The daughter-in-law replied, “This house is your house, O Lalla.” Because even if the young widow was not yet twenty, she was still the only widow of old Soliman and had a sizable share in the inheritance.
Fatima looked at Halima for a long time, Halima, always the most eloquent one in the sadness of these restricted days: “I thank you, O Halima. This house will be a haven for my daughter, Khadidja; she will be well off here among you, among her brothers and sisters. There are many of them, thanks be to God! But please, tell your husband that I have sent for my father. Because tomorrow I want to return home with him.”
Halima emotionally kissed the widow’s hand and cheeks. She had had the opportunity to confirm Fatima’s character and maturity. (“Just sixteen!” Halima thought to herself. “If only the dead man’s sons, the ones who are already forty, had the lucidity of this adolescent!”)
Father Ferhani, adorned in his two togas, the one of Tlemcen wool and the heavy woolen one from Fez, arrived that very evening. He bore regretfully a message from his wife (whether he admired or loved her I do not know; perhaps he was also afraid of her): Amna the Golden Woman, made known to her half brothers that she would not take part in the discussions concerning the inheritance, that they should inform the cadi of this. Allah had assured her — thanks to her mother’s wealth alone. which her father, it is true, had luckily made profitable — of a comfortable and peaceful life. She was content with that. She had no descendants. Her husband, thanks be to God, was noble and “beloved of God.” Consequently his house and “the caïd’s orchards” (the most beautiful olive trees on the hillsides as well as an orange grove at oued el-Mellah) were enough for him: for his comfort and for the alms that she would now give increasingly. She would take care of the youngest of her sisters, Khadidja, who was scarcely two, the daughter of Fatima, and, by lucky accident, the granddaughter of her husband whom she so much respected … Let Fatima come to her home and live there, where she would be surrounded by peace and serenity!
And so Fatima packed her bags: three willow trunks lined with pink satin, several others that were wooden and painted in the Algerian style, her gowns, and above all her jewels, the ones from her marriage and the ones that Soliman liked to buy her almost every month, because toward the end he had become more and more extravagant with his young wife.
Fatima takes her little daughter in her arms, even though she is as heavily veiled as when she arrived for the wedding night three years before.
During the three years that she lived there, she left the big house regularly once a week on the eve of Friday to go to her father and her stepmother’s house. From the beginning she had told Soliman, “My father is used to having me be the one to bring him the copper cup for his ablutions and then the towels every Friday morning, and having me unfold his antique rug from Fez for him. I do this for his dawn prayer because the second prayer he makes in public, though not like his father. In earlier days his father would descend from the zaouia just to pray at the great and venerable mosque, the mosque “with a hundred columns” and built of green marble — alas, this sacred place was turned into a common hospital by the French! But my father goes now to the oldest remaining mosque, the one most people go to.”
Soliman, in the bedroom — this was around the tenth day after the wedding and already Fatima knew how to make her desires known — had listened to his child wife’s wish: “Oh, I wouldn’t like for my father, the mokkadem, not to have me there at dawn every Friday!” Then Soliman, to everyone’s astonishment, agreed, with the excuse that Fatima was descended from mokkadems (and thus blessed). Every Thursday evening she went to spend the night in Amna’s house with her father; she stood there at her father’s bedside at dawn, even before the faintest voice from the most distant muezzin could be heard.
So this time, accompanied by her daughter, she went back to her father’s home. She stayed there until the next day, Friday. Saw to Ferhani’s prayer … Then, seven days and seven nights later, she heard herself say to him as well as to his wife who sat beside him, radiant, “Forgive me, both of you! As God is my witness I would like to live my whole life beside you! And you are my daughter’s true guardians! But …”
And she stopped, intimidated.
“What do you want, then, daughter?” father Ferhani exclaimed in a gruff voice, giving his wife who was just as surprised, a questioning look.
“I miss the mountains, and I like being at the zaouia so much! I want to go back up there and probably live there!” She sighed.
Soon afterward, Fatima, her daughter in her arms, left the city in a barouche.
Arable Woman III
A MONTH BEFORE filming began, after two days of looking for locations, I got out of the car with the assistant director and went toward the farm: sheds and solidly built houses, all buried, however, behind any number of reed hedges. It was a beautiful day.
I went around the main house. Behind it and beyond a hedge of Barbary figs a large wasteland went down to the sea on the other side. There, among the pebbles and red rocks, a panorama of Chenoua mountain met one’s eyes: a wide view with the isolated mountain jutting out like a gigantic ship over the deep bay. Nobility of lines, majesty, with a sort of modesty to its various colors, and on the left, hills fading off toward the interior plain: Chenoua — a screen, almost like one in a theater, standing in front of my family’s mountains, where I have been traveling now for four months already.
I wanted this flat, open stretch to be like a balcony out over the calm and everyday countryside that the couple in the film story could see. Luckily from here one cannot make out the new patch of white, the tourist village built ten years ago.
Up behind me, surrounded by peasants, the chauffeur and the assistant director are waiting for me. It is four in the afternoon: alone here, my rendezvous is with this space. It is the space of my childhood and of something else … perhaps the space of this fiction to be created. Four o’clock in the afternoon: not even Camus and his étranger come to mind.
Alone I walk across this shelf. I hide my excitement by walking athletically, in sudden great strides (I am glad I have long legs for walking energetically while everything inside me churns and boils).
On this November day the air is soft and the end of autumn takes on intense hues, almost those of spring, and I am happy. I neither hide it nor show it. Not yet. I neither burst out into dancing nor yeild to the violent desire to dissolve, to fly away and disappear. Oh, these months of fierce chastity (just as fierce as were my years of sensual love)!
And thus it all began. Not the first period of quiet investigation: the endless whispering conversations with the old women of my tribe, the questions that were misleadingly banal, the words of my childhood language.
Everything really began this first day on the farm, everything. Because as I found my everyday space, this film’s existence became no longer theoretical but present. Though you might not think so, this freedom.
This space, in actual fact, is like me. So, I think, begin a film story, when the space that is right for it is really found. Go all around this space. The way they used to make the walls of the city first and then — an hour later, a day later — build the city in the middle.
So this November day my own city — that is, the house in which my three characters, Lila, Ali, and their daughter Aïcha will live — is founded.