She had to be nice to them, smile and come out with all the traditional platitudes: ‘Today’s a very special day. You light up our house, you fill it with your goodness, may God give life to those who behold you. Please bear with us, accept us as we are, we haven’t adequately prepared for your visit. Forgive us, this is a special day, a very special day,’ and so on.
She’d trot out the words, thinking of the huge amount of work this impromptu visit would entail. She had no choice, what could she do? Those who come to your house require your protection, your hospitality. Sometimes they’d be members of her husband’s family and she’d welcome them with the same warmth, the same smile as if they were her own relatives. She’d overdo things because she couldn’t bear the slightest criticism from her husband or from her mother-in-law. It was a question of dignity.
She knew she was being tested. How does the new little bride receive guests? We’ll find out straight away, we’ll turn up at her home without warning …
She’d be riddled with anxiety that she wasn’t up to the mark. Mother enjoyed entertaining but not when she was unprepared. A stickler for rules and traditions, she was afraid that she wouldn’t have enough food, she’d be shamed. Even yesterday, she made me reiterate my promise to arrange a sumptuous funeral for her: ‘If you take care of it, I know you’ll do things properly, make it a real occasion. You are generous and I love you for that, I always have. You’ve always had a special place deep in my heart. You have to promise me, so I can depart with one less thing to worry about!’
Yesterday was one of her lucid days. She went over all the things she’d said that hadn’t made sense: ‘Do you know, son, I thought your father was still alive and I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t come to see me. Oh, my mind can’t keep hold of anything nowadays, it keeps playing tricks on me and I feel so ashamed. I know your father died ten years ago. I know your cousin’s wife died in childbirth thirty years ago. All these dead people flitting around in my head! It must be the diabetes, it must be all the pills I’ve been taking for such a long time …
‘Anyway, I feel good today, everything’s clear, I know what’s going on. But tell me, you’re not going to sell this house, are you? I like it here, I prefer it to the house we had last year, the one by the sea.’ I correct her: ‘No, Yemma, the house by the sea was thirty years ago. Here, where you live, this isn’t a new house.’
‘And this garden: our house didn’t have a garden …’
All this because she’s moved to a different room. From her window she can see an ancient fig tree and a few plants. Before, she lived in the sitting room that gives onto the tiny garden. The door and windows didn’t close properly. It was draughty. The doctor made her change rooms.
My mother cried this morning. She says her children have been taken away from her, that they were wrenched from her while she was nursing them. She always had beautiful breasts and very soft skin. ‘I had one baby on my right breast, another on my left. I was feeding them. They were very hungry. Then a woman dressed in black from head to toe rushed over and pulled them off me. I felt pain right at the root of my breasts, a knife slicing into my flesh. Then the babies went up to heaven; suddenly they were gone. I’ll have to go and look for them.’
Mother’s always been small. My father used to laugh at her. She’d take it badly. One day he called her ‘media mujer’ (half a woman). That made her laugh. These days she doesn’t talk about being short. She talks about her worries, her obsessive attachment to certain objects: her plastic prayer beads brought back from Mecca by one of her daughters-in-law, her glasses, the polished stone for doing her ablutions, her purse in which she keeps a few notes … Keltum must have taken advantage of her memory lapses more than once to extract money from her. Mother’s not in charge of the housekeeping money any more. I don’t know whether Keltum steals because she has an increasing need for money or because it’s a compulsion, a kind of illness. Mother’s often complained she’s been robbed. She says: ‘But I turn a blind eye, it doesn’t matter, as long as they leave my children alone … Money’s nothing, it’s the dirt of life.’
