while she was completely buried, with her face barely a few centimetres from the surface. She could hear the sound of the wind and even, depending on which way it blew, the voices of Le Monsieur and his men.
Many times Aza had heard her elders tell stories about the war. She had heard them so much that she’d stopped paying attention, but she’d never entirely forgotten them. The Saharawi shepherds who, in the seventies, had become warriors and fought the same way and using the same tactics as their ancestors. When laying ambushes for the Moroccans, the Saharawis had often buried themselves. Aza’s uncle had told her many times how, buried in the sand, he’d felt an armoured vehicle pass over him. You needed a lot of sangfroid, as her uncle had often said as well. Aza tried to remember those stories as she was in the sand, and regretted not having been more attentive, she had not anticipated how useful those guerrilla tactics might be.
Her heart felt like a bomb about to go off. Aza knew her worst enemy would be anxiety. She tried to think of pleasant things. She thought of her son and her mother. She remembered the seafront in Havana, with those old cars miraculously winding up and down the street. The desert wind started to resemble the wind of the Caribbean, whose fearsome waves broke against the rocks of the jetty. She recalled the day of her wedding. Though breathing with difficulty, she calmed herself little by little, until her thoughts blended in with the voices of the despicable men who thought they had killed her. Then she recognised Le Monsieur’s voice, speaking in French with the mercenaries who followed him everywhere. Now and again he uttered curses in Spanish. She knew they were desperately looking for her, no doubt thinking she’d been gunned down. When her body did not appear they began to blame one another. They came so close she could hear their laboured breathing. And above their voices, she heard Le Monsieur, insulting them all and threatening to cut their throats. Aza feared her heart would give her away. She was trying to breathe deeply but very slowly. A few grains of sand slipped through the cloth of the melfa covering her face. She knew she wouldn’t be able stand the horrible situation for long. However, she would rather suffocate, buried, than fall into the hands of those criminals.
Every time Le Monsieur’s voice drew near, her body tensed up and her jaw locked. He got so close that for a moment she thought he would tread on her. The voices would alternately move away and return. The men were obviously walking in circles around the area where they’d seen her go down. It was an extremely tense atmosphere, and the mercenaries soon started arguing with each other. Aza knew men like that, and they were perfectly capable of killing one another because of an offence or a few insults. But the voice she heard most often was Le Monsieur’s. He was shouting himself hoarse. In the meantime, the wind was working in Aza’s favour. Not only had her footsteps been erased, but also the sand kept accumulating on the imperceptible mound that her body made on the surface of the desert, so that she became better and better hidden.
As the voices grew distant, Aza weighed up her chances of survival. It had been ten hours since she’d last drunk any water, which of course didn’t help. Also, after running away from the mercenaries, she had started sweating, and moisture was seeping out of her pores. In spite of the wind, the sand was burning hot in the sun. Any Saharawi knew full well what it meant to be stranded in the desert without water. She’d seen cases of death by dehydration, and it was a terrible end. For a moment she wondered whether it would be worse to be shot or die of thirst. But she was so scared that she was incapable of deciding. If the men went away in both vehicles, her chances would be slim. She anxiously thought of the washing-up bowl filled with filthy water near the hellish oasis. And, listening to the maddened voices of her pursuers, she reached the conclusion that it was preferable to withstand the terrible effects of thirst to being captured by them. Her mouth felt dry and full of sand. She strove not to lose control of her body and mind. She closed her eyes and pictured herself in her jaima,7 with her son next to her. She tried hard to distract herself. For a while
her heartbeat almost went back to normal.
