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.