© 1995, Orin Hargraves. All
rights reserved.
It
was more than a month before I saw Fatima again, and then only for a weekend
when I could get away from my work. It was mid-August, and the last traces of
spring vegetation had long since withered and died, returning the countryside
around Azrou to the parched brown that characterized it for half the year.
Fatima didn’t expect me; I had written a while before, sending her a note and a
money order, but all her translators were gone now, and she never trusted
anyone but the Americans to interpret her letters; she would just save them
until someone came along.
I
found her door shut when I arrived in town just after noon. I pounded on it and
shouted, “Fatima!”
“Who
is it?” It was her witch’s voice, indicating either bad humor or sleepiness.
“Qrib,”
I said, near, meaning someone
well-known to her. She didn’t seem to recognize my voice. I heard shifting
noises, followed by the sound of her slippered feet descending the stairs, and
her bony hands unbolting the door.
She
looked awful, haggard, worn-down. I suspected that Ramadan, which had just
ended a few weeks before, had been harder than ever on her that year, with no
livelihood to look forward to in the fall. Her eyes seemed almost loose in
their sockets; her skin sagged. But however she felt, she became the same old
Fatima when she found me at the bottom of the stairs and she began dancing
around like an elf.
“I’m
so glad you’ve come,” she said, “I have four new letters and I don’t even know
who they’re from, and someone sent me a money order for 6000 riyals!”
Like
most country people she counted her money in an old, pre-colonial unit, like
counting in nickels or shillings, that made every sum seem enormous. This was
the money I’d sent her but she couldn’t have know it by my surname on the money
order, even if someone had read it to her, for she had never heard it.
Not
a thing had changed in her living room, though the storeroom stock, I noted in
passing, was a little depleted. She was in the middle of preparing her kif,
which explained why her door had been locked; she makes occasional gestures to
the fact that it is illegal by undertaking her elaborate preparations only
behind closed doors. All her paraphernalia were lying about on the floor in
front of her folded blanket: a bundle of the best marijuana from the Rif mountains, leaves of brown,
strong-smelling tobacco that she cut the kif with, a cutting board, and a giant
butcher knife that she used to chop the kif-and-tobacco mixture to an almost
powderish consistency. She was locally famous among the addicts for her
superior blend.
“I
was just making up some kif, and this is the last that I have,” she sighed.
This, no doubt, was where part of the 6000 riyals had gone.
She
made coffee and I squatted down on a block for a long afternoon of talking, or
rather listening, as I knew I would hardly get in a word: she would have much
to tell. Her speech was always a good indication of her general mood and from
it I surmised that she’d been through a slump and was still in it, for she
hardly had a good word to say about anyone. The cheerfulness with which she had
greeted me vanished.
She
started out on her friend Fatuma. She was feuding with her over a
three-month-old argument about who would pay for a bundle of mint for tea. They
weren’t speaking.
Fatuma,
a tiny, perpetually smiling black woman hardly five feet tall, was a
prostitute. Fatima never disparaged her profession except when she was mad at
her, as now, and then she could hiss out the word qhaba, whore, in a way that made it sound reptilian.
“That
daughter of sin,” she told me, “she gets so cheap in the summer. Ten riyals for
a bundle of mint and she tries to get me to pay for it when she knows it’s her
turn. You know why: the soldiers will only come to her in the winter, they know
black women are warmer inside. If I didn’t put my foot down she would board
here in my house all summer long until the rains came.”
I
asked about Sidi Hamid and family and she said she didn’t see them any more.
“I
don’t have anything to do with them,” she said, “I’m tired of them. They don’t
know how to raise those children. They have to crack down on them and they
won’t. You know that round table that Mary left? I gave them that for the
children to study on. I gave them Bob’s briefcase. I bought them notebooks and
pens. They got their results from school last month and not one of them passed. You know why?
Because they won’t make them study. They sit in front of that TV every night”
(here she paused in a blank, zombie-like stare for effect) “and they’ll never
learn anything that way. I asked them, do you want to grow up like me, alone
and poor without enough education to write your name? But I’m tired of them, I
have nothing to do with them.”
“Don’t
the children come to see you any more?” I asked.
“No,
they don’t come, Figuigi’s probably told them not to. What do I have to give
them anyway? I have nothing to do with them.”
It
was significant that she called Sidi Hamid Figuigi, rather than by his American
nickname — as if he’d been demoted from having any association with the
Americans at all. I suspected that she was really hurt that they didn’t come
around, and suspected them, unfairly perhaps, of neglecting Fatima because
there was no American pie to be shared at the moment.
She
went on and on, cataloguing the minor shortcomings of her friends and neighbors
as if each one were a personal insult to her. The excitement that I’d seen in
her at the bottom of the stairs now seemed like something from the distant
past. Hoping to lead her into happier thoughts, or to opening her letters, I
asked if she’d heard of Bob or any of the others. This rubbed another bruise.
