Desert (35 page)

The most extraordinary thing about it all is the letters: they come from all over, with Hawa’s name on the envelopes. They’re from magazines, fashion reviews that forward them after adding the photographer’s name and address. He’s both happy and unsettled at receiving all those letters. Hawa asks him to read them, and she always listens with her head cocked a little to one side, drinking mint tea (now the photographer’s kitchenette is full of boxes of gunpowder tea and jasmine tea and little bundles of mint). Sometimes the letters say extraordinary things, or really dumb things written by young girls who have seen Hawa’s picture somewhere and who talk to her as if they’d always known her. Or else letters from young boys who have fallen in love with her, and say she’s as beautiful as Nefertiti or an Incan princess, and they would love to meet her one day.

Lalla starts laughing:

“What liars!”

When the photographer shows her the pictures he’s just taken, Hawa with her almond-shaped eyes, shining like gems, and her amber-colored skin, sparkling with light, and her lips with a slightly ironic smile, and her sharp profile, Lalla Hawa starts laughing again, repeats, “What a liar! What a liar!”

Because she thinks it doesn’t look like her.

There are also serious letters that speak of contracts, money, appointments, fashion shows. The photographer makes all the decisions, takes care of everything. He calls the fashion designers, notes the appointments in his agenda, signs the contracts. He’s the one who chooses the designs, the colors, decides where the shots will be taken. Then he takes Hawa in his little red Volkswagen van, and they go far away, out where there are no houses, nothing but gray hills covered with thorny scrub, or to the delta of the great river, on the smooth beaches of the marshes, out where the water and the sky are the same color.

Lalla Hawa loves to travel in the photographer’s van. She watches the landscape slipping around the windows, the black road winding toward her, the houses, the gardens, the fallow fields unraveling on the side, whipping away. People are standing on the side of the road, with blank looks on their faces, as if in a dream. Maybe it is a dream that Lalla Hawa is living, a dream in which there’s no more day or night really, no more hunger or thirst, but shifting landscapes of chalk, brambles, crossroads, towns going by, with their streets, their monuments, their hotels.

The photographer never stops photographing Hawa. He changes cameras, measures the light, pushes the trigger. Hawa’s face is everywhere, everywhere. It’s in the sunlight, lit up as if with a halo in the winter sky, or in the depth of the night, it’s vibrating over the waves of radio sets, in telephone messages. The photographer closes himself up all alone in his laboratory, under his little orange lamp, and looks indefinitely at the face taking form on the paper in the developing pan. First the eyes, immense, two stains growing deeper, then the black hair, the curve of the lips, the outline of the nose, the shadow under the chin. The eyes are looking elsewhere, as Lalla Hawa always does, elsewhere, out on the other side of the world, and every time, the photographer’s heart speeds up, like the first time he caught sight of the light in her eyes in the Galères restaurant, or when he just happened to run into her again in the stairways of the old town.

She gives him her shape, her image, nothing else. Sometimes the contact of the palm of her hand, or an electric spark when her hair brushes against his body, and also her smell, slightly bitter, slightly stinging, like the smell of citrus fruit, and the sound of her voice, her clear laughter. But who is she? Maybe she’s just a pretext for a dream he’s chasing in his darkroom with his bellows cameras and his lenses that accentuate the shadow of her eyes, the shape of her smile a dream he and other men share about the pages of fashion reviews and glossy magazine pictures?

He takes Hawa by airplane to the city of Paris; they drive along in a taxi under the gray sky, by the Seine, on their way to business meetings. He takes pictures on the banks of the muddy river, on the large squares, on the endless avenues. He tirelessly photographs the handsome copper-colored face with the light flowing over it like water. Hawa wearing a black satin jumpsuit, Hawa wearing a midnight-blue trench coat, hair braided into a single thick tress. Every time his eyes meet Hawa’s, it makes his heart skip a beat, and that’s why he’s hurrying to take pictures, always more pictures. He moves forward, backs up, changes his camera, puts one knee to the ground. Lalla makes fun of him: “You look like you’re dancing.”

