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.
THERE 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 win
d 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.
There is hunger everywhere, fear, cold poverty, like old, used, damp clothing, like old, withered, fallen faces.
Rue du Panier, Rue du Bouleau, Traverse Boussenoue, always the same scabby walls, the tops of the buildings brushed with cold light, the feet of the buildings where green water puddles, where piles of garbage rot. Here, there are no wasps or flies zooming freely through the air where the dust swirls. There is nothing but people, rats, cockroaches, everything that dwells in holes with no light, no air, no sky. Lalla prowls around the streets like an old black dog with its hair bristling, not being able to find its spot. She sits down for a minute on the steps of the stairway, next to a wall on the other side of which grows the only tree in town, an old fig tree rich with smells. She thinks for a second about the tree she used to love back when Old Naman would tell stories while he was repairing his nets. But, like an old arthritic dog, she can’t stay in one place for very long. She strikes out again through the dark labyrinth, as the light from the sky grows slowly dimmer. She sits back down for a moment on the bench in the little square where there is a preschool. There are days she really likes sitting there, watching the small children toddling around in the square, legs wobbling, arms held out on either side. But now, there’s nothing but shade, and on one of the benches, an old black woman in an ample colorful dress. Lalla goes over to sit beside her, tries to talk to her.
“Do you live here? Where are you from? What’s the name of your country?”
The old woman looks at her without understanding, then she gets frightened and covers her face with the skirt of her colorful dress.
At the back of the square, there is a wall that Lalla is very familiar with. She knows every stain on the roughcast, every crack, every dribble of rust. All the way up at the top of the wall are black chimney stacks, gutters. Under the roof, little shutterless windows with dirty windowpanes. Under old Ida’s window, laundry stiffened with rain and dust is hanging on a line. Under that, the windows of the gypsies. Most of the windowpanes are broken, some windows don’t even have wooden frames anymore, they’re nothing more than gaping black holes, like eye sockets.
Lalla stares at the dark openings, and once again she feels the cold and terrifying presence of death. She shudders. There is an immense void in this square, a whirl of emptiness and death that is coming from those windows, spiraling between the walls of the houses. On the bench next to her, the old mulattress isn’t moving, isn’t breathing. The only thing Lalla can see is her emaciated arm where the veins protrude like ropes, and her hand with long fingers stained with henna, holding the skirt of her dress up to her face on the side next to Lalla.
Maybe there’s some kind of trap here too? Lalla would like to stand up and run away, but she feels riveted to the plastic bench, as if in a dream. Night falls gradually over the city, shadows fill the square, blotting out the corners, the cracks, slipping into the windows through the broken panes. It’s cold now, and Lalla wraps herself tightly in her brown coat, she turns the collar up all the way to her eyes. But the cold creeps up through the rubber soles of her sandals, along her legs, to her bottom, to her lower back. Lalla closes her eyes to struggle against it, to stop seeing the emptiness whirling around the square, around the abandoned playground, before the blind eyes of the windows.
When she opens her eyes again, she’s alone. The old mulattress in the colorful dress has left without her noticing. Oddly enough, the sky and the earth are not as dark as before, as if night had receded.
Lalla continues walking along the narrow silent streets. She goes down stairways where the pavement has been smashed in with jackhammers. Cold sweeps along the street, making the sheet metal on the toolsheds bang.
When she comes out facing the sea, Lalla sees the day isn’t finished yet. There is a big bright spot above the cathedral, between the towers. Lalla runs across the avenue without even seeing the speeding automobiles, which honk their horns and flash their headlights. She slowly approaches the upper parvis, climbs the steps, slips between the columns. She remembers the first time she ever came to the cathedral. She was very frightened, because it was so huge and abandoned, like a cliff. Then Radicz the beggar showed her where he spends the night in summer, when the wind coming in from the sea is as warm as a breath. He showed her the place from where you can see the huge freighters coming into the harbor at night, with their red and green lights. He also showed her the place where you can see the moon and the stars, between the columns of the parvis.
