The Last Patriarch

by Najat El Hachmi

  In other circumstances, mother would have covered the incident up as best she could and father would never have found out, as with so many key episodes in our childhood, but this was too public to be hidden. The truck wasn’t ours and the damage was there for all to see. As the interval was too long between when father parked the vehicle and the collision with the red car, he couldn’t be blamed either, fancy leaving the truck like that, without the handbrake on, fact is you’re a… No, it wouldn’t have worked, because at the time of the crash father was lying on the sofa, skin stuck to the black leather, where he’d leave a sweat mark when he went out to see what was up.

  Mother was worried about the fright the children had had and kept saying what did you do, what did you do, but father had his own methods for getting rid of frights. He gave you much bigger ones so you totally forgot about the original ones.

  So he sat them side by side on the sofa, where their legs could but dangle down they were so small, wearing only short trousers. And he beat them in a systematic, orderly way; which wasn’t his usual style. He kept hitting their legs with his belt, one, two, three, four, and in between lashes he asked, will you do it again? They’d already said they wouldn’t from the start and now repeated as they sobbed, please father, that’s enough, please, we’ve had enough. Mother also said that’s enough, can’t you see they’re almost dead, let them be, it’s your fault for leaving the keys in, and they said, enough, father, enough, until they were almost hoarse. Father told mother anyone interfering will get the same treatment, this is the way I do things, and I couldn’t bear to watch anymore.

  I hid in my bedroom and shut the door so I wouldn’t have to hear them, my head under my pillow, what could I do? I should have done something, but I suppose I still loved him a little, if only a little if I couldn’t bring myself to ask anyone for help. Then everything would have been very different, but I didn’t want to be the one to break up the family.

  After a few days, one of the two little ones came upstairs and asked can you give me a plaster? and I asked why and he said look what father did to me, and said it as if it were just another accident, a graze from a fall in the park or a nosebleed, the kind of thing that happens when you’re growing up. I was beginning to learn that it wasn’t normal for your father to bite your knee when you’re growing up. Taba, astrologer. Tabac, a plant. Tabac, a little round basket; tábac, a punch.

  22

  Summer camp, or don’t stick your nose in where it’s not wanted

  Buy a lucky number? There must be a current of positive energy operating where Carrer Argenters crosses the Plaça Santa Isabel that made the lottery tickets fly from my hands. Either that or it was my eyes smiling behind my incredibly thick lenses, or people were sorry for me, or it was my accent, or they were thinking what a plucky little Moorish girl, or I surprised them, or they took pity on my down-at-heel state, or it was all those things put together, anyway I beat the record of tickets sold by anyone at school. I beat the record that Saturday morning, and it meant I’d already paid three-quarters of the cost of the summer camp. Father said we’ll have to see if you can go, it’s very expensive, ask your mother. Mother said what do you expect me to say, ask your father, and in all that mess I took it for granted I could go. I imagined money was the main obstacle and there it was, all sorted.

  When the time came, father signed the authorisation forms, yippee! He did it opposite that teacher who’d taken nude photos of them together so he could show them to mother, who wouldn’t believe they were lovers, and I almost saw them too except she said hey, you shouldn’t be looking at that. It was a teacher who preferred me to all the other girls and was always on top of us, because that was part of her job. Father said she’d gone after him, but the fact was he’d gone after her. He’d even taken us to her house, because he had some job to do in a brand new apartment with a video entry and all that. He fooled no one with all that stuff about her helping him with his VAT returns or his employment tax forms or whatever. She was one of those women mother never called by her name and we all called her Slug Eyes, and they were. I mean she wasn’t slug-eyed, but her eyes looked like slugs about to slime their way down her face.

  She was the teacher who contacted father to complain I was behaving badly, yours truly, the pupil already doing next year’s homework and reading in the playground, about whom nobody had complained before. I still think it was her excuse to ring father, because at the slightest slip my brothers made she rang him and that week they must have been on their best behaviour and I was the one to get it in the neck. She’s always touching her hair, she told him. It was simply the first time I’d ever been to a hairdressers and I couldn’t get used to my hair coming down to my bum and feeling so smooth. It’ll stay like that until you wash it, the girl dressed in purple had said. What could I do if I couldn’t touch my hair? She wasn’t to know that was a serious business in the Driouch family, a sign of flirtatiousness, of being conceited, of worrying about your looks, and it was only whores who wanted others to like them, and not chaste, decent girls who tried to pass unnoticed. She wasn’t to know that father had got angry and said don’t go back there, with your hair all loose again, and don’t let me see you with a fringe again. mother just said, you see? I told you so.

  She was like the teacher in White Teeth, although she wasn’t a redhead and wasn’t very pretty and didn’t have the twin children of a Bangladeshi Muslim in her class. I was the one who saw her in class every day and had to keep quiet and not shout out whenever she humiliated me in front of everyone, hey, you, I know you’re pulling my father. Why didn’t I? What would have become of us?

