Once alone, near the balcony where the aunt takes such good care of her slender but profusely blooming jasmines, I try to imagine Fatima’s entrance into the house in Caesarea that I know so welclass="underline" the most magnificent Arab residence in the city.
In 1896, when the nuptial procession arrives (barouches and people on foot, the bride entirely swallowed up beneath her father’s flowing woolen cloak, riding on the ceremonial mule, and the line of women and children bearing candelabras, a group of black musicians walking ahead of them and keeping rhythm with their cymbals to the mournful songs, then the crowd proceeding down the very narrow streets next to the Roman theater, whose ruins had recently been excavated), Fatima descends from her mount and is carried to the first vestibule. From there she is led slowly to the main floor into the jostling crowd filling the marble and mosaic staircase — all the way to Soliman’s chamber of honor. It was a summer day, or rather night, in the last century; and yet now I myself hear the pounding heart of the mokkadem‘s daughter. She sees nothing of the women and children of the house where she is going to live. She knows she is going to sit in state (they close the shutters made of priceless cedar on the door, they give her a cup of lemonade to drink, they sprinkle perfumes from Mecca over her, an old woman intones a very shrill litany). Yes, she will live there as the mistress, as the infanta, in Caesarea’s richest dwelling.
She will be able to look around tomorrow — or rather, not until after the seven days of interminable protocol. She will examine the banisters with their columns and arches crimped with copper, running all around the galleries of the main floor that overlook the patio below with its basin, and its floor tiled in turquoise blue and sea green. She will go down. In the reflection of the basin she will contemplate the overturned sky of the city. She will climb up to the terraces at dusk or early at night when the moon is full. From there she and the young girls of the family will spy on the neighboring terraces; she will try her hand at the game women play where messages are mimed just with moving fingers, or their bare forearms. She had already been told about this wordless language in her mountain zaouia. Apparently it is unique to the city-women, a language that, according to some, was supposed to have been brought from Andalusia, so that now the baker’s daughter, Aouicha, who is simple-minded and mute, easily understood it and participated with sudden bursts of laughter in the nocturnal conversation floating in the sky from roof to roof among the women thus set free …
Yes, under her wedding veil, her hands and feet brilliantly stained with henna, her face wearing the traditional makeup with sequins glued between her eyebrows and the glistening triangles on the top of her cheekbones, yes, Fatima, her eyes downcast, expects that in a moment the “prince” will enter! Fatima imagines the whole heart, the whole body of the house, a sort of small palace, where, as mistress of the premises she is supposed to reign starting tomorrow … She knows that it is Soliman, her husband, who oversaw its entire construction a long long time ago, providing lodging for the best craftsmen in the country. He had marble brought from Italy, crockery from Morocco, maybe even from Holland. Then he inaugurated this house when he celebrated his second marriage and went on to celebrate his third there as well … Little Fatima suddenly felt how little she was, how isolated: her mother did not come, stayed behind in the hills to weep. But her proud, rough aunts, with their countrywomen’s tawny scarves are there, coldly studying the copper and marble, all this luxury, and trying not to seem impressed. The crowd of women speed up their excited, spasmodic moaning: ululu.
Is the prince going to come in? Is the bridegroom going to lift the curtain? Fatima begins — even though the old woman guarding her as if she were an idol squats there on the threshold, keeping an eye on her (or at least on the small, silk veil half masking the girl’s face) — she begins to hope. Like so many young girl brides, she hopes, not daring to hope, that the “bride thief” will intervene. He is the one who will come in, the Adonis. Invisible to all the other women, he will slip in. He is the one who will lift the gauze veiling her face, will brush her lips, will reach out his fingers to make her stand up, and all of a sudden, two ghosts, they will float out to the vestibule where they will easily find the stairway to the terrace. They will take refuge there: facing the whole city and its port and the sea in the distance, its reflected glints of onyx.
Motionless, Fatima is dreaming when the curtain is raised. Her old guardian’s voice intones the conventional good wishes: “May happiness be upon you, O Soliman!”
And taking in her hand his generous contribution, she slips outside, letting the curtain fall as the two cedar panels close softly behind it. Fatima feels her heart stop, her body suddenly grow cold. She keeps her eyes cast down when the man — her master — raises the light veil with his fingers and brings his gray face close to the young bride’s eyes … His hand gropes, brushes Fatima’s cheekbones, her eyes, and slowly, finally, she looks at him.
Humbly, Soliman murmurs in a voice full of emotion, “A gift from God, my daughter! From God!”
Then, as is customary, he goes to the corner of the long room to begin his prayer: trembling, praying that God grant him the potency, the power — he repeats the word at the end of his invocation—“the power to enjoy the gifts of God!”
On my aunt’s balcony, beneath the jasmine and not quite a century later, I wonder if the old man in his seventies was able to deflower the virgin that first night. There is no doubt that was what everyone wanted to know the next day: the women of the extended family, young and old, and the waiting heirs: the sons, the sons’ sons, the sons-in-law, the brothers-in-law … In the morning Soliman was the first to enter his private hammam: “For ablutions,” he said, his head held high and looking proud.
Did some mystery remain at the end of this wedding celebration: Was the old man “potent” from the first night on or only after several nights of effort? By spying on the bride, the women were unable to guess, as they usually could, whether her face radiated some secret contentment, some passive or serene acceptance, or bitterness not properly kept in control … The fourth wife seemed so young, and, it must be said, so reserved, whereas the daughters-in-law and the daughters all knew that this daughter of the mokkadem of Saint Ahmed, or Abdallah, grew up in the country, free no doubt, and cherished and laughing … The day after her wedding she stood up straight and mysterious, neither bitter nor beaming with fulfillment: nor was she closed and withdrawn; she put on no airs; she concealed nothing. There, confronted with so many matrons, and heiresses, and wives of heirs, was she already facing up to the future days of mute rivalry, spying, and complicity? No. She remained the mokkadem‘s daughter, calmly accustomed to the homage of peasant men and women in her hamlet up there, thanks to the baraka entrusted to her as well.
Did she almost think of herself as old Soliman’s daughter, or granddaughter? Did he, as the gossips imagined, all night long caress her naked body, the blossoms of her breasts, the face she offered? She said nothing. She confessed nothing. Nor did she seem to regret anything either.
Even after the next day in the hammam, when she would only tolerate bathing with her young aunt and her younger sister, she did not listen to the murmurs afterward as the wedding sheet, spattered with a long streak of crimson, passed from hand to hand among the oldest ladies seated on the deep mattresses of the reception hall facing the bedroom of the master of the house.