was also a big blackboard above the door with two crescent-shaped letters like this:
Lalla goes into the house, she climbs the stairs with narrow steps, just as she used to do when she would carry Mr. Ceresola’s packages, slowly, stopping on each landing to catch her breath. She is so tired today, she feels so heavy, as if she were going to fall asleep, as if she were going to die when she reached the top floor.
She stops in front of the door, hesitating a little. Then she pushes the door open and walks into the little apartment. At first she doesn’t recognize the place, because the shutters are closed and it’s dark inside. There isn’t anyone in the apartment, and Lalla walks toward the large room where there’s a table covered with an oilcloth, and a basket of fruit on it. At the back of the room is the alcove with the bed. When she draws near, Lalla can make out Mr. Ceresola, who is lying in the bed on his back, as if he were sleeping. He looks so peaceful in the half-light, with his eyes closed and his hands on either side of his body, that Lalla thinks for an instant that he’s simply dozed off, that he’ll soon wake up. She says, in a whisper, so as not to disturb him, “Mr. Ceresola? Mr. Ceresola?”
But Mr. Ceresola isn’t sleeping. You can see that from his clothing, still the same black suit, the same polished shoes, but the jacket is on a little crooked, with the collar turning up behind his head, and Lalla thinks it’s going to get wrinkled. There is a gray shadow on the old man’s cheeks and chin, and blue rings around his eyes, as if he’d been beaten. Lalla thinks of Naman’s eyes again, when he was lying on the floor in his house and couldn’t breathe anymore. She thinks of him so hard that for a few seconds, he’s the one she sees lying on the bed, his face sunk in sleep, his hands stretched out on either side of his body. Life is still quivering in the half-light of the room, with a very low, barely perceptible murmur. Lalla steps up very near to the bed, she looks more closely at the extinguished, wax-colored face, straight strands of white hair falling on the temples, mouth half opened, cheeks hollowed from the weight of the falling jaw. The thing that makes the face look odd is that it’s no longer wearing the old tortoiseshell glasses; it looks naked, weak, because of the marks on the nose, around the eyes, along the temples, that are pointless now. Mr. Ceresola’s body has suddenly become too small, too thin for those black clothes, and it’s as if he’d disappeared, as if all that were left was this mask and these waxen hands, and these ill- fitting garments on hangers that are too narrow. Then suddenly fear surges back over Lalla, fear that burns her skin, that blurs her eyes. The half-light is suffocating, it’s a paralyzing poison. The half-light comes from the back of the courtyards, flows down the narrow streets, through the old town, drowning everyone it encounters, the prisoners in the narrow rooms: small children, women, old people. It creeps into the houses, under the damp roofs, into the cellars, filling the smallest cracks.
Lalla stands motionless in front of Mr. Ceresola’s corpse. She feels the cold creeping through her body, the funny waxen color covering the skin on her face and hands. She still remembers the wind of ill fortune that blew over the Project that night when Old Naman was dying, and the cold that seemed to seep out of all the holes in the earth to annihilate human beings.
Slowly, without taking her eyes from the dead body, Lalla backs toward the door of the apartment. Death is in the gray shadows floating between the walls, in the stairway, on the chipped paint in the hallways. Lalla goes down as fast as she can, heart pounding, eyes filled with tears. She leaps outside, and tries to run down to the lower part of town, down to the sea, wreathed in wind and light, but a pain in her belly forces her to sit down on the ground, doubled over. She groans, while people walk by, glance at her furtively, and move away. They too are afraid, you can tell by the way they walk, sort of sidling along, hugging the walls, the way dogs with their hair bristling do.
Death is upon them everywhere, thinks Lalla, they can’t escape. Death is settled into the dark shop on the ground floor of the Hotel Sainte-Blanche, amongst the bouquets of plaster violets and the marble aggregate gravestones. That’s where it lives, in the old decrepit house, in the rooms of the men, in the halls. They don’t know it, they don’t even have the slightest inkling. At night it leaves the shop of the funeral home in the form of cockroaches, rats, bedbugs, and spreads through all of the damp rooms, over all the doormats, it crawls and seethes over the floors, into the cracks, it fills everything like a poisonous shadow.
