I only listened to these learned explanations with half an ear, because it was the sight of the roofs in particular which filled my gaze: on that autumn afternoon, the sun was made milder by thick clouds, and everywhere thousands of people were sitting on the roofs as if on terraces, talking to one another, shouting, drinking, laughing, their voices mingling in a tremendous hubbub. All around them, hanging up and stretched out, was the washing of the rich and the poor billowing in the breeze, like the sails of the same boat.
An exhilarating rumour, a vessel which sails through storm after storm, and which is sometimes wrecked, is that not what a city is? During my adolescence it often happened that I passed whole days gazing at this scene, daydreaming without restraint. The day of my entry to Fez was only a passing rapture. The journey from Melilla had exhausted me, and I was in a hurry to reach Khali’s house. Of course I had no recollection of my uncle, since he had emigrated to Barbary when I was only a year old, nor of my grandmother, who had left with him, the oldest of her sons. But I was sure that their warm welcome would make us forget the horrors of the journey.
Warm it certainly was, for Salma and myself. While she disappeared completely into the all-enveloping veils of her mother, I found myself in the arms of Khali, who looked at me for a long time without saying a word before planting on my forehead the most affectionate of kisses.
‘He loves you as a man loves the son of his sister,’ my mother used to tell me. ‘More than that, since he only has daughters, he considers you his own son.’
He was to prove the truth of this to me on several occasions. But, that day, his solicitude had awful consequences for me.
After having put me down on the ground, Khali turned towards Muhammad.
‘I have been waiting for you for a long time,’ he said in a tone full of reproach, since no one was unaware of the embarrassing idyll which had delayed the weigh-master’s departure.
Nevertheless, the two men embraced each other. Then my uncle turned for the first time towards Warda, who had until then kept herself in the background. His gaze did not alight upon her, but veered off into the distance. He had chosen not to see her. She was not welcome in his house. Even Mariam, adorable, smiling, chubby little girl, did not have the right to the least display of affection.
‘I dreaded this welcome, and this was why I was so unhappy when Warda appeared on the boat,’ my mother explained to me later. ‘I had always put up with Muhammad’s misdemeanours in silence. His behaviour had humiliated me in front of all the neighbourhood, and in the end all Granada made fun of his passions. In spite of that, I always told myself: “Salma, you are his wife and you owe him obedience; one day, when he is weary of fighting, he will return to you!” While waiting I resigned myself to bow my head patiently. My brother, so proud, so haughty, could not do so. He would certainly have forgotten the past if the three of us had arrived alone. But to welcome under his roof the Rumiyya whom all the world accused of having bewitched his brother-in-law would have made him the laughing stock of all the émigrés from Granada, of whom there were not less than six thousand in Fez, all of whom knew and respected him.’
Apart from myself, showered with attentions and already dreaming of delicious little treats, my family barely dared to breathe.
‘It was as if we were taking part in a ceremony which a baleful jinn had changed from a marriage into a funeral,’ said Muhammad. ‘I always considered your uncle like a brother, and I wanted to shout aloud that Warda had fled from her village to find me, risking her life, that she had left the land of the Rumis to come to us, that we no longer had the right to consider her as a captive, that we did not even have the right to call her Rumiyya. But no sound issued from my lips. I could do no more than turn round and go out, in the silence of the grave.’
Salma followed him without a moment’s hesitation, although she was almost fainting. Of them all, she was the most affected, even more than Warda. The concubine had been humiliated, certainly. But at least she had the consolation of knowing that henceforth Muhammad could never abandon her without losing face, and while she was trembling in her corner she had the soothing feeling of having been the victim of injustice. A feeling which wounds, but which puts balm on wounds, a feeling which sometimes kills, but one which much more often gives women powerful reasons to live and to struggle. Salma had none of this.
‘I felt myself crushed by adversity. For me that day was the Day of Judgement; I was about to lose your father after having lost the city of my birth and the house in which I had given birth.’
So we got back on to our mules without knowing which direction to take. Muhammad muttered to himself as he hammered the beast’s withers with his fist:
‘By the earth that covers my father and my ancestors, if I had been told that I would be received in such a fashion in this kingdom of Fez, I would never have left Granada.’
His words rang out in our frightened ears.
‘To leave, to abandon one’s house and lands, to run across mountains and seas, only to encounter closed doors, bandits on the roads and the fear of contagion!’
It was true that since our arrival in the land of Africa misfortunes and miseries had not ceased to rain down upon us, indeed since the very moment our galley drew up alongside the quay at Melilla. We thought that we should find there a haven of Islam, where reassuring hands would be stretched out towards us to wipe away the fatigue of the old and the tears of the weak. But only anxious questions had greeted us on the quayside: ‘Is it true that the Castilians are coming? Have you seen their galleys?’ For those who questioned us thus there was no question of preparing the defences of the port, but rather of not wasting any time before taking flight. Seeing that it was for us, the refugees, to offer words of comfort, we were only the more anxious to put a mountain or a desert between ourselves and this coast which presented itself so openly to the invaders.
A man came up to us. He was a muleteer, he said, and he wanted to leave for Fez immediately. If we wished, he would hire his services to us for a modest sum, a few dozen silver dirhams. Wishing to leave Melilla before nightfall, and probably tempted by the low price, Muhammad accepted without bargaining. However, he asked the muleteer to take the coast road as far as Bedis before striking due south towards Fez; but the man had a better idea, a short cut which, he swore, would save us two whole days. He went that way every month, he knew every bump like the back of his mule. He was so persuasive that half an hour after having disembarked we were already on our way, my father and me on one animal, my mother on another with most of the luggage, and Warda and Mariam on another, the muleteer walking alongside us with his son, an unpleasant urchin of about twelve, barefoot, with filthy fingers and a shifty look.
We had hardly gone three miles when two horsemen veiled in blue suddenly came into view in front of us, holding curved daggers in their hands. As if they had only been waiting for a signal, the muleteer and his son made off as fast as their legs would carry them. The bandits came closer. Seeing that they only had to deal with one man protecting two women and two children, and thus feeling themselves in complete control, they began to run experienced hands over the load on the backs of the mules. Their first trophy was a mother-of-pearl casket in which Salma had unwisely packed all her jewellery. Then they began to unpack one superb silk dress after another, as well as an embroidered sheet which had been part of my mother’s trousseau.
Then, going up to Warda, one of the bandits commanded her: