Authors: Margaret Mazzantini
We are invisible to the world, but not to God.
They moved from place to place with this thought in their hearts.
In winter, the northern wind that crossed the ocean of rocks stiffened the woollen shawls on their bodies. Their skin, bloodless like the goatskins stretched taut across their drums, clung to their bones. Ancient curses fell from the sky. The fault lines in the sand were blades. Touching the desert brought wounds.
Their elders were buried where they died, left to the silence of the sand. Afterwards, the Bedouins set out again, fringes of white and indigo cloth.
In spring, new dunes emerged, rosy and pale. Sand virgins.
The searing ghibli wind drew near, accompanied by the jackal’s hoarse cry. Here and there, little tendrils of wind nipped at the sand like wandering spirits. Rough squalls followed, as sharp as scimitars. An army brought back to life. In a flash, the desert rose to devour the sky and there was no longer any border with the hereafter. The Bedouins bent beneath the weight of the grey tempest, protecting themselves against the bodies of animals that had fallen to their knees as if beneath the shroud of some ancient judgement.
Then they stopped, built a wall of clay, an enclosed pasture. Wheels left furrows in the sand.
Now and then, a caravan passed through. The settlement lay on the route used by merchants who cut across the desert from black Africa to the sea. They carried ivory, resin, precious stones and captives to sell as slaves in the ports of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania.
The merchants rested in the oasis, ate, drank. A city was born, with roofs of palm and walls of dried clay reminiscent of braided rope. The women lived above the men, separate. They walked barefoot across the roofs and went to the well with terracotta jars on their heads. They mixed couscous with lamb innards. They prayed on the tombs of marabouts, of holy men. At sunset, they danced on the roofs to the sound of the nay, their bellies moving like drowsy snakes. On the ground, the men made bricks, bartered, played tawla and smoked the narghile.
That city is no longer there. Nothing remains but a sketch, a sanctuary eaten by the wind of sand. Next to it, a new city arose, built for Colonel Gaddafi by foreign architects from the East. Cement buildings, aerials.
Along the roads, there are huge images of the colonel, here pictured in desert camouflage, there as a devout Muslim or a military official. In some, he’s imperious and grave; in others, he smiles with open arms.
People sit on empty petrol cans, bony children, old men sucking roots to freshen their mouths. Electrical wires travel limply from one building to the next. The searing ghibli bears plastic bags and litter left behind by desert tourists.
There’s no work, just sugary drinks and goats and dates to can for export.
Many of the young leave to find work in the oil reserves, the black blocks on the map, the eternal flames of the desert.
It’s not a real city. It’s an aggregation of lives.
Farid lives in the old city, in one of those low houses with doors all round the same central court, a wild garden, a gate that’s always open. He walks to school, runs on his thin legs with their skin that peels like the bark on reeds. His mother, Jamila, wraps sesame sticks in paper for his snack.
After school, he and his friends play with a little old cart that drags tin cans, or else football. He rolls like a grub in the red dust. He steals little bananas and bunches of black dates. With the help of a rope, he climbs high into the heart of those trees full of shadows.
Round his neck, he wears an amulet, a little leather pouch stuffed with beads and a few tufts of animal fur. All children wear them.
Evil eyes will look at the amulet. You will be safe
, his mother explained.
Omar, Farid’s father, is a technician. He installs TV aerials. He waits for the signal, smiling at the women who don’t want to miss the next episode of the Egyptian soap opera and treat him like a saviour of dreams. Jamila is jealous of those stupid women. She studied singing, but her husband won’t let her perform during weddings or at festivals, let alone for tourists. So Jamila sings for Farid, her only spectator in the rooms full of drapes and rugs and smelling of sagebrush and herbs beneath the domed plaster roof of their house.
Farid is in love with his mother and her arms, which make a breeze like palm leaves, and the smell of her breath when she sings one of her maloufs full of love and tears, and her heart swells so much that she has to hold it tight so it won’t fall into the rusty iron rainwater basin that’s always dry.
