Desert (32 page)

Lalla knows the other lodgers by sight, but doesn’t know anything about them. They’re people who never stay long, Arabs, Portuguese, Italians, who only come to sleep. There are also a few who have stayed, but Lalla doesn’t like them – two Arabs on the first floor who look cruel, and who get drunk on wood alcohol. There’s the man who reads obscene magazines, and who leaves all those pictures of naked women on his unmade bed, so that Lalla will pick them up and look at them. He’s a Yugoslavian, whose name is Gregori. One day, Lalla went into his room, and he was there. He took her by the arm and wanted to knock her onto the bed, but Lalla started yelling, and he got scared. He let her go, shouting insults at her. Ever since that day, Lalla has never gone into his room while he’s there.

But none of those people really exist, except for the old man with his face eaten away. They don’t exist because they leave no trace of their passage, as if they were nothing but shadows, ghosts. When they leave one day, it’s as if they’d never come. The bed with canvas webbing is still the same, and the wobbly chair, the stained linoleum, the greasy walls where the paint is blistering, and the bare, flyspecked, electric lightbulb hanging at the end of its wire. Everything stays the same.

But most of all, it’s the light coming from outside, through the dirty windowpanes, the gray light from the interior courtyard, the pale reflection of the sun, and the sounds: sounds of radios, sounds of automobile motors on the main avenue, the voices of men arguing. Sounds of pipes squeaking, the sound of the toilet flushing, the stairs creaking, the sound of the wind rattling the metal gutters.

Lalla listens to all of those sounds, at night, lying on her bed, looking at the yellow spot of the electric lightbulb burning. The men can’t exist here, neither can children, nor any living thing. She listens to the sounds of the night as if she were inside a cave, and it’s as if she herself didn’t really exist anymore. In her belly, something is fluttering now, palpitating like an unfamiliar organ.

Lalla curls up in her bed, knees drawn up against her chin, and she tries to listen to the thing that is moving inside of her, that is beginning to take on life. There is still the fear, the fear that makes you flee through the streets and makes you bounce around from one corner to the next, like a ball. But at the same time, there is an odd wave of happiness, of warmth and light, that seems to be coming from far away, from beyond the seas and the cities, and binding Lalla to the beauty of the desert. Then, just as she does every night, Lalla closes her eyes, she breathes in deeply. Slowly, the gray light of the narrow room fades out, and the lovely night appears. It is inhabited with stars, cold, silent, lonely. She is resting on the boundless earth, on the stretch of immobile dunes. Next to Lalla is the Hartani, wearing his homespun robe, and his black copper face is shining in the starlight. It is his gaze that is coming all the way out to her, reaching her here, in this narrow room, in the sickly light of the electric lightbulb, and the Hartani’s gaze is moving inside of her, in her belly, awakening life. It’s been such a long time since he disappeared, such a long time since she went away, across the sea, as if she had been banished, and yet the gaze of the young shepherd is very forceful; she can feel him actually moving deep down inside, in the secrecy of her womb. Then they are the ones who disappear, the people in this city, the policemen, the men in the streets, the lodgers in the hotel, all of them disappear, and along with them, their city, their houses, their streets, their automobiles, their trucks, and there is nothing left but the stretch of desert where Lalla and the Hartani are lying together. They are both wrapped up in the large homespun robe, surrounded by the black night and the myriads of stars, and they are holding very tightly to one another, so as not to feel the cold creeping over the earth.

***

When someone dies in the Panier, the funeral shop on the ground floor of the hotel takes care of everything. At first Lalla thought it belonged to a relative of the hotel owner; but it’s just a business like all the others. At first, Lalla thought that people came to die at the hotel, and afterward, they were sent to the funeral home. There aren’t many people in the shop, only the boss, Mr. Cherez, two morticians, and the limousine driver.

When someone in the Panier is dead, the employees leave in the limousine, and they go to hang big black tapestries with silver teardrops on the door of the house. In front of the door, on the sidewalk, they set up a little table draped with a black cloth that also has silver tears on it. On the table, there is a saucer so that people can put a little card with their name on it when they go and visit the dead person.

