She looks at the shepherd’s hands trying to understand. They are long hands with slender fingers, with pearl-colored nails, with thin skin that is brown, almost black on top, and pink, tinged with yellow underneath, like the leaves of those trees that have two colors.
Lalla likes the Hartani’s hands very much. They’re not like the hands of the other men in the Project, and she thinks there aren’t any others like them in all the land. They are nimble and light, full of strength too, and Lalla thinks that they are the hands of a nobleman, the son of a sheik maybe, or maybe even a warrior from the Orient, from Baghdad.
The Hartani knows how to do everything with his hands, not just pick up a stone or break a piece of wood, but make slip-knots with palm fibers, traps for catching birds, or else whistle, make music, imitate the call of the partridge, the hawk, the fox, and imitate the sound of the wind, the storm, the sea. Most of all his hands know how to talk. That’s what Lalla likes best. Sometimes, tucking his feet under his large homespun robe, the Hartani sits down in the sun on a big flat rock to talk. His clothes are very light-colored, almost white, and you can only see his dark face and hands, and that is how he begins to talk.
It isn’t really stories that he tells Lalla. Rather, it’s images that he makes appear in the air, with only his gestures, his lips, with the light in his eyes. Furtive images that appear in flashes, flickering on and off, but never has Lalla heard anything more beautiful, more true. Even the stories that Naman the fisherman tells, even when Aamma talks about al-Azraq, the Blue Man of the desert, and the fountain of clear water that sprang up from under a stone, it’s not that beautiful. The things that the Hartani says with his hands are preposterous, just like he is, but it’s like a dream, because every image that he makes appear comes at a time when you’re least expecting it, and yet it is just what you were expecting. He talks in that way for a long time, making birds with spread feathers appear, rocks clenched like fists, houses, dogs, storms, airplanes, giant flowers, mountains, wind blowing over sleeping faces. None of that means anything, but when Lalla looks at his face, the play of his black hands, she sees these images appear, so lovely and new, bursting with light and life, as if they actually sprang from the palms of his hands, as if they were coming from his lips, along the beam of his eyes.
The most beautiful thing when the Hartani is talking in this way is that nothing disturbs the silence. The sun burns down on the plateau of stones, on the red cliffs. The wind blows at times, slightly chilly, or you can hear the faint swish of sand running down the grooves in the rocks. With his long hands and agile fingers, the Hartani makes a snake slipping along the bottom of a ravine appear, then it stops, head uplifted. That’s when a large white ibis takes flight, flapping its wings. In the night sky, the moon is round, and with his index finger the Hartani lights up the stars, one, one more, still another… In summer, the rain begins to fall; the water runs into the streams, filling out a round pond where mosquitoes hover. Straight into the center of the blue sky, the Hartani throws a triangular stone that rises, rises, and — whish! — it suddenly opens and turns into a tree with infinite foliage filled with birds.
Sometimes the Hartani uses his face to imitate people or animals. He can do the turtle really well, squinching up his lips, head down between his shoulders, back rounded. It makes Lalla laugh every time. Just like the first time. Or sometimes he does the camel, lips pushed out in front, front teeth bared. He also does a very good job of imitating the heroes he’s seen in the movies. Tarzan, or Maciste, and all of the comic book characters.
Every now and again, Lalla brings him pocket-sized comics that she takes from Aamma’s eldest son or that she buys with her savings. There are the stories of Akim, of Roch Rafal, stories that are set on the moon or on other planets, and small Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck comic books. She can’t read what’s written, but she has Aamma’s son tell her the story two or three times, and she knows them by heart. But at any rate, the Hartani doesn’t feel like hearing the story. He takes the small books, and he has a strange way of looking at them, holding them diagonally and cocking his head a little to one side. Afterwards, when he’s looked at all the pictures closely, he leaps to his feet and imitates Roch Rafal or Akim on the back of an elephant (a rock plays the part of the elephant).
But Lalla never stays with the Hartani for very long, because there always comes a time when his face seems to close up. She doesn’t really understand what happens when the face of the young shepherd turns sullen and stiff, and there is such a faraway look in his eyes. It’s like when a cloud passes in front of the sun, when the night falls very suddenly on the hills in the valley bottoms. It’s terrible, because Lalla really wants to hold on to the moment the Hartani seemed happy, to his smile, the light that gleamed in his eyes. But it’s impossible. All of a sudden the Hartani is gone, like an animal. He jumps up and disappears in the wink of an eye, without Lalla being able to tell where he’s gone. But she doesn’t try to hold him back anymore. There are even certain days, when there’s been so much light up on the plateau of stones, when the Hartani has been talking with his hands and making so many extraordinary things appear, that Lalla prefers to leave first. She stands up and without running, without looking back, makes her way down to the path that leads to the plank and tarpaper Project. Maybe from having spent so much time with the Hartani, she has grown to be like him now.
As a matter of fact, people don’t like it very much that she goes to see the Hartani so often. Perhaps they’re afraid she’ll become mejnoun too, that she’ll catch the evil spirits that are in the shepherd’s body. Aamma’s eldest son says that the Hartani is a thief, because he has gold in a small leather bag that he wears around his neck. But Lalla knows that’s not true. The Hartani found that gold one day in the bed of a dried-up torrent. He took Lalla by the hand and guided her down to the bottom of the crevice and down there, in the gray sand of the torrent, Lalla had seen the gold dust shining.
“He’s not the right kind of boy for you,” says Aamma when Lalla comes back from the plateau of stones.
Lalla’s face is now just as black as the Hartani’s, because the burning sun is stronger up there.
Sometimes Aamma adds, “After all, you don’t want to marry the Hartani, do you?”
“Why not?” Lalla answers. And she shrugs her shoulders.
She doesn’t want to get married; she never even thinks about it. The idea of getting married to the Hartani makes her start laughing.
Nevertheless, whenever she can, once she’s decided she’s finished her work, Lalla leaves the Project and heads toward the hills where the shepherds are. It’s east of the Project, up where the lands without water, the high cliffs of red stone, begin. She enjoys walking along the very white path that snakes through the hills, listening to the shrill music of the crickets, observing the marks left by snakes in the sand.
A little farther along, she hears the whistling of shepherds. They are mostly young children, boys and girls who are scattered about almost everywhere in the hills with herds of goats and sheep. They whistle like that to call to one another, to talk to one another, to scare off the wild dogs.