The Country of Others Read online

  Two days later they moved into the house in Berrima. In the narrow streets of the old town, Mathilde kept a tight grip on her husband’s arm. She was afraid of losing him in this labyrinth where shopkeepers crowded around you and vegetable vendors called out their wares. Behind the heavy, hobnailed front door, the family was waiting for her. Amine’s mother, Mouilala, stood in the middle of the patio, wearing an elegant silk kaftan, her hair covered with an emerald-green headscarf. She’d taken some old gold jewellery out of her cedar chest for the occasion: ankle bracelets, an engraved brooch, a necklace so heavy that it bent her scrawny neck forward. When Amine and Mathilde entered, she threw herself at her son and blessed him. She smiled at Mathilde, who took the old lady’s hands in hers and contemplated that beautiful brown face, those slightly reddened cheeks. ‘She says welcome,’ translated Selma, Amine’s little sister, who had just turned nine. She was standing in front of Omar, a thin and silent teenager who kept his hands behind his back and his eyes to the floor.

  Mathilde had to get used to this cramped and crowded life, to this house where the mattresses were infested with stink bugs and vermin, where there was no protection from the sounds of bodies and snoring. Her sister-in-law would enter her room without warning and jump on the bed, repeating the few words of French that she’d learned at school. At night Mathilde heard the cries of Jalil, the youngest brother, who was locked in a room upstairs, alone with a mirror that he never let out of his sight. He smoked a sebsi pipe all the time and the smell of cannabis spread through the corridors, leaving her dazed.

  All day long, hordes of bony cats paraded through the small courtyard, where a dusty banana tree struggled to stay alive. A well had been dug at the back of the patio, and the maid – a former slave – drew water from it for cleaning the house. Amine had told Mathilde that Yasmine came from Africa, maybe Ghana, and that Kadour Belhaj had bought the slave for his wife at the market in Marrakech.

  In the letters she wrote to her sister, Mathilde always lied. She said that her life was like a novel by Karen Blixen or Alexandra David-Néel or Pearl Buck. In each missive she would invent adventures where she came in contact with the indigenous people, who were sometimes tender, sometimes superstitious. She described herself, wearing boots and a hat, haughtily riding an Arabian thoroughbred. She wanted Irène to be jealous, she wanted each word to be torture to her, she wanted her sister to die of envy, to be enraged. Mathilde wanted vengeance on this tall, strict, authoritarian sister who had always treated her like a child and often taken pleasure in publicly humiliating her. ‘Feather-brained Mathilde’, ‘shameless Mathilde’, Irène called her, without any love or indulgence. Mathilde had always felt misunderstood by her sister, a prisoner of her tyrannical affection.

  When she’d left for Morocco, when she’d left behind their village, their neighbours and the future that had been promised to her, Mathilde’s first feeling had been one of triumph. To begin with, she wrote enthusiastic letters describing her life in the house in the medina. She emphasised the mysteriousness of Berrima’s alleys, exaggerated the filthiness of the streets, the noise, the stink of the donkeys transporting men and merchandise. One of the nuns at the school gave her a little book about Meknes, with reproductions of engravings by Delacroix. She put this book with its yellowed pages on a table and tried to steep herself in it. She memorised certain especially poetic passages by Pierre Loti and marvelled at the thought that the writer had slept only a few miles from there, that his eyes too had seen the walls and pools of the Agdal Basin.

  She told her sister about the embroiderers, the boilermakers, the woodturners who sat cross-legged in their underground shops. She told her about the processions of guilds and associations in Place El-Hedim and the parade of seers and healers. In one of her letters she devoted almost a whole page to a description of a bonesetter’s shop that sold hyena skulls, dried crows, hedgehog feet and snake venom. She thought this would impress Irène and Georges, their father, and that they, upstairs in their bourgeois house, would envy her for having sacrificed boredom to adventure, comfort to exoticism.

