In the Country of Others Page 3

  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 sentimentality. 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 need 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 woolen underwear. 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 gotten 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.

  How could Mathilde admit that the man she’d met during the war was no longer the same? Weighed down by all his worries and humiliations, Amine had changed, his personality had darkened. How many times, walking with him in town, had she felt the oppressive stares of passersby? The touch of his skin seemed to burn her then, and she was unable to prevent a frisson of disgust when she perceived her husband’s foreignness. It struck her that it would take a vast amount of love—more love than she imagined herself capable of feeling—to endure the contempt of others. It would require a solid, huge, unshakable love to bear the shame she felt when French people called him tu instead of vous, when policemen asked to see his papers, when they apologized upon seeing his war medals or noting his perfect mastery of French. “But with you, my dear friend, it’s not the same.” And Amine would smile. In public, he gave the impression that he had no problem with France after almost dying for its honor. But as soon as they were alone, Amine would shut himself away in silence and brood over his cowardice, his betrayal of his people. He went into the house, opened the cupboards and flung everything to the floor. Mathilde had a temper too: once, in the middle of an argument, when he yelled, “Shut up! You make me ashamed!,” she opened the fridge and picked up a bowl of overripe peaches, which she’d been planning to turn into jam, and threw them at Amine’s face, unaware that Aïcha was watching them and that she would never get over the sight of her father in that state, his hair and neck dripping with sticky juice.

  Amine didn’t talk to her about work. The laborers, his anxieties, the price of wheat, weather forecasts. When family members visited the farm, they sat in the parlor and, after asking about his health three or four times, just sat there in silence and drank their tea. Mathilde found their company sickening; there was a baseness, a triviality to them that hurt her more than homesickness or loneliness. She wished she could talk about her feelings, her hopes, the anxieties that swarmed inside her meaninglessly, like all anxieties. Doesn’t he have an inner life at all? she wondered, watching Amine as he ate in silence, gazing vacantly at a tajine of chickpeas prepared by the maid, cooked in a fatty sauce that disgusted Mathilde. Amine was only interested in the farm and in work. Never in laughing, dancing, relaxing, talking. People didn’t talk here. Her husband was as dour as a Quaker. He spoke to her as if to a little girl who needed educating. She learned good manners at the same time as Aïcha, and she had to nod when Amine explained: “You can’t do that” or “We can’t afford that.” When she had come to Morocco, she’d still looked like a child, and she’d had to learn—in the space of a few months—to endure the loneliness of domestic life, to bear the brutality of a man and the foreignness of a country. She had gone from her father’s house to her husband’s house but she felt as if she had no more independence or authority than before. She could barely even exercise her domination over Tamo, the young maid, because Ito—Tamo’s mother—was always watching, and Mathilde didn’t dare raise her voice in front of her. She didn’t know how to be patient when teaching her daughter. She would switch from sweet hugs to hysterical anger in a second, with nothing in between. Sometimes, watching Aïcha, the fact of her motherhood struck her as monstrous, cruel, inhuman. How could a child raise other children? Her young body had been torn open and out of it they had pulled an innocent victim that she didn’t know how to defend.

  When Amine had married her, Mathilde had only just turned twenty. At the time, this hadn’t worried him. In fact he found his wife’s youth charming, her big eyes thrilled and surprised by everything, her voice still fragile, her way of speaking mild and sweet like a little girl’s. He was twenty-eight, which wasn’t much older, but later he had to acknowledge that age had nothing to do with the unease that he sometimes felt when he looked at his wife. He was a man and he had been to war. He came from a country where God and honor were conflated, and he no longer had a father, which forced him into a certain gravity. What had charmed him when they were still in Europe now started to annoy him. Mathilde was capricious, frivolous. Amine was irritated by her thin skin, her lack of toughness. He didn’t have the time or the ability to console her. And her tears! How many tears had she shed since arriving in Morocco? She wept at the slightest setback. She was constantly bursting into sobs and it exasperated him. “Stop crying. My mother lost children and became a widow at forty, and she’s cried less in her whole life than you have in the last week. Stop it, stop!” It was in the nature of European women, he thought, to reject reality.

  She cried too much and she laughed too much. When they’d first met, they’d spent afternoons lying in the grass beside the Rhine. Mathilde would tell him about her dreams, and he encouraged her, without thinking about the consequences or the vanity of such conversations. She amused him. He’d never been able to laugh freely; he always covered his mouth when laughing, as if he considered happiness the most shameful and immodest of all the passions. In Meknes everything was different: the few times he accompanied her to the Empire, he would leave the movie theater in a bad mood, angry at his wife who’d giggled too much and tried to cover him with kisses.

