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 cafes 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.
Farther on, there is the curve in the street from where you can see, as though from a balcony, the intersection of the main avenues like the mouth of a river, and all the blinking, blinding lights. So Lalla climbs down the hill, following the stairways, she goes in through Passage de Lorette, walks across the large courtyard filled with the sound of radios and human voices, with walls blackened with smoke and poverty. She stops for a minute, her head turned toward the windows, as if someone were going to appear. But all that can be heard is the inhuman sound of a voice on the radio shouting something, slowly repeating the same sentence, “At the sound of this music the gods make their entrance!”
But Lalla doesn’t know what that means. The inhuman voice drowns out the sound of the children coughing, the sound of drunken men, and the whimpering woman. Then there is another dark passageway, like a corridor, and you come out on the boulevard.
Out there, for a moment, Lalla doesn’t feel the fear anymore, or the sadness. The crowd hurries along the sidewalks, eyes glittering, hands agile, feet pounding on the cement, hips swinging, garments rustling, charged with static electricity. Automobiles, trucks, motorcycles drive along on the pavement, headlights bright, and the reflections in the shop windows flash on and off constantly. Lalla lets herself be swept along by the movement of the people; she’s not thinking about herself now; she’s empty, as if she didn’t really exist anymore. That’s why she always comes back to the main avenues, to lose herself in the flow, to just drift along.
There are so many lights! Lalla watches them as she walks straight ahead. The blue, red, orangey, purple lights, the steady lights, the ones that move, the ones that dance in place like match flames. Lalla thinks about the star-filled sky, about the vast desert night, when she was lying on the hard sand next to the Hartani, and they were breathing softly, as if they had but one body. But it’s difficult to remember. Out here, you have to keep walking, walking along with the others, as if you knew where you were going, but there’s no end to the journey, no hiding place in a dip of the dunes. You have to keep walking so you won’t fall, so you won’t be trampled by the others.
Lalla goes all the way down to the end of the avenue, then walks back up another avenue, and yet another. There are still all the lights, and the sound of humans and their motors roars endlessly on. Then, all of a sudden, the fear returns, the anxiety, as if all the sounds of those tires and footsteps were tracing large concentric circles on the sides of a gigantic funnel.
Now Lalla can see them again: they’re out there everywhere, sitting against the blackened walls, hunched over on the ground amidst the excrement and the garbage: the beggars, the old blind people with outstretched hands, the young women with chapped lips, a child hanging on their flaccid breast, the little girls dressed in rags, faces covered with scabs, who cling to the clothing of passersby, old women, the color of soot, with tangled hair, all the people whom the hunger and the cold have driven out of their hovels, and who are pushed along like flotsam by the waves. They are there, in the middle of the indifferent city, in the head-splitting din of motors and voices, rain- soaked, windblown, uglier and poorer still in the wan light of the electric lightbulbs. They look at the people passing by with blurry eyes, their sad moist eyes which are constantly fleeing and turning back toward yours, like those of dogs. Lalla walks slowly past the beggars, looking at them with a knot in her throat and again, that terrible void is hollowing out its whirlwind there, in front of those discarded bodies. She’s walking so slowly that a beggar woman grabs her by the coat and tries to pull the young woman over to her. Lalla resists, forcefully pries away the fingers that are clutching at the cloth of her coat; she looks in pity and in horror at the face of the woman who is still young, cheeks swollen with alcohol, blotched red from the cold and, above all, those two blue, almost transparent, blind eyes, in which the pupils are no bigger than a pinhead.
“Come! Come here!” says the beggar woman, as Lalla is trying to unlock the fingers with broken nails. Then fear gains the upper hand, and Lalla yanks her coat out of the woman’s grasp, and runs away, while the other beggars start laughing and the woman, rising to her knees on the sidewalk amidst her piles of rags, begins to scream insults at her.
Heart pounding, Lalla runs along the avenue; she bumps into people who are strolling around, going in and out of cafes, movie theaters; men in suits who have just had dinner and whose faces are still glistening from the effort they have made to eat and drink too much, perfumed boys, couples, soldiers out for a night on the town, foreigners with black skin and frizzy hair, who say words she doesn’t understand, or who try to grab her, laughing very loud, as she runs by.
In the cafes, music blares incessantly, wild and throbbing music that reverberates deep in the ground, that vibrates all through your body, in your belly, in your eardrums. It’s always the same music coming out of the cafes and the bars, colliding with the neon lights, with the red, green, orangey colors on the walls, on the tables, with the painted faces of women.
How long has Lalla been moving through the whirl of that music? She’s not sure anymore. For hours, maybe for whole nights, nights with no days to interrupt them. She thinks about the expanse of the plateaus of stones in the night, of the mounds of razor-sharp rocks, of hare and viper tracks in the moonlight, and she glances about herself, here, as if she were going to see him appear. The Hartani, clothed in his homespun robe, with his eyes shining in his very black face, with his long slow movements like the gait of antelopes. But there is only this avenue, and still more of this avenue, and these intersections full of faces, of eyes, of mouths, these shrill voices, these words, these murmurs. The sounds of all these motors and horns, these glaring lights. You can’t see the sky, as if there were a white veil covering the earth. How could they get all the way over here, the Hartani and he, the blue warrior of the desert, al-Ser, the Secret, as she used to call him? They would never be able to see her through the white veil separating the city from the sky. They would never be able to recognize her, in the midst of so many faces, so many bodies, with all of these automobiles, these trucks, these motorcycles. They would never even be able to hear her voice, here, with the sound of all of these voices speaking in all different languages, with this music reverberating, making the ground shake. That’s why Lalla doesn’t look for them anymore, doesn’t talk to them anymore, as if they’d disappeared forever, as if for her, they were dead.
The beggars are out there in the night, in the very heart of the city. It has stopped raining, and the night is very white, distant, all the way through to midnight. There are very few people. Men go in and out of cafes and bars, but then they go speeding off in automobiles. Lalla turns right into the narrow street that climbs slightly uphill and she walks behind the stopped cars to keep from being seen. On the opposite sidewalk, there are a few men. They’re standing still, not talking. They’re looking up the street, at the entrance to a squalid building, a very small door painted green, half open on a lighted hallway.
Lalla stops too, and watches, hidden behind a car. Her heart is beating fast, and the great void of anxiety is blowing in the street. The building stands there like a dirty fortress, with its shutterless windows plastered with newspaper pages. Some windows are lit with a harsh ugly light, others an odd wan, blood-colored glow. It looks like a giant with scores of eyes standing stock still and watching, or sleeping, a giant filled with an evil force, who is going to devour the little men waiting in the street. Lalla is so weak she needs to lean up against the hull of the car,
