Free Desert by J. M. G. Le Clézio Page A

any more then because it’s the time of day when you run into people on the dunes, boys who are going to check the bird traps or men on their way to work. Sometimes the boys make fun of Lalla because she doesn’t know how to walk barefoot very well and because she doesn’t know any curse words. But Lalla can hear them coming from a long way off, and she hides behind a thorn bush near a dune and waits till they’ve passed.
    There’s also that scary woman. She’s not old, but she’s very dirty, with tangled black and red hair, clothing torn from the thorns. When she appears on the path in the dunes you have to be very careful because she’s mean and doesn’t like children. People call her Aïsha Kondisha, but that’s not her real name. No one knows her real name. They say that she kidnaps children to hurt them. When Lalla hears Aïsha Kondisha coming along the path, she hides behind a bush and holds her breath. Aïsha Kondisha goes by muttering incomprehensible phrases. She stops a moment, lifts her head because she senses that someone is there. But she’s almost blind and can’t see Lalla. So she strikes out again, hobbling and shouting out insults in her hideous voice.
    On certain mornings there is something in the sky that Lalla really loves: it’s a big white cloud, long and stringy, that crosses the sky right in the bluest spot. At the end of the white trail, you can see a little silver cross moving slowly through the sky with its head pointing upward. She loves to watch the cross moving across the huge blue sky, without a sound, leaving behind the long white cloud made of little cottony puffs that blend in with each other and spread out like a road, then the wind brushes over the cloud and washes the sky clean.
    Lalla thinks she would love to be up there, in the tiny silver cross, above the sea, above the islands like that, heading out to the most distant of lands. She remains for a long time looking up at the sky after the airplane disappears.
    The Project comes into view after a bend in the path when you’re far from the sea and you’ve walked for half an hour in the direction of the river. Lalla doesn’t know why it’s called the Project, because in the beginning there were only about ten plank and tarpaper cabins on the other side of the river and the vacant lots that separate it from the real town. Maybe they called it that to make people forget they were living with dogs and rats in the dust.
    This is where Lalla came to live when her mother died, so long ago that she doesn’t remember very well when she came. It was very hot because it was in the summer, and the wind blew clouds of dust up over the plank shacks. She’d walked with her eyes shut behind the form of her aunt until they reached the windowless cabin where her aunt’s sons lived. Then she’d felt like running away, taking off along the road that leads to the high mountains and never coming back.
    Every time Lalla comes back from the dunes and sees the roofs of tarpaper and sheet metal, her heart sinks and she remembers the day she came to the Project for the first time. But that was so long ago now, it’s as if everything that had come before didn’t really happen to her, as if it were a story that she’d heard someone tell.
    It’s like her birth, in the mountains to the south, where the desert begins. Sometimes in winter, when there’s nothing to do outside and the wind blows hard over the plain of dust and salt, whistling between the poorly fitted planks in Aamma’s house, Lalla sits down on the floor and listens to the story of her birth.
    It’s a very long and very strange story, and Aamma doesn’t always tell it the same way. In her slightly singsong voice, her head nodding as if she were going to fall asleep, Aamma says: “When the day you were to be born came, it was just before summer, before the dry season. Hawa could feel you were coming, and since everyone was still asleep, she left the tent silently. She just