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.