His mother is young, like a sister. Sometimes they play bride and groom. Farid combs her hair, adjusts her veil.
Jamila’s forehead is a round stone; her eyes are rimmed like a bird’s; her lips are two sweet, ripe dates.
It’s a sunset with no wind. The sky is peach-coloured.
Farid leans against the wall in his garden. He studies his feet, the filthy toes sticking out of his sandals.
A flurry of new moss is growing in one of the cracks in the wall. Farid bends to smell the fresh scent. Only then does he realize that an animal is breathing beside him, so close that he can’t move. His heart leaps into his eyes.
He’s afraid it might be a uaddan, a legendary creature, part sheep, part donkey, with big horns. His grandfather told him it sometimes appears on the horizon between two dunes, an evil mirage. It’s been a long time since anyone has seen a uaddan, but Grandfather Mussa swears the creature still hides in the black sandstone wadi, where living things are unable to survive. Grandfather Mussa says the uaddan’s very angry about all the jeeps ruining the desert, damaging it with their wheels.
But the animal doesn’t have white tufts and lunar horns, and she’s not grinding her teeth. She has a sand-coloured coat and horns so thin they look like twigs. The animal gazes at Farid. She may be hungry.
Farid realizes it’s a gazelle, a young gazelle. She doesn’t run away. Her eyes, wide and so near, are lustrous and calm. Her coat shivers with a sudden tremor. Maybe the animal is trembling, just like Farid. But the gazelle is also too curious to move away. Farid slowly moves a branch towards her. The gazelle opens a mouth full of flat white teeth and tears off a few fresh pistachios, then backs away in her tracks without taking her eyes off Farid. All of a sudden, she turns, jumps over the earthen wall, and runs over the horizon of the dunes, kicking up sand.
At school the next day, Farid fills pages with gazelles. He draws them crookedly in pencil, then jabs his finger in tempera paint to colour them in.
The television is broadcasting a continuous loop of the film the colonel produced with Anthony Quinn starring as the legendary Omar Mukhtar, the Bedouin leader who fought like a lion against the Italian invaders. Farid is proud. He can feel his heart beating in his bones. His father’s name is Omar, like the desert hero.
Farid and his friends play war with blowguns made from reeds that spit out pistachios and red rocks left behind by storms.
You’re dead! You’re dead!
They fight on, because no one wants to throw himself to the ground and end the game.
Farid knows that war has broken out somewhere.
His parents whisper until late at night, and his friends say weapons have arrived from the frontier. They saw them being unloaded from jeeps at night. They’d like to have an AK-47 or a rocket launcher, too.
They fire off a few Bengal flares beside the old deaf beggar.
Farid jumps around and has so much fun.
Hisham, his youngest uncle, a university student in Benghazi, has joined the rebel forces.
Grandfather Mussa, who works as a guide taking tourists to the Cursed Mountain, and knows how to recognize snake tracks and read rock drawings, says Hisham is stupid, that he’s read too many books.
He says the colonel has paved Libya over with tarmac and cement, filled it with black Tuaregs from Mali, carved the words of that ridiculous green book of his on every wall, met with bankers and politicians the world over, his escort of beautiful women in tow as if he were an actor on holiday. But he’s a Bedouin just like them, a man of the desert. He defended their race, which was persecuted by history, pushed back to the edges of the oases. Better him than the Muslim Brotherhood.
Hisham said,
Freedom is better
.
Omar climbs onto the roof to adjust the satellite dish. They manage to get a channel that isn’t scrambled by the regime. The coastal cities are burning. Now they know that the prophet of a united Africa is firing upon his Jamahiriya, his peopledom. At this point, he’s alone in the halls of power. When Grandfather Mussa sees Misurata destroyed, he tears his print of the colonel off the wall and throws it under the bed.