But this evening it’s empty. The green and white stone is ice-cold, the silence is heavy, disturbed only by the distant whishing of automobile tires and the screeching of bats flitting about under the vaulted ceiling. The pigeons are already sleeping, perched all around on the cornices, huddling together.
Lalla sits down for a moment on the steps, sheltered by the stone balustrade. She looks at the ground stained with guano and the dusty earth in front of the parvis. The wind is blowing violently, whistling through the gratings. There is great loneliness here, like on a ship on the high seas. It is painful; it tightens in your throat and temples, makes sounds echo strangely, makes lights flicker in the distance, along the streets.
Later, when night has come, Lalla goes back up into the city. She crosses Place de Lenche, where men are crowding around the doorways of bars, takes Montée Accoules, her hand resting on the polished double iron railing she so likes. But even there, the anxiety doesn’t dissipate. It’s behind her, like one of the big dogs with its hair bristling, with a starved look, which prowls around in the gutters looking for a bone to gnaw on. It’s hunger, undoubtedly, hunger that gnaws at your belly, that hollows out its emptiness in your head, but hunger for everything, everything that is denied, inaccessible. It’s been such a long time since people have eaten their fill, such a long time since they’ve had any rest, or happiness, or love, anything other than cold basement rooms, where the fog of anxiety floats, anything other than those dark streets overrun with rats, oozing with fetid water, filled with piles of refuse. Misery.
As she walks along in the narrow grooves of the streets, Rue du Refuge, Rue des Moulins, Rue de Belles-Ecuelles, Rue de Montbrion, Lalla sees all the detritus as if it had been washed up by the sea, rusted tin cans, old papers, bits of bone, wilted oranges, vegetables, rags, broken bottles, rubber rings, bottle caps, dead birds with
torn-off wings, squashed cockroaches, dust, dirt, decay. These are the marks of loneliness, of abandon, as if humans had already fled this city, this world, left them in the grips of disease, death, oblivion. As if there were only a few people left in this world, the misfortunate, who continue to live in those run-down houses, in those already tomblike apartments, while the emptiness blows in through the gaping windows, the chill of night that tightens chests, that veils the eyes of old people and children.
Lalla continues to walk through the rubble; she walks over fallen plaster. She doesn’t know where she’s going. She goes down the same street several times, around the high walls of the general hospital. Maybe Aamma is there, in the big underground kitchen with greasy transoms, running her sponge mop over the black floors that nothing will ever be able to clean? Lalla doesn’t want to go back to Aamma’s place, ever again. She wanders along dark streets as a drizzle begins to fall from the sky, because the wind has fallen silent. Men walk past, dark faceless shapes that also seem lost. Lalla steps aside to let them pass, disappears into doorways, hides behind stopped cars. When the street is empty once again, she comes out, continues walking silently, exhausted, drunk with sleep.
Yet she doesn’t want to sleep. Where would she be able to let herself go, forget herself? The city is too dangerous, and anxiety won’t let poor girls sleep like the children of rich people.
There are too many sounds in the dark silence, sounds of hunger, sounds of fear, of loneliness. There is the sound of the sodden voices of bums in the shelters, the sound of Arab cafés with their endless, monotonous music, and the slow laughter of hashish smokers. There is the terrifying sound of the mad man punching his wife hard with his fist, every night, and the high-pitched voice of the woman screaming at first, then whimpering and moaning. Lalla is hearing all of those sounds now, very clearly, as if they echoed on endlessly. There is one sound in particular that follows her everywhere, that gets inside of her head and her belly and always repeats the same affliction: it’s the sound of a child coughing, somewhere in the night, in the house next door, maybe it’s the son of the Tunisian woman who is so fat and so pale, with sort-of-crazed green eyes? Or maybe it’s some other child who’s coughing in a house a few streets away, and then another who answers from somewhere else, in an attic room with a hole in the roof, still another who can’t sleep in the freezing alcove, and another, as if there were scores, hundreds of sick children coughing in the night, making the same hoarse sound which is tearing up their throats and their lungs. Lalla stops, leaning her back against a door, and presses the palms of her hands against her ears with all of her might, to keep from hearing the coughing of the children barking out in the cold night from house to house.
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