on Saturdays and Sundays, he plays soccer. He’s passionate about it. He’s got posters and pictures all over his room, tacked to the walls, to the door, inside the closet. Every time he sees Lalla, he asks her when she’s going to come and watch him play at the stadium.
She went once, on a Sunday afternoon. She sat all the way at the top of the bleachers, and watched. He made a little black spot on the green turf in the field, and that’s how she was able to recognize him. He was the attacking right center midfielder. But Lalla never told him she’d gone to see him, maybe so he would keep asking her to come, with that laugh of his that rings out loudly in the halls of the hotel.
There’s also an old man who lives in a very small room, at the other end of the hall. He never talks to anyone, and no one really knows where he comes from. He’s an old man whose face has been eaten away by a terrible disease, with no nose or mouth, only two holes in place of his nostrils and a scar in place of his lips. But he has pretty eyes which are deep and sad, and he is always polite and kind, and Lalla likes him because of that. He lives on nearly nothing in that room, almost without eating, and he only goes out early in the morning to glean fruit that has fallen on the ground in the marketplace and to take a walk in the sunshine. Lalla doesn’t know his name, but she likes him. He resembles Old Naman in a way; he has the same type of hands, strong and agile, hands burned by the sun and full of know-how. When she looks at his hands it’s a little bit as if she could recognize the burning landscape, the stretches of sand and stones, the charred shrubs, the dried-up rivers. But he never talks about his country, or about himself; he keeps it locked up deep inside. He barely utters a few words to Lalla when he passes her in the hall, only about what the weather’s like outside, or the news he heard on the radio. He might be the only one in the hotel who knows Lalla’s secret, because he asked her twice, looking at her with his extremely profound eyes, if it wasn’t too hard on her to be working. He didn’t say anything else, but Lalla thought that he knew she had a baby in her belly, and she was even a little afraid the old man would tell the owner, because he wouldn’t want to keep her at the hotel anymore. But the old man didn’t say anything to anyone else. Every Monday, he pays for a week’s lodgings in advance, without anyone knowing where his money comes from. Lalla is the only one who knows he’s very poor, because there is never anything to eat in his room, save the bruised fruit that has fallen on the ground at the marketplace. So, sometimes, when she has a little extra money, she buys one or two nice apples, some oranges, and she puts them on the only chair in the small room, when she’s doing the cleaning. The old man never thanks her, but she can tell from his eyes he’s pleased when she runs into him.
Lalla knows the other lodgers by sight, but doesn’t know anything about them. They’re people who never stay long, Arabs, Portuguese, Italians, who only come to sleep. There are also a few who have stayed, but Lalla doesn’t like them — two Arabs on the first floor who look cruel, and who get drunk on wood alcohol. There’s the man who reads obscene magazines, and who leaves all those pictures of naked women on his unmade bed, so that Lalla will pick them up and look at them. He’s a Yugoslavian, whose name is Gregori. One day, Lalla went into his room, and he was there. He took her by the arm and wanted to knock her onto the bed, but Lalla started yelling, and he got scared. He let her go, shouting insults at her. Ever since that day, Lalla has never gone into his room while he’s there.
But none of those people really exist, except for the old man with his face eaten away. They don’t exist because they leave no trace of their passage, as if they were nothing but shadows, ghosts. When they leave one day, it’s as if they’d never come. The bed with canvas webbing is still the same, and the wobbly chair, the stained linoleum, the greasy walls where the paint is blistering, and the bare, flyspecked, electric lightbulb hanging at the end of its wire. Everything stays the same.
But most of all, it’s the light coming from outside, through the dirty windowpanes, the gray light from the interior courtyard, the pale reflection of the sun, and the sounds: sounds of radios, sounds of automobile motors on the main avenue, the voices of men arguing. Sounds of pipes squeaking, the sound of the toilet flushing, the stairs creaking, the sound of the wind rattling the metal gutters.
Lalla listens to all of those sounds, at night, lying on her bed, looking at the yellow spot of the electric lightbulb burning. The men can’t exist here, neither can children, nor any living thing. She listens to the sounds of the night as if she were inside a cave, and it’s as if she herself didn’t really exist anymore. In her belly, something is fluttering now, palpitating like an unfamiliar organ.
