countries without ever having found anything else, because lodgings are expensive, and no one wants to have anything to do with them in the city. So they live in the Hotel Sainte-Blanche, two or three to a room, without knowing each other. Every morning when they leave for work, they knock on the owner’s glass door, and pay for the night in advance.
When she’s finished scrubbing the filthy stairs and the sticky linoleum in the hallways with the long-handled brush, Lalla scours down the toilets and the only shower room with the brush alone, but there again, the layer of filth is such that the hard bristles of the brush can’t even put a dent in it. Then she cleans the rooms; she empties the ashtrays and sweeps up the crumbs and the dust. The owner gives her his passkey, and she goes from room to room. There’s no one in the hotel. The rooms are easy to do because the men who live there are very poor, and they have practically no possessions. Just the cardboard suitcases, the plastic bags with their dirty laundry, a bit of soap wrapped in a piece of newspaper. Sometimes there are a few photographs in an envelope on the table; Lalla looks at the blurred faces on the glossy paper for a moment, sweet faces of children, of women, half faded away, as if through a fog. There are letters too, sometimes, in large envelopes, or sometimes keys, empty coin purses, souvenirs purchased in bazaars near the old port, plastic toys for the children who are in the fuzzy pictures. Lalla looks at all of that for a long time; she holds the objects in her wet hands, looks at those precarious treasures as if she were half dreaming, as if she would be able to enter into the world of those murky photographs, hear the sound of the voices, laughter, glimpse the light in the smiles. Then it all suddenly vanishes, and she goes back to sweeping the room, cleaning up the crumbs left after the men’s hasty meals, restoring the sad gray anonymity that the objects and the photographs had disturbed for an instant. Sometimes, on a bed with the sheets thrown back, Lalla finds a magazine full of obscene pictures, naked women with their legs spread, obese swollen breasts, like huge oranges, women with their lips painted light pink, with heavy eyes smeared with blue and green, with blond and red hair. The pages of the magazines are crumpled, stained with sperm, the photos are dirty and worn as if they had been left on the street under people’s feet. Lalla also looks at the magazine for a long time, and her heart starts beating faster, from anxiety and uneasiness; then she puts the magazine down on the made bed, after having straightened out the pages and closed the cover, as if it too were a precious souvenir.
The whole time she’s working in the stairways and the rooms, Lalla doesn’t see anyone. She’s never seen the faces of the men who live at the hotel; as for them, they’re in a hurry when they leave for work in the morning and go past her without seeing her. In fact, Lalla is dressed so she won’t be seen. Under her brown coat, she wears a gray dress that belongs to Aamma, which comes down almost to her ankles. She knots a large scarf over her head and slips her feet into black rubber sandals. In the dark corridors of the hotel, on the mud-colored linoleum, and in front of the dirty doors, she is barely visible, gray and black, like a pile of rags. The only people who know her here are the owner and the night watchman who stays until morning; he’s a tall, very skinny Algerian, with a tough face and pretty green eyes like those of Naman the fisherman. He always greets Lalla, in French, and says a few nice words to her; since he always talks very ceremoniously in his deep voice, Lalla answers him with a smile. He is perhaps the only person here who has noticed that Lalla is a teenage girl, the only person who has seen, under the shadows of the rags, her handsome copper-colored face and her eyes filled with light.
When she’s finished her work at the Hotel Sainte-Blanche, the sun is still high in the sky. So Lalla walks down the main avenue to the sea. She doesn’t think of anything else then, as if she’d forgotten everything. In the avenue, on the sidewalks, the crowd is still rushing on, still rushing toward the unknown. There are men with glinting eyeglasses, striding hurriedly along; there are poor men wearing threadbare suits, going in the opposite direction, with guarded looks, like foxes. There are groups of young girls, wearing skintight clothing, who walk along clacking their heels, like this: kra-kab, kra-kab, kra-kab. The automobiles, the motorcycles, the mopeds, the trucks, the buses are all speeding past, going down to the sea, or up toward the higher part of the city, all filled with men and women with identical faces. Lalla is walking along on the sidewalk, looking at all of that, all of the movement, all of the shapes, the bursts of light, and it all goes inside of her and whirls around. She’s hungry; her body is weary from having worked in the hotel, and yet she still feels like walking, to see more light, to drive out all the darkness that has remained deep inside of her. The icy winter wind blows in gusts along the avenue, raising dust and old newspaper pages. Lalla half closes her eyes, moves along bent slightly forward, just as she used to back in the desert, toward the source of light out there at the end of the avenue.