  Everything in this landscape was unexpected, different from what she had known before. She would have needed new words, a whole vocabulary freed of the past, to express her feelings, the light so bright that you lived life through squinting eyes, to describe the awe she felt, day after day, when faced with so much mystery, so much beauty. Nothing here was familiar: not the colour of the trees or the sky, not even the taste that the wind left on her tongue and lips. Everything had changed.

  During the first months in Morocco, Mathilde spent a lot of time behind the little desk that her mother-in-law had put in their room. The old woman was touchingly deferential towards her. For the first time in her life, Mouilala was sharing her home with an educated woman; whenever she saw Mathilde bent over her brown writing paper, she felt an immense admiration for her daughter-in-law. She told her family to be quiet in the corridors and forbade Selma from running in the house. She also refused to let Mathilde spend her days in the kitchen because she believed it was not a suitable place for a European woman capable of reading newspapers and novels. So Mathilde stayed in her room and wrote. But it rarely gave her much pleasure because, each time she started describing a landscape or recounting a lived experience, she felt cramped by her own vocabulary. She kept bumping against the same dull, heavy words, and perceived in a vague way that language was a limitless playground whose vast panoramas frightened and overwhelmed her. There was so much to say, and she wished that she were Maupassant so she could describe the yellow that covered the walls of the medina, so she could bring to life the young boys who played in the streets or the women who glided past like ghosts, enveloped in their white haiks. She summoned an exotic vocabulary that she felt certain would please her father. She wrote about razzias, fellahs, djinns and multicoloured zellige tiles.

  But what she wanted was a way of expressing herself with no barriers or obstacles at all. To be able to say things as she saw them. To describe the kids with their heads shaved because of ringworm, all those boys who ran from street to street, yelling and playing, and who stopped when they saw her and – with dark eyes that seemed older than the boys themselves – observed her. One day she was stupid enough to hand a coin to a little boy, not even five years old, who wore shorts and a fez too big for his head. He was no taller than those jute bags filled with lentils or couscous that the grocer would leave outside their door, into which Mathilde always fantasised about plunging her arm. ‘Buy yourself a ball,’ she told him, all puffed up with pride and joy. But the little boy shouted and children appeared suddenly from all the neighbouring streets and swarmed around Mathilde like a cloud of insects. She heard them invoking the name of God, heard a few words in French, but she didn’t understand and in the end she had to run away, under the mocking stares of passers-by who thought: That’ll teach her to give away her money. She wished she could observe this beautiful world from afar, that she could be invisible. Her height, her whiteness, her status as a foreign woman all combined to keep her at a distance from the heart of things, from the silence that lets you know you are home. In the narrow streets she tasted the smell of leather, of firewood and fresh meat, the mingled odours of stagnant water and overripe pears, of donkey dung and sawdust. But she had no words for all this.

  When she was tired of writing or rereading novels that she knew by heart, Mathilde lay on the roof terrace where laundry was washed and meat hung to dry. She listened to the conversations on the street, the songs of the women in those private labyrinths reserved for them. She watched them as they moved along walls that separated one terrace from another like tightrope walkers, sometimes almost falling and breaking their necks. The girls, the maids, the wives all shouted, danced, swapped secrets on those terraces of varying heights that they deserted only at night or at noon, when the heat of the sun grew too intense. Hidden by a small wall, Mathilde worked on her accent by repeating the few insults she’d learned, and the passers-by loo
ked up and insulted her in return. ‘Lay atik typhus!’ they called. ‘May God give you typhus!’ They probably thought it was a little boy making fun of them, some young rascal bored from trailing behind his mother’s skirts all day. Her ears were always pricked and she absorbed the local vocabulary with a speed that took everyone by surprise. ‘Just yesterday she didn’t understand a word!’ Mouilala exclaimed. From then on, people were more careful what they said in her presence.

