Desert

LIFE WITH THE SLAVES

LEANING ON THE RAILING, Lalla watches the strip of land that has appeared on the horizon like an island. In spite of her fatigue, all of her energy is turned toward scrutinizing the land; she’s trying to make out the houses, the roads, maybe even the shapes of people. Next to her, the passengers are crowding up against the railing. They’re shouting, gesticulating, talking excitedly; they’re calling to one another in all diVerent languages from one end of the afterdeck to the other. They’ve been waiting for this moment for such a long time! There are many children and teenagers. They’re all wearing the same tag pinned to their clothing, with their name, date of birth, and the name and address of the person who is waiting for them in Marseille. The bottom of the tag has been stamped, signed, and marked with a small red cross circled in black. Lalla doesn’t like the red cross; she has the feeling it’s burning her skin through her smock, that it’s gradually leaving its mark on her chest.

The cold wind is gusting over the deck, and the heavy waves are making the iron sides of the ship vibrate. Lalla feels nauseous because all night long, instead of sleeping, the children were passing around tubes of condensed milk that the Red Cross officials distributed before they embarked. And also, since there weren’t enough deck chairs, Lalla had to sleep on the floor in the nauseating heat of the hold, surrounded with the smell of kerosene, of grease, shaken by the chugging of the engine. Now the first gulls are flying over the stern, they’re screeching and squawking as if they were angry to see the ship arriving. They don’t look like princes of the sea at all; they’re a dirty gray color, with yellow beaks and a cruel gleam to their eyes.

Lalla hadn’t seen the sun rise. She’d fallen asleep, overcome with fatigue on the tarpaulin in the hold, her head resting on a piece of cardboard. When she awoke, everyone was already up on deck, their eyes glued to the strip of land. The only person left in the hold was a very pale young woman holding a tiny baby in her arms. The baby was sick; it had vomited on the floor; it was whimpering softly. When Lalla drew near to ask what was wrong with it, the young woman looked at her without answering, glassy-eyed.

Now land is very near, it is floating on the green sea littered with trash. Rain is beginning to fall on the deck, but no one goes for shelter. The cold water runs over the children’s frizzy hair, forming drops on the ends of their noses. They are dressed like paupers, in thin, short-sleeved shirts, blue cotton pants or gray skirts, sometimes in traditional long homespun robes. Their bare feet are stuck into black leather shoes that are too big. The adult men are wearing old worn suit jackets with pants that are too short, and woolen ski caps. Lalla looks at the children, the women, the men around her; they seem sad and frightened; their faces are yellow, swollen with weariness, their arms and legs nubbly with goose bumps. The smell of the sea mingles with that of fatigue and anxiety, and off in the distance, like a smudge on the green sea, the land also seems sad and weary. The sky is low; the clouds are hiding the tops of the hills; no matter how hard she looks, Lalla can’t see the white city Naman the fisherman used to speak of, not the palaces or the church towers. Now there is nothing but endless stone- and cement-colored wharves, wharves opening out onto other wharves. The ship loaded with passengers is gliding slowly through the black water of the basins. Standing on the wharves, a few men are watching the ship go by indifferently. Though the children shout at the top of their lungs, waving their arms around, no one answers them. The rain continues to fall, a fine cold drizzle. Lalla looks at the water in the basin, the black greasy water, where refuse even the gulls don’t want floats.

Maybe there is no city? Lalla looks at the rain-soaked wharves, the shapes of the docked freighters, the cranes, and still farther out, the long white buildings making a wall at the far end of the harbor. Little by little, the merriment of the children on the International Red Cross ship begins to subside. From time to time, a few shouts ring out, but they don’t last. The officials and female assistants are walking over the deck, shouting out orders that no one understands. They succeed in grouping the children together and begin to call out names, but their voices are lost in the noise of the engine and the clamor of the crowd.

“…Makel…”

“…Séfar…”

“Ko-di-ki…”

“Hamal…”

“…Lagor…”

It doesn’t make any sense and no one answers. Then the loudspeaker starts talking, as if it were barking over the heads of the passengers, and a kind of panic occurs. Some people run up toward the front, others try to climb the stairs to the upper deck, where the officers push them back. Finally, everyone calms down because the ship has just docked and the engines have been cut. On the wharf there is an ugly cement structure with lit windows. The children, the women, the men lean over the railing trying to get a glimpse of a familiar face amongst the people that can be seen walking around over there, no larger than insects, on the other side of the structure.

The process of disembarkment begins, meaning that for several hours, the passengers remain on the deck of the International Red Cross ship, waiting to be given some kind of signal. As time goes by, the children who are crowded together on the deck grow more and more restless. The small children begin to cry, with a continual high-pitched whining, which doesn’t help matters. The women shout, or sometimes the men. Lalla is sitting on a pile of rope, with her suitcase beside her, in the shade of the bulkhead of the officers’ deck, and is waiting, watching the gray gulls in the gray sky.

Finally the time comes to go ashore. The passengers are so tired of waiting that it takes them quite some time to get moving. Lalla follows the drove up to the large gray structure. There, three policemen and some interpreters are asking questions of the people arriving. It is a bit quicker for the children, because the policeman simply reads what is written on their tags and copies it on the forms.

When he’s finished, the man looks at Lalla and asks, “Do you intend to work in France?”

“Yes,” Lalla says.

“What job?”

“I don’t know.”

“Housemaid,” the policeman says, and writes that on his form. Lalla picks up her suitcase and goes over to wait with the others, in the large dirty room with gray walls where the electric light shines brightly. There’s nothing to sit on, and in spite of the cold and the rain outside, the room is stiflingly hot. The youngest children have fallen asleep in their mothers’ arms, or else on the floor, lying on a pile of clothing. Now it’s the older children who are complaining. Lalla is thirsty; her throat is dry; her eyes are burning with fever. She’s too tired to think of anything. She’s waiting, leaning up against the wall, standing first on one leg, then the other. At the other end of the room, in front of the police lines, is the very pale young woman with a blank look, holding her baby in her arms. She’s standing in front of the officer’s desk looking haggard, not saying anything. The policeman talks to her for a long time, shows the papers to the interpreter from the International Red Cross. Something isn’t right. The policeman asks questions that the interpreter repeats to the young woman, but she just looks at them, not seeming to understand. They don’t want to let her through. Lalla looks at the young woman who is so pale, holding her baby. She is holding it so tightly in her arms that it wakes up a little and starts screaming, then calms down when its mother quickly uncovers her breast and offers it for the baby to suck on. The policeman looks embarrassed. He turns away, glances around. His eyes meet those of Lalla, who has just walked up.

“Do you speak her language?”

“I don’t know,” says Lalla.

Lalla says a few words in Chleuh, and the young woman looks at her for a minute and then answers.

“Tell her that her papers aren’t in order, the authorization for the baby is missing.”

Lalla tries to translate the sentence. She thinks the young woman hasn’t understood, then all of a sudden she collapses and begins to weep. The policeman says a few more words, and the interpreter from the International Red Cross lifts the young woman to her feet as well as he can and guides her over to the back of the room, where there are two or three imitation leather armchairs.

Lalla is sad because she realizes that the young woman will have to take the boat back in the opposite direction with her sick baby. But she is too weary herself to think about it much, and she goes back to lean up against the wall next to her suitcase. At the other end of the room, high up on the wall, there is a clock with numbers inscribed on rotating flaps. Each minute, a flap turns with a sharp click. The people in the room aren’t talking anymore. They’re waiting, sitting on the floor, or standing against the wall, eyes fixed, faces tense, as if with each click, the door in the back is going to open and let them go.

Finally, after such a long time that no one is hoping for anything anymore, the men from the International Red Cross walk across the large room. They open the door in the back and start calling out the names of the children again. The muttering of voices resumes, the people crowd up near the exit. Lalla, carrying her cardboard suitcase, cranes out her neck to see over the heads of the others; she is so impatient for her name to be called that her legs begin to tremble. When the man from the Red Cross says her name, he sort of barks it out, and Lalla doesn’t understand. Then he repeats himself, shouting, “Hawa! Hawa ben Hawa!”

Lalla runs, her suitcase banging around at the end of her arm, and makes her way through the crowd. She stops in front of the door while the man checks her tag, then she leaps out, as if someone had shoved her from behind. There is so much light outside, after all those hours spent in the large gray room, that Lalla staggers, overcome with dizziness. She moves forward through the rows of women and men without seeing them, walks aimlessly straight ahead, until she feels someone taking her by the arm, hugging her, kissing her. Aamma pulls her over toward the exit from the wharves, toward the city.

Aamma lives alone in an apartment in the old town, near the port, on the top floor of a dilapidated house. There’s just a living room with a sofa, a dark bedroom with a folding bed, and a kitchen. The windows of the apartment open onto an inner courtyard, but you can see the sky pretty well above the tile roofs. In the morning, up until noon, there’s even a little sunshine that comes in through the two windows of the room with the sofa. Aamma tells Lalla that she was very lucky to have found the apartment, and also to have found work as a cook at the hospital cafeteria. When she arrived in Marseille, several months ago, she was first housed in a furnished apartment in the outskirts, where there were five women to each room, and the police came by every morning, and there were fights in the street. Two men even had a knife fight, and Aamma had to flee, leaving one of her suitcases behind, because she was afraid of being picked up by the police and deported.

Aamma seems quite happy to see Lalla, after all this time. She doesn’t ask her any questions about what happened when Lalla ran away into the desert with the Hartani and was later taken to the hospital in the city, because she was dying of thirst and fever. The Hartani had continued his journey southward alone, toward the caravans, because that was what he was always meant to do. Aamma has aged a lot in a few months’ time. She has a thin weary face, a gray complexion, and her eyes are ringed with dark circles. In the evening, when she gets home from work, she nibbles on cookies and drinks mint tea while she talks about her journey by car across Spain with other men and women who were going to look for work. They drove along the roads for days, passing through villages, over mountains, rivers. And one day, the driver of the car showed them a city with a lot of identical brick houses, with black roofs. He said, this is it, here we are. Aamma got out of the car along with the others, and, since the entire trip had been paid in advance, they took their belongings and started walking through the streets of the town. But when Aamma showed the envelope with the name and address of Naman’s brother, people started laughing and told her she wasn’t in Marseille, but Paris. So then she had to take the train and travel all night again before she got here.

When Lalla hears that story, it gives her a good laugh, because she can imagine the passengers of the car walking around in the streets of Paris thinking they were in Marseille.

This city is really big. Lalla never thought there could be so many people living in the same place. Ever since she got here, she has been spending her days walking around town, from north to south, and from east to west. She doesn’t know the names of the streets; she doesn’t know where she’s going. At times she walks along the wharves, looking at the silhouettes of the freighters; other times she walks up the main avenues, toward the center of town, or else she follows the labyrinth of narrow streets in the old town, climbs the stairways, going from square to square, from church to church, until she reaches the large esplanade from where you can see the fortified castle overlooking the sea. Or still other times, she’ll go sit on the benches in the parks and watch the pigeons walking round on the dusty paths. There are so many streets, so many houses, stores, windows, cars; it makes your head spin, and the noise and the smell of gasoline fumes are inebriating and give you a headache. Lalla doesn’t speak to anyone. Sometimes she sits on the steps of the churches, well hidden in her brown woolen coat, and watches the passersby. There are men who look at her, then stop on a street corner and pretend to be smoking a cigarette while they keep an eye on her. But Lalla knows how to disappear very quickly, she learned that from the Hartani; she goes across two or three streets, through a store, weaves around the stopped cars, and no one can follow her.

Aamma would like for her to work at the hospital with her, but Lalla is too young; you have to be eighteen. And also, it’s hard to find work.

A few days after she arrived, she went to see Old Naman’s brother, whose name is Asaph, but everyone calls him Joseph. He has a grocery store in Rue des Chapeliers, not far from the police station. He seemed happy to see Lalla, and he hugged her and talked about his brother, but Lalla was wary of him right away. He doesn’t look anything like Naman. He’s small, almost bald, with repulsive, bulging gray-green eyes, and a smile that augurs nothing good. When he learned that Lalla was looking for work, his eyes lit up, and he got nervous. He told Lalla that he just happened to need a young girl to help with the grocery store, putting things away, cleaning, and maybe even being in charge of the cash register. But as he was talking about all that, he was constantly staring at Lalla’s abdomen and breasts with his repulsive watery eyes, so she told him she would come back tomorrow, and left immediately. Since she didn’t go back, he came to Aamma’s place one evening. But Lalla went out as soon as she saw him, and took a long walk through the narrow streets of the old town, making herself as invisible as a shadow, until she was sure the grocer had gone back to his place.

This city is a strange land, with all of these people, because they don’t really pay any attention to you if you don’t show yourself. Lalla learned how to slip silently along the walls, up the stairways. She knows all the places where you can see without being seen, hiding places behind trees, in big parking lots filled with cars, in doorways, in vacant lots. Even in the middle of very straight avenues, where there is a constant flow of cars and people going up, going down, Lalla knows she can become invisible. In the beginning, she still bore the marks of the burning desert sun, and her long, black curly hair was full of sparkling sunshine. So people would look at her in surprise, as if she were from another planet. But now months have gone by, and Lalla has been transformed. She cut her hair short; it is dull, almost gray. In the shadows of the narrow streets, in the damp chill of Aamma’s apartment, Lalla’s skin has grown dull too; it’s become pale and gray. And then there’s the brown coat Aamma found in a Jewish thrift store, near the cathedral. It reaches almost down to her ankles, the sleeves are too long and the shoulders sag, and the best thing is that it’s made out of a sort of wool carpeting, worn and shiny with age, the color of city walls, of old paper; when Lalla puts on her coat, she really feels as if she becomes invisible.

Now she’s learned the names of the streets by listening to people talking. They’re strange names, so strange that sometimes she recites them under her breath as she’s walking along between the houses:

La Major

La Tourette

Place de Lenche

Rue du Petit-Puits

Place Vivaux

Place Sadi-Carnot

La Tarasque

Impasse des Muettes

Rue du Cheval

Cours Belsunce

There are so many streets, so many names! Each day, Lalla goes out before her aunt wakes up; she puts an old piece of bread in the pocket of her brown coat and starts walking, first making circles around the Panier neighborhood until she reaches the sea by way of the Rue de la Prison, with the sun lighting up the walls of the city hall. She sits down for a moment to watch the cars going by, but not for too long, because the police will come along and ask her what she’s doing there.

Then she continues going northward, walking up the wide, noisy avenues, La Canebière, Boulevard Dugommier, Boulevard Athènes. There are people from countries all over the world, who speak all sorts of languages; people who are very black with narrow eyes, wearing long, white robes and plastic slippers. There are people from the north, with light hair and pale eyes, soldiers, sailors, and also corpulent businessmen who walk briskly and carry around odd little black suitcases.

Lalla likes to sit down there too, in a doorway, to watch all of those people coming and going, walking, running. When there are a lot of people, no one pays any attention to her. Maybe they think she’s like them, that she’s waiting for someone, for something; or maybe they think she’s a beggar.

In crowded neighborhoods, there are lots of poor people, and those are the ones that Lalla watches most closely. She sees women in rags, very pale in spite of the sunshine, holding very small children by the hand. She sees old men, wearing long patched robes, drunks with blurry eyes, bums, foreigners who are hungry carrying cardboard suitcases and empty grocery bags. She sees children alone, faces grimy, hair disheveled, wearing old clothes too large for their scrawny bodies; they walk along quickly as if they were going somewhere, and their eyes are shifty and unpleasant like those of stray dogs. From her hiding place behind the parked cars, or else in the shadow of a carriage entrance, Lalla watches all of those people who look lost, who are walking along as if they were half asleep. There’s an odd gleam in her dark eyes as she watches them, and perhaps just at that moment, a bit of the great desert light falls upon them, but they hardly even feel it, not knowing where it’s coming from. They might get a slight shudder, but they walk quickly away, melt into the crowd of strangers.

On some days she goes out a very long way, walks for such a long time through the streets that her legs ache, and she has to sit down on the curb to rest. She walks eastward along the main avenue lined with trees, with a multitude of cars and trucks driving past, then crosses over hills and glens. In those neighborhoods, there are a good many vacant lots, buildings as tall as cliffs, entirely white, with thousands of small identical windows; farther out, there are villas surrounded with laurels and orange trees, with vicious dogs that run along the fence barking as loud as they can. There are also lots of stray cats, thin, ill-kempt, that live atop the walls and under parked cars.

Lalla keeps walking, aimlessly, following the roads. She crosses distant neighborhoods through which canals snake, swarming with mosquitoes; she goes into the cemetery, as large as a city, with its rows of gray stones and rusty crosses. She climbs up to the very top of the hills, so far away you can barely even glimpse the sea, like a dirty blue smudge between the cubes of the buildings. There is a strange haze floating over the city, a big gray, pink, and yellow cloud where the light pales. The sun is already going down in the west, and Lalla can feel weariness stealing over her body, sleepiness. She looks at the city glittering in the distance; she can hear it humming like a motor, trains rolling along, entering the black holes of the tunnels. She’s not afraid, and yet something is spinning inside of her, like a dizzy feeling, like a wind. Maybe it’s the chergui, the desert wind that is coming all the way over here, which has crossed the whole sea, the mountains, the cities, the roads, and is on its way? It’s hard to know. There are so many diVerent forces here, so many sounds, movements, and maybe the wind has gotten lost in the streets, on the stairways, on the esplanades.

Lalla is watching a plane lifting slowly into the pale sky, making a thundering sound. It veers up over the city, passing in front of the sun, blinking it out for a fraction of a second, and then flies off in the direction of the sea, growing smaller and smaller. Lalla stares at it very hard, until it is nothing more than an imperceptible dot. Maybe it’s going to fly out over the desert, over the expanses of sand and stones, out where the Hartani is walking?

So then Lalla goes off as well. Legs wobbling a little, she walks back down toward the city.

There’s something else that Lalla really likes to do: she goes to sit on the steps of the wide flight of stairs in front of the train station and watches the travelers going up and down. There are the ones who are arriving, all out of breath, eyes tired, hair mussed, and who go teetering down the stairs into the light. There are the ones who are leaving, who are in a hurry because they’re afraid of missing their trains; they run up the stairs two at a time, and their suitcases and bags knock against their legs, and their eyes are trained straight ahead on the entrance to the station. They stumble on the last steps, they call out to one another for fear of getting lost.

Lalla really likes hanging around the train station. It’s as if the big city wasn’t quite finished yet, as if there were still that large hole through which people keep coming and going. She often thinks that she would really like to go away, get on a train headed northward, with all of those names of lands that are intriguing and a little frightening, Irun, Bordeaux, Amsterdam, Lyon, Dijon, Paris, Calais. When she has a little money, Lalla goes into the station, buys a Coca-Cola at the refreshment stand and a platform ticket. She goes into the large departure hall, and wanders around on all the platforms in front of the trains that have just come in or that are leaving soon. Sometimes she even gets on one of the cars and sits down for a minute on the green moleskin seat. The people arrive one after the other and settle down in the compartment, they even ask, “Is it taken?” and Lalla gives a little shake of her head. Then when the loudspeaker announces that the train is going to leave, Lalla quickly gets off the car, jumps down onto the platform.

The train station is also one of the places where you can see without being seen, because there is too much agitation and hurriedness to pay much attention to anyone. There are all sorts of people in the station, cruel people, violent people with bright red faces, people who shout at the top of their lungs; there are very sad and very poor people too, old people who are lost, anxiously searching for the platforms their trains are leaving from, women with too many children who hobble along with their loads by the cars that are too high. There are all of the people that poverty has brought to this city, blacks who have come off boats, heading for the cold countries with their colorful short-sleeved shirts and a lone beach bag serving as luggage; dark-skinned North Africans, layered with old jackets, wearing ski caps or hats with ear flaps; the Turks, the Spaniards, the Greeks, all looking worried and weary, wandering around on the platforms in the wind, bumping into one another in the midst of the crowd of indifferent travelers and jeering soldiers.

Lalla watches them, just barely hidden between the telephone booth and the information board. She’s backed into the shadows pretty well, and her copper-colored face is shielded with the collar of her coat. But from time to time, her heart starts beating faster and a flash of light darts from her eyes, like the reflection of the sun off the stones in the desert. She watches all the people who are headed for other cities, for hunger, cold, misfortune, those who will be humiliated, who will live in solitude. They go by, stooping slightly, eyes blank, clothing already worn from nights of sleeping on the ground, like so many defeated soldiers.

They are headed for black cities, for low skies, for smokestacks, for the cold, the sickness that rips your chest apart. They’re headed for their shantytowns in muddy lots, down below the freeways, for rooms like graves dug into the ground, surrounded by high walls and fences. Maybe those men, those women, passing by like ghosts, dragging their bags and their too-heavy children, will never come back, maybe they’ll die in those countries they don’t even know, far from their villages, far from their families? They’re headed into those foreign countries that will take their lives, that will crush and devour them. Lalla is standing very still in her dark corner, and her vision blurs because that’s what she thinks. She would so like to go away from here, walk through the streets of the city until there were no more houses, no more gardens, not even any roads, or shoreline, just a path like before, that would lead out, growing ever narrower till it reached the desert.

Night falls on the city. Lights flicker on in the streets, around the train station, on the iron pylons, and on the long red, white, and green bars over the cafés and the movie theaters. Lalla is walking through the dark streets without making a sound, slipping along hugging the walls. Men’s faces are terrifying when night falls, and they are only partially lit by the streetlamps. Their eyes shine cruelly, the sound of their footsteps echoes in the corridors, under the carriage entrances. Lalla is walking quickly now, as if she were trying to flee. From time to time, a man follows her, tries to come up to her, take her arm, so Lalla hides behind a car, then disappears. Once again, she starts slipping along like a shadow; she wanders around in the streets of the old town until she reaches the Panier neighborhood, where Aamma lives. She takes the unlit stairway, so no one will see which door she’s gone in. She knocks lightly on the door, and when she hears her aunt’s voice, she says her name with relief.

That’s what Lalla’s days are like, here, in the big city of Marseille, along all the streets, with all of the men and all of the women she’ll never be able to know.

THERE ARE A LOT of beggars. In the beginning, when she’d just arrived, Lalla was quite surprised. Now she’s gotten used to it. But she doesn’t forget to see them, like most people in the city, who just make a little detour so as not to step on them, or who even step over them when they’re in a hurry.

Radicz is a beggar. That’s how she met him, walking along the main avenues near the train station. One day, she’d left the Panier early, and it was still dark, because it was winter. There weren’t many people in the narrow streets and stairways of the old town, and the main avenue below the general hospital was still deserted, with only trucks driving along with their headlights on and a few men and a few women on their mopeds all muffled up in their overcoats.

That was where she saw Radicz. He was sitting scrunched up in a doorway, doing his best to keep out of the wind and drizzling rain. He looked as if he were very cold and when Lalla came up beside him, he gave her a funny look, not at all like boys usually do when they see a girl. He looked at her without lowering his eyes, and there wasn’t much you could read in that look, like the eyes of animals. Lalla stopped in front of him; she asked, “What are you doing here? Aren’t you cold?”

The boy shook his head without smiling. Then he held out his hand.

“Give me something.”

Lalla had nothing but a piece of bread and an orange that she’d brought along for her lunch. She gave them to the boy. He snatched the orange from her without saying thank you and began eating it.

That’s how Lalla got to know him. After that, she saw him often, in the streets, near the train station, or else on the wide flight of stairs when the weather was nice. He can remain sitting for hours, staring straight ahead, without paying attention to anyone. But he likes Lalla quite a bit, maybe because of the orange. He told her his name was Radicz; he even wrote the name on the ground with a twig, but he seemed astonished when Lalla told him she didn’t know how to read.

He has pretty hair, very black and straight, and a copper complexion. He has green eyes and a little moustache like a shadow over his lips. Most of all, he has a lovely smile sometimes, which makes his very white front teeth sparkle. He wears a small ring in his left ear, and he claims it’s made of gold. But he’s clothed shabbily, in an old pair of stained, torn pants, a bunch of old sweaters that he wears one on top of the other, and a man’s suit jacket, which is too big for him. He wears a pair of black leather shoes with no socks.

Lalla likes to run into him by chance in the street, because he’s never exactly the same. Some days his eyes are sad and veiled, as if he were lost in some dream and nothing could pull him out of it. Other days, he’s happy, and his eyes shine; he tells all sorts of absurd stories that he makes up as he goes along, and he starts laughing for a long time, noiselessly, and Lalla can’t help but laugh along with him.

