it, along with Anita’s daughter, we stop into the supermarkets all over. Sometimes the boss says to Anita, come on, we’re going shopping at the supermarket, so he takes two boys, and sometimes Anita’s daughter and another boy, well, the other boy is always me. You know, supermarkets are really big, there are so many aisles you can get lost, aisles with things to eat, clothes, shoes, soaps, records, everything. So you can work fast in pairs. We’ve got a bag with a false bottom for the smaller things, and the things to eat, and Anita puts the rest in her stomach, she has a round thing she puts under her dress as if she were pregnant, and the boss has a trench coat with pockets all over the inside, so we grab everything we want and leave! You know, at first I was scared of getting caught, but all you need to do is choose the right time, and not falter. If you falter, you’ll get spotted by the detectives. I’m really good at recognizing detectives now, even from a long way off, they all have the same way of walking, of watching out of the corner of their eyes, I could pick them out a mile away. What I like best is working in the street with cars. The boss says he’s going to teach me to work with cars, that’s his specialty. Sometimes he goes into town and brings back a car so I can practice. He taught me how to pick the locked doors with a wire, or a fake key. Most cars can be opened with a fake key. Afterward, he shows me how to pull the wires out from under the dashboard and release the steering wheel lock. But he says I’m too young to drive. So I take whatever there is in the cars, and there’s often a bunch of stuff in the glove compartment, checkbooks, papers, even money, and under the seats, cameras, radio sets. I like working real early in the morning, all alone, when there’s no one in the streets, just a cat every now and again, and I really like to see the sun come up, and the nice clean sky in the morning. The boss also wants me to learn locks on the doors of houses, the rich villas around here, near the sea, he says that working in pairs, we could do some good jobs, because we’re light and we can scale up walls easily. So he’s teaching us the ropes, picking door locks, and opening windows too. He doesn’t want to do it anymore, he says he’s too old and that he couldn’t run if he had to anymore, but that’s not why, it’s because he already got caught once and it scared him. I already went once with a guy called Rito, he’s older than I am, he used to work for the boss and he took me along with him. We went into a street near the Prado, he’d scouted out a house, he knew no one was home. I didn’t go in, I stayed out in the garden while Rito was taking everything he could, then we carried it all over to the car where the boss was waiting. I was scared, because I was the one who stayed in the garden standing watch, and I think I would have been less scared if I’d gone into the house to work. But you have to know everything before you start or you’ll get caught. To get in, first of all you have to know how to find the right window, and then climb up a tree, or use the rainspout. You can’t get dizzy. And if the police come, you can’t panic, you have to stay still, or hide on the roof, because if you start running, they’ll get you in two shakes. So the boss shows us all that at our place, at the hotel, he has us scale up the house, he has us walk on the roof at night, he even teaches us to jump like paratroopers, it’s called rolling. But he says we’re not going to stay here indefinitely, we’re going to buy a trailer and leave for Spain. I’d rather go over to the area around Nice, but I think the boss prefers Spain. Wouldn’t you like to come with us? You know, I’d tell the boss you were a friend, he won’t ask you any questions, I’ll just tell him you’re my friend, and that you’re going to live with us in the trailer, it’ll be great. Maybe you could learn to work in the stores too, or else we could work the cars together, taking turns, that way people wouldn’t suspect anything? You know, Anita is really nice, I’m sure you’d like her a lot, she’s got blond hair and blue eyes, no one wants to believe she’s a gypsy. If you came with us, I wouldn’t mind not going to Nice, I wouldn’t mind going to Spain, or anywhere…”
Radicz stops talking. He’d like to ask Lalla a few things, about the child in her belly, but he doesn’t dare. He’s lit up another cigarette, and is smoking, and from time to time, he passes the cigarette to Lalla so she can have a puff. The two of them are looking out at the lovely sea, at the black islands like whales, and the toy boats moving slowly over the shimmering sea. From time to time, the wind blows so hard you’d think the sea and the sky were going to go tumbling over.
NOW LALLA IS LOOKING at her photographs in magazine articles, on the covers of fashion reviews. She looks at the reams of pictures, the contact sheets, the color layouts where her almost life-sized face appears. She thumbs through the magazines from back to front, holding them a little tilted, cocking her head to one side.
“Do you like them?” asks the photographer, sounding a little worried, as if it really mattered.