“He’ll
never write,” she said, “he still thinks I stole wood from him. You should have
seen him when he left. He wore those big
glasses that have mirrors on them” (she simulated wearing enormous shades) “and
I couldn’t even see his eyes. All he said was, ‘good-bye, Fatima.’ For a year I
washed his clothes and made bread for him and taught him everything he needed
to know about Azrou and that’s what I get. He left a little money but it’s gone
now. I’ve never met an American like him. He’s not like my girls.”
I
was concerned that she might be out of money now and asked about the money
she’d been sent, only to elicit another tale of suffering.
“Well,
she said, “I still don’t know where it came from but it must have been one of
the Americans who knows me. My niece was getting married last week in Midelt
and my uncle invited me to the wedding. I waited until the evening before to
leave here because it was so hot that day and I didn’t want to travel in the
heat. In the evening when I went to the station there were no buses and I had
to be there the next day so I took a taxi alone.”
I
tried not to flinch as she mentioned this, an incredible extravagance that not
even Americans indulged in. The price of a solo taxi ride to Midelt would have
fed her and her circle for nearly a month, and was well over half the money I’d
sent her.
“I
just wore clothes like I have on now,” she continued, “the things I always
wear, what you all have given me. Everyone at the wedding was happy and
dancing, and my niece looked so
beautiful, and there was lots of food and tea. When they went to take the
pictures they called us all into the next room and when I got to the door my
uncle’s wife” (here she took on the character of a petty shrew) “put her arm
across the door like this and said, ‘you can’t come in! The pictures are for
people who dressed for the wedding.’ What was I to do? I come all the way from
here in a taxi by myself to come to the wedding, but I don’t have any nice
Moroccan clothes. These are the clothes I wear to the Americans’ parties and
everyone takes pictures of me. What’s wrong with them? So I found a room by
myself and sat in the dark and smoked my pipe, and came back here the next day.
I’m done with them. I’ll never go to visit them again.”
She
continued airing grievances as the afternoon wore on and the room became
increasingly heavy with the weight of her troubles. Much of the heaviness
seemed to have settled in my shins, weary from squatting, and I suggested that
we go out and walk a little.
“No,
it’s still too hot. Stretch your legs out if they hurt you, we haven’t even
read my letters yet.”
This
was the activity that was bound to cheer her. I suspected that she was saving
it, making herself utterly miserable first so she would enjoy the letters all
the more. Her face began to light up even as she handed a packet of letters to
me, wrapped up in a lace ribbon.
“Open
them and see what’s inside!” she said excitedly. “I don’t even know who they’re
from.”
One
of the letters was from me; two were from a couple of her “little girls,” the
early volunteers. I read mine to her quickly, since I had already told her
everything in it, and then started the girls’ letters.
As
soon as I began to translate them to her she was transported, back to the
Golden Age, and each new sentence seemed to recall to her another incident from
the glorious past. She would stop me, between pipefuls of kif, to explain
references in great detail, and sometimes tell stories only vaguely related to
the contents of the letter, all of them ending with “and we laughed so much!”
or “she liked it so much!” or “they were so surprised!” She would clap her hand
against her knee, her eyes sparkling through the haze of smoke in the room. She
giggled until I went on with more from the letters, and she would stop me
again. Though the letters were each only two pages long it took us 45 minutes
to get through them. By the end of the first two, she was as animated and sassy
— and stoned — as I had ever seen her.
The
fourth letter had an unfamiliar return address on the outside and I found that
it was from Bob only when I opened it. I told Fatima and she tried to look
indifferent, but her heart leapt to her face as she watched me unfold it. We
both knew she loved Bob as well as she did all the others and she could hardly
wait to hear what he said.
The
letter was long and full of details on his leaving the country, his journey
home, his current activities, and how much he missed Azrou. Fatima listened to
all of this, but impatiently, as if she were waiting for a particular piece of
news. The last paragraph in the letter was a confused but sincere account of
his emotions during his final weeks in Azrou, and how he thought he had not
done right by Fatima at their parting. He said he wore the big glasses because
he didn’t want her to see that he’d been crying, and he had had so little to
say for fear of his voice breaking. Fatima listened quietly throughout this
part, stopping me only once or twice to correct faulty syntax that made my
translation ambiguous. When I was finished she was crying and blessed Bob over
and over to me.
“That
little boy of mine,” she said, laughing and crying at once, “this whole summer
I’ve been so upset thinking about him and that business about the wood. I knew we didn’t understand each other
about that and now to see that he felt badly too. He is so dear to me! There’s
no one like Bob!”
