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.
NOW 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.
The most extraordinary thing about it all is the letters: they come from all over, with Hawa’s name on the envelopes. They’re from magazines, fashion reviews that forward them after adding the photographer’s name and address. He’s both happy and unsettled at receiving all those letters. Hawa asks him to read them, and she always listens with her head cocked a little to one side, drinking mint tea (now the photographer’s kitchenette is full of boxes of gunpowder tea and jasmine tea and little bundles of mint). Sometimes the letters say extraordinary things, or really dumb things written by young girls who have seen Hawa’s picture somewhere and who talk to her as if they’d always known her. Or else letters from young boys who have fallen in love with her, and say she’s as beautiful as Nefertiti or an Incan princess, and they would love to meet her one day.
Lalla starts laughing:
“What liars!”
When the photographer shows her the pictures he’s just taken, Hawa with her almond-shaped eyes, shining like gems, and her amber-colored skin, sparkling with light, and her lips with a slightly ironic smile, and her sharp profile, Lalla Hawa starts laughing again, repeats, “What a liar! What a liar!”
Because she thinks it doesn’t look like her.
There are also serious letters that speak of contracts, money, appointments, fashion shows. The photographer makes all the decisions, takes care of everything. He calls the fashion designers, notes the appointments in his agenda, signs the contracts. He’s the one who chooses the designs, the colors, decides where the shots will be taken. Then he takes Hawa in his little red Volkswagen van, and they go far away, out where there are no houses, nothing but gray hills covered with thorny scrub, or to the delta of the great river, on the smooth beaches of the marshes, out where the water and the sky are the same color.
Lalla Hawa loves to travel in the photographer’s van. She watches the landscape slipping around the windows, the black road winding toward her, the houses, the gardens, the fallow fields unraveling on the side, whipping away. People are standing on the side of the road, with blank looks on their faces, as if in a dream. Maybe it is a dream that Lalla Hawa is living, a dream in which there’s no more day or night really, no more hunger or thirst, but shifting landscapes of chalk, brambles, crossroads, towns going by, with their streets, their monuments, their hotels.
The photographer never stops photographing Hawa. He changes cameras, measures the light, pushes the trigger. Hawa’s face is everywhere, everywhere. It’s in the sunlight, lit up as if with a halo in the winter sky, or in the depth of the night, it’s vibrating over the waves of radio sets, in telephone messages. The photographer closes himself up all alone in his laboratory, under his little orange lamp, and looks indefinitely at the face taking form on the paper in the developing pan. First the eyes, immense, two stains growing deeper, then the black hair, the curve of the lips, the outline of the nose, the shadow under the chin. The eyes are looking elsewhere, as Lalla Hawa always does, elsewhere, out on the other side of the world, and every time, the photographer’s heart speeds up, like the first time he caught sight of the light in her eyes in the Galères restaurant, or when he just happened to run into her again in the stairways of the old town.
She gives him her shape, her image, nothing else. Sometimes the contact of the palm of her hand, or an electric spark when her hair brushes against his body, and also her smell, slightly bitter, slightly stinging, like the smell of citrus fruit, and the sound of her voice, her clear laughter. But who is she? Maybe she’s just a pretext for a dream he’s chasing in his darkroom with his bellows cameras and his lenses that accentuate the shadow of her eyes, the shape of her smile a dream he and other men share about the pages of fashion reviews and glossy magazine pictures?
He takes Hawa by airplane to the city of Paris; they drive along in a taxi under the gray sky, by the Seine, on their way to business meetings. He takes pictures on the banks of the muddy river, on the large squares, on the endless avenues. He tirelessly photographs the handsome copper-colored face with the light flowing over it like water. Hawa wearing a black satin jumpsuit, Hawa wearing a midnight-blue trench coat, hair braided into a single thick tress. Every time his eyes meet Hawa’s, it makes his heart skip a beat, and that’s why he’s hurrying to take pictures, always more pictures. He moves forward, backs up, changes his camera, puts one knee to the ground. Lalla makes fun of him: “You look like you’re dancing.”
