The Salt Road (29 page)

Reluctantly, I put it around my neck.

Habiba regarded it gravely. ‘Good.’

Her scrutiny made me uncomfortable. Swiftly, I changed the subject. ‘Now, what about her medications?’

Habiba laughed. ‘She won’t take anything the doctor gives her, only the herbal remedies the old women make. But lately she’s refused to take anything at all.’

‘She’ll be all right, won’t she?’ I asked nervously. It struck me suddenly and rather belatedly that taking such a sick old woman into the greatest wilderness on earth might not be such a good idea.

Habiba quickly read the look on my face. ‘She’ll be fine,
insh’allah
. And if she isn’t …’ She spread her hands. ‘Taïb will deal with it: he’s very capable.
You
needn’t worry.’

I felt suitably chastened, sensing that she had caught me out yet again in my Western selfishness. I was, if I were being truthful, suddenly terrified at being in the proximity of death. But for these people death was ever-present, a part of life, in a way that it simply wasn’t for us in the West, where it was hidden away, made distant and clinical and more taboo than it had ever been, as if the idea that we did not control everything in the world would somehow bring the whole shaky façade crashing down around us.

Taïb put his head around the door. He looked as if he had taken a shower: his head was wet and he wore his turban draped loose around his neck, over a T-shirt and jeans that I realized he must have been wearing under the robe that was now bundled under his arm. Seeing Lallawa in her regalia, he beamed. ‘
T’fulkit
,’ he said; and whatever that meant wreathed her face in smiles. Then he looked right at me. His glance brushed the amulet, then returned to my face. ‘Beautiful,’ he said softly and held my gaze until I looked away. Then he bent and swept up the old woman, just as he had carried me into the hotel; but where I had been stiff and resisting, Lallawa grinned so widely that I could see the back of her throat.

We got her safely stowed in the back seat of the car in a cocoon of blankets, held upright by the seat belt, and I came back for the bag of food and drink the crow-women had put together to sustain us on the journey. At the doorway Habiba gave me a short, fierce hug. ‘Thank you for doing this,’ she said, her dark eyes intent on mine. ‘Thank you. I am sorry I was harsh with you yesterday. This is a good thing you are doing, you and Taïb.’ Then she turned, waved and went back into the house.

‘
Vous allez bien, madame?
’ I asked the old lady, though I knew she couldn’t understand me. Her little wrinkled face peered out at me from amidst her headscarf and jewellery: she looked like a gypsy fortuneteller abducted from an end-of-the-pier show. The blanket stirred and out came her hand, as brown as a monkey’s paw, and a moment later her thumb came up in the universal gesture of all good things.

We left Tiouada just as the sun came up over the hills, flooding the car with its bright beams. Nothing stirred in the still dawn except for a group of sparrows taking a dust bath by the side of the road; they burst up into the air, their dun wings full of light, which suddenly rendered them golden and magical, little streaks of fire against the azure sky.

I turned to point them out to Lallawa, but her head was already nodding, her folded hands rising and falling rhythmically over the swell of her bosom. ‘She’s asleep,’ I told Taïb softly, and he glanced in the rear-view mirror.

‘No need to whisper: she’s very deaf.’

‘Poor thing. And her eyes too. She’s got glaucoma, hasn’t she?’

‘Cataracts, certainly. A life in the desert sun is harsh on the eyes,’ he agreed. ‘But she can still see.’

‘I thought she was almost blind. I hope this won’t be a wasted trip for her.’

‘She will see the desert, blind or not,’ Taïb said cryptically. ‘It’s a gift she shares with the People of the Veil.’

‘The People of the Veil?’

‘The Kel Tagelmust: the people who wear the veil. It’s what the desert people call themselves. The term “Tuareg” is not often used.’

‘But it’s what you said to me when you were talking about your family’s roots. You said you were Tuareg.’

He gave an almost imperceptible shrug. ‘It’s an easy shorthand. Actually it’s an Arab coinage. Some say it derives from the region known as the Targa in Libya, since the word for one Tuareg is “Targui”; others that it means “cast out by God” or “those whom God has cursed”; but that’s probably because they resisted the Bedouin tribes who invaded from the east in the eighth century bringing Islam with them so fiercely.’

‘And the Blue Men? I’ve heard them called that too.’