When she heard the engines of the truck and the four by four, her body tensed up once again. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed – perhaps several hours. The wind had dropped. However, she could still hear the roaring engines, as though the mercenaries were driving in widening circles and then closing in on themselves until they were very near her. Aza thought of the Spanish woman who had stayed in the Toyota. Although she hadn’t heard any more shots, she was sure that the woman would soon die. Aza herself had seen the scorpion that had stung her, but she hadn’t had enough time to warn her. If those men had not already killed her, the poison would spread through her veins and cause cardiac arrest. She pitied the woman. The noise of the vehicles was unnerving. The more upset she felt, the drier her throat became. Now and again she noticed the sweat on her skin. She didn’t remember ever having been so thirsty. She tried not to think about what would become of her if those bandits didn’t find her and she stayed at the mercy of the desert. She knew that the feeling of thirst started after the body lost half a litre of water. After two litres, the stomach shrank and it was no longer capable of holding the amount of water the body needed. She’d seen cases like that, especially in old people. People suffering from this condition stopped drinking long before the body had met its needs. Doctors called it ‘voluntary dehydration’. Still, that wasn’t the worst case scenario. If the body lost five litres, symptoms of fatigue and fever would appear, one’s pulse would quicken and one’s skin would turn very red. After that came dizziness, intense headache, absence of saliva and circulatory problems. In a less hostile environment, you reached that phase in three days, but in the Sahara you could get there in twelve hours of intense heat. Buried in the sun, with her mouth all doughy, she knew she was sweating, but found it impossible to estimate how much water she’d lost. She had a momentary panic attack. It felt as though her skin had stuck to her bones and was beginning to harden and crack. She even felt that her eyes had sunk into their sockets as the hours had gone by. However, she drew some comfort from the fact that she could still hear very clearly what was going on, even in the distance. What she feared most was delirium, and so she tried to calm down once again so as not to be overwhelmed by the heat. Aza couldn’t get the idea out of her head that death was not caused by thirst, but by excess heat: the blood thickened in one’s veins and couldn’t carry the internal body heat to the surface of the skin. Indeed, what ended up killing you was the heat, as your body temperature rose unexpectedly and irrevocably.
She was about to fall asleep when her eyes opened with a start. Suddenly she couldn’t hear the wind, or the mercenaries’ voices, or the roaring of the vehicles. The absolute silence was spine chilling. She had the horrible feeling of having been buried for several days. The light that reached her through the sand felt less aggressive. She tilted her head forwards and, with great difficulty, pushed it out into the open air. Grains of sand slipped over her body. Her arms and shoulder ached. She struggled again and unearthed half her body. She removed the melfa and surveyed the deserted, silent hammada. In two hours the sun would set, so the heat was no longer so intense. With a great effort, Aza managed to sit up. She was so frightened she didn’t dare to remove her clothes to shake the sand off her body. It was a long time before she was totally sure that the mercenaries had gone. Nevertheless, she knew that even in the immensity of the desert the men might be able to find her. The tyre tracks left by the two vehicles were all around her: from the looks of it they must have circled around for hours, probably until the petrol tanks began to run out. Although she was dying to get away, she kept her wits about her and decided to wait for the sun to set. Under the canopy of the stars it would be easier for her to orient herself, and of course her body would lose less water while walking. While she was sitting down, on the alert, she thought she saw a moving shadow in the distance. Her first reaction was to crouch down and stay still, but she soon realised what it was. She walked in the direction of the figure, glancing everywhere around her in case it was a trap. But it wasn’t. From a distance of a hundred metres she could see that it was the Spanish woman. Aza couldn’t even remember her name. She approached and knelt down beside her. The woman must have been lying there for over five hours. With a string of insults that she’d learned as a child, she cursed the men who’d abandoned her there. She turned the woman over and raised her head, but there was no reaction. She put her ear to the woman’s chest; the situation looked desperate. It took a while before she could hear the heartbeat. It was faint and irregular, arrhythmical, as if the heart was announcing that it would stop imminently. Aza looked frantically for the spot where the woman had been stung. It was too late to try to extract the poison. She knew that the woman would die, and there was nothing she could do about it. The thought of death distressed her horribly. She tried to remain calm. Soon it would be dark and her chances of escape would improve.