He’d
also sent a check made out to me with a note asking that I cash it into dirhams
and give the money to Fatima. I explained this to her and she multiplied the
blessings on him, exclaiming what a good man he was and recalling some of his
witty sayings and endearing habits. He had entered the Golden Age.
I
stayed with her until dark and answered her letters, trying to translate her
colorful phrases and stories into an English that could do them justice. To
each letter she affixed her “signature,” a series of jagged peaks and troughs
that she inscribed with a bic pen. After a few strokes she would stop and say,
“Is that enough or should I do more?” We would study the signature to decide
whether it needed more humps.
The
day ended with another difficult good-bye. She showered blessings on me again.
I kept trying to get away, to make her cut them short, as if each blessing were
another burden I had to carry with me. I left her with some money, but I would
be leaving the country soon myself and there was still no word about whether another
volunteer would be sent to Azrou. Fatima was again stoic and assured me that
she would be all right. She asked only that I write, and continued her
blessings even as I walked away.
Just before I left Morocco I learned at the Peace
Corps office that a second-year volunteer had been accepted for a transfer to
Azrou, and that she meant to take on Fatima. Her name was Susan. She had met
Fatima at a party once and felt sure that they would get on, so Fatima was
secured for one more year.
During the next nine months as I traveled a
letter from Fatima caught up with me occasionally and if these were any
indication, she seemed to be faring better than ever. Susan, now the chief
scribe, wrote several times without mention of a problem. The two of them
seemed to be a perfect match. Susan was a Golden Age girl before she had even
left Azrou.
Three or four such letters came over the course
of the school year, and I marveled at Susan’s patience, knowing that I was only
about one-eighth of the correspondence she was carrying on for Fatima. The
letters were informally chatty and happy; all the little girls, and Bob, had
written at least once and everyone was well by her report. Fences were mended
with Fatuma and Sidi Hamid and family; she sent news of them too, and related
Susan’s adventures with them. She said she was having a nice traditional
Moroccan dress made for herself so she wouldn’t bomb at any more Moroccan
parties.
Only in the last letter did the tone begin to
falter some, and Susan spoke a little for herself as well as for Fatima: “I
don’t know what will happen to her,” she wrote, “again no volunteer has been
assigned here for next year. She mopes around all the time and says she wants
to die. She talks about how poor she was before she worked for the Americans,
when she used to eat dirt to stay alive. Did she ever do this before? I have to
go in the middle of June, and will leave her all my stuff and as much money as
I have left.”
This letter caught up to me just at the end of
May, at about the same time that another letter came, much to my delight, from
the Peace Corps, inviting me for a short work assignment that I had applied for
in Morocco. I didn’t hesitate a minute in accepting, for having been nine
months away from there the idea of going back seemed like a homecoming.
What I didn’t know when I returned to Morocco
was that I would actually be working in Azrou. The Peace Corps was staging a
training program there, by happy coincidence, in which I would be an
administrator.
There was no time to warn Fatima of my coming,
and I knew that she probably had no one to read letters to her anyway. I
arrived in Azrou just after Susan had left, in late June, which that year
coincided with Ramadan in the Islamic calendar. It is a difficult time of year
for all Moroccans, everyone being obligated to fast completely from dawn to
dusk, or to carry on the appearance of fasting, which may be as difficult as
actually doing so, there being no such thing as personal privacy there. Fatima,
rigorously devout like most of the old and the poor, took the fast seriously
and was therefore completely impossible to be around for the whole month
because she couldn’t smoke during the day.
Though I had arrived in town in the middle of
the day I waited till just before sundown to visit her, thinking we could
“breakfast” together. Her door was open. I went up and found her sitting in a
glassy-eyed trance in her corner. She didn’t seem either surprised or happy to
see me. Indeed, she barely seemed to notice me come in. She looked skeletal — a
combination of too little food, not enough of the kif that vitalized her, and a
classic mid-Ramadan funk. She could barely get out a greeting and didn’t rise
from her roost when I came in the door.
“It’s good you’ve come,” she said, “It’s almost
breakfast time and Tata brought me that harira,
but I really can’t eat anything. You eat it.”
She was depressed. When the cannon blew to
announce breakfast she felt around wearily for her kif pouch and filled her
pipe. She lit up and blew smoke wistfully out the window.
“Come on Fatima,” I said, “you have to eat
something, you look like a string. Have you been fasting at night too?”
“I have no appetite, my boy, you go ahead and
eat it. This is the worst Ramadan ever. It’s been hot like you wouldn’t
believe. I’m too old for this now. Maybe I’ll die before it’s over and go
straight to heaven — they say that’s what happens to those who die in Ramadan.”
With effort and pampering I got her to eat. I
set about making coffee and she began to revive: as evidence of this, she
watched my preparations and corrected me whenever I was about to do something
other than the way that she would do it herself. She still had not spoken much,
however, and we were well into our cups before she said anything that demanded
my attention.
