The Happy Marriage

I come from a dry, rotten land where nothing grows, that’s dotted only with rocks and prickly pears. It wasn’t even a village, or a douar

, but a cemetery inhabited by the living. Sometimes the dust was gray, sometimes it was ochre. It would depend on the day. The dust clung to the wild weeds, to the young girls’ faces, and on the hungry dogs and cats. The rest of the world couldn’t have cared less about my village. It was just a nameless place in the middle of nowhere. Some called it Bled el Fna, the village of nothingness. No saint or prophet ever stopped by there. What would have been the point? Why would they have bothered? For some miserable peasants and a few starved animals? Nothingness, that’s right, the village of nothingness.

My father wanted me to be a shepherdess, and I obeyed him right up to the day when I discovered school. Instead of collecting firewood and looking after the cows, I followed my cousin to the school that lay an hour’s walk from the village. I covered my head in a gray scarf and blended in with the other children. Since most kids hardly ever showed up, the teacher didn’t notice me until I squabbled with a classmate who’d refused to lend me a pencil and a piece of paper. I’m violent, and if anyone refuses to give me something, I just take it. That’s the way it is. I snatched her satchel away from her and started to use it. Then she screamed, and the teacher stepped in and made me spend the whole morning standing in the corner. My father was told about the incident. In any case, he’d never wanted his girl to mix with boys at the local school. “What’s the point of learning how to read and write?” he’d told me. “It would be better if you learned how to birth a calf or an ewe.” My mother didn’t share his opinion and wanted me to study to help dispel the gloominess that sometimes took hold of me and made me very sad. But she had no say. My father was kind to her, but he said it was better for everyone to know their place and to resign themselves to it. He forbade me from going back to school and entrusted me into the care of his uncle Boualem, a grocer in Marrakech who treated me as though I were his maid. Boualem was a miser, a real miser. He spent all of his days in the shop counting tins of sardines, then moving them around and counting them all over again. He never washed very often and thought the ablutions before his prayers were enough — it was his way of being pious! His grooming was incredibly basic. His clothes stank of sweat. He was skinny as a rake, not an ounce of fat on his bones. It was said that skinny men lived for a long time. My aunt would scream at him. Once, he struck her ferociously. She cried. I cried. He forbade us to eat that evening. I was always hungry. On one occasion, I snuck into the grocery shop, which was connected to the house, and stole a jar of jam. I’d never tasted jam before. The next day, he slapped me so hard it almost knocked my head off my shoulders, without even asking me a question. “That’s the price I had to pay for stealing a jar of jam,” I told myself.