  It was in the kitchen that Mathilde learned Arabic. In the end she insisted on being allowed in there and Mouilala let her sit and watch. The women winked at her, smiled at her, sang. First she learned how to say tomato, oil, water and bread. She learned hot, cold, the lexicon of spices, then words related to the climate: drought, rain, ice, hot wind, even sandstorm. With this vocabulary, she could also talk about the body, about love. Selma, who was learning French at school, acted as her interpreter. Often, when she came downstairs for breakfast, Mathilde would find Selma asleep on a bench in the living room. She would scold Mouilala, who didn’t care about her daughter’s education, shrugging at bad reports, never encouraging her to work hard. She let Selma sleep as long as she wanted; she thought it cruel to wake her early just so she could go to school. Mathilde would try to convince Mouilala that education could provide her daughter with the means to gain her independence, her freedom. But the old woman would only frown. Her expression, normally so affable, would darken, and she’d grow angry with the nassrania – the Nazarene – for preaching to her. ‘Why do you let her miss school? You’re endangering her future.’ What future was this Frenchwoman talking about? What did it matter if Selma spent her days at home, if she learned to stuff intestines and sew them back up instead of covering the pages of an exercise book with ink? Mouilala had had too many children, too many worries. She’d buried a husband and several babies. Selma was her gift, her respite, her last chance in life to be tender and indulgent.

  For her first Ramadan, Mathilde decided to fast too, and her husband was grateful for this show of respect for their rites. Every evening she drank the harira, although she didn’t like the taste, and every morning she was up before the sun to eat dates and drink sour milk. During the holy month Mouilala never left the kitchen, and Mathilde, with her gourmand’s desires and her weak will, found it hard to understand how anyone could deprive themselves of food while spending their days amid the aromas of tajines and baking bread. From dawn until dusk, the women rolled marzipan and dipped fried cakes in honey. They kneaded the fat-soaked pastry and stretched it out until it was as thin as parchment. Their hands had no fear of hot or cold and they would often place their palms on burning metal. Fasting made them pale and Mathilde wondered how they could resist temptation, in this overheated kitchen where the smell of soup made your head spin. She herself could think of nothing, during these long days of abstinence, but what she would eat when night fell. She would lie on one of the damp benches in the living room, eyes closed, letting the saliva slosh around her mouth. She warded off headaches by imagining freshly baked bread, fried eggs with smoked meat, gazelle horns soaked in tea.

  Then, when they heard the call to prayer, the women set the table with a carafe of milk, hard-boiled eggs, the bowl of steaming soup, the dates that they would open with their fingernails. Mouilala paid attention to everyone; she stuffed raïs with meat, adding chilli to the ones for her youngest son, who liked it when his tongue burned. She squeezed oranges for Amine, whose health was a source of worry to her. Standing in the doorway of the living room, she would wait for the men – faces still creased after their nap – to break the bread, peel a boiled egg and lean back against a cushion before she would finally return to the kitchen and start eating. Mathilde could not understand this at all. ‘It’s slavery!’ she said. ‘She spends all day cooking and then she has to wait until you’ve eaten! I can’t believe it.’ Selma, sitting on the kitchen windowsill, laughed at this and Mathilde took offence.

  She roared out her anger at Amine and she did it again after Eid al-Adha, the feast that would give rise to a terrible argument. The first time, Mathilde remained silent, as if petrified by the spectacle of the butchers in their blood-splattered aprons. From the roof terrace, she observed the silent alleys of the medina where these men moved, accompanied by young boys who came and went between the houses and the oven. Streams of hot, bubbling blood trickled from house to house. The smell of raw flesh filled the air and the woolly skins of sheep were hung from iron hooks on front doors. This would be a good day to murder someone, thought Mathilde. On the other terraces, in the domain of women, the activity was relentless. They cut, gutted, flayed, quartered. They shut themselves in the kitchen to clean the entrails, removing the stink of shit from the intestines before stuffing them, sewing them back up and browning them for a long time in a spicy sauce. They had to separate the fat from the flesh and cook the animal’s head, because even the eyes would be eaten by the oldest son, who would poke his index finger into the sockets and pull out the glistening white balls. When she told Amine that it was a ‘feast of savages’, ‘a cruel rite’, when she told him that the raw meat and the blood made her want to throw up, her husband would raise his shaking hands above his head and the only reason he held back from smashing them against his wife’s mouth was that it was a sacred day and he had a duty to God to be calm and understanding.

