Did we real y live this way? she wonders. She wants to ask the question aloud, but nothing comes, and then she snaps herself back, pinches her wrist, and remarks how nice the office is, though clearly it is a temporary structure, cramped, leaky, tight.
“What were you saying about eiderdowns, Mamma?” I m not sure.
“You're pale,” Francesca says again.
“It's just a little hot in here.”
Her daughter clicks on a smal white fan and directs it at Zoli's face.
“I have always had some paleness,” says Zoli, and she means it as a joke, but it's not a joke, nobody gets it, not even her own daughter. She reaches forward and turns the fan off, and can feel Francesca's warm breath on her cheeks, can hear her saying: “Mamma, maybe I should take you home.”
“No, no, I'm fine.”
“I'l just make some phone cal s.”
“You go ahead, chonorroeja.”
“You don't mind? It's just a few cal s, that's al . A couple of other things and then I'm al yours.”
“Headscarves,” says Zoli for no reason that she can recognize or discern.
When they emerge through the back door, there is a group of young boys swinging along, carrying a giant radio on their shoulders. They wear basebal caps turned backwards and wide baggy trousers with brightly colored shoes. The beat of the song, loud and jarring, is not entirely foreign and Zoli thinks that she has heard it somewhere before, but perhaps al songs come around to the same song, and she wishes for a moment that she could walk with the boys, over the hil of rubbish to the cluttered construction site, just to figure out where exactly she has heard it before.
“Drive me around, Franca,” she says.
“But you're tired.”
“Please, I want to drive around.”
“You're the boss,” says her daughter, and it's meant as something sweet, Zoli knows, though it comes out barbed and strange-sounding. They round the back of the makeshift cabin and her daughter stops short. “Oh, shit,” she says as she leans over the hood of the car, pul s back the windscreen wipers. “They took the rubber,” she says. “They use them for catapults. That's the fourth time this year. Shit!”
A pebble lands at the back of the car and rol s on the tar.
“Get in, Mamma.”
“Why?”
“Get in! Please.”
Zoli settles in the front seat. Her daughter leans against the car, her breasts against the window, and Zoli can hear her talking urgently into the phone. Within moments the security guard is out, his radio crackling. Francesca points at a number of children scampering away in different directions. The security guard bends down to Zoli's window: “I'm very sorry, Madame,” he says in a broad African accent, then walks wearily towards the construction site.
“Can you believe that?” says Francesca. “I'm going to get you out of here.”
“I want to see it.”
“What is there to see, Mamma? It's not exactly the val ey. Sometimes the gendarmes won't even come in here. There's a few vigilante groups now, they keep it quieter. Mamma, don't you think—I shouldn't have brought you out here, I'm sorry.”
“And where are ours? ”
“Ours?” Yes, ours.
“Block eight. There's a few out near the highway too. They've built little shelters for themselves. They come and go.”
“Block eight, then.”
“It's not a good idea, Mamma.” Please.
Francesca shifts the car into gear and drives past the shuttered shops, pul s up at a series of yel ow bol ards. She points across a gray courtyard at the buildings, six stories high, where laundry is strung from balconies and shattered windows are patched with thick gray tape.
Zoli watches a tiny girl running through the courtyard, carrying a folded red paper flower stuck on the end of a coat-hanger. The girl picks her way across the gloom, past the hulk of a burned-out van, and begins to climb a set of black railings. She twirls the coathanger above her head. The folded flower takes off and she jumps and catches it in midnight.
“How many live here, Franca?”
“A couple of hundred.”
The figure of an enormous woman looms out onto a balcony. She leans over the railing—the fat of her arms wobbling—and screams at the little girl. The child darts into the shadow of the stairwel , pauses, flicks her wrist, and the paper flower takes off again in the air, and then she is swal owed by darkness. Zoli feels as if she has seen her before, in some other place, some other time, that if she spends long enough she wil recognize her.
The girl appears on the top balcony, where she skips along and is suddenly dragged into the doorway.
