agitation and hurriedness to pay much attention to anyone. There are all sorts of people in the station, cruel people, violent people with bright red faces, people who shout at the top of their lungs; there are very sad and very poor people too, old people who are lost, anxiously searching for the platforms their trains are leaving from, women with too many children who hobble along with their loads by the cars that are too high. There are all of the people that poverty has brought to this city, blacks who have come off boats, heading for the cold countries with their colorful short-sleeved shirts and a lone beach bag serving as luggage; dark-skinned North Africans, layered with old jackets, wearing ski caps or hats with ear flaps; the Turks, the Spaniards, the Greeks, all looking worried and weary, wandering around on the platforms in the wind, bumping into one another in the midst of the crowd of indifferent travelers and jeering soldiers.
Lalla watches them, just barely hidden between the telephone booth and the information board. She’s backed into the shadows pretty well, and her copper-colored face is shielded with the collar of her coat. But from time to time, her heart starts beating faster and a flash of light darts from her eyes, like the reflection of the sun off the stones in the desert. She watches all the people who are headed for other cities, for hunger, cold, misfortune, those who will be humiliated, who will live in solitude. They go by, stooping slightly, eyes blank, clothing already worn from nights of sleeping on the ground, like so many defeated soldiers.
They are headed for black cities, for low skies, for smokestacks, for the cold, the sickness that rips your chest apart. They’re headed for their shantytowns in muddy lots, down below the freeways, for rooms like graves dug into the ground, surrounded by high walls and fences. Maybe those men, those women, passing by like ghosts, dragging their bags and their too-heavy children, will never come back, maybe they’ll die in those countries they don’t even know, far from their villages, far from their families? They’re headed into those foreign countries that will take their lives, that will crush and devour them. Lalla is standing very still in her dark corner, and her vision blurs because that’s what she thinks. She would so like to go away from here, walk through the streets of the city until there were no more houses, no more gardens, not even any roads, or shoreline, just a path like before, that would lead out, growing ever narrower till it reached the desert.
Night falls on the city. Lights flicker on in the streets, around the train station, on the iron pylons, and on the long red, white, and green bars over the cafes and the movie theaters. Lalla is walking through the dark streets without making a sound, slipping along hugging the walls. Men’s faces are terrifying when night falls, and they are only partially lit by the streetlamps. Their eyes shine cruelly, the sound of their footsteps echoes in the corridors, under the carriage entrances. Lalla is walking quickly now, as if she were trying to flee. From time to time, a man follows her, tries to come up to her, take her arm, so Lalla hides behind a car, then disappears. Once again, she starts slipping along like a shadow; she wanders around in the streets of the old town until she reaches the Panier neighborhood, where Aamma lives. She takes the unlit stairway, so no one will see which door she’s gone in. She knocks lightly on the door, and when she hears her aunt’s voice, she says her name with relief.
That’s what Lalla’s days are like, here, in the big city of Marseille, along all the streets, with all of the men and all of the women she’ll never be able to know.
THERE ARE A LOT of beggars. In the beginning, when she’d just arrived, Lalla was quite surprised. Now she’s gotten used to it. But she doesn’t forget to see them, like most people in the city, who just make a little detour so as not to step on them, or who even step over them when they’re in a hurry.
Radicz is a beggar. That’s how she met him, walking along the main avenues near the train station. One day, she’d left the Panier early, and it was still dark, because it was winter. There weren’t many people in the narrow streets and stairways of the old town, and the main avenue below the general hospital was still deserted, with only trucks driving along with their headlights on and a few men and a few women on their mopeds all muffled up in their overcoats.
That was where she saw Radicz. He was sitting scrunched up in a doorway, doing his best to keep out of the wind and drizzling rain. He looked as if he were very cold and when Lalla came up beside him, he gave her a funny look, not at all like boys usually do when they see a girl. He looked at her without lowering his eyes, and there wasn’t much you could read in that look, like the eyes of animals. Lalla stopped in front of him; she asked, “What are you doing here? Aren’t you cold?”
