So Vast the Prison (28 page)

Lla Fatima, finally in her own home, surrounded by her son—who attends the French school—and her three daughters, begins her new life. She is not yet forty.

Little Bahia, a little more than two, almost three now, explores the new place: four deep rooms, the patio with just one tree, an orange tree (with the bitter oranges so much sought after for preserves) spreading its low, dense foliage. Way in the back is the edge of a well and right next to it a staircase leading to a broad, low terrace from which there is a view of the mountainous slopes of the southern part of the city.

Bahia squats all alone in the back near the edge of the well. When they call her, she runs away; she climbs the staircase and makes a place for herself on the terrace with her cat, in a hidden corner where she has put down a mat. She stretches out, contemplates the mountain: she can hear noise from the nearby houses, smell the coffee roasting or the paprika cooking, hear the scattered voices of the gossips shouting, laughing. One voice of an unknown woman, in the evening, just before the prayer at sunset, sings, naked and alone, always singing the same lament …

Lying there on her back, Bahia fills her eyes with the blue of the sky and dreams: She would like to be far from the city. (Below, in the reception hall, the endless stream of ladies still comes to congratulate Lla Fatima.) She imagines herself at her father’s house at the
zaouia
of the Beni Menacers.

Bahia’s father is the man Lla Fatima has left. One afternoon a week he comes. One hour after the Friday public prayer he knocks at the front door. The meal awaits him; he comes in. Afterward he shuts himself up with his wife in her room.

When Hassan, Lla Fatima’s son, returns from school to discover that “the other man,” the one not his father, is trying to bring Lla Fatima back to her senses (or submission?), he climbs up to the terrace, where he finds little Bahia. To calm his displeasure, he says
mockingly, “You, why don’t you go with your father? That’s your father, isn’t it?”

“That’s my father!” answers the child.

“Go do it! When he comes out, go and tell him to take you!”

Bahia would like that. She would like to take her father’s hand when he crosses the patio, she would like him to call her joyfully in his clear, musical voice, she would like to stay with him … She bursts out crying; she weeps in silence, but how could she defy the big brother?

A fifteen-year-old girl appears; her long hair is light brown and her somewhat wide-set eyes are the color of honey. Catching them in this childish conversation, she scolds Hassan roundly: “Why are you jealous of her? And what will she do without us?”

Bahia takes refuge in the skirts of her favorite sister, Chérifa. She cries even harder, this time for the pleasure of being comforted, of wallowing in Chérifa’s sweetness, her warm voice, her almost motherly caresses.

The brother shrugs his shoulders, implying that he knows what is going on.

“You think I don’t know!
Mma
brought us all down here so she can hang on to her wealth. Her wealth comes from my father. And that man there,” he says, waving angrily toward the couple’s room, “was the one profiting from it up to now!”

“You’re not even ten years old and you’re already looking after grown people’s business!” Chérifa says sarcastically, finished now with consoling the little girl.

“What kind of authority will my brother have over me and my sisters and my mother when my Lord Brother”—she says it in Arabic,
“Sidi Khouya”
—“is a grown man!” Chérifa, jaunty and teasing, bursts into laughter.

Even now, three-quarters of a century later, I, Isma, the narrator, the descendant through the youngest daughter, do not know if Lla Fatima (“
mamané
”) loved her two successive husbands afterward, or one rather than the other, or one more than the other … Surely I am the only one who wonders about dead people this way!

“The two mountain husbands,” I call them for short. The mountain is the Dahra—etymologically the mountain of the “back” or “that turns its back” on the city of Caesar. Despite the way it looks, in these ravines at the beginning of this century called by some “the colonial night,” right in with these rocks and eroded slopes, at the bottom of half-dried-up wadis, some rebellious individuals hung on and kept alive and resisted. They felt they were still “aristocrats”; even though all that remained of their property was dust, still there was a dark deposit springing inside them, the memory of former battles (against the Turks in the old days, against the French yesterday).

Was it for this oxygen that Fatima, widowed at seventeen, furrowed with pride and sensing the acrid taste of freedom, left the city and went back up into the mountains? She raised her little girl, Khadidja, alone for several years and only returned to Caesarea once a year for the great feast of Abraham, to show her first child to the crowd of half brothers and half sisters. Was it for this air?