‘They prized indigo robes and turbans over everything other than their camels: good indigo cloth is hard to come by and very expensive. It’s been a form of currency throughout Africa for centuries and to achieve a really good-quality fabric takes a lot of work: the Hausa dye-masters dye the cloth ten times over and then beat it till it acquires a glittering sheen. And the better the quality, the more dye there is in the cloth, and the more of it will come off on the skin, marking the wearer indelibly as Kel Tagelmust. The odd thing is that it does actually protect the skin: it keeps moisture from escaping the body, and the women swear by its cosmetic properties too. So that’s what makes them Blue Men.’

‘Or Blue Women.’ I smiled. ‘But Lallawa … forgive me … Lallawa is much darker of skin than any of the rest of your family. She doesn’t bear much resemblance.’

Even in profile, he looked embarrassed. ‘She’s not exactly … of the family, not originally. She’s
iklan
.’

‘
Iklan?
’

‘A slave.’

‘A
slave
?’ I heard my voice rise an octave.

Taïb sighed. ‘Lallawa was bought by Habiba’s great-grandfather for cones of salt from traders in the south of Algeria. No one knows exactly where she came from, least of all Lallawa herself: she was no more than a child when she was captured. She was probably a victim of a tribal war in Guinea or the Ivory Coast, taken prisoner along with other members of her tribe by the victors and sold to passing traders. That was during the time when all of our family still lived a desert life, of course, and while Lallawa was young and able. She’s been with the family ever since:
iklan
are not treated like slaves in the way you think, but like regular members of the tribe. They shared the same encampment, travelled the same hard road, shared the same food; they chose their own husbands and wives and raised their own children; and when they became old and could no longer work, they were looked after just like the elderly of the tribe. And so when Habiba’s father made the decision in the sixties to give up the nomadic life and move to Tiouada, it was quite natural that Lallawa should come with the family. She said she had always wanted her own house, her own animals: it was Habiba’s brothers who built her house for her and set up her smallholding, before they went to work in Casablanca. She was sad to leave it, but Habiba said she was just too ill to be left there alone.’

I stared at him, taking all this in. How unimaginable to have been a slave in this day and age, to have been forcibly uprooted from your home and family, to have been carried off and sold like merchandise. It was hard to believe that a woman who had suffered this fate should exist in this, the twenty-first, century; that she should be fast asleep in the back of the car in which I now sat. The concept was impossible to assimilate, let alone justify, no matter how easily Taïb spoke of it. ‘And just when did this sort of thing, this slavery, come to an end?’ I tried and failed to keep the outrage out of my voice.

After a long pause, Taïb said, ‘Well, it varied. The Tuareg are a people without boundaries, so traditionally they have not been subject to any form of central government or law, only to their tribal chiefs and the leaders of a regional drum-group. And you have to remember that much of North and West Africa was until quite recently subject to colonial control, mainly by the French. The colonials largely turned a blind eye towards slavery, simply didn’t address the issue. It wasn’t until the individual countries won their independence from colonialism in the sixties that slavery was formally prohibited and the Tuareg way of life was dismantled, often violently.’

‘And how do you feel about this part of your heritage?’ I asked, curious.

He shot me a look. ‘How do you feel about
your
heritage? With a French mother and a British father I would imagine you must have your own share of slave-owning forebears.’

This didn’t seem entirely fair, but I couldn’t think of a useful rebuttal, and so for a while we drove in silence through the dusty vistas, past towers of crumbling rock and dried-up riverbeds bordered by scrubby vegetation and the occasional shocking burst of green oleander or palm. The few scattered settlements we passed were half-hearted affairs: squat, single-storey adobe buildings of the same dull red-brown as the soil out of which they rose. The further south we went, the more rudimentary these hamlets became, the higher the incidence of bare breeze-block, as if no one could raise the optimism or the energy to complete the buildings with render and paint. Man was losing the battle with the natural environment here, his influence losing traction, slipping backwards; for several kilometres we did not even pass another vehicle.

Clouds of dust swirled in the air outside; even with the air conditioning on I could smell it, spicy and musty, clogging the hairs of my nostrils; feel it coating the inside of my mouth and settling heavily at the top of my lungs. Dusty flatlands gave way to a rugged lunar landscape of barren peaks and jagged outcrops of jutting slate, all stabbing at an angle into the hard ground like foundered ships in a sea of rock, bringing to mind, despite the different colour values and environment, the north Devon coast at Hartland and Sharpnose where I’d climbed one summer and refused, superstitiously, to return to. The area had a grim, forbidding air to it, even on a sunny day. It was a coastline haunted by shipwrecks and drownings, a place that had long been seasoned by death and disaster. I’d had the same sensation there that I had here: that we were intruders in a place where the natural world didn’t want us to be, and that it had made itself ugly and unwelcoming in a determined effort to keep us out. I was still turning over this Gothic notion in my mind when Taïb said suddenly, ‘Look!’