  Until mother got tired of all that and said I’m going to get the reports this year, yours as well, and Slug Eyes went white when she saw her waiting in the corridor. I acted as a translator, as usual. Mother said tell her she’s an evil whore and to leave my husband alone, and I smiled and said mother says that as she’s the one who spends so much time with the children it’s best for her to come and get their reports and, apart from that, she was keen to meet you. Well, I’d rather deal directly with your father, because I thinks it’s a bit odd you translating the report for your mother, don’t you? You bet you’d have liked him to come, mother said, not waiting for me to translate, you bitch, don’t even try to pretend. She says father’s very busy at work and couldn’t spare the time, but she trusts me. Excellent, outstanding, excellent, outstanding, shows interest, can’t translate that and I said well, it says everything’s been good. Only a ‘good’ in gymnastics and she could do with some activities outside school, especially English, that we don’t teach here, and she’s a gift for languages. Mother said all right all right which meant forget it, merely because she had suggested it. The truth is I’d have loved to do something extracurricular, and really envied my friends who did. She gave us the list of what we had to take to the summer camp.

  I’d gotten everything ready when father said you’re not going. Just like that. You’re not going to the summer camp and that’s final, because I say so. But you said that I… but you signed the permission, but you told me… Don’t argue, you’re not going. Tell your tutor it’s your mother who won’t let you go, she’s afraid something might happen to you. Mother didn’t want me to go, that’s why she didn’t try to persuade father. Three nights sleeping away from home, my God, if something happens to you I’ll leave by the window rather than the door, and I didn’t know what exactly might happen to me because mother always spoke like that and was rarely very explicit.

  Blood had spoiled everything. The blood that makes you a woman puts everyone on your back, you must do this, not that, you can’t jump too high, ride on horseback or sit with your legs too far apart, who knows what might happen.

  And that’s how my dream of spending a night under the stars with the boy who was my best friend was smashed to smithereens and the teacher who wasn’t my tutor tried to speak to father, even the headmistress spoke to him, everybody spoke to him, and he kept repeating
what do you expect me to do then, her mother has a right to an opinion, doesn’t she? You know I bought several lottery tickets from her and signed the permission forms myself, but both of us are bringing her up and I have to respect my wife’s opinion.

  Liar! Even the teacher who wasn’t my tutor took me to one side and said it isn’t your mother who’s not letting you go, is it? Because they’d phoned mother and she said she couldn’t make the appointment, she had a headache, which was true enough. It’s not your mother, is it? Father told me to say that, so you were less likely to kick up a fuss, but the fact was I’d already got used to the idea I couldn’t go. I was gradually getting it out of my system.

  She talked to him again and clearly there was nothing doing. After thinking it over a good while, he’d look at her that way he did every so often and say: Don’t stick your nose in where it’s not wanted. And that’s how someone else took my place under the stars.

  U, for the letter U. U, cardinal number. Uabaïna, a cardiac glucose that inhibits the active transfer of sodium.

  23

  How they gradually incarcerate you

  There were several reasons why a traditional, delicious stew in our house could end up turning into a flying dish. 1) If father were eating with somebody else who was chewing very noisily. He’d never tolerate such behaviour, although he himself made strange sounds when he dunked bread into the gravy and left a trail of yellow droplets dripping down his moustache. If he’d had a good day, he turned his head and looked with closed eyes at the male or female who was eating and said do you mind shutting your mouth? If he’d not had a good day he either picked the plate up and threw it against the wall or else upended the whole table, but for that to happen he must have had a very, very bad day, because the table was solid wood and weighed too much for an averagely bad day. 2) If one of the little boys walked past him when he was eating with snot hanging from his nose; in this case he usually shut his eyes and shouted to mother to clean them, but if he’d had lots of stress to deal with out in the wide world a dish might very well fly, although, in his defence, we must say never straight at the heads of the two kids, who he didn’t consider responsible for such pernickety hygiene. 3) If someone spoke or mentioned anything he might find repugnant, or suddenly one of those things started on the telly, say, an exchange about excrement, messy deaths, pus or diseases, or such like. It was more serious if one of us started such an exchange and switched on the box, than if he’d heard it on the box, when he’d only shout turn that off at once. 4) If a smutty scene started up on the telly and we didn’t make a move to change channels. That’s to say, smut usually meant a kiss on the lips and, obviously, any bedroom scene. That’s why it was always better to watch cartoons, although we never knew what to expect from the Simpsons or some Japanese series so we’d switch channels just in case.

  It may or may not have been point four that led to me getting a beating that day. I’d done all the tasks mother thought right: sweeping, mopping, washing the dishes and dusting the dining room furniture. I’d done all that listening to the Walkman and still had the headphones on high when I sat down to write something I was in the middle of, and then another temper tantrum. He was eating on the sofa and watching the telly that somebody had left on, I wasn’t listening, my thoughts were elsewhere, I was only thinking about the word I needed, and my eyes apparently looked as if they reflected the image on the screen when I saw a dish pass over my head, and the laws of physics fixed it so the yellow broth didn’t spill until it smashed against the wall, which had registered previous hits. And he got up, raising an arm, and I was still wearing the headphones and didn’t understand what was going on. I wasn’t even looking at the telly, and so what if I was? I didn’t understand what was wrong. He was pounding my shoulder with his fists and I tried to defend myself by crossing my arms over my head as I gathered it was a bare-chested, fair-haired man who’d unleashed his anger. But I wasn’t even looking, father, really, I was writing, I looked up because I was thinking what to put down.