When Mr. Ceresola died, Lalla knew right away, because she saw his son in the shop on the ground floor of the hotel. Mr. Ceresola’s son is a short, chubby little man with a bristly mustache who doesn’t have much hair, and he always looks at Lalla as if she were transparent. But Mr. Ceresola was different. He’s someone Lalla really likes. He’s an Italian, not very tall, but old and thin, and he walks painfully because of his rheumatism. He’s always dressed in a black suit that must be pretty old too, because the fabric is threadbare at the elbows, at the knees. With the suit, he wears old black leather shoes that are always well polished, and in cold weather, he adds a wool scarf and a cap. Mr. Ceresola has a very dry, wrinkled face, quite leathered from the open air, short white hair, and funny tortoiseshell glasses, repaired with bandage tape and string.

People in the Panier really like him because he’s polite and pleasant to everyone, and he has a dignified air about him with his old-fashioned black suit and his polished shoes. And also, everyone knows that he used to be a carpenter, a real master carpenter, and that he came from Italy before the war, because he didn’t like Mussolini. That’s the story he sometimes tells when he runs into Lalla in the street on his way to the grocery. He says he arrived in Paris without any money, just enough to pay for two or three nights in a hotel, and that he didn’t speak a word of French; so when he asked for some soap to wash with, he was shown a pot of hot water.

When Lalla runs into him, she helps him carry his packages because he has a hard time walking, especially when you have to go up the stairs leading to Rue du Panier. So as they walk along, he tells her about Italy, about his village, and the days when he worked in Tunisia, and the houses he built everywhere in Paris, in Lyon, in Corsica. He has a funny, somewhat loud voice, and Lalla has a hard time understanding his accent, but she enjoys hearing him speak.

Now he’s dead. When Lalla realized that, she looked so sad that Mr. Ceresola’s son glanced at her in astonishment, as if he were surprised that someone could care about his father. Lalla left very quickly, because she doesn’t much like to breathe in the air in the funeral home, or see all of those celluloid wreaths, those coffins, and above all those morticians who have mean eyes.

So then Lalla followed the streets, slowly, head bowed, and that’s how she ended up at the door to Mr. Ceresola’s house. Around the door were the tapestries and the little table with its black cloth and saucer. There was also a big blackboard above the door with two crescent-shaped letters like this:

Lalla goes into the house, she climbs the stairs with narrow steps, just as she used to do when she would carry Mr. Ceresola’s packages, slowly, stopping on each landing to catch her breath. She is so tired today, she feels so heavy, as if she were going to fall asleep, as if she were going to die when she reached the top floor.

She stops in front of the door, hesitating a little. Then she pushes the door open and walks into the little apartment. At first she doesn’t recognize the place, because the shutters are closed and it’s dark inside. There isn’t anyone in the apartment, and Lalla walks toward the large room where there’s a table covered with an oilcloth, and a basket of fruit on it. At the back of the room is the alcove with the bed. When she draws near, Lalla can make out Mr. Ceresola, who is lying in the bed on his back, as if he were sleeping. He looks so peaceful in the half-light, with his eyes closed and his hands on either side of his body, that Lalla thinks for an instant that he’s simply dozed off, that he’ll soon wake up. She says, in a whisper, so as not to disturb him, “Mr. Ceresola? Mr. Ceresola?”

