Desert (31 page)

In the cafés, music blares incessantly, wild and throbbing music that reverberates deep in the ground, that vibrates all through your body, in your belly, in your eardrums. It’s always the same music coming out of the cafés and the bars, colliding with the neon lights, with the red, green, orangey colors on the walls, on the tables, with the painted faces of women.

How long has Lalla been moving through the whirl of that music? She’s not sure anymore. For hours, maybe for whole nights, nights with no days to interrupt them. She thinks about the expanse of the plateaus of stones in the night, of the mounds of razor-sharp rocks, of hare and viper tracks in the moonlight, and she glances about herself, here, as if she were going to see him appear. The Hartani, clothed in his homespun robe, with his eyes shining in his very black face, with his long slow movements like the gait of antelopes. But there is only this avenue, and still more of this avenue, and these intersections full of faces, of eyes, of mouths, these shrill voices, these words, these murmurs. The sounds of all these motors and horns, these glaring lights. You can’t see the sky, as if there were a white veil covering the earth. How could they get all the way over here, the Hartani and he, the blue warrior of the desert, al-Ser, the Secret, as she used to call him? They would never be able to see her through the white veil separating the city from the sky. They would never be able to recognize her, in the midst of so many faces, so many bodies, with all of these automobiles, these trucks, these motorcycles. They would never even be able to hear her voice, here, with the sound of all of these voices speaking in all different languages, with this music reverberating, making the ground shake. That’s why Lalla doesn’t look for them anymore, doesn’t talk to them anymore, as if they’d disappeared forever, as if for her, they were dead.

The beggars are out there in the night, in the very heart of the city. It has stopped raining, and the night is very white, distant, all the way through to midnight. There are very few people. Men go in and out of cafés and bars, but then they go speeding off in automobiles. Lalla turns right into the narrow street that climbs slightly uphill and she walks behind the stopped cars to keep from being seen. On the opposite sidewalk, there are a few men. They’re standing still, not talking. They’re looking up the street, at the entrance to a squalid building, a very small door painted green, half open on a lighted hallway.

Lalla stops too, and watches, hidden behind a car. Her heart is beating fast, and the great void of anxiety is blowing in the street. The building stands there like a dirty fortress, with its shutterless windows plastered with newspaper pages. Some windows are lit with a harsh ugly light, others an odd wan, blood-colored glow. It looks like a giant with scores of eyes standing stock still and watching, or sleeping, a giant filled with an evil force, who is going to devour the little men waiting in the street. Lalla is so weak she needs to lean up against the hull of the car, shivering all over.

The evil wind is blowing in the street, that is what is creating the void over the city, the fear, the poverty, the hunger: that is what hollows out the whirling winds in the squares and makes silence weigh down in lonely rooms where children and old
people are suffocating. Lalla hates that wind and all those giants with open eyes, reigning over the city, only to devour the men and women, crush them in their entrails.

Then the little green door of the building opens all the way, and now, on the sidewalk facing Lalla, a woman is standing motionless. That’s what the men are staring at, without moving, smoking cigarettes. She’s a very small woman, almost a dwarf, with a thick body and a swollen head set on neckless shoulders. But her face is childlike, with a tiny little cherry-colored mouth, and very black eyes with green rings around them. What is most surprising about her, apart from her small size, is her hair: cropped short, curly, it is a coppery red color that sparkles strangely in the light of the hallway behind her and makes a sort of flaming halo around her chubby doll’s head, like a supernatural apparition.

Lalla looks at the little woman’s hair, fascinated, not moving, almost not breathing. The cold wind is blowing hard all around her, but the little woman stands there in front of the entrance to the building, with the hair on her head ablaze. She’s dressed in a very short black skirt that shows her heavy white thighs and a sort of low-necked purple pullover. She’s wearing very high spike-heeled patent leather pumps. Because of the cold, she’s pacing around a little in front of the door, and the sound of her heels echoes through the empty street.

Some men walk up to her now, smoking cigarettes. Most of them are Arabs with dark black hair, with gray complexions Lalla has never seen before, as if they lived underground and only came out at night. They don’t say anything. They look tough, obstinate, tight-lipped, cold-eyed. The little woman with fiery hair doesn’t even glance at them. She too lights a cigarette, and smokes rapidly, pivoting this way and that. When she turns around, she seems to be hunchbacked.