  It was and wasn’t point number four because in fact that alien disguised as a rat-eating human was merely a semi-naked man, but he didn’t fall into the banned category because he wasn’t about to have sex with a woman or kiss someone, he was simply getting dressed. The rules were beginning to get a bit confused if we consider that the films he liked most showed a constant flow of semi-naked men. Bruce Lee, Jean-Claude Van Damme or even Terence Hill and Bud Spencer.

  And I never talked about that kind of thing, not even to that teacher who was my friend and who soon started living in the local capital city, because going to and fro was a bore, what with the train, a real drag.

  It was with her help I started to understand music, and she recommended Erich Fromm and finally got me wearing bras that women wear and not those half T-shirt things that weren’t any use to me. I don’t want to grow, and she laughed, that’s life, you’ve got no choice, you can’t refuse, that’s life.

  I talked to her about crises, crises I still couldn’t recognise as being about identity, about breasts that grew too much, a mother who didn’t want me to depilate and who’d thrown my tampons away, just like that, without telling me, for fear I might lose my virginity, she saw the drawings with the instructions and had thrown them in the bin. I told her about father being obsessed with me not seeing boys outside school. That’s how I got to meet friends of hers in her house and they said what about going for a coffee? and I dithered, yes, no, shaking all the time, you know father’s like a God, he’s everywhere. I don’t know if I’d told her about the teacher who was like the one in Zadie Smith, though an ugly version, because at the time Zadie’s fiction didn’t exist, but mine did, but for real.

  And above all I talked to her about love, about what it was and wasn’t, how you knew, how you learned, whether a glance on the sly gives you enough to consider yourself in love or if you need a whole lifetime to discover who you really love. All that with poems and songs, I was lucky to get to know her at that time when my body felt strange and my home was never my home.

  Father knew I had this friendly relationship with my teacher. He said he didn’t like her and said it even more forcefully after the episode with her friend, her and me, when the three of us met him in the street. He didn’t hit me then, I said father, I swear, I was going in the same direction as them and they were walking up the street and I couldn’t cross over, what could I say? What could I do? I had to go to the library and they were going to the square, what did you expect me to do? He said I don’t want to see you talking to a man in the middle of the street ever again, let it never be said that Driouch’s daughter is a slag.

  That was how everything was changed into transgression and tinged with fear. Mother said you spend too much time with this woman and I couldn’t understand what was wrong with that. Father couldn’t see us together and pretended to ignore the amount of time I spent with her.

  Until that birthday of mine when nobody remembered it was my birthday. It was a Saturday and she had come to the local capital just to bring me a present and a card. The present was a notebook with blank pages, a really good one, with a hard cover and not a spiral binding, and a fountain pen. A real fountain pen, like a proper writer’s, she’d said, and initially she said it should be a space to share my own experiences with everyone else and I had lots of years before me to fill it up. She’d travelled all that way and brought her brother as well, and, when she introduced me, he kissed me twice, I’d so wanted to meet him. It was pure emotion and I was growing up, but I’d not noticed all that had taken place next to the car she’d parked in front of our house and the day would go pear-shaped from then on. It would have been completely normal if it hadn’t been for the fact that father had been looking out of the dining room, with the shutter half down, and had seen everything. The way I hugged her at the end and kissed him twice again, what should I do now?

  However, he didn’t hit me, although I’d have sworn I was dead the minute I saw him waiting for me on
the doorstep. He just said that’s the last time you see her, and I felt like Whoopi Goldberg in The Color Purple.

  Va, vana, that is only appearance, has no reality. Vaca is only the adult female of the ox. Vacació, holidays. Vacada, a herd of cows.

  24

  Secondary school

  Whether I went to secondary school or not depended on many factors which had nothing to do with how well I paid attention, whether I got good marks or was obedient. There had been some strange disappearances from my primary school over the last two years, and I was grateful my turn hadn’t yet come. Strange disappearances of girls like me who were from places similar to where I was born but were perhaps very different to me or didn’t share my luck. Girls who now have three or four children and put in a few hours cleaning like our neighbour, or just stay at home and know what to give their children to eat because we all studied that at school, but wouldn’t know how to do other things that if I’d disappeared I’d never have needed either, like writing a report or essay. That kind of thing.

  My turn to disappear from the school scene had come and I still don’t know why it didn’t happen. Grandfather was one factor, who was the only one who asked me well, how did your examinations go, did you pass everything? Of course, grandfather, I’ve never failed a single subject, of course I’ve passed the year. Mother had already told me, your father says this is the last year you’ll go to school, and it was a refrain repeated at the end of every school year. This is your last, and I’d say all right, but I knew it wouldn’t be like that. Perhaps another factor was the teacher who was too friendly with my father, who must have influenced him in some way, who said your daughter must go to university and who knows what he replied, and that was part of the private space they still shared from time to time, behind mother’s back, or so they said.