So Ferhani gave his second daughter, who was just fourteen, to an old man who was …
“Sixty-two?” I asked.
“Oh no,” my aunt replied. “They said he was a hundred!”
“No,” I retort. “That’s not possible! And besides, would he have married again?”
The aunt insists.
“Soliman’s grandsons already had beards! They say he had just lost his third wife, whom he had married very young, a virgin from a modest family who was fifteen or sixteen while he was already more than sixty-five, I’m sure of it! At that third marriage his oldest sons had already sulked, especially the first one, who was a highly regarded man of law in another city, Koléa, I think. And Soliman had been prudent this time in not requesting the daughter of a family of notables, but one from modest people who must have felt themselves honored all the same! …
“Well, this wife had given him four or five more children, three of whom were living. She died suddenly, giving birth once again, this time to a premature child, who took his first breaths of air, that blessing from God, and moaned once, then a second time, and was silent forever. And the unfortunate woman suffered for a whole day, despite the expertise of the old midwife, losing almost all her blood.
“Scarcely was the burial over when apparently old Soliman went into his bedroom — the most beautiful one, on the main floor and open to the west, and he wept there — great, long sobs … His daughters-in-law, or at least the second one, the one who dared speak in his presence and sometimes stood up to him, and therefore was his favorite, came to him and chided him: ‘Lean on God’s mercy, rely on his patience! Don’t despair and don’t weep so for the poor orphans! They have brothers and sisters who are men and women! They can count on them. I myself promise that if you wish I will suckle the youngest. I will be a mother for him! …’
“She had a big heart, this Halima, and thought to console him this way. But Soliman had always spoken his mind, and now that he was older, this habit was even more pronounced, and do you know what his reply was?
‘It is not for the orphans that I am weeping. No! They are little and know nothing about life! But I, I, am I going to end my life all alone?’
“In short, you see, ten years after people thought he was too old to marry a virgin, he was complaining. He was afraid of how cold his bed would be! He wanted a woman …”
My aunt sighs, gets up to serve the tea, then, after a thoughtful silence she goes on, her head bent into the all-absorbing past: “Of course, one could imagine that being so old (eighty, or a hundred, tell me, what is the difference?), he would at least be looking for a widow, a lady unable to have children anymore, just because his bed is cold every night and also, as they say at home, “so she can carry him,” him and his old bones! That could have seemed normal. Aren’t men after all, and especially when they get older, big egotistical children!” Suddenly she briskly recovered: “Except, may Allah forgive me, our Prophet so sweet to our heart. He and the Mourashidien, the four well-guided imams, especially Sid Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, his cousin, and—” her pious murmur became lost in a long list that her tears made incomprehensible.
“Soliman,” she went on, calmer now. “Think especially how this would have affected his sons — there were at least ten of them alone — and his daughters, at least five or six, two of whom, the widow and the one who was repudiated, had returned to their father’s house! Not only did the old man not die (and you must not forget that he was a tough businessman, who looked after his own interests, with his heirs even more than with strangers) but he got married for the fourth time, with your grandmother, who was so young!”
“Explain to me, Lalla, how the girl’s father — this Ferhani, this forty-year-old who was, you say, a mokkadem, makes the decision to give his daughter, who was so very young, to a man who could be older than his own father!”
“It’s true.” She sighs. “If old Soliman had not had so many sons, you might think that the father, Ferhani, had reasoned that if his daughter were widowed young, he would stand to gain something himself. But in this case he knew very well that he would get very little. And besides, Fatima, who did in fact become a widow after three years of being there in the big house, had only a daughter and not a son!”
The aunt hesitates for just a moment; she stops, gets her breath, and then starts in again, this time speaking more dispassionately: “I must say, though — why should I hide this from you, after all, he is my maternal grandfather, even if I did not know him — that this father Ferhani had a reputation for being greedy.”
My mind went elsewhere: I was having absolutely no success at imagining this grandparent now emerging for me from the darkness. In my childhood the only genealogy that had counted for me, through my mother’s father, who was therefore my grandmother’s third husband, had been that of this third husband. The important genealogy had been only through the father of the father of the mother, and going back, only the fathers of the preceding fathers, as if one single branch had been glorious, prestigious, heroic. Perhaps that was simply because it was the only one recorded in writing! Yet now my grandmother’s father was making an appearance, an unexpected figure, in what my aunt was saying.
“When the father Ferhani gave his daughter in this manner, he in turn asked old Soliman for his own daughter, and obtained her, the most beloved Amna, daughter of Soliman’s second wife. She was a beauty who was twenty years old, of course, but above all she was also very wealthy through her mother — the only daughter of a caïd. This young woman was nicknamed the Golden Woman, and she had been widowed recently. A widow and with no children! So that was what had really happened: Old Soliman agreed to give the beautiful Amna to Ferhani, who, though already married, with several children, was, in short, remarrying this time for pleasure and for esteem. At the same time that he sacrificed his little girl, he became the son-in-law of the wealthy Soliman and found himself the father-in-law of the old man as well! I don’t know how they thought up this exchange. Perhaps Ferhani was the initiator of it after hearing the women talk at such length about how the old man pitied himself rather than his youngest children, who were now motherless! Probably Ferhani was already ogling Amna’s beauty and surely her wealth. In any case, at first the barter between the two men was almost secret, but shortly before your grandmother’s wedding, the town gossips discussed every detail on the terraces and in the far corners of courtyards. Yet no one became indignant. They let the little fourteen-year-old girl be carried off to spend her wedding night in the arms of the man …” The aunt hesitated, then added bluntly, “In the cold arms of a near-corpse!”
Suddenly, decades and decades later, she seemed to be suffering in Fatima’s place as the virgin began her wedding night. Listening to my aunt chronicling the past, I felt fascinated — but also offended — I do not know why, by this more than sixty-year-old woman who was talking about her mother, dead now for fifteen years. She was delving three-quarters of a century back into her mother’s life to become, instead of a tender and bitter daughter, just one woman facing up to another woman and attempting to live through the stings and nettles in her place, to relive the ordeals of this first destiny!