Desert (20 page)

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.

Something terrible, yet at the same time very beautiful is reaching out to Lalla. It’s as if something deep down inside of her were being torn and broken and allowing death, the unknown to enter. The burn of the desert heat inside of her spreads, courses through her veins, mixes with her entrails. The gaze of al-Ser is terrifying and painful, because it is the suffering born of the desert: hunger, fear, death, which come, pass over her. The lovely golden light, the red city, the delicate white tomb from which the supernatural light is emanating, also carry with them sorrow, anxiety, abandonment. It is a long anguished gaze that comes because the earth is hard, and the sky wants nothing to do with men.

Lalla remains motionless, crumpled over on herself, knees on the stones. The sun is burning her shoulders and neck. She doesn’t open her eyes. Two streams of tears make little furrows in the red dust caked on her face.

When she lifts her head and opens her eyes, her vision is blurred. She needs to make an effort to see straight. The sharp silhouettes of the hills appear, then the deserted stretch of the plateau, with not a blade of grass, not a tree, only the light and the wind.

So then she begins to walk, staggering, slowly making her way back down the path leading to the valley, to the sea, to the plank and tarpaper Project. The shadows are long now, the sun is near the horizon. Lalla can feel her face swollen from the burn of the desert, and she thinks no one will be able to recognize her, now that she’s become like the Hartani.

When she gets back down near the mouth of the river, night has fallen on the Project. The electric lightbulbs make yellow dots. On the road, trucks are driving along throwing out the white beams of their headlights, idiotically.

At times Lalla runs, at other times she moves very slowly, as if she were going to stop, turn around, and flee. There are a few radios making their music mechanically in the night. The fires of the braziers are going out on their own, and in the houses of poorly fitted planks, the women and children are already rolled up in their blankets because of the night dampness. From time to time, the faint wind makes an empty can roll, a piece of corrugated iron flap. The dogs are hiding. Above the Project, the black sky is filled with stars.

Lalla walks silently through the alleys and thinks that no one here needs her, that everything is just perfect without her, as if she’d been gone for years, as if she’d never existed.

Instead of going toward Aamma’s house, Lalla walks slowly to the other end of the Project, where Old Naman lives. She’s shivering because the night air is very damp, and her knees are trembling beneath her because she hasn’t eaten anything since the day before. The day was so long up there on the plateau of stones that Lalla has the impression she’s been gone for days, maybe months. It’s as if she barely recognizes the streets of the Project, the sounds of children crying, the smell of urine and dust. Suddenly she thinks maybe months really have gone by, up there on the plateau of stones, and it only seemed like one long day. Then she thinks of Old Naman, and her throat tightens. In spite of her weakness, she starts running through the empty streets of the Project. The dogs hear her running; it makes them growl and bark a little. When she arrives in front of Naman’s house, her heart is beating very hard, and she can barely breathe. The door is cracked open; there is no light.