“When is mama dying, life is go all black.” Fadila tells her again about her mother, about her own sorrow when she died. Édith says, dully, “She lived a long life, she was old.”
“Yes,” nods Fadila. “Is sixty.”
Her mother died a gentle death, the kind she would like to have, she says. She was in Casablanca, with her granddaughter Aïcha, who was twenty at the time and had been married for a while already. She was fine. She was to have left a few days earlier to go back to be with Fadila, with whom she was living in Rabat, but Aïcha had insisted she stay on a bit longer until her mother-in-law came back from Mecca “with things for her.”
Fadila’s mother had agreed to postpone her departure. The “hadja” came home, told them all about her pilgrimage, and they listened. Everyone had dinner and went to bed. The grandmother had planned to leave the next morning. She got up at dawn and said her prayer. But when she went to get dressed, she couldn’t. She went to rouse Aïcha, and Aïcha realized something was wrong. They fussed over her. “Don’t worry,” said the grandmother, “I’m dying.” She lay down, said her prayers, very calmly, and died.
Fadila’s great regret is that they were not able to reach her in time for her to see her mother again before the burial. In Islam the burial takes place very soon after death. “If is die in the morning, has to burying before evening prayer.” She knows that it is different for Christians, that they let a few days go by. “Is be sure the person is really dead,” she says, evoking a fear that Édith knew, from her reading, had been prevalent in bygone eras, but which seemed to have disappeared in their own.
“What sort of work did you do in Rabat?”
Fadila had been the housekeeper for a French couple with three children. People who ran a café. “Is Jewish, but is very nice,” she says. She raised their children. She spent more than twelve hours a day with this family, and that is why she is grateful to her own mother for having come to keep house for her and take care of the children while they were little.
“Your daughters got married very young,” says Édith.
“No. Aïcha is eighteen, Zora seventeen.”
“That’s not exactly old. You said you found it so hard, getting married when you were still a girl—wouldn’t you have preferred for them to wait a bit?”
“Girls is have to getting married young,” says Fadila firmly, “otherwise is going around with boys, is no good.”
“You were twenty-five when you were on your own with your children and went to work in Rabat?”
“Twenty.”
“You were twenty and you’d already been married three times?”
“No, is third is after, in Rabat. I’m no luck with husbands.” She changes her tone: “Is ironing to do. Gotta go.”
However willingly she speaks of her mother, she will only talk about her husbands if Édith asks her about them, and then she quickly changes the subject.
16
Ramadan has begun. Fadila is in a bad mood. She works fewer hours, and leaves earlier. She has to finish cooking before breaking the fast, which is set for seven in the evening these days. And the ritual meal takes a long time to prepare. She really has no time at all for reading and writing.
One morning she calls to say she won’t be coming this Tuesday. She had an upset stomach all night. “Is lady giving me Ramadan cakes is making someone in Morocco.”
Cakes that keep one awake all night long, from the country where Fadila cannot go without being sick.
The following week, her upset stomach is better, so she comes to do the ironing. But she is still in a black mood. Her back aches. Every year it’s the same thing, she says. She cannot stand fasting.
Édith asks Fadila whether, given the fact that sick people are exempt from fasting, and that not being able to drink anything makes her sick, she could not exempt herself from fasting, or at least allow herself to drink. Fadila does not grasp this casuistry, is shocked, even: “I no sick, since I working. If you working, you no sick!”
It is Fadila who comes, once she has finished ironing, to sit by Édith and say, “We going writing a little today?”
Édith asks her to write her first and last names. She no longer watches while she does it. It has been a long time since she had to guide her hand.
Fadila puts down her felt-tip and sits up straight. She wrote FADILFADIL and below that, MRANI. Édith is bewildered.
“You wrote FADILA twice?”
“Yes,” she replies, cheerfully, as if she were saying, “Why not?”
Édith points out that there is a letter missing from FADIL, and a letter missing from MRANI. Fadila cannot see which one.
“Both times it’s the A.”
This seems to amuse Fadila.
Édith writes slowly there before her: AMRANI. Just below that, Fadila writes AMRAI. Édith points out that there is a letter missing. Fadila cannot see which one.
“The N,” says Édith.
Fadila starts over. This time she writes AMRNI. Same observation, letter missing. Same fog, she cannot find it.
“That’s the one that’s missing,” says Édith, pointing with her finger.
“Ah, the A,” says Fadila, identifying it at last.
They move on to reading. Édith writes RER B. Fadila reads RER C. LARBIT: she recognizes it. RER C: she reads RER A. NASSER: she cannot.
“You know, is very difficult,” she says.
Édith suddenly feels so helpless, that she has to find a trick, a magic formula, a mantra. If only Fadila could grasp that words are made up of syllables, she thinks, with a sort of despair, as if she were squeezing a lucky charm, the overall difficulty would be transformed into tiny little efforts. Syllables are tiny, very simple little words.