Lalla would like for him to come to see her at her aunt’s house, but she doesn’t dare, because Radicz is a gypsy, and that would certainly not please Aamma. He doesn’t live in the Panier neighborhood, or even nearby. He lives very far away, somewhere west of the city, near the railroad, over where there are the big vacant lots and large gasoline storage tanks, and smokestacks that burn day and night. He said so himself, but he never talks for long about his house or his family. He simply says that he lives too far away to come to town every day, and when he does come, he sleeps outside instead of going back to his house. He doesn’t mind; he says he knows some good hiding places, where you’re not cold, where you can’t feel the wind and where no one, absolutely no one, could find him.

For example, there are the places under the stairs in the broken-down customs buildings. There’s a hole, just the size of a kid, and you slip inside and plug up the hole with a piece of cardboard. Or else there are tool sheds on the building sites, or tarp-covered trucks. Radicz knows all about those kinds of things.

Most of the time, you can find him somewhere around the train station. When the weather’s fine, and the sun is nice and warm, he sits on the steps of the wide flight of stairs, and Lalla comes over to sit by him. They watch the people going by together. Sometimes Radicz picks someone out, says, “Watch this.” He goes straight over to the traveler who’s leaving the train station, a little dazed by the light, and asks for some change. Since he has a handsome smile and something sad about his eyes too, the traveler stops, searches his pockets. It’s mostly men of around thirty, well-dressed, without much baggage, who give Radicz money. With women it’s more complicated, they want to ask questions, and Radicz doesn’t like that.

So when he sees a nice-looking young woman he prods Lalla and says, “Go ahead, you ask her.”

But Lalla is reluctant to ask for money. She’s a little ashamed. Yet there are times when she’d like to have a little money, to eat a piece of pastry or go to the movies.

“This is the last year I’ll be doing this,” says Radicz. “Next year I’m leaving, I’m going to work in Paris.”

Lalla asks him why.

“Next year I’ll be too old, people won’t give you anything when you’re too old, they say you should go out and get a job.”

He looks at Lalla for a minute, then he asks her if she works, and Lalla shakes her head.

Radicz points out someone walking past, over by the buses.

“He works with me too, we’ve got the same boss.”

It’s a young, very skinny black teenager, who looks like a shadow; he goes up to people and tries to take their suitcases, but it doesn’t seem to work very well. Radicz shrugs his shoulders.

“He doesn’t know how to go about it. His name is Baki, I don’t know what it means, but it makes the other black people laugh when he says his name. He never brings much money back to the boss.”

Since Lalla is looking at him in surprise, he says, “Oh yeah, you don’t know, the boss is a gypsy like me, his name is Lino, and the place where we all live — we call it the hotel — is a big house where there are lots of children, and they all work for Lino.”

He knows the names of all the beggars in the city. He knows where they live, and who they work with, even those who are more or less bums and who live alone. There are some children who work as a family, with their brothers and sisters, and who also shoplift in the department stores and the supermarkets. The youngest ones learn how to keep a lookout or distract the shopkeepers; sometimes they’re used as relays. Above all, there are the women, gypsy women dressed in their long flowered dresses, faces covered with a black veil, and all you can see are their shiny, black eyes, like those of birds. And then there are also the old men and women, poverty-stricken, hungry, who cling to the jackets and skirts of middle-class people and won’t let go, mumbling incantations, until they are given a small coin.

Lalla gets a lump in her throat when she sees them, or when she runs into an ugly young woman with a small child hanging at her breast, begging on the corner of the main avenue. She didn’t really know what fear was before, because back there in the Hartani’s land, there were only snakes and scorpions or, at worst, evil spirits making shadowy motions in the night; but here it’s the fear of emptiness, of need, of hunger, unnamed fear that seems to seep in from half-opened transoms into the horrid, stinking, basement rooms, well up from dark courtyards, enter rooms as cold as graves, or, like an evil wind, sweep along the wide avenues, where people are endlessly walking, walking, going away, pushing and shoving one another like that incessantly, day and night, for months on end, for years, through the unflagging sound of their rubber soles and, rising into the heavy air, the rumbling of their words, their motors, their grumbling, their gasping.

Sometimes your head starts spinning so fast that you have to sit down right away, and Lalla glances around for something to lean on. Her metal-colored face turns gray, her eyes blink out, she’s falling, very slowly, as if into a huge well, with no hope of stopping her fall.

“What is it? Miss? Are you feeling okay? Are you all right?

The voice is shouting somewhere very far from her ear, she can smell the odor of garlic on the breath before her sight comes back. She’s half-crumpled-up against the foot of a wall. A man is holding her hand and leaning over her.

“… It’s okay, it’s okay…”

She’s able to speak, very slowly, or maybe she’s only thinking the words?

The man helps her walk, leads her over to the terrace of a café. The people who had gathered around move away, but even so, Lalla hears the voice of a woman saying very clearly, “She’s simply pregnant, that’s all.”

The man has her sit down at a table. He’s still leaning toward her. He’s short and fat, with a pockmarked face, a moustache, hardly any hair.

“You need something to drink, it’ll make you feel better.”

“I’m hungry,” Lalla says. She feels apathetic about everything, maybe she thinks she’s going to die.

“I’m hungry.” She repeats the words slowly.

The man panics and begins to stutter. He stands up and runs over to the counter, comes back soon with a sandwich and a basket of brioches. Lalla doesn’t listen to him; she eats quickly, first the sandwich, then all the brioches, one after the other. The man watches her eat, and his fat face is still agitated with emotion. He speaks in bursts, then stops, for fear of tiring Lalla.

“When I saw you fall like that right in front of me, it really threw me! Is this the first time it’s happened to you? I mean, it’s awful with so many people in the avenue there, the ones just behind you almost walked over you, and they didn’t even stop, it’s — My name’s Paul, Paul Estève, and you? Do you speak French? You’re not from here, are you? Have you had enough to eat? Would you like me to get you another sandwich?”

His breath reeks of garlic, tobacco, and wine, but Lalla is glad he’s there; she thinks he’s nice with his somewhat shiny eyes. He notices that, and starts talking again, like he does, every which way, asking questions and then answering them.

“You’re not hungry anymore? Will you have a little something to drink? A cognac? No, better have something sweet, it’s good for you when you’re feeling weak, a Coke? Or some fruit juice? I’m not bothering you, am I? You know, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen someone faint right in front of me like that, fall on the ground, and it — it really threw me. I work — I’m an employee for the Post and Telecommunications, you see, I’m not used to — well, I mean, maybe you should go and see a doctor all the same, would you like me to go and phone one?”

He’s already getting up, but Lalla shakes her head, and he sits back down. Later, she drinks a little hot tea, and her exhaustion dissipates. Her face is once again copper-colored, light is shining in her eyes. She stands up and the man accompanies her out into the street.

“You’re — you’re sure you’ll be all right now? Can you walk?”

“Yes, yes, thank you,” Lalla says.

Before leaving, Paul Estève writes his name and address on a scrap of paper.

“If you need anything…”

He squeezes Lalla’s hand. He’s barely any taller than she is. His blue eyes are still all misty with emotion.

“Good-bye,” says Lalla. And she walks away as quickly as she can without looking back.

THERE ARE DOGS almost everywhere. But they’re not like the beggars, they prefer to live in the Panier, between Place de Lenche and Rue du Refuge. Lalla looks at them when she passes by, she’s wary of them, their coats bristle up, they’re very scrawny, but they don’t look anything like the wild dogs that used to steal chickens and sheep back in the Project; these dogs are bigger and stronger, and there’s something dangerous and desperate about the way they look. They go around scrounging for food in all the piles of garbage, they gnaw on old bones, fish heads, the waste the butchers throw out to them. There’s one dog that Lalla knows well. He’s always in the same spot every day, at the bottom of the stairway, near the street that leads to the big striped church. He’s all black with a collar of white fur that grows down onto his chest. His name is Dib, or Hib, she’s not sure, but in the end, his name isn’t important at all because he doesn’t really have a master. Lalla heard a little boy calling him that in the street. When he sees Lalla, he looks kind of glad and wags his tail, but he doesn’t come near her, and he won’t let anyone get near him. Lalla merely says a few words to him; she asks him how he is, but without stopping, just in passing, and if she has something to eat, she throws him a little piece.

Here in the Panier neighborhood, everyone knows everyone, more or less. It’s not the same in the rest of the city, where there are those streams of men and women flowing along the avenues, creating that great din of shoes and motors. Here in the Panier, the streets are short; they twist and open into other streets, alleyways, stairways, and it’s more like a big apartment with halls and rooms that fit together. Yet except for the big dog, Dib or Hib, and a few children whose names she doesn’t know, most people don’t even seem to see her. Lalla slips along without making a sound, going from one street to another, she follows the path of the sun and the light.

Maybe the people here are afraid? Afraid of what? It’s hard to say; it’s as if they feel they are being watched, and they have to be careful about everything they do and say. But no one is really watching them. So maybe it comes from the fact that they speak so many diVerent languages? There are the people from North Africa, the Magrhebis, Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, Mauritanians, and then people from Africa, the Senegalese, the Malians, the Dahomeyans, and also the Jews, who come from all over, but never really speak the language of their country; there are the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Italians, and also the odd people, who don’t resemble the others, the Yugoslavians, the Turks, the Armenians, the Lithuanians; Lalla doesn’t know what those names mean, but that’s what everyone here calls them, and Aamma is quite familiar with all of those names. Most of all, there are the gypsies, like the ones who live in the house next door, so many of them you never know whether you’ve already seen them, or if they’ve just arrived; they don’t like Arabs, or Spaniards, or Yugoslavians; they don’t like anyone, because they’re not used to living in a place like the Panier, so they’re always ready to get into a fight, even the little boys, even the women, who, according to what Aamma says, carry razor blades in their mouths. Sometimes, at night, you’re awakened by the sound of a battle in the alleyways. Lalla goes down the stairs to the street and, in the pale light of the streetlamp, sees a man crawling on the ground holding a knife stuck in his chest. The next day, there is a long gooey streak on the ground that the flies come buzzing around.

Sometimes people from the police come too; they stop their big black cars at the bottom of the stairways and go into the houses, especially those where the Arabs and the gypsies live. There are policemen with uniforms and caps, but those aren’t the ones who are the most dangerous; it’s the others, the ones who are dressed like everyone else, gray suits and turtleneck sweaters. They knock on the doors very hard, because you have to open up right away, and they go into the apartments without saying anything, to see who’s living there. At Aamma’s, the policeman goes and sits on the vinyl sofa that Lalla uses as a bed, and she thinks he’s going to make it sag and that tonight when she goes to bed the mark where the fat man sat down will still be there.

“Name? First name? Tribal name? Resident card? Work permit? Name of employer? Social security number? Lease, rent receipt?”

He doesn’t even look at the papers Aamma gives him one after the other. He’s sitting on the sofa, smoking a Gauloise, looking bored. He does look at Lalla though, who is standing at attention in front of the door to Aamma’s room. He says to Aamma, “Is she your daughter?”

“No, she’s my niece,” Aamma says.

He takes all of the papers and examines them.

“Where are her parents?”

“They’re dead.”

“Ah,” says the policeman. He looks at the papers as if he were thinking something over.

“Does she work?”

“No, not yet, sir,” says Aamma; she says “sir” when she’s afraid.

“But she’s going to work here?”

“Yes, sir, if she finds work. It’s not easy for a young girl to find work.”

“She’s seventeen?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You must be careful, there are a lot of dangers here for a young seventeen-year-old girl.”

Aamma doesn’t say anything. The policeman thinks she hasn’t understood and insists. He talks slowly, carefully articulating each word, and his eyes are shining as if he were more interested now.

“Be careful your daughter doesn’t end up in Rue du Poids de la Farine, eh? There are lots of them over there, girls just like her, you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” says Aamma. She doesn’t dare repeat that Lalla isn’t her daughter.

But the policeman feels Lalla’s cold eyes on him, and it makes him feel uneasy. He says nothing more for several seconds, and the silence becomes unbearable. So then, in an outburst, the fat man starts over again with a furious voice, eyes squinted in anger.

“‘Yes, I know, yes,’ that’s what you say, and then one day your daughter will be on the sidewalk, a whore at ten francs a pass, so then you’d better not come crying to me and say you didn’t know, because I warned you.”

He’s almost screaming, the veins in his temples are bulging. Aamma stands still, paralyzed, but Lalla isn’t afraid of the fat man. She looks at him coldly, walks up to him and simply says,

“Go away.”

The policeman looks at her stunned, as if she’d insulted him. He’s going to open his mouth, he’s going to get up, maybe he’s going to slap Lalla. But the young girl’s stare is hard as steel, hard to hold. So the policeman suddenly stands up and is out of the apartment in an instant, rushing down the stairs. Lalla hears the door to the street slam shut. He’s gone.

Aamma is crying now, holding her head between her hands, sitting on the sofa. Lalla goes over to her, puts her arms around her shoulders, kisses her cheek to comfort her.

“Maybe I should leave here,” Lalla says softly, as one would speak to a child. “It might be best if I left.”

“No, no,” says Aamma, and cries even harder.

At night, when everything around her is asleep, when there’s nothing but the sound of the wind on the zinc valleys of the roofs, and the water dripping somewhere into a gutter, Lalla lies on the sofa, eyes open in the half-light. She thinks about the house back there in the Project, so far away, when the cold night wind came. She thinks that she would like to push open the door and be outside right away, like before, engulfed in the deep night with thousands of stars. She would feel the hard, icy earth under her bare feet. She would hear the cracking sounds of the cold, the cries of the nighthawks, the owl hooting and the wild dogs barking. She thinks she would walk like that, alone in the night, until she reached the rocky hills, with the song of crickets all around her, or else out along the path in the dunes, guided by the breath of the ocean.

She searches the darkness as hard as she can, as if her eyes could open up the sky again, make the invisible shapes appear again, the outline of the sheet metal and tarpaper roofs, the walls of planks and cardboard, the crest of the hills, and all of the people, Naman, the girls at the fountain, the Soussi, Aamma’s sons, and most of all, him — the Hartani, just as he’d been, motionless in the desert heat, standing on one leg, his body and face covered, without a word, without a sign of anger or fatigue, motionless before her as if he were awaiting death, while the men from the Red Cross came to get her and take her away. She also wants to see the one she used to call al-Ser, the Secret, the one whose gaze came from afar and enveloped her, penetrated her like sunlight.

But is it possible for them to come all the way over here, to the other side of the sea, to the other side of everything?

Can they find their way amongst all of those paths, find the gate amongst all of those gates? The darkness is still opaque; the emptiness in the room is immense, so immense that it is swirling around and hollowing out a funnel in front of Lalla’s body, and the dizzy mouth clamps against her and sucks her toward it. She clings to the sofa with all of her might, resists, her body tensed to the breaking point. She would like to shout out, scream, in order to break the silence, throw off the weight of the night. But her tight throat will not let out a single sound, and merely breathing in requires a painful effort, makes a hissing sound like steam. For long minutes, hours maybe, she struggles, her whole body caught up in that spasm. Finally, all of a sudden, as the first light of dawn appears in the courtyard of the building, Lalla feels the whirlwind loosening, leaving her. Her limp shapeless body falls back onto the sofa. She thinks of the child she is carrying, and for the first time feels anxious about having hurt someone who is dependent upon her. She lays her two hands on each side of her belly, until the warmth goes very deep. She cries for a long time, without making a sound, with calm little sobs, like breathing.

THEY’RE PRISONERS of the Panier. Maybe they don’t really realize it. Maybe they think they’ll be able to leave one day, go somewhere else, go back to their villages in the mountains and in the muddy valleys, find the people they left behind, the parents, the children, the friends. But it’s impossible. The narrow streets lined with old decrepit walls, the dark apartments, the cold dank rooms where the gray air weighs down on your chest, the stifling workshops where the girls work in front of their machines making pants and dresses, the hospital rooms, the construction sites, the roads with the deafening detonations of jackhammers, everything is keeping them here, grasping them, holding them prisoner, and they’ll never get free.

Now Lalla has found work. She is a cleaning woman at the Hotel Sainte-Blanche, in the first part of the old town, to the north, not far from the main avenue where she met Radicz for the first time. She leaves early every day, before the shops open. She wraps herself up tightly in her brown coat because of the cold, and goes all the way across the old town; she walks through dark narrow streets, up stairways with dirty water trickling down one step at a time. There aren’t many people out, just a few dogs with their hair bristling, looking for something to eat in the piles of garbage. Lalla keeps a piece of old bread in her pocket because they don’t feed her at the hotel; sometimes she shares it with the old black dog, the one they call Dib or Hib. As soon as she arrives, the owner of the hotel gives her a bucket of water and a long-handled scrub brush for her to wash the stairs with, even though they are so dirty that Lalla thinks it’s a waste of time. The owner is a fairly young man, but with a yellow face and swollen eyes as if he didn’t get enough sleep. The Hotel Sainte-Blanche is a run-down, four-story house, with a funeral parlor on the ground floor. The first time Lalla went there, it frightened her and she almost left immediately; it was so dirty, cold, and smelly. But she’s used to it now. It’s like Aamma’s apartment, or like the Panier neighborhood, it’s just a matter of getting used to it. You just have to close your mouth and breathe slowly, in short breaths, to keep that odor from getting inside your body, that odor of poverty, of sickness, and of death that pervades the stairways, the halls, and all the nooks and crannies where the spiders and cockroaches live.

The owner of the hotel is a Greek, or a Turk, Lalla isn’t quite sure. When he’s given her the bucket and the scrub brush, he returns to his room on the first floor, the one with the glass door so he can watch who goes in and out from his bed. The people who live in the hotel are all menial workers, poor, men only. They’re North Africans who work on the construction sites, black men from the Antilles, Spaniards too, who have no family, no home, and who are living there until they find something better. But they get used to it and stay, and often go back to their countries without ever having found anything else, because lodgings are expensive, and no one wants to have anything to do with them in the city. So they live in the Hotel Sainte-Blanche, two or three to a room, without knowing each other. Every morning when they leave for work, they knock on the owner’s glass door, and pay for the night in advance.

When she’s finished scrubbing the filthy stairs and the sticky linoleum in the hallways with the long-handled brush, Lalla scours down the toilets and the only shower room with the brush alone, but there again, the layer of filth is such that the hard bristles of the brush can’t even put a dent in it. Then she cleans the rooms; she empties the ashtrays and sweeps up the crumbs and the dust. The owner gives her his passkey, and she goes from room to room. There’s no one in the hotel. The rooms are easy to do because the men who live there are very poor, and they have practically no possessions. Just the cardboard suitcases, the plastic bags with their dirty laundry, a bit of soap wrapped in a piece of newspaper. Sometimes there are a few photographs in an envelope on the table; Lalla looks at the blurred faces on the glossy paper for a moment, sweet faces of children, of women, half faded away, as if through a fog. There are letters too, sometimes, in large envelopes, or sometimes keys, empty coin purses, souvenirs purchased in bazaars near the old port, plastic toys for the children who are in the fuzzy pictures. Lalla looks at all of that for a long time; she holds the objects in her wet hands, looks at those precarious treasures as if she were half dreaming, as if she would be able to enter into the world of those murky photographs, hear the sound of the voices, laughter, glimpse the light in the smiles. Then it all suddenly vanishes, and she goes back to sweeping the room, cleaning up the crumbs left after the men’s hasty meals, restoring the sad gray anonymity that the objects and the photographs had disturbed for an instant. Sometimes, on a bed with the sheets thrown back, Lalla finds a magazine full of obscene pictures, naked women with their legs spread, obese swollen breasts, like huge oranges, women with their lips painted light pink, with heavy eyes smeared with blue and green, with blond and red hair. The pages of the magazines are crumpled, stained with sperm, the photos are dirty and worn as if they had been left on the street under people’s feet. Lalla also looks at the magazine for a long time, and her heart starts beating faster, from anxiety and uneasiness; then she puts the magazine down on the made bed, after having straightened out the pages and closed the cover, as if it too were a precious souvenir.

The whole time she’s working in the stairways and the rooms, Lalla doesn’t see anyone. She’s never seen the faces of the men who live at the hotel; as for them, they’re in a hurry when they leave for work in the morning and go past her without seeing her. In fact, Lalla is dressed so she won’t be seen. Under her brown coat, she wears a gray dress that belongs to Aamma, which comes down almost to her ankles. She knots a large scarf over her head and slips her feet into black rubber sandals. In the dark corridors of the hotel, on the mud-colored linoleum, and in front of the dirty doors, she is barely visible, gray and black, like a pile of rags. The only people who know her here are the owner and the night watchman who stays until morning; he’s a tall, very skinny Algerian, with a tough face and pretty green eyes like those of Naman the fisherman. He always greets Lalla, in French, and says a few nice words to her; since he always talks very ceremoniously in his deep voice, Lalla answers him with a smile. He is perhaps the only person here who has noticed that Lalla is a teenage girl, the only person who has seen, under the shadows of the rags, her handsome copper-colored face and her eyes filled with light.

When she’s finished her work at the Hotel Sainte-Blanche, the sun is still high in the sky. So Lalla walks down the main avenue to the sea. She doesn’t think of anything else then, as if she’d forgotten everything. In the avenue, on the sidewalks, the crowd is still rushing on, still rushing toward the unknown. There are men with glinting eyeglasses, striding hurriedly along; there are poor men wearing threadbare suits, going in the opposite direction, with guarded looks, like foxes. There are groups of young girls, wearing skintight clothing, who walk along clacking their heels, like this: kra-kab, kra-kab, kra-kab. The automobiles, the motorcycles, the mopeds, the trucks, the buses are all speeding past, going down to the sea, or up toward the higher part of the city, all filled with men and women with identical faces. Lalla is walking along on the sidewalk, looking at all of that, all of the movement, all of the shapes, the bursts of light, and it all goes inside of her and whirls around. She’s hungry; her body is weary from having worked in the hotel, and yet she still feels like walking, to see more light, to drive out all the darkness that has remained deep inside of her. The icy winter wind blows in gusts along the avenue, raising dust and old newspaper pages. Lalla half closes her eyes, moves along bent slightly forward, just as she used to back in the desert, toward the source of light out there at the end of the avenue.

When she reaches the harbor, she feels a kind of drunkenness inside, stands teetering on the edge of the sidewalk. Here the wind is whirling about freely, driving the water in the harbor out ahead of it, making the riggings on the boats snap. The light is coming from even farther out, beyond the horizon, directly south, and Lalla walks along the wharves, toward the sea. The sound of humans and motors swirls around her, but she doesn’t pay attention to it anymore. Sometimes running, sometimes walking, she heads for the large striped church; then even farther out, she enters into the derelict zone of the wharves, where the wind raises squalls of cement dust.

Here, suddenly, everything is silent, as if she really were going to enter the desert. Before her lies the white expanse of the wharves where the sunlight is shining brightly. Lalla walks slowly along beside the silhouettes of the huge freighters, under the metallic cranes, between the rows of red containers. There are no people here, or automobile motors, only white stone and cement, and the dark water in the basins. So then she picks out a place, between two rows of containers covered with blue tarps, and she sits down sheltered from the wind to eat some bread and cheese, gazing at the water in the harbor. At times big seabirds pass overhead shrieking, and Lalla thinks of her place between the dunes and the white bird that was a prince of the sea. She shares her bread with the gulls, but some pigeons also come. Here everything is calm, no one ever comes looking for her out here. From time to time, a fisherman walks down the wharf, holding his rod, looking for a good place to catch sea bream; but he hardly even glances at her out of the corner of his eye, and goes off to the back of the harbor. Or sometimes a child will walk along with his hands in his pockets, playing by himself at kicking a rusty tin can around.

Lalla feels the sunlight penetrating her, gradually filling her, driving out everything that is dark and sad deep inside. She no longer thinks about Aamma’s place, about the dark courtyards with dripping laundry. She no longer thinks about the Hotel Sainte-Blanche, or even about all of those streets, avenues, boulevards, where people are endlessly walking, endlessly rumbling along. She becomes like a piece of rock, covered with moss and lichen, immobile, with no thoughts, dilated in the heat of the sun. Sometimes she even falls asleep, leaning against the blue tarpaulin, her knees pulled up under her chin, and she dreams she’s in a boat gliding out on the still sea, all the way out to the other side of the world.

The huge freighters glide slowly through the black basins. They go over to the entrance of the harbor; they want to go back out to sea. Lalla plays at following them, running along the wharves as far as she can. She can’t read their names, but she looks at their flags, the rust stains on their hulls, and their huge derricks folded back like antennae, and their chimneys decorated with stars, crosses, checkers, suns. In front of the freighters, the pilot boat sails out with a waddling motion like an insect, and when the freighters reach the high seas, they blow their horns, just once or twice, like that, to say good-bye.