He brought the car to a halt just in time for me to see an enormously bushy-tailed fox propelling itself in great galvanic bursts of adrenalin-fuelled energy up an almost-sheer rock face, terrified by the noisy thunder of our approach.

I watched it in amazement and admiration: admiration for its flamboyant brush and thick, glossy coat of rust and black; amazement that a thing so vital and beautiful could exist in this dusty cauldron of a place. It seemed a minor miracle of life in the midst of such deadness and I said so to Taïb.

He snorted. ‘Of course there are animals here! Did you think that just because you did not see them they did not exist, or that because there are no people to be seen there’s no living thing in this zone? This fox lives here because there are rabbits to hunt; the rabbits are here because there are tender plants and good burrows to be had amongst the boulders. Keep watching and you’ll see hawks and owls too. And when the sun goes down you’ll hear jackals and wild boar. Herds of gazelle pass through these valleys on their way to their grazing grounds in the north. There is life everywhere, as you’ll see, even in the depths of the desert.’

‘And what sort of fox was that? I’ve never seen one with such a bushy tail, or with such a dark coat.’

He looked at me oddly. ‘It was just a fox,’ he said.

A few minutes later a white-tailed black bird jinked low across the ground in front of the car and vanished into the branches of a thorny tree. ‘What was that?’ I asked.

‘The tree’s an acacia. The bird? I have no idea.’

‘I thought you knew everything about the wild world,’ I teased, and watched him bridle.

‘Our people don’t share the European mania for naming and categorizing,’ he chided me. ‘You think that just because you can give something a name you know something about it; but if I told you its name, what more would you know about it? Nothing essential about its nature, nothing important at all: just an artificial word some man has randomly attached to the creature that won’t make it fly any better or produce more young. It is another form of colonialism, this naming of our world.’

This stung me. ‘Look, it wasn’t
me
who colonized your wretched country! I didn’t even like my French family.’ I saw his lips twitch and realized I had just swallowed the bait.

‘So, Isabelle, tell me about your family, your childhood.’

‘I’d rather not,’ I said primly.

‘What, you will punish me now for being sharp with you?’

‘It’s not that. It’s just … well, there’s not much to say.’

‘That’s the saddest thing in the world to say about your childhood. Can you really dismiss it so easily?’

‘I was a different person then.’

‘How can that be? When I look back at who I was at the age of four, then nine, or fifteen, I can see that I am still the same person now as I was then – whether I am walking the streets of Paris or in the Tafraout souq. Nothing has greatly changed who I am. I have just learnt more lessons about life, about other people, and myself. But I hope I haven’t lost the essential innocence or joy of the boy I was back then.’

I sat quietly, thinking about this, envying him such simplicity, such clarity in his life. Could I remember my four-year-old self? I could, if I tried, quite clearly – little Izzy, always out in the garden, making things: castles and hides and daisy chains and wormeries and nests for birds who never used them. I smiled, but the memory was tinged with sadness, for I was not that Izzy any more. ‘Tell me about your childhood,’ I said instead, deflecting the awkward subject. And so we drove through endless wastes of fractured rock and low scarps and black pyramidal hills rising mistily through the dust-filled air, while Lallawa snored softly on the back seat and Taïb told me tales from his youth. How he had been the leader of a band of boys who ran riot through the town, stealing fruit from the orchards, playing war-games amongst the rocks, creeping into the donkey-park on market day and letting loose all the hobbled donkeys, driving them into the hills so that all the poor folk returning with their sacks of shopping from the souq found their transport home to the outlying villages milling around in noisy confusion. How they would run off into the mountains with whatever food they could cadge or steal. It had one day been Taïb’s task to bring a chicken as a dare, and so he had sneaked out to where the neighbours kept their livestock and made off with a struggling bird stuffed down inside his robe. How they had got up into the mountains and prepared to butcher the poor thing only to find their only penknife so blunt that even sawing at the chicken’s neck caused no harm but a great deal of squawking, and how in the end the chicken had wrestled itself free and gone staggering off into the wilds with its neck at a peculiar angle and its wings shedding feathers as it ran, and they had all laughed so much no one had thought to go after it. ‘I like to think it’s still out there somewhere,’ Taïb said, his black eyes gleaming, ‘having founded a dynasty of wrench-necked, rugged mountain chickens.’