When she reaches the harbor, she feels a kind of drunkenness inside, stands teetering on the edge of the sidewalk. Here the wind is whirling about freely, driving the water in the harbor out ahead of it, making the riggings on the boats snap. The light is coming from even farther out, beyond the horizon, directly south, and Lalla walks along the wharves, toward the sea. The sound of humans and motors swirls around her, but she doesn’t pay attention to it anymore. Sometimes running, sometimes walking, she heads for the large striped church; then even farther out, she enters into the derelict zone of the wharves, where the wind raises squalls of cement dust.
Here, suddenly, everything is silent, as if she really were going to enter the desert. Before her lies the white expanse of the wharves where the sunlight is shining brightly. Lalla walks slowly along beside the silhouettes of the huge freighters, under the metallic cranes, between the rows of red containers. There are no people here, or automobile motors, only white stone and cement, and the dark water in the basins. So then she picks out a place, between two rows of containers covered with blue tarps, and she sits down sheltered from the wind to eat some bread and cheese, gazing at the water in the harbor. At times big seabirds pass overhead shrieking, and Lalla thinks of her place between the dunes and the white bird that was a prince of the sea. She shares her bread with the gulls, but some pigeons also come. Here everything is calm, no one ever comes looking for her out here. From time to time, a fisherman walks down the wharf, holding his rod, looking for a good place to catch sea bream; but he hardly even glances at her out of the corner of his eye, and goes off to the back of the harbor. Or sometimes a child will walk along with his hands in his pockets, playing by himself at kicking a rusty tin can around.
Lalla feels the sunlight penetrating her, gradually filling her, driving out everything that is dark and sad deep inside. She no longer thinks about Aamma’s place, about the dark courtyards with dripping laundry. She no longer thinks about the Hotel Sainte-Blanche, or even about all of those streets, avenues, boulevards, where people are endlessly walking, endlessly rumbling along. She becomes like a piece of rock, covered with moss and lichen, immobile, with no thoughts, dilated in the heat of the sun. Sometimes she even falls asleep, leaning against the blue tarpaulin, her knees pulled up under her chin, and she dreams she’s in a boat gliding out on the still sea, all the way out to the other side of the world.
The huge freighters glide slowly through the black basins. They go over to the entrance of the harbor; they want to go back out to sea. Lalla plays at following them, running along the wharves as far as she can. She can’t read their names, but she looks at their flags, the rust stains on their hulls, and their huge derricks folded back like antennae, and their chimneys decorated with stars, crosses, checkers, suns. In front of the freighters, the pilot boat sails out with a waddling motion like an insect, and when the freighters reach the high seas, they blow their horns, just once or twice, like that, to say good-bye.
The water in the harbor is lovely too, and Lalla often settles down with her back leaning up against a bollard, legs dangling over the water. She looks at the rainbow-colored oil slicks making and unmaking their clouds, and all the odd things drifting on the surface, beer bottles, orange peels, plastic bags, pieces of wood and rope, and that sort of brown foam that comes from who knows where, stretching like strings of spittle along the wharves. When a ship goes by, wavelets spread out from its wake, lapping up against the wharves. The wind blows very hard at times, driving wrinkles, shudders, over the basins, blurring the reflections of the freighters.
Some days in winter, when there is a lot of sunshine, Radicz the beggar comes to see Lalla. He walks slowly along the wharves, but Lalla recognizes him from a long way off; she comes out of her hiding place between the tarpaulins, and whistles between her fingers, as the shepherds used to back in the Hartani’s land. The boy comes running up, sits down next to her on the edge of the wharf, and they look at the water in the harbor for a while, not saying anything.
Then the boy shows Lalla something she’s never noticed before: on the surface of the black water, there are small silent explosions making circular ripples. At first Lalla looks up at the sky, because she thinks it’s from raindrops. But the sky is blue. Then she realizes there are bubbles coming up from the bottom and bursting at the surface of the water. Together they have fun watching the bubbles explode.
“There! There’s one!… Another one, another!”
“Over there, look!”
“And there!…”
Where are those bubbles coming from? Radicz says it’s the fish breathing, but Lalla thinks it’s probably the plants, and she thinks of those mysterious grasses swaying slowly at the bottom of the harbor.