The water in the harbor is lovely too, and Lalla often settles down with her back leaning up against a bollard, legs dangling over the water. She looks at the rainbow-colored oil slicks making and unmaking their clouds, and all the odd things drifting on the surface, beer bottles, orange peels, plastic bags, pieces of wood and rope, and that sort of brown foam that comes from who knows where, stretching like strings of spittle along the wharves. When a ship goes by, wavelets spread out from its wake, lapping up against the wharves. The wind blows very hard at times, driving wrinkles, shudders, over the basins, blurring the reflections of the freighters.

Some days in winter, when there is a lot of sunshine, Radicz the beggar comes to see Lalla. He walks slowly along the wharves, but Lalla recognizes him from a long way off; she comes out of her hiding place between the tarpaulins, and whistles between her fingers, as the shepherds used to back in the Hartani’s land. The boy comes running up, sits down next to her on the edge of the wharf, and they look at the water in the harbor for a while, not saying anything.

Then the boy shows Lalla something she’s never noticed before: on the surface of the black water, there are small silent explosions making circular ripples. At first Lalla looks up at the sky, because she thinks it’s from raindrops. But the sky is blue. Then she realizes there are bubbles coming up from the bottom and bursting at the surface of the water. Together they have fun watching the bubbles explode.

“There! There’s one!… Another one, another!”

“Over there, look!”

“And there!…”

Where are those bubbles coming from? Radicz says it’s the fish breathing, but Lalla thinks it’s probably the plants, and she thinks of those mysterious grasses swaying slowly at the bottom of the harbor.

After that, Radicz takes out his box of matches. He says it’s to smoke, but in truth smoking isn’t what he likes most; it’s burning matches. When he has a little money of his own, Radicz goes into a tobacco shop and buys a big box of matches with an image of a gypsy woman dancing on it. He goes to sit down in a calm spot, and strikes his matches, one after the other. He does it very quickly, just for the pleasure of watching the little red match head flare up, making its rocket sound, and then the pretty orange flame dancing at the end of the little wooden stick, sheltered in his cupped hands.

Down by the harbor, there’s a lot of wind, and Lalla has to act like a tent, holding out the flaps of her coat, and she can smell the pungent heat of the phosphorus stinging her nostrils. Every time Radicz strikes a match, they both laugh real hard, and they try to take turns holding the little piece of wood. Radicz shows Lalla how you can burn the whole match by licking the ends of your fingers and holding it by the burnt end. It makes a little hiss when Lalla takes the match by the end that’s still red hot, and it burns her thumb and index finger, but it’s not an unpleasant feeling; she watches the flame devouring the match, and the burnt wood twisting as if it were alive.

Then they smoke, one cigarette for the two of them, leaning their backs up against the blue tarp and gazing out into nothingness in the direction of the dark waters of the harbor and the cement-colored sky.

“How old are you?” Radicz asks.

“Seventeen, but I’ll be eighteen soon,” Lalla says.

“I’m going to be fourteen next month,” Radicz says.

He thinks for a minute, furrowing his eyebrows.

“Have you ever … gone to bed with a man?”

Lalla is surprised at the question.

“No — I mean yes, why?”

Radicz is so preoccupied that he forgets to pass the cigarette to Lalla; he takes drag after drag, without inhaling the smoke.

“I haven’t done it,” he says.

“You haven’t done what?”

“I’ve never gone to bed with a woman.”

“You’re too young.”

“That’s not true!” says Radicz. He gets angry and stutters a little. “It’s not true! All my friends have done it, and there are even some who’ve got their own woman, and they make fun of me, they say I’m a faggot, because I don’t have a woman.”

He thinks some more, smoking his cigarette.

“But I don’t care what they say. I don’t think it’s right to sleep with a woman like that, just to — to act big, to joke around. It’s like cigarettes. You know, I never smoke in front of the others back at the hotel, so they think I’ve never smoked and that makes them laugh too. But that’s because they don’t know, but it’s all the same to me, I’d rather they didn’t know.”

Now he gives the cigarette back to Lalla. It’s smoked almost all the way down to the end. Lalla takes just one puff and then crushes it out on the ground on the wharf.

“You know I’m going to have a baby?”

She doesn’t really know why she’s telling that to Radicz. He looks at her for a long time without answering anything. There is something dark in his eyes, but it suddenly grows bright.

“That’s good,” he says seriously. “That’s good, I’m very happy.”

He’s so happy he can’t sit still anymore. He gets to his feet, paces around out by the water, then comes back toward Lalla.

“Will you come and see me over there, where I live?”

“If you like,” says Lalla.

“You know, it’s a long way away, you have to take the intercity bus, and then walk for a long time, toward the storage tanks. We’ll go together whenever you want to, because otherwise you’ll get lost.”

He runs off. The sun has gone down now; it’s not far from the line of big buildings that can be seen on the other side of the wharves. The freighters are still motionless, like tall rusty cliffs, and flights of gulls are swooping slowly past them, dancing above the masts.

THERE ARE DAYS when Lalla can hear the sounds of fear. She doesn’t really know what it is, like a heavy pounding on thick plates of metal, and also a muffled rumbling that doesn’t come through her ears, but through the soles of her feet and echoes inside her body. Maybe it’s loneliness, and hunger too, hunger for gentleness, for light, for songs, hunger for everything.

As soon as she goes out the door of the Hotel Sainte-Blanche, after finishing her work, Lalla feels the excessively white light of the sky falling upon her, making her stumble. She pulls the collar of her brown coat up as high as she can around her head, she covers her hair all the way down to her eyebrows with Aamma’s gray scarf, but the whiteness of the sky still reaches her, and the emptiness of the streets also. It’s like a feeling of nausea, rising from the pit of her stomach, coming up into her throat, filling her mouth with bitterness. Lalla sits down quickly, anywhere, without trying to understand, without worrying about the people looking at her, because she’s afraid of fainting again. She fights against it with all her might, tries to slow the beating of her heart, the movements of her entrails. She puts both of her hands on her belly, so that the gentle warmth of her hands travels through her dress, goes inside of her, till it reaches the child. That’s how she used to ease those terrible pains that would come to her lower abdomen, like an animal gnawing from the inside. Then she rocks herself a little, back and forth, sitting on the edge of the sidewalk like that, next to the stopped cars.

People go by her without stopping. They slow down a little, as if they were going to come over to her, but when Lalla looks up, there’s so much suffering in her eyes that they hurry away, because it frightens them.

After a moment, the pain subsides under Lalla’s hands. She can breathe again more freely. In spite of the cold wind, she’s covered with sweat, and her damp dress is sticking to her back. Maybe it’s the sound of fear that you don’t hear with your ears, but with your feet and your whole body, that is emptying the streets of the city.

Lalla goes back up toward the old town, slowly climbing the steps of the crumbling stairway where the stinking sewer runs. At the top of the stairway, she turns left, and walks down Rue du Bon-Jesus. On the old scabby walls, there are signs marked in chalk, letters and incomprehensible half-erased drawings. On the ground, there are several blood-red stains, drawing flies. The red color rings in Lalla’s head, making a sirenlike noise, a sharp whistling that digs out a hole, empties her mind. Slowly, with great difficulty, Lalla steps over the first stain, the second, the third. There are strange white things mixed in with the red stains, like cartilage, broken bones, skin, and the siren rings even louder in Lalla’s head. She tries to run down the sloping street, but the stones are damp and slippery, especially when you’re wearing rubber sandals. Rue du Timon, there are more signs written in chalk on the old walls, words, maybe names? Then a naked woman with breasts like two eyes, and Lalla thinks of the obscene magazine unfolded on the unmade bed in the hotel room. A little farther along, there is a huge phallus drawn in chalk on an old door, like a grotesque mask.

Lalla keeps on walking, breathing laboriously. Sweat is still running down her forehead, between her shoulder blades, dampening her lower back, stinging her underarms. There’s no one in the streets at this time of day, only a few dogs with their hair bristling, growling as they gnaw on their bones. The windows at street level have grilles or bars on them. Higher up, the shutters are closed, the houses look abandoned. A deathly cold emanates from the air vents, cellars, dark windows. It’s like a breath of death blowing through the streets, filling the filthy recesses at the foot of the walls. Where should she go? Lalla is moving slowly again, she turns right once more, toward the wall of the old house. Lalla is always a little frightened when she sees those large windows with bars over them, because she believes it is a prison where people have died in the past: they even say that at night you can sometimes hear the prisoners moaning behind the bars on the windows. Now she goes down Rue des Pistoles, which is always deserted, and takes Traverse de la Charité to see the strange pink dome she likes so much, through the gray stone gateway. Some days she sits down on the doorstep of a house and stares at the dome that looks like a cloud for a very long time, and she forgets everything, until a woman comes and asks her what she’s doing there and makes her go away.

But today, even the pink dome frightens her, as if there were a threat behind its narrow windows, or as if it were a tomb. Without looking back, she walks hurriedly away, goes down along the silent streets, toward the sea again. The wind comes in gusts, making the laundry snap, large white sheets with frayed edges, children’s clothing, men’s clothing, blue and pink women’s undergarments; Lalla doesn’t want to look at them because they display invisible bodies, legs, arms, breasts, like corpses with no heads. She walks down Rue Rodillat, and there too, those low windows covered with grilles, closed off with bars, where men, women, and children are prisoners. Lalla hears snatches of sentences from time to time, sounds of dishes or of cooking, or at times that nasal music, and she thinks of all the people who are prisoners, in cold dark rooms, with the cockroaches and the rats, all the people who will never see the light again, never breathe in the wind again.

Over there, behind that window with cracked blackened panes, there’s the fat infirm woman who lives alone with two scrawny cats, and who is always talking about her garden, her roses, her trees, about the tall lemon tree that produces the most beautiful fruit in the world — she, who has nothing but a cold dark cubbyhole and her two blind cats. This is Ibrahim’s house; he’s an old soldier from Oran who fought against the Germans, against the Turks, against the Serbs, out there in the places whose names he tirelessly repeats when Lalla asks him to: Thessalonica, Varna, Bjala. But won’t he die too, trapped in his crumbling house in which the dark slippery stairs almost trip him up at every step, where the walls weigh down on his thin chest like a wet coat? Over there too, the Spanish woman with six children who all sleep in the same room with the narrow window, and who wander the Panier neighborhood, dressed in rags, pale, always starving. There, in the house with the walls that seem to be damp with sickly sweat, right where that lizard is running, is the sick couple who cough so hard that sometimes Lalla wakes up with a start in the night, as if she could really hear them through all of the walls. Then the foreign couple: he’s Italian, she’s Greek, and he’s drunk every night, and every night he beats his wife, hits her hard in the head, just like that, without even getting mad, just because she’s there and looking at him with those teary eyes in her face swollen with fatigue. Lalla hates that man; she clenches her teeth when she thinks about him, but she’s also frightened of that calm and desperate drunkenness, of the woman’s submission, because that’s what can be seen in every stone and every stain in the cursed streets of this city, in every sign written on the walls of the Panier.

There is hunger everywhere, fear, cold poverty, like old, used, damp clothing, like old, withered, fallen faces.

Rue du Panier, Rue du Bouleau, Traverse Boussenoue, always the same scabby walls, the tops of the buildings brushed with cold light, the feet of the buildings where green water puddles, where piles of garbage rot. Here, there are no wasps or flies zooming freely through the air where the dust swirls. There is nothing but people, rats, cockroaches, everything that dwells in holes with no light, no air, no sky. Lalla prowls around the streets like an old black dog with its hair bristling, not being able to find its spot. She sits down for a minute on the steps of the stairway, next to a wall on the other side of which grows the only tree in town, an old fig tree rich with smells. She thinks for a second about the tree she used to love back when Old Naman would tell stories while he was repairing his nets. But, like an old arthritic dog, she can’t stay in one place for very long. She strikes out again through the dark labyrinth, as the light from the sky grows slowly dimmer. She sits back down for a moment on the bench in the little square where there is a preschool. There are days she really likes sitting there, watching the small children toddling around in the square, legs wobbling, arms held out on either side. But now, there’s nothing but shade, and on one of the benches, an old black woman in an ample colorful dress. Lalla goes over to sit beside her, tries to talk to her.

“Do you live here? Where are you from? What’s the name of your country?”

The old woman looks at her without understanding, then she gets frightened and covers her face with the skirt of her colorful dress.

At the back of the square, there is a wall that Lalla is very familiar with. She knows every stain on the roughcast, every crack, every dribble of rust. All the way up at the top of the wall are black chimney stacks, gutters. Under the roof, little shutterless windows with dirty windowpanes. Under old Ida’s window, laundry stiffened with rain and dust is hanging on a line. Under that, the windows of the gypsies. Most of the windowpanes are broken, some windows don’t even have wooden frames anymore, they’re nothing more than gaping black holes, like eye sockets.

Lalla stares at the dark openings, and once again she feels the cold and terrifying presence of death. She shudders. There is an immense void in this square, a whirl of emptiness and death that is coming from those windows, spiraling between the walls of the houses. On the bench next to her, the old mulattress isn’t moving, isn’t breathing. The only thing Lalla can see is her emaciated arm where the veins protrude like ropes, and her hand with long fingers stained with henna, holding the skirt of her dress up to her face on the side next to Lalla.

Maybe there’s some kind of trap here too? Lalla would like to stand up and run away, but she feels riveted to the plastic bench, as if in a dream. Night falls gradually over the city, shadows fill the square, blotting out the corners, the cracks, slipping into the windows through the broken panes. It’s cold now, and Lalla wraps herself tightly in her brown coat, she turns the collar up all the way to her eyes. But the cold creeps up through the rubber soles of her sandals, along her legs, to her bottom, to her lower back. Lalla closes her eyes to struggle against it, to stop seeing the emptiness whirling around the square, around the abandoned playground, before the blind eyes of the windows.

When she opens her eyes again, she’s alone. The old mulattress in the colorful dress has left without her noticing. Oddly enough, the sky and the earth are not as dark as before, as if night had receded.

Lalla continues walking along the narrow silent streets. She goes down stairways where the pavement has been smashed in with jackhammers. Cold sweeps along the street, making the sheet metal on the toolsheds bang.

When she comes out facing the sea, Lalla sees the day isn’t finished yet. There is a big bright spot above the cathedral, between the towers. Lalla runs across the avenue without even seeing the speeding automobiles, which honk their horns and flash their headlights. She slowly approaches the upper parvis, climbs the steps, slips between the columns. She remembers the first time she ever came to the cathedral. She was very frightened, because it was so huge and abandoned, like a cliff. Then Radicz the beggar showed her where he spends the night in summer, when the wind coming in from the sea is as warm as a breath. He showed her the place from where you can see the huge freighters coming into the harbor at night, with their red and green lights. He also showed her the place where you can see the moon and the stars, between the columns of the parvis.

But this evening it’s empty. The green and white stone is ice-cold, the silence is heavy, disturbed only by the distant whishing of automobile tires and the screeching of bats flitting about under the vaulted ceiling. The pigeons are already sleeping, perched all around on the cornices, huddling together.

Lalla sits down for a moment on the steps, sheltered by the stone balustrade. She looks at the ground stained with guano and the dusty earth in front of the parvis. The wind is blowing violently, whistling through the gratings. There is great loneliness here, like on a ship on the high seas. It is painful; it tightens in your throat and temples, makes sounds echo strangely, makes lights flicker in the distance, along the streets.

Later, when night has come, Lalla goes back up into the city. She crosses Place de Lenche, where men are crowding around the doorways of bars, takes Montée Accoules, her hand resting on the polished double iron railing she so likes. But even there, the anxiety doesn’t dissipate. It’s behind her, like one of the big dogs with its hair bristling, with a starved look, which prowls around in the gutters looking for a bone to gnaw on. It’s hunger, undoubtedly, hunger that gnaws at your belly, that hollows out its emptiness in your head, but hunger for everything, everything that is denied, inaccessible. It’s been such a long time since people have eaten their fill, such a long time since they’ve had any rest, or happiness, or love, anything other than cold basement rooms, where the fog of anxiety floats, anything other than those dark streets overrun with rats, oozing with fetid water, filled with piles of refuse. Misery.

As she walks along in the narrow grooves of the streets, Rue du Refuge, Rue des Moulins, Rue de Belles-Ecuelles, Rue de Montbrion, Lalla sees all the detritus as if it had been washed up by the sea, rusted tin cans, old papers, bits of bone, wilted oranges, vegetables, rags, broken bottles, rubber rings, bottle caps, dead birds with torn-off wings, squashed cockroaches, dust, dirt, decay. These are the marks of loneliness, of abandon, as if humans had already fled this city, this world, left them in the grips of disease, death, oblivion. As if there were only a few people left in this world, the misfortunate, who continue to live in those run-down houses, in those already tomblike apartments, while the emptiness blows in through the gaping windows, the chill of night that tightens chests, that veils the eyes of old people and children.

Lalla continues to walk through the rubble; she walks over fallen plaster. She doesn’t know where she’s going. She goes down the same street several times, around the high walls of the general hospital. Maybe Aamma is there, in the big underground kitchen with greasy transoms, running her sponge mop over the black floors that nothing will ever be able to clean? Lalla doesn’t want to go back to Aamma’s place, ever again. She wanders along dark streets as a drizzle begins to fall from the sky, because the wind has fallen silent. Men walk past, dark faceless shapes that also seem lost. Lalla steps aside to let them pass, disappears into doorways, hides behind stopped cars. When the street is empty once again, she comes out, continues walking silently, exhausted, drunk with sleep.

Yet she doesn’t want to sleep. Where would she be able to let herself go, forget herself? The city is too dangerous, and anxiety won’t let poor girls sleep like the children of rich people.

There are too many sounds in the dark silence, sounds of hunger, sounds of fear, of loneliness. There is the sound of the sodden voices of bums in the shelters, the sound of Arab cafés with their endless, monotonous music, and the slow laughter of hashish smokers. There is the terrifying sound of the mad man punching his wife hard with his fist, every night, and the high-pitched voice of the woman screaming at first, then whimpering and moaning. Lalla is hearing all of those sounds now, very clearly, as if they echoed on endlessly. There is one sound in particular that follows her everywhere, that gets inside of her head and her belly and always repeats the same affliction: it’s the sound of a child coughing, somewhere in the night, in the house next door, maybe it’s the son of the Tunisian woman who is so fat and so pale, with sort-of-crazed green eyes? Or maybe it’s some other child who’s coughing in a house a few streets away, and then another who answers from somewhere else, in an attic room with a hole in the roof, still another who can’t sleep in the freezing alcove, and another, as if there were scores, hundreds of sick children coughing in the night, making the same hoarse sound which is tearing up their throats and their lungs. Lalla stops, leaning her back against a door, and presses the palms of her hands against her ears with all of her might, to keep from hearing the coughing of the children barking out in the cold night from house to house.

Farther on, there is the curve in the street from where you can see, as though from a balcony, the intersection of the main avenues like the mouth of a river, and all the blinking, blinding lights. So Lalla climbs down the hill, following the stairways, she goes in through Passage de Lorette, walks across the large courtyard filled with the sound of radios and human voices, with walls blackened with smoke and poverty. She stops for a minute, her head turned toward the windows, as if someone were going to appear. But all that can be heard is the inhuman sound of a voice on the radio shouting something, slowly repeating the same sentence, “At the sound of this music the gods make their entrance!”

But Lalla doesn’t know what that means. The inhuman voice drowns out the sound of the children coughing, the sound of drunken men, and the whimpering woman. Then there is another dark passageway, like a corridor, and you come out on the boulevard.

Out there, for a moment, Lalla doesn’t feel the fear anymore, or the sadness. The crowd hurries along the sidewalks, eyes glittering, hands agile, feet pounding on the cement, hips swinging, garments rustling, charged with static electricity. Automobiles, trucks, motorcycles drive along on the pavement, headlights bright, and the reflections in the shop windows flash on and off constantly. Lalla lets herself be swept along by the movement of the people; she’s not thinking about herself now; she’s empty, as if she didn’t really exist anymore. That’s why she always comes back to the main avenues, to lose herself in the flow, to just drift along.

There are so many lights! Lalla watches them as she walks straight ahead. The blue, red, orangey, purple lights, the steady lights, the ones that move, the ones that dance in place like match flames. Lalla thinks about the star-filled sky, about the vast desert night, when she was lying on the hard sand next to the Hartani, and they were breathing softly, as if they had but one body. But it’s difficult to remember. Out here, you have to keep walking, walking along with the others, as if you knew where you were going, but there’s no end to the journey, no hiding place in a dip of the dunes. You have to keep walking so you won’t fall, so you won’t be trampled by the others.

Lalla goes all the way down to the end of the avenue, then walks back up another avenue, and yet another. There are still all the lights, and the sound of humans and their motors roars endlessly on. Then, all of a sudden, the fear returns, the anxiety, as if all the sounds of those tires and footsteps were tracing large concentric circles on the sides of a gigantic funnel.

Now Lalla can see them again: they’re out there everywhere, sitting against the blackened walls, hunched over on the ground amidst the excrement and the garbage: the beggars, the old blind people with outstretched hands, the young women with chapped lips, a child hanging on their flaccid breast, the little girls dressed in rags, faces covered with scabs, who cling to the clothing of passersby, old women, the color of soot, with tangled hair, all the people whom the hunger and the cold have driven out of their hovels, and who are pushed along like flotsam by the waves. They are there, in the middle of the indifferent city, in the head-splitting din of motors and voices, rain-soaked, windblown, uglier and poorer still in the wan light of the electric lightbulbs. They look at the people passing by with blurry eyes, their sad moist eyes which are constantly fleeing and turning back toward yours, like those of dogs. Lalla walks slowly past the beggars, looking at them with a knot in her throat and again, that terrible void is hollowing out its whirlwind there, in front of those discarded bodies. She’s walking so slowly that a beggar woman grabs her by the coat and tries to pull the young woman over to her. Lalla resists, forcefully pries away the fingers that are clutching at the cloth of her coat; she looks in pity and in horror at the face of the woman who is still young, cheeks swollen with alcohol, blotched red from the cold and, above all, those two blue, almost transparent, blind eyes, in which the pupils are no bigger than a pinhead.

“Come! Come here!” says the beggar woman, as Lalla is trying to unlock the fingers with broken nails. Then fear gains the upper hand, and Lalla yanks her coat out of the woman’s grasp, and runs away, while the other beggars start laughing and the woman, rising to her knees on the sidewalk amidst her piles of rags, begins to scream insults at her.

Heart pounding, Lalla runs along the avenue; she bumps into people who are strolling around, going in and out of cafés, movie theaters; men in suits who have just had dinner and whose faces are still glistening from the effort they have made to eat and drink too much, perfumed boys, couples, soldiers out for a night on the town, foreigners with black skin and frizzy hair, who say words she doesn’t understand, or who try to grab her, laughing very loud, as she runs by.

In the cafés, music blares incessantly, wild and throbbing music that reverberates deep in the ground, that vibrates all through your body, in your belly, in your eardrums. It’s always the same music coming out of the cafés and the bars, colliding with the neon lights, with the red, green, orangey colors on the walls, on the tables, with the painted faces of women.

How long has Lalla been moving through the whirl of that music? She’s not sure anymore. For hours, maybe for whole nights, nights with no days to interrupt them. She thinks about the expanse of the plateaus of stones in the night, of the mounds of razor-sharp rocks, of hare and viper tracks in the moonlight, and she glances about herself, here, as if she were going to see him appear. The Hartani, clothed in his homespun robe, with his eyes shining in his very black face, with his long slow movements like the gait of antelopes. But there is only this avenue, and still more of this avenue, and these intersections full of faces, of eyes, of mouths, these shrill voices, these words, these murmurs. The sounds of all these motors and horns, these glaring lights. You can’t see the sky, as if there were a white veil covering the earth. How could they get all the way over here, the Hartani and he, the blue warrior of the desert, al-Ser, the Secret, as she used to call him? They would never be able to see her through the white veil separating the city from the sky. They would never be able to recognize her, in the midst of so many faces, so many bodies, with all of these automobiles, these trucks, these motorcycles. They would never even be able to hear her voice, here, with the sound of all of these voices speaking in all different languages, with this music reverberating, making the ground shake. That’s why Lalla doesn’t look for them anymore, doesn’t talk to them anymore, as if they’d disappeared forever, as if for her, they were dead.

The beggars are out there in the night, in the very heart of the city. It has stopped raining, and the night is very white, distant, all the way through to midnight. There are very few people. Men go in and out of cafés and bars, but then they go speeding off in automobiles. Lalla turns right into the narrow street that climbs slightly uphill and she walks behind the stopped cars to keep from being seen. On the opposite sidewalk, there are a few men. They’re standing still, not talking. They’re looking up the street, at the entrance to a squalid building, a very small door painted green, half open on a lighted hallway.