When Khadidja is six, Fatima, taking the advice of her father the
mokkadem
, agrees to marry an honorable suitor from the region: Si Larbi, one of the descendants of another saint, twenty or so miles from here, on the slope that faces Miliana. This saint’s religious reputation is greater than Saint Ahmed or Abdallah’s.

Si Larbi is not young, but he is still not an old man. He is “in the prime of life,” or at least that is how Ferhani describes him to Fatima through his wife Amna, “the Golden Woman.” In the spring Amna
goes up to the
zaouia
for a few days. She sees Fatima, at twenty-four, acting as mistress of the house for the entire little community: servants, dependent families, tenants … Fatima, first one up at four in the morning, taking care of the animals in the darkness first then awakening the little shepherds and farm girls. Not stopping there, smiling, sturdy and radiant, taking hardly any rest when it is time for the siesta and then receiving the usual women come to visit; they will bring her the detailed chronicle that makes its way through the valleys, from the hills and tiny hamlets. On the other hand, she will listen somewhat absentmindedly to the news Amna brings from the city: the scattering of Soliman’s family, the weddings, the funerals, the newly wealthy …

Amna mentions the Berkanis, the prestigious family to which the suitor belongs. She does not say that she understands perfectly well what Ferhani is up to. Up to this point he has been setting in play a whole strategy against the heirs of the two Berkani saints (father and son, buried side by side in two mausoleums), men of exalted faith who had only arrived two centuries before. Some said, predictably, that they came from Seguiat el-Hamra, on the borders of Mauritania, the cradle of almost all the sacred genealogies. Others preferred to say they were Andalusian exiles come through the usual places: Tétouan, then Fez and Tlemcen, then the mountains neighboring Médéa, at the moment when Algiers was a modest village (a little hideout for pirates trapped by the Spanish fortifications on Peñón). Finally, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, they would have reached this
zaouia
of the Beni Menacers that the oh so “glorious” General de Saint-Arnaud would come to pillage from top to bottom, burning the olive trees and all the orchards …

So, as the
mokkadem
Ferhani sees it in his schemes and ruminations, Algeria at the turn of the century apparently is still at war with
itself. One dead saint vies with another dead saint, one
koubba
, that is, tomb and sanctuary, vies with another
koubba
, another sanctuary—just as elsewhere, in other places, one bell tower would be the rival of another. A phantom Algeria where the living, who think they are living for themselves, continue in spite of themselves to settle the accounts of dead men who are not quite dead and who keep right on devouring each other …

Amna talks to the young Fatima and convinces her to marry Si Larbi, the descendant of Saint Berkani, this saint who is considered to be a “modernist” because one of his grandsons (in fact, a great-grandnephew) chose, right from the outset, to side with emir Abd el-Kader against the protégés of the French. Aïssa el-Berkani, one of the emir’s five caliphates, lost almost the entire Berkani patrimony as a result, but increased its prestige considerably. Si Larbi, who thus became Fatima’s second husband, after a stormy life, much of which was spent in exile in the west, seems to have been a beloved, perhaps loving, spouse—in any case one who was sensible and with a tranquil spirit. Long after his death, forgetting herself, Lla Fatima, throughout her austere old age would mention and even sometimes quote Si Larbi.

Her first child by him was Chérifa, the great beauty, and next Malika, two years younger. (This is the aunt who now welcomes and cherishes me during these days I spend resting there, probably because she has always been sad that she had only boys and not even one girl of her own.) Then finally came the beloved son. Soon afterward, Si Larbi, always lovingly responsible for the eldest child, Khadidja, gave Fatima some advice concerning her marriage. Then he fell sick; for a whole year Fatima cared for him.

Dealers in ancient medicine came from every hill, from even the most modest and humble sanctuary, from as far away as the Sahel
around the capital, sellers of potions and rare herbs: but any
roumi
, even a learned doctor, the sick man would have refused. Fatima knew that no Christian would cross the threshold of the Beni Menacer family, and regretted it. A second time she found herself a widow. This time, I imagine, she wept.

When, two years later, she married Malek el-Berkani’s cousin (she was thirty, or a little older; he was practically the same age, though some say he was probably two or three years younger), it came as a surprise to the people around her. They expected her to take solace in solitude and piety. No.

