I stayed there, living with my aunt, the only one of my mother’s sisters still alive, although quite old, pious and gentle, and I felt fussed over. She guessed that these are transitional days in my life and was worried about it. (“So, like your grandmother you, too — but she, she does it later, for the youngest child, the third, a boy — you are leaving the man, you flee, you abandon the unlocked house to him? Is that the law, are you at least retaining your rights? … Alas, where are our rights, whether we are illiterate or educated, all of us, all women? It is as bad today as yesterday.” That is what she whispered that evening as we stood looking out over the twilight, while the sounds of the crowded street rose up to the balcony.)
Why, I mused, still dreaming about the grandmother, does feminine memory tirelessly return in concentric circles to the fathers and leave in the shadows (naturally in the silence of the unwritten as well) the real crises, the blacking out, the fall of a woman? As if that were too much, as if it undermined the very roots of strength and hope, of the future! Too much …
For example, back to father Ferhani! The man who married off his fourteen-year-old daughter but who shortly afterward hastily remarried, forcing his first wife to be present for this wedding, responsible for the meals, the proper reception of the guests, and the necessary organization of the festivities … And he required particularly (a husband’s ambiguous and strange cruelty) that she look at the bride who was younger, of course, though already widowed, and especially more fortunate because she was “the Golden Woman.” She, the wife who reigned in the other wife’s room — and who had waited beneath the candles for the husband on the verge of entering, wearing his white ceremonial cloak, dipping his shoulder at the door and smiling with happiness to the sounds of ululation — she was the first wife! But now her hands were in the butter, her face red as she bent over the bouillon for couscous in the steamy kitchen, and she watched from her own place, watching the husband repeat his entrance into the bedroom, fifteen years after her own marriage.
It had only taken fifteen years for her to change roles, for her to cease being the one set up like an idol who waited, her heart pounding. Only fifteen years for her to become the servant, the cook at the hot stove. Yes, on the same evening, the same smile from the man, making the same entrance as today, and suddenly — suddenly a long cry, followed by silence from all the women (too late, the bridegroom has already closed the door on his marriage). And she, the first wife, falls flat on the ground, right on the threshold of the pantry … All the women of the family run to her and sprinkle her face and palms with cool water, they make her sit up like a floppy doll, they repeat verses for her, they pass the ewers around and orange-flower water. But still, a week later, they carried her off, dead: “With a swollen belly,” my aunt tells me today.
“What did she have?” I feel touched, and I add, “What did the doctor say?”
“Was there a doctor for women then? No … In those days, never, not even for childbirth, would we have entered a French hospital! The women who told me about it (no, not your grandmother, she never said anything about this wedding, but instead her young sister, my aunt, whom you knew, the mother of the “great fighter” in the resistance), these women all thought that it was livid, powerless jealousy that “made her blood go bad.”
And so, father Ferhani had hardly remarried when he found himself a widower. It must be said that “the Golden Woman,” his newly-wed, turned out to have a big heart: She went back down to the city and moved into one of the houses her mother had inherited. There she regularly received her husband when he would come down, dressed in white, even more sumptuously than before, like a caïd or a bachagha. Afterward, she remained barren, but she dealt generously with her husband’s children as their stepmother.
“He died honored by all men and all women?” I asked tongue-in-cheek. “This Ferhani who,” I stressed, “was the one responsible for the death of his wife!”
“Oh!” My aunt was surprised. “In those days men were naturally harsh! Often without even being aware of it … And others, of course — Moh’, your mother’s half brother, comes to mind, and M’hamed, the younger half brother — others keep their hearts untarnished. Sometimes they even love just one woman in their lifetime! Ferhani died in the sanctuary. I remember hearing the news of his sudden death; I was a little girl. As for the saint’s tomb, what is left of it? Nothing, only ruins, the result of the war of liberation! Today’s “people in high places,” as you well know, make fun of our marabouts … Because they themselves have no lineage.” She muttered in displeasure, shrugged her shoulders, then was silent.
Now, during the week following the final breakup of my first marriage, as I plunged into the maze of my genealogy — the genealogy of my mother and of the grandmother whom I used to feel was so terrifying — I reconstruct this memory.
I wanted to conjure up the grandmother when, just before 1900, old Soliman died: What was the day like when the seventeen-year-old widow left this house that later would be so familiar to me?
The entire extended family, numbering so many, is there after the third day of the funeral. The women have returned from the rustic cemetery, the one overlooking the city and close enough to the Roman baths on the west that the dead of recent generations are getting in the way of the digs that scientists from the capital consider necessary!
Soliman’s sons, his daughters, and his grandsons respect the standard custom, keeping the house (which, for many, during these times of deprivation, seems the last remaining little Arabian palace) in joint ownership and favoring the eldest along with the most energetic (or at least the least lethargic) of the younger ones. Oddly, several of Soliman’s sons, unlike the founding father, will prove to be dreamers and given to pleasure, frequenting musical evenings or spending their time in the company of fishermen in secluded inlets. So “the most capable” are allowed to manage the surrounding farms and orchards.
The hierarchy of the heirs was visible in the new division of the domestic quarters: The second floor, the most splendid (because the father lived there), with its four long, deep bedrooms each of which had its separate kitchen and “Turkish” toilet, and galleries covered by luminous mosaics, with banisters whose twisted columns were made of cedar and pine from Aleppo, was reserved for the sons of the first marriage, or at least the ones who remained in the city. The rooms on the ground floor were more numerous but more shady, wide open to the patio, with its basin and fountain rippling their tiny, honeyed music. These were reserved, half for the daughters (the repudiated one and several grandchildren, adolescent girls) and half for the two younger sons who remained bachelors … (I imagine them from puberty on feeling vaguely disgusted, or merely uncomfortable, with the “vitality”—in marriages and descendants — of their omnipresent father!)
This new division of the space must have been made easier when Fatima, the young widow, had let them know — either through one of the old women (one of those poor relations living there two or three months at a time before finding shelter somewhere else, in another of the “great houses” of the city) or telling the eldest daughter-in-law directly — her decision. “I shall not remain with you. You are my family of course. But I have sent for my father to come for me and my little daughter.”