Lalla stops too, and watches, hidden behind a car. Her heart is beating fast, and the great void of anxiety is blowing in the street. The building stands there like a dirty fortress, with its shutterless windows plastered with newspaper pages. Some windows are lit with a harsh ugly light, others an odd wan, blood-colored glow. It looks like a giant with scores of eyes standing stock still and watching, or sleeping, a giant filled with an evil force, who is going to devour the little men waiting in the street. Lalla is so weak she needs to lean up against the hull of the car, shivering all over.

The evil wind is blowing in the street, that is what is creating the void over the city, the fear, the poverty, the hunger: that is what hollows out the whirling winds in the squares and makes silence weigh down in lonely rooms where children and old

people are suffocating. Lalla hates that wind and all those giants with open eyes, reigning over the city, only to devour the men and women, crush them in their entrails.

Then the little green door of the building opens all the way, and now, on the sidewalk facing Lalla, a woman is standing motionless. That’s what the men are staring at, without moving, smoking cigarettes. She’s a very small woman, almost a dwarf, with a thick body and a swollen head set on neckless shoulders. But her face is childlike, with a tiny little cherry-colored mouth, and very black eyes with green rings around them. What is most surprising about her, apart from her small size, is her hair: cropped short, curly, it is a coppery red color that sparkles strangely in the light of the hallway behind her and makes a sort of flaming halo around her chubby doll’s head, like a supernatural apparition.

Lalla looks at the little woman’s hair, fascinated, not moving, almost not breathing. The cold wind is blowing hard all around her, but the little woman stands there in front of the entrance to the building, with the hair on her head ablaze. She’s dressed in a very short black skirt that shows her heavy white thighs and a sort of low-necked purple pullover. She’s wearing very high spike-heeled patent leather pumps. Because of the cold, she’s pacing around a little in front of the door, and the sound of her heels echoes through the empty street.

Some men walk up to her now, smoking cigarettes. Most of them are Arabs with dark black hair, with gray complexions Lalla has never seen before, as if they lived underground and only came out at night. They don’t say anything. They look tough, obstinate, tight-lipped, cold-eyed. The little woman with fiery hair doesn’t even glance at them. She too lights a cigarette, and smokes rapidly, pivoting this way and that. When she turns around, she seems to be hunchbacked.

Then from the top of the street comes another woman. She’s very tall by contrast, and very fleshy, already aged, withered with fatigue and lack of sleep. She’s clothed in a long blue oilcloth raincoat, and her black hair is tousled with the wind.

She slowly descends the street, clacking her high-heeled shoes; she walks down to the dwarf and also stops in front of the door. The Arabs come up to her, talk to her. But Lalla doesn’t understand what they’re saying. One after the other, they walk away and stop a little farther off, eyes riveted on the two women standing there smoking. The wind gusts through the narrow street, plastering the women’s clothes against their bodies, ruffling their hair. There is so much hate and despair in this street, as if it kept drifting endlessly down through the different degrees of hell, without ever reaching the bottom, without ever stopping. There is so much hunger, unsatisfied desire, violence. The silent men look on, standing motionless on the curb like lead soldiers, their eyes glued to the women’s abdomens, to their breasts, to the curve of their hips, to the pale flesh of their throats, to their bare legs. Perhaps there is no love anywhere, no pity, no gentleness. Perhaps the white veil separating the earth from the sky has smothered the men, stopped the palpitations of their hearts, made all of their memories, all of their old desires, all of the beauty die?

Lalla can feel the relentless dizziness of the void entering her, as if the wind blowing in the street was part of a long spiraling movement. Maybe the wind is going to tear the roofs off the sordid houses, smash in the doors and windows, knock down the rotten walls, heave all the cars into a pile of scrap metal. It’s bound to happen, because there’s too much hate, too much suffering… But the big building remains standing, stunting the men in its tall silhouette. They are the immobile giants, with bloody eyes, with cruel eyes, the giants who devour men and women. In their entrails, young women are thrown down on dirty old mattresses, and possessed in a few seconds by silent men with members as hot as pokers. Then they get dressed again and leave, and the cigarette — left burning on the edge of the table — hasn’t had time to go out. Inside the devouring giants, old women lie under the weight of men who are crushing them, dirtying their yellow flesh. And so, in all of those women’s wombs, the void is born, the intense and icy void that escapes from their bodies and blows like a wind along the streets and alleys, endlessly shooting out new spirals.

Suddenly, Lalla can’t wait any longer. She wants to scream, even cry, but that’s impossible. The void and the fear are gripping her throat tightly, and she can barely breathe. So she breaks away. She runs as hard as she can down the alley, and the sound of her footsteps echoes loudly in the silence. The men turn and watch Lalla fleeing. The dwarf shouts something, but a man takes her by the neck and pushes her into the building with him. The void, disturbed for a moment, clamps shut over them, grasps them. Some men throw their cigarettes in the gutter and move off in the direction of the avenue, slipping along like shadows. Others arrive and stop at the curb and look at the tall woman with black hair standing in front of the door to the building.

Many beggars are sleeping around the train station, hunkered down in their tattered clothing, or surrounded by pieces of cardboard, in front of doorways. In the distance shines the edifice of the train station with its tall white street lamps as bright as stars. In one doorway, sheltered by a stone milepost, in a large pool of damp shadows, Lalla has lain down on the ground. She’s pulled her head and limbs into her big brown coat as well as she can, exactly like a turtle would. The stone is cold and hard, and the moist sound of the automobile tires makes her shiver. But at least she can watch the sky opening up, as she used to do out on the plateau of stones and, in keeping her eyes shut tightly, she can see the desert night once again between the edges of the veil that is parting.

LALLA IS LIVING at the Hotel Sainte-Blanche. She has a tiny little room, a dark cubbyhole up under the roof that she shares with the brooms, buckets, and old things left behind years ago. There’s an electric lightbulb, a table, an old cot with canvas webbing. When she asked the owner if she could live there, he simply said yes, without asking her any questions. He didn’t make any comments; he told her she could live there, that the bed wasn’t being used. He also told her he would deduct the money for the electricity and the water from her salary, that was all. He went back to reading his newspaper, stretched out on his bed. That’s why Lalla thinks the boss is okay, even if he is dirty and un­shaven, because he doesn’t ask questions. It’s all the same to him.

With Aamma, it hadn’t gone that smoothly. When Lalla told her she wasn’t going to live at her place anymore, her face closed up, and she said all kinds of unpleasant things, because she thought Lalla was going away to live with a man. But she agreed to it anyway, since it worked out better for her in the end because of her sons who would soon be arriving. There wouldn’t have been enough room for everyone.

Now Lalla knows the people in the Hotel Sainte-Blanche better. They’re all very poor, and they’ve come from countries where there’s nothing to eat, where there’s almost nothing to live off of. They have hardened faces, even the youngest ones, and they aren’t able to talk for very long. No one lives on the floor where Lalla is, because it’s the attic, where the mice live. But directly under her, there’s a room in which three black men live, three brothers. They aren’t mean or sad. They’re always cheerful, and Lalla loves to hear them laughing and singing on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. She doesn’t know their names; she’s not aware of what they do in the city. But she runs into them sometimes in the hallway, when she goes to the toilet, or when she comes down early in the morning to scrub the steps of the staircase. But when she goes to clean their room, they aren’t there any longer. They hardly have any belongings, just a few boxes filled with clothing, and a guitar.

Next to the black men’s room, there are two rooms occupied by North Africans working on the construction sites; they never stay for very long. They’re nice enough, but taciturn, and Lalla doesn’t talk to them for very long either. There’s nothing in their rooms, because they keep all of their clothing in suitcases, and the suitcases under their beds. They’re afraid of being robbed.

The person Lalla really likes is a young black African who lives with his brother in the small room on the second floor, at the very end of the hallway. It’s the prettiest room, because it opens onto a bit of courtyard where there is a tree. Lalla doesn’t know the older brother’s name, but she knows that the young one’s name is Daniel. He’s very, very dark, with hair so frizzy that things are always getting caught in it, bits of straw, feathers, blades of grass. He has a perfectly round head, and an inordinately long neck. For that matter, everything about him is long; he’s got long arms and legs, and a funny way of walking, as if he were dancing. He’s always very merry when he talks to Lalla; he laughs all the time. She doesn’t understand what he says very well, because he has a strange, singsong accent. But it doesn’t really matter, because he makes very funny gestures with his long hands, and all sorts of grimaces with his wide mouth full of extremely white teeth. He’s the one Lalla prefers, because of his smooth face, because of his laugh, because he looks a bit like a child. He works at the hospital with his brother, and 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 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 people, as if they were nothing but shapes, images, ghosts that the wind and the light would sweep away.

Radicz looks so unhappy that Lalla feels sorry for him.

“Come on!” She takes the boy by the hand, pulling him through the swirling crowd. Together they go into a very big store with bright light, not the beautiful light of the sun, but a harsh white glow, reflected in the profusion of mirrors. But that glare is also inebriating; it numbs and blinds you. With Radicz stumbling slightly behind her, Lalla goes through the perfume department, through cosmetics, wigs, and soaps; she stops almost everywhere, buys several different colored bars of soap that she has Radicz smell, then small bottles of perfume that she breathes in briefly as she walks along the aisles, and it makes her feel dizzy, almost nauseated. Red lipsticks, green eye shadow, black, ochre, foundation, brilliantine, creams, false eyelashes, false hair extensions — Lalla asks to be shown it all, and she shows it to Radicz, who doesn’t say anything; then she takes a long time choosing a little square bottle of brick-colored nail polish and a tube of bright red lipstick. She’s sitting on a tall stool, in front of a mirror, and trying out the colors on the back of her hand, while the salesgirl with strawlike hair gazes at her stupidly.

On the first floor, Lalla weaves through the clothing, still holding Radicz by the hand. She picks out a T-shirt, some blue denim work overalls, some canvas sandals, and red socks. She leaves her old, gray smock-dress and rubber sandals behind in the dressing room, but she holds on to the brown coat because she likes it. Now she walks more buoyantly, bouncing on the springy soles of the sandals, one hand in the pocket of her overalls. Her black hair falls in heavy curls on the collar of her coat, gleaming in the white electric light.

Radicz looks at her and thinks she’s beautiful, but he doesn’t dare tell her so. Her eyes are sparkling with joy. There’s something like a fiery glow to Lalla’s black hair and red copper face. Now it seems as if the electric light has brought the color of the desert sun back to life, as if she had stepped directly from the path out on the plateau of stones into the Prisunic store.

Maybe everything really has disappeared and the big store is standing alone in the midst of the boundless desert, just like a fortress of stone and mud. Yet it is the entire city that is surrounded by the sand, held tightly in its grips, and you can hear the superstructures of the concrete buildings snapping while cracks run up the walls and the plate glass mirrors of skyscrapers fall to the ground.

Lalla holds the burning force of the desert in her eyes. The light blazes on her black hair, on the thick tress she’s braiding in the hollow of her collarbone as she walks along. The light blazes in her amber-colored eyes, on her skin, on her high cheekbones, on her lips. And so, in the big store full of noise and white electricity, people step aside, stop as Lalla and Radicz the beggar go by. The women, the men stop, surprised, because they’ve never seen anyone like them. Lalla strides along in the middle of the aisle, wearing her dark overalls, her brown coat which opens to show her throat and her copper-colored face. She isn’t tall, and yet she seems huge as she moves down the center of the aisle and goes down the escalator to the ground floor.

It’s because of all the light streaming from her eyes, her skin, her hair, the almost supernatural light. Behind her comes the strange, skinny boy, in his men’s clothing, barefoot in his black leather shoes. His long black hair frames his hollow-cheeked, sunken-eyed triangular face. He tags behind silently, not moving his arms, walking a little bit sideways, the way cowering dogs do. People also look at him in surprise, as if he were a shadow detached from a body. Fear is visible on his face, but he tries to hide it with an odd smirking smile that looks more like a grimace.

At times, Lalla turns around, gives him a little wave, or takes his hand, “Come on!”

But the boy quickly lets himself fall behind. When they are outside again in the street, in the sun and the wind, Lalla asks him, “Are you hungry?”

Radicz looks at her with shiny feverish eyes.

“We’re going to eat now,” says Lalla. She shows him what’s left of the handful of rumpled bills in the pocket of her new overalls.

Along the wide straight avenues, people are walking, some hurriedly, others slowly, dragging their feet. The automobiles are still driving along near the sidewalks, as if they were on the lookout for something or someone, a place to park. There are swifts up in the cloudless sky; they swoop down the valleys of the streets giving shrill cries. Lalla is happy to be walking like that, holding Radicz’s hand, not saying anything, as if they were going off to the other side of the world and never coming back. She thinks about the lands across the sea, the red and yellow soil, the black rocks standing up tall in the sand like teeth. She thinks of the eyes of fresh water open on the sky, and of the taste of the chergui, which lifts up the thin skin of dust and makes the dunes move forward. She thinks of the Hartani’s cave again, up on top of the cliff, the place where she’d seen the sky, nothing but the sky. Now it was as if she were walking toward that land, along the avenues, as if she were going back. People step aside to let them pass, eyes squinting in the light, not understanding. She moves past them without seeing them, as if through a crowd of shadows. Lalla isn’t talking. She’s squeezing Radicz’s hand very tightly, walking straight ahead, toward the sun.

When they reach the sea, the wind is blowing even harder, heaving against them. The automobiles are honking aggressively, caught in the traffic jams around the harbor. Once again fear is visible on Radicz’s face, and Lalla holds his hand firmly, to reassure him. She mustn’t hesitate; if she does, the giddiness of the wind and the light will go away, leaving them on their own, and they won’t be brave enough to be free.

They walk down the wharves not looking at the ships with hollow clanking masts. The reflections of the water dance on Lalla’s cheek, setting her copper-colored skin, her hair aglow. The light around her is red, the red of burning embers. The boy looks at her, allows the heat emanating from Lalla to enter him, make him light-headed. His heart is pounding heavily, pulsing in his temples, in his neck.

Now the high white walls, the plate glass windows of the fine restaurant appear. That’s where she wants to go. Over the door, colored flags are snapping in the wind on their masts. Lalla knows this place well; she’s been noticing it from afar for quite some time now, very white, with its plate glass windows shooting off flashes in the setting sun.

She goes in without hesitating, pushing open the glass door. The large dining room is dark, but on the round tables, the cloths make dazzling splashes. Lalla sees everything in a glance, very clearly: the bouquets of pink flowers in the crystal vases, the silver utensils, the cut-glass goblets, the immaculate napkins, and the chairs covered with dark blue velvet, the waxed hardwood floor over which the waiters dressed in white slip by. It is unreal and remote, and yet this is the place she has come into, walking slowly, silently, over the parquet, and holding Radicz the beggar’s hand very tightly.

“Come on,” says Lalla. “We’re going to sit over there.”

She points out a table, near a plate glass window. They cross the dining room. Men and women sitting at the round tables lift their heads from their plates and stop chewing, stop talking. The waiters are stopped short, the spoon sunk into the dish of rice, or the bottle of white wine slightly tilted, pouring into the glass a very fine trickle of wine tailing off at the end like a flame going out. Then Lalla and Radicz sit down at the round table, on either side of the lovely white tablecloth, separated by a bouquet of roses. So the people start chewing, talking again, but in lower voices, and the wine starts pouring again, the spoon serves the rice, and the voices whisper a little, drowned out by the commotion of the automobiles passing in front of the large plate glass windows like monstrous fish in an aquarium.

Radicz doesn’t dare look around. He’s keeping his eyes trained solely on Lalla’s face with all of his might. He has never seen a more beautiful, more luminous face. The light from the window shines on her heavy black hair, making a flame around Lalla’s face, on her neck, on her shoulders, all the way down to her hands laying flat on the white tablecloth. Lalla’s eyes are like two pieces of flint, the color of metal and fire, and her face is like a smooth copper mask.

A tall man is standing in front of their table. He’s dressed in a black suit, and his shirt is as white as the tablecloths. He has a large, bored, flabby face, with a lipless mouth. He is precisely just about to open that mouth of his and tell the children to leave immediately, without making a scene, when his sad eyes meet those of Lalla, and he suddenly forgets what he was going to say. Lalla’s stare is as hard as flint, filled with such strength that the man in black has to look away. He takes a step backward, as if he were going to leave, but then says, in a funny, slightly strangled voice, “Would … would you like something to drink?”

Lalla is still staring at him unblinkingly.

“We’re hungry,” she simply says. “Bring us something to eat.”

The man in black walks away and comes back with the menu, which he lays on the table. But Lalla hands the piece of cardboard back and keeps her eyes trained on his. Perhaps later he’ll remember his hatred and be ashamed 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 maître d’hôtel 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 maître d’hôtel 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 maître d’hôtel 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 Canebière. 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 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 trigger. Hawa’s face is everywhere, everywhere. It’s in the sunlight, lit up as if with a halo in the winter sky, or in the depth of the night, it’s vibrating over the waves of radio sets, in telephone messages. The photographer closes himself up all alone in his laboratory, under his little orange lamp, and looks indefinitely at the face taking form on the paper in the developing pan. First the eyes, immense, two stains growing deeper, then the black hair, the curve of the lips, the outline of the nose, the shadow under the chin. The eyes are looking elsewhere, as Lalla Hawa always does, elsewhere, out on the other side of the world, and every time, the photographer’s heart speeds up, like the first time he caught sight of the light in her eyes in the Galères restaurant, or when he just happened to run into her again in the stairways of the old town.

She gives him her shape, her image, nothing else. Sometimes the contact of the palm of her hand, or an electric spark when her hair brushes against his body, and also her smell, slightly bitter, slightly stinging, like the smell of citrus fruit, and the sound of her voice, her clear laughter. But who is she? Maybe she’s just a pretext for a dream he’s chasing in his darkroom with his bellows cameras and his lenses that accentuate the shadow of her eyes, the shape of her smile a dream he and other men share about the pages of fashion reviews and glossy magazine pictures?

He takes Hawa by airplane to the city of Paris; they drive along in a taxi under the gray sky, by the Seine, on their way to business meetings. He takes pictures on the banks of the muddy river, on the large squares, on the endless avenues. He tirelessly photographs the handsome copper-colored face with the light flowing over it like water. Hawa wearing a black satin jumpsuit, Hawa wearing a midnight-blue trench coat, hair braided into a single thick tress. Every time his eyes meet Hawa’s, it makes his heart skip a beat, and that’s why he’s hurrying to take pictures, always more pictures. He moves forward, backs up, changes his camera, puts one knee to the ground. Lalla makes fun of him: “You look like you’re dancing.”

He’d like to get angry, but it’s impossible. He wipes the sweat from his forehead, from his eyebrow, which is slipping against the viewfinder. Then Lalla suddenly steps out of the light field because she’s tired of being photographed. She walks away. To keep from feeling the emptiness, he’ll continue to look at her for hours, in the darkness of his improvised laboratory in the bathroom of his hotel room, waiting — counting his heartbeats — for the handsome face to appear in the developing pan, most of all the eyes, that profound light flowing from the slanted eyes. That dusk-colored light, from ever so far away, as if someone else, someone secret, were looking out from those pupils, judging silently. And then, appearing later, slowly, like a cloud forming, the forehead, the line of the high cheekbones, the grain of the copper skin, weathered with the sun and the wind. There’s something secret about her that sometimes just happens to be revealed on the paper, something you can see but never possess, even if you take pictures every second of her existence, until she dies. There’s her smile too, very gentle, somewhat ironic, that makes little hollows at the corners of her mouth, and narrows the slanted eyes. It’s all of this the photographer would like to capture with his cameras and bring back to life in the darkness of his laboratory. At times he’s under the impression that it really is going to appear, the smile, the light in the eyes, the beauty of the features. But it only lasts a brief instant. On the paper plunged into the developer, the image moves, modifies, blurs, is covered with shadow, and it’s as if the image erased the living person.

Maybe it’s elsewhere, rather than in the image? Maybe it’s in the way she walks, in her movements? The photographer watches Lalla Hawa’s gestures, the way she sits down, moves her hands, palms open, making a perfect curve from the crook of her elbow to the tips of her fingers. He looks at the line of her neck, her lithe back, her wide hands and feet, her shoulders, and her heavy black hair with ashen reflections falling in thick curls on her shoulders. He looks at Lalla Hawa, and at times it’s as if he can glimpse another face showing through the young woman’s features, another body behind hers; barely perceptible, immaterial, ephemeral, the other person drifts up from deep within, then melts away, leaving a flickering memory. Who is it? Who is the girl he calls Hawa, what is her real name?

Sometimes Hawa looks at him, or she looks at people, in the restaurants, in the airport terminals, in the offices, she looks at them as if her eyes would simply erase them, send them back to the void they must belong to. When that strange look comes over her face, the photographer shudders, as if something cold has entered his body. He doesn’t know what it is. Maybe it is the other being living inside Lalla Hawa, who is observing and judging the world through her eyes, as if in that very instant all of this — this gigantic city, this river, these squares, these avenues — disappeared, and let the vast stretch of the desert show through, the sand, the sky, the wind.

So the photographer takes Hawa to places that resemble the desert: wide-open rocky plains, marshes, esplanades, vacant lots. For him, Hawa walks around in the sunlight, and her eyes scan the horizon like those of birds of prey, searching for a shadow, a shape. She looks for a long time, as if she really were searching for someone; then she stands still on her shadow, while the photographer starts shooting.

What is she looking for? What does she want from life? The photographer looks at her eyes, her face, and he can feel the profound anxiety behind the force of her light. There is also wariness, the instinct to flee, that funny sort of glimmer that flits over the eyes of wild animals at times. She told him one day, right when he was expecting it, she spoke to him softly of the child she is carrying, who is rounding out her belly and making her breasts swell: “You know, one day I’ll go away, I’ll leave, and you mustn’t try to hold me back, because I’ll leave forever…”

She doesn’t want money, it doesn’t interest her. Every time the photographer gives her some money — wages for the hours of posing — Hawa takes the bills, picks out one or two, and hands him back the rest. Sometimes, she’s even the one who gives him money, handfuls of bills and coins that she takes out of the pocket in her overalls, as if she didn’t want to keep any of it for herself.

Or sometimes she wanders the streets of the city looking for beggars at the corners of buildings, and she gives them money, coins by the handful too, pressing her hand firmly into theirs so they won’t lose anything. She gives money to the veiled gypsies who wander around barefoot in the main avenues, and to old women dressed in black squatting in the entrances to the post offices, to bums lying on benches in the squares, and to old men rummaging in rich people’s garbage cans at nightfall. They all know her well, and when they see her coming their eyes get bright. The bums think she’s a prostitute, because prostitutes are the only ones who give them that much money, and they make jokes and laugh real hard, but they look really happy to see her all the same.

Now, Hawa is being mentioned everywhere. In Paris, reporters come to see her, and one evening in the lobby of the hotel, a woman asks her questions.

“People are talking about you, about the mystery of Hawa. Who is Hawa?”

“My name isn’t Hawa, when I was born I didn’t have a name, so I was called Bla Esm, which means ‘No name’.”

“So, why Hawa?”

“It was my mother’s name, and I’m called Hawa, the daughter of Hawa, that’s all.”

“What country did you come from?”

“The country I come from has no name, like me.”

“Where is it?”

“It’s in the place where there is nothing, where there is no one.”

“Why are you here?”

“I like to travel.”

“What do you enjoy in life?”

“Life.”

“Food?”

“Fruit.”

“What’s your favorite color?”

“Blue.”

“Your favorite stone?”

“The pebbles on the path.”

“Music?”

“Lullabies.”

“They say that you write poems?”

“I don’t know how to write.”

“And films? Have you got any projects?”

“No.”

“What is love to you?”

But suddenly Lalla Hawa has had enough, and she walks away very quickly, without looking back; she pushes open the door to the hotel and disappears into the street.

Now there are people who recognize her in the street, young girls who give her one of her photographs so she can put her signature on it. But since Hawa doesn’t know how to write, she just draws the sign of her tribe, the one they mark the camels’ hides with, which looks a little like a heart:

There are so many people everywhere, on the avenues, in the stores, on the streets. So many people jostling one another, looking at one another. But when Lalla Hawa’s gaze passes over them, it’s as if everything fades away, grows mute and deserted.

Lalla Hawa wants to get past these places very quickly to find out what comes next. One night, the photographer takes her to a dance hall called the Palace, the Paris-Palace, something like that. She has put on a black dress cut low in the back for dancing, because the photographer wants to take some shots.

