THE ROAD FROM MOROCCO

  Copyright © 2010 Wafa Faith Hallam

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN: 1452808082

  ISBN-13: 9781452808086

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-61789-819-8

  First Publication Date: January 10, 2011

  Second Publication Date: July 31, 2012

  In loving memory of you, Mother!

  Your beautiful and serene face graces this book cover and

  guides me on my path.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  If there ever were a time when I felt the need to acknowledge others, it would undoubtedly be now as I finish the final revisions to my memoir. This book would not have been completed were it not for the love and encouragement of friends and family members along the way.

  The first to read my prose and voice words of praise and unbridled support was Marie Volpe. Without my dear Marie, this project would not have seen the light of day. Not only did Marie read my first chapters, she also shared them with others—particularly Angela and Lillian—who went on to further encourage me in my budding attempt. I thank you all for helping me with my initial efforts.

  Many months later, as I doubted and anguished, I met Barry Sheinkopf and joined his writing workshop in Englewood, NJ. Thank you, Barry, for believing in me and reigniting the spark. Your friendly and professional guidance made all the difference in the world.

  In the final stages of my writing, it was my sweet and gentle friend, Anne DeMarzo, whose infinite kindness and generosity allowed me to finish my manuscript. Anne took a leap of faith and opened her home and heart to lend me, a perfect stranger then, a cozy winter nest to complete my task.

  Last but not least, I am grateful to my daughter, Sophia, and my sister, Nezha, for their invaluable love and support throughout the tortuous, and often punishing, process of memoir-writing.

  Sophia, you endured countless displays of frustration and gloom and lived through long periods of soul searching even as you had to contend with your own adolescent trials and tribulations. Thank you, my darling, for showing so much forgiveness and understanding when it was needed most.

  As to my loving sister, words are not enough to express the depth of my gratitude as you went out of your way at every turn to help revive my deficient memory, always with compassion and humor.

  Wafa Faith Hallam

  June 2010

  CONTENTS

  Prologue The Calling

  Chapter 1 The Virgin Bride

  Chapter 2 The Blessed Child

  Chapter 3 A Brave New World

  Chapter 4 The Emancipation of Saadia

  Chapter 5 The First Kiss

  Chapter 6 Forbidding Years

  Chapter 7 A Taste of Freedom

  Chapter 8 The Loss of Innocence

  Chapter 9 Wanton Times

  Chapter 10 Sex and Betrayal

  Chapter 11 More Lies

  Chapter 12 Running Away

  Chapter 13 Travel and Discovery

  Chapter 14 The Way to America

  Chapter 15 Robbie

  Chapter 16 Sour Love

  Chapter 17 Wretched Marriage

  Chapter 18 Baby in a Storm

  Chapter 19 Madness

  Chapter 20 Tricks of her Mind

  Chapter 21 Dead-End

  Chapter 22 Saying Goodbye

  Chapter 23 New Identity

  Chapter 24 Endings and Understandings

  Chapter 25 Wall Street Waltz

  Chapter 26 Up Close and Personal

  Chapter 27 Gathering Storm

  Chapter 28 The Eye of the Storm

  Chapter 29 Dying Inside

  Chapter 30 Costly Choices

  Chapter 31 Back to Morocco

  Chapter 32 The River and the Sea

  Chapter 33 Sleep Walking

  Chapter 34 Overcoming Fear

  Chapter 35 Awakening

  Epilogue Dharma

  It’s going to take a lot of awareness for you to understand that perhaps this thing you call “I” is simply a conglomeration of your past experiences, of your conditioning and programming…

  When you’re beginning to awaken, you experience a great deal of pain. It’s painful to see your illusions being shattered. Everything that you thought you had built up crumbles and that’s painful. That’s what repentance is all about; that’s what waking up is all about.

  Awareness, Anthony de Mello

  PROLOGUE

  The Calling

  My eyes were suddenly drawn to the stunning face of Penelope on the cover of the DVD I had rented a couple of days before. In the midst of a flaming garland, her black hair, up in a loose twist, was adorned with a large red poppy and framed her charcoal-dark eyes and crimson lips. The bright, fiery tableau contrasted with the forlorn expression on her eerily familiar pale face, a ghost beckoning me.

  I was home alone that night in late April 2007. It was well past midnight, and I had decided to call it a night when, like the faint flutter of a butterfly, an idea flickered in my mind: watch Volver tonight…

  The spirit of Volver, as a New York Times’s reviewer had aptly put it, was “buoyant without being flip, consoling without ever becoming maudlin,” and while I loved its humorous outlandishness—the peculiar return of a presumed-dead mother, among other things—it touched me at a level that I could not really fathom. The unrelenting adversity and hardship of its themes, however, were not what moved me; rather it was the intricate relationships between its superbly talented female characters that most affected me, their humanity. As the credits scrolled down on my TV screen, so my tears silently rolled down my cheeks.

