The Hartani is the one who taught her how to sit still like that, just looking at the sky, the stones, the bushes, looking at the wasps and the flies flying, listening to the song of hidden insects, feeling the shadows of birds of prey and the trembling of hares in the scrub.
Like Lalla, the Hartani doesn’t really have a family, he doesn’t know how to read or write, he doesn’t even know the prayers, he doesn’t know how to speak, and yet he’s the one who knows all those things. Lalla loves his smooth face, his long hands, his dark metallic eyes, his smile, she loves the way he walks, quick and agile as a hare, and the way he leaps from rock to rock, and disappears in the wink of an eye into one of his hiding places.
He never comes into the city. Maybe he’s afraid of the other boys, because he’s not like them. When he goes away, he always heads southward, toward the desert, to the place where the nomads atop their camels have left their tracks. He goes away for several days like that, without anyone knowing where he is. Then one morning he returns and goes back to his post in the field of stones with the she-goats and their buck as if he’d only been gone a few minutes.
When she’s sitting there on a rock like that next to the Hartani, and they’re both looking out at the vast stretch of stones in the sunlight, with the wind blowing from time to time, with the wasps humming over the little gray plants, and the sound of the goats’ hooves slipping on loose stones, there’s really no need for anything else. Lalla can feel the heat deep down inside of her, as if all the light of the sky and the stones were going straight into the very quick of her body, expanding. The Hartani takes Lalla’s hand in his long, brown, slender fingers, he holds it so tight that it almost hurts. Lalla can feel the current of heat pass through the palm of her hand, like an odd, feeble vibration. She doesn’t want to talk or think. She feels so good sitting there that she could stay all day long, right up until night fills the ravines, without moving. She stares straight out ahead, she can see each detail of the stone landscape, each tuft of grass, can hear each snapping sound, each insect call. She can feel the slow movement of the shepherd’s breathing, she is so close to him that she is seeing through his eyes, feeling things with his skin. It lasts a brief instant, but it seems so long that, head spinning, she forgets everything else.
Then all at once, as if he were afraid of something, the young shepherd jumps to his feet, lets go of Lalla’s hand. Without even looking at her, he starts running fast, like a dog, jumping over the rocks and the dried ravines. He leaps over the drystone walls, and Lalla sees his pale silhouette disappearing between the thorn bushes.
“Hartani! Hartani! Come back!”
Lalla shouts, standing up on the boulder, and her voice cracks because she knows it won’t do any good. The Hartani disappears suddenly, swallowed up by one of those dark hollows in the limestone. He won’t show himself again today. Maybe tomorrow, or some other time? So then Lalla also goes down the hill, slowly, from one rock to another, clumsily, and she looks back from time to time to try to catch a glimpse of the shepherd. She leaves the fields of stone and the drystone walls, makes her way back down toward the valley bottom, not far from the sea, where people live in houses made of planks, sheet metal, and tarpaper.
DAYS ARE THE SAME every day, here in the Project, and sometimes you’re not really sure what day you happen to be living. It’s an already remote time, and it’s as if there were nothing written in the cards, nothing certain. As a matter of fact, no one really thinks about it here, no one really wonders who he is. Yet Lalla thinks about it often, when she goes up to the plateau of stones where the Blue Man dwells, the man she calls al-Ser.
It might be due to the wasps as well. There are so many wasps in the Project, many more than there are men and women. From dawn to dusk they go humming through the air searching for food, dancing in the sunlight.
Yet in one sense, the hours are never the same, like the things Aamma says, like the faces of the girls who gather around the fountain. There are torrid hours, when the sun burns your skin through the clothing, when the light sticks pins in your eyes and makes your lips bleed. That’s when Lalla wraps herself up in blue cloth, ties a large handkerchief behind her head that covers her face up to the eyes, and wraps another thin blue cloth around her head that hangs down to her chest. The burning wind comes in from the desert, blowing hard grains of dust. Outside, the streets of the Project are empty. Even the dogs are hiding in holes in the earth, at the foot of the houses, against empty oil drums.
But Lalla loves being outdoors on days like that, maybe precisely because there is no one around. It’s as if there were nothing left on earth, nothing that belonged to humans. That’s when she feels most divorced from herself, as if nothing she had ever done could count, as if all memory had been erased.
So she goes over toward the sea, to the place where the dunes begin. She sits down in the sand, wrapped in the blue cloths; she looks at the dust rising in the air. Above the earth, at the zenith, the sky is a very deep blue, almost the color of night, and when she looks over at the horizon just above the line of dunes, she can see that pink ashen color, like at dawn. On those days you are free too from flies and wasps because the wind has driven them back into the hollows in the rocks, into their nests of dried mud, or into the dark corners of the houses. There are no men, or women, or children. There are no dogs, no birds. There is only the wind whistling in the branches of the shrubs, in the leaves of the acacias and the wild fig trees. There are only the thousands of stone particles lashing at your face, parting around Lalla, forming long ribbons, snakes, plumes. There is the sound of the wind, the sound of the sea, the swishing sound of sand, and Lalla leans forward to breathe, the blue veil plastered against her nostrils and lips.
It’s great because it’s as if you’d sailed away on a boat, like Naman the fisherman and his companions, lost in the middle of a huge storm. The sky is blank, extraordinary. The earth has disappeared, or almost, barely visible through the cracks in the sand, ragged, worn, a few dark patches of reefs surrounded by the sea.
Lalla doesn’t know why she goes out on those days. She just can’t help it, she can’t stay closed up in Aamma’s house, or even go walking through the narrow streets of the Project. The burning wind dries out her lips and her nostrils; she can feel the flame descending inside her. It might be the flame of the light in the sky, the flame that comes from the East and that the wind is forcing into her body. But light doesn’t only burn, it also liberates, and Lalla can feel her body getting lighter, swifter. She resists, clinging to the sand dune with both hands, her chin against her knees. She barely breathes, in short little gasps, so as not to become too light.
She tries to think of the people she loves, because that can keep the wind from blowing her away. She thinks of Aamma, of the Hartani, of Naman most of all. But on those days, nothing really counts, not even any of the people she knows, and her thoughts slip immediately away, escape, as if the wind had torn them from her and carried them out among the dunes.
Then suddenly she feels the eyes of the Blue Man from the desert upon her. It’s the same look that was up there on the plateau of stones at the edge of the desert. It is a blank, imperious gaze that pushes down on her shoulders with all the weight of the wind and the light, a look filled with unbearable dryness that is painful, a look that has been hardened like the particles of stone that are hitting her face and clothing. She doesn’t understand what he wants, what he’s asking for. Maybe he wants nothing of her, he’s just simply passing over the coastline, the river, the Project, and he’s going even farther out, to burn up the cities and the white houses, the gardens, the fountains, the wide avenues in the lands on the other side of the sea.