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.
Old Naman is lying on his mat, just as she’d left him. He’s still breathing, very slowly, with a wheeze, and his eyes are wide open in the dark. Lalla leans over his face, but he doesn’t recognize her. His mouth is so busy trying to breathe, it can’t smile anymore.
“Naman … Naman…” Lalla murmurs.
Old Naman has no strength left. The wind of ill fortune has given him a fever, the kind that weighs on your body and on your head and keeps you from eating. The wind might carry him away. Anxiously Lalla leans down near the fisherman’s face.
She says, “You don’t want to go now? Not now, not yet?”
She wants so much to be able to hear Naman talk to her, tell her the story of the white bird who was a prince of the sea once again, or the story of the stone the Archangel Gabriel gave to human beings, and which turned black with their sins. But Old Naman can’t tell stories anymore; he barely has enough strength to raise his chest to breathe, as if there were an invisible weight upon him. Foul sweat and urine soak the thin body lying seemingly broken on the floor.
Lalla is too tired now to tell other stories, to continue talking about everything over there, across the sea, all of those cities in Spain and France.
So she sits down next to the old man and watches the night light through the open door. She listens to the wheezing breath, hears the evil sound of the wind outside, rolling tin cans around and making pieces of corrugated iron flap. Then she falls asleep, like that, sitting with her head resting on her knees. From time to time Old Naman’s choked breathing awakens her, and she asks, “Are you there? Are you still there?”
He doesn’t respond, he’s not sleeping; his gray face is turned toward the door, but his shiny eyes don’t seem to see anymore, as if they were contemplating what lies beyond.
Lalla tries to fight against sleep, because she’s afraid of what will happen if she goes to sleep. It’s like the fishermen, the ones who are far away, lost out at sea, who can’t see anything, rocked on the waves, caught in the whirling winds of the storm. They can’t ever fall asleep because then the sea will grab them, throw them down into the depths, swallow them up. Lalla wants to resist, but her eyelids close in spite of herself, and she feels herself falling backwards. She swims for a long time without knowing where she’s going, borne along on the slow sound of Old Naman’s breathing.
Then, before daybreak, she awakens with a start. She looks at the old man stretched out on the floor, his peaceful face resting against his arm. He’s not making a sound now, because he has stopped breathing. Outside, the wind has stopped blowing, the danger has passed. Everything is peaceful, as if no one ever died,