“These good-byes are so hard,” she began. “I
don’t know if I can do any more. You all don’t know what it’s like. You come
here for a year, or two years to teach and live and keep house and then one day
. . . time’s up! That’s all! Time to go home. ‘Bye-bye, Fatima!’ One year is
your first year, one year is your last year. I know you can’t stay, you have
your friends and your families. Morocco is not your blad. But who is my family? You
are my family. And every time one of you leaves a little piece of my heart
falls off and dies. Now Susan’s left. Gone. Another of my little girls. I don’t
know if there’s any more of me left. It’s too much for me.”
She cried, and although there was a bit of
theater in this, as there was in everything she said, this was theater in
earnest. It was obvious how deeply she felt about us all and how much she hurt.
I didn’t answer her, but sat quietly to let her know I was listening.
“You know that map?” she continued. “The map of
the world in the house. It’s gone.”
This was a prompt demanding a gasp from me, for
we all knew that the map was precious to her, an illustration of her history
with the Americans. By unknown mnemonics she could point out the region where
each of her children came from, and show all the countries they had traveled to
and sent her postcards from.
“Gone. Susan gave up the house to some Moroccan
woman for the summer, Khadija somebody, and she took it. I was there the other day and it was gone. She probably
threw it away. You know that map was like my eyes. I could look all over the
world and see where my boys and girls were. You remember that time when you
were new and I showed you where we were? And when Mary went to Italy, you
showed me where that was and I was so happy because she was so close. And those
people that Bob met that spoke English, where were they from?”
“Australia.”
“That place, that big pink one. He showed me
that. And now it’s gone, fifteen years in that house and it disappears
overnight.”
“Why don’t you ask her for it back?”
“I don’t know her. I have nothing to do with
her.”
“What’s going to happen to the house?”
She screwed up her face into a horror mask
dripping with cunning and greed and I knew what was coming: a story to do with the
Benjellouns, owners of the rented house and the wealthiest merchants in town.
“Benjelloun! May God scatter his family! He
asked me to give him back my key to the house!”
“Did you?”
“Are you kidding? Fifteen years I’ve had this
key, if not for me that house would have rotted and fallen apart. Who called
the plumber when the pipes broke? Who fixed the leak in the roof? Who’s
repaired the hot water heater a hundred times because Benjelloun, son of a
donkey, is too cheap to buy a new one?”
The answer was obvious, but I said “you,” as it
seemed the story could not go on until I did. “Of course I did. He wants to get
my key back so he can jack up the price if another American comes. He’s not
dumb. He knows if I have anything to do with it I’ll shame him into holding
down the rent. But maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe it’s all over now. No more
Americans.”
This brought us to the subject of the current
training program, which in all likelihood would assign a volunteer or two to
Azrou. I told her nothing was definite, but that if anyone was given Azrou I
would recommend her to work for them. This brought a shower of lukewarm
blessings on me, still diluted with despair.
I stayed a while longer and tried to accentuate
the positive, such of it as there was. I pointed out that we would at least
have one another’s company for the summer, and she agreed to work for me in the
apartment I’d subleased. It was really just a formality, there would be little
work for her to do and I could as well have taken my laundry to be done with
everyone else’s in the training program, but it would provide her with some
activity, which she desperately needed now, and supply a comfortable pretext
for my supporting her for the summer. So now for the first time I was truly one
of Fatima’s volunteers.
It was a miserable summer. I had seen Azrou in
all the other seasons and always found it agreeable, but the summer was
unbearable. The heat made even the smallest efforts exhausting. The training
program was plagued by illness and conflicts that required constant attention.
There was hardly a spare moment to enjoy any of the things that had made Azrou
so dear to me, the things that had made me so happy at the prospect of passing
a few months there. But Fatima was my consolation. She came to my apartment two
times a week, one of them on Saturdays when I could get away from work and
visit with her. Then it was like old times. I would come home about midday and
find her washing clothes, crawling under beds, turning rooms inside out to
track down errant dust and all the while muttering about the domestic
shortcomings and appalling materialism of the French people I’d rented the
place from.
Once Ramadan was over I usually fixed her lunch
because I knew she wouldn’t bother to eat if I didn’t. She became a great
appreciator of hashbrowns and eggs, and always ask that I make them for her on
her Saturdays at my house. Over the course of weeks her spirits improved, she
put on weight, and little by little she began to seem her old self.
Relations with all of her old friends had stayed
on an even keel. She visited Sidi Hamid’s family, and received Fatuma into her
own house. I didn’t see much of her eclectic circle for lack of time and I
didn’t make it often to visit her at home, so part of our Saturday conversation
was usually a run-down on what all of them were up to.