  ***

  At the end of each letter Mathilde asked Irène to send her books. Adventure novels, short story collections set in cold, distant countries. She didn’t admit that she no longer went to the bookshop in the centre of the European town. She hated that neighbourhood – it was full of busybodies, the wives of colonists and soldiers – and she felt ready to kill somebody whenever she set foot in those streets, with all their bad memories. One day in September 1947, when she was seven months pregnant, she had found herself on the Avenue de la République, which most of the locals called simply ‘the Avenue’. It was hot and her legs were swollen. She was thinking about going to the Empire cinema or having a cold drink on the terrace of the Roi de la Bière. Just then, two young women pushed past her. The dark-haired one started laughing: ‘Look at her. She’s pregnant by an Arab!’ Mathilde turned around and grabbed the woman’s sleeve, but she yanked it free. If it hadn’t been for her big belly and the oppressive heat, Mathilde would have gone after her. She’d have stuffed those words back down her throat. She’d have returned all those blows that she’d received throughout her life. As an insolent little girl, as a lustful teenager, as a disobedient wife, she’d been slapped and bullied many times by angry men who wanted to turn her into a respectable woman. Those two young women would have paid for the life of domestication that Mathilde had endured.

  As strange as it may seem, it never crossed Mathilde’s mind that Irène or Georges might not believe her, and it certainly never occurred to her that they would one day come and visit. After finally moving to the farm, in the spring of 1949, she felt free to lie about her life as a landowner. She didn’t admit that she missed the bustle of the medina, that she now longed for the lack of privacy she’d once cursed. Often she wrote ‘I wish you could see me’ without realising that this was, in fact, a confession of her immense solitude. She was saddened by all these first times that interested nobody but her, by this hidden existence. What was the point of living, she thought, if not to be seen?

  Her letters ended with phrases such as ‘I love you’ or ‘I miss you’, but she never mentioned her homesickness. She didn’t surrender to the temptation to tell them that the flight of the storks, which arrived in Meknes at the start of winter, plunged her into a deep melancholy. Neither Amine nor any of the people on the farm shared her love of animals, and when one day she mentioned Minet, the cat she’d had as a child, in front of her husband, he rolled his eyes at her sentimental ity. She collected cats, which she tamed with milk-soaked bread, and when the Berber women looked at her resentfully, because they considered it a waste to give good bread to cats, she thought: These cats ne
ed love – they haven’t had any for so long.

  What good would it have done to tell Irène the truth? To admit that she spent her days working like crazy, with her two-year-old on her back? What poetry could she wring from her long nights spent sewing Aïcha clothes that looked new, or from the blistered thumb that this work gave her? In candlelight, sickened by the smell of the cheap wax, she cut patterns from old magazines and, with remarkable devotion, knitted little woollen knickers. Through the scorching month of August, she sat on the concrete floor dressed in overalls, and made a dress for her daughter. Nobody saw how beautiful it was, nobody noticed the delicacy of the gathered stitches, the little bows above the pockets, the red lining. It was killing her, people’s indifference to the beauty of things.

  Amine was rarely mentioned in her letters. Her husband was a secondary character, a vague presence in the background. She wanted to give Irène the impression that their love was so passionate that it could not be shared or put into words. Her silence was thick with insinuation; she wanted her omissions to be seen as an act of modesty – or even delicacy – on her part. Because Irène, who had fallen in love and got married just before the war, to a German man with scoliosis, had been widowed after only three months. When Amine had arrived in the village, Irène had watched, sick with envy, as her sister’s body trembled in the African’s hands. Little Mathilde, her neck covered in black love bites.