He’d like to get angry, but it’s impossible. He wipes the sweat from his forehead, from his eyebrow, which is slipping against the viewfinder. Then Lalla suddenly steps out of the light field because she’s tired of being photographed. She walks away. To keep from feeling the emptiness, he’ll continue to look at her for hours, in the darkness of his improvised laboratory in the bathroom of his hotel room, waiting – counting his heartbeats – for the handsome face to appear in the developing pan, most of all the eyes, that profound light flowing from the slanted eyes. That dusk-colored light, from ever so far away, as if someone else, someone secret, were looking out from those pupils, judging silently. And then, appearing later, slowly, like a cloud forming, the forehead, the line of the high cheekbones, the grain of the copper skin, weathered with the sun and the wind. There’s something secret about her that sometimes just happens to be revealed on the paper, something you can see but never possess, even if you take pictures every second of her existence, until she dies. There’s her smile too, very gentle, somewhat ironic, that makes little hollows at the corners of her mouth, and narrows the slanted eyes. It’s all of this the photographer would like to capture with his cameras and bring back to life in the darkness of his laboratory. At times he’s under the impression that it really is going to appear, the smile, the light in the eyes, the beauty of the features. But it only lasts a brief instant. On the paper plunged into the developer, the image moves, modifies, blurs, is covered with shadow, and it’s as if the image erased the living person.

Maybe it’s elsewhere, rather than in the image? Maybe it’s in the way she walks, in her movements? The photographer watches Lalla Hawa’s gestures, the way she sits down, moves her hands, palms open, making a perfect curve from the crook of her elbow to the tips of her fingers. He looks at the line of her neck, her lithe back, her wide hands and feet, her shoulders, and her heavy black hair with ashen reflections falling in thick curls on her shoulders. He looks at Lalla Hawa, and at times it’s as if he can glimpse another face showing through the young woman’s features, another body behind hers; barely perceptible, immaterial, ephemeral, the other person drifts up from deep within, then melts away, leaving a flickering memory. Who is it? Who is the girl he calls Hawa, what is her real name?

Sometimes Hawa looks at him, or she looks at people, in the restaurants, in the airport terminals, in the offices, she looks at them as if her eyes would simply erase them, send them back to the void they must belong to. When that strange look comes over her face, the photographer shudders, as if something cold has entered his body. He doesn’t know what it is. Maybe it is the other being living inside Lalla Hawa, who is observing and judging the world through her eyes, as if in that very instant all of this – this gigantic city, this river, these squares, these avenues – disappeared, and let the vast stretch of the desert show through, the sand, the sky, the wind.

So the photographer takes Hawa to places that resemble the desert: wide-open rocky plains, marshes, esplanades, vacant lots. For him, Hawa walks around in the sunlight, and her eyes scan the horizon like those of birds of prey, searching for a shadow, a shape. She looks for a long time, as if she really were searching for someone; then she stands still on her shadow, while the photographer starts shooting.

What is she looking for? What does she want from life? The photographer looks at her eyes, her face, and he can feel the profound anxiety behind the force of her light. There is also wariness, the instinct to flee, that funny sort of glimmer that flits over the eyes of wild animals at times. She told him one day, right when he was expecting it, she spoke to him softly of the child she is carrying, who is rounding out her belly and making her breasts swell: “You know, one day I’ll go away, I’ll leave, and you mustn’t try to hold me back, because I’ll leave forever...”

She doesn’t want money, it doesn’t interest her. Every time the photographer gives her some money – wages for the hours of posing – Hawa takes the bills, picks out one or two, and hands him back the rest. Sometimes, she’s even the one who gives him money, handfuls of bills and coins that she takes out of the pocket in her overalls, as if she didn’t want to keep any of it for herself.

Or sometimes she wanders the streets of the city looking for beggars at the corners of buildings, and she gives them money, coins by the handful too, pressing her hand firmly into theirs so they won’t lose anything. She gives money to the veiled gypsies who wander around barefoot in the main avenues, and to old women dressed in black squatting in the entrances to the post offices, to bums lying on benches in the squares, and to old men rummaging in rich people’s garbage cans at nightfall. They all know her well, and when they see her coming their eyes get bright. The bums think she’s a prostitute, because prostitutes are the only ones who give them that much money, and they make jokes and laugh real hard, but they look really happy to see her all the same.

