It was still dark when Hamsa got up, and the wind out of the east was whistling over the cliff face, rattling the branches and leaves like a thousand maracas. He could hear the waves crashing violently on the rocks at the foot of the cliff. He finished his ablutions, then knelt to pray on the skin of a sheep slaughtered at the last Aid el Kebir. He brewed a glass of tea on his small brazier, broke open a dark round loaf of bread, and dunked a piece of it in a dish of olive oil. “In God’s name,” he said, and began to eat.
It was just getting light when he set out toward the slopes of Shlokía, where he had last seen the stray lamb just before returning to the sheep cote the day before. He followed the road along the cliff, the frogs still croaking around him, and passed below a big abandoned house that had once belonged to the Perdicaris family. Instead of following the path through the pine woods, he chose a trail through the thickets where he had found other strays in the past. Raising his arms from time to time against the thorns, he moved inward through a dim tunnel of vegetation. It was dangerous here, he knew—he could easily run into a wild boar—but he wasn’t afraid. He knew no djinn would come here: the djinn hated thorns (which was why Muslims let thorns grow on their family graves). The thicket was damp with dew, and inside it stank of resin, rosemary, and porcupine droppings.
Beyond the wide swath of bushes lay the shore with its big boulders and punishing waves over which a cold wind buffeted the seagulls back and forth. Hamsa cried out twice for the lamb, looking carefully down the slope as the first rays of daylight gilded the sides of the rocks. Nothing. He climbed up to the little grove that concealed the ruins of the old Spanish boating club, and looked into what had once been the swimming pool, now ruined and overgrown with grass. Nothing. Finally, he climbed back down to the steep rocks where the sea was pounding.
He was standing next to a rock wall when he saw the lamb a few meters below him, cornered between two boulders, splashed intermittently by the waves; it was trembling. How had it gotten there? Maybe some of the soldiers’ dogs had chased it—they had their barracks near the boating club. He began to ease himself down, sliding dangerously along the wall, his body pressed to the sandy rock. He was seized with an irrepressible shiver, the way one is when scaling the trunk of a very tall tree. His foot searched blindly for support in a chink of the rock but couldn’t find one. His sweaty hands locked for a moment onto a sharp outcropping. Suddenly, a turtledove flew close behind him. Hamsa turned his head with a shudder, and the rock came off in his hand with a dull crack. He landed feet first on the rocks below, a stab of pain in his heel. He looked around him.
“Yalatif!”
His fall had sent the lamb tumbling into the sea.
Without taking his eyes off the animal, its little white head bobbing in the waves, Hamsa quickly stripped off his gandura, his Nikes, and his drawers. Calling out God’s name, he jumped into the water.
Hamsa had been smoking kif since he was a child. His grandmother Fátima tried to get him to quit, going so far as to sprinkle drops of urine on the kif, but it was no use. Hamid, his father, now dead, laughed the day Fátima told him how she had surprised Hamsa stealing kif from his sheep-bladder pouch as he slept.
“A chip off the old block,” he said.
Hamsa smoked kif every day when he herded for Si Mohammed M’rabati, who had hundreds of sheep, and who liked the idea that they pastured on the slopes of Agla, which lay between Tangier and Cape Spartel. Sitting on a flat rock, watching the sea in the mouth of the strait, Hamsa would play his lyre to relax after a pipe. Sometimes he would go down as far as the Sinduq, a giant rock shaped like a coffer half-sunk in the sea, to see the creamy blue water rise and fall among the honey- and cinnamon-colored boulders. But he usually couldn’t smoke there. The east wind or the north wind would pick the kif right up and scatter it over the water, where it might stir up the dreadful beings who lived under the waves and who could bring bad luck. You could get sick and have impure thoughts. Like when Hamsa had to pass a night in the quba, the tomb of Sidi Mesmudi, which is in Monte Viejo, because he had caught typhus. The next morning he saw a woman give a black chicken to an old man with a yellow turban. He watched the old man draw a knife from under his shirt, call upon Allah, and, crouching next to the saint’s fountain, cut the animal’s throat. Or like when he had sullied himself with a sheep, hiding behind a black canvas lean-to, wishing all the while that the sheep would turn into a woman but thankful that God had at least ordered things in such a way that the sheep didn’t get pregnant. Or like when he plunged his penis into a pile of donkey dung to make it grow bigger.
