Desert (29 page)

Lalla feels the sunlight penetrating her, gradually filling her, driving out everything that is dark and sad deep inside. She no longer thinks about Aamma’s place, about the dark courtyards with dripping laundry. She no longer thinks about the Hotel Sainte-Blanche, or even about all of those streets, avenues, boulevards, where people are endlessly walking, endlessly rumbling along. She becomes like a piece of rock, covered with moss and lichen, immobile, with no thoughts, dilated in the heat of the sun. Sometimes she even falls asleep, leaning against the blue tarpaulin, her knees pulled up under her chin, and she dreams she’s in a boat gliding out on the still sea, all the way out to the other side of the world.

The huge freighters glide slowly through the black basins. They go over to the entrance of the harbor; they want to go back out to sea. Lalla plays at following them, running along the wharves as far as she can. She can’t read their names, but she looks at their flags, the rust stains on their hulls, and their huge derricks folded back like antennae, and their chimneys decorated with stars, crosses, checkers, suns. In front of the freighters, the pilot boat sails out with a waddling motion like an insect, and when the freighters reach the high seas, they blow their horns, just once or twice, like that, to say good-bye.

The water in the harbor is lovely too, and Lalla often settles down with her back leaning up against a bollard, legs dangling over the water. She looks at the rainbow-colored oil slicks making and unmaking their clouds, and all the odd things drifting on the surface, beer bottles, orange peels, plastic bags, pieces of wood and rope, and that sort of brown foam that comes from who knows where, stretching like strings of spittle along the wharves. When a ship goes by, wavelets spread out from its wake, lapping up against the wharves. The wind blows very hard at times, driving wrinkles, shudders, over the basins, blurring the reflections of the freighters.

Some days in winter, when there is a lot of sunshine, Radicz the beggar comes to see Lalla. He walks slowly along the wharves, but Lalla recognizes him from a long way off; she comes out of her hiding place between the tarpaulins, and whistles between her fingers, as the shepherds used to back in the Hartani’s land. The boy comes running up, sits down next to her on the edge of the wharf, and they look at the water in the harbor for a while, not saying anything.

Then the boy shows Lalla something she’s never noticed before: on the surface of the black water, there are small silent explosions making circular ripples. At first Lalla looks up at the sky, because she thinks it’s from raindrops. But the sky is blue. Then she realizes there are bubbles coming up from the bottom and bursting at the surface of the water. Together they have fun watching the bubbles explode.

“There! There’s one!... Another one, another!”

“Over there, look!”

“And there!...”

Where are those bubbles coming from? Radicz says it’s the fish breathing, but Lalla thinks it’s probably the plants, and she thinks of those mysterious grasses swaying slowly at the bottom of the harbor.

After that, Radicz takes out his box of matches. He says it’s to smoke, but in truth smoking isn’t what he likes most; it’s burning matches. When he has a little money of his own, Radicz goes into a tobacco shop and buys a big box of matches with an image of a gypsy woman dancing on it. He goes to sit down in a calm spot, and strikes his matches, one after the other. He does it very quickly, just for the pleasure of watching the little red match head flare up, making its rocket sound, and then the pretty orange flame dancing at the end of the little wooden stick, sheltered in his cupped hands.

Down by the harbor, there’s a lot of wind, and Lalla has to act like a tent, holding out the flaps of her coat, and she can smell the pungent heat of the phosphorus stinging her nostrils. Every time Radicz strikes a match, they both laugh real hard, and they try to take turns holding the little piece of wood. Radicz shows Lalla how you can burn the whole match by licking the ends of your fingers and holding it by the burnt end. It makes a little hiss when Lalla takes the match by the end that’s still red hot, and it burns her thumb and index finger, but it’s not an unpleasant feeling; she watches the flame devouring the match, and the burnt wood twisting as if it were alive.

Then they smoke, one cigarette for the two of them, leaning their backs up against the blue tarp and gazing out into nothingness in the direction of the dark waters of the harbor and the cement-colored sky.

“How old are you?” Radicz asks.

“Seventeen, but I’ll be eighteen soon,” Lalla says.

“I’m going to be fourteen next month,” Radicz says.