Now, Hawa is being mentioned everywhere. In Paris, reporters come to see her, and one evening in the lobby of the hotel, a woman asks her questions.

“People are talking about you, about the mystery of Hawa. Who is Hawa?”

“My name isn’t Hawa, when I was born I didn’t have a name, so I was called Bla Esm, which means ‘No name’.”

“So, why Hawa?”

“It was my mother’s name, and I’m called Hawa, the daughter of Hawa, that’s all.”

“What country did you come from?”

“The country I come from has no name, like me.”

“Where is it?”

“It’s in the place where there is nothing, where there is no one.”

“Why are you here?”

“I like to travel.”

“What do you enjoy in life?”

“Life.”

“Food?”

“Fruit.”

“What’s your favorite color?”

“Blue.”

“Your favorite stone?”

“The pebbles on the path.”

“Music?”

“Lullabies.”

“They say that you write poems?”

“I don’t know how to write.”

“And films? Have you got any projects?”

“No.”

“What is love to you?”

But suddenly Lalla Hawa has had enough, and she walks away very quickly, without looking back; she pushes open the door to the hotel and disappears into the street.

Now there are people who recognize her in the street, young girls who give her one of her photographs so she can put her signature on it. But since Hawa doesn’t know how to write, she just draws the sign of her tribe, the one they mark the camels’ hides with, which looks a little like a heart:

There are so many people everywhere, on the avenues, in the stores, on the streets. So many people jostling one another, looking at one another. But when Lalla Hawa’s gaze passes over them, it’s as if everything fades away, grows mute and deserted.

Lalla Hawa wants to get past these places very quickly to find out what comes next. One night, the photographer takes her to a dance hall called the Palace, the Paris-Palace, something like that. She has put on a black dress cut low in the back for dancing, because the photographer wants to take some shots.

This too is a place that resembles the wide-open, empty esplanades, where there are only the outlines of buildings and the parked cars in the sun. It’s a dreadful and empty place, where men and women crowd together and grimace in the suffocating darkness, with electric lights flashing in clouds of cigarette smoke, and thundering noise pulsing, making the walls and the floor vibrate.

Lalla Hawa sits down on a step in a corner, and watches the people dancing, their faces glistening with sweat, their clothes glittering everywhere. At the back of the room, in a sort of cave, are the musicians: they’re swinging their guitars, beating on the drums, but the sound of the music seems to come from elsewhere, like giants shouting.

Then she too gets up on the dance floor, surrounded by people. She dances the way she was taught to long ago, alone amongst the people, to hide her fear, because there is too much noise and too much light. The photographer remains sitting on the step, not moving, not even thinking to take pictures of her. At first the people don’t pay any attention to Hawa, because the light is blinding. Then it’s as if they’ve felt something extraordinary has happened, without their realizing it. They step aside, stop dancing, one after the other, to watch Lalla Hawa. She’s all alone in the circle of light, she can’t see anyone. She’s dancing to the slow rhythm of the electric music, and it’s as if the music were inside her body. The light is shining on the black fabric of her dress, on her copper-colored skin, on her hair. You can’t see her eyes due to the shadows, but her gaze passes over the people, fills the room with all of its power, all of its beauty. Hawa is dancing barefooted on the smooth floor, her long flat feet are stamping to the rhythm of the drums, or rather it is she who seems to be imposing the rhythm of the music with the soles of her feet, and her heels. Her supple body is undulating; her hips, her shoulders, and her arms are held slightly out from her body, like wings. The light from the projectors is bouncing off of her, enveloping her, whirling about her feet. She’s absolutely alone in the large room, alone as if she were in the middle of an esplanade, alone as if she were in the middle of a plateau of stones, and the electric music with its slow heavy rhythm is playing for her alone. Maybe they’ve all disappeared, all of those people who were there all around her, men, women, fleeting reflections in blinded mirrors, maybe they’ve been swallowed up? She can’t see them anymore now, can’t hear them anymore. Even the photographer sitting on his step has disappeared. They’ve become like rocks, like blocks of limestone. But she can move at last, she is free, she twirls around, arms outstretched, and her feet are hitting the floor, the tips of her toes, then her heels, as if on the spokes of a huge wheel whose axis reaches high up into the night.