Then from the top of the street comes another woman. She’s very tall by contrast, and very fleshy, already aged, withered with fatigue and lack of sleep. She’s clothed in a long blue oilcloth raincoat, and her black hair is tousled with the wind.

She slowly descends the street, clacking her high-heeled shoes; she walks down to the dwarf and also stops in front of the door. The Arabs come up to her, talk to her. But Lalla doesn’t understand what they’re saying. One after the other, they walk away and stop a little farther off, eyes riveted on the two women standing there smoking. The wind gusts through the narrow street, plastering the women’s clothes against their bodies, ruffling their hair. There is so much hate and despair in this street, as if it kept drifting endlessly down through the different degrees of hell, without ever reaching the bottom, without ever stopping. There is so much hunger, unsatisfied desire, violence. The silent men look on, standing motionless on the curb like lead soldiers, their eyes glued to the women’s abdomens, to their breasts, to the curve of their hips, to the pale flesh of their throats, to their bare legs. Perhaps there is no love anywhere, no pity, no gentleness. Perhaps the white veil separating the earth from the sky has smothered the men, stopped the palpitations of their hearts, made all of their memories, all of their old desires, all of the beauty die?

Lalla can feel the relentless dizziness of the void entering her, as if the wind blowing in the street was part of a long spiraling movement. Maybe the wind is going to tear the roofs off the sordid houses, smash in the doors and windows, knock down the rotten walls, heave all the cars into a pile of scrap metal. It’s bound to happen, because there’s too much hate, too much suffering... But the big building remains standing, stunting the men in its tall silhouette. They are the immobile giants, with bloody eyes, with cruel eyes, the giants who devour men and women. In their entrails, young women are thrown down on dirty old mattresses, and possessed in a few seconds by silent men with members as hot as pokers. Then they get dressed again and leave, and the cigarette – left burning on the edge of the table – hasn’t had time to go out. Inside the devouring giants, old women lie under the weight of men who are crushing them, dirtying their yellow flesh. And so, in all of those women’s wombs, the void is born, the intense and icy void that escapes from their bodies and blows like a wind along the streets and alleys, endlessly shooting out new spirals.

Suddenly, Lalla can’t wait any longer. She wants to scream, even cry, but that’s impossible. The void and the fear are gripping her throat tightly, and she can barely breathe. So she breaks away. She runs as hard as she can down the alley, and the sound of her footsteps echoes loudly in the silence. The men turn and watch Lalla fleeing. The dwarf shouts something, but a man takes her by the neck and pushes her into the building with him. The void, disturbed for a moment, clamps shut over them, grasps them. Some men throw their cigarettes in the gutter and move off in the direction of the avenue, slipping along like shadows. Others arrive and stop at the curb and look at the tall woman with black hair standing in front of the door to the building.

Many beggars are sleeping around the train station, hunkered down in their tattered clothing, or surrounded by pieces of cardboard, in front of doorways. In the distance shines the edifice of the train station with its tall white street lamps as bright as stars. In one doorway, sheltered by a stone milepost, in a large pool of damp shadows, Lalla has lain down on the ground. She’s pulled her head and limbs into her big brown coat as well as she can, exactly like a turtle would. The stone is cold and hard, and the moist sound of the automobile tires makes her shiver. But at least she can watch the sky opening up, as she used to do out on the plateau of stones and, in keeping her eyes shut tightly, she can see the desert night once again between the edges of the veil that is parting.

L
ALLA IS LIVING at the Hotel Sainte-Blanche. She has a tiny little room, a dark cubbyhole up under the roof that she shares with the brooms, buckets, and old things left behind years ago. There’s an electric lightbulb, a table, an old cot with canvas webbing. When she asked the owner if she could live there, he simply said yes, without asking her any questions. He didn’t make any comments; he told her she could live there, that the bed wasn’t being used. He also told her he would deduct the money for the electricity and the water from her salary, that was all. He went back to reading his newspaper, stretched out on his bed. That’s why Lalla thinks the boss is okay, even if he is dirty and un­shaven, because he doesn’t ask questions. It’s all the same to him.

With Aamma, it hadn’t gone that smoothly. When Lalla told her she wasn’t going to live at her place anymore, her face closed up, and she said all kinds of unpleasant things, because she thought Lalla was going away to live with a man. But she agreed to it anyway, since it worked out better for her in the end because of her sons who would soon be arriving. There wouldn’t have been enough room for everyone.

