Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

“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!

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 well: 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 .