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.