Now Lalla knows the people in the Hotel Sainte-Blanche better. They’re all very poor, and they’ve come from countries where there’s nothing to eat, where there’s almost nothing to live off of. They have hardened faces, even the youngest ones, and they aren’t able to talk for very long. No one lives on the floor where Lalla is, because it’s the attic, where the mice live. But directly under her, there’s a room in which three black men live, three brothers. They aren’t mean or sad. They’re always cheerful, and Lalla loves to hear them laughing and singing on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. She doesn’t know their names; she’s not aware of what they do in the city. But she runs into them sometimes in the hallway, when she goes to the toilet, or when she comes down early in the morning to scrub the steps of the staircase. But when she goes to clean their room, they aren’t there any longer. They hardly have any belongings, just a few boxes filled with clothing, and a guitar.

Next to the black men’s room, there are two rooms occupied by North Africans working on the construction sites; they never stay for very long. They’re nice enough, but taciturn, and Lalla doesn’t talk to them for very long either. There’s nothing in their rooms, because they keep all of their clothing in suitcases, and the suitcases under their beds. They’re afraid of being robbed.

The person Lalla really likes is a young black African who lives with his brother in the small room on the second floor, at the very end of the hallway. It’s the prettiest room, because it opens onto a bit of courtyard where there is a tree. Lalla doesn’t know the older brother’s name, but she knows that the young one’s name is Daniel. He’s very, very dark, with hair so frizzy that things are always getting caught in it, bits of straw, feathers, blades of grass. He has a perfectly round head, and an inordinately long neck. For that matter, everything about him is long; he’s got long arms and legs, and a funny way of walking, as if he were dancing. He’s always very merry when he talks to Lalla; he laughs all the time. She doesn’t understand what he says very well, because he has a strange, singsong accent. But it doesn’t really matter, because he makes very funny gestures with his long hands, and all sorts of grimaces with his wide mouth full of extremely white teeth. He’s the one Lalla prefers, because of his smooth face, because of his laugh, because he looks a bit like a child. He works at the hospital with his brother, and on Saturdays and Sundays, he plays soccer. He’s passionate about it. He’s got posters and pictures all over his room, tacked to the walls, to the door, inside the closet. Every time he sees Lalla, he asks her when she’s going to come and watch him play at the stadium.

She went once, on a Sunday afternoon. She sat all the way at the top of the bleachers, and watched. He made a little black spot on the green turf in the field, and that’s how she was able to recognize him. He was the attacking right center midfielder. But Lalla never told him she’d gone to see him, maybe so he would keep asking her to come, with that laugh of his that rings out loudly in the halls of the hotel.

There’s also an old man who lives in a very small room, at the other end of the hall. He never talks to anyone, and no one really knows where he comes from. He’s an old man whose face has been eaten away by a terrible disease, with no nose or mouth, only two holes in place of his nostrils and a scar in place of his lips. But he has pretty eyes which are deep and sad, and he is always polite and kind, and Lalla likes him because of that. He lives on nearly nothing in that room, almost without eating, and he only goes out early in the morning to glean fruit that has fallen on the ground in the marketplace and to take a walk in the sunshine. Lalla doesn’t know his name, but she likes him. He resembles Old Naman in a way; he has the same type of hands, strong and agile, hands burned by the sun and full of know-how. When she looks at his hands it’s a little bit as if she could recognize the burning landscape, the stretches of sand and stones, the charred shrubs, the dried-up rivers. But he never talks about his country, or about himself; he keeps it locked up deep inside. He barely utters a few words to Lalla when he passes her in the hall, only about what the weather’s like outside, or the news he heard on the radio. He might be the only one in the hotel who knows Lalla’s secret, because he asked her twice, looking at her with his extremely profound eyes, if it wasn’t too hard on her to be working. He didn’t say anything else, but Lalla thought that he knew she had a baby in her belly, and she was even a little afraid the old man would tell the owner, because he wouldn’t want to keep her at the hotel anymore. But the old man didn’t say anything to anyone else. Every Monday, he pays for a week’s lodgings in advance, without anyone knowing where his money comes from. Lalla is the only one who knows he’s very poor, because there is never anything to eat in his room, save the bruised fruit that has fallen on the ground at the marketplace. So, sometimes, when she has a little extra money, she buys one or two nice apples, some oranges, and she puts them on the only chair in the small room, when she’s doing the cleaning. The old man never thanks her, but she can tell from his eyes he’s pleased when she runs into him.