“Hh! Hh! Houwa! Hayy!… Hh! Hh!”
The wrenching sound of breathing was so great, so powerful that it was as if they had all already traveled very far from Smara, through the sky, on the wind, mingling with the moonlight and the fine desert dust. There was no such thing as silence, or solitude. The sound of breathing had filled the entire night, covered all of space.
Sitting in the dust in the center of the square, Ma al-Aïnine wasn’t looking at anyone. His hands were holding the beads of the ebony chaplet, letting one bead fall at each exhalation of the crowd. He was the center of the breathing, he who had shown the people the path in the desert, he who had taught them each rhythm. He expected nothing more now. He had no more questions for anyone now. He too was breathing, along with the rhythm of the prayer, as if he and the other men had but one throat, one chest. And their breathing had already cleared the way leading north, to new lands. The old man no longer felt his age, or weariness, or anxiety. Breath passed through him, coming from all of those mouths, the breath that was both harsh and sweet, that increased his life. The men were no longer looking at Ma al-Aïnine. Eyes closed, arms outstretched, faces turned toward the night, they were soaring, gliding along the path to the north.
When day broke in the east, above the rocky hills, the men and women began to walk toward the tents. Despite all of those days and all of those nights of exaltation, no one felt tired. They saddled the horses, rolled up the large woolen tents, loaded the camels. The sun was not very high in the sky when Nour and his brother began to walk along the trail of dust, heading northward. They carried bundles of clothing and food on their shoulders. Before them, other men and other children were also walking on the trail, and the cloud of gray and red dust began to drift up into the blue sky. Somewhere near the gates of Smara, surrounded by blue-clad warriors on horseback, with his sons at his side, Ma al-Aïnine watched the long caravan stretching out across the deserted plain. Then he pulled his white cloak closed and nudged his camel’s neck with his foot. Slowly, without looking back, he rode away from Smara toward his end.
HAPPINESS
THE SUN RISES over the earth, the shadows stretch over the gray sand, over the dust in the paths. The dunes stand motionless before the sea. The small succulent plants quiver in the wind. In the cold, deep blue sky there’s not a bird, not a cloud. There’s the sun. But the morning light wavers a little, as if it weren’t quite sure.
Along the path sheltered by the line of gray dunes, Lalla walks slowly. From time to time she stops, looks at something on the ground. Or she picks a leaf from a fleshy plant, squishes it between her fingers to smell the sweet peppery odor of the sap. The plants are dark green, shiny, they look like seaweed. Sometimes a big golden bumblebee is sitting on a clump of hemlock, and Lalla runs to chase it. But she doesn’t get too close because she’s a little frightened all the same. When the insect flies away, she runs after it, hands outstretched, as if she really did want to catch it. But it’s just for fun.
Out here, that’s all there is: the light in the sky, as far as you can see. The dunes quake with the pounding sea that can’t be seen but can be heard. The little succulent plants are shiny with salt, as if from sweat. There are insects here and there, a pale ladybug, a sort of wasp with such a narrow middle it looks like it is cut in two, a centipede that leaves tiny marks in the dust, and louse flies, the color of metal, that try to land on the little girl’s legs and face to eat the salt.
Lalla knows all the paths, all the dips in the dunes. She could go anywhere with her eyes closed and she’d know where she was right away, just from feeling the ground with her bare feet. At times the wind leaps over the barrier of dunes, throwing handfuls of needles at the child’s skin, tangling her black hair. Lalla’s dress clings to her moist skin, she has to pull at the cloth to make it come loose.
Lalla knows all the paths, the ones that follow the gray dunes through the scrub as far as the eye can see, the ones that curve around and double back, the ones that never go anywhere. Yet every time she walks out here, there is something new. Today it was the golden bumblebee that led her so far away, out beyond the fishermen’s houses and the lagoon of stagnant water. A little later, in the brush, that sudden carcass of rusted metal with its threatening claws and horns uplifted. Then, in the sand on the path, a small tin can with no label and with two holes on either side of the lid.
Lalla keeps walking, very slowly, searching the gray sand so intently that her eyes are a little sore. She looks for things on the ground, without thinking of anything else, without looking up at the sky. Then she stops under a parasol pine, sheltered from the light, and she closes her eyes for a minute.
She clasps her hands around her knees, rocks slightly back and forth, then from side to side, singing a song in French, a song that says only, “Méditerra-né-é-e…”
Lalla doesn’t know what it means. It’s a song she heard on the radio one day, and she only remembers that one word, but it’s a word that pleases her. So every now and again, when she’s feeling good, when she doesn’t have anything else to do, or when on the contrary, she’s a bit sad without really knowing why, she sings the word, sometimes in a whisper just for herself, so faintly that she hardly hears herself, or sometimes very loudly, almost at the top of her lungs, to make echoes and drive the fear away.
Now she’s singing the word in a whisper, because she’s happy. The large red ants with black heads walk over the pine needles, hesitate, scale up twigs. Lalla nudges them away with a dead branch. The smell of the trees drifts over on the wind mixed with the acrid taste of the sea. Sometimes there are spurts of sand that shoot up into the sky, forming wobbly spouts that balance on the crest of the dunes and then suddenly break, sending thousands of sharp needles into the child’s legs and face.
Lalla remains in the shade of the tall pine until the sun is high in the sky. Then she goes leisurely back toward town. She recognizes her own footprints in the sand. They seem smaller and narrower than her feet, but, turning around, Lalla checks to make sure they are really hers. She shrugs her shoulders and starts to run. The thorns on the thistles prick her toes. Sometimes after limping a few steps she has to stop to pick the thorns from her big toe.
There are always ants, wherever you stop. They seem to come out from between the stones and scurry over the gray sand burning with light, as if they were spies. But Lalla is quite fond of them anyway. She also likes the slow centipedes, the golden-brown June bugs, the dung beetles, stag beetles, potato beetles, ladybugs, the crickets — like bits of burnt wood. The large praying mantises scare her, and Lalla waits for them to go away, or else she makes a detour without taking her eyes from them while they pivot, brandishing their pincers.
There are even gray and green lizards. They skitter off toward the dunes, thrashing their tails widely to help them run faster. Sometimes Lalla succeeds in catching one, and she plays at holding it by the tail until it comes loose. She watches the piece of tail twisting around by itself in the dust. One day a boy told her that if you waited long enough, you’d see the legs and head grow back onto the lizard tail, but Lalla doesn’t really believe that.