  My heart was filled to the brim with melancholy and compassion when an indescribable yearning took hold of me. Out of nowhere, the urge to tell my mother’s story overcame me. My mother’s life story! All my life, I had heard her wishing out loud to tell it. She was absolutely certain it had to be told, as if there were something invaluable to be learned from it. And there I was, experiencing her desire almost physically, as if she were channeling it through me. I stared at Penelope’s image once more, and her uncanny resemblance to my gorgeous mother’s in her prime, many years ago, hit me.

  I jumped out of bed and went rummaging through the drawers of my dresser, looking for a small tape recorder I had taken with me to Morocco when I moved there in December 2003.

  Mere weeks after we had settled in the sunny white house on the ocean, I had gone to her room, thrilled at the thought of surprising her.

  “Mom, I have something here I want to show you,” I exclaimed in French as I approached her bed. “But first I’m going to help you get out of bed. It’s so beautiful out there.”

  It was already mid-morning, and her room was still in semi-darkness.

  “What is it, honey?” she asked in a weak voice.

  “It’s a surprise,” I answered. “It’s something you’ve wanted to do for a very long time.”

  I pulled down the covers and helped her sit on the edge of the mattress, her feet dangling above the floor. I reached for the walker, placed it in front of her, within her reach, and turned to the large bay window to draw the curtains wide for the sun to stream through.

  Just beyond the large terrace and across a short stretch of barren ground, the sea met the sky in a palette of blue shades bordered with a frothy ribbon of waves breaking over the rocky bluff. The glorious vista never failed to take my breath away.

  “Here you go. Now, how about you show me you can pull yourself up on your own?” I challenged her cheerfully.

  “Yeah, sure,” she snickered. “Why don’t you hand me my sweater?” She gestured toward the chair by the bed.

  “Mom, you sound like it’s an impossibility for you to ever stand up on your own again. You should at least try, don’t yo
u think?”

  I handed her the cardigan she pointed to and helped her insert each arm through the sleeves. At sixty-five, she looked frail and listless. A dark cotton scarf hid the scalp wounds still discernible through her thinning gray hair; her eyes had lost their twinkle and mirrored her vanished appetite for life. Her trademark seductive grin had been replaced by the sad, fleeting hint of a smile.

  “What’s the surprise you have for me?” she asked ignoring my remark.

  “Hold on. Let’s first sit down comfortably. You’ll need to wait a bit longer,” I teased her.

  Slowly, she placed both hands on the walker while I stood by her side and leaned over to lift her up, taking in her sweet scent.

  Once seated side by side, I took the small recorder out of my pocket and gave it to her.

  “This is a tape recorder I bought especially for you to narrate your life story.” I grinned and waited for her to say something.

  If she was pleased, she didn’t show it. She kept turning the little object in her hand as if not knowing what to make of it.

  “Isn’t that what you always wanted; to tell the world what you went through? Well this is our project now. You record everything for me, and I’ll write it for you,” I insisted.

  “What for?” she muttered at last. “It would take too long, and I’m too weary. Besides, you already know the whole story…”

  She handed the recorder back to me with a disillusioned air.

  “No, no, no, no… I don’t want to hear that. It’s a fascinating narrative and I’m sure there is much more that you haven’t told anyone.” I took back the recorder and patted her knee. “You never know—your story could be made into a movie one day!”

  She cracked a feeble smile at last. I pushed the record button.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  “What do you want me to say?” she whined, sounding vaguely annoyed. “I don’t even know where to begin.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Mom. Anything you want. Here, why don’t you start reminiscing about your early childhood, your adoring parents… their loving marriage…?”

  “Yes, not like mine…” she finally relented.

  She spoke in a dispassionate whisper for about forty minutes at a slow, halting pace, jumping from one event to another. I kept encouraging her, asking follow-up questions. At last, she asked for a glass of water and, with a grimace, indicated she was tired.

  “That was a good start, Mom,” I said. “We’ll do it again in a day or two, okay?”

  She simply shook her head without a word. I was far from imagining, at that moment, that there would never be another time.

  Here it is. I knew I’d put it here, I cried in the night’s silence.

  I placed the small recorder on my desk and went back to bed. It was close to three in the morning when I closed my eyes.

  The next day, before my first cup of coffee, I turned on the recorder with trembling hands and pushed play. I felt the drum roll in my ribcage and the pounding in my head; I hadn’t heard her voice in so long, I didn’t know what to expect…

  Nothing!…

  Incredulous, I pushed play again; still nothing. I tried again and again, turning over the mini-tape inside, rewinding and fast-forwarding it, but her sound had died along with her. The tape was as blank as my mind. Yet, I was sure I had recorded Mom that day. I had no idea what had happened.