“I saw Kenza coming from the hospital with a WHO
card in her hand a while back,” I remarked on one such day when I remembered
it, to elicit the lowdown. Kenza was half of the pair of Tata and Kenza, two
widows who had been simultaneous wives of the same man; they continued to live
together after he died. With the yellow WHO card I assumed that she’d got some
kind of vaccination. It was the time of the Hajj,
the pilgrimage to Mecca; but I didn’t think Kenza could possibly afford to go.
“She’s going on the Hajj,” Fatima answered with
arch gravity. “It’s all she’s thought about for ten years. I thought she would
die, God prevent it, of wanting to go on the Hajj.”
“Didn’t you ever want to go on the Hajj?” I asked.
She came away from the sink where she’d been
washing dishes, wringing her hands on a dish towel, and sat at the table where
I was. Clearly she’d found something more important than mere housework to
attend to.
“Do you know what a pilgrim is?” she asked me.
I supplied the rhetorical negative.
“It’s this,” she said, and she held out her two
hands, palms open: the sign of charity.
“How do you mean?”
“Those people who go to Mecca and come back like
they’re important” — she got up and strutted around pompously — “and they think
they’re better than everyone else because they went to Mecca, like they’ve done
something important. And they’re all like this.” She closed her hands into
tight fists. “They wouldn’t give a riyal to someone who was hungry or sick or crippled.
They think they’ve done their part. Well, God sees those things and he doesn’t
like them.
“You know how Kenza got the money to go on the
Hajj? Gold.” She performed a complex gesture bringing to life a vulgar wealth
of necklaces, bracelets, earrings hanging all over her. “She had lots of it
from her husband, all kinds of jewelry, it used to be so cheap and now it’s so
expensive. Tata sold all of hers to keep the two of them alive all these years.
Kenza sold hers too, but she’s never had a riyal to spend on anything or
anyone. She’s been hoarding money since the day her husband died.”
“What about Hajj Benjelloun? Is he a pilgrim?” I
asked her. Kenza had always seemed a kind person and I wanted to spare her from
complete character assassination. Beyond that, it was not an unreasonable
question because the old man Benjelloun, father of the infamous
landlord-merchants, carried the title of the returned pilgrim.
“Benjelloun? He could bring the holy shrine to
Azrou and still never get into heaven. You don’t understand anything about
religion. Look: you know what happens when you die?” she asked, in her softest,
hushed voice that she reserved for truths of the gravest importance. “Well,”
she continued, standing up, “there’s a road that leads to heaven as narrow as
the edge of a razor, and on either side of it there is only fire.” She pointed
to the crack between tiles on the floor. “Each of us has to walk that road,
carrying on our backs all the possessions we’ve accumulated in life.” She stood
now at the beginning of the road, simulating a light traveler with a modest
knapsack on her back, as she looked resolutely forward. This was Fatima, on the
road to heaven.
“But if you’re like the Benjellouns . . .” She
stooped over, terror filling her eyes as she reeled under the weight of the
imaginary bundle that must have been three times her size, trying to balance it
on her back, and quaking with fear. “Well, you see what will happen to them.”
She made an hilarious impersonation of a Benjelloun, on the realization that he
was burning to death, and erupted in demonic laughter. I started to laugh. Then
she was deadly serious again.
“People like the Benjellouns are mistaken. They
don’t know what their work is here, or what questions God will have for them.
Is he going to ask ‘Did you build big houses? Did you buy a bank? Did you save
enough money to go on the Hajj?’ ” After each of these questions she became a
happily deluded Benjelloun, nodding childishly before God.
“No. That’s not God’s business. He has more
important work. He wants to know, ‘Did you buy your bread from a poor woman on
the street? Did you give shelter to a man who had nowhere to sleep? Did you
help the people who crawl on their hands because they have no feet?’ ” After
each of these she took on dark, trembling looks of horror that she knew would
overcome the Benjellouns on their days of reckoning.
“So you see, all this that we go through in life
— it’s nothing. What comes later on: that’s what we have to prepare for.”
From here she began her usual battery of
questions to make sure that I’d understood everything, and she reiterated the
points which I didn’t regurgitate fully with further examples. I haven’t ever
forgotten what a pilgrim is.
Toward
the end of the summer there was a big feast at the training program. Its main
purpose was to provide a cross-cultural experience for the trainees, but
enjoyment was also among the objectives, and the staff made detailed
arrangements to insure that everything would come off well. Women were hired to
make bastilla, a pigeon-and-pastry
dish, for 150 people; our drab dining hall was festively decorated with bunting
and tablecloths, Saharan musicians were hired for entertainment, and local
dignitaries were invited. I invited two of the Benjellouns fils who, in addition to their real-estate dealings, had been among
the vendors for the training program. Fatima was my other guest of honor.
