My mother rarely wore make-up. She’s never bought a brand-name lipstick. When she was well, she’d use an artisanal product that made her cheeks too pink. She’s never heard of foundation or anti-wrinkle creams, let alone cosmetic surgery. Wouldn’t know it exists. Someone told her that one of her nieces had had a nose job and a breast job. She laughed and asked God to forgive her. ‘How can you touch God’s work? It’s heresy.’ Then she added: ‘That’s why she has suddenly aged! It’s God’s punishment!’
My mother knows that her body has succumbed to disease, but she doesn’t complain, doesn’t hanker after her lost youth. She has no regrets, just a slight weariness at having to come to terms with a weak body and increasingly blurred eyesight. She doesn’t hide her age. And has no idea when she was born. ‘I’m old, I’m at death’s door. That’s how it is, it’s our fate. I’m not afraid, just tired of waiting. But I need you all there when I go. That’s all I ask!’
I’ve sometimes tried to work out how old she is by cross-referencing people’s accounts with historical events. Married the first time at a very young age, her memory of that time is vague. The fact is, she doesn’t care about the passing of time. She just says that sometimes she ran away from her husband’s house to go and play dolls with her cousins. In the evening, her husband would come and fetch her but didn’t have the heart to reprimand her. She must have been fifteen. Of course, he was rather older. They hadn’t met before the wedding night. That was how it was in those days, a matter of tradition, of modesty. No one spoke about it. Who would have dared question that sort of custom? In her family, not one woman of her generation rebelled against it.
I remember the afternoons when the women would gather in our big house in Fez. They’d drink tea and bake cakes, they’d be laughing and joking, using swear words, and forget I was there. I’d pretend to be asleep. They referred to men’s penises. Some of them got to their feet and danced. My mother was very reserved. Her younger sister was more daring. Using the almond paste for the gazelle-horn biscuits, she once modelled a huge penis and testicles, rolled it in flour and sent it to the ovens. The women fought over who would eat it. I laughed quietly in my corner.
I’ve always loved sitting beside my mother, listening to her. Before, she’d tell me about her life when she was young, or the difficulties of married life. She didn’t resent my father, but was sad that he showed her so little affection. She noticed how well her sister was treated by her husband and it made her slightly envious. But very quickly, as if she’d offended fate, she’d ask God’s forgiveness and pray for His help to endure difficult things: ‘Lord, I know I had a bad thought. I strayed into ignorance and followed the devil, so please forgive me. Forgive this woman, a holy man’s daughter, who prays every day and asks your blessing. I’m usually more careful; I avoid bad words and bad thoughts.’
Now, when I sit beside her, we talk for a few minutes, then lapse into silence. She dozes a little. I clear my throat to wake her up. She opens her eyes and forgets we’d been chatting. She asks after the children again, what I do, where I live and when the family will all be together. She goes back to sleep. I watch her, suppressing enormous sadness. Mother’s withdrawing. She’s dying a little. I watch her chest rising and falling. I know her heart could give out at any moment, perhaps while she’s asleep. She’s often spoken of that gentle way of dying. One of her cousins died after the evening prayer. In the morning, she didn’t wake up. My mother says she was a good and virtuous woman. God called her to Him in the silence of the night, without making her suffer. Saying that, she’s expressing her wish to go the same way. My grandmother died in her sleep too. She was very old. Her funeral was more like a celebration, a party.
Pain and disease are worming their way into her body: the moment of death, the slowness of time and things. That’s what my mother fears most. She says that all things come from God. ‘It is His will. I’m just a weak little thing in His great light. I pray, I recite God’s verses, the words of His holy Prophet. I wait patiently but I can’t bear the suffering. My skin hurts all over; my limbs ache. And I’m bored.’
Boredom, that’s the real enemy. God has nothing to do with it. Mother’s bored because she doesn’t know how to read or write. Again I think of Roland’s mother, ninety-two years old and never misses a game of bridge. Last year, she fainted at the foot of the Pyramids. It was the heat and the sudden emotion. But she’s still reading and she watches some television programmes. The next day she phones her son to discuss them with him. But Roland goes to bed very early and doesn’t watch arts programmes, which are on late. His mother reproaches him for it and secretly laughs at him.
One day I told my mother all the things my friend’s mother does at ninety plus. She wasn’t surprised: ‘That’s normal. Those people know how to live. They haven’t spent their lives in kitchens and washhouses. We never used to have machines at home. I’d do everything by hand. I had help, but I’d often end up with women who knew less than I did and they’d get on my nerves. Your friend’s mother must have had the wherewithal to live comfortably. But we were always hard up. Your father had no commercial sense, yet he kept rushing into bad business ventures. He always said that next time it would work out. We’d get by on just the essentials.’
Perhaps Roland’s mother had known other difficulties. My mother never looked at another man. Nor did my sister or my aunt. That’s just how it was, a question of habit and of upbringing too. In her family, you married for life. You didn’t divorce. You didn’t remarry. The wife of one of my father’s friends was caught in bed with her lover. She was repudiated, sent away without a cent. My mother was horrified by this adulterous woman’s audacity. She spoke of her pityingly. She couldn’t comprehend what she had done or the risks she had taken. It was beyond her.
Roland believes that relations with one’s parents are bound to have conflicts. He speaks warmly of his mother, but writes about her with an acuity that borders on malice. Describing the time he visited her at the Résidence de Rumine in Lausanne, he wrote: ‘There, a crabby, temperamental old biddy treats me as if my sole purpose in life is to be endlessly at her beck and call. She orders me to phone her friends. They must know that her beloved son has finally come to pay her a visit.’ He sees himself as a ‘hypocritical son’, ‘cruel when he writes’, but ‘kind in day-to-day life’.
It is true that ‘blood ties corrupt everything’. But we agree to play the game even to the point of accepting this nasty side of ourselves. I haven’t felt the need to be hypocritical, or cynical and cruel. My mother’s disarming. Her gaze, her implicit emotional blackmail, her increasingly nebulous demands don’t make me feel sadness or compassion but fill me with irrational, selfless love.
As a keen reader of Nietzsche, I’m sometimes shocked by his tumultuous relationships with his sister and his mother. He says he regretted developing the concept of ‘eternal recurrence’ because it might allow those ‘infernal machines’ to come back. It’s easy to imagine Nietzsche, born of an unknown mother, living with no family, alone on his mountain peak, the image of Zarathustra. But when he was annoyed with his mother, he’d write letters asking for the sausages she used to cook for him when he was a child!