She divides FADILA into three, circles the FA, then the DI, then the LA. “We’re going to try a little exercise with your first name, the word you know best. At the same time as you write FA, you will say fa, and then di when you write DI, then la when you write LA.”
You have your eyes, your ears, and your mouth. You learn from all sides. If you say what you write that’s one way of absorbing it. It is bound to work.
But Fadila must think it’s ridiculous, she doesn’t follow. Or else, thinks Édith, the way we pronounce the word in French must seem light years away from what she knows of her first name. For a moment Édith imagines someone asking her to write her first name in Arabic, using Arabic letters, in other words, with no capital or final h. It would be a transcription. A very abstract process: you change the word before putting it down in writing in unfamiliar signs. It’s hard, very hard.
But the following Tuesday Fadila writes AMRANI perfectly, first try. Édith squeezes her in her arms.
She remembers the first thing Fadila wrote for her, that little scribble of messy, unrecognizable signs: it’s absolutely clear that they’ve made considerable headway in seven months. Considerable headway with nothing at all.
And that is the day, the last in the month, when Fadila leaves with her paycheck. As she is preparing to endorse the check on the back with her usual zigzag, Édith suggests she try signing her name instead. You cannot just change your signature like that, retorts Fadila; you have to warn the bank. Maybe she knows this because she told her branch office that one day she would sign her name?
Édith has left herself a reminder at the end of the table, a piece of cardboard on which she has written in big fat letters: LAUNDRY. She mustn’t forget to take out a load she started a while ago and hang it up to dry.
Fadila picks up the piece of cardboard: “What’s this?” she asks.
“Laundry,” says Édith. And she shows Fadila that she already knows the L, the A, the U, the N, the D, and the R. “The only one that’s new is the Y. It’s not too difficult.”
“Have to learning this word, too,” says Fadila, and Édith adds LAUNDRY to their treasure.
“I won’t offer you any coffee because of Ramadan,” says Édith.
“It’s as if you had,” answers Aïcha.
They go and sit in the kitchen. Before long the tone of their voices becomes animated. Aïcha comes over to Édith at her work desk and asks her for a sheet of paper.
“I’m showing her that letters are easy,” she says.
“It’s easy when you know how to write,” says Édith. “You’ve known for a long time, you went to school.”
“Yes, I finished high school. I didn’t pass my final exams, but at least I sat them. I started school at five.”
17
Two days later Édith runs into Aïcha again at the post office.
“I wanted to ask you something, actually,” she says. “Could you work with your mother a bit on her reading and writing? She’s not spending enough time on it. She should do a bit every day.”
“She’ll never agree.” Aïcha is adamant. “With me? Acting as teacher? No use even suggesting it to her.”
They walk a short ways down the street together.
“She’s not an easy person,” says Aïcha. “We’re getting along at the moment, but there have been other times . . . Poor woman, it’s no wonder, with the life she’s had.”
Édith grabs the line she’s been thrown.
“She was married three times, and not one of the marriages worked out?”
“Married, married . . . The second time, she was sold.”
It was her father who arranged it. Fadila had just left her first husband, the year she turned fifteen. She went back to her parents. Her father had no intention of supporting her. He had heard that in Casablanca there was a rich man looking for a second wife. The man had been married for a long time and had no children, so he’d struck a bargain with his wife: he’d take a second wife, and once she had given him a son and a daughter—a son for him, a daughter for his wife—he would repudiate her.
“My mother had no choice,” says Aïcha. “But what her father didn’t know at the time he was concluding his business was that she was pregnant with a second child. She hadn’t told anyone about it because she was afraid it might prevent her from getting a divorce.”
She complied with her father’s demands, and went to Casablanca, to the house of the childless couple. “She couldn’t understand a thing. She didn’t speak Arabic, all she knew was Berber.”
They found out she was expecting. It didn’t really matter, but it did complicate things somewhat. The child was born three months after Fadila arrived in the home of the rich man, so no one would believe that he was the father.
“The child was Zora,” says Aïcha. “My sister and I are true sisters. Same father, same mother.”
As for the issue of paternity, it was easy to fix. They waited six months before declaring the birth. And of course Zora was declared as being the daughter of the man in whose house she was born.
The woman in want of a child now had her daughter, but they still needed a son. They did not wait long, Fadila fell pregnant again and a boy was born.
“A successful purchase,” says Édith. “The couple must have been pleased.”
“Yes and no,” winces Aïcha. “The man, yes, the woman, no.”
The wife reminded her husband of the terms of their agreement: You’ve had your son, I’ve got my daughter, we agreed, now you send Fadila away.
“But the thing was, the husband didn’t want to send her away,” laughs Aïcha. “My mother was a very beautiful woman, she was seventeen, he found her rather to his liking. He told his wife he had changed his mind.”