Without
giving the arrangement any thought, I seated my guests at the same table with
myself and a couple of fellow administrators. Nothing struck me as incongruous
in putting all my distinguished Moroccan friends in one place, and I didn’t
begin to have doubts about it until I told Fatima, who had arrived first, that
the Benjellouns would be filling the empty places at our table. She stood up
suddenly and tightened her scarf, then buttoned up her Pendleton shirt,
covering up a faded tee-shirt that said “Piece Corps.” Then she came, without
speaking, to sit next to me.
We
were in the back of the large dining hall. Soon I saw the Benjellouns at the
door, and went to escort them in. They were dressed interchangeably in their
sleekest European costumes: silk sportshirts, pressed trousers, lubricated
hair, gold chains and pointy-toed shoes. We bantered lightly on the way to the
table; they politely oohed and ahhed the decor. The silence began when they saw
Fatima seated there. They emitted icily courteous greetings, sat, and didn’t
say anything further. Then the weight of my faux
pas settled on the table with a crash: I was forcing the high and the low
to share the same meal; juxtaposing widely separated social strata in a setting
that would never occur in nature.
Fatima
was well-known to the Benjellouns. She had bargained with them for the rent on
the Peace Corps house for each volunteer she had worked for, and seen that the
price had not gone up in five years; whenever she needed their authorization
for any repair on the house she went to the Benjellouns’ store, the busiest
place in Azrou, always humming with customers, and created scenes geared to
mortifying the Benjellouns. They usually gave her what she wanted just to get
rid of her. To be seated at the same table with her now was a black indignity.
Fatima,
if her slouching and sulking were an indication, was no happier with the
arrangement. Everyone looked sullenly at the bastilla, which had arrived too
hot to eat, and no one spoke. I broached five or six suitable table topics in
Arabic but no one gave more than one or two word answers, and finally I gave
up, ready to resort to the rudeness of speaking English with the other
Americans, merely to provide noise.
“Why
did you invite me to eat here?” Fatima asked me loudly, out of the resounding
silence.
After
letting me fidget a moment she winked. I didn’t have a clue about what I should
say. Then she continued in very formal language: “I’ve cleaned that fine house
of the Benjellouns for years now, ever since I began my humble service to the
American volunteers so long ago, and without the benevolence of these gentlemen
toward the volunteers and myself, I might have had to work in a much less
resplendent place. It would be an honor for me merely to serve their table, but
to sit at their table as an equal is an honor I could never have imagined.
Their forbearance is remarkable; to sit with me, their servant, and only an old
woman.”
The
Benjellouns had already begun to squirm with polite protest. They were trapped;
they knew that the Americans revered Fatima.
“God
bless your parents,” Fatima said, turning to the Benjellouns, “please forgive
his ignorance of Moroccan customs, though he’s been here three years he was
mistaken in thinking he could seat me with you.” She pushed her chair back as
if about to leave the table.
“Sit!
Sit!” they said, one of them leaping up to settle her back in her chair. They
howled how wrong she was, how they considered her a friend of long-standing and
didn’t know why they’d never had the pleasure before, etc. The ice was broken.
There were smiles all around and conversation, formerly dammed up, now began to
flow forth, for nothing comes more naturally to Moroccans than conversation and
its absence can only betoken the most serious disorder. Fatima gave me looks
throughout the meal to make sure I appreciated the skill of her maneuver. She
regaled her circle with the story for days afterwards, doing hilarious
imitations of the portly Benjellouns and an even greater exaggeration of her
own mock-humility before them.
The
summer was ending. I couldn’t say it was too soon, as I had looked forward,
since the day the program began, to the day when the trainees would become
volunteers and go to their sites, when there would be peace and quiet. As I had
hoped, two new volunteers from the group had been assigned to the school in
Azrou. I recommended Fatima to them and introduced her. They each agreed to use
her one day a week. One of them would take the Benjelloun’s house, and the
other would rent elsewhere. So Fatima’s prospects looked good — two volunteers
in Azrou at the beginning of their two years — but she didn’t seem enthusiastic
about the future.
“I
don’t know if I can work for them,” she said, “they probably don’t want someone
so old. They’ll just leave someday, like all the others. And the volunteers now
aren’t good, not like the old ones.”
She
persisted in this attitude for the whole last week I was in town, until many
assurances to the contrary by all of her friends finally subdued her
stubbornness.
Finally
the training program ended. Morocco had 70 new Peace Corps volunteers, ready to
begin their two-year adventure. I left Azrou but, knowing that I would have to
return there in a week’s time to tie up loose administrative ends, I postponed
the last farewell. I was exhausted then and thought that with a short absence I
could better put Fatima and my Azrou days in a proper perspective for saying
good-bye to them.