He thinks for a minute, furrowing his eyebrows.

“Have you ever ... gone to bed with a man?”

Lalla is surprised at the question.

“No – I mean yes, why?”

Radicz is so preoccupied that he forgets to pass the cigarette to Lalla; he takes drag after drag, without inhaling the smoke.

“I haven’t done it,” he says.

“You haven’t done what?”

“I’ve never gone to bed with a woman.”

“You’re too young.”

“That’s not true!” says Radicz. He gets angry and stutters a little. “It’s not true! All my friends have done it, and there are even some who’ve got their own woman, and they make fun of me, they say I’m a faggot, because I don’t have a woman.”

He thinks some more, smoking his cigarette.

“But I don’t care what they say. I don’t think it’s right to sleep with a woman like that, just to – to act big, to joke around. It’s like cigarettes. You know, I never smoke in front of the others back at the hotel, so they think I’ve never smoked and that makes them laugh too. But that’s because they don’t know, but it’s all the same to me, I’d rather they didn’t know.”

Now he gives the cigarette back to Lalla. It’s smoked almost all the way down to the end. Lalla takes just one puff and then crushes it out on the ground on the wharf.

“You know I’m going to have a baby?”

She doesn’t really know why she’s telling that to Radicz. He looks at her for a long time without answering anything. There is something dark in his eyes, but it suddenly grows bright.

“That’s good,” he says seriously. “That’s good, I’m very happy.”

He’s so happy he can’t sit still anymore. He gets to his feet, paces around out by the water, then comes back toward Lalla.

“Will you come and see me over there, where I live?”

“If you like,” says Lalla.

“You know, it’s a long way away, you have to take the intercity bus, and then walk for a long time, toward the storage tanks. We’ll go together whenever you want to, because otherwise you’ll get lost.”

He runs off. The sun has gone down now; it’s not far from the line of big buildings that can be seen on the other side of the wharves. The freighters are still motionless, like tall rusty cliffs, and flights of gulls are swooping slowly past them, dancing above the masts.

T
HERE ARE DAYS when Lalla can hear the sounds of fear. She doesn’t really know what it is, like a heavy pounding on thick plates of metal, and also a muffled rumbling that doesn’t come through her ears, but through the soles of her feet and echoes inside her body. Maybe it’s loneliness, and hunger too, hunger for gentleness, for light, for songs, hunger for everything.

As soon as she goes out the door of the Hotel Sainte-Blanche, after finishing her work, Lalla feels the excessively white light of the sky falling upon her, making her stumble. She pulls the collar of her brown coat up as high as she can around her head, she covers her hair all the way down to her eyebrows with Aamma’s gray scarf, but the whiteness of the sky still reaches her, and the emptiness of the streets also. It’s like a feeling of nausea, rising from the pit of her stomach, coming up into her throat, filling her mouth with bitterness. Lalla sits down quickly, anywhere, without trying to understand, without worrying about the people looking at her, because she’s afraid of fainting again. She fights against it with all her might, tries to slow the beating of her heart, the movements of her entrails. She puts both of her hands on her belly, so that the gentle warmth of her hands travels through her dress, goes inside of her, till it reaches the child. That’s how she used to ease those terrible pains that would come to her lower abdomen, like an animal gnawing from the inside. Then she rocks herself a little, back and forth, sitting on the edge of the sidewalk like that, next to the stopped cars.

People go by her without stopping. They slow down a little, as if they were going to come over to her, but when Lalla looks up, there’s so much suffering in her eyes that they hurry away, because it frightens them.

After a moment, the pain subsides under Lalla’s hands. She can breathe again more freely. In spite of the cold wind, she’s covered with sweat, and her damp dress is sticking to her back. Maybe it’s the sound of fear that you don’t hear with your ears, but with your feet and your whole body, that is emptying the streets of the city.