“And then?”
“And then the first wife poisoned my mother. Just like in some story from a harem. It was a close call.”
Fadila’s mother had done everything she could to oppose the contract her husband had made. She had a brother in Casablanca so she stayed with him as often as possible, in order to be in touch with her daughter. You cannot stop a mother from visiting her child.
“So she was the one who brought you up, your grandmother?”
“In addition to everything else, yes. She had me with her day and night. When she moved in with her brother in Casablanca, she took me there, too.”
One Sunday, the rich man’s wife told Fadila that she and her husband were going out for the day. “You stay here, your lunch is ready,” she said to Fadila. When they left they locked the door.
Just by chance, that same afternoon Fadila’s mother came to visit her daughter. She found the door locked. She knocked.
“You know what it’s like back there,” says Aïcha, “the houses so close together, everyone knows everyone else’s business.” The neighbors came out: “They’ve gone out.” “And my daughter, too?” “No, your daughter stayed behind.”
Through the door Fadila’s mother could hear someone moaning. She sensed something was wrong.
She set off at a run to fetch her brother, and they came back together. The brother broke down the door. They found Fadila in a very bad way and took her to the hospital.
“My mother never set foot in that house again,” says Aïcha. “At least the poisoning enabled her to get away from those people. A man who kept her there to sleep with her and nothing else; a woman who hated her. Her own children in the same house and she didn’t even have the right to treat them as her own . . .”
Fadila didn’t stop there, she sued the couple for fraudulent declaration of birth and attempted murder.
“The lawsuit took forever, it took the judges eight years to hand down their decision,” says Aïcha. “The couple won. They had bought everyone—all the neighbors who could testify, the lawyers, the judges.”
In the meantime Fadila had to find work. That was when she went to stay in Rabat with her mother and Aïcha, and went into service for “the very nice Jews.”
“I thought she had raised three children in Rabat?” says Édith.
“The couple kept Zora and Khaled. My mother had two more children after them.”
Édith keeps her surprise to herself. Fadila has never breathed a word about Khaled. It would be an understatement to say she talks about Nasser, calling him her son, she never calls him anything but my son. Moreover, she has always insisted she has three children; now Aïcha is talking about five.
“In Rabat she met a man she liked, and she got pregnant again,” continues Aïcha.
“I’m glad to hear she finally met a man she was in love with,” says Édith tenderly, while working out that Fadila must not have been much older than twenty.
“Another bastard. She loved him all right, but he was married.”
“Did he take her as his second wife, too, then?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Did he marry her?”
“Only a religious marriage. I remember, he used to come and spend the night at our place two or three times a week.”
Nasser was born soon after. By then Fadila’s father’s patience was at its limit, and he demanded that Fadila’s mother return to the marital home. His wife refused and stayed in Rabat with her daughter. Her husband got a divorce and remarried.
“Basically Nasser was the first of her children she was able to bring up herself,” comments Édith.
“He was the only one.”
For Fadila was pregnant again, and when the man she loved found out, he left her. “I told you, a bastard.” The fifth child was born, a third son, but he died very young.
“I know that Zora married young, that she has several children, that she lives in Aubervilliers,” says Édith. “And Khaled, what became of him? Does he live in Morocco?”
Aïcha tells her that he and Zora had everything they needed. Édith understands this to mean, Unlike me. “They were educated at the French Mission. Khaled h
as a technical degree.”
“Were their adoptive parents good to them?”
“Of course they were. They spoiled them.”
Until Khaled, at fifteen, came upon the family booklet and discovered there were two names on the line that said Mother, both for him and his sister. He asked about it. They lied to him. He would not give up, and he found out that his mother was not the woman who had brought him up.
“It drove him crazy. He began to go off the rails. He made life impossible for his adoptive mother.”
He began to live on the edge; he drank, ended up in prison. Aïcha falls silent for a moment.
As for Zora, she continues, not only did she find out that she was not the daughter of the woman she had always believed was her mother, but also that the man she thought was her father was not her father either. She got married very quickly.
“You can see why my mother loves her son so much,” says Aïcha. “He’s the only one of her children who grew up in her home.”
Édith notices that Aïcha says her son. Not my brother, or even my half-brother.
“I get the impression that your grandmother was quite a person.”
“My grandmother?” Aïcha beams. “She was a fabulous woman. She died in my house, you know.”
“I know. Your mother loved her so much.”
“And as for my grandmother: how she loved her daughter! My mother hasn’t been very lucky in life, but at least she’s had that. She was everything to her mother.”
18
The literacy center at the mairie of the sixteenth arrondissement has not called back. Édith decides to look into it. They confirm that Madame Amrani is indeed on a waiting list, but nothing has opened up, they tell her. The friendly lady had been so sure, however, back in September. “People who enroll frequently give up quite soon”: Édith remembers what she said, word for word.
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