So
after a week on the coast I arrived back in Azrou and dutifully went to
Fatima’s house. It was the morning of what would be another very hot day. My
absence hadn’t done me any good. I still felt exhausted and weary. Fatima,
however, was completely her old self again, in new-volunteer transition mode.
“That
Sylvie — Sophie — what’s her name?” she said of one of the new volunteers.
“I’ll never get along with her. I went over there the other day and you know
what she was doing? She was on a ladder washing the ceilings. What does she pay
me for? Why is she doing my work? I had to be sharp with her to get her to come
down, and then she was mad at me. That reminds me. Julie, whatever her name is,
the other girl, that took a different house, she wants to buy the two
banquettes that Susan left and the gas burner and bottle and some pots. You
have to tell her a good price so she’ll know what to pay me.”
“Why
don’t you tell her?” I asked. The goods in question had passed through her
hands several times. One of the early girls had bought them new and left them
to Fatima. Mary had bought them from her and then given them back; then Bob,
and then Susan.
“I
don’t have any idea what these things go for now,” she said, a bit
disingenuously, “I never look at them in the souq.”
She
knew herself well in asking me to set the price. If she left it to her
volunteer to make an offer and the price were too low she would feel resentful
and cheated. She wouldn’t name a price herself, because she knew that any price
would be over the top, she had sold the things so many times. If I named the
price I could prevent any bad feelings from arising between her and her new
girl.”Why don’t you just sell them for the price you sold them for the last
time?” I said, smiling.
“I
don’t even remember,” she said, apparently not appreciating the irony.
“Besides, I’m ashamed to bargain with her. And she’s new, she doesn’t know what
things cost. Just tell her something.”
I
promised her I would, and put it on my list of things to do in Azrou before
leaving later that day. I also promised her I would stop by before I left to
say good-bye, and give her my address so we could keep in touch.
I
finished up all my business in Azrou, including a visit to Julie; but I never
did go back to Fatima’s. When I finished up it was early afternoon, the hottest
part of the day, and I felt ready to collapse. I figured Fatima would be eating
or sleeping, both activities that would hard to get away with interrupting for
only a moment. Besides I could think only of getting back to the coast where it
was cool. I felt no less exhausted and spent than I had a week earlier and
there seemed no satisfaction for either of us in saying good-bye to Fatima yet
another time; the heaviness of the other good-byes seemed still palpable in the
heat. So this time, the last time I saw Azrou, I just left.
Two weeks later I was in England, flat on my
back, in a friend’s country cottage, turned a sour shade of yellow. Hepatitis
that I had contracted at some time over the course of the summer had waited
until I was finished working to blossom, and then it came on with a vengeance.
I fell ill the very day I hit the cooler climate and realized how my fatigue of
the previous few weeks had really been the beginning of it.
I stayed there two more weeks, till I was
allowed to travel, and then returned to the US to convalesce. Word of my
illness had trickled back to Morocco on the Peace Corps grapevine and when I
arrived back in the states there was a letter from Fatima.
“One of the girls got your address from Peace
Corps in Rabat,” she said, “and it’s a good thing, because you never gave it to
me. I knew something was wrong when you never came back that day. I wasn’t
surprised at all when they said you were sick. I knew it when I saw you. It’s
no wonder. You weren’t taking care of yourself. You worked too hard all summer.
Now you have to rest and take good care of yourself and tell whoever is with
you . . .” The rest of the letter was prescriptions for my care and healing,
and admonitions to be careful and write regularly.
Two years have passed since then. I do write,
and she replies through her scribes. The letters vary in length and quality and
I don’t think any three have been written by the same person — but she seems to
say about the same thing in all of them: I’m all right, so-and-so is leaving
soon but maybe someone else is coming, and nothing is as good as it used to be
when you were here.
Sometimes months pass between her letters and
when the interval seems unusually long I always wonder: was the last letter
really the last letter? She is an old woman; by Moroccan standards she is
ancient, and her days are dwindling. There is a heavy sadness when I think that
someone so dear to me will die so far away, and probably without my even
knowing of it till long afterward. But I know she wouldn’t have me feeling sad
about her, and when I am inclined to do so I remember a walk we took one
afternoon, the same day she told me what a pilgrim was. When she finished her
work that day I offered to accompany her back into the village — the apartment
I rented was on the outskirts of town — and she agreed, but she immediately got
a look in her eye that told me a plan was being hatched.
We started back on the main road but she turned
and said, “Come on, take this other way. I know a trail over here away from the
cars and trucks and noise.”
We took a little footpath along the mountainside
down into the village, talking all along the way, greeting most everyone we
passed and sometimes stopping to chat with them, for nearly everyone along the
way knew Fatima.
