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

bound up her belly with a piece of cloth and walked out as best she could until she reached a spot with a tree and a spring, because she knew that when the sun came up she would need shade and water. It’s the custom down there, everyone must always be born near a spring. So she walked there and then she lay down near the tree and waited for the night to end. No one knew that your mother was outside. She could walk without making a sound, without making the dogs bark. Even though I was sleeping right next to her, I hadn’t heard her moan or get up to leave the tent...”
    “Then what happened, Aamma?”
    “Then it was daybreak, so the women woke up and we saw that your mother wasn’t there and we realized why she’d left. So I went looking for her by the spring and when I arrived she was standing against the tree with her arms hanging onto a branch and she was moaning softly to avoid alarming the men and the children.”
    “What happened after that, Aamma?”
    “Then you were born, right away, just like that, in the dirt between the roots of the tree, and we washed you in the spring water and wrapped you in a cloak because the night chill had not yet lifted. The sun rose, and your mother went back to the tent to sleep. I remember there was nothing to wrap you in, and you slept in your mother’s blue cloak. Your mother was happy because you came very quickly, but she was sad too, because of your father’s death; she thought she wouldn’t have enough money to raise you, and she was afraid she would have to give you to someone else.”
    Sometimes Aamma tells the story differently, as if she doesn’t really remember very well. For example, she says that Hawa wasn’t clinging to the branch of the tree, but she was hanging from the rope of a well, and she was pulling with all her might to fight the pain. Or else she says that a passing shepherd delivered the baby and wrapped it in his woolen cloak. But all of that is veiled in an incomprehensible fog as if it had happened in another world, a world on the other side of the desert, where a diVerent sun shines in a diVerent sky.
    “After a few days your mother was able to walk out to the well for the first time to wash herself and comb her hair. She carried you wrapped in the same blue cloak that she tied around her waist. She walked cautiously because she wasn’t yet as strong as before, but she was very happy that you had come and when we asked her your name she said it was the same as hers, Lalla Hawa, because you were the daughter of a sharifa.”
    “Please, tell me about the one who was called al-Azraq, the Blue Man.”
    But Aamma shakes her head.
    “Not now, another day.”
    “Please Aamma, tell me about him.”
    But Aamma shakes her head without answering. She stands up and goes to knead the bread in the large earthen platter near the door. Aamma’s like that; she never wants to talk for very long, and she never says very much about the Blue Man or Moulay Ahmed ben Mohammed al-Fadel, who was called Ma al-Aïnine, Water of the Eyes.
    The odd thing here in the Project is that everyone is very poor, but no one ever complains. The Project is mostly this heap of plank and sheet metal shacks with those large sheets of tarpaper held down with stones that serve as roofs. When the wind blows too hard in the valley, you can hear all the planks banging and the sheet metal clanging, and the snapping of the tarpaper tearing in a strong gust. It makes a funny music that rattles and clatters, as if everyone were in a big, old, broken-down bus on a dirt road, or as if there were a bunch of animals and rats galloping over the roofs and through the alleys.
    Sometimes the storm is very violent, it whisks everything away. The next day the whole town needs to be rebuilt. But the people laugh as they do it because they are so poor they aren’t afraid of losing what they have. Maybe they’re happy too, because after the storm the sky is even vaster, bluer, and the light even more