J.M. le Clézio - Desert

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.

Then they smoke, one cigarette for the two of them, leaning their backs up against the blue tarp and gazing out into nothingness in the direction of the dark waters of the harbor and the cement-colored sky.

“How old are you?” Radicz asks.

“Seventeen, but I’ll be eighteen soon,” Lalla says.

“I’m going to be fourteen next month,” Radicz says.

He thinks for a minute, furrowing his eyebrows.

“Have you ever … gone to bed with a man?”

Lalla is surprised at the question.

“No — I mean yes, why?”

Radicz is so preoccupied that he forgets to pass the cigarette to Lalla; he takes drag after drag, without inhaling the smoke.

“I haven’t done it,” he says.

“You haven’t done what?”

“I’ve never gone to bed with a woman.”

“You’re too young.”

“That’s not true!” says Radicz. He gets angry and stutters a little. “It’s not true! All my friends have done it, and there are even some who’ve got their own woman, and they make fun of me, they say I’m a faggot, because I don’t have a woman.”

He thinks some more, smoking his cigarette.

“But I don’t care what they say. I don’t think it’s right to sleep with a woman like that, just to — to act big, to joke around. It’s like cigarettes. You know, I never smoke in front of the others back at the hotel, so they think I’ve never smoked and that makes them laugh too. But that’s because they don’t know, but it’s all the same to me, I’d rather they didn’t know.”

Now he gives the cigarette back to Lalla. It’s smoked almost all the way down to the end. Lalla takes just one puff and then crushes it out on the ground on the wharf.

“You know I’m going to have a baby?”

She doesn’t really know why she’s telling that to Radicz. He looks at her for a long time without answering anything. There is something dark in his eyes, but it suddenly grows bright.

“That’s good,” he says seriously. “That’s good, I’m very happy.”

He’s so happy he can’t sit still anymore. He gets to his feet, paces around out by the water, then comes back toward Lalla.

“Will you come and see me over there, where I live?”

“If you like,” says Lalla.

“You know, it’s a long way away, you have to take the intercity bus, and then walk for a long time, toward the storage tanks. We’ll go together whenever you want to, because otherwise you’ll get lost.”

He runs off. The sun has gone down now; it’s not far from the line of big buildings that can be seen on the other side of the wharves. The freighters are still motionless, like tall rusty cliffs, and flights of gulls are swooping slowly past them, dancing above the masts.

THERE ARE DAYS when Lalla can hear the sounds of fear. She doesn’t really know what it is, like a heavy pounding on thick plates of metal, and also a muffled rumbling that doesn’t come through her ears, but through the soles of her feet and echoes inside her body. Maybe it’s loneliness, and hunger too, hunger for gentleness, for light, for songs, hunger for everything.

As soon as she goes out the door of the Hotel Sainte-Blanche, after finishing her work, Lalla feels the excessively white light of the sky falling upon her, making her stumble. She pulls the collar of her brown coat up as high as she can around her head, she covers her hair all the way down to her eyebrows with Aamma’s gray scarf, but the whiteness of the sky still reaches her, and the emptiness of the streets also. It’s like a feeling of nausea, rising from the pit of her stomach, coming up into her throat, filling her mouth with bitterness. Lalla sits down quickly, anywhere, without trying to understand, without worrying about the people looking at her, because she’s afraid of fainting again. She fights against it with all her might, tries to slow the beating of her heart, the movements of her entrails. She puts both of her hands on her belly, so that the gentle warmth of her hands travels through her dress, goes inside of her, till it reaches the child. That’s how she used to ease those terrible pains that would come to her lower abdomen, like an animal gnawing from the inside. Then she rocks herself a little, back and forth, sitting on the edge of the sidewalk like that, next to the stopped cars.

People go by her without stopping. They slow down a little, as if they were going to come over to her, but when Lalla looks up, there’s so much suffering in her eyes that they hurry away, because it frightens them.

After a moment, the pain subsides under Lalla’s hands. She can breathe again more freely. In spite of the cold wind, she’s covered with sweat, and her damp dress is sticking to her back. Maybe it’s the sound of fear that you don’t hear with your ears, but with your feet and your whole body, that is emptying the streets of the city.

Lalla goes back up toward the old town, slowly climbing the steps of the crumbling stairway where the stinking sewer runs. At the top of the stairway, she turns left, and walks down Rue du Bon-Jesus. On the old scabby walls, there are signs marked in chalk, letters and incomprehensible half-erased drawings. On the ground, there are several blood-red stains, drawing flies. The red color rings in Lalla’s head, making a sirenlike noise, a sharp whistling that digs out a hole, empties her mind. Slowly, with great difficulty, Lalla steps over the first stain, the second, the third. There are strange white things mixed in with the red stains, like cartilage, broken bones, skin, and the siren rings even louder in Lalla’s head. She tries to run down the sloping street, but the stones are damp and slippery, especially when you’re wearing rubber sandals. Rue du Timon, there are more signs written in chalk on the old walls, words, maybe names? Then a naked woman with breasts like two eyes, and Lalla thinks of the obscene magazine unfolded on the unmade bed in the hotel room. A little farther along, there is a huge phallus drawn in chalk on an old door, like a grotesque mask.

Lalla keeps on walking, breathing laboriously. Sweat is still running down her forehead, between her shoulder blades, dampening her lower back, stinging her underarms. There’s no one in the streets at this time of day, only a few dogs with their hair bristling, growling as they gnaw on their bones. The windows at street level have grilles or bars on them. Higher up, the shutters are closed, the houses look abandoned. A deathly cold emanates from the air vents, cellars, dark windows. It’s like a breath of death blowing through the streets, filling the filthy recesses at the foot of the walls. Where should she go? Lalla is moving slowly again, she turns right once more, toward the wall of the old house. Lalla is always a little frightened when she sees those large windows with bars over them, because she believes it is a prison where people have died in the past: they even say that at night you can sometimes hear the prisoners moaning behind the bars on the windows. Now she goes down Rue des Pistoles, which is always deserted, and takes Traverse de la Charité to see the strange pink dome she likes so much, through the gray stone gateway. Some days she sits down on the doorstep of a house and stares at the dome that looks like a cloud for a very long time, and she forgets everything, until a woman comes and asks her what she’s doing there and makes her go away.