Desert (34 page)

When Radicz has finished eating everything in the dishes, he wipes his mouth with the napkin and leans back in the chair. He’s a little red, and his eyes are very bright.

“Was it good?” asks Lalla.

“Yes,” Radicz simply says. He’s eaten so much that he’s hiccupping a little. Lalla has him drink a glass of water and tells him to look her in the eye until his hiccups go away.

The big man in black comes over to their table.

“Coffee?”

Lalla shakes her head. When the maître d’hôtel brings the bill on a tray, Lalla holds it out to him.

“Read it.”

She takes the wad of wrinkled bills out of her coat pocket and unfolds them one after the other on the tablecloth. The maître d’hôtel takes the money. He starts to walk away and then changes his mind.

“There is a man who would like to speak with you over there, at the table near the door.”

Radicz takes hold of Lalla’s arm, gives her a hard jerk.

“Come on, let’s get out of this place!”

As she nears the door, Lalla sees a man around thirty with somewhat of a sad look about him sitting at a neighboring table. He stands and walks up to her. He stammers.

“I, excuse me for accosting you like this, but I – ”

Lalla looks straight at him, smiling.

“You see, I’m a photographer, and I’d like to take some pictures of you, whenever you like.”

Since Lalla doesn’t answer, and keeps smiling, he gets more and more muddled.

“It’s because – I saw you over there a little while ago, when you walked into the restaurant and it was – it was extraordinary, you are – it was really extraordinary.”

He takes a ballpoint pen out of his suit jacket and quickly scribbles his name and address on a scrap of paper. But Lalla shakes her head and doesn’t take the paper.

“I don’t know how to read,” she says.

“Then tell me where you live?” asks the photographer. He has very sad gray-blue eyes, very watery like those of dogs. Lalla looks at him with her eyes filled with light, and the man tries to think of something else to say.

“I live at the Hotel Sainte-Blanche,” says Lalla. And goes out hurriedly.

Outside, Radicz the beggar is waiting for her. The wind is blowing his long hair over his thin face. He doesn’t look happy. When Lalla talks to him he shrugs his shoulders.

Together, they walk till they reach the sea, not knowing where they are going. Here, the sea isn’t the same as at Naman the fisherman’s beach. It’s a big cement wall that runs along the coast, clinging to the gray rocks. The short waves come crashing into the hollows of the rocks, making explosions; the foam rises up like mist. But it’s great, Lalla loves to pass her tongue over her lips and taste the salt. She and Radicz climb down amongst the rocks till they get to a deep recess sheltered from the wind. The sun burns down very hot there; it sparkles out on the open sea and on the salty rocks. After the noise of the city, and after all those odd smells in the restaurant, it’s good to be out here, with nothing before you but the sea and the sky. Slightly westward, there are some small islands, a few black rocks sticking up out of the sea like whales – that’s what Radicz says. There are also some small boats with big white sails, and they look like children’s toys.

When the sun starts going down in the sky, and the light is growing softer on the waves, on the rocks, and the wind is also blowing more gently, it makes you want to dream, to talk. Lalla is looking at the tiny succulent plants that smell of honey and pepper; they quiver at each gust of wind in the hollows of the gray rocks, facing the sea. She thinks she would like to become so small she could live in a grove of those little plants; then she would live in a hole in a rock, and she would have enough to drink for a whole day with just a single drop of water, and a single crumb of bread would be enough for her to eat for two whole days.

Radicz pulls a slightly crumpled pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of his brown suit jacket and gives one to Lalla. He says he never smokes in front of others, only when he’s in a place he really likes. He says that Lalla is the first person he’s ever smoked in front of. They’re American cigarettes that have a piece of cardboard and cotton at one end, and they have a nauseating smell of honey. They both smoke slowly, looking out at the sea before them. The wind whisks the blue smoke away.

“You want me to tell you about the place I live in, over by the storage tanks?”

Radicz’s voice is all different now, a little hoarse, as if emotion were making a lump in his throat. He talks without looking at Lalla, smoking the cigarette down until it burns his lips and fingertips.

