When she starts a conversation, I’m so desperately eager to play along it puts her off. Too much fawning unsettles her. She gets angry. I try to patch things up. It ends in tears. Example:
‘It’s raining,’ she says out of the blue.
‘Is it?’
‘Can’t you see it is?’ She’s angry now.
‘I was just wondering if you had noticed.’
‘I’m not blind!’ she screams.
‘Sometimes people don’t really pay attention, we listen without hearing.’
‘I’m not deaf!’
‘I was just saying.’
At this point, she throws whatever she’s holding on the floor and stomps out of the room.
Does she even realise that I love her?
How do you raise a child? The question popped into my head as I was going through a bunch of old recipes I’d collected here and there. Papa and Maman left me a basketful and I accumulated quite a few while I was growing up. Evolution being what it is, and the Muslim world being what it is, I had struggled to understand why girls were put upon while boys were fawned upon and wondered whether the hand of God or the hand of the Devil was at work. I quickly realised that our society does not have ears capable of hearing girls.
What about me, how will I bring up this child? This girl!
With other people’s children, it’s simple: we ignore them, give them a clip round the ear or smile at them as if to say: ‘Carry on like that and you’ll turn out just like your ignoramus of a father or your cack-handed mother.’ Or we find them unbearably cute and let them get away with murder. With other people’s children, we don’t have to worry about feeding them, clothing them, knocking some sense into them. They can be offhandedly loved, affectionately castigated, shamelessly forgotten.
The problem is that Chérifa is neither a child nor a woman. Between the two, it’s difficult to know how to behave — we casually refer to girls of that age as Lolitas, but it brings us no closer to understanding them. Nature is fairly straightforward in its workings, it transforms us from larva to adult after briefly keeping us in a pupa stage there to eliminate our childhood dreams and fashion new ones. Sometimes, the machine unspooling time grinds to a halt and we hesitate as we wait for it to start up again; but I’ve noticed that some people, the foolish ones, cling to old dreams like rotten acorns, while others, the more enlightened, determinedly follow their star even in the blinding glare of noon.
I know I didn’t much enjoy leaving childhood behind, nor do I much like what I see looming on the horizon. The future looks to me too much like ancient history, while the childhood innocence I trail behind me is a terrible handicap in this jungle. In the end, the problem is to decide whether it is better to die at our appointed hour or to live on through our ancestors. At first glance there would seem to be no connection, but I can imagine an explorer finding himself face to face with a sign reading: turn right and you will be eaten alive, turn left and you will be roasted on a spit, straight ahead a boiling cauldron awaits you. Turn back and you will die of starvation.
Enough of these riddles, I have a practical problem I need to resolve. I need to make Chérifa love me, I need to make her understand that I love her, as my own daughter, with all my strength, with all my weakness.
Where is the path?
From one door to the next
Hushed is the silence
The wind has nothing worthwhile to report
The crowd is running on empty
The nightmare draws out its shadow
My heart aches.
To say I love you to the walls
And hearken for an answer
Beggars reason.
Where can it be, the path
Which from the unknown
Will fashion my native soil
My love, my life
And my death?
Suddenly, I have begun to dread coming back to this house. This is new only yesterday I would be halfway home before I’d even left the Hôpital Parnet. In my haste, I would rip my white coat. This house is my haven, my personal history, my life. One question nags at me, unsettles me, slows my pace. It worries me. The answer, I know, will be there when I get home, Chérifa will be slumped in front of the TV, flicking through the channels or counting her toes, or she’ll have taken off without so much as a note — she can’t write, cannot even formulate thought, so alien is writing to her — and yet still I come back here, one moment fretting and fearing the worst and the next hoping for the best, I cling to that thought though it does not seem to put an end to the agonising uncertainty. At times, I walk more slowly, at times more quickly, and here and there in the twisting alleyways that irrigate this city I allow myself to be buttonholed by the women who wait on their doorsteps, I stop and take the time to give them the latest news about their case. They listen to me, beating their breasts or covering their faces with their hands, stammering oh and ah. There are times when I find this gesture infuriating, when I see it as an abdication of responsibility, a thoroughly masculine cowardice; sometimes I browbeat them to the point where I fear for their lives and sometimes my heart bleeds and so I give them news that will have them singing and dancing all night. Dear God, how tenuous their life is, it hangs by a thread, a word, a glimmer, a law. And how absurd my own life.
Chérifa is bored. I’ve noticed that she’s become less voluble, less frivolous; she is brooding, preoccupied, serious. I scarcely recognise her. She is like a caged bird that has forgotten how to sing, to splash in its bath, to hop and skip for joy — a joy it can scarcely remember, one too distant and too fleeting to gladden the heart. Chérifa is like a living doll, in her glassy eyes there is a faraway look; are they staring at the bars or past them to a distant something that glimmers in the sky, rustles in the wind, sings in the trees? I’m reminded of the story of the man who was born blind and who, one day, for a fraction of a second, recovers his sight — a miracle — and in that second he sees a sleek, handsome rat scurry along the wall. And ever after, when something is being described to him, he asks, awestruck and anxious: ‘Does it look like the rat?’
The honeymoon period is over: our chats, our games, our rambles through the winding passageways of the house in search of some forgotten ghost no longer leave Chérifa spellbound, open-mouthed, eyes shining. I’m almost tempted to tell her the story of M. Seguin’s goat being eaten by the big bad wolf, but that might reawaken the nomad in her and if I opened the door, would she even be able to resist the call of the sea long enough to say goodbye? The thing is, I’ve grown attached to her; the only solitude I can imagine now is in her company. Dear Lord, how much do our lives truly belong to us?
Something has changed in her, I can feel it, I can sense it. What did I do? What has happened to her?
Pregnancy — of course! — and all the upheaval that entails. The swollen body, the leaden legs, the hot flushes, the swirl of hormones, the mood swings, the sudden cravings that affect the very core of one’s being. I’ve seen some odd cases at the Hôpital Parnet, women who chew their fingers, gnawing the bone down to the marrow, others who tear their hair, there are even women who stare at the ceiling like saints, oblivious to the hustle and bustle, to the midwives, to the cheeping of the chicks and the silences of the angels; there are the women who hit out at the nurses, lash out at their husbands, their brothers. There are the stately, old-fashioned princesses who come to us by chance or out of the goodness of their hearts; we crowd around to admire them, cajole and flatter them, but there is nothing to be done about their delusions, they are not of this world; with an imperious wave they brush us away like insignificant germs. They are difficult to deal with, the very fact that they are carrying the family heir means they are constantly in a state. There are the mother hens, feathery as eiderdowns, who amble between the cubicles pecking at each other; life does not bother them, they love the chaos, they love the crowing, they are always in good spirits. No sooner have they laid this baby in a manger than they are back to bustling about the house, clucking all the while. Every woman who comes to us has her own story, none of them banal. Then there are other problems, and God knows Chérifa has her share: youth, inexperience, vain hopes, bad dreams and I don’t know what else, her mood swings, her wilfulness, those things she has inherited. She is volatile, fierce and aggressive one minute, dazed and sullen the next. Love and sex and all the bother and the upset that goes with them, they destroy, they damage, they scar. Chérifa is young, she’s wild, she can’t resist the lure of the sensual. I have long since left behind the agonies of desire but there was a time when I too rolled around on the floor like an addict in withdrawal.