J.M. le Clézio - Desert

The voice becomes deeper and more hushed like a sigh, it quivers a little in the flickering flame, is lost in the twirls of blue smoke.

“One day, oh, one day, the sun will be dark, the earth will split open to its very core, the sea will cover the desert, one day, oh, one day, my eyes will see no light, my lips will be unable to say your name, my heart will suffer no more, for that will be the day I will leave my love…”

The unknown voice fades away in a murmur, disappears in the blue smoke, and Lalla has to wait a long time without moving before she realizes that the voice won’t come back. Her eyes are filled with tears, and her heart is aching, but she says nothing as Aamma resumes cutting off strips of meat and placing them on the wood lattices in the smoke.

“Tell me more about her, Aamma.”

“She knew a lot of songs, Lalla Hawa did; she had a lovely voice, like you do, and she knew how to play the guitar and the flute and dance. Then when your father had the accident, she suddenly changed, and she never sang or played the guitar again, even when you were born, she never felt like singing again, except for you, when you cried in the night, to rock you and sing you to sleep…”

The wasps are out now. They’re drawn by the smell of grilled meat, and they’ve come by the hundreds. They’re humming around the fire, trying to land on the strips of meat. But the smoke drives them off, chokes them, and they fly drunkenly through the fire. Some fall onto the coals and blaze up with a short yellow flame, others fall to the ground, dazed, half burned. Poor wasps! They’ve come to get their share of the meat, but they don’t know how to go about it. The bitter smoke makes them dizzy and infuriates them, because they can’t land on the wood lattices. So they fly straight ahead, blinded, mindless as moths, and die. Lalla tosses them a piece of meat to stave off their hunger, to keep them away from the fire. But one of them hits Lalla, stings her on the neck. “Ouch!” Lalla shouts as she pulls it off and throws it away from her. She is stinging with pain, but feeling very sorry, because deep down inside she really likes the wasps.

Aamma pays no attention to the wasps. She bats them away with a wave of a rag and keeps turning the strips of meat on the lattices and talking.

“She didn’t much like staying at home…” she said, her voice a little hushed as if she were relating a very old dream. “She would often go off, with you tied on her back with a scarf, and go far away, very far away… No one knew where she was going. She would get on the bus and go all the way to the ocean, or sometimes to the surrounding villages. She would go into the marketplaces, over by the fountains, where there were people she didn’t know, and she would sit down on a stone and observe them. Maybe they thought she was a beggar… But she didn’t want to work around the house because my family was hard on her, but I liked her a lot, she was like my sister.”

“Tell me about her death again, Aamma.”

“It’s not right to speak of that on a feast day.”

“It doesn’t matter, Aamma, tell me about the day she died anyway.”

Separated by the flames, Aamma and Lalla can’t see each other very well. But it’s as if there were other eyes touching them deep inside, right where it hurts.

The blue and gray plumes of smoke dance, swelling and shrinking like clouds, and on the lattices of green wood, the strips of meat have turned dark brown like old leather. In the background, the sun is slowly setting, the tide is rising with the wind, there is the song of crickets, the shouts of children running through the streets of the Project, the voices of men, music. But Lalla hardly hears any of that. She’s totally absorbed in the whispering voice relating the death of her mother, long, long ago.

“We didn’t know what was going to happen, no one knew. One day, Lalla Hawa went to bed because she was very tired, and she felt terribly cold all through her body. She remained in bed like that for several days without eating or moving, but she didn’t complain. When we asked her what was wrong, she just said, nothing, nothing, I’m just tired, that’s all. I was the one who was taking care of you then, feeding you, because Lalla Hawa couldn’t even get out of bed… But there was no doctor in the village, and the dispensary was a long way away, and no one knew what to do. And then one day, it was on the sixth day, I think, Lalla Hawa called me, and her voice was very weak, she motioned to me to come closer and she simply said, ‘I’m going to die,’ that’s all. Her voice was strange, and her face was all gray, and there was a burning look in her eyes. Then I became frightened and went running out of the house, and I took you as far away as I could, through the countryside until I reached a hill, and I stayed there all day long sitting under a tree while you played nearby. And when I came back to the house you were asleep, but I could hear the sounds of my mother and my sisters crying, and I came across my father in front of the house, and he told me that Lalla Hawa was dead…”

Lalla is listening with every fiber of her being, her eyes trained on the flames that are crackling and dancing before the twirls of smoke rising into the blue sky. The wasps continue their drunken flight, darting through the flames like bullets, falling to the ground, wings singed. Lalla is also listening to their music, the only true music of the plank and tarpaper Project.

“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…”