“I didn’t use to live with the boss before, you know. I lived with my father and mother in a trailer, we went from one fair to the next, we had a shooting stand, I mean, not with rifles, with balls and tin cans. Then my father died, and since there were a lot of us kids, and we didn’t have enough money, my mother sold me to the boss and I came to live here in Marseille. At first, I didn’t know that my mother had sold me, but one day, I wanted to leave, and the boss caught me and beat me, and he told me that I couldn’t go back to live with my mother because she’d sold me and now he’d become like a father to me, so after that, I never left him again, because I didn’t want to see my mother. At first I was really sad, because I didn’t know anyone and I was all alone. But later I got used to it, because the boss is nice, he gives us as much as we want to eat, and it was better for me than staying with my mother since she didn’t want to take care of me anymore. There were six of us boys living with the boss, well at first there were seven, and one of them died, he got pneumonia and he died right away. So we would go and sit in the places the boss had paid for, and we begged, and we brought the money back in the evening, we kept a little and the rest was for the boss. He bought our food with it. The boss always told us to be careful not to get picked up by the police, because then we’d be taken to child welfare, and he couldn’t get us out of there. We never stayed for long in the same spot because of that, and the boss would take us someplace else afterward. First we lived in a hangar north of the city, then we had a trailer like my father’s, and we went to pitch camp with the gypsies in the vacant lots just outside of town. Now we’ve got a big house for all of us, just before you get to the storage tanks, and there are other children, they work for a boss called Marcel, and there’s Anita with still other children, two boys and three girls, I think the oldest one really is her daughter. We work around the train station, but not every day, so we won’t get spotted, and we also go down to the harbor, and over to Cours Belsunce, or on La Canebière. But now the boss says I’m too old to beg, he says that’s a job for little boys and girls, but he wants me to work a serious job, he’s teaching me how to be a pickpocket, steal from stores, from the marketplace. Look, see this suit, this shirt, these shoes, he stole it all for me in a store while I was keeping watch. A little while ago, if you’d wanted to, you could have left with your outfit for nothing, it’s easy, all you had to do was pick it out and I would have gotten it out of the store for you, I know the tricks. For example, for wallets, there have to be two of you, one takes it and passes it right away to the other, so you don’t get caught with it. The boss says I’ve got a knack for it because I have long agile hands. He says that’s good for playing music and for stealing. Now there are three of us boys doing it, along with Anita’s daughter, we stop into the supermarkets all over. Sometimes the boss says to Anita, come on, we’re going shopping at the supermarket, so he takes two boys, and sometimes Anita’s daughter and another boy, well, the other boy is always me. You know, supermarkets are really big, there are so many aisles you can get lost, aisles with things to eat, clothes, shoes, soaps, records, everything. So you can work fast in pairs. We’ve got a bag with a false bottom for the smaller things, and the things to eat, and Anita puts the rest in her stomach, she has a round thing she puts under her dress as if she were pregnant, and the boss has a trench coat with pockets all over the inside, so we grab everything we want and leave! You know, at first I was scared of getting caught, but all you need to do is choose the right time, and not falter. If you falter, you’ll get spotted by the detectives. I’m really good at recognizing detectives now, even from a long way off, they all have the same way of walking, of watching out of the corner of their eyes, I could pick them out a mile away. What I like best is working in the street with cars. The boss says he’s going to teach me to work with cars, that’s his specialty. Sometimes he goes into town and brings back a car so I can practice. He taught me how to pick the locked doors with a wire, or a fake key. Most cars can be opened with a fake key. Afterward, he shows me how to pull the wires out from under the dashboard and release the steering wheel lock. But he says I’m too young to drive. So I take whatever there is in the cars, and there’s often a bunch of stuff in the glove compartment, checkbooks, papers, even money, and under the seats, cameras, radio sets. I like working real early in the morning, all alone, when there’s no one in the streets, just a cat every now and again, and I really like to see the sun come up, and the nice clean sky in the morning. The boss also wants me to learn locks on the doors of houses, the rich villas around here, near the sea, he says that working in pairs, we could do some good jobs, because we’re light and we can scale up walls easily. So he’s teaching us the ropes, picking door locks, and opening windows too. He doesn’t want to do it anymore, he says he’s too old and that he couldn’t run if he had to anymore, but that’s not why, it’s because he already got caught once and it scared him. I already went once with a guy called Rito, he’s older than I am, he used to work for the boss and he took me along with him. We went into a street near the Prado, he’d scouted out a house, he knew no one was home. I didn’t go in, I stayed out in the garden while Rito was taking everything he could, then we carried it all over to the car where the boss was waiting. I was scared, because I was the one who stayed in the garden standing watch, and I think I would have been less scared if I’d gone into the house to work. But you have to know everything before you start or you’ll get caught. To get in, first of all you have to know how to find the right window, and then climb up a tree, or use the rainspout. You can’t get dizzy. And if the police come, you can’t panic, you have to stay still, or hide on the roof, because if you start running, they’ll get you in two shakes. So the boss shows us all that at our place, at the hotel, he has us scale up the house, he has us walk on the roof at night, he even teaches us to jump like paratroopers, it’s called rolling. But he says we’re not going to stay here indefinitely, we’re going to buy a trailer and leave for Spain. I’d rather go over to the area around Nice, but I think the boss prefers Spain. Wouldn’t you like to come with us? You know, I’d tell the boss you were a friend, he won’t ask you any questions, I’ll just tell him you’re my friend, and that you’re going to live with us in the trailer, it’ll be great. Maybe you could learn to work in the stores too, or else we could work the cars together, taking turns, that way people wouldn’t suspect anything? You know, Anita is really nice, I’m sure you’d like her a lot, she’s got blond hair and blue eyes, no one wants to believe she’s a gypsy. If you came with us, I wouldn’t mind not going to Nice, I wouldn’t mind going to Spain, or anywhere...”