He opened his eyes. The sky was liquid blue, and the cold, though not as intense as he had expected, was countless needles and bubbles stuck to his skin. He spit salt water and blinked, looking for the lamb. Two strokes and he reached it. It had a fibrous little body, incredibly heavy for its size. Hamsa’s head sank under a wave, and he felt a sharp sting of salt in his nostrils and a sourness in his throat, but he managed to get the animal to float. He paddled hard to keep it up above the rough surface of the water, as it churned back and forth between the boulders. With his free arm he struggled to approach the shore without being thrown against the rocks. He clutched at the foot of the large rock he had leapt from and rested a moment in a crevice, precariously shielded from the violence of the waves. He slung the lamb over his shoulders and crept up the rock as far as the landing where he had stripped off his clothes. The wind, coming in gusts from above, whistled and made the chill bone-deep. The lamb trembled uncontrollably, like an electric toy, in the little puddle of water draining from its wool; a ray of sunlight grazed its back as Hamsa stood at its side, taking the same ray full on his face.
“Hamdul-láh,” he said, but at this moment the wind lifted up his pile of clothes, which lay one step away from him on the rock. They traced a downward arc into the sea.
“Shaitán!”
Hamsa leapt into the water again.
On the way back to the hut, the lamb over his shoulders, Hamsa thought of his uncle Jalid, who was living in Spain. The last time his uncle had come to visit, he had given him the (imitation) Nikes he now wore constantly. They were the envy of Ismail, his playmate. Ismail was going to envy him all his life, because, as his uncle had said, Hamsa would be rich and would own lands and livestock. His father had died poor, and when Hamsa grew up, he would have to support his grandparents, Fátima and Artifo, who worked as servants in a house owned by a Christian woman in Monte Viejo.
“You want to have money, don’t you?” his uncle said.
Hamsa reflected.
“Yes,” he said.
And his uncle explained how, working for him, he would begin to earn money. It was an easy job, but only Hamsa could do it, because he knew that part of the coast better than anyone besides his uncle, who from childhood had been a shepherd like Hamsa, and, later, a fisherman. (It was a dangerous coast, lined with reefs and rocks, and full of steep cliffs and slopes covered with all sorts of vegetation, soaked incessantly by the sea wind.)
Before going back to Spain, his uncle visited the hut where Hamsa lived. Little Ismail was there, helping Hamsa mark the sheep they would sell that Sunday in the market.
“Bghit n’hadar m’ak,” said his uncle. “I want to talk to you.”
Hamsa told Ismail to get lost, and the boy ran out and disappeared behind some rocks. The uncle sat down on a stool that Hamsa kept in the shadow of a twisted fig tree, and Hamsa squatted in front of him, wiping the grime off his hands on the folds of his gandura.
“Iyeh?”
Was Hamsa ready to do the work? All his uncle asked was that Hamsa watch a certain part of the coast during one night. A speedboat with Jalid in it would approach the coast from Cádiz, and Hamsa would have to send signals with a lantern. Was Hamsa capable of spending the whole night awake, alert, so that no one, neither gendarmes nor soldiers patrolling the beach, would surprise them?
Of course he could do it, Hamsa said. He was already thinking of the various ways he knew to fight off sleep, like eating red ants or the dirt of an ant hill, drinking water with lice, or wearing an amulet made from an owl’s eye.
“I knew I could count on you,” his uncle told him. “You’re a winner. You’ll have cars and as many women as you want—even though they really cause a lot of problems.” He smiled.
Jalid returned to Spain a few days later, and before long he sent news to Hamsa. They would decide soon on the exact date and place.
It was nearly noon and the wind had almost dried his clothes when he set the lamb on the ground beside the fig tree. It shook itself violently and sneezed. Then it ran toward the corral of rocks and thorns to be near the flock and stood trembling against the fence in a patch of sunlight.
Hamsa went into the hut, blew on the embers that were still glowing in the brazier, and began to prepare his tea. Then he went out into the sun and sat down under the fig tree with his kif pipe. But smoking soon gave him a light headache, and Hamsa knew he had been struck by the berd, the cold that could pierce one to the bone. The wind was still blowing cold and hard; it had grown worse since sunrise.