  Mathilde wanted to go to the theater, to listen to loud music, to dance in the parlor. She dreamed of pretty dresses, parties, tea dances, dinners under the palm trees. She wanted to go to the Saturday-night dance at the Café de France, to the Vallée Heureuse on Sundays, to invite friends over for tea. Sinking into nostalgia, she would remember parties that her parents had thrown. She was afraid that time would pass too quickly, that poverty and work would drag on forever, and that, when there was finally time to rest, she would be too old for pretty dresses and palm tree shade.

  One evening, just after they’d moved to the farm, Amine walked through the kitchen dressed in his Sunday best while Mathilde was feeding Aïcha. She looked up in shock at her husband, unsure whether to be excited or angry. “I’m going out,” he said. “Some old friends from the garrison are in town.” He was bending down
to plant a kiss on Aïcha’s forehead when Mathilde stood up. She called out to Tamo, who was cleaning the courtyard, and handed her the child. In a confident voice, she asked: “Should I change or isn’t it necessary?”

  Amine was speechless. Then he mumbled something about it being a night out with friends, that it wasn’t suitable for a woman. “If it’s not suitable for me, I don’t see how it could be suitable for you.” And without understanding what was happening, Amine let Mathilde follow him outside after leaving her jacket on the back of a kitchen chair and pinching her cheeks to give herself some color.

  In the car Amine didn’t say a word. He just stared sullenly at the road as he drove, furious at Mathilde and at his own weakness. She chatted and smiled, acting as if she didn’t realize that she’d gone too far. She was sweet, mischievous, carefree, convinced as she was that if she could just remain light-hearted, he would eventually start to relax. But his lips were still pursed when they arrived in town. Amine parked and hurried out of the car, walking quickly toward the café terrace. It was hard to tell whether he was hoping he might lose her in the streets of the European town or whether he simply wanted to avoid the humiliation of arriving on his wife’s arm.

  She caught up to him so quickly that he didn’t have time to provide an explanation to the other men. They stood up and shyly, deferentially, greeted Mathilde. Omar, her brother-in-law, gestured to a chair next to his. All the men were dressed elegantly: they’d put on jackets, slicked back their hair. They ordered drinks from the jovial Greek who’d run this café for twenty years. It was one of the few unsegregated cafés in the city, where Arabs could drink alcohol at a table with Europeans, where women other than prostitutes could brighten the evenings. The terrace, on a street corner, was protected from public view by bushy bitter orange trees. Sitting there, you felt safe and sheltered from the world. Amine and his friends clinked glasses but they didn’t say much. There were long silences punctuated by quiet laughter or the telling of an anecdote. It was always like this, but Mathilde didn’t know that. She couldn’t believe that this was what Amine’s nights out with his friends were really like, those evenings that had caused her so much jealousy and concern. She thought it was her fault that the evening had been ruined. She wanted to tell a story to liven things up. The beer gave her courage and, in a timid voice, she talked about a memory from her native Alsace. She was trembling slightly, struggling to find the right words, and her story turned out to be boring. Nobody laughed. Amine stared at her with such contempt that she felt heartbroken. Never in her life had she felt so out of place.

  On the opposite pavement the streetlamp flickered and then died. The terrace, lit only by a few candles, suddenly appeared more charming and Mathilde calmed down as her presence was forgotten. She dreaded the moment when Amine would cut short the evening, end the awkward tension, when he would say: “Time to go.” There was bound to be a scene afterward: some shouting, a slap, her forehead crushed against a window. So she savored the tranquil sounds of the city, she listened to the conversations around the table and she closed her eyes to better hear the music at the back of the café. She wanted it all to last a bit longer; she wasn’t ready to go home yet.

  The men relaxed. The alcohol did its work and they began speaking Arabic. Perhaps because they thought she wouldn’t be able to understand. A young waiter, his face covered with acne, placed a large plate of fruit on the table. Mathilde bit into a slice of peach, then into a crescent of watermelon. The juice dribbled onto her dress and stained it. She trapped a black pip between her thumb and her index finger and let it slide through the pressed flesh. It shot out like a bullet and hit the face of an obese man in a fez who was sweating in his frock coat. The man waved at it with his hand as if shooing away a fly. Mathilde picked up another pip and this time she aimed at a tall, very blond man who’d put his feet up and was jabbering away enthusiastically. But she missed her target and the pip hit the back of a waiter’s neck, almost making him spill the plate he was carrying. Mathilde giggled, and in the hour that followed she machine-gunned the men around her, sending them into convulsions. It looked as if they’d caught some strange disease, like those tropical fevers that drive their sufferers wild with the urge to dance and have sex. The customers complained and the bar owner burned incense sticks to ward off this invasion of flies. But the attacks didn’t cease and soon all the men had headaches from the mixture of incense and alcohol. The terrace emptied, Mathilde said good-bye to the others, and as soon as they were home Amine slapped her. At least I had fun tonight, she thought.