This too is a place that resembles the wide-open, empty esplanades, where there are only the outlines of buildings and the parked cars in the sun. It’s a dreadful and empty place, where men and women crowd together and grimace in the suffocating darkness, with electric lights flashing in clouds of cigarette smoke, and thundering noise pulsing, making the walls and the floor vibrate.

Lalla Hawa sits down on a step in a corner, and watches the people dancing, their faces glistening with sweat, their clothes glittering everywhere. At the back of the room, in a sort of cave, are the musicians: they’re swinging their guitars, beating on the drums, but the sound of the music seems to come from elsewhere, like giants shouting.

Then she too gets up on the dance floor, surrounded by people. She dances the way she was taught to long ago, alone amongst the people, to hide her fear, because there is too much noise and too much light. The photographer remains sitting on the step, not moving, not even thinking to take pictures of her. At first the people don’t pay any attention to Hawa, because the light is blinding. Then it’s as if they’ve felt something extraordinary has happened, without their realizing it. They step aside, stop dancing, one after the other, to watch Lalla Hawa. She’s all alone in the circle of light, she can’t see anyone. She’s dancing to the slow rhythm of the electric music, and it’s as if the music were inside her body. The light is shining on the black fabric of her dress, on her copper-colored skin, on her hair. You can’t see her eyes due to the shadows, but her gaze passes over the people, fills the room with all of its power, all of its beauty. Hawa is dancing barefooted on the smooth floor, her long flat feet are stamping to the rhythm of the drums, or rather it is she who seems to be imposing the rhythm of the music with the soles of her feet, and her heels. Her supple body is undulating; her hips, her shoulders, and her arms are held slightly out from her body, like wings. The light from the projectors is bouncing off of her, enveloping her, whirling about her feet. She’s absolutely alone in the large room, alone as if she were in the middle of an esplanade, alone as if she were in the middle of a plateau of stones, and the electric music with its slow heavy rhythm is playing for her alone. Maybe they’ve all disappeared, all of those people who were there all around her, men, women, fleeting reflections in blinded mirrors, maybe they’ve been swallowed up? She can’t see them anymore now, can’t hear them anymore. Even the photographer sitting on his step has disappeared. They’ve become like rocks, like blocks of limestone. But she can move at last, she is free, she twirls around, arms outstretched, and her feet are hitting the floor, the tips of her toes, then her heels, as if on the spokes of a huge wheel whose axis reaches high up into the night.

She’s dancing to get away, to become invisible, to rise up like a bird into the clouds. Under her bare feet, the plastic floor becomes burning hot, very lightweight, the color of sand, and the air is whirling around her body as fast as the wind. The dizziness of the dance is making the light appear now, not the hard cold beams of the spotlights, but the beautiful light of the sun, when the earth, the rocks, and even the sky are white. It’s the slow heavy music of the electricity, of the guitars, of the organ, and the drums that is entering her; but maybe she’s not even hearing it anymore. The music is so slow and deep that it covers her skin, her hair, her eyes with copper. The euphoria of the dance spreads out around her, and the men and women — stopped for a minute — take up the movements of the dance, following the rhythm of Hawa’s body, tapping the floor with the tips of their toes, and their heels. No one is saying anything, no one is breathing. They’re waiting, ecstatically, for the movement of the dance to enter them, sweep them up, like those waterspouts that go whirling over the sea. Lalla’s heavy mane of hair is rising up and falling against her shoulders in cadence, her hands — fingers spread wide — are quivering. The men and women’s bare feet are hitting the shiny floor faster and faster, harder and harder, as the rhythm of the electric music accelerates. In the large room, there are no more walls, mirrors, flashing lights. They’ve disappeared, been destroyed by the dizzying dance, overthrown. There are no more hopeless cities, abysmal cities, cities of beggars and prostitutes, where the streets are traps, where the houses are graves. There’s none of that anymore; the elated look of the dancers has eradicated all the obstacles, all of the old lies. Now Lalla Hawa is surrounded with an endless expanse of dust and stones, a living expanse of sand and salt, and the waves of the dunes. It’s the same as in the old days, at the end of the goat path, in the place where everything seemed to end, as if you were at the end of the earth, at the foot of the sky, on the threshold of the wind. It’s the same as when she felt the gaze of al-Ser for the first time, the one she calls the Secret. So then, at the very heart of her dizziness, while her feet continue to make her twirl around faster and faster, for the first time in a long time, she can feel the gaze settling upon her, examining her once again. In the middle of the immense and barren space, far from the dancing people, far from the smoggy cities, the gaze of the Secret enters her, touches her heart. The light suddenly begins to burn with un­bearable intensity, a white-hot explosion sending its glaring rays through the whole room, a flash that will surely burst all the electric lightbulbs, the neon tubes, that will smite the musicians, their fingers on their guitars, and cause all the speakers to explode.

Slowly, still turning, Lalla slumps down, slips onto the polished floor, like a disarticulated mannequin. She remains alone for a long time, sprawled on the floor, her face hidden by her hair, before the photographer comes up to her as the dancers step aside, not understanding yet what has happened.

DEATH CAME. It began with the goats and sheep, and the horses too, left in the riverbed, bellies bloated, legs hanging open. Then it was the turn of the children and the old people; they became delirious and could no longer get back on their feet. So many died that a cemetery had to be made for them downstream, on a hill of red dust. They were carried away at dawn, unceremoniously, swathed in old pieces of canvas and buried in a simple hole dug hurriedly, over which a few stones were later placed to keep the wild dogs from digging them up. Along with death came the wind of the chergui. It blew in gusts, enveloping people in its burning folds, erasing all moisture from the earth. Every day, Nour wandered over the riverbed with other children, looking for shrimp. He also set snares made with grass nooses and twigs to catch hares and jerboas, but foxes usually got to them before he did.

It was hunger that was eating away at the people and making the children die. Since they’d arrived in front of the red city, days ago, the travelers had not received any food, and the provisions were nearly depleted. Each day, the great sheik sent his warriors out to the walls of the city to ask for food and land for his people. But the officials always made promises and never gave anything. They were so poor themselves, they said. The rains had been scarce and drought had hardened the earth, and the reserves from the harvest had run out. A few times, the great sheik and his sons went up to the ramparts of the city to ask for land, for seed, part of the palm grove. But there wasn’t enough land for themselves, said the officials, from the head of the river all the way to the sea, the fertile lands had all been taken, and the soldiers of the Christians often went into the city of Agadir and took most of the harvest for themselves.

Each time, Ma al-Aïnine listened to the officials’ answers without saying anything; then he went back to his tent in the bed of the river. But it was no longer anger or impatience that was growing in his breast. With the coming of death, each day, and the burning desert wind, he was sharing the feeling of desperation with his people. It was as if the people wandering along the empty banks of the river or squatting in the shade of their shelters were being confronted with their evident doom. That red soil, those desiccate fields, those meager terraces planted with olive and orange trees, those dark palm groves, were all foreign to them, remote, like mirages.

In spite of their despair, Larhdaf and Saadbou wanted to attack the city, but the sheik refused to use force. The blue men of the desert were too weary now; they had been walking and fasting for too long. Most of the warriors were feverish, sick with scurvy, their legs covered with festering wounds. Their weapons didn’t even function anymore.

The people in the city were wary of the men from the desert, and the gates remained closed all day long. Those who tried nearing the ramparts had been met with gunfire: it was a warning.

So when he realized there was nothing left to hope for, that they would all die, one after the other, on the scorching riverbed, in front of the ramparts of the merciless city, Ma al-Aïnine gave the signal to move on northward. This time there was no praying or chanting or dancing. One after the other, slowly, like sick animals straightening up on their legs, teetering, the blue men left the riverbed, struck out again, walking toward the unknown.

Then the troop of the sheik’s warriors no longer looked the same. They walked along with the convoy of men and animals, as haggard as they were, their clothing in tatters, their eyes blank and feverish. Maybe they’d stopped believing in the reasons for this long march; they continued moving forward simply out of habit, at the end of their strength, ready to collapse at any minute. The women bent over as they walked, their faces hidden by their blue veils, and many of them no longer had a child on her back, because he’d been left in the red earth of the Souss Valley. Then, at the end of the convoy, which stretched out over the whole valley, were the children, the old people, the wounded warriors, everyone who walked slowly. Nour was among them, guiding the blind warrior. He didn’t even know where his family was anymore, lost somewhere in the cloud of dust. Only a few warriors were still mounted. The great sheik was traveling with them, on his white camel, wrapped in his cloak.

No one spoke. They walked on, each man keeping to himself, burned faces, feverish eyes trained on the red earth of the hills in the west, in order to spot the trail leading over the mountains to the city of Marrakech. They walked on with the light beating down on their skulls, their necks, making pain throb through their limbs, burning down into the very quick of their bodies. They could no longer hear the wind, or the sound of the people’s feet scuffing over the desert. They could only hear the sound of their hearts, the sound of their nerves, the pain whistling and grating behind their eardrums.

Nour could no longer feel the hand of the blind warrior gripping his shoulder. He was just moving forward, without knowing why, with no hope of ever stopping. Maybe the day his mother and father decided to leave the camps in the South, they had been condemned to wander for the rest of their lives on this endless march, from well to well, along dried valleys? But were there other lands on earth apart from these infinite stretches in which the dust mingled with the sky, stark mountains, sharp stones, rivers with no water, thorn bushes, each of which could bring death with the slightest wound? Each day, off in the distance, on the hillsides near the wells, the people saw more houses, fortresses of red mud surrounded with fields and palm groves. But they saw them as one sees mirages, shimmering in the burning hot air, remote, inaccessible. The inhabitants of the villages didn’t show themselves. They had fled into the mountains or they were hiding behind their ramparts, ready to combat the blue men of the desert.

At the head of the caravan, on their horses, the sons of Ma al-Aïnine pointed to the narrow opening of the valley surrounded by the chaos of the mountains.

“The trail! The trail to the North!”

So they walked through the mountains for days. The burning wind blew through the ravines. The blue sky was immense above the red rocks. There wasn’t a soul up there, not a person or an animal, only the tracks of a snake in the sand once in a while, or, very high up in the sky, the shadow of a vulture. They walked on without looking for life, without seeing a sign of hope. Like blind people, the men and women made their way along in single file, placing their feet in the footsteps that preceded them, mixed in with the herd animals. Who was guiding them? The dirt trail snaked through ravines, over rockslides, merged with dried torrent beds.

Finally, the travelers arrived on the edge of Oued Issene, swollen with melting snow. The water was lovely and pure; it leapt between the arid banks. But the people looked at it without emotion, because the water was not theirs; they could not retain it. They stayed on the banks of the stream for several days, while the warriors of the great sheik, accompanied by Larhdaf and Saadbou, went up the Chichaoua trail.

“Have we arrived, is this our land?” the blind warrior always asked. The cold water of the stream tumbled down over the rocks in cascades, and the path was getting more difficult. Then the caravan arrived in front of a Chleuh village at the end of the valley. The sheik’s warriors were waiting for them there. They had raised their large tent, and the sheiks of the mountains had sacrificed sheep to welcome Ma al-Aïnine. It was the village of Aglagla, at the foot of the high mountains. The people of the desert set up camp near the walls of the village, without even asking. That evening, children from the village came, bringing grilled meat and sour milk, and they were all able to eat their fill, which they hadn’t done in a long time. Then they lit big fires of cedar wood, because the night was cold.

Nour watched the flames dancing in the pitch-black night for a long time. There was chanting too, strange music the likes of which he’d never heard, sad and slow, accompanied by the sound of the flute. The men and women of the village asked for Ma al-Aïnine’s blessing, asked him to heal them of their illnesses.

Then the travelers started out for the other side of the mountains, in the direction of the holy city. It just might prove to be the place where the people of the desert would know an end to their suffering, according to what Ma al-Aïnine’s blue warriors said, because it was in Marrakech that Ma al-Aïnine had given his oath of allegiance to Moulay Hafid, the Leader of the Faithful, fourteen years earlier. It was there that the king had given the sheik a piece of land, so that he could build the house for teaching the Goudfia. And it was also in the holy city that the eldest son of Ma al-Aïnine was waiting for his father in order to join the holy war; and everyone venerated Moulay Hiba, he who was called Dehiba, the Particle of Gold, he who was called Moulay Sebaa, the Lion, for it was he whom they had chosen to be king of the lands of the South.

In the evening, when the caravan stopped and the fires were being lit, Nour led the blind warrior over to where Ma al-Aïnine’s warriors were sitting, and they listened to the stories of what had come to pass when the great sheik and his sons had arrived with the warriors from the desert, all mounted on swift camels, and how they had entered the holy city; they had been welcomed by the king along with Ma al-Aïnine’s two sons, Moulay Sebaa, the Lion, and Mohammed al-Shems, he who was called the Sun; they also told of the offerings the king had made, so the sheik could build the ramparts of the city of Smara; and the journey they had undertaken with such large herds of camels, they covered the entire plain, while the women and the children and the equipment and the food supplies were all loaded aboard the big steamship called Bashir, and sailed several days and several nights from Mogador to Marsa Tarfaya.

They also recounted the legend of Ma al-Aïnine, in their slightly singsong voices, and it was as if they were telling about a dream they had once had. The voice of the warriors mingled with the sound of the flames, and every now and again, Nour caught a glimpse of the frail shape of the old man through the plumes of smoke, like a flame, in the center of the camp.

“The great sheik was born far from here, to the south, in the country that is called Hodh, and his father was the son of Moulay Idriss, and his mother was a descendant of the Prophet. When the great sheik was born, his father named him Ahmed, but his mother named him Ma al-Aïnine, Water of the Eyes, because she had wept with joy when he was born….”

Nour listened in the night, beside the blind warrior, his head resting against a stone.

“When he turned seven, he recited the Koran without making a single mistake, so his father, Mohammed al-Fadel, sent him to the great holy city of Mecca, and on the way, the child performed miracles… He knew how to heal the sick, and to those who asked him for water, he said, the heavens will give you water, and immediately heavy rains streamed over the earth…”

The blind warrior was swaying his head slightly, as if he were marking time to the words, and Nour was drifting slowly off to sleep.

“Then people from all corners of the desert came to see the child who could perform miracles, and the child, the son of the great Mohammed Fadel ben Maminna, simply put a little saliva on the eyes of the sick person, he blew on his lips and the sick person immediately stood up and kissed the child’s hand, for he had been healed…”

Nour could feel the body of the blind warrior trembling against him, as he rocked his head slowly from shoulder to shoulder. It was the monotone voice of the storyteller and the wavering of the smoke and the flames: the earth itself seemed to be moving in time with the rhythm of the voice.

“So then the great sheik settled in the holy city of Chinguetti, at the Nazaran well, near al-Dakhla, to give his teachings, for he knew the science of the stars and of numbers, and the word of God. So the men of the desert became his disciples, and they were called Berik Allah, those who have received the blessing of God…”

The voice of the blue warrior droned on in the night, before the leaping dancing flames, with the smoke enveloping the men and making them cough. Nour listened to the stories of the miracles, the springs gushing forth in the desert, the rainwater covering the arid fields, and the words of the great sheik in the square of Chin­guetti, or in front of his home in Nazaran. He listened to the beginning of Ma al-Aïnine’s long march through the desert, all the way to the smara, the brush land, where the great sheik had founded his city. He listened to the legend of his battles against the Spaniards, in al-Aaiún, in Ifni, in Tiznit, with his sons, Rebbo, Taaleb, Larhdaf, al-Shems, and the one who was called Moulay Sebaa, the Lion.

Thus, every evening, the same voice continued the legend, in the same way, half singing, and Nour forgot where he was, as if it were his own story that the blue man was telling.

On the other side of the mountains, they entered the great red plain, and walked northward, going from village to village. In each village, men with feverish eyes, women, children came to join the caravan and took the places of those who had died. The great sheik was out ahead on his white camel, surrounded by his sons and his warriors, and Nour could see the cloud of dust in the distance that seemed to be guiding them.

When they arrived before the great city of Marra­kech, they did not dare go very close, so they set up camp near the dried river to the south. For two days the blue men waited, barely even moving, in the shelter of their tents and in huts of branches. The hot summer wind covered them with dust, but they waited, every last bit of their strength turned to waiting.

Finally, on the third day, Ma al-Aïnine’s sons came back. Next to them, on horseback, was a tall man, clothed like the warriors from the North, and his name passed over everyone’s lips: “Moulay Hiba, he who is called Moulay Dehiba, the Particle of Gold, Moulay Sebaa, the Lion.”

When the blind warrior heard this name, he began to tremble, and tears ran from his burnt eyes. He set off running straight ahead, arms outstretched, letting out a long cry, something like a high-pitched earsplitting wail.

Nour tried to catch him, but the blind man was running as fast as he could, tripping over stones, staggering over the dusty ground. The people of the desert stepped out of his path, and some were even frightened and turned their eyes away, because they thought the blind man was possessed by the devil. The blind warrior seemed to be consumed with immeasurable joy and suffering. Several times he fell to the ground, having stumbled over a root, or a stone, but each time he got back up and continued to run toward the place where Ma al-Aïnine and Moulay Hiba were, without being able to see them. Finally, Nour caught up with him, took him by the arm; but the man continued running and shouting, dragging Nour along with him. He ran straight ahead, as if he could see Ma al-Aïnine and his son, he was moving unfalteringly toward them. So then the sheik’s warriors grew frightened, they grabbed their rifles to stop the blind man from coming closer. But the sheik simply said: “Let them come.”

Then he dismounted his camel and walked up to the blind warrior.

“What do you want?”

The blind warrior threw himself on the ground, arms stretched out before him, and sobs wracked his body, choked him. Only the long, high-pitched wail still came from his throat, like a plaint. Then Nour spoke: “Grant him sight, great king,” he said.

Ma al-Aïnine looked at the man lying on the ground for a long time, his body shaken with sobs, his clothing in rags, his hands and feet bleeding from the journey. Without saying anything, he knelt down next to the blind man, laid his hand on the back of his neck. The blue men and the sons of the sheik remained standing. The silence was so great at that moment, Nour felt dizzy. A strange, unknown force was welling up from the dusty earth, enveloping the men in its whirl. It was the light of the setting sun perhaps, or the power of the gaze that had fallen upon the place, that was trying to find its way out, like trapped water. Slowly, the blind warrior raised himself up, his face appeared in the light, caked with sand and the water of his tears. Taking a corner of his sky-blue haik, Ma al-Aïnine wiped off the man’s face. Then he passed his hand over his forehead, over his burnt eyelids, as if he were trying to erase something. Moistening his fingertips with saliva, he rubbed the blind man’s eyelids, and blew softly on his face, without uttering a word. The silence lasted for such a long time that Nour couldn’t recall what had come before, what he had said. Kneeling in the sand next to the sheik, he was looking only at the blind warrior’s face, in which a new light seemed to be dawning. The man was no longer wailing. He was sitting very still in front of the sheik, arms held slightly out from his body, his damaged eyes open very wide, as if he were slowly becoming inebriated by the gaze of the sheik.

Then Ma al-Aïnine’s sons came, and Moulay Hiba also drew near, and they helped the old man to his feet. Very gently, Nour took the warrior by the arm, and had him stand also. The man started walking, leaning on the boy’s shoulder, and the light of the setting sun shone upon his face like golden dust. He did not speak. He moved along very slowly, like a man who had gone through a long illness, placing his feet squarely on the stony ground.

He was teetering a little, but his arms were no longer held out, and his body was free of suffering. The people of the desert were standing still in silence, watching him walk out toward the other end of the plain. There was no more suffering, and now his face was calm and gentle, and his eyes were filled with the golden light of the sun, which was touching the horizon. And on Nour’s shoulder, his hand had grown light, like that of a man who knew where he was going.

Oued Tadla, June 18, 1910

THE SOLDIERS LEFT Zettat and Ben Ahmed before dawn. General Moinier was in charge of the column that left from Ben Ahmed, two thousand foot soldiers armed with Lebel rifles. The convoy was moving slowly over the charred plain, in the direction of the Tadla River valley. General Moinier, two French officers, and a civilian observer were at the head of the column. A Moorish guide accompanied them, dressed like the warriors of the South, mounted on horseback, like the officers.

The same day, the other column, numbering only five hundred men, had left the city of Zettat, to form the other jaw of the pincers that were to close in on Ma al-Aïnine’s rebels on their way north.

Before the soldiers, the bare earth stretched out as far as the eye could see, ochre, red, gray, gleaming under the blue of the sky. The scorching summer wind passed over the earth, raised the dust, veiled the light like a haze.

No one spoke. The officers up front spurred their horses on, trying to move ahead of the rest of the troop in the hopes of escaping the stifling cloud of dust. Their eyes scanned the horizon to see what would appear: water, mud villages, or the enemy.

General Moinier had been waiting for this moment for such a long time. Every time someone mentioned the South, the desert, he thought about him — Ma al-Aïnine — the intransigent, the fanatic, the man who had sworn to drive all Christians from the desert lands, him, the head of the rebellion, the man who assassinated Governor Coppolani.

“Nothing serious,” they’d said at headquarters in Casablanca, at Fort-Trinquet, at Fort-Gouraud.

“A fanatic. A sort of witch doctor, a rainmaker, who’s gathered all the ragpickers from the Drâa, from Tindouf, all the Negroes from Mauritania behind him.”

But the old man of the desert was slippery. He was sighted in the North, near the first checkpoints in the desert. When someone was sent out to have a look, he had disappeared. Then people spoke of him again, this time on the coast, in Rio de Oro, in Ifni. Of course he was in a great position with the Spanish! What was going on down there in al-Aaiún, in Tarfaya, in Cape Juby? Once he had struck, the old sheik, wily as a fox, went back with his warriors to his “territory” down there south of the Drâa, in the Saguiet al-Hamra, to his “fortress” in Smara. Impossible to dislodge him. And there was also the mystery, the superstition. How many men had been able to cross over to that region? As he rode along beside the officers, the observer recalled the journey of Camille Douls in 1887. The account of his meeting with Ma al-Aïnine in front of his palace in Smara: clothed in his ample sky-blue haik, with a tall white turban on his head, the sheik had come up to him, had looked at him for a long time. Douls was a prisoner of the Moors; his clothing was in shreds, his face ravaged from fatigue and from the sun, but Ma al-Aïnine had looked at him without hatred, without contempt. It was that long look, that silence, which were still with him, which had made the observer shudder, every time he thought about Ma al-Aïnine. But maybe he was the only one who had felt that way, when he had read the Douls account long ago. “A fanatic,” said the officers, “a savage, who thinks only of plundering and killing, of putting the southern provinces to fire and sword, as he had in 1904, when Coppolani was assassinated in the Tagant, as he had in August of 1905 when Mauchamp was assassinated in Oujda.”

Yet, each day, as he marched with the officers, the observer had that uneasy feeling inside, that feeling of apprehension he could not understand. It was as if he were afraid — in rounding a hill, or in some dried stream­bed — of suddenly running into the gaze of the great sheik, alone in the middle of the desert.

“He’s had it now, he can’t hold out, it’s a question of a few months, a few weeks perhaps, he’ll have to surrender, or else he’ll be forced to throw himself into the sea, or lose himself in the desert, no one is backing him anymore and he knows it…”

The officers and the army headquarters in Oran, in Rabat, even in Dakar, have been waiting for this moment for so long. The “fanatic” is backed into a corner, on one side is the sea, on the other, the desert. The sly old fox will be forced to capitulate. Hadn’t he been abandoned by everyone? To the north, Moulay Hafid signed the Act of Algeciras, putting an end to the holy war. He had accepted the French protectorate. Then there was the letter of October 1909, signed by Ma al-Aïnine’s own son, Ahmed Hiba, he who is called Moulay Sebaa, the Lion, in which he offers the sheik’s submission to the law of Makhzen and asks for aid. “The Lion! He’s quite alone right now, the Lion and the sheik’s other sons, al-Shems, in Marrakech, and Larhdaf, the bandit, the plunderer of the Hamada. They’ve got no more resources, no more arms, and the population of the Souss Valley has abandoned them… They’ve only got a handful of warriors left, ragpickers, whose only arms are their old bronze-barreled rifles, their yataghans, and their spears! The Middle Ages!”

As he rides along with the officers, the civilian observer thinks of everyone who’s waiting for the fall of the old sheik. The Europeans in North Africa, the “Christians,” as the people from the desert call them — but isn’t their true religion money? The Spanish in Tangiers, in Ifni, the English in Tangiers, in Rabat, the Germans, the Dutch, the Belgians, and all the bankers, all the businessmen awaiting the fall of the Arab empire, already making plans for the occupation, parceling out the arable lands, the forests of cork oaks, the mines, the palm groves; the brokers from the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas, who keep track of the amount of customs duties collected in all the ports; Deputy Etienne’s racketeers who created the “Emeralds of the Sahara Company,” the “Gourara-Touat Nitrates Company,” for whom the bare earth must make way for imaginary railroads, for trans-Saharan, trans-Mauritanian rails, and it will be the army which will clear the way with rifle shots.

