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.