Lalla curls up in her bed, knees drawn up against her chin, and she tries to listen to the thing that is moving inside of her, that is beginning to take on life. There is still the fear, the fear that makes you flee through the streets and makes you bounce around from one corner to the next, like a ball. But at the same time, there is an odd wave of happiness, of warmth and light, that seems to be coming from far away, from beyond the seas and the cities, and binding Lalla to the beauty of the desert. Then, just as she does every night, Lalla closes her eyes, she breathes in deeply. Slowly, the gray light of the narrow room fades out, and the lovely night appears. It is inhabited with stars, cold, silent, lonely. She is resting on the boundless earth, on the stretch of immobile dunes. Next to Lalla is the Hartani, wearing his homespun robe, and his black copper face is shining in the starlight. It is his gaze that is coming all the way out to her, reaching her here, in this narrow room, in the sickly light of the electric lightbulb, and the Hartani’s gaze is moving inside of her, in her belly, awakening life. It’s been such a long time since he disappeared, such a long time since she went away, across the sea, as if she had been banished, and yet the gaze of the young shepherd is very forceful; she can feel him actually moving deep down inside, in the secrecy of her womb. Then they are the ones who disappear, the people in this city, the policemen, the men in the streets, the lodgers in the hotel, all of them disappear, and along with them, their city, their houses, their streets, their automobiles, their trucks, and there is nothing left but the stretch of desert where Lalla and the Hartani are lying together. They are both wrapped up in the large homespun robe, surrounded by the black night and the myriads of stars, and they are holding very tightly to one another, so as not to feel the cold creeping over the earth.
When someone dies in the Panier, the funeral shop on the ground floor of the hotel takes care of everything. At first Lalla thought it belonged to a relative of the hotel owner; but it’s just a business like all the others. At first, Lalla thought that people came to die at the hotel, and afterward, they were sent to the funeral home. There aren’t many people in the shop, only the boss, Mr. Cherez, two morticians, and the limousine driver.
When someone in the Panier is dead, the employees leave in the limousine, and they go to hang big black tapestries with silver teardrops on the door of the house. In front of the door, on the sidewalk, they set up a little table draped with a black cloth that also has silver tears on it. On the table, there is a saucer so that people can put a little card with their name on it when they go and visit the dead person.
When Mr. Ceresola died, Lalla knew right away, because she saw his son in the shop on the ground floor of the hotel. Mr. Ceresola’s son is a short, chubby little man with a bristly mustache who doesn’t have much hair, and he always looks at Lalla as if she were transparent. But Mr. Ceresola was different. He’s someone Lalla really likes. He’s an Italian, not very tall, but old and thin, and he walks painfully because of his rheumatism. He’s always dressed in a black suit that must be pretty old too, because the fabric is threadbare at the elbows, at the knees. With the suit, he wears old black leather shoes that are always well polished, and in cold weather, he adds a wool scarf and a cap. Mr. Ceresola has a very dry, wrinkled face, quite leathered from the open air, short white hair, and funny tortoiseshell glasses, repaired with bandage tape and string.
People in the Panier really like him because he’s polite and pleasant to everyone, and he has a dignified air about him with his old-fashioned black suit and his polished shoes. And also, everyone knows that he used to be a carpenter, a real master carpenter, and that he came from Italy before the war, because he didn’t like Mussolini. That’s the story he sometimes tells when he runs into Lalla in the street on his way to the grocery. He says he arrived in Paris without any money, just enough to pay for two or three nights in a hotel, and that he didn’t speak a word of French; so when he asked for some soap to wash with, he was shown a pot of hot water.
When Lalla runs into him, she helps him carry his packages because he has a hard time walking, especially when you have to go up the stairs leading to Rue du Panier. So as they walk along, he tells her about Italy, about his village, and the days when he worked in Tunisia, and the houses he built everywhere in Paris, in Lyon, in Corsica. He has a funny, somewhat loud voice, and Lalla has a hard time understanding his accent, but she enjoys hearing him speak.
Now he’s dead. When Lalla realized that, she looked so sad that Mr. Ceresola’s son glanced at her in astonishment, as if he were surprised that someone could care about his father. Lalla left very quickly, because she doesn’t much like to breathe in the air in the funeral home, or see all of those celluloid wreaths, those coffins, and above all those morticians who have mean eyes.
So then Lalla followed the streets, slowly, head bowed, and that’s how she ended up at the door to Mr. Ceresola’s house. Around the door were the tapestries and the little table with its black cloth and saucer. There