Lalla rises to her feet, staggers forward, her hands pushing against her lower abdomen, where a pain protrudes. She’s not looking at anyone anymore. Where could she go? They’re all alive, they eat, they drink, they talk, and in the meantime, the trap is closing in on them. They’ve lost everything, exiled, beaten, humiliated, they work on the roads, in the freezing winds, in the rain, they dig holes in the stony earth, they ruin their hands and their heads, driven mad by the jackhammers. They’re hungry, they’re frightened, they’re frozen with solitude and emptiness. And when they stop, death wells up around them, right there, under their feet, in the shop, on the ground floor of the Hotel Sainte-Blanche. Down there, the morticians with mean eyes erase them, snuff them out, make their bodies disappear, replace their faces with masks of wax, their hands with gloves that stick out of their empty clothing.
Where can she go, where can she disappear to? Lalla would like to find a hiding place, like she had before in the Hartani’s cave, up on top of the cliff, a place where all you can see is the sea and the sky.
She reaches the little square and sits down on the plastic bench, facing the wall of the broken-down house with empty windows like the eyes of a dead giant.
AFTER THAT, there was a sort of fever, almost everywhere in the city. Maybe it was because of the wind that had begun to blow at the end of the winter; it wasn’t the wind of ill fortune and sickness, like the one when Old Naman had started to die, but a cold hard wind that blew down the main avenues of the city, raising the dust and the old newspapers, a wind that made you light-headed, that made you stagger. Lalla has never felt a wind like that before. It gets inside your head and whirls around, goes through your body like a cold draft, driving great shudders out ahead of it. So that afternoon, as soon as she gets outside, she starts running straight away, without even glancing at the shop of the funeral home, with the bored man in black.
Outside in the main avenues, there’s a great deal of light because it’s being carried in on the wind. It’s leaping about, sparkling on the hulls of the automobiles, on the windows of the houses. It gets inside of Lalla’s head too; it vibrates on her skin, makes her hair sparkle. Today, for the first time in ages, she can see the eternal whiteness of stone and sand all around her, shards as sharp as flint, the stars. Far out ahead of her, at the end of the large avenue, in the haze of light, mirages appear, domes, towers, minarets, and caravans mingling with the swarm of people and automobiles.
It’s the wind of light, coming from the west, and blowing in the same direction as the shadows. Lalla can hear, just as she used to, the sound of the light sizzling on the asphalt, the long sound of it reflecting off the windows, all of the crackling sounds of the embers. Where is she? There’s so much light it’s as if she were alone in the midst of a network of needles. Maybe she’s walking over the immense expanse of stones and sand right now, in the place where the Hartani is waiting for her, in the middle of the desert? Maybe she’s dreaming as she walks along, because of the light and the wind, and the big city will soon dissolve, evaporate in the heat of the rising sun after the horrid night?
At the corner of one street, near the flight of stairs leading up to the train station, Radicz the beggar is standing in front of her. His face is tired and anxious, and Lalla has a hard time recognizing him because the boy now looks like a man. He’s wearing clothing Lalla isn’t familiar with, a brown suit that sags around his bony body and big, black leather shoes that must certainly be wounding his bare feet.
Lalla would like to talk to him, tell him that Mr. Ceresola is dead, and that she’s never going to go back to work at the Hotel Sainte-Blanche, or in any of those rooms where death can strike at any minute and turn you into a wax mask; but there’s too much wind and too much noise to talk, so she shows Radicz the wad of rumpled banknotes in her hand.
“Look!”
Radicz opens his eyes wide, but he doesn’t ask any questions. Maybe he thinks Lalla stole the money, or worse yet.
Lalla puts the bills back into her coat pocket. That’s all that is left of the days she spent in the darkness of the hotel, scrubbing the linoleum with the couch-grass brush, sweeping the gray rooms that smell of sweat and tobacco. When she told the owner of the hotel she was leaving, he didn’t say anything either. He got out of his old bed, which was never made, and walked over to the safe at the back of his room. He took out the money, counted it, added a week’s advance, and gave it all to Lalla; then he went and lay back down again without saying anything else. He did all of that in a very leisurely fashion, in his pajamas, with his unshaven cheeks, and his dirty hair; then he went back to reading his newspaper again, as if nothing else were of any importance.
So now Lalla is drunk with freedom. She looks around, at the walls, the windows, the automobiles, the