  I sat there for a long while in disbelief before I shook myself up. Then it dawned on me that what I really missed was hearing my mother’s voice. I already knew everything she had told me that day, and a lot more.

  The question before me was how to go about writing the whole thing. The idea seemed so farfetched, a mammoth undertaking. I had attempted to write slices of her story a few times since that day. Each time I had quit after a few lines. It was all too raw; my mind was jumbled and felt like a crumpled piece of paper. I told myself that I didn’t have it in me, that it was a task that would never be done. Besides, it took creativity, and that was a quality I did not have. I viewed myself as a practical individual, grounded in reality, with little or no artistic talent.

  What if someone else were to write it for me? I wondered.

  I went on the internet and googled “ghost writer.” In a flash, a list of options appeared on my screen. Immediately, I called a couple of companies with promising-looking websites. My first contact suggested that I write a synopsis of the story I wished to write.

  “That way, we can determine the type of writer we need to match you with,” she’d said.

  That afternoon, I sat down with my laptop and began writing.

  I wrote nonstop for hours in a feverish streak, not leaving my seat, defying hunger and thirst, until very late at night, and, when I was done, I knew I had to write the book myself.

  The very next day, I immersed myself in a sea of remembrances—diving in with a scene that had always haunted me and moved me to tears: my parents’ wedding night. There were less than seventeen years between my mother and me, and I was mature beyond my age, which explained our closeness and why she found it so easy to confide in me very early on. For a very long time, nobody could actually believe we were mother and daughter and not sisters. This intimacy was both a blessing and a burden, for it made her life and problems feel like my own.

  Our symbiotic relationship did not end there. Very quickly, her dreams and their fulfillment had become my own life fixation. To a large extent, she had lived vicariously through me, and now it seemed that had not ended with her demise. I became convinced that the overwhelming impulse to tell her life story was my way of finding out and understanding, not only who she was, but more importantly, who I was, independently of her. For if her death had torn me apart, it had not freed me from her.

  Such was the project that faced me. Her story could not be told without mine. It was no wonder my breakdown coincided with hers. And now, now that she was gone, I felt like a stranger to myself. For years, I had been under the illusion of being in control of my life, a strong and independent woman, a self-starter, doer, and high achiever. Little did I know! In reality, I had no clue who I was or what I wanted for myself.

  Nearly all of my fears, all of my desires, had been hers and hence came first. With her collapse, all my attempts at bringing her lasting happiness, my life’s primary ambition, had collapsed too. And in that respect, I was a big failure. With her passing, I was a nobody.

  For three months, I wrote with ease and focus—albeit not without a jarring ache—over ten chapters, about 150 pages. That summer, however, my two-year lease was up, and my landlord sold the apartment my daughter and I had been living in. It took me close to four months to find another home, move in, and settle out of my boxes. With the holiday season upon me and a young niece’s month-long visit from Paris, I had no time to write again.

  My New Year resolution for 2008 was the completion of my book. But that was easier said than done; the process had turned laborious and fraught with doubt. Adding to my angst was the issue of money. My savings were fast diminishing, and I began looking for a job, even considered a return to Wall Street after a four-year absence.

  Following their 2003 bottom, the markets had again hit a peak in the fall of 2007, sailing high on a sub-prime mortgage orgy and real estate bubble the likes of which had never been seen. The general euphoria caught up with me, and between December 2007 and March 2008 I sent my resume out and went on a couple of interviews.

  The prospect of going back to Wall Street did not fill me with joy, though.

  “I don’t know what it is; it just doesn’t feel right to me anymore,” I moaned on the phone with my sister. “It’s not that I don’t want to make money anymore, God knows I do. It’s that I don’t want to make it this way. I honestly have little interest in a career whose sole objective is to make more money for me and others. This inner resistance is nothing short of inexplicable…”

  “But the job you’re pursuing is not the same as the one you had before. You wouldn’t be a financ
ial advisor anymore, right?” asked Nezha.

  “Yes, that’s right. I’m contemplating this new position where I would serve as a liaison between a fund manager and their institutional clients, explaining the strategy and rationale behind their picks. Listen, it really sounds like an exciting job if I can get it. You know how attracted to research and analysis I’ve always been. Plus, I’ve kept completely abreast of the financial markets since I left Merrill.”

  “I know—you’re always watching financial news and reading the business section of the Times,” she laughed. “I don’t know how you can stand it!”

  “It’s true. That stuff really interests me. The fact is, in discussions with old colleagues, I often find that I know much more than they do in many areas. I simply don’t know what my reluctance is about,” I mused.

  The biggest impediment to the resumption of my professional life, I assumed then, was my unfinished book, a memoir that, in my mind, had come to signify my very belated separation from my mother, and the rebuilding of my shattered self, a re-birth of sorts. This was