J.M. le Clézio - Desert

Lalla is walking slowly along, eyes almost closed, putting the tips of her bare toes down on the burning rocks. It’s like being in another world, near the sun, balancing precariously, ready to fall. She’s moving forward, but the essence of her is absent, or rather, her whole being is preceding her, her vision, her acutely tuned senses, only her body remains behind, still hesitating on the sharp-edged rocks.

She’s waiting impatiently for the one who is bound to come now, she’s sure of it, he must come. As soon as she’d started running to escape the man with the gray-green suit, escape Old Naman’s death, she knew someone was waiting for her up on the plateau of stones, up where there are no people. It is the desert warrior veiled in blue, of whom she knows only the razor-sharp gaze. He was watching her from high up in the deserted hills, and his eyes reached all the way out to her and touched her, pulled her straight up here.

Now she is standing still in the middle of the vast plateau of stones. Around her there is nothing, only the mounds of stones, the powdered light, the cold hard wind, the intense sky with not a cloud, not a trace of mist.

Lalla remains motionless, standing up on a large, slightly inclined slab of stone, a hard dry slab of stone that no water has ever polished. The sunlight is beating down upon her, pulsating on her forehead, on her chest, in her belly, the light which is a gaze.

The blue warrior will certainly come now. It won’t be long. Lalla thinks she hears the soft tread of his feet in the dust, her heart is pounding hard. Whirls of white light envelop her, curling their flames around her legs, tangling in her hair, and she can feel the rough tongue of light burning her lips and her eyelids. Salty tears stream down her cheeks, run into her mouth, salty sweat runs down drop by drop from under her arms, stinging her ribs, trickles down the length of her neck, down between her shoulder blades. The blue warrior must come, now, his gaze will be white-hot like the light of the sun.

But Lalla remains alone in the middle of the deserted plateau, standing on her sloping slab of rock. The cold wind is burning her, the dreadful wind that shuns human life, it’s blowing to abrade her, to pulverize her. The wind that blows up here hardly even cares for the scorpions and the scolopendras, the lizards or the snakes; it might have a slight penchant for the foxes with their burnt coats. Yet Lalla isn’t afraid of it, because she knows that somewhere between the rocks, or maybe up in the sky, there is the gaze of the Blue Man, the one she calls al-Ser, the Secret, because he is hidden. He is surely going to come, his eyes will look straight into the deepest part of her being and give her the strength to fight against the man in the suit, against the death hovering over Naman, will transform her into a bird, throw her up into the center of space; then maybe she could at last join the big white gull who is a prince, and who flies untiringly over the sea.

When the gaze reaches her, it makes a whirlwind in her head, like a wave of light unfurling. The gaze of al-Ser is brighter than fire, a light that is blue and burning at once, like that of the stars.

Lalla stops breathing for a few moments. Her pupils are dilated. She squats down in the dust, eyes closed, head thrown backward, because there is a terrible weight in that light, a weight which is entering her and making her as heavy as stone.

He has come. Once again, without making a sound, slipping over the sharp stones, dressed like the ancient warriors of the desert, with his ample cloak of white wool, and his face veiled with a midnight-blue cloth. Lalla watches him moving forward in her dream with every fiber of her being. She sees his hands tinted with indigo, she sees the light pouring from his dark eyes. He doesn’t speak. He never speaks. It is with his eyes that he speaks, for he lives in a world where there is no need for the words of men. There are great whirls of golden light around his white cloak, as if the wind were raising clouds of sand. But Lalla can hear only the beat of her own heart, pounding very slowly, far away.

Lalla has no need for words. She has no need to ask questions, or even to think. Eyes closed, squatting in the dust, she can feel the eyes of the Blue Man upon her, and the warmth penetrates her body, pulses through her limbs. That is the extraordinary thing. The warmth of the gaze finds its way into the smallest recesses of her body, driving out the pain, the fever, the blood clots, everything that can obstruct and cause pain.

Al-Ser does not move. Now he’s standing in front of her, while the waves of light slip and swirl around his cloak. What is he doing? Lalla is no longer afraid, she can feel the warmth growing inside of her, as if it were radiating out through her face, illuminating her whole body.

She can see what is in the eyes of the Blue Man. It is all around her, out into infinity, the shimmering, undulating desert, showers of sparks, the slow waves of dunes inching into the unknown. There are towns, large white cities with towers as slender as palm trees, red palaces adorned with foliage, vines, giant flowers. There are vast lakes of sky-blue water, water so lovely, so pure that it exists nowhere else on earth. It is a dream that Lalla is having, eyes closed, head thrown backward in the sunlight, arms wrapped around her knees. It is a dream that has come from afar, that existed up here on the plateau of stones long before her, a dream in which she is now partaking, as if in sleep, and its realm is unfolding before her.

Where does the path lead? Lalla doesn’t know where she’s going, drifting along in the desert wind that is blowing, burning her lips and eyelids at times, blinding and cruel, and at other times cold and slow, the wind that obliterates people and makes rocks tumble to the foot of cliffs. It’s the wind that is leading out to infinity, out beyond the horizon, beyond the sky, all the way out to the frozen constellations, to the Milky Way, to the sun.

The wind carries her along on the endless path, the immense plateau of stones where the light is whirling. The desert unfurls its empty, sand-colored fields, strewn with crevasses, as wrinkled as dead skin. The gaze of the Blue Man is everywhere, all the way out in the farthest reaches of the desert, and it is through his eyes now that Lalla is seeing the light. She can feel the burn of his gaze, the wind, the dryness on her skin, and her lips taste of salt. She sees the shapes of the dunes, large sleeping animals, and the high black walls of the Hamada, and the immense dried-up city of red earth. This is the land where there are no humans, no towns, nothing that stops and unsettles. There is only stone, sand, wind. Yet Lalla feels happy because she recognizes everything, each detail of the landscape, each charred shrub in the large valley. It’s as if she had walked there, long ago, the ground scorching her bare feet, eyes trained out on the horizon shimmering in the air. Then her heart starts beating harder and faster and she sees signs appear, lost traces, broken twigs, bushes quivering in the wind. She waits, she knows she will get there soon, it is very near now. The gaze of the Blue Man guides her over the fissures, the rockslides, along dry torrents. Then all of a sudden she hears that strange, uncertain, nasal song, quavering way off in the distance; it seems to be coming up from the sand itself, mingling with the constant swish of wind over stones, with the sound of the light. The song makes Lalla’s insides flutter; she recognizes it; it’s Lalla Hawa’s song, the one that Aamma sang, the one that went, “One day, oh, one day, the crow will turn white, the sea will go dry, we will find honey in the desert flower, we will make up a bed of acacia sprays…” But now Lalla can’t understand the words anymore because someone is singing in a very distant voice, in the Chleuh language. Yet the song goes straight to her heart, and her eyes fill with tears, despite her holding them closed with all her might.