On the anniversary of Chérifa’s death, or shortly afterward, Lla Fatima agreed to put her youngest child in the hands of a local sorceress. She was told the sorceress knew how to free someone possessed, kidnapped by a beloved now among the dead who held on to this person “despite the will of God.”
It was difficult, but she let her little girl go with an old neighbor, the woman who gave her the advice. “It will be near the beach, in an isolated inlet where the woman lives as a recluse … You will see, with the will and protection of the saints of your lineage, Ahmed or Abdallah and the two Berkanis, father and son, she will succeed!”
Bahia returned that evening silent. The next morning, the last Friday before the month of fasting, just after her mother and big sister completed their prayer, Bahia spoke softly, as if things had always been the way they were now, without sadness: just a few words about the cool breeze and the brightness of the light.
Lla Fatima gave alms every morning for the next week.
Twelve years later Bahia is nineteen. She was eighteen when she had me.
At nineteen, just thirteen months after my birth (because she nursed me only for the first month; she had no more milk after that; she had grown thinner and felt ill. Her lethargy and sadness faded when this blessed pregnancy arrives a few weeks later to renew her energy and make her bloom), she finally has her son. Her first.
So beautiful. A big baby who made her suffer giving birth. But how happy she was afterward hearing the women’s compliments when they came to visit: “White, fat, and so blond, so blond …”
“He has blue eyes, you are lucky, he will be a real lord! A bridegroom! …
“He has his father’s eyes, his lineage is paternal!”
“The women are mountain Berbers,” another whispered, all sweetness.
But Lla Fatima, my mother’s mother, retorted calmly, “It’s true! On our side the men have black eyes and long lashes! They are all dark and handsome at home.” She sighed, thinking nostalgically of her son whom France kept in the Sahara as a soldier, so far away!
The endless talk of the visitors creates a warm babble of sound close by. It is Bahia’s third day after the birth; she will leave her bed before the seventh day for the celebration — what a stroke of luck that after all she delivered her son in the city, and in her mother’s beautiful house, she will enjoy the ritual cermony. A great many women will come as guests; an orchestra of women musicians will provide the music. Lla Fatima attends to it all, as she did when this her youngest child was married (the most beautiful wedding in the city, the one that all the women will talk about for a long time. The bride, after having arrayed herself in the traditional caftan, then was so proudly the first in the city to wear the white gown of European brides: according to the wishes of the bridegroom, the brother’s friend, just out of teachers’ training …).
Consequently Bahia does not worry. As the seventh day unfolds her serenity and contentment will grow in this soothing, new sweetness.
When she bore her daughter a year earlier, it was quite the opposite: Everything had been done hastily and far away, at the first teaching post assigned to the husband, in the mountains north of Bou Saada. As if she had had her first child in exile! On that last day of classes, the baby coming a week too early, whereas they had both expected to leave the next day (in the corners half-open suitcases needed only to be closed). Summer vacation was beginning, her mother had prepared her room for her in the city, the bed, the sheets and the provisions for the celebration with all the women arriving to visit … Now the birth was going to take place in the middle of the mountains! They were going to have to get through it with the midwife, an extremely old peasant woman; she was experienced of course, with a jolly, soothing face, but still, she did not even speak Arabic, except the words to invoke God and to call for patience, just a few expressions from the Koran sprinkled over her chatter. It sounded like some foreign idiom to the woman giving birth as she tried to surmount her pain.
The old woman had wanted to get a rope ready to hang from the ceiling so that the woman in labor could hang on it and help herself by pulling with her arms raised over her head … Bahia refused: She knew that was a peasant custom. No. In the city all they did was tilt the bed … The boiling water was ready, and while the future mother suffered, she recited verses from the Koran … As a last resort they might call the French doctor. Lla Fatima would be determined: he would come, even at midnight, he knew the family … And Bahia, waiting to give birth for the first time, would have been tranquilized. Instead, now, faced with this old peasant woman who came running from the nearby douar, my mother had to suffer, first in silence and then with harsh rattling breaths that became more and more rhythmic — until finally I burst into the light of day.
The old woman set to work with a great laugh. She cut the cord. Turned me quickly upside down. Waited for my first cry. Then she spouted a long sentence that my mother in her weakness heard but did not understand.
Lla Fatima arrived in haste four or five days later (taking the bus to Bou Saada, then as far as the road was passable in a car, after that she asked for a mare, a mule, anything at all, and there before the surprised peasants she proudly straddled her mount). She was impatient to see her youngest daughter safe and sound, even though she had been abandoned to the customs of the past. When my grandmother found herself there with the midwife (whom she brought a remnant of cloth from the city for her séroual, perfumes from Mecca, and a string of beads that were blessed as well), the two women plunged immediately deep into a conversation that lasted the entire evening.
Even though she was able to get up after the third day and take a few steps before lying down again, my mother was lying there on her bed and heard them laughing. She thought, How long it has been since I heard my mother laugh, she is such a stern woman! They seem to get along well!
Finally the midwife left, spreading a great flood of blessings. Lla Fatima said to her daughter, “Do you know how she greeted the arrival of your first child, when the baby uttered its first cry?”
“I heard her give some long speech,” said my mother, “but I didn’t understand any of it.”
“Luckily her version of Berber and mine, the one I spoke as a child, are rather close: we talked together like two cousins!”
She began laughing all over again, long, soft laughter, almost inaudible, but it shook her entire torso. Bahia, still surprised, watched her until finally she took a breath, and went back to what she was saying. “The midwife greeted the child, when your pains finally came to an end: ‘Hail to thee, daughter of the mountain. You were born in haste, you emerge thirsty for the light of day: you will be a traveler, a nomad whose journey started at this mountain to go far, and then farther still!’ ”
The young mother, Bahia, said nothing.
“So much talk for a girl!” She sighed.
“You will have a boy the next time!” retorted the grandmother.
The second delivery took place as Bahia had hoped. She did not necessarily expect such radiant beauty in a newborn.
The blue eyes, of course, that was ancestry on his father’s side — whereas her daughter had hazel eyes; she had noticed this but not mentioned it to anyone. They were the honey color of Chérifa’s eyes, the sister she had lost as a child, for whom she had never wept.
When she was just slightly more than nineteen, Bahia savored the joy of entering the realm of the mothers. For a month, as if to make up for the fact that the firstborn, the daughter born a “mountain girl,” had not been entitled to the usual honors, women poured into Lla Fatima’s house to pay their visits.