Was it a marriage for love this time? No one will ever know … The bitter and cynical version of the “other man’s” son sometimes seems to be right: Yes, Fatima’s wealth was primarily Si Larbi’s, hence it was also the property of her son and her two adolescent daughters … And now the cousin, having remarried into the same household, started any number of new projects: modernizing the arboriculture and buying agricultural equipment never seen before in the mountains … Up to this point no “native” farmer had dared to imitate the European colonists of the plains!

In the off-season the young husband, who had been so busy and energetic, became unruly! He liked the itinerant bands of musicians and supported them. Sometimes he would not show up until dawn after evenings spent far away in the company, people said, of dancers … News of this was reported any number of times to Fatima, who, with her children, remained near the sanctuary. Did she regret the days when, she, all alone in her father’s
zaouia
, knew just as well as this man how to inject enthusiasm into everything, or did the shadow of the dancers inhabit the sleepless hours of her lonely evenings? She was of two minds.

Then Malek would settle down and devote himself entirely to overseeing the crops. Everyone called him the
chatter
, the man who is energetic and unflagging, throughout the region.

The little girl that Fatima had by him, Bahia, was two, the same age as her eldest daughter, when Fatima was widowed for the first time and decided to return to these “back” mountains—the Dahra. She muttered this word:
dahra;
ancient revolts had taken place on this site, and it was also, she thought: “the site of women’s bitterness” (as if, suddenly, the image of her mother who died so tragically, had the upper hand)! In the end she decided upon the separation of property that is provided for in Islamic law.

“To protect my son’s future!” she would say on the day that she and almost all her children rode in the barouche back down to Caesarea for good.

Two or three years later she is just barely getting used to her new house. She learns that her husband, Malek, whose weekly visits have become less and less frequent, has now taken action. Lla Fatima did not plan to live in the mountains again (using the excuse of her son’s French education). Lla Fatima does not want to come back and moreover does not let him manage the land. So he will remarry. He sends her the letter of repudiation … Is it on this black day that she starts going into her dramatic trances? No, I think not.

Misfortunes continue even though she has just bought another house. It is near the European quarter, just behind the church built like an ancient temple; this building is larger, its huge rooms have windows and balconies facing the street on the first floor, but they also look out onto Moorish galleries opening toward the sea and the port. So it is in a modern, mixed style (she is already imagining her son’s wedding that will be celebrated here in ten years)! She does not
yet live there. She leaves one of the apartments on the ground floor rented to the city’s former rabbi and his family, whom she knows. She will live on the main floor and meet with her sharecroppers in the unoccupied rooms downstairs … She thinks about how she will move when autumn comes.

And yet misfortune (or probably “the evil eye”) continues: This is 1924 and there is an epidemic of typhoid fever in the city—it occurs first in the surrounding regions, but no one pays any attention, then it quickly reaches the Arab quarter.

Just before summer Lla Fatima realized that almost all her children were infected. Only Malika remained healthy, and took care of Chérifa, who took to bed first, then Bahia, the little one, who became dangerously delirious as a result of her raging fever. When it was Hassan’s turn to become tortured by constant vomiting, Lla Fatima lost heart. She was alone: Her father had been dead for ten years, her younger sister had long ago married in a distant city, and Amna was now practically paralyzed by the rheumatism of old age.

Aided by Malika—who was just thirteen but a hard worker, silent and energetic—Lla Fatima coped with it all. She decided that she would even call a doctor—yes, the French doctor, why not: she was the first Arab “lady” in the city who dared do so. The physician, a gruff man of fifty who could speak a few words of the local dialect, came to the house, curtly sounded “the hand of Fatima” at the heavy door, crossed the patio, went into the first room, where the son had lain, almost unconscious, for three days. He listened to his chest, wrote out a prescription, then asked to see the daughters who were ill. He spent more time over Chérifa, who smiled at him sadly (it was only at that moment that her mother became aware of how thin the adolescent had become: she never complained, she was sweet and passive in her illness, her narrow eyes looking at you from far away,
so far away, and always this smile! …). Bahia, the baby, also seemed to worry the Frenchman. Without consultation he administered some lotions he carried in his heavy satchel; he wrote out a second prescription and said he would come back in two days’ time.