In the afternoon, he took the flock as far as the pasture at the foot of the ruined house. He carried his lyre with him, but he didn’t play it. Water flowed from his nostrils.
When the sun went down behind the mountain, Hamsa began to drive the flock back to the corral.
—Derrrrrr! Derrrrrr!
After counting the animals, he boiled some sheep’s milk in a saucepan, drank a little, and fell asleep on a cushion of sheepskins, covered with a woolen shawl. Later, stretched out in the darkness, he felt the bite of the cold in all his bones. The sound of the wind nauseated him. He woke several times with the sensation that he was falling. He sank into his sickness. What would happen if his uncle called for him this very day? he wondered.
He woke up late, after dawn, drenched in sweat. When Ismail lifted the curtain of the hut to look inside, the daylight blinded Hamsa.
“Are you sick?” asked Ismail. “What’s the matter?”
Hamsa sat up.
“The cold.”
The boy came inside and sat down next to him. He kept looking at him in silence.
“What shall we do?” he asked.
Hamsa opened and closed his eyes.
“You know what would do you good?” said Ismail. “Some milk with pennyroyal.”
“I’ve got milk here. Do you know where to get pennyroyal?”
“No.” The boy stood up.
“Go and ask for a handful from my grandmother.”
When the boy had gone, Hamsa sank back into a dream. A battle of swords that turned out to be bulrushes or reeds, then a rain of pebbles.
“Aulidi,” said the voice of his grandmother, but she was not speaking to him. “Go tell Si Mohammed that Hamsa is sick and that he should send someone to look after the sheep. I’m going home now to talk with madame (who wouldn’t mind putting him up for a few days, they knew how generous she was) and I’ll be back in a taxi for him.”
Ismail did not move. He stared at her with an expression that the old woman understood.
“Ah, you want money. Here, a hundred francs.” She dropped a coin in the boy’s little hand, which closed on it quickly.
In the tool shed where they made a bed for him, Hamsa spent two days burning with fever. His grandmother made him drink milk with pennyroyal, fed him pennyroyal couscous, and rubbed his body with sheep grease, to which also she added pennyroyal powder.
“Drink this, my son. You’ll be better soon.”
Mohammed had sent Ismail to tell Hamsa not to worry, that old Larbi would take care of the flock while he was gone. Mohammed also sent fifty dirhams to pay for medicine, but Fátima didn’t think much of the medicine of the Nazarenes, and she put away the money for future needs.
On the third morning, still weak and painfully stiff in his neck and shoulders, Hamsa stood up and took a few steps around the room. Later, he went out into the garden. The east wind was blowing hard as ever, and the sky was clear. The sun, mirrored a thousand times in the leaves, hurt his eyes so much he quickly went back inside to the comfort of the darkness.
At noon, his grandfather brought him chicken stew and sat down to have lunch with him.
“Now you’re better,” he said. “Tomorrow you’ll go back to work.” He drew from his jacket Hamsa’s motui, the kit containing his pipe and kif, and put it on the mat with a gesture of tolerant disapproval. “Ismail brought this for you.”
In the afternoon, when the light was softer and the wind had calmed, Hamsa went out into the garden again. He sat down in a raised section near an old monkey tree that grew on the other side of a bed of lilies. From there, behind the cane fence in the lower part of the garden, he could see the white hills of Tangier and the ocean. He watched a woman come out of the little guest house at the far end of the garden. He stopped smoking. She wore blue jeans and a white shirt, and her long blond hair was loose and damp. She wasn’t young, but she wasn’t old either. She crossed the garden by the flagstone path and turned into the main house. Hamsa smoked another pipe of kif. Now a man, who could have been Moroccan but who, judging by his clothes and way of walking, must have been European, came out of the guest house and followed the woman’s steps up the gravel path. “Whore,” Hamsa thought. A little later he could hear Madame Choiseul’s car start and Fátima’s voice shout at Artifo to open the gate. The noise of the car faded as it went down toward the city, and Hamsa took up his pipe again, dreaming that he was a rich man and that the garden was his.