The telegram comes. Hisham has lost his sight – a shrapnel wound to the face. He won’t use his eyes to read books any more. Everyone cries; everyone prays. Hisham is in the hospital in Benghazi. At least he’s alive. He’s not in a green bag like Fatima’s son.
On the streets, people scratch the colonel’s words from the walls, cover them with slogans of liberty and caricatures of the Big Rat and his fake medals. Rocks decapitate the statue at the entrance to the medina.
It’s nighttime. There’s nothing but a little bare light that won’t stop trembling as if from a cough. Omar empties a bag onto the table. There’s money inside, all the dinars from Omar’s savings, plus the euros and dollars Grandfather Mussa has earned with the tourists in the desert. Omar counts the money, then pulls out a stone and hides it in the wall. He talks with Jamila, clutches her little hands in his own. Farid isn’t sleeping. He looks at that knot of hands wavering in the dark like a coconut in the rain.
Omar says they have to go. That they should have gone a while ago. There’s no future in the desert. Now there’s war. He’s afraid for the child.
Farid thinks his father is wrong to be afraid for him. He’s ready for war, just like Uncle Hishram. He’s covered his eyes with his hands to see what it’s like to be blind. You bang into things, but it doesn’t matter.
Farid leans against the wall in his garden.
The gazelle always comes noiselessly – a light leap and there she is, with her rimmed eyes, her diamond-shaped pupils, her ears with their light, tufty fur, and her bone horns, little and coiled. They’ve become friends. Farid hasn’t told anyone about her. But he’s always worried someone will find out, terrified someone will catch her. She’s young and overly trusting, taking risks, coming too far into the residential area. She ventures along, tension beneath her coat, quivering muscles primed to bound away, not to stay. Each time they have to get accustomed to trusting. They belong to the same desert but to different races. Farid presses himself back against the wall and waits for the gazelle to breathe out of her dark nostrils so that he can breathe with her. She moves her muzzle. She wants to play. Once, when she sits on her hind legs, it looks like his mother at sunset, the same regal pose.
It’s a spring morning. Omar is working on the roof. He connects electrical cables and waits for a spark, the signal that the soap opera is safe. These days, the electricity comes and goes in hiccups. The women don’t want to think about the war; they want to cry over love. They want to find out whether the good man will learn that his son is really his and whether the bad man will plummet over the cliff in his black car.
Farid saw Omar step backwards on the roof, vainly seek for something to grab on to, stumble, stand back up. Other men have climbed up on the village roofs, men in camouflage outfits and yellow hats. They look like construction workers, but they shoot, aiming low at the people in the market, who run and yell. The men are loyalist troops. Many are foreigners,
murtaziqa
, paid mercenaries from other, sub-Saharan wars. When they shoot, they yell like in the movies. A half-naked soldier crouches to do his business. Maybe he drank too much tamarind juice, or maybe he’s scared. Now he fires like that, trousers down.
Omar stayed to watch them. He tried to speak, to stop them. They put a rifle down his throat.
Fight with us or you’re dead
. Farid saw his father slide towards the rain gutter. He was missing a shoe. Farid could see one of the beige socks Jamila mended in the evenings. The men put a pistol into his father’s hands. Omar shot into the sky towards the birds that weren’t there. Then he let the pistol fall. The man without trousers pushed Farid’s father off the roof.
Farid saw the pick-up trucks with machine guns and bazookas and dirty, wild faces, green flags wrapped round their heads. They even killed the animals to scare the people.
Fortunately, the gazelle wasn’t there that day. She only came when it was quiet.
Jamila waited for night to fall, night that is never as dark as one thinks. The full moon lit up the sandhills and the palm groves, the buildings, and the clay houses with their spiky points against the evil eye.
She hid Farid in the root cellar with the tealeaves and hanging dried meat. All around came lightning bursts of fire, shots, the smell of burning petrol in the sand.