Just before reaching the village proper the
trail passed through a little gully, with a residential area on one side, a
cemetery and mountains on the other.
“Come on, let’s sit in the cemetery for a minute
and rest,” she said, “no one’s there on Saturdays.”
The point about it’s being empty was that on Friday
it wouldn’t have been: cemeteries, along with rooftops, are about the only
outdoor gathering places for women where they will be left alone, and Friday
afternoons are popular for graveyard klatches. We did indeed find the place
deserted, by the living anyway, and found a rock to sit on. She took out her
pipe and kif pouch and lit up. This, I surmised, was the real reason she wanted
to come home on the quiet road.
Azrou’s cemetery is like every other Muslim
cemetery in Morocco, a mere weedlot punctuated with tombs that look like shower
stalls turned inside out and laid on their sides: they are decorated with tiles
of the kind made in Morocco, and their opulence is probably a rough index of
the wealth of the deceased.. In Azrou the setting of the graveyard mitigates
its harshness a bit, for a big, juniper-covered mountain rises immediately to
the south, and the western view overlooks the rest of Azrou and the valleys
beyond. On this day there was an additional feature, a kind of amber aura that
came from the angled sunlight through high clouds. The air was fresh, as a cool
breeze had picked up, and the place was in all a very pleasant resting spot
just then.
A striking feature about the graves is that they
are all laid out at the same precise angle, with the heads in the same
direction. I had heard explanations for this, but I asked for Fatima’s, knowing
that it would be more colorful than anything I’d read or heard before.
“You don’t know why?” she said. “OK, look.
Where’s Mecca?”
I pointed, and said, “there, in the East.”
“And look. The heads of all the graves are there
in the South. And the corpses are in there, lying on their right sides, like
this.” She laid quietly on the ground, closed her eyes, crossed her hands on
her breast and looked perfectly dead.
“But one day” — her eyes popped open — “on the
last day, Judgment Day — there will be something like we have never seen before
in Mecca, we’ll be able to see it from far, far away, from all over the world.
That’s why we lie on your sides, so we won’t have to move to watch it happen.”
She stood up again.
“Look,” she said, holding her hand out palm
down, fingers spread wide. “That’s how wide my grave will be. Some people, who
have been very good in life, like this” — she held out both hands spread wide,
next to each other — “whose hands have been open in their lives — they will get
a grave this wide, both hands. I give with this hand, but this other one” —she
clutched her kif pocket — “is for my kif. That’s the way it is.”
“And all the things in your house — will you
have to carry them all on your back down that road with the fire?” I asked her.
“Oh, that stuff. I’m not taking it. You don’t
know what will happen to that? I’ll show you.”
Here she proceeded with her ultimate act — a
satire of her own funeral and its aftermath. And I think this is the scene she
would have me remember her by.
“Well, one day . . . I’ll die.” She lay down
quietly, peacefully on top of the nearest grave. “They’ll take me to someone’s
house, Figuigi’s, Tata’s, I don’t know where, and wash me, and wrap me in a
shroud, like this.” She held her limbs in and turned slowly, as if she were
being done up as a mummy. “Then some men will carry me here to the graveyard.
That’s why I have to start being nicer to them, if I keep up the way I am now,
no one will want to carry me! Anyway, here they’ll come, carrying me on the
bier, chanting ‘La ilaha ila allah! Wa
Muhammed rasul allah!’ ”
She marched in place, sounding oddly like a cheerleader,
supporting a corner of her bier on her shoulder for the long walk to the
cemetery.
“And the women! How they’ll suffer! They’ll be
at home, and they’ll cry, and tear their hair, and beat on their breasts:
‘Fatima! Meskina, Fatima! She’s gone, God bless her. We’ll miss her so much!’ ”
She mourned loudly for a minute or two, taking time out from it now and then to
laugh with me.
“OK, that’s enough. Now, two days later. Rue
Zerqtouni.” She stealthily opens a door like a midnight thief, looking around
to see that no one is watching. Finding the coast clear, she motions others to
follow her, and they quietly climb the stairs, looking in the rooms to see that
no one is inside. “OK,” she says, in the voice of one of them, “ ‘this is mine.
Fatima always said I could have it, bless her heart.’ ‘No! She always told me I
could have that!’ ‘No, it’s mine!’ ‘No, you take this, I want that thing over
here!’ ” She kept this up, perfectly miming each of her friends with a gesture,
posture or tone of voice that precisely captured them. Each time she spoke as
someone new she winked at me and giggled until we were both doubled over with
laughter and I told her to stop.
“Well, my boy, you see how it is,” she said,
with tears still in her eyes from all the laughter. “Things. What am I going to
do with them? Everything I have in my life that I want to keep, I have right
here, in my head, and in my heart. My dear friends. My little boys and girls.
And everything that we did together.”