  During the war, while his regiment was advancing eastward, Amine had thought about his domain the way other men thought about wives or mothers left behind. He was afraid that he would die before he had time to honor the promise he’d made to fertilize that land. In the war’s long moments of boredom the men would play cards or read novels or look through stacks of letters covered in stains. As for Amine, he would open a book about botany or a specialist magazine on new irrigation methods. He’d read that Morocco was going to become like California, that American state filled with sunlight and orange trees, where the farmers were millionaires. He confidently told Mourad, his aide-de-camp, that the kingdom was about to go through a revolution, to escape these dark times when farmers feared razzias or preferred to raise sheep rather than plant wheat because sheep could run away if someone attacked them. Amine fully intended to turn his back on the old methods and make his farm a model of modernity. He’d recently been bowled over by the account of a certain H. Ménager, a former soldier who, after the end of the First World War, had planted eucalyptus trees in the barren plain of Gharb. This man had been inspired by the report of a mission to Australia, ordered by Lyautey in 1917, and he’d compared the qualities of the earth and the region’s rainfall totals to those of that faraway continent. Of course, he’d been mocked. This pioneer, who wanted to plant vast fields with ugly gray trees that gave no fruit, had been laughed at by Frenchmen and Moroccans alike. But H. Ménager managed to convince the Department of Rivers and Forests and soon everyone had to acknowledge that he was right: the eucalyptus trees put an end to the sandstorms; they allowed the purification of cesspools where parasites proliferated; and their deep roots could draw sustenance from the water table that would otherwise have been inaccessible to the simple peasants. Amine wanted to be part of that wave of pioneers for whom agriculture was a mystical quest, an adventure. He wanted to walk in the footsteps of those wise, patient men who had carried out experiments in hostile soils. All those farmers denounced as madmen had steadfastly planted orange trees from Marrakech to Casablanca, and they were going to turn this dry, sterile country into a land of plenty.

  Amine returned to Morocco in 1945, aged twenty-eight, victorious and married to a foreign woman. He fought to regain possession of his domain, to train his laborers, to sow, harvest, to “see far and wide,” as Marshal Lyautey had once said. At the end of 1948, after months of negotiations, Amine got his land back. First he had to renovate the house: make new windows, create an ornamental garden, pave a courtyard behind the kitchen for washing and hanging laundry. The terrain to the north sloped downward and he had to build some pretty stone steps and an elegant French window that opened on to the dining room. From there they could admire the magnificent outline of the Zerhoun mountain and the vast wild expanses that had for centuries been trampled and grazed by passing animals.

  During the farm’s first four years they would encounter every imaginable disappointment and life would begin to feel almost biblical. The colonist who’d rented the property during the war had lived on a small plot of cultivable land, but all the rest needed a huge amount of work. First they had the exhausting job of ridding the earth of dwarf palms. Unlike the colonists on the neighboring farms, Amine had no tractors, so his laborers had to spend months digging into the hard earth with pickaxes to dislodge those vicious, tenacious little trees. Next they spent weeks clearing away stones, before plowing the rockless
soil. They planted lentils, peas, beans, and whole acres of barley and wheat. Then the farm was attacked by a plague of locusts. A rattling, reddish-brown cloud swooped down on their fields and devoured all their crops, all the fruit from their trees. It was like something from a nightmare. Amine grew angry at his laborers, who did nothing more to frighten away the parasites than hitting tin cans with sticks. “You ignorant fools! Is that all you can think to do?” he yelled at them, before teaching them to dig ditches and fill them with poisoned bran.

  The following year there was a drought. The harvest was a time of mourning, because the ears of wheat were as empty as the peasants’ bellies would be for months to come. In the douars the workers prayed for rain—the same prayers that had been muttered for centuries without any evidence of their effectiveness. But they prayed anyway, in the hot October sun, and nobody cursed God’s deafness. Amine ordered a well dug: this necessitated a huge amount of work and swallowed up part of his inheritance. But the tunnels kept filling up with sand and the peasants couldn’t pump water for irrigation.

  Mathilde was proud of him. And even though she raged at his absences and blamed him for leaving her alone in the house, at least she knew he was honest and hardworking. Sometimes she thought that all her husband lacked was luck and a certain instinct. Her father had been blessed with those gifts. Georges was less serious and determined than Amine. He drank until he forgot his name and all the basic rules of decency and decorum. He played cards until dawn and fell asleep in the arms of large-breasted women who smelled of butter. He fired his accountant on an impulse, forgot to hire another one, and let the letters pile up on his old wooden desk. He invited the bailiffs to have a drink with him and they ended up rubbing their bellies and singing old songs together. Georges had a remarkable sixth sense, an instinct that never failed him. That was just how it was; even he couldn’t explain it. He understood people and there was something in his character—a sort of tender, benevolent pity for mankind (himself included)—that always aroused the sympathy of strangers. Georges never negotiated out of greed but purely as a game, and if he ever conned anybody it wasn’t deliberate.