He’d like to get angry, but it’s impossible. He wipes the sweat from his forehead, from his eyebrow, which is slipping against the viewfinder. Then Lalla suddenly steps out of the light field because she’s tir
ed of being photographed. She walks away. To keep from feeling the emptiness, he’ll continue to look at her for hours, in the darkness of his improvised laboratory in the bathroom of his hotel room, waiting – counting his heartbeats – for the handsome face to appear in the developing pan, most of all the eyes, that profound light flowing from the slanted eyes. That dusk-colored light, from ever so far away, as if someone else, someone secret, were looking out from those pupils, judging silently. And then, appearing later, slowly, like a cloud forming, the forehead, the line of the high cheekbones, the grain of the copper skin, weathered with the sun and the wind. There’s something secret about her that sometimes just happens to be revealed on the paper, something you can see but never possess, even if you take pictures every second of her existence, until she dies. There’s her smile too, very gentle, somewhat ironic, that makes little hollows at the corners of her mouth, and narrows the slanted eyes. It’s all of this the photographer would like to capture with his cameras and bring back to life in the darkness of his laboratory. At times he’s under the impression that it really is going to appear, the smile, the light in the eyes, the beauty of the features. But it only lasts a brief instant. On the paper plunged into the developer, the image moves, modifies, blurs, is covered with shadow, and it’s as if the image erased the living person.
Maybe it’s elsewhere, rather than in the image? Maybe it’s in the way she walks, in her movements? The photographer watches Lalla Hawa’s gestures, the way she sits down, moves her hands, palms open, making a perfect curve from the crook of her elbow to the tips of her fingers. He looks at the line of her neck, her lithe back, her wide hands and feet, her shoulders, and her heavy black hair with ashen reflections falling in thick curls on her shoulders. He looks at Lalla Hawa, and at times it’s as if he can glimpse another face showing through the young woman’s features, another body behind hers; barely perceptible, immaterial, ephemeral, the other person drifts up from deep within, then melts away, leaving a flickering memory. Who is it? Who is the girl he calls Hawa, what is her real name?
Sometimes Hawa looks at him, or she looks at people, in the restaurants, in the airport terminals, in the offices, she looks at them as if her eyes would simply erase them, send them back to the void they must belong to. When that strange look comes over her face, the photographer shudders, as if something cold has entered his body. He doesn’t know what it is. Maybe it is the other being living inside Lalla Hawa, who is observing and judging the world through her eyes, as if in that very instant all of this – this gigantic city, this river, these squares, these avenues – disappeared, and let the vast stretch of the desert show through, the sand, the sky, the wind.
So the photographer takes Hawa to places that resemble the desert: wide-open rocky plains, marshes, esplanades, vacant lots. For him, Hawa walks around in the sunlight, and her eyes scan the horizon like those of birds of prey, searching for a shadow, a shape. She looks for a long time, as if she really were searching for someone; then she stands still on her shadow, while the photographer starts shooting.
What is she looking for? What does she want from life? The photographer looks at her eyes, her face, and he can feel the profound anxiety behind the force of her light. There is also wariness, the instinct to flee, that funny sort of glimmer that flits over the eyes of wild animals at times. She told him one day, right when he was expecting it, she spoke to him softly of the child she is carrying, who is rounding out her belly and making her breasts swell: “You know, one day I’ll go away, I’ll leave, and you mustn’t try to hold me back, because I’ll leave forever...”
She doesn’t want money, it doesn’t interest her. Every time the photographer gives her some money – wages for the hours of posing – Hawa takes the bills, picks out one or two, and hands him back the rest. Sometimes, she’s even the one who gives him money, handfuls of bills and coins that she takes out of the pocket in her overalls, as if she didn’t want to keep any of it for herself.
Or sometimes she wanders the streets of the city looking for beggars at the corners of buildings, and she gives them money, coins by the handful too, pressing her hand firmly into theirs so they won’t lose anything. She gives money to the veiled gypsies who wander around barefoot in the main avenues, and to old women dressed in black squatting in the entrances to the post offices, to bums lying on benches in the squares, and to old men rummaging in rich people’s garbage cans at nightfall. They all know her well, and when they see her coming their eyes get bright. The bums think she’s a prostitute, because prostitutes are the only ones who give them that much money, and they make jokes and laugh real hard, but they look really happy to see her all the same.
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