of his fear.
“Bring us the same thing as they’re having,” Lalla orders. She motions to the group of people at the next table, the ones who are peering at them over their eyeglasses every now and again, turning halfway around in their seats.
The man goes and says something to one of the waiters, who comes up pushing a small cart loaded with dishes of all different colors. On the plates, the waiter places tomatoes, lettuce leaves, filets of anchovies, olives and capers, cold potatoes, eggs in a yellow powder, and still many more things. Lalla watches Radicz eating quickly, leaning over his plate like a dog gnawing at a bone, and she feels like laughing.
The light and the wind are still dancing for her, even here, on the glasses and the plates, in the mirrors on the walls, on the bouquets of flowers. The dishes are brought to the table one after the other, huge, flamboyant, filled with all sorts of delicacies with which Lalla isn’t familiar: fish swimming in orange sauces, mounds of vegetables, plates full of red, green, brown, covered with silver domes, which Radicz lifts to sniff at the smells. The maitre d’hotel ceremoniously pours them an amber-colored wine, then in another wide, very fragile glass, a ruby- colored, almost black wine. Lalla dips her lips into the drink, but it is rather the color that she drinks, looking at it against the light. They are more inebriated with the light and the colors and smells of the food than with the wine. Radicz eats rapidly, everything at the same time, and he drinks the glasses of wine one after the other. But Lalla hardly eats anything; she just watches the boy eating, and the other people in the room, who seem to be frozen in front of their plates. Time has slowed down, or maybe it’s her gaze, coupled with the light, that is immobilizing everything. Outside, the automobiles continue to drive past the windows, and you can glimpse the gray color of the sea between the boats.
When Radicz has finished eating everything in the dishes, he wipes his mouth with the napkin and leans back in the chair. He’s a little red, and his eyes are very bright.
“Was it good?” asks Lalla.
“Yes,” Radicz simply says. He’s eaten so much that he’s hiccupping a little. Lalla has him drink a glass of water and tells him to look her in the eye until his hiccups go away.
The big man in black comes over to their table.
“Coffee?”
Lalla shakes her head. When the maitre d’hotel brings the bill on a tray, Lalla holds it out to him.
“Read it.”
She takes the wad of wrinkled bills out of her coat pocket and unfolds them one after the other on the tablecloth. The maitre d’hotel takes the money. He starts to walk away and then changes his mind.
“There is a man who would like to speak with you over there, at the table near the door.”
Radicz takes hold of Lalla’s arm, gives her a hard jerk.
“Come on, let’s get out of this place!”
As she nears the door, Lalla sees a man around thirty with somewhat of a sad look about him sitting at a neighboring table. He stands and walks up to her. He stammers.
“I, excuse me for accosting you like this, but I — ”
Lalla looks straight at him, smiling.
“You see, I’m a photographer, and I’d like to take some pictures of you, whenever you like.”
Since Lalla doesn’t answer, and keeps smiling, he gets more and more muddled.
“It’s because — I saw you over there a little while ago, when you walked into the restaurant and it was — it was extraordinary, you are — it was really extraordinary.”
He takes a ballpoint pen out of his suit jacket and quickly scribbles his name and address on a scrap of paper. But Lalla shakes her head and doesn’t take the paper.
“I don’t know how to read,” she says.
“Then tell me where you live?” asks the photographer. He has very sad gray-blue eyes, very watery like those of dogs. Lalla looks at him with her eyes filled with light, and the man tries to think of something else to say.
“I live at the Hotel Sainte-Blanche,” says Lalla. And goes out hurriedly.
Outside, Radicz the beggar is waiting for her. The wind is blowing his long hair over his thin face. He doesn’t look happy. When Lalla talks to him he shrugs his shoulders.