Lalla goes back up toward the old town, slowly climbing the steps of the crumbling stairway where the stinking sewer runs. At the top of the stairway, she turns left, and walks down Rue du Bon-Jesus. On the old scabby walls, there are signs marked in chalk, letters and incomprehensible half-erased drawings. On the ground, there are several blood-red stains, drawing flies. The red color rings in Lalla’s head, making a sirenlike noise, a sharp whistling that digs out a hole, empties her mind. Slowly, with great difficulty, Lalla steps over the first stain, the second, the third. There are strange white things mixed in with the red stains, like cartilage, broken bones, skin, and the siren rings even louder in Lalla’s head. She tries to run down the sloping street, but the stones are damp and slippery, especially when you’re wearing rubber sandals. Rue du Timon, there are more signs written in chalk on the old walls, words, maybe names? Then a naked woman with breasts like two eyes, and Lalla thinks of the obscene magazine unfolded on the unmade bed in the hotel room. A little farther along, there is a huge phallus drawn in chalk on an old door, like a grotesque mask.

Lalla keeps on walking, breathing laboriously. Sweat is still running down her forehead, between her shoulder blades, dampening her lower back, stinging her underarms. There’s no one in the streets at this time of day, only a few dogs with their hair bristling, growling as they gnaw on their bones. The windows at street level have grilles or bars on them. Higher up, the shutters are closed, the houses look abandoned. A deathly cold emanates from the air vents, cellars, dark windows. It’s like a breath of death blowing through the streets, filling the filthy recesses at the foot of the walls. Where should she go? Lalla is moving slowly again, she turns right once more, toward the wall of the old house. Lalla is always a little frightened when she sees those large windows with bars over them, because she believes it is a prison where people have died in the past: they even say that at night you can sometimes hear the prisoners moaning behind the bars on the windows. Now she goes down Rue des Pistoles, which is always deserted, and takes Traverse de la Charité to see the strange pink dome she likes so much, through the gray stone gateway. Some days she sits down on the doorstep of a house and stares at the dome that looks like a cloud for a very long time, and she forgets everything, until a woman comes and asks her what she’s doing there and makes her go away.

But today, even the pink dome frightens her, as if there were a threat behind its narrow windows, or as if it were a tomb. Without looking back, she walks hurriedly away, goes down along the silent streets, toward the sea again. The wind comes in gusts, making the laundry snap, large white sheets with frayed edges, children’s clothing, men’s clothing, blue and pink women’s undergarments; Lalla doesn’t want to look at them because they display invisible bodies, legs, arms, breasts, like corpses with no heads. She walks down Rue Rodillat, and there too, those low windows covered with grilles, closed off with bars, where men, women, and children are prisoners. Lalla hears snatches of sentences from time to time, sounds of dishes or of cooking, or at times that nasal music, and she thinks of all the people who are prisoners, in cold dark rooms, with the cockroaches and the rats, all the people who will never see the light again, never breathe in the wind again.

Over there, behind that window with cracked blackened panes, there’s the fat infirm woman who lives alone with two scrawny cats, and who is always talking about her garden, her roses, her trees, about the tall lemon tree that produces the most beautiful fruit in the world – she, who has nothing but a cold dark cubbyhole and her two blind cats. This is Ibrahim’s house; he’s an old soldier from Oran who fought against the Germans, against the Turks, against the Serbs, out there in the places whose names he tirelessly repeats when Lalla asks him to: Thessalonica, Varna, Bjala. But won’t he die too, trapped in his crumbling house in which the dark slippery stairs almost trip him up at every step, where the walls weigh down on his thin chest like a wet coat? Over there too, the Spanish woman with six children who all sleep in the same room with the narrow window, and who wander the Panier neighborhood, dressed in rags, pale, always starving. There, in the house with the walls that seem to be damp with sickly sweat, right where that lizard is running, is the sick couple who cough so hard that sometimes Lalla wakes up with a start in the night, as if she could really hear them through all of the walls. Then the foreign couple: he’s Italian, she’s Greek, and he’s drunk every night, and every night he beats his wife, hits her hard in the head, just like that, without even getting mad, just because she’s there and looking at him with those teary eyes in her face swollen with fatigue. Lalla hates that man; she clenches her teeth when she thinks about him, but she’s also frightened of that calm and desperate drunkenness, of the woman’s submission, because that’s what can be seen in every stone and every stain in the cursed streets of this city, in every sign written on the walls of the Panier.