The boy shook his head without smiling. Then he held out his hand.
“Give me something.”
Lalla had nothing but a piece of bread and an orange that she’d brought along for her lunch. She gave them to the boy. He snatched the orange from her without saying thank you and began eating it.
That’s how Lalla got to know him. After that, she saw him often, in the streets, near the train station, or else on the wide flight of stairs when the weather was nice. He can remain sitting for hours, staring straight ahead, without paying attention to anyone. But he likes Lalla quite a bit, maybe because of the orange. He told her his name was Radicz; he even wrote the name on the ground with a twig, but he seemed astonished when Lalla told him she didn’t know how to read.
He has pretty hair, very black and straight, and a copper complexion. He has green eyes and a little moustache like a shadow over his lips. Most of all, he has a lovely smile sometimes, which makes his very white front teeth sparkle. He wears a small ring in his left ear, and he claims it’s made of gold. But he’s clothed shabbily, in an old pair of stained, torn pants, a bunch of old sweaters that he wears one on top of the other, and a man’s suit jacket, which is too big for him. He wears a pair of black leather shoes with no socks.
Lalla likes to run into him by chance in the street, because he’s never exactly the same. Some days his eyes are sad and veiled, as if he were lost in some dream and nothing could pull him out of it. Other days, he’s happy, and his eyes shine; he tells all sorts of absurd stories that he makes up as he goes along, and he starts laughing for a long time, noiselessly, and Lalla can’t help but laugh along with him.
Lalla would like for him to come to see her at her aunt’s house, but she doesn’t dare, because Radicz is a gypsy, and that would certainly not please Aamma. He doesn’t live in the Panier neighborhood, or even nearby. He lives very far away, somewhere west of the city, near the railroad, over where there are the big vacant lots and large gasoline storage tanks, and smokestacks that burn day and night. He said so himself, but he never talks for long about his house or his family. He simply says that he lives too far away to come to town every day, and when he does come, he sleeps outside instead of going back to his house. He doesn’t mind; he says he knows some good hiding places, where you’re not cold, where you can’t feel the wind and where no one, absolutely no one, could find him.
For example, there are the places under the stairs in the broken-down customs buildings. There’s a hole, just the size of a kid, and you slip inside and plug up the hole with a piece of cardboard. Or else there are tool sheds on the building sites, or tarp-covered trucks. Radicz knows all about those kinds of things.
Most of the time, you can find him somewhere around the train station. When the weather’s fine, and the sun is nice and warm, he sits on the steps of the wide flight of stairs, and Lalla comes over to sit by him. They watch the people going by together. Sometimes Radicz picks someone out, says, “Watch this.” He goes straight over to the traveler who’s leaving the train station, a little dazed by the light, and asks for some change. Since he has a handsome smile and something sad about his eyes too, the traveler stops, searches his pockets. It’s mostly men of around thirty, well-dressed, without much baggage, who give Radicz money. With women it’s more complicated, they want to ask questions, and Radicz doesn’t like that.
So when he sees a nice-looking young woman he prods Lalla and says, “Go ahead, you ask her.”
But Lalla is reluctant to ask for money. She’s a little ashamed. Yet there are times when she’d like to have a little money, to eat a piece of pastry or go to the movies.
“This is the last year I’ll be doing this,” says Radicz. “Next year I’m leaving, I’m going to work in Paris.”
Lalla asks him why.
“Next year I’ll be too old, people won’t give you anything when you’re too old, they say you should go out and get a job.”
He looks at Lalla for a minute, then he asks her if she works, and Lalla shakes her head.
Radicz points out someone walking past, over by the buses.
“He works with me too, we’ve got the same boss.”
It’s a young, very skinny black teenager, who looks like a shadow; he goes up to people and tries to take their suitcases, but it doesn’t seem to work very well. Radicz shrugs his shoulders.
“He doesn’t know how to go about it. His name is Baki, I don’t know what it means, but it makes the other black people laugh when he says his name. He never brings much money back to the boss.”