Together, they walk till they reach the sea, not knowing where they are going. Here, the sea isn’t the same as at Naman the fisherman’s beach. It’s a big cement wall that runs along the coast, clinging to the gray rocks. The short waves come crashing into the hollows of the rocks, making explosions; the foam rises up like mist. But it’s great, Lalla loves to pass her tongue over her lips and taste the salt. She and Radicz climb down amongst the rocks till they get to a deep recess sheltered from the wind. The sun burns down very hot there; it sparkles out on the open sea and on the salty rocks. After the noise of the city, and after all those odd smells in the restaurant, it’s good to be out here, with nothing before you but the sea and the sky. Slightly westward, there are some small islands, a few black rocks sticking up out of the sea like whales — that’s what Radicz says. There are also some small boats with big white sails, and they look like children’s toys.
When the sun starts going down in the sky, and the light is growing softer on the waves, on the rocks, and the wind is also blowing more gently, it makes you want to dream, to talk. Lalla is looking at the tiny succulent plants that smell of honey and pepper; they quiver at each gust of wind in the hollows of the gray rocks, facing the sea. She thinks she would like to become so small she could live in a grove of those little plants; then she would live in a hole in a rock, and she would have enough to drink for a whole day with just a single drop of water, and a single crumb of bread would be enough for her to eat for two whole days.
Radicz pulls a slightly crumpled pack of cigarettes out of the pocket of his brown suit jacket and gives one to Lalla. He says he never smokes in front of others, only when he’s in a place he really likes. He says that Lalla is the first person he’s ever smoked in front of. They’re American cigarettes that have a piece of cardboard and cotton at one end, and they have a nauseating smell of honey. They both smoke slowly, looking out at the sea before them. The wind whisks the blue smoke away.
“You want me to tell you about the place I live in, over by the storage tanks?”
Radicz’s voice is all different now, a little hoarse, as if emotion were making a lump in his throat. He talks without looking at Lalla, smoking the cigarette down until it burns his lips and fingertips.
“I didn’t use to live with the boss before, you know. I lived with my father and mother in a trailer, we went from one fair to the next, we had a shooting stand, I mean, not with rifles, with balls and tin cans. Then my father died, and since there were a lot of us kids, and we didn’t have enough money, my mother sold me to the boss and I came to live here in Marseille. At first, I didn’t know that my mother had sold me, but one day, I wanted to leave, and the boss caught me and beat me, and he told me that I couldn’t go back to live with my mother because she’d sold me and now he’d become like a father to me, so after that, I never left him again, because I didn’t want to see my mother. At first I was really sad, because I didn’t know anyone and I was all alone. But later I got used to it, because the boss is nice, he gives us as much as we want to eat, and it was better for me than staying with my mother since she didn’t want to take care of me anymore. There were six of us boys living with the boss, well at first there were seven, and one of them died, he got pneumonia and he died right away. So we would go and sit in the places the boss had paid for, and we begged, and we brought the money back in the evening, we kept a little and the rest was for the boss. He bought our food with it. The boss always told us to be careful not to get picked up by the police, because then we’d be taken to child welfare, and he couldn’t get us out of there. We never stayed for long in the same spot because of that, and the boss would take us someplace else afterward. First we lived in a hangar north of the city, then we had a trailer like my father’s, and we went to pitch camp with the gypsies in the vacant lots just outside of town. Now we’ve got a big house for all of us, just before you get to the storage tanks, and there are other children, they work for a boss called Marcel, and there’s Anita with still other children, two boys and three girls, I think the oldest one really is her daughter. We work around the train station, but not every day, so we won’t get spotted, and we also go down to the harbor, and over to Cours Belsunce, or on La Canebiere. But now the boss says I’m too old to beg, he says that’s a job for little boys and girls, but he wants me to work a serious job, he’s teaching me how to be a pickpocket, steal from stores, from the marketplace. Look, see this suit, this shirt, these shoes, he stole it all for me in a store while I was keeping watch. A little while ago, if you’d wanted to, you could have left with your outfit for nothing, it’s easy, all you had to do was pick it out and I would have gotten it out of the store for you, I know the tricks. For example, for wallets, there have to be two of you, one takes it and passes it right away to the other, so you don’t get caught with it. The boss says I’ve got a knack for it because I have long agile hands. He says that’s good for playing music and for stealing. Now there are three of us boys doing