It makes her laugh, with her silent laughter that makes her extremely white teeth sparkle. She laughs about all of it, about the pictures, the magazines, as if it were a joke, as if it weren’t her you could see on those sheets of paper. To begin with, it really isn’t her. It’s Hawa, the name she’s given herself, the one she gave the photographer, and that’s what he calls her; that’s what he called her the first time he ran into her, in the stairways in the Panier, and brought her back to his place, to his big empty apartment on the ground floor of the new building.
Now Hawa is everywhere, on the pages of magazines, on the contact sheets, on the walls of the apartment. Hawa dressed in white, a black belt around her waist, alone in the middle of a shadeless rocky area; Hawa, in black silk, a scarf around her forehead, like an Apache; Hawa standing above the Mediterranean; Hawa in the midst of the crowd on Cours Belsunce, or else on the flight of stairs in front of the train station; Hawa dressed in indigo, barefoot on the asphalt of the esplanade, vast as a desert, with the outlines of storage tanks and smoking chimneys; Hawa walking, dancing; Hawa sleeping; Hawa with her handsome copper-colored face, with her long smooth body, shining in the light; Hawa eagle-eyed, with her heavy black hair cascading down over her shoulders, or smoothed back by the sea, like a Galalith helmet. But who is Hawa? Every day, when she wakes up in the large gray-white living room where she sleeps on an air mattress on the bare floor, she goes and washes up in the bathroom, not making a sound; then she climbs out the window and walks off aimlessly through the streets of the neighborhood; she walks as far as the sea. The photographer wakes up, opens his eyes but doesn’t move; he acts as if he hasn’t heard a thing, so as not to disturb Hawa. He knows that’s the way she is, that he mustn’t try to hold her back. He simply leaves the window open so she can come back in, like a cat. Sometimes she doesn’t come back till after dark. She slips into the apartment through the window. The photographer hears her, comes out of his laboratory and sits down beside her in the living room, to talk with her a little. He’s always moved when he sees her, because her face is so full of light and life, and he blinks his eyes a little, because in coming out of the dark laboratory, he’s a bit dazzled. He always thinks he has a lot of things to tell her, but when Hawa is there before him, he can’t recall what he wanted to say. She’s the one who talks; she tells about the things she’s seen, or heard, in the streets, and she eats a little as she’s talking, some bread she’s bought, some fruit, some dates that she brings back to the apartment by the pound.
The most extraordinary thing about it all is the letters: they come from all over, with Hawa’s name on the envelopes. They’re from magazines, fashion reviews that forward them after adding the photographer’s name and address. He’s both happy and unsettled at receiving all those letters. Hawa asks him to read them, and she always listens with her head cocked a little to one side, drinking mint tea (now the photographer’s kitchenette is full of boxes of gunpowder tea and jasmine tea and little bundles of mint). Sometimes the letters say extraordinary things, or really dumb things written by young girls who have seen Hawa’s picture somewhere and who talk to her as if they’d always known her. Or else letters from young boys who have fallen in love with her, and say she’s as beautiful as Nefertiti or an Incan princess, and they would love to meet her one day.
Lalla starts laughing:
“What liars!”
When the photographer shows her the pictures he’s just taken, Hawa with her almond-shaped eyes, shining like gems, and her amber-colored skin, sparkling with light, and her lips with a slightly ironic smile, and her sharp profile, Lalla Hawa starts laughing again, repeats, “What a liar! What a liar!”
Because she thinks it doesn’t look like her.
There are also serious letters that speak of contracts, money, appointments, fashion shows. The photographer makes all the decisions, takes care of everything. He calls the fashion designers, notes the appointments in his agenda, signs the contracts. He’s the one who chooses the designs, the colors, decides where the shots will be taken. Then he takes Hawa in his little red Volkswagen van, and they go far away, out where there are no houses, nothing but gray hills covered with thorny scrub, or to the delta of the great river, on the smooth beaches of the marshes, out where the water and the sky are the same color.
Lalla Hawa loves to travel in the photographer’s van. She watches the landscape slipping around the windows, the black road winding toward her, the houses, the gardens, the fallow fields unraveling on the side, whipping away. People are standing on the side of the road, with blank looks on their faces, as if in a dream. Maybe it is a dream that Lalla Hawa is living, a dream in which there’s no more day or night really, no more hunger or thirst, but shifting landscapes of chalk, brambles, crossroads, towns going by, with their streets, their monuments, their hotels.
The photographer never stops photographing Hawa. He changes cameras, measures the light, pushes the
