“No one knew that would happen,” said Aamma. “But when it happened, everyone cried, and I was filled with a cold feeling, as if I were going to die as well, and everyone was sad for you, because you were too young to understand. Later, I brought you here when my father died, and I had to come to the Project to live with the Soussi.”
It will be a long time yet before the strips of meat are finished being smoked, so Aamma keeps on talking, but she says nothing more about Lalla Hawa. She talks about al-Azraq, who was called the Blue Man, who could tame the wind and the rain, who could make all things obey him, even the stones and the bushes. She talks about the hut made of branches and palm leaves that was his house, standing alone in the middle of the open desert. She says that the sky over the Blue Man’s head would fill with birds of all sorts that sang celestial songs to accompany his prayer. But only those with a pure heart could find the house of the Blue Man. The others would get lost in the desert.
“Did he also know how to talk to wasps?” asks Lalla.
“To wasps and to wild bees, for he was their master, he knew the words to tame them. But he also knew the song to send clouds of wasps, bees, and flies to his enemies and he could have destroyed a whole city if he wanted to. But he was righteous and only used his powers to do good.”
She also speaks of the desert, the wide open desert that commences south of Goulimine, east of Taroudant, beyond the Drâa Valley. It was there in the desert that Lalla was born, at the foot of a tree, as Aamma tells it. There in the open desert, the sky is immense; the horizon has no end because there is nothing for the eye to catch upon. The desert is like the sea, with the waves of wind over the hard sand, with the froth of rolling bramble bushes, with the flat stones, patches of lichen and plaques of salt, and the black shadows that dig out holes when the sun draws near to the earth. Aamma speaks of the desert for a long time, and while she speaks, the flames gradually grow smaller, the smoke gets lighter, transparent, and the embers slowly cover over with a kind of shimmering silver dust.
“Out there, in the open desert, men can walk for days without passing a single house, seeing a well, for the desert is so vast that no one can know it all. Men go out into the desert, and they are like ships at sea; no one knows when they will return. Sometimes there are storms, but nothing like here, terrible storms, and the wind tears up the sand and throws it high into the sky, and the men are lost. They die, drowned in the sand, they die lost like ships in a storm, and the sand retains their bodies. Everything is so diVerent in that land; the sun isn’t the same as it is here, it burns hotter, and there are men that come back blinded, their faces burned. Nights, the cold makes men who are lost scream out in pain, the cold breaks their bones. Even the men aren’t the same as they are here … they are cruel, they stalk their prey like foxes, drawing silently near. They are black, like the Hartani, dressed in blue, faces veiled. They aren’t men, but djinns, children of the devil, and they deal with the devil; they are like sorcerers…”
Then Lalla thinks again of al-Azraq, the Blue Man, master of the desert, he who could make water spring from under the desert stones.
Aamma thinks of him too and says, “The Blue Man was like the men of the desert, then he received God’s blessing, and he left his tribe, his family, to live alone… But he knew the things that the people of the desert know. He was given the power of healing with his hands, and Lalla Hawa also had that power, and she knew how to interpret dreams, and tell the future, and find lost objects. And when people knew she was a descendant of al-Azraq, they would come to ask her advice, and sometimes she would tell them what they asked of her, and other times she didn’t want to answer…”
Lalla looks at her hands and tries to understand what they hold. Her hands are large and strong, like the hands of boys, but the skin is soft and the fingers are tapered.
“Do I have the power too, Aamma?”
Aamma starts laughing, she rises to her feet and stretches.
“Don’t think about that,” she says. “The meat is ready now, it’s time to put it on the platter.”
When Aamma walks away, Lalla takes down the lattice rack and lays the strips of meat out on the earthenware platter, nibbling on a piece here and there. Since the fire has died down, the wasps have come back in droves; they’re humming very loudly, dancing around Lalla’s hands, getting tangled in her hair. Lalla isn’t afraid of them. She shoos them away gently and throws them another piece of smoked meat, because today is a special day for them too.
Afterward, she goes down toward the sea following the narrow path that leads to the dunes. But she doesn’t go as far as the water. She stays on the other side of the dunes, sheltered from the wind, and looks for a hollow in the sand in which to lie down. When she finds a place where there aren’t too many thistles or ants, she lies down on her back, arms at her sides, and keeps her eyes on the sky. There are big white clouds scudding across. There is the slow sound of the sea scraping against the sand on the beach, and it’s nice hearing it without being able to see it. There are the cries of the gulls slipping along on the wind, making the sunlight blink on and off. There are the sounds of dry shrubs, small acacia leaves, the rustling sound of the filao needles, like water. There are still a few wasps humming around Lalla’s hands, because they smell of meat.
Then Lalla tries once again to hear the stranger’s voice singing very far away, as if from another country, the voice that goes up and down agilely, clearly, like the sound of fountains, like the sunlight. The sky before her grows slowly dim, but night is a long time in coming because it is the end of winter and the beginning of the season of light. Dusk is first gray, then red, with huge clouds like flaming manes. Lalla remains stretched out in her hollow of sand between the dunes, without taking her eyes off the clouds and the sky. She really does hear, in the whoosh of the sea and the wind, in the sharp cries of the gulls seeking out a beach for the night, she hears the soft voice repeating its lament, the clear, yet somewhat shaky voice, as if it already knew death was coming to silence it, the voice which is as pure as the water you can never drink enough of after long scorching days. It’s a music born of the heavens and of the clouds, it bounces off the sand of the dunes, spreads out and resonates everywhere, even in the dry thistle leaves. It’s singing for Lalla, just for Lalla, it envelops her and cleanses her in its fresh waters, it runs its hand through her hair, over her forehead, across her lips, it declares its love, it descends upon her and gives her its blessing. So then Lalla turns away and hides her face in the sand, because something inside of her has come undone, has broken, and tears come silently. No one comes to put a hand on her shoulder and ask, “Why are you crying, little Lalla?” Yet the stranger’s voice makes her warm tears flow, it stirs up images deep inside of her that have been still for years. The tears run into the sand and make a little wet spot under her chin, make the sand stick to her cheeks, her lips. Then suddenly it is gone. The voice deep in the sky has grown silent. Night has fallen now, a lovely, dark blue, velvet night in which the stars sparkle between the phosphorescent clouds. Lalla shivers as if with a passing fever. She wanders down along the dunes amidst the blinking lightning bugs. Because she is afraid of snakes, she goes back to the narrow path where she can still see her footprints and walks slowly toward the Project where the feast is still going on.
LALLA IS WAITING for something. She doesn’t really know what it is, but she’s waiting. The days are long in the Project, the rainy days, the windy days, the summer days. Sometimes Lalla thinks she’s simply waiting for the days to come, but when they arrive, she realizes that wasn’t it. She’s waiting, that’s all. People have a lot of patience, maybe they wait for something all their lives, and nothing ever comes.