My mother’s never known how to conduct herself with the women who worked in her house. She quickly became very close to them, treated them like family. Then she couldn’t understand why they left her, taking valuable items with them: ‘I treated them like my own — I shared my meals with them, I gave them presents, even some of my dresses, and in return, they cheated me, abandoned me … Country people and mountain people are jealous of city folk, it’s no wonder they lose their heads and begin to steal …’
Last year, alerted by our doctor, my aunt came hurrying over to see her. It was a false alarm. My mother detected something like disappointment on her sister’s face. She thought she could read her mind: ‘I came rushing over, only to find my sister fit as a fiddle. What a waste of my time!’ She didn’t say anything, but the visit was a brief one.
It reminds me of Ozu’s film, Tokyo Story. One of the sons, who’s raced to his father’s bedside, regrets having made an unnecessary journey and says: ‘If he were to die now, that would be quite convenient for my wife and me, it would save us making the journey again!’ When I’m with my family, I sometimes feel as if I’m in an Ozu film. I see them all in black and white. I turn down the sound and close my eyes. For years, my mother’s sister has chosen to make light of things. She likes to joke, and sometimes says hurtful things. Life has been kind to her — she married a rich, very sophisticated man who refused her nothing. Sometimes she’d taunt my mother, criticising her for not travelling abroad, for not demanding her husband give her fine things. Mother couldn’t remind her that we were poor, that we couldn’t afford to live as she did.
All her life, Mother’s been haunted by the fear of losing her house, of finding herself shunted from one city to another, a burden to her sons, the last straw for her daughters-in-law, yet another worry for her daughter who’d suffered from chronic depression since losing her husband. She remembered her own mother’s final years, when she’d lived with one of her sons, who died prematurely, so then she was taken in by her daughter. She’d lost her ‘place’, her dignity: no longer in her own home, she stayed in other people’s. It wasn’t the same, no matter how kind they were.
She saw her mother weeping and complaining that she wasn’t getting any attention, she was taken for granted, she suffered from loneliness and a lack of consideration. She was oversensitive. Which wasn’t surprising in a very elderly, obsessive woman, nostalgic for the days when she’d lived like a queen.
5
This morning, she’s looking for her very fine, gold-embroidered cherbil, the pretty babouche slippers worn by young brides. ‘Where have my cherbil gone, my beautiful golden cherbil, embroidered all over by the hand of Moishe, the rabbi’s son, the great expert in gold thread? My cherbil, it must be Keltum that’s stolen them from me, she steals and then hides the things she takes under the bed. As soon as I close my eyes, she calls her children or her grandchildren and gives them the things she’s collected to take home. My cherbil, my beautiful cherbil …’
The drawing up of the marriage certificate takes place on a Friday, after the midday prayer. Two aduls come in, wearing white djellabas, red felt tarbouches — the nationalists’ emblem — and delicate yellow babouches. They are followed by the male relatives of the bridegroom and the men from my mother’s family. It’s a gathering of men; the women remain hidden from view in adjoining rooms. They watch the ceremony from behind the curtain, peeping discreetly through a chink. The certificate is drawn up in silence. Bride and groom are asked to give their full names and dates of birth. They give the approximate year. This is Fez, in 1936. Moroccans do not have public records. People know each other and have no need to check birth dates. They say: ‘He was born the year of the great drought,’ or ‘It must have been when the French had just arrived in Morocco,’ ‘He was born the same year as the Sultan’s son, do you remember?’ ‘It was springtime …’ Or again, without naming my mother, they said: ‘Moulay Ahmed’s daughter was born the year it snowed in Fez,’ then they’d talk about that rare event. People had never seen snow, so white, so strange. They slithered about, fell over and then struggled to stand up again, laughing. Then, one morning, the snow vanished — not completely — it melted into the mud and turned to slush. ‘Yes, I remember,’ says Moulay Ahmed. ‘We were very cold, we weren’t used to snow. That was the day my daughter — God keep and protect her — came into the world. God chose that day to bring light to my home.’ Then they turn to the bridegroom’s father. He hesitates, and then says: ‘My son — may God make him a man, a true man — was born the day the kissaria went on strike. The Christians moved in and no one wanted them. So it must have been 1916 — that’s right, twenty years ago.’