But Mr. Ceresola isn’t sleeping. You can see that from his clothing, still the same black suit, the same polished shoes, but the jacket is on a little crooked, with the collar turning up behind his head, and Lalla thinks it’s going to get wrinkled. There is a gray shadow on the old man’s cheeks and chin, and blue rings around his eyes, as if he’d been beaten. Lalla thinks of Naman’s eyes again, when he was lying on the floor in his house and couldn’t breathe anymore. She thinks of him so hard that for a few seconds, he’s the one she sees lying on the bed, his face sunk in sleep, his hands stretched out on either side of his body. Life is still quivering in the half-light of the room, with a very low, barely perceptible murmur. Lalla steps up very near to the bed, she looks more closely at the extinguished, wax-colored face, straight strands of white hair falling on the temples, mouth half opened, cheeks hollowed from the weight of the falling jaw. The thing that makes the face look odd is that it’s no longer wearing the old tortoiseshell glasses; it looks naked, weak, because of the marks on the nose, around the eyes, along the temples, that are pointless now. Mr. Ceresola’s body has suddenly become too small, too thin for those black clothes, and it’s as if he’d disappeared, as if all that were left was this mask and these waxen hands, and these ill-fitting garments on hangers that are too narrow. Then suddenly fear surges back over Lalla, fear that burns her skin, that blurs her eyes. The half-light is suffocating, it’s a paralyzing poison. The half-light comes from the back of the courtyards, flows down the narrow streets, through the old town, drowning everyone it encounters, the prisoners in the narrow rooms: small children, women, old people. It creeps into the houses, under the damp roofs, into the cellars, filling the smallest cracks.

Lalla stands motionless in front of Mr. Ceresola’s corpse. She feels the cold creeping through her body, the funny waxen color covering the skin on her face and hands. She still remembers the wind of ill fortune that blew over the Project that night when Old Naman was dying, and the cold that seemed to seep out of all the holes in the earth to annihilate human beings.

Slowly, without taking her eyes from the dead body, Lalla backs toward the door of the apartment. Death is in the gray shadows floating between the walls, in the stairway, on the chipped paint in the hallways. Lalla goes down as fast as she can, heart pounding, eyes filled with tears. She leaps outside, and tries to run down to the lower part of town, down to the sea, wreathed in wind and light, but a pain in her belly forces her to sit down on the ground, doubled over. She groans, while people walk by, glance at her furtively, and move away. They too are afraid, you can tell by the way they walk, sort of sidling along, hugging the walls, the way dogs with their hair bristling do.

Death is upon them everywhere, thinks Lalla, they can’t escape. Death is settled into the dark shop on the ground floor of the Hotel Sainte-Blanche, amongst the bouquets of plaster violets and the marble aggregate gravestones. That’s where it lives, in the old decrepit house, in the rooms of the men, in the halls. They don’t know it, they don’t even have the slightest inkling. At night it leaves the shop of the funeral home in the form of cockroaches, rats, bedbugs, and spreads through all of the damp rooms, over all the doormats, it crawls and seethes over the floors, into the cracks, it fills everything like a poisonous shadow.

Lalla rises to her feet, staggers forward, her hands pushing against her lower abdomen, where a pain protrudes. She’s not looking at anyone anymore. Where could she go? They’re all alive, they eat, they drink, they talk, and in the meantime, the trap is closing in on them. They’ve lost everything, exiled, beaten, humiliated, they work on the roads, in the freezing winds, in the rain, they dig holes in the stony earth, they ruin their hands and their heads, driven mad by the jackhammers. They’re hungry, they’re frightened, they’re frozen with solitude and emptiness. And when they stop, death wells up around them, right there, under their feet, in the shop, on the ground floor of the Hotel Sainte-Blanche. Down there, the morticians with mean eyes erase them, snuff them out, make their bodies disappear, replace their faces with masks of wax, their hands with gloves that stick out of their empty clothing.

Where can she go, where can she disappear to? Lalla would like to find a hiding place, like she had before in the Hartani’s cave, up on top of the cliff, a place where all you can see is the sea and the sky.

She reaches the little square and sits down on the plastic bench, facing the wall of the broken-down house with empty windows like the eyes of a dead giant.

A
FTER THAT, there was a sort of fever, almost everywhere in the city. Maybe it was because of the wind that had begun to blow at the end of the winter; it wasn’t the wind of ill fortune and sickness, like the one when Old Naman had started to die, but a cold hard wind that blew down the main avenues of the city, raising the dust and the old newspapers, a wind that made you light-headed, that made you stagger. Lalla has never felt a wind like that before. It gets inside your head and whirls around, goes through your body like a cold draft, driving great shudders out ahead of it. So that afternoon, as soon as she gets outside, she starts running straight away, without even glancing at the shop of the funeral home, with the bored man in black.