Without looking back, Aza started walking the minute that the blinding sphere of the sun dipped below the horizon. A few moments later the surface of the desert started cooling down. Each time the wind blew, she got goose-pimples. She didn’t waste any time. After checking one last time that the foreign woman’s heart was still beating, she set forth towards the south-east. She weighed up her chances again. She didn’t have a clear idea of how far the nearest camp would be. Besides, although most Saharawis were capable of finding their way perfectly in the desert at night, she had had little opportunity to learn to do so. She had spent half her life in Cuba as a student. The desert, at times, was as hostile to her as to a foreigner, even though she had not left it for the last three years. In any case, she knew that if one wanted to reach a certain place it was vital to be precise and always walk in a straight line; a small deviation might mean straying several kilometres from the intended destination. She walked slowly so as not to tire herself out. She tried to ignore her thirst. If she didn’t sweat too much and lay down as soon as the sun was up, she might be able to walk for one more night. But that was just a guess. Meanwhile, her steps became clumsier and clumsier. She frequently stumbled and fell forwards. Her eyes clouded with fatigue. Although there was a full moon, she could barely make out the terrain five or six metres ahead. She hadn’t eaten anything for over a day. Eventually, a few hours before dawn, she fell to the ground and could not find the strength to pick herself up again.
A noise, almost a vibration, awoke her. Her eyelids were stuck together, and she didn’t remember where she was. She had covered herself with the melfa to keep insects from biting her. It was very cold. As the noise became clearer, she feared she was experiencing the onset of hallucinations. Her head ached horribly. She sat up and took a good look around, but saw nothing. The sun had been up for at least two hours. She lay back down on the ground, and this time the noise made her jump to her feet. There was no room for doubt: it was a truck engine. She listened, but the wind changed direction. However, a plume of dust rising on the horizon revealed the presence of several vehicles. It didn’t even occur to her that it might be Le Monsieur and his mercenaries. Although she could not yet see the shining surface of the cars, she figured out that they were moving quite slowly, judging from the height of the cloud of dust. She traced a mental line in their direction and started walking over to intercept them. They were probably two kilometres away. It was difficult to calculate distances. As she pressed on she shook the dirt off her clothes, and wiped her eyes and the corners of her mouth with saliva; she cleaned her ears of sand and put on the melfa as if she had just got up on a normal day. About five hundred metres from them, she started waving her arms, but trying not to reveal her desperation. They saw her a moment later. Four trucks with canvas covering the back and two four-by-fours. Even from afar she could see the surprised faces of the young soldiers. In a fit of embarrassment, she prayed to Allah that none of those men would know who she was.
The convoy changed course directly after seeing the woman signal to them from the most inhospitable are
a of the hammada. As they approached, the drivers and passengers could hardly believe their eyes. They were all, staring fixedly at the same spot. One of the four-by-fours ran ahead and stopped a few metres from the woman. An officer got out. His stripes made it obvious that he was the one in charge. As he walked up to her, he took off his sunglasses and loosened his turban. He started a long formulaic greeting, all the time studying the woman. If his men had not been following his every move, he would have touched her arm to make sure she was not a mirage. The greeting finished, his neutral tone changed and his surprise showed through. ‘What are you doing here? Where did you come from?’ he asked in an obviously annoyed voice.
‘I got lost.’
‘You got lost?’ he asked again, not believing her. ‘How did you get lost?’
‘It’s a long story, and I haven’t got much time,’ she replied, respectfully. The officer seemed spooked, as though he were talking to a ghost. ‘And how did you get here? How long have you been lost?’
‘I need to drink some water, I’m about to collapse.’ The rest of the convoy had stopped in a long line, and the soldiers got out of their vehicles. The officer opened the door of the four-by-four and took out a canteen covered in leather. Aza drank as much as she could. The water went into her mouth and flowed out of her pores, as if from a fountain. Then she sought the shade of one of the trucks. The soldiers looked at her without really grasping what was going on.
With a shout, the officer ordered them to go back to their vehicles. ‘Now explain to me how it was you got lost.’
‘It’s a long story, and there are more important things to be done.’
‘More important?’
‘Yes, over in that direction there’s a dying woman. She’s foreign. She was stung by a scorpion nearly twenty-four hours ago. She may be dead already.’ The officer grew agitated. He called over the driver of one of the four-by-fours and asked Aza to tell him where the exact place was. ‘It’s in that direction. I’ve walked in a straight line for eight hours. You could get there in twenty minutes.’ The driver and two soldiers left immediately. Meanwhile, the soldiers were forming another line near the woman, trying to remain inconspicuous. The officer began to lose his patience when no more information was forthcoming. ‘I need to go to my wilaya8,’ said Aza. ‘My two-year-old son needs me.’