What more can the old man from Smara do against this wave of money and bullets? What can his ferocious gaze of a hunted animal do against the speculators who covet the lands, the cities, against those who are after the riches that will ensure the poverty of these people?

Beside the civilian observer, the officers ride along, faces impervious, never uttering an unnecessary word. Their eyes are trained on the horizon, out beyond the rocky hills, over where the misty valley of the Oued Tadla stretches.

Maybe they aren’t even thinking about what they’re doing? They’re riding along on the invisible trail which the Tuareg guide on his tawny horse is opening for them.

Behind them the Senegalese, the Sudanese infantry dressed in their dust-gray uniforms march heavily, leaning forward, lifting their legs up high, as if they were walking over furrows. Their steps make a steady scuffing sound on the hard earth. Behind them, the cloud of red and gray dust rises slowly, dirtying the sky.

It all began long ago. Now nothing can be done about it, as if this army were marching against phantoms. “But he will never agree to give himself up, especially not to the French. He would rather have every last one of his men killed, and be killed himself beside his sons, than be taken… And that would really be best for him, because believe me, the government will not accept his surrender, not after Coppolani’s assassination, remember. No, he’s a cruel wild fanatic who must disappear, he and all of his tribe, the Berik Allah, the ‘blessed by God’ as they call themselves… It’s the Middle Ages, isn’t it?”

The old fox had been betrayed, abandoned by his own people. One after the other, the tribes parted ways with him, because the chieftains realized that it was impossible to stop the advance of the Christians, in the north, in the south, they even came from the sea, they crossed the desert, they were at the gates of the desert in Tindouf, in Tabelbala, in Ouadane, they even occupied the holy city of Chinguetti, where Ma al-Aïnine had given his first teachings.

Perhaps the last great battle had taken place at Bou Denib, when General Vigny had crushed Moulay Hiba’s six thousand men. That’s when Ma al-Aïnine’s son fled into the mountains, disappeared to hide his shame undoubtedly, because he’d become a lakhme, a spineless being, as they say, defeated. The old sheik was left alone, prisoner to his Smara fortress, not understanding that it hadn’t been the arms but the money that had defeated him: the money of the bankers who had paid for Sultan Moulay Hafid’s soldiers and their handsome uniforms; the money that the soldiers of the Christians came to exact in the ports, taking their part of the customs duties; the money from the plundered lands, usurped palm groves, forests given over to those who knew best how to take them. How could he have understood that? Did he know what the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas was? Did he know what a loan for the construction of railroads was? Did he know what a company for mining nitrates from Gourara-Touat was? Did he even know that while he was praying and giving his blessing to the people of the desert, the governments of France and Great Britain were signing an agreement that gave to one of them a country named Morocco, and to the other a country named Egypt? While he was giving his word and his breath to the last free men, to the Izarguen, the Aroussiyine, the Tidrarin, the Ouled Bou Sebaa, the Taubalt, the Reguibat Sahel, the Ouled Delim, the Imraguen, while he was bestowing his powers upon his own tribe, the Berik Allah, did he know that a banking consortium, whose principal member was the Banque de Paris et des Pays Bas, was granting King Moulay Hafid a loan of sixty-two million five hundred thousand gold francs, with a five percent interest rate guaranteed by the proceeds of customs duties from the ports on the coast, and that the foreign soldiers had entered the country to ensure that at least sixty percent of the daily intake of customs was paid to the Banque? Did he know that upon the signing of the Act of Algeciras, which put an end to the holy war in the North, King Moulay Hafid was indebted to the tune of two hundred and six million gold francs, and that it was already evident that he could never reimburse his creditors? But the old sheik didn’t know all of that, because his warriors weren’t fighting for gold, but simply for a blessing, and the land they were defending didn’t belong to them, or to anyone, because it was simply the free open spaces over which their eyes swept, a gift from God.

“… A wild man, a fanatic, who tells his warriors before the battle that he will render them invincible and immortal, who sends them charging against rifles and machine guns armed only with their spears and their sabers…”

Now the troop of black infantrymen is occupying the whole valley of the Tadla River, at the ford, while the officials from Kasbah Tadla have come to acknowledge their submission to the French officers. Curls of smoke from the campfires rise into the evening air, and the civilian observer, as he does at every halt, watches the lovely night sky slowly unveiling. Again he thinks of Ma al-Aïnine’s gaze, mysterious and profound, the gaze that fell upon Camille Douls disguised as a Turkish merchant, and scrutinized him to the very depths of his soul. Perhaps at the time he had guessed what the foreign man dressed in rags brought with him, the first image-stealer who wrote his travel log every evening on the pages of his Koran. But now it’s too late, and nothing can stop destiny from being fulfilled. On one side, the sea, on the other, the desert. The horizons are closing in on the people of Smara, the last nomads are surrounded. Hunger, thirst are hemming them in, they are beset with fear, illness, defeat.

“We could have put an end to your sheik and his ragpickers long ago if we’d wanted to. A 75-millimeter cannon in front of his cob palace, a few machine guns, and we would have been rid of him. Maybe they thought he wasn’t worth the trouble. They told themselves it was best to wait for him to fall on his own, like a worm-eaten fruit… But now, after Coppolani’s assassination, it’s no longer a matter of war: it’s a police operation against a band of brigands, that’s all.”

The old man had been betrayed by the same people he was trying to defend. It was the men from the Souss Valley, from Taroudant, Agadir, who had spread the news: “The great sheik Moulay Ahmed ben Mohammed al-Fadel, he who is called Ma al-Aïnine, Water of the Eyes, is marching northward with his warriors of the desert, those from the Drâa, the Saguiet al-Hamra valley, and even the blue men from Oualata, from Chinguetti. There are so many of them they cover an entire plain. They are marching northward toward the holy city of Fez, to overthrow the sultan and have Moulay Hiba appointed in his place, he who is called Sebaa, the Lion, the eldest son of Ma al-Aïnine.”

But the general staff at headquarters hadn’t believed the rumors. It gave the officers a good laugh.

“The old man of Smara has gone mad. As if he could, with his troop of ragpickers, overthrow the sultan and drive out the French army!” That’s what I thought: the old fox is backed up against the sea and the desert, and he’s chosen to commit suicide; it’s his only way out now, to get himself killed along with his whole tribe.

Therefore, today, June 21, 1910, the troop of black infantrymen is en route with three French officers and the civilian observer at the head. They have veered south to meet up with the other troop that left from Zettat. The jaws of the pincers are closing in, to seize the old sheik and his ragpickers.

The light of the sun, mingled with the dust, burns the soldiers’ eyes. In the distance, on the hill overlooking the stone-strewn plain, an ochre village suddenly appears, barely distinguishable from the desert. “Kasbah Zidaniya,” the guide simply says. But he pulls his horse up short. In the distance, a group of warriors on horseback are galloping along the hills. The black foot soldiers take position while the officers move their horses aside. Scattered shots crash out, without a single bullet whistling or hitting a mark. The observer thinks it sounds more like hunters out in the brush. A wounded man is taken prisoner, an Arab from the Beni Amir tribe. Sheik Ma al-Aïnine isn’t far; his warriors are marching on the al-Borouj trail, to the south. The troop sets out again, but now the officers stay close to the soldiers. Everyone is watching the brush closely. The sun is still high in the sky when the second skirmish takes place, on the al-Borouj trail. Shots ring out again in the torrid silence. General Moinier gives the order to charge toward the valley bottom. The Senegalese shoot, their knees to the ground, then run, with bayonets fixed. The Beni Moussa tribe has killed twelve black soldiers before fleeing through the bush, leaving scores of their dead on the ground. Then the Senegalese troops continue their charge toward the valley bottom. The soldiers flush out blue men everywhere, but they are not the invincible warriors everyone expected. They are men in rags, disheveled, weaponless, who run limping away, who fall on the stony ground. More like beggars, thin, scorched from the sun, consumed with fever, who run into one another, letting out cries of distress, while the Senegalese, gripped with a murderous desire for vengeance, fire their rifles into their midst, nail them to the red earth with their bayonets. In vain, General Moinier calls for them to fall back. Before the black soldiers, the men and women run helter-skelter, fall to the ground. The children run through the shrubs, speechless with fear, and the herds of goats and sheep run into one another bleating frantically. Everywhere the bodies of blue men are strewn over the ground. The last shots echo out, then there is nothing more to be heard; once again, the torrid silence weighs heavily over the landscape.

From atop a hill, motionless on their horses, which are pacing nervously, the officers watch the great expanse of brush into which the blue men have already disappeared, as if they had been swallowed up by the earth. The Senegalese foot soldiers come back, carrying their dead companions, without a glance at the hundreds of men and women in rags who are lying on the ground. Somewhere on the slopes of the valley, amidst the thorn bushes, a boy is sitting next to the body of a dead warrior, staring very hard at the bloody face whose eyes have grown dark.

IN THE STREET lit with the rising sun, the boy walks unhurriedly alongside the parked cars. His lean body glides past the shiny hulls, his reflection slips over the windows, the polished fenders, the headlights, but that’s not what he’s looking at. He leans slightly toward each automobile, and his eyes search the interior of the cab, the seats, the floor under the seats, the rear window, the glove compartment.

He moves silently forward, all alone in the wide empty street where the sun is lighting the first glimmer of morning, clear and pure. The sky is already very blue, limpid, without a cloud. The summer wind is blowing in from the sea, rushing through the streets, along the straight avenues, whirling about the small parks, shaking the palm trees and the tall araucarias.

Radicz quite likes the summer wind; it’s not a malevolent wind like the one that tears up the dust, or the one that goes into your body and chills you to the bone. It’s a mild wind, laden with sweet smells, a wind that smells of the sea and of grass, that makes you sleepy; Radicz is happy, because he slept out under the stars, in an abandoned garden, with his head between the roots of a tall parasol pine not far from the sea.

Before sunrise, he woke up and knew instantly that the summer wind had begun. So he rolled around in the grass a little, the way dogs do, and then he ran without stopping all the way to the edge of the sea. He looked at it for a long time from up on the road, so lovely and so calm, still gray with night, but already splashed in places with the blue and pink of dawn. For a second even, he almost felt like climbing down on the rocks — still cold with night — taking off all his clothes, and diving into the water. It was the summer wind that had called him out to the sea, had shown him the water. But he remembered he didn’t have much time left, that he had to hurry because people would be getting up soon. So he went back up into the streets, looking for cars.

Now, he’s nearing a large complex of buildings and gardens. He walks along the alleys of the park, where the cars are stopped. There isn’t a soul in the gardens for as far as you can see. The shades on the buildings are still down; the balconies are empty. The summer wind is blowing on the façades of the buildings, making the shades snap. There’s also the soft sound in the branches of the mimosas and the oleanders, and the tall palm trees rustling as they sway.

The light appears slowly, first up in the sky, then on the tops of the buildings, and the streetlamps grow pale. Radicz really likes this time of day because the streets are still silent, the houses closed up, without a soul, and it’s as if he were alone in the world. He walks slowly along the alleys around the building, and he thinks the whole city is his, there’s no one else left. Maybe, as in the aftermath of a catastrophe, while he was sleeping in the abandoned garden, the men and women had fled, had already left, running for the mountains, abandoning their houses and their cars. Radicz moves along beside the still hulls, looking inside, the empty seats, the motionless steering wheels, and he has the strange feeling that someone is observing him, threatening him. He stops, looks up in the direction of the high walls of the buildings. The dawn light has already lit the tops of the façades with its pink hue. But the shades and the windows remain closed, and the large balconies are empty. The sound of the wind passing is a very soft sound, very lazy, a sound which isn’t meant for humans, and again Radicz feels the void which has hollowed out over the city, which has replaced human sounds and movements.

Maybe while he was sleeping, his head between the roots of the old parasol pine, the summer wind, as if coming from some other world, mysteriously put all the men and all the women in town to sleep, and they’re lying in their beds, in their apartments with closed shutters, deep in a magical sleep that will never end. So now the city can rest at last, breathe, the wide empty streets with stopped cars, the closed shops, the darkened streetlamps and traffic lights; so now the grass will be able to grow peacefully in the cracks of the pavement, the gardens will start looking like forests again, and the rats and birds will be able to go wherever they want fearlessly, as they did in the days before humans.

Radicz stops for a minute to listen. The birds just happen to be awakening in the trees, starlings, sparrows, blackbirds. It’s the blackbirds especially that are calling out very loudly, and flying heavily from one palm tree to another, or else hopping along on the wet tar in the big parking lots. The boy really likes blackbirds. They have a lovely black coat and a bright yellow beak, and they have that peculiar way of hopping, with their head turned slightly to one side, keeping an eye out for danger. They look like thieves, and that’s why Radicz likes them. They’re like him, a bit careless, a bit crooked, and they know how to whistle shrilly to warn that danger is near; they know how to laugh, with a kind of resonant chuckling in their throats that really makes him laugh too. Radicz moves slowly through the parking lots, and from time to time, he whistles to answer the blackbirds. Maybe while the boy was sleeping in the abandoned garden, his head between the roots of the tall parasol pine, the men and women left the big city, just like that, without making a sound, and the blackbirds have taken their place. That idea really pleases Radicz, and he whistles even louder, using his fingers, to tell the blackbirds he’s with them, that it’s all theirs, everything, the houses, the streets, and even the shops and everything inside them.

The light in the park, around the buildings, is rapidly increasing. Dewdrops are glistening on the roofs of the cars, on the leaves of the shrubs. Radicz has to force himself not to stop and look at all those drops of light. In the emptiness of the big parking lot, with those high white walls, those shades rolled down, those empty balconies, they shine with heightened intensity, as if they were the only real and living things. They quiver a little in the wind from the sea, they look like thousands of unblinking eyes watching the world.

Then once again, Radicz vaguely feels the threat hanging over it all, here, in the parking lot of the buildings, the danger that is prowling. It’s a gaze, or perhaps a light, that the boy can’t see, can’t understand. The threat is hidden under the tires of the stopped automobiles, in the reflections on their windows, in the wan glow of the streetlamps that are still lit in spite of the daylight. It makes a shudder run over his skin, and the boy feels his heart slowing down, then speeding up, and the palms of his hands grow moist with cold sweat.

The birds have disappeared now, except some flights of swifts that go rushing by at top speed, twittering. The blackbirds have fled over to the other side of the huge blocks of concrete, and the air has grown silent. Even the wind is gradually letting up. Dawn doesn’t last very long over the big city; it shows its miracle for an instant, then fades away. Now day is coming. The sky is no longer gray and pink, the dull color is invading it. There’s a sort of haze in the west, over where the tall chimneys of the storage tanks have undoubtedly begun spitting out their poisonous fumes.

Radicz sees all of that, everything that’s happening, and his throat tightens. Soon the men and the women will open their shutters and doors, they’ll roll up their shades and come out on the balconies; they’ll walk through the streets of the city, and start the motors of their cars and trucks, and drive around looking at everything with their mean eyes. That’s why there’s that gaze, that threat. Radicz doesn’t like the daytime. He only likes the night, and the dawn, when everything is silent, uninhabited, when there’s nothing but bats and stray cats.

So, he keeps walking up the alleys of the big parking lot, looking a little more closely at the interiors of the parked cars. From time to time, he sees something that might be interesting, and he tries the door handles, just like that, rapidly in passing, just in case they should open. He’s run across three cars whose doors aren’t locked, but hasn’t touched them yet, because he’s not sure it’s worth the trouble. He tells himself he’ll come back a little later, when he’s gone around the whole lot, because unlocked cars are a quick job.

The light of day is broadening rapidly up above the trees, but you still can’t see the sun. All you can see is the lovely, warm light opening out, spreading through the sky. Radicz doesn’t like the daytime, but he quite likes the sun, and he’s happy at the idea of seeing it appear. It finally comes, an incandescent disk that shoots a glint deep into his eyes, and Radicz stops walking for a second, blinded.

He waits, listening to the sound of his heart beating in his arteries. The threat is all around, without his being able to say where it’s coming from. The light increases, and fear weighs down all the more heavily, from atop the high white walls with hundreds of blue shades, from atop the flat roofs bristling with antennae, from atop the cement pylons, from atop the tall palm trees with smooth trunks. It’s the silence that is most frightening. The silence of the day and the electric lights of the streetlamps that continue to shine with a shrill humming sound. It’s as if the ordinary sounds of humans and their motors could never come back, as if sleep had stopped them short, locked them in stone, motors jammed, throats tight, faces with closed eyes.

“Okay, let’s go.”

It’s Radicz talking out loud, to muster his courage. His hand tries the door handles again, his eyes search the cold interiors of the cabs. The sunlight is glittering on the drops of dew clinging to the hulls and the windshields.

“Nothing … nothing.”

Haste now somewhat overrides his anxiety. The day is spread taut, white, the sun will soon be above the roofs of the tall buildings. It’s undoubtedly already shining on the sea, lighting up sparkling reflections on the crests of the waves. Radicz is walking along not paying attention to his surroundings.

“Good, thanks.”

A car door has opened. Without a sound, the boy slips his body into the car; his hands feel everywhere, under the seats, in the corners, in the door pockets, open the glove compartment. His hands feel quickly, agilely, like the hands of the blind.

“Nothing!”

Nothing: the inside of the car is empty, cold and damp as a cave.

“Bastards!”

Anxiety is followed by anger, and the boy goes back up the alley, alongside the building, searching inside each car. Suddenly a noise makes him start, the roaring of a motor and the crashing of metal. Hidden behind a green station wagon, Radicz watches the garbage truck pass and the collectors who are emptying the bins. The truck makes its way around the buildings, without entering the parking lot. It goes off, half hidden by the hedges of oleander and the palm trunks, and Radicz thinks it looks like a funny metallic insect, a dung beetle maybe, with its big rounded back lurching along.

When everything has fallen silent again, Radicz sees some shapes that could be interesting in the bed of the station wagon. He moves closer to the back window and can distinguish clothing, lots of clothing piled up in the back, in orange plastic sacks. There are also clothes in the front, shoe boxes and, on the floor, right next to the seat, difficult for someone with no experience to make out, the corner of a transistor radio set. The doors of the station wagon are locked, but the front window is cracked open; Radicz pulls with all his might, hangs on the edge of the window to enlarge the opening. Millimeter by millimeter, the window gives way, and soon Radicz can pass his long skinny arm through until his fingertips touch the door lock and pull it up. He opens the door and slips into the front of the car.

The station wagon is very spacious, with deep seats, covered in dark green vinyl. Radicz is glad to be inside the vehicle. He remains sitting on the cold seat for a minute, his hands resting on the steering wheel, and looks at the parking lot and the trees through the large windshield. The top part of the windshield is tinted emerald green, and it casts a strange hue on the white sky when you move your head. To the right of the steering wheel, there’s a radio. Radicz turns the knobs, but the radio doesn’t come on. His hand pushes the button on the glove compartment, and it opens; in the compartment there are papers, a ballpoint pen, and a pair of sunglasses.

Radicz passes over the back of the front seat to the rear. He examines the garments rapidly. They are new clothes, suits, shirts, women’s suits and pants, sweaters, all folded up in their plastic sacks. Next to himself, Radicz makes a pile of clothing, then piles of shoe boxes, ties, scarves. He stuffs the clothes into the pants, knotting the legs to make bundles. Suddenly, he remembers the transistor radio. He slips onto the front seat, his head on the floor, and his hands feel the object, lift it a little. He turns a knob, and this time music blares out, guitar notes that glide and flow like the song of birds at dawn.

That’s when he hears the sound of the police coming. He didn’t see them coming, maybe he didn’t even really hear them coming, the soft sound of tires on the tarred gravel of the circular alley, the rustling of a shade going up somewhere on the immense silent façade of the building, white with light; maybe it’s something else that alerted him, while he was there with his head down listening to the transistor radio’s bird music. Inside his body, behind his eyes, or else in his guts, something knotted up, clenched, and the void filled the body of the station wagon like a cold chill. So then he rose up and saw it.

The black police car is racing toward the alley of the parking lot. Its tires are making a wet sound on the tar and on the gravel, and Radicz can clearly see the faces of the policemen, their black uniforms. At the same time he feels the hard murderous look observing him from up on one of the balconies of the building, up where the shade has just gone quickly up.

Should he remain hidden in the large car, holed up like an animal? But he’s the one the police are coming after, he knows it, he’s sure of it. So his body suddenly uncoils, springs out of the front door of the station wagon, and he starts running on the sidewalk, in the direction of the wall surrounding the parking lot.

All at once, the black car accelerates, because the policemen have seen him. There’s the sound of voices, brief shouts that echo through the park, bounce off the tall white walls. Radicz hears the whistle blowing shrilly, and he hunches his shoulder up, as if it were bullets. His heart is pounding so hard he can barely hear anything else, as if the whole surface of the parking lot, the buildings, the trees in the park, and the asphalt alleys were all throbbing, quivering, and aching fitfully along with it.

His legs are running, running, beating on the asphalt, beating on the loose earth of the flower beds. His legs are leaping over the planted shrubs, over the low walls around the lawns. They are tearing along as fast as they can, frantic, shaking with panic, not knowing where they’re going, not knowing where they’ll stop. Now there is the high wall separating the parking lot, and the legs can’t take flight. They run along the wall, they zigzag between the still cars. The boy doesn’t need to turn around to see that the black police car is still there, that it’s very near, that it’s taking the curves at top speed, making its tires screech and its motor race. Then it’s behind him on a long straight stretch, at the end of which is the open avenue, and Radicz’s tiny body is bolting like a flushed rabbit. The black police car grows larger, approaches, its wheels are devouring the tar and gravel alley. As he’s running, Radicz hears the sound of shades going up, everywhere, on the façade of the building, and he thinks all the people are now out on their balconies to watch him run. And suddenly, there is an opening in the wall, a door maybe, and Radicz’s body leaps through the opening. Now he’s on the other side of the wall, all alone on the main avenue that leads to the sea, with maybe a three- , four-minute head start, the time it will take for the black police car to get to the parking lot exit, do a U-turn on the avenue. That too the boy knows without thinking about it, as if it were his frantic heart and his legs that were thinking for him. But where can he go? At the end of the avenue, less than a hundred yards away, is the sea, the rocks. That’s the direction the young man is instinctively running in, so fast that the hot air of the day is making tears run from his eyes. His ears can’t hear the sound of the wind, and he can’t see anything but the black ribbon of the road where the sunlight is shining brightly, and, at the very end, above the wall of the coastal road, the milky color of the sea and the sky mingling together. He is running so fast he can’t hear the tires of the black police car on the pavement anymore, or the two terrifying horn blasts that are filling up all of the space between the buildings.

Just a few more leaps, keep going, legs, a few more beats, heart, keep going, for the sea isn’t very far now, the sea and the sky mingling together, where there are no more houses, or people, or cars. So in the same instant that the body of the young man bounds onto the pavement of the coastal road, heading straight for the sea and the sky mingling together, like a deer the pack hounds are catching up with, at that very instant, a large blue city bus with its headlights still lit arrives, and the rising sun hits its curved windshield like a flash of lightning when Radicz’s body smashes up against the hood and the headlights with a terrific crash of metal and screeching brakes. Not far from there, on the edge of the palm tree park, stands a very somber young woman, still as a shadow, watching intently. She doesn’t move, she just watches as people approach from all sides, gathering on the road around the bus, around the black car, around the blanket covering the thief’s broken body.

Tiznit, October 23, 1910

OUT WHERE THE city melts in with the red earth of the desert, old drystone walls, ruins of houses made of adobe in amongst acacias, some of which have burned, out where the dusty winds blow freely, far from the wells, from the shade of the palm trees, that is where the old sheik is in the process of dying.

He arrived here, in the city of Tiznit, at the end of his long pointless march. To the north, in the land of the defeated king, the foreign soldiers are advancing, from city to city, destroying everything that resists them. To the south, the soldiers of the Christians have entered the holy valley of the Saguiet al-Hamra, they are even going to occupy Ma al-Aïnine’s empty palace. The wind of ill-fortune has begun to blow on the stone walls, through the narrow loopholes, the wind that wears everything away, that empties everything out.

It’s blowing here now, the malevolent wind, the warm wind that comes from the north, that brings the mist in from the sea. Scattered around Tiznit like lost animals, the blue men are waiting, sheltered by their huts of branches.