Radicz stops talking. He’d like to ask Lalla a few things, about the child in her belly, but he doesn’t dare. He’s lit up another cigarette, and is smoking, and from time to time, he passes the cigarette to Lalla so she can have a puff. The two of them are looking out at the lovely sea, at the black islands like whales, and the toy boats moving slowly over the shimmering sea. From time to time, the wind blows so hard you’d think the sea and the sky were going to go tumbling over.

N
OW LALLA IS LOOKING at her photographs in magazine articles, on the covers of fashion reviews. She looks at the reams of pictures, the contact sheets, the color layouts where her almost life-sized face appears. She thumbs through the magazines from back to front, holding them a little tilted, cocking her head to one side.

“Do you like them?” asks the photographer, sounding a little worried, as if it really mattered.

It makes her laugh, with her silent laughter that makes her extremely white teeth sparkle. She laughs about all of it, about the pictures, the magazines, as if it were a joke, as if it weren’t her you could see on those sheets of paper. To begin with, it really isn’t her. It’s Hawa, the name she’s given herself, the one she gave the photographer, and that’s what he calls her; that’s what he called her the first time he ran into her, in the stairways in the Panier, and brought her back to his place, to his big empty apartment on the ground floor of the new building.

Now Hawa is everywhere, on the pages of magazines, on the contact sheets, on the walls of the apartment. Hawa dressed in white, a black belt around her waist, alone in the middle of a shadeless rocky area; Hawa, in black silk, a scarf around her forehead, like an Apache; Hawa standing above the Mediterranean; Hawa in the midst of the crowd on Cours Belsunce, or else on the flight of stairs in front of the train station; Hawa dressed in indigo, barefoot on the asphalt of the esplanade, vast as a desert, with the outlines of storage tanks and smoking chimneys; Hawa walking, dancing; Hawa sleeping; Hawa with her handsome copper-colored face, with her long smooth body, shining in the light; Hawa eagle-eyed, with her heavy black hair cascading down over her shoulders, or smoothed back by the sea, like a Galalith helmet. But who is Hawa? Every day, when she wakes up in the large gray-white living room where she sleeps on an air mattress on the bare floor, she goes and washes up in the bathroom, not making a sound; then she climbs out the window and walks off aimlessly through the streets of the neighborhood; she walks as far as the sea. The photographer wakes up, opens his eyes but doesn’t move; he acts as if he hasn’t heard a thing, so as not to disturb Hawa. He knows that’s the way she is, that he mustn’t try to hold her back. He simply leaves the window open so she can come back in, like a cat. Sometimes she doesn’t come back till after dark. She slips into the apartment through the window. The photographer hears her, comes out of his laboratory and sits down beside her in the living room, to talk with her a little. He’s always moved when he sees her, because her face is so full of light and life, and he blinks his eyes a little, because in coming out of the dark laboratory, he’s a bit dazzled. He always thinks he has a lot of things to tell her, but when Hawa is there before him, he can’t recall what he wanted to say. She’s the one who talks; she tells about the things she’s seen, or heard, in the streets, and she eats a little as she’s talking, some bread she’s bought, some fruit, some dates that she brings back to the apartment by the pound.