This is where Lalla came to live when her mother died, so long ago that she doesn’t remember very well when she came. It was very hot because it was in the summer, and the wind blew clouds of dust up over the plank shacks. She’d walked with her eyes shut behind the form of her aunt until they reached the windowless cabin where her aunt’s sons lived. Then she’d felt like running away, taking off along the road that leads to the high mountains and never coming back.
Every time Lalla comes back from the dunes and sees the roofs of tarpaper and sheet metal, her heart sinks and she remembers the day she came to the Project for the first time. But that was so long ago now, it’s as if everything that had come before didn’t really happen to her, as if it were a story that she’d heard someone tell.
It’s like her birth, in the mountains to the south, where the desert begins. Sometimes in winter, when there’s nothing to do outside and the wind blows hard over the plain of dust and salt, whistling between the poorly fitted planks in Aamma’s house, Lalla sits down on the floor and listens to the story of her birth.
It’s a very long and very strange story, and Aamma doesn’t always tell it the same way. In her slightly singsong voice, her head nodding as if she were going to fall asleep, Aamma says: “When the day you were to be born came, it was just before summer, before the dry season. Hawa could feel you were coming, and since everyone was still asleep, she left the tent silently. She just bound up her belly with a piece of cloth and walked out as best she could until she reached a spot with a tree and a spring, because she knew that when the sun came up she would need shade and water. It’s the custom down there, everyone must always be born near a spring. So she walked there and then she lay down near the tree and waited for the night to end. No one knew that your mother was outside. She could walk without making a sound, without making the dogs bark. Even though I was sleeping right next to her, I hadn’t heard her moan or get up to leave the tent…”
“Then what happened, Aamma?”
“Then it was daybreak, so the women woke up and we saw that your mother wasn’t there and we realized why she’d left. So I went looking for her by the spring and when I arrived she was standing against the tree with her arms hanging onto a branch and she was moaning softly to avoid alarming the men and the children.”
“What happened after that, Aamma?”
“Then you were born, right away, just like that, in the dirt between the roots of the tree, and we washed you in the spring water and wrapped you in a cloak because the night chill had not yet lifted. The sun rose, and your mother went back to the tent to sleep. I remember there was nothing to wrap you in, and you slept in your mother’s blue cloak. Your mother was happy because you came very quickly, but she was sad too, because of your father’s death; she thought she wouldn’t have enough money to raise you, and she was afraid she would have to give you to someone else.”
Sometimes Aamma tells the story differently, as if she doesn’t really remember very well. For example, she says that Hawa wasn’t clinging to the branch of the tree, but she was hanging from the rope of a well, and she was pulling with all her might to fight the pain. Or else she says that a passing shepherd delivered the baby and wrapped it in his woolen cloak. But all of that is veiled in an incomprehensible fog as if it had happened in another world, a world on the other side of the desert, where a diVerent sun shines in a diVerent sky.
“After a few days your mother was able to walk out to the well for the first time to wash herself and comb her hair. She carried you wrapped in the same blue cloak that she tied around her waist. She walked cautiously because she wasn’t yet as strong as before, but she was very happy that you had come and when we asked her your name she said it was the same as hers, Lalla Hawa, because you were the daughter of a sharifa.”
“Please, tell me about the one who was called al-Azraq, the Blue Man.”
But Aamma shakes her head.
“Not now, another day.”
“Please Aamma, tell me about him.”
But Aamma shakes her head without answering. She stands up and goes to knead the bread in the large earthen platter near the door. Aamma’s like that; she never wants to talk for very long, and she never says very much about the Blue Man or Moulay Ahmed ben Mohammed al-Fadel, who was called Ma al-Aïnine, Water of the Eyes.
The odd thing here in the Project is that everyone is very poor, but no one ever complains. The Project is mostly this heap of plank and sheet metal shacks with those large sheets of tarpaper held down with stones that serve as roofs. When the wind blows too hard in the valley, you can hear all the planks banging and the sheet metal clanging, and the snapping of the tarpaper tearing in a strong gust. It makes a funny music that rattles and clatters, as if everyone were in a big, old, broken-down bus on a dirt road, or as if there were a bunch of animals and rats galloping over the roofs and through the alleys.
Sometimes the storm is very violent, it whisks everything away. The next day the whole town needs to be rebuilt. But the people laugh as they do it because they are so poor they aren’t afraid of losing what they have. Maybe they’re happy too, because after the storm the sky is even vaster, bluer, and the light even more lovely. In any case, all there is around the Project is very flat land, and the dusty wind, and the sea so huge that you cannot see the whole of it.
Lalla loves to look at the sky. She often goes over by the dunes to the place where the sand path leads away in a straight line. And she flops down on her back right in the middle of the sand and the thistles with her arms outspread. Then the sky opens out over her smooth face, it shines like a mirror — peaceful, so peaceful, not a cloud, not a bird, not a plane.
Lalla opens her eyes very wide, she lets the sky come inside of her. It makes a swaying motion, as if she were on a boat, or as if she’d smoked too much and her head were spinning. It’s because of the sun. It burns down very brightly despite the cold wind from the sea: it burns so brightly that its warmth enters the little girl’s body, fills her belly, her lungs, her arms and legs. It hurts too, hurts her eyes and her head, but Lalla remains motionless, because she so loves the sun and the sky.
When she’s there, sprawled out on the sand, far from other children, far from the Project filled with its noises and smells, and when the sky is very blue like today, Lalla can think about what she loves. She thinks of the one she calls al-Ser, the Secret, he whose gaze is like the sunlight that envelops and protects you.
No one here in the Project knows him, but sometimes when the sky is very beautiful and the light sparkles on the sea and on the dunes, it’s as if the name of al-Ser were everywhere, vibrating everywhere, even deep within her. Lalla believes she can hear his voice, hear the faint sound of his footsteps, she feels his burning gaze that sees all, penetrates all, on the skin of her face. It’s a gaze that comes from across the mountains, beyond the Drâa, from the heart of the desert, and it shines like a light that can never die.
No one knows anything about him. When Lalla talks to Naman the fisherman about al-Ser, he shakes his head because he’s never heard the name, and he never mentions him in his stories. Yet Lalla thinks it must surely be his true name, since it was the one she had heard. But maybe it was only a dream. Even Aamma probably doesn’t know anything about him. Nevertheless, it’s a very handsome name, thinks Lalla, a name that makes you feel good when you hear it.
It’s in order to hear his name, to catch a glimpse of the light in his eyes, that Lalla always walks far into the dunes till she reaches the place where there is nothing but the sea, the sand, and the sky. For al-Ser cannot make his name heard, or let the warmth of his gaze be felt when Lalla is in the plank and tarpaper Project. He’s a man who doesn’t like noise or strong smells. He needs to be alone in the wind, alone like a bird hanging in the sky.