Throughout the entire camp, no other sound can be heard but that of the wind clicking in the acacia branches, and from time to time the complaint of a hobbled animal. There is a vast silence, a terrible silence that hasn’t let up since the attack of the Senegalese soldiers, in the valley of the Oued Tadla. The voices of the warriors have been stilled now; the chants have fallen silent. No one speaks about what will happen anymore, maybe because nothing else will happen.

It’s the wind of death that is blowing over the dried earth, the malevolent wind coming from the lands occupied by the foreigners, in Mogador, in Rabat, in Fez, in Tangiers. The warm wind, bearing with it the murmur of the sea, and even beyond, the humming of the big white cities where the bankers, the merchants rule.

In the mud house with the half-caved-in roof, the old sheik is lying on his cloak on the bare mud floor. The heat is stifling; the sound of flies and wasps fills the air. Does he know that all is lost, that it’s all over now? Yesterday, day before yesterday, the messengers from the South came to bring him news, but he didn’t want to listen to them. The messengers had kept their news of the South to themselves, the surrender of Smara, the flight of Hassena and Larhdaf, Ma al-Aïnine’s youngest sons, in the direction of the plateau of Tagant, the flight of Moulay Hiba in the direction of the Atlas Mountains. But now they are taking away with them the news they will give to those who are awaiting them down there: “The great sheik Ma al-Aïnine will soon be dead. Already, his eyes can see no more, and his lips can speak no more.” They will say that the great sheik is dying in the poorest house in Tiznit, like a beggar, far from his sons, far from his people.

A few men are sitting around the ruined house. They are the last blue warriors of the Berik Allah tribe. They fled across the plain of the Tadla River, without looking back, without trying to understand. The others turned back southward, back to their trails, because they realized there was no hope left, that the lands they had been promised would never be given to them. But it wasn’t land they had wanted. They loved the great sheik, they venerated him as they would a saint. He had given them his divine blessing, and that had bound them to him, like the words of an oath.

Nour is with them today. Sitting on the dusty earth, sheltered by a roof of branches, he is staring steadily at the mud house with the half-caved-in roof, where the great sheik is closed up. He doesn’t know yet that Ma al-Aïnine is dying. It’s been several days since he’s seen him come out, wearing his soiled white cloak, leaning on the shoulder of his servant, followed by Meymuna Laliyi, his first wife, the mother of Moulay Sebaa, the Lion. When he first arrived in Tiznit, Ma al-Aïnine sent messengers out for his sons to come and get him. But the messengers did not come back. Every evening, before the prayer, Ma al-Aïnine came out of the house to gaze northward at the trail upon which Moulay Hiba should have come. Now it is too late, and it is obvious his sons won’t come.

He lost his sight two days ago, as if death had taken his eyes first. Even when he used to come out to look northward, it was no longer his eyes that were searching for his son, it was his whole face, his hands, his body that desired the presence of Moulay Hiba. Nour watched him, frail figure, almost ghostly, surrounded by his servants, followed by the black shadow of Lalla Meymuna. And he could feel the chill of death darkening the landscape, as if a cloud had hidden the sun.

Nour thought about the blind warrior lying in the ravine, on the bed of the Tadla River. He thought about the dead face of his friend who might have already been eaten by jackals, and he also thought about all the people who had died on the journey, left at the mercy of the sun and the night.

Later, he had met up again with the rest of the caravan that had escaped the massacre, and they had walked for days, dying of hunger and weariness. They had fled like outlaws along the most difficult trails, avoiding the cities, barely daring to taste the well water. Then the great sheik had fallen sick, and they had had to stop here, at the gates of Tiznit, on this dusty land over which the malevolent wind was blowing.

Most of the blue men had continued their aimless endless journey, toward the plateaus of the Drâa, to pick up the trails where they’d left off. Nour’s mother and father had gone back to the desert. But he couldn’t bring himself to follow them. Maybe he was still hoping for a miracle, the land that the sheik had promised them, where there would be peace and abundance, which the foreign soldiers could never enter. The blue men had left, one after the other, taking their rags with them. But so many had died on the way! Never would they find the peace they had known before, never would the wind of ill-fortune leave them in peace.

At times, the rumor would crop up: “Moulay Hiba is coming, Moulay Sebaa, the Lion, our king!” But it was only a mirage, which faded away in the torrid silence.

Now it is all too late, because the sheik Ma al-Aïnine is dying. Suddenly the wind stops blowing; the heaviness in the air causes the men to stand. They all heave to their feet, look westward, where the sun is descending toward the low horizon. The dusty earth, strewn with razor-sharp stones, is bathed in a glaring hue, bright as molten metal. The sky is veiled with a thin haze, through which the sun resembles an enormously dilated red disk.

No one understands why the wind has suddenly stopped, or why there is that strange, burnt color out on the horizon. But once again, Nour feels the chill enter him, like a fever, and he starts to tremble. He turns toward the ruins of the old house, where Ma al-Aïnine is. He walks slowly toward the house, drawn to it in spite of himself, his eyes trained on the black door.

Ma al-Aïnine’s warriors, the Berik Allah, watch the boy walking toward the house with dark faces, but none of them step forward to bar his way. Their eyes are blank and weary, as if they were living a dream. Perhaps they too have lost their sight during the pointless march, eyes burned by the desert sun and sand?

Slowly, Nour walks forward over the rocky earth, toward the house with mud walls. The setting sun is lighting up the old walls, deepening the dark shadow of the door.

It is through that door that Nour is now passing, just as he once had with his father, into the tomb of the saint. For an instant, he remains immobile, blinded by the darkness, feeling the damp coolness inside the house. When his eyes have adjusted, he sees the large, empty room, the mud floor. At one end of the room, the old sheik is lying on his cloak, his head resting on a stone. Lalla Meymuna is sitting next to him, wrapped in her black mantle, face veiled.

Nour doesn’t make a sound, he holds his breath. After a long time Lalla Meymuna turns her face toward the boy, because she can feel his eyes upon her. The black veil pulls aside, uncovering her handsome, copper-colored face. Her eyes are shining in the half-light; tears are running down her cheeks. Nour’s heart starts pounding very hard, and he feels a sharp pain in the center of his body. He is going to back away toward the door, leave, when the old woman tells him to come in. He walks slowly toward the center of the room, doubled over slightly because of the pain in the middle of his body. When he is before the sheik, his legs buckle under him, and he falls heavily to the floor, arms stretched out in front. His hands are touching Ma al-Aïnine’s white cloak, and he remains lying with his face against the damp earth. He doesn’t cry, doesn’t say anything, doesn’t think of anything, but his hands are clutching the woolen cloak and holding it so tightly that it hurts. Next to him, Lalla Meymuna is sitting still beside the man she loves, wrapped in her black mantle, and she can no longer see anything, no longer hear anything.

Ma al-Aïnine is breathing slowly, painfully. His breath lifts his chest with difficulty, making a hoarse sound that fills the entire house. In the half-light, his emaciated face seems even whiter, almost transparent.

Nour stares very hard at the old man, as if his eyes could slow down the march of death. Ma al-Aïnine’s parted lips pronounce snatches of words that are quickly drowned out by the rales. Maybe he is chanting the names of his sons again, Mohammed Rebbo, Mohammed Larh­daf, Taaleb, Hassena, Saadbou, Ahmed al-Shems, he who is called the Sun, and above all the name of the one he searched for every evening on the northern trail, the one he is still waiting for, Ahmed Dehiba, he who is called Moulay Sebaa, the Lion.

With a corner of her cloak, Lalla Meymuna dries the sweat beading on Ma al-Aïnine’s face, but he doesn’t even feel the contact of the cloth on his forehead and cheeks.

At times his arms go stiff, and his torso strains, because he wants to sit up. His lips tremble, his eyes roll around in their sockets. Nour draws nearer, and helps Meymuna raise Ma al-Aïnine; they hold him in a sitting position. With incredible energy for such a frail body, the old sheik remains sitting upright for a few seconds, arms outstretched, as if he were going to stand. His thin face betrays intense anxiety, and Nour feels terrified because of that empty look, those pale eyes. Nour remembers the blind warrior, Ma al-Aïnine’s hand that touched his eyes, his breath on the wounded man’s face. Now Ma al-Aïnine is feeling that same kind of solitude, the kind from which there is no escape, and no one can appease the utter emptiness in his eyes.

The pain Nour feels is so great that he would like to get away, leave this house of shadows and death, go running out over the dusty plain, out toward the golden light of the setting sun.

But suddenly, he feels the power in his hands, in his breath. Slowly, as if he were trying to remember forgotten gestures, Nour runs the palm of his hand over Ma al-Aïnine’s forehead, without saying a word. He wets his fingertips with his saliva, and touches the eyelids that are fluttering with anxiety. He blows softly on the old man’s face, his lips, his eyes. He wraps his arm around his torso and slowly, the frail body lets go, reclines.

Now Ma al-Aïnine’s face seems appeased, freed of its suffering. Eyes closed, the old man is breathing softly, noiselessly, as if he were going to fall asleep. Nour too feels peaceful inside, the pain in his body has relaxed. He moves back a little without taking his eyes off the sheik. Then he goes out of the house, as the dark shadow of Lalla Meymuna stretches out on the floor to sleep.

Outside, night is slowly falling. You can hear the cries of birds flying over the bed of the stream, toward the palm grove. The warm wind from the sea starts blowing again, in fits and starts, rustling in the leaves of the collapsed roof. Meymuna lights the oil lamp, she gives the sheik some water. In front of the door to the house, Nour’s throat feels tight, burning; he can’t sleep. Several times during the night, following a sign from Meymuna, he goes up to the old man, runs his hand over his forehead, blows on his lips and eyelids. But weakness and despair have destroyed his power, and he is no longer able to erase the anxiety that is making Ma al-Aïnine’s lips tremble. Perhaps it is the pain inside his own body that is crippling his breath.

Just before the first dawn, when the air outside is completely still and silent, when there is not a sound, not a single insect call, Ma al-Aïnine dies. Meymuna, who is holding his hand, feels it, and she lies down on the floor next to the man she loves, and begins to cry, no longer holding back the sobs. Nour, standing by the door, looks once more at the frail figure of the great sheik, lying on his white cloak, so light that he seems to be floating above the ground. Then, backing away, he leaves, finds himself alone in the night, on the ash-colored plain lit with the full moon. Grief and fatigue prevent him from walking very far. He stumbles to the ground near some thorn bushes and falls immediately asleep, not hearing the voice of Lalla Meymuna weeping as if in song.

THAT’S HOW SHE LEFT one day, without telling anyone. She got up one morning, just before dawn, as she used to do, back in her country, to go down to the sea, or out to the gates of the desert. She listened to the breathing of the photographer who was sleeping in his big bed, overwhelmed with the summer heat. Outside, the swifts were already letting out their high-pitched cries, and off in the distance, maybe the soft sound of the street cleaner’s water hose. Lalla had hesitated, because she wanted to leave something for the photographer, a sign, a message, to say good-bye to him. Since she didn’t have anything, she took a piece of soap and drew the well-known sign of her tribe, the one she used to sign her photographs with in the streets of Paris:

because it’s the oldest drawing she knows and because it looks like a heart. Then she walked away, through the streets of the city, never to return.

She traveled by train for days and nights, from city to city, from country to country. She waited for trains in the stations for such a long time that her legs grew stiff and her back and buttocks ached.

People came and went, talked, looked. But they didn’t pay any attention to the silhouette of the young woman with a weary face who, despite the heat, was wrapped up in a funny old brown coat that reached down to her feet. Maybe they thought she was poor, or sick. Sometimes people talked to her in the passenger cars, but she didn’t understand their language, and simply smiled.

Then the ship sails slowly out over the smooth sea away from Algeciras; it’s heading for Tangiers. On the deck, the sun and the salt burn, and the people are all crowded into the shade, men, women, children, sitting beside their boxes and suitcases.

Some sing from time to time, to ward off anxiety, a sad nasal song, then the song stops, and all that can be heard is the chugging of the engine.

Over the railing, Lalla is looking at the smooth, dark blue sea, out where the rollers curl slowly over the swell. Dolphins are leaping in the ship’s white wake, chasing after one another, swimming away. Lalla thinks of the white bird, the one that was a true prince of the sea, the one that flew over the beach back in the days of Old Naman. Her heart quickens, and she looks up ecstatically, as if she were really going to see him, arms outstretched over the sea. She can feel the burn of the sun on her skin, the old burn, and she can see the light of the sky which is so lovely and so cruel.

Suddenly the voice of some men singing their nasal song troubles her, and she feels tears running from her eyes, without really understanding why. It’s been such a long time since she’s heard that song, as if in an old dream, half faded away. They are men with black skin, dressed only in camouflage shirts and cotton pants that are too short, barefoot in Japanese sandals. One after the other, they sing the sad nasal song, which no one else can understand, just like that, rocking themselves with their eyes half shut.

And when she hears their song, Lalla feels — deep down inside of herself, very secretly — the desire to see that white land again, the tall palm trees in the red valleys, the expanses of stones and sand, the wide lonely beaches, and even the villages of mud and planks, with sheet metal and tarpaper roofs. She squints her eyes a little and sees it before her, as if she hadn’t left, as if she’d only fallen asleep for an hour or two.

Deep inside of her, inside her swollen belly, there is also that movement, those painful thrusts that are hitting the inside of her skin. Now she thinks of the child who wants to be born, who is already living, who is already dreaming. She shivers a little and pushes her hands against her dilated stomach, lets her body fall in with the heavy rocking of the boat, her back leaning against the vibrating iron bulkhead. She even sings a little to herself, between her teeth, a little to the child who stops hitting her and listens, the old song, the one Aamma used to sing, that came from her mother:

“One day, the crow will be white, the sea will go dry, there will be honey in the desert flower, we will make up a bed of acacia sprays, one day, oh, one day, the snake will spit no more poison, and rifle bullets will bring no more death, for that will be the day I will leave my love…”

The chugging of the engines drowns out the sound of her voice, but inside her belly, the unknown child listens closely to the words, and falls asleep. So to make more noise, and to muster her courage, Lalla sings the words to her favorite song louder:

“Méditerra-né-é-e…”

The boat glides slowly over the smooth sea, under the heavy sky. Now there is an ugly gray splotch on the horizon, like a cloud snagging on the sea: Tangiers. All the faces are turned toward the spot, and the people have stopped talking: even the black men are no longer singing. Africa comes slowly into view — irresolute, deserted — in front of the stem of the ship. The seawater turns gray, shallower. In the sky, the first gulls are flying, gray as well, scrawny and fearful.

Has everything changed then? Lalla thinks of her first journey, to Marseille, when everything was still new, the streets, the houses, the people. She thinks of Aamma’s apartment, of the Hotel Sainte-Blanche, of the vacant lots near the storage tanks, of everything that she left behind in the big deadly city. She thinks of Radicz the beggar, of the photographer, of the reporters, of all the people who have turned into shadows. She’s got nothing left but her clothes now, and the brown coat that Aamma gave her when she arrived. The money too, the bundle of new bank­notes held together with a pin that she took from the photographer’s jacket pocket before leaving. But it’s as if nothing had ever happened, as if she’d never left the Project of planks and tarpaper, or the plateau of stones and the hills where the Hartani lives, as if she’d simply fallen asleep for an hour or two.

She looks out at the empty horizon, off the stern of the ship, then at the spot of gray earth and the mountain where the houses, like smudges, in the Arab city are growing larger. She winces, because inside her abdomen, the child has started making rough movements.

In the bus, driving down the dust road, stopping to let on peasants, women, children, Lalla gets that strange, ecstatic feeling again. The light is enveloping her, so is the fine dust rising like a fog on either side of the bus, entering the passenger compartment, sticking in her throat, and gritting under her fingers, the light, the dryness, the dust: Lalla can feel their presence, and it’s like a new skin covering her, like a new breath.

Is it possible that something else once existed? Is there another world, other faces, another light? The lie of memories cannot survive the noise of the coughing bus, or the heat, or the dust. The light cleanses everything, abrades everything, as it used to, out on the plateau of stones. Lalla feels the weight of the secret gaze upon her again, around her; no longer the gaze of men, filled with desire and yearning, but the gaze filled with mystery that belongs to the one who knows Lalla and who reigns over her like a god.

The bus drives along the dust track, lumbers up hills. Everywhere, there is nothing but dry burned earth, like an old snakeskin. Above the roof of the bus, the sky and the light burn fervently, and the passenger compartment grows as hot as the inside of an oven. Lalla feels the drops of sweat rolling down her forehead, along her neck, down her back. In the bus, the people are immobile, impassive. The men are wrapped in their woolen cloaks; the women are squatting on the floor, between the seats, covered with their blue-black veils. Only the driver is moving, grimacing, looking in the rearview mirror. Several times his eyes meet Lalla’s, and she turns her face away. The plump man with a flat face adjusts the mirror to see her better, then, with an angry gesture, puts it back in place. The radio, volume turned all the way up, screeches and spits and, when passing near an electricity pylon, lets out a long trail of nasal music.

All day long, the bus drives along the tarred roads and dust tracks, crosses dried rivers, stops in front of mud villages where naked children are waiting. Skeletal dogs run along beside the bus, trying to nip at the wheels. At times, the bus stops in the middle of a deserted plain because the motor stalls. While the driver with a flat nose leans into the open hood to clean the idling jet, the men and women get off, sit down in the shade of the bus or go to urinate, squatting amid the euphorbia bushes. Some take small lemons out of their pockets to suck on, clacking their tongues.

Then the bus starts out again, bumping over the roads, climbing up hills, like that, interminably, in the direction of the setting sun. Night falls quickly on the stretch of deserted plains; it covers over the stones and turns the dust to ashes. Then, suddenly, the bus stops in the night, and Lalla can see lights in the distance, on the far side of the river. Outside, the night is hot, filled with the whirring of insects, the croaking of toads. But it seems like silence after the hours spent on the bus.

Lalla gets off, walks slowly along the river. She recognizes the building of the public bathhouse, then the ford. The river is black; the tide has pushed back the freshwater stream. Lalla crosses the ford with the water at mid-thigh, but the cool river soothes her. In the dusk light, Lalla sees the figure of a woman carrying a bundle on her head, her long cloak hitched up to her waist.

A little farther ahead, on the opposite bank, the path leading to the Project begins. Then the mud and plank houses, one, another one. Lalla doesn’t recognize the houses anymore. There are new ones everywhere, even near the riverbank, where it floods when the water is high. The alleyways of tamped earth are poorly lit with electric lamps, and the plank and sheet metal houses look abandoned. As she walks down the streets, Lalla hears the sound of voices whispering, of babies crying. Somewhere, out beyond the town, the eerie yapping of a wild dog. Lalla’s feet are treading upon ancient traces, and she takes off her canvas sandals to better feel the coolness and the grain of the earth.

The same gaze is still guiding her, here, in the streets of the Project; it’s a very long and very gentle gaze, coming from all sides at once, from the depths of the sky, swaying in the wind. Lalla walks past the houses she’s familiar with; she smells the odor of coal fires going out; she recognizes the sound of the wind in the tarpaper, on the sheet metal. It all comes back to her at once, as if she’d never left, as if she’d only fallen asleep for an hour or two.

So, instead of going toward Ikikr’s house, over by the fountain, Lalla takes the path to the dunes. Weariness is making her body heavy, triggering a pain in her lower back, but it is the unknown gaze that is guiding her, and she knows she must go out of the village. Barefoot, she walks as quickly as she can between the thorn bushes and the dwarf palms, till she reaches the dunes.

Here, nothing has changed. She walks along the gray dunes, just as she used to. From time to time, she stops, looks around, picks a sprig of a succulent plant and squishes it between her fingers to smell the peppery odor she used to love. She recognizes all the hollows, all the paths, those that lead up to the rocky hills, those that go to the salt marsh, those that don’t go anywhere. The night is deep and mild, and above her the stars are bright. How much time has gone by for them? They haven’t changed places, their flame — like that of magic lamps — has not burned out. Perhaps the dunes have moved, but how could you tell? The old carcass that used to bare its claws and lift its horns and scare her so much has disappeared now. There are no more abandoned tin cans, and certain shrubs have burned; their branches have been broken to pieces for the brazier fires.

Lalla can’t find her spot up on top of the dunes anymore. The passageway that led to the beach has filled with sand. Laboriously, Lalla scales the cold sand of the dunes till she reaches the crest. Her breath is wheezing in her throat, and the pain in her back is so sharp she’s moaning, in spite of herself. In clenching her teeth, she changes the moaning into a song. She thinks of the song she used to love to sing, in the old days, when she was afraid:

“Méditerra-né-é-e…”

She tries to sing, but her voice is too weak.

Now she’s walking over the hard sand of the beach, right along the sea foam. The wind isn’t blowing very hard, and the waves are purling softly in the night, and Lalla feels the giddy thrill once again, just as she had on the ship and in the bus, as if it had all been waiting for her, expecting her. Maybe it’s the gaze of al-Ser, the one she calls the Secret, that is on the beach, mixed in with the starlight, with the sound of the sea, with the whiteness of the foam. It is a night without fear, a remote night, the likes of which Lalla has never known.

Now she’s nearing the place where Old Naman used to like to haul his boat up, to heat the pitch or mend his nets. But the place is empty, and the beach stretches on into the night, deserted. There is only the old fig tree, standing against the dune, with its thick branches thrown back from being accustomed to the wind. Lalla recognizes its heavy bland odor with delight; she watches the movement of its leaves. She sits down at the foot of the dune, not far from the tree, and looks at it for a long time, as if the old fisherman were going to appear any second.

Weariness weighs upon Lalla’s body, pain has numbed her arms and legs. She lets herself fall slowly backward into the cold sand, and goes immediately to sleep, lulled by the sound of the sea and the smell of the fig tree.

The moon rises in the east, climbs into the night over the rocky hills. Its pale light shines on the sea and the dunes, bathes Lalla’s face. Later in the night, the wind rises too, the warm wind that blows in from the sea. It passes over Lalla’s face, over her hair, sprinkles sand on her body. The sky is so vast, and the earth absent. Below the constellations, things have changed, evolved. Cities have enlarged their rings, like mold stains in the valley bottoms, in the shelter of bays and estuaries. People have died, houses have fallen to ruin, in a cloud of dust and scattering cockroaches. And yet, on the beach, near the fig tree, in the place where Old Naman used to come, it’s as if nothing had happened. It’s as if the young woman had just gone on sleeping.

The moon moves slowly upward till it reaches its zenith. Then it descends in the west, out in the high seas. The sky is pure, without a cloud. In the desert, beyond the plains and the rocky hills, the cold wells up from the sand, spreads out like water. It’s as if the whole earth, here, and even the sky, the moon, and the stars, had been holding their breath, had suspended their time.

Now they are all stopped, as the fijar, the first dawn, begins.

In the desert, the fox, the jackal, no longer chase after the jerboa or the hare. The horned viper, the scorpion, the scolopendra, are stopped on the cold earth, under the black sky. The fijar has seized them, has turned them to stone, to powdered stone, to mist, because this is the hour when the heavens spread celestial time over the earth, chilling bodies, and sometimes interrupting life and breath. In the dip of the dune, Lalla isn’t moving. Her skin is shivering, in long shivers that shake her limbs and make her teeth chatter, but she doesn’t wake up.

Then comes the second dawn, the white. The light begins to mix with the darkness of the air. Instantly, it sparkles in the sea foam, on patches of dried salt on the rocks, on the sharp stones at the foot of the old fig tree. The pale gray glimmer shines on the peaks of the rocky hills, gradually fading out the stars: the Goat, the Dog, the Snake, the Scorpion, and the three sister stars, Min­taka, Alnilam, Alnitak. Then the sky seems to invert, a large pearly veil covers it, snuffing out the last stars. In the dips of the dunes, the small prickly plants tremble slightly, while dewdrops form pearls in their down.

On Lalla’s cheeks, the drops roll a little, like tears. The young woman awakens and moans quietly. She doesn’t open her eyes yet, but her plaint rises, mingles with the unbroken sound of the sea, which is now in her ears again. The pain comes and goes

in her belly, sending out signals which are closer and closer together, rhythmical like the sound of the waves.

Lalla raises herself up slightly on the bed of sand, but the pain is so sharp it takes her breath away. Then suddenly she realizes the time has come for the baby to be born, right now, here, on this beach, and a wave of fear runs through her, overwhelms her, because she knows she’s alone, that no one will come to help her, no one. She wants to get up; she takes a few steps in the cold sand, staggering, but falls back down, and her moaning turns to a scream. Out here, there is nothing but the gray beach, and the dunes, which are still plunged in darkness, and before her, the heavy sea, gray and green, dark, still mingling with the black of night.

Lying on her side in the sand, knees curled up, Lalla is moaning again in rhythm with the sea. The pain comes in waves, in long regular rollers, whose highest crest moves over the dark surface of the water, catching a brief glint of pale light from time to time, until it breaks. Lalla follows the progress of her pain on the sea, each shudder stemming from far out on the horizon, from the dark area, where the night is still thick, and radiating slowly out till it reaches the shore on the eastern side, spreading slantwise, casting out layers of foam, while the swish of the water over the hard sand creeps up, engulfs her. Sometimes the pain is just too strong, as if her belly were tearing open, were emptying, and the moaning increases in her throat, covering over the crashing of the waves breaking on the sand.

Lalla rises onto her knees, tries to crawl along by the dune to get to the path. She makes such an intense effort that, in spite of the dawn chill, sweat streams down her face and body. She waits again, eyes fixed on the sea. She turns toward the path on the other side of the dunes, and cries, calls out: “Hartani! Hartani!” just as she used to in the old days, when she would go up on the plateau of stones, and he’d be hiding in the hollow of a rock. She tries to whistle too, like the shepherds, but her lips are chapped and trembling.

It won’t be long before people start waking up in the houses of the Project; they’ll throw back their covers, and the women will walk to the fountain to draw the morning water. Maybe the girls will wander around in the brush looking for twigs of dead wood for the fire, and the women will light the brazier, to grill a little meat, to heat up the oatmeal, the water for the tea. But all of that is far away, in another world. It’s like a dream that continues to play out over there on the muddy plain where the people live at the mouth of the big river, or else, even farther away, across the sea, in the big city of beggars and thieves, the murderous city with white buildings and booby-trapped cars. The fijar has spread its cold white glow everywhere at the very same instant in which the elderly meet with death, in silence, in fear.

Lalla can feel her body emptying, and her heart starts beating very slowly, very painfully. The waves of pain are so close together now, there is only one continuous pain undulating and throbbing inside her belly. Slowly, in an immense effort, Lalla drags her body with her forearms along the dune. Before her, a few tugs away, the silhouette of the tree stands on the pile of rocks, very black against the white sky. The fig tree has never seemed so tall to her, so strong. Its wide trunk twists backward, its thick branches are tossed back, and the lovely laced leaves are stirring slightly in the cool wind, shining in the light of day. But the most beautiful and powerful thing is the smell. It envelops Lalla, it seems to be drawing her forward, it inebriates and nauseates her at the same time, it undulates with the waves of pain. Barely breathing, Lalla heaves her body slowly over the resisting sand. Her spread legs leave a trail behind her like a boat being hauled up to dry on the beach.

Slowly, laboriously, she drags the too-heavy load, groaning when the pain gets too strong. She doesn’t take her eyes off the shape of the tree, the tall fig tree with the black trunk, with pale leaves shining in the morning light. As she approaches, the fig tree gets even taller, becomes immense, seems to fill the whole sky. Its shade spreads out all around like a dark lake in which the last colors of the night are still lingering. Slowly, pulling her body along, Lalla enters that shade, under the high powerful branches like the arms of a giant. That’s what she wants, she knows he’s the only one who can help her now. The powerful smell of the tree penetrates her, encompasses her, and soothes her tormented body, mingles with the odor of the sea and the kelp. The sand has left the rocks at the foot of the tall tree bare, rusted with the sea air, polished, worn with the wind and the rain. Between the rocks are the mighty roots, like arms of iron.

Clenching her teeth to keep from crying out, Lalla wraps her arms around the trunk of the fig tree, and slowly pulls herself up, gets in an upright position on her wobbly knees. The pain in her body is now like a wound that is gradually spreading open, tearing. Lalla can no longer think of anything but what she sees, what she hears, what she smells. Old Naman, the Hartani, Aamma, and even the photographer, who are they, what has become of them? The pain that is springing from the young woman’s womb spreads out over the whole expanse of the sea, the whole expanse of the dune, all the way out to the pale sky, it is stronger than everything, it erases everything, empties everything. Pain fills her body, like a deafening sound, it makes her body as huge as a mountain lying stretched upon the earth.

Time has slowed down because of the pain, it is beating to the rhythm of her heart, to the rhythm of her breathing lungs, to the rhythm of the contractions of her uterus. Slowly, as if she were lifting an enormous weight, Lalla raises her body up against the trunk of the fig tree. She knows he is the only one that can help her, like the tree that helped her mother long ago, on the day of her birth. Instinctively, she repeats the ancestral motions, gestures whose significance goes beyond her, without needing anyone to teach them to her. Squatting at the foot of the tall dark tree, she unties the belt of her dress. Her brown coat is spread on the ground, over the rocky earth. She loops the belt around the first main branch of the fig tree, after having twisted the fabric to make it stronger. When she hangs from the cotton belt with both hands, the tree sways a little, letting dewdrops rain down. The virgin water runs over Lalla’s face, and she drinks it in with delight, running her tongue over her lips.

In the sky, the red hour is beginning now. The last stains of night disappear, and the milky whiteness gives way to the blaze of the last dawn in the east, above the rocky hills. The sea grows darker, almost purple, while at the peaks of the waves, violet sparkles light up, and the sea foam glitters even whiter. Never has Lalla watched the coming of day so intently, eyes dilated, pained, face burning with the splendor of the light.

Just then the spasms suddenly become violent, unbearable, and the pain is like the huge blinding red light. To keep from screaming, Lalla bites the cloth of her dress on her shoulder, and her arms lifted over her head pull on the cotton belt so hard that the tree bends and her body lifts up. At each extreme pain, in rhythm, Lalla hangs from the branch of the tree. Sweat is running down her face now, blinding her; the blood-red color of the pain is before her, out on the sea, in the sky, in the foam of each wave rolling in. At times, in spite of herself, a cry escapes from between her clenched teeth, is drowned out by the sound of the sea. It’s a cry of pain and of distress at the same time, due to all of that light, all of that loneliness. The tree bows down slightly at each spasm, making its wide leaves shimmer.

In short little gulps, Lalla breathes in its odor, the odor of sugar and sap, and it’s like a familiar smell that reassures and soothes her. She pulls on the main branch, her lower back bumps against the trunk of the fig tree, the dewdrops continue to rain down on her hands, on her face, on her body. There are even very small black ants that are running along her arms as they cling to the belt, and making their way down her body to escape.

It lasts a long time, such a long time that Lalla feels the tendons in her arms have grown as hard as ropes, but her fingers are clenching the cotton belt so tightly that nothing could pry them away. Then suddenly, incredibly, she can feel her body emptying, while her arms pull fiercely on the belt. Very slowly, with the motions of a blind person, Lalla lets herself slip backwards along the cotton belt, her hips and back touch the roots of the fig tree. Air finally enters her lungs and at the same time, she hears the sharp scream of the child who is starting to cry.

On the beach, the red light has turned orange, then the color of gold. The sun must already be touching the rocky hills in the east, in the land of the shepherds. Lalla holds the child in her arms, she cuts the umbilical cord with her teeth, and knots it like a belt around the tiny belly that is jerking with sobs. Very slowly, she crawls over the hard sand toward the sea, kneels in the fluffy foam, and dips the screaming child into the saltwater; she bathes and cleans the baby carefully. Then she returns to the tree, lays the baby in the big brown coat. With the same instinctive gestures that she doesn’t understand, she digs into the sand with her hands, near the roots of the fig tree, and buries the placenta.

Then she lies down at last at the foot of the tree, her head very close to the trunk which is so strong; she opens the coat, takes the baby in her arms, and brings it to her swollen breasts. When the child begins to suck, its tiny little face with closed eyes pushing up against her breast, Lalla stops resisting the fatigue. She looks briefly at the lovely light of day that has just begun, and at the deep blue sea, with its slanting waves like animals running. Her eyes close. She’s not sleeping, but it’s as if she were floating on the surface of the waters, for a long time. She can feel the warm little head pushing up against her breast, wanting to live, sucking her milk greedily. “Hawa, daughter of Hawa,” Lalla thinks, only once, because it’s funny, and makes her feel good, like a smile, after so much suffering. Then she waits, patiently, for someone from the plank and tarpaper Project to come, a young boy crab catcher, an old woman hunting for dead wood, or a little girl who simply loves to walk in the dunes to watch the seabirds. Someone always ends up coming out here, and the shade of the fig tree so peaceful and cool.

Agadir, March 30, 1912

SO THEY CAME for the last time, they appeared on the vast plain, near the sea, at the mouth of the river. They came from all directions, those from the north, the Ida ou Trouma, the Ida ou Tamane, the Aït Daoud, the Meskala, the Aït Hadi, the Ida ou Zemzen, the Sidi Amil, those from Bigoudine, from Amizmiz, from Ichemraren; those from the east, beyond Taroudant, those from Tazenakht, from Ouarzazate, the Aït Kalla, the Assarag, the Aït Kedif, the Amtazguine, the Aït Toumert, the Aït Youss, the Aït Zarhal, the Aït Oudinar, Aït Moudzit, those from the Sarhro Mountains, the Bani Mountains; those from the coast, from Essaouira to Agadir, the fortified city; those from Tiznit, from Ifni, from Aoreora, from Tan-Tan, from Goulimine, the Aït Meloul, the Lahoussine, the Aït Bella, Aït Boukha, the Sidi Ahmed ou Moussa, the Ida Gougmar, the Aït Baha; and above all, those from the far south, the free men of the desert, the Imraguen, the Arib, the Oulad Yahia, the Oulad Delim, the Aroussiyine, the Khalifiya, the Reguibat Sahel, the Sebaa, the peoples of the Chleuh language, the Ida ou Belal, Ida ou Meribat, the Aït ba Amrane.

They gathered together on the riverbed, so numerous they covered the whole valley. But they weren’t warriors for the most part. They were women and children, wounded men, the elderly, all the people who had been fleeing endlessly over the dust tracks, driven by the arrival of the foreign soldiers, and who no longer knew where to go. The sea had stopped them there, before the great city of Agadir.

Most of them didn’t know why they had come there, to the Souss riverbed. Perhaps it was simply hunger, weariness, despair that had led them there, to the mouth of the river, facing the sea. Where could they go? For months, years, they had been wandering in search of a land, a river, a well where they could set up their tents and make corrals for their sheep. Many had died, lost on the trails leading nowhere in the desert around the great city of Marrakech, or in the ravines of the Oued Tadla. Those who had succeeded in fleeing had gone back to the South, but the old wells had gone dry, and the foreign soldiers were everywhere. In the city of Smara, where Ma al-Aïnine’s palace of red stones stood, the desert wind that wears everything away was now blowing. The soldiers of the Christians had slowly closed their wall around the free men of the desert; they occupied the wells of the holy valley of the Saguiet al-Hamra. What did these foreigners want? They wanted the entire earth; they wouldn’t stop until they had devoured everything, that was certain.

The people of the desert had been there for days, south of the fortified city, and they were waiting for something. Ma al-Aïnine’s last warriors, the Berik Allah were mixed in with the mountain tribes; their faces were marked with distress, with forlorn hope, due to the death of Ma al-Aïnine. There was a strange feverish, hungry sheen to their eyes. Each day, the men from the desert looked toward the citadel, where Moulay Sebaa, the Lion, was to appear along with his mounted warriors. But off in the distance, the red walls of the city remained silent; the gates were closed. And there was something threatening about that silence which had lasted for days. Big black birds circled in the blue sky, and at night, the yapping of jackals could be heard.

Nour was there too, alone in the crowd of defeated men. He had gotten used to that loneliness long ago. His father, his mother, and his sisters had gone back to the South, back to the endless trails. But he hadn’t been able to go back, not even after the death of the sheik.

Every evening, lying on the cold earth, he thought of the path upon which Ma al-Aïnine had led his people northward, to new lands, the path the Lion would now follow, to become the true king. For two years now, his body had become hardened to hunger and exhaustion, and his whole being was filled with the desire to set out upon that path which would soon be opened.

Then, in the morning, the rumor spread through the camp: “Moulay Hiba, Moulay Sebaa, the Lion! Our king! Our king!” Shots cracked, and women and children cried out, making their voices quaver. The crowd turned toward the dusty plain, and Nour saw the sheik’s horsemen engulfed in a red cloud.

The cries and the shots drowned out the sound of the horses’ hooves. The red fog rose high into the morning sky, whirling over the river valley. The crowd of warriors ran out to meet the horsemen, firing their long-barreled rifles skyward. They were, for the most part, men from the mountains, Chleuhs wearing their homespun cloaks, wild men, disheveled, eyes blazing. Nour didn’t recognize the warriors of the desert, the blue men who had followed Ma al-Aïnine until his death. Hunger and thirst had not left their mark on these men; they had not been burned by the desert for days and months; they had come from their fields, their villages, without knowing why or against whom they were going to fight.

All day long, the warriors ran across the valley, all the way up to the ramparts of Agadir, as the galloping horses of Moulay Sebaa, the Lion, raised the great red cloud. What did they want? They were just running and shouting, that was all, and the voices of the women and children quavered over the riverbed. At times, Nour caught a glimpse of the horsemen going by in their red cloud, surrounded by flashes of light: the Lion’s horsemen were brandishing their spears.

“Moulay Hiba! Moulay Sebaa, the Lion!” the voices of the children were shouting all around him. Then the horsemen disappeared over on the other side of the plain, by the ramparts of Agadir.

That whole day the valley was filled with jubilation, and with the lip-scorching fire of the sun. The desert wind started blowing around evening time, covering the campsites in a golden fog, hiding the walls of the city. Nour sought shelter under a tree, wrapped in his cloak.

Gradually, the excitement fell, as night did. Cool darkness settled over the desiccate earth at prayer time, when the animals knelt down to protect themselves from the damp of night.

Nour thought again of the summer that would soon begin, of the drought, of the wells, of the slow herds his father would lead out to the salt flats on the other side of the desert, in Oualata, in Ouadane, in Chinchan. He thought of the loneliness of those boundless lands, so remote that all memory of the sea or the mountains is effaced. It had been so long since he had known rest. It was as if there were nothing anywhere but the expanses of dust and stones, ravines, dried rivers, rocks jutting up like knives, and most of all, fear, like a shadow hanging over everything one sees.

At mealtime, when he went to have some bread and millet porridge with the blue men, Nour watched the star-filled night covering the earth. Weariness burned his skin, fever too, throwing its long shivers down his body.

In their makeshift campsite, under the shelters of branches and leaves, the blue men no longer spoke, no longer told the legend of Ma al-Aïnine, no longer sang. Wrapped in their ragged cloaks, they stared into the burning coals, blinking when the wind swept the smoke back. Maybe they weren’t waiting for anything anymore, eyes blurred, hearts beating very slowly.

One after the other, the fires went out, and darkness flooded through the wide valley. In the distance, jutting into the black sea, the city of Agadir blinked weakly. Then Nour lay down on the ground, his head turned toward the lights, and as he did every evening, he thought of the great sheik Ma al-Aïnine, who had been buried in front of the ruined house in Tiznit. They had laid him in the grave, face turned toward the east; in his hands they had placed his only possessions, his holy book, his calamus, his ebony prayer beads. The loose earth tumbled over his body, the red dust of the desert, then they had put down large stones so the jackals wouldn’t dig up the body; and the men had stamped on the earth with their bare feet until it became smooth and hard as a slab of stone. Near the tomb stood a young acacia with white thorns, like the one in front of the house of prayer in Smara.

Then, one after the other, the blue men of the desert, the Berik Allah, the last companions of the Goudfia had knelt on the grave, and had run their hands slowly over the smooth earth, then over their faces, as if to receive one last blessing from the great sheik.

Nour thought of that night, when all of the men had left the plain of Tiznit, and he had remained alone with Lalla Meymuna near the tomb. In the cold night, he had listened to the voice of the old woman crying interminably inside the ruined house, like a song. He had fallen asleep on the ground, lying next to the tomb, and his body had remained motionless, dreamless, as if he too were dead. The next morning, and the following days, he had hardly left the tomb, sitting on the burning earth, enveloped in his woolen cloak, his eyes and throat burning with fever. Already, the wind was blowing dust onto the smooth earth of the tomb, gently obliterating it. Then the fever had seized his whole body, and he had lost consciousness. Some women from Tiznit had taken him home and cared for him while he was delirious, on the verge of death. When he recovered, after several weeks, he walked back to the ruined house where Ma al-Aïnine had died. But no one was there; Lalla Meymuna had gone back to her tribe, and the wind had blown so hard, carrying so much sand, he wasn’t able to find the grave.

Perhaps that was the way things were meant to be, thought Nour; perhaps the great sheik had gone back to his true domain, lost in the desert sands, swept away in the wind. Now Nour looked out on the vast stretch of the Souss River, in the night, barely lit by the haze of the galaxy, the great glow that is the mark of blood left by the angel Gabriel’s lamb, according to what people say. It was the same silent land as that around Tiznit, and Nour sometimes thought he was hearing the long weeping chant of Lalla Meymuna, but it was probably the sound of a jackal yapping in the night. The spirit of Ma al-Aïnine was still alive there; it was covering the entire earth, mingling with the sand and the dust, hiding in the crevices or glimmering faintly on each sharp stone.

Nour could feel his gaze, out there in the sky, in the dark spots on the earth. He could feel his gaze upon him, as he had once before, in the square in Smara, and a shudder ran over his body. The gaze entered him, hollowing out its dizziness. What did he want to say? Maybe he was asking something, just like that, mutely, out on that plain, encompassing the men in his light. Maybe he was asking the men to come join him, where he was, mixed in with the gray earth, scattered in the wind, turned to dust… Nour fell into a motionless, dreamless sleep, buoyed by the immortal gaze.

When they heard the sound of the cannons for the first time, the blue men and the warriors started running toward the hills, to look out on the sea. The noise shook the sky like thunder. Alone, off the coast of Agadir, a large battleship, like a monstrous slow animal, was spitting out flashes. The noise came a long time afterward, a long rumble, followed by the crashing sound of shells exploding inside the city. In a few minutes, the high walls of red stone were no more than a pile of rubble from which black smoke rose. Then the inhabitants spilled out of the broken walls, men, women, children, bloody and screaming. They filled the river valley, running away from the sea as fast as they could, in the throes of panic.

The short flame flashed several times from the cannons of the cruiser Cosmao, and the ripping sound of the shells exploding in the Kasbah of Agadir rolled out over the entire valley of the Souss River. The black smoke of the burning city rose high into the blue sky, covering the camp of nomads with its shadow.

Then the mounted warriors of Moulay Sebaa, the Lion, appeared. They crossed the riverbed, falling back toward the hills in front of the inhabitants of the city. In the distance, the cruiser Cosmao was immobile on the metal-colored sea, and its cannons turned slowly toward the valley where the people of the desert were fleeing. But the flame didn’t flare again at the end of the cannons. There was a long silence, with only the sound of the people running and the cries of the animals, while the black smoke continued to rise into the sky.

When the soldiers of the Christians appeared before the crumbled ramparts of the city, no one understood at first who they were. Perhaps for a second even Moulay Sebaa and his men believed they were the warriors from the North that Moulay Hafid, the Leader of the Faithful, had sent for the holy war.

But it was Colonel Mangin’s four battalions, having come on a forced march to the rebel city of Agadir — four thousand men wearing the uniforms of African infantrymen, Senegalese, Sudanese, Saharans, armed with Lebel rifles and a score of Nordenfeldt machine guns. The soldiers advanced slowly toward the bank of the river, fanning out in a half-circle, while on the other side of the river, at the foot of the rocky hills, Moulay Sebaa’s cavalry of three thousand began turning in a circle, churning up a large whirling cloud, raising the red dust up into the sky. Moulay Sebaa, wearing his white cloak, standing at a distance from the cloud, anxiously watched the long line of enemy soldiers, like a column of insects marching over the dried earth. He knew that the battle was already lost, as in the past at Bou Denib, when the bullets of the black infantrymen had cut down more than a thousand of his mounted warriors from the South. Sitting still on his horse, which was quivering with impatience, he watched the foreigners advancing slowly toward the river, as if on maneuver. Several times, Moulay Sebaa tried to give the order to retreat, but the warriors from the mountains weren’t listening to his orders. They were spurring their horses on to gallop in that frantic circle, drunk with dust and the smell of gunpowder, letting out cries in their savage language, invoking the names of their saints. When the circling was over, they would jump into the trap which had been laid for them; they were all going to die.

Moulay Sebaa could do nothing more then, and tears of pain were already filling his eyes. On the other side of the dried riverbed, Colonel Mangin had prepared the machine guns on either flank of his army, atop the rocky hills. When the Moorish cavalry charged toward the center, just when they were crossing the riverbed, the crossfire of the machine guns would decimate them, and then it would simply be a matter of finishing them off with bayonets.

There was another heavy silence, as the horsemen stopped circling on the plain. Colonel Mangin took a look with his binoculars, trying to understand: were they going to retreat? Then it would mean marching again for days over that deserted land, pursuing that fleeing, exasperating horizon. But Moulay Sebaa remained motionless on his horse, because he knew that the end was near. The mountain warriors, the sons of the tribal chieftains had come here to fight, not to flee. They had stopped circling to pray before the charge.

Then everything went very quickly in the cruel, noonday sun. The three thousand horsemen charged in close formation, as if for a cavalcade, brandishing their long spears. When they reached the riverbed, the non-commissioned officers in charge of the machine guns glanced at Colonel Mangin, who had raised his arm. He let the first horsemen through, then suddenly brought his arm down, and the steel barrels started firing their streams of bullets, six hundred a minute, with a sinister sound that hacked the air and echoed through the entire valley, all the way out to the mountains. Does time exist when a few minutes are enough to kill a thousand men, a thousand horses? When the horsemen realized they were trapped, that they would never get through that wall of bullets, they tried to retreat, but it was too late. The bursts of machine gun fire swept over the riverbed, and the bodies of men and horses continued to fall, as if a large invisible wave were mowing them down. Streams of blood ran over the smooth stones, mingled with the thin trickles of water. Then silence fell again, while the last horsemen escaped toward the hills, covered with blood, on their horses whose hair was bristling in fear.

Unhurriedly, the army of black soldiers began marching along the riverbed, company after company, with the officers and Colonel Mangin in the lead. They took the eastern trail, in the direction of Taroudant, Marrakech, in pursuit of Moulay Sebaa, the Lion. They left without even glancing at the site of the massacre, without looking at the broken bodies of the men sprawled on the shingles, or the horses on their backs, or the vultures that were already on the banks of the river. They didn’t look at the ruins of Agadir either, the black smoke still rising into the blue sky. In the distance, the cruiser Cosmao was gliding slowly out on the metal-colored sea, heading northward.

Then the silence ceased, and the cries of the living could be heard, the wounded men and animals, the women, children, like a single interminable wail, like a song. It was a sound filled with horror and suffering that rose from all sides at once, on the plain and on the riverbed.

Now Nour was walking over the shingles, amongst the felled bodies. The voracious flies and wasps were already buzzing in black clouds above the cadavers, and Nour felt nausea tightening in his throat.

With very slow movements, as if they were emerging from a dream, women, men, children, drew back the brush and walked over the riverbed without speaking. All day long, until nightfall, they carried the bodies of the men to the riverbanks to bury them. When night came, they lit fires on each bank, to ward off the jackals and wild dogs. The women of the villages came, bringing bread and sour milk, and Nour ate and drank with relief. Then he slept, lying on the ground, without even thinking of death.

The next day, at the crack of dawn, the men and women dug more graves for the warriors, then they also buried their horses. Over the graves, they placed large rocks from the river.

When everything was finished, the last blue men started walking again, on the southern trail, the one that is so long that it seems to never end. Nour was walking with them, barefoot, with nothing but his woolen cloak and a little bread tied in a moist cloth. They were the last Imazighen, the last free men, the Taubalt, the Tekna, the Tidrarin, the Aroussiyine, the Sebaa, the Reguibat Sahel, the last survivors of the Berik Allah, those who are blessed by God. They had nothing but what their eyes saw, what their bare feet touched. Before them, the flat earth stretched out like the sea, glistening with salt. It undulated, created white cities with magnificent walls, with domes that burst like bubbles. The sun burned their faces and their hands, the light hollowed out its dizziness at the time of day when the shadows of men are like bottomless wells.

Each evening, their bleeding lips sought the cool wells, the brackish mud of alkaline rivers. Then, the cold night enveloped them, crushed their limbs and took their breath away, weighed down on their necks. There was no end to freedom, it was as vast as the wide world, beautiful and cruel as the light, gentle as the eyes of water. Each day, at the first light of dawn, the free men went back toward their home, toward the south, toward the place where no one else could live. Each day, with the same motions, they erased the traces of their fires, they buried their excrement. Turned toward the desert, they carried out their wordless prayer. They drifted away, as if in a dream, disappeared.