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.