Still, the following day Lalla just can’t stand it anymore. When the fat pale woman resumes whipping Mina — a puny, thin little girl of barely ten — with the switch because she’s broken her shuttle, Lalla stands up and says coldly, “Stop beating her!”
Zora looks at Lalla incredulously for a minute. Her pale flabby face has taken on such an idiotic expression that Lalla repeats, “Stop beating her!”
Suddenly, Zora’s features screw up in hatred. She strikes out vehemently at Lalla’s face with the switch, but only grazes her left shoulder, as Lalla manages to dodge the blow.
“You’ll see the beating I’ll give you!” Zora screams, and now there’s some color to her face.
“You bully! You wicked woman!”
Lalla grabs Zora’s switch and breaks it over her knee. Then it is fear that twists the fat woman’s face.
She backs away stuttering, “Get out! Get out! Right now! Get out!”
But Lalla is already running across the large room; she leaps outside into the sunlight; she runs without stopping all the way back to Aamma’s house. Freedom is beautiful. You can watch the clouds floating along upside down again, the wasps busying themselves around little piles of garbage, the lizards, the chameleons, the grasses quivering in the wind. Lalla sits down in front of the house, in the shade of the wall of planks, and listens eagerly to all the minute sounds.
When Aamma comes home around evening time, she simply says, “I’m not going back to work at Zora’s, ever again.”
Since that day, things here in the Project have really changed for Lalla. It’s as if she’d grown up all of a sudden, and people have started noticing her. Even Aamma’s sons aren’t like they used to be, cold and scornful. Sometimes she sort of misses the days when she was very young, when she had just arrived in the Project, and no one knew her name, and she could hide behind a shrub, in a bucket, in a cardboard box. She really enjoyed that, being like a shadow, coming and going without being seen, without being spoken to.
Old Naman and the Hartani are the only ones who haven’t changed. Naman the fisherman still tells incredible stories as he repairs his nets on the beach, or when he comes to eat corn cakes at Aamma’s house. He hardly ever catches fish anymore, but people really like him and continue to invite him over. His pale eyes are as transparent as water, and his face is stitched with deep wrinkles like scars from ancient wounds.
Aamma listens to him talk about Spain, about Marseille, or Paris, and about all the cities where he has been, where he’s walked, where he knows the names of the streets and the people who live there. Aamma asks him questions, asks him if his brother can help her find work over there.
Naman nods his head. “Why not?”
That’s his answer to everything, but he promises to write his brother all the same. Leaving the country is complicated though. You need money, papers. Aamma remains pensive, a faraway look in her eyes; she’s dreaming of white cities with so many streets, houses, automobiles. Maybe that’s what she’s waiting for.
Lalla doesn’t think about that very much herself. It’s all the same to her. She’s watching Naman’s eyes, and it’s a little bit as if she had known those seas, those countries, those houses.
The Hartani doesn’t think about it either. He’s remained like a child still, even though he’s as tall and strong as an adult. His body is slim and elongated, his face is pure and smooth like a piece of ebony. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t know how to speak the same language others do.
He still sits down on a rock, staring out into the distance, wearing his homespun robe, with the white cloth on his head drawn over his face. Around him there are still black shepherds just like him, wild, dressed in rags, whistling as they leap from rock to rock. Lalla likes coming out where they live, out to the place which is filled with white light, the place where time stands still, where you can’t grow up.
THE MAN WALKED into Aamma’s house one morning in the beginning of summer. He was a man from the city, wearing a gray suit with a green sheen, black leather shoes that were as shiny as mirrors. He came with a few gifts for Aamma and her sons, an electric mirror framed in white plastic, a transistor radio no larger than a box of matches, pens with gold-colored caps, and a bag full of sugar and canned food. When he came into the house he passed Lalla at the door but hardly looked at her. He lay all the presents on the floor; Aamma told him to sit down, and he looked around for a seat, but there were only cushions and Lalla Hawa’s wooden trunk that Aamma had brought back from the South with Lalla. The man chose to sit on the trunk after having tested it a little with the palm of his hand. The man waited for tea and sweet cakes to be brought to him.
When she learned a little later that the man had come to ask for her hand in marriage, Lalla felt very frightened. It made her head spin, and her heart started beating wildly. It wasn’t Aamma who told her about it, but Bareki, Aamma’s eldest son.
“Our mother decided to have you marry him, because he is very rich.”
“But I don’t want to get married!” Lalla shouted.
“You have nothing to say about it, you must obey your aunt,” Bareki said.
“Never! Never!” Lalla ran off shouting, her eyes filled with angry tears.
Then she went back to Aamma’s house. The man with the gray-green suit was gone, but the gifts were there. Ali, Aamma’s younger son, was even listening to music, holding the tiny transistor radio against his ear. When Lalla walked in, he gave her a knowing look.
“Why did you keep that man’s gifts? I won’t marry him,” Lalla said to Aamma coldly.
Aamma’s son snickered, “Maybe she wants to marry the Hartani!”
“Get out!” said Aamma. The young man went out with the transistor.
“You can’t force me to marry that man!” Lalla says.
“He will be a good husband for you,” responds Aamma. “He’s no longer very young, but he’s rich, he has a big house in the city, and he has lots of powerful relations. You must marry him.”
“I don’t want to get married, ever!”
Aamma remains silent for a long time. When she speaks again, her voice is softer, but Lalla stays on her guard.
“I raised you as if you were my own daughter, I love you, and today you would affront me in this way?”
Lalla looks angrily at Aamma, because for the first time she’s seeing her dishonest side.
“I don’t care,” she says. “I don’t want to marry that man. I don’t want these ridiculous gifts!”
She motions toward the electric mirror on its stand on the dried mud floor. “You don’t even have electricity!”
Then suddenly, she’s had enough. She leaves Aamma’s house and goes out to the sea. But this time she doesn’t run along the path; she walks very slowly. Today, nothing is the same. It’s as if everything has been dulled, worn down from being looked at so much.
“I’m going to have to leave,” Lalla says out loud to herself. But she immediately thinks that she doesn’t even know where to go. So then she crosses over to the other side of the dunes and walks along the wide beach, looking for Old Naman. She would so like for him to be there, as usual, sitting on a root of the old fig tree, repairing his nets. She would ask him all sorts of questions about those cities in Spain with magic names, Algeciras, Málaga, Granada, Teruel, Zaragoza, and about those ports from which ships as big as cities sail, about the roads upon which automobiles drive northward, about trains and airplanes departing. She’d like to listen to him talk for hours about those snow-capped mountains and those tunnels, those rivers that are as vast as the sea, those wheat-covered plains, immense forests, and most of all about those fragrant cities where there are white palaces, churches, fountains, stores glittering with light. Paris, Marseille, and all of those streets, houses so tall you can barely see the sky, the gardens, the cafés, the hotels, and the intersections where you meet people from all corners of the world.