As the corpse passed by, the flies left the restaurant table and followed it flying in droves, although they returned after a few minutes.
The small group of mourners - all of them men and boys, not a single woman - made their way through the market, through the piles of grenades, through the cabs and camels, with mournful voices chanting a short song, repeated over and over again. What really attracts the flies is that the corpses here are never put in a coffin, only wrapped in a piece of coarse cloth and carried on wooden legs on the shoulders of four friends of the deceased. When the friends arrive at the place where he is to be buried, they dig an oblong hole, half a meter deep, in which they place the body and then cover it with clods of parched earth, like crushed brick. There is no gravestone, no name, nothing to identify the presence of anyone. The burial site is a vast expanse of barren earth, like an abandoned lot, where nothing has been built. After a month or two, no one has the slightest certainty as to where their relatives are buried.
When one walks through a city like this - two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand own literally nothing but the rags that cover them - when one sees how people live, and even how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe that one walks among human beings. All colonial empires have indeed been built on this reality. The people have dark, dark faces; besides, there are so many of them! Are they really as flesh and blood as oneself? Do they have a name of their own? Or are they made only of a sort of undifferentiated paste, of a brownish hue, as individuated as bees or other insects living in colonies? They emerge from the earth, sweat and starve for a few years, and then sink back into the nameless mounds of cemeteries, with no one noticing that they are gone. And even the graves become blurred, soon blurred in the ground. Sometimes, when you go for a walk, as you walk among the prickly pears, you notice that the ground is uneven, and only a certain regularity in the bulges of the ground tells you that you are, in fact, walking on the skeletons.
I went to feed one of the gazelles in the public gardens.
Gazelles are almost the only animals that are appetizing to eat when they are still alive. In fact, it's hard to look at their rump without thinking of a good mint sauce. The gazelle I was feeding seemed to read my thoughts, for although she took the crust of bread I was holding out to her, it was clear to me that she didn't like me at all. He nibbled the bread in a hurry, lowered his testicle and tried to lunge at me; nibbled again, made another attempt to lunge. He probably thought that if I moved a little away, the bread would be within his reach, suspended in the air.
An Arab laborer working on the path put aside his heavy hoe and approached us. He looked from the gazelle to the crust of bread and from the bread to the gazelle with a sort of quiet perplexity, as if he had never seen anything like it. At the end, he addressed us shyly, in French:
-I was just about ready to eat some of that bread.
I broke off a piece, gave it to him and he gratefully kept it in some secret place under his rags. The man is a municipal employee.
When you walk through the Jewish quarter you get a good idea of what the ghettos of the Middle Ages were like. Under Muslim rule, Jews were only allowed to own land in certain restricted areas, and after many centuries of such treatment they have stopped worrying about overcrowding. Many of the streets are nowhere near two meters wide, the houses have no windows, children with eyes irritated by some infection swarm everywhere in unheard-of numbers, like swarms of flies. In the middle of the street there is almost always a stream of urine.
In the bazaar, large families of Jews, all dressed in black robes and little black skullcaps, work in dreary, fly-infested squatting rooms that look more like caves. There is a carpenter sitting cross-legged at a prehistoric lathe, turning chair legs at breakneck speed. He turns the lathe with a bow held in his right hand, and guides the chisel with his left foot. Thanks to the fact that he has spent his whole life in this posture, his left leg is completely bent, deformed. Next to him is his grandson, six years old, who already knows the basics of the trade.
I was walking past the boilermakers' stalls when someone noticed that I had just lit a cigarette. On the spot, out of the dark holes all around came a frenzied rush of Jews, many of them already grandfathers, with long gray beards, all of them in their early twenties, and all of them with long gray beards, and all of them in their early thirties.