A secret in the wind

One could almost see the dryness in the air. That afternoon on the Barbary Coast, autumn announced itself in the wind over the walled city of Mogador. Its unseen surges, long and dry, making their way through the reefs like frenzied snakes, wrestling from the scoured stones the sound of something being torn.

And, as happened every year when the season announced itself in this fashion, the birds of the port appeared to answer that sound with caws of alarm. The next morning, the most vulnerable of the birds migrated. That morning the small Moon Tail Gulls, the Sea Turkeys, the Red Crows, the Chilly Storks, and the Dwarf Fowl--those devoured by fish--flew in ever widening circles around the small boats and vanished. The boats continued knocking their hulls slowly against the dock pilings as the birds disappeared over the horizon, reappeared for an instant, hurriedly approached, then vanished once again.

The city was falling irresistibly before the new climate--cruel bird with cold, transparent feather--as Farina at her window heard the wind between the rocks, felt the dryness of the air on her lips, and let her eyes accompany the birds in their indecisive flight.

But Fatma's gaze, obstinate and removed, was a target in flight for thousands of rumors. It was pierced by the arrows of a small city's populace who saw in her fixity the fluttering form of an enigma: a possible secret whose shadow troubled the line of the horizon.

While a hundred rumors crisscrossed the city, the afternoon wind removed the sediments of salt deposited oil the wall over the course of the year, lifting large, delicate white leaves off the stone. The moment the leaves of salt were loosened from the wall, the children ran to catch them and then returned home, walking slowly with the fragile sheets in their hands. The sheets of salt never arrived, for the same wind that brought them would snatch them away, and as it sent them flying, reduced them to a dust so free as to be indistinguishable from the air itself.

Fatma saw the children sink their hands in the stone and gently lift several lengths of Free, spire cloth, which in the sun and from her window seemed splashed with shining stitches. These scraps of cloth exploded in the children's hands without a sound. For all instant, they were enveloped by a luminous cloud that vanished as they waved their arms about, trying to hold on to what they could no longer even see.

With great attention, Fatma watched this scene over and over again, a daily event during that season in Mogador. For she had suddenly begun to observe commonplace events with meticulous attention, finding in them a window onto a world that remained an enigma to everyone else. "Fatma, you look at things as if you'd come from another land," they would say to her, "as if you were early interested in flies buzzing in the distance or birds flying by night." No one could pinpoint the day Fatma's spirit had taken its new and strange course.

When everyone understood this, it already seemed too late and there was no advice to be given nor any dear reason for offering condolences. She was doing everything in a way that exasperated the women and the men, while at the same time inciting them to try to discover what it was that had changed her so.

Everyone in Mogador wanted to know her secret and set out to discover it like someone trying to extract a confession front a mute by interpreting that person's silences: each would put his or her own choice of words in that sealed mouth.

Fatma knew that all around her crude gossip was being spread, but she showed no anxiety, as if all her thoughts were embedded in an unseen cloth, and she knew for sure that no one could grasp her secret because it was made of a light, shining fabric comparable only to those sudden clouds of salt that in the afternoon slipped from the children's clenched hands.

From Mogador: The Nantes of the Air, by Alberto Ruy Sanchez, published by City Lights Books, San Francisco, California, 1992. Translation [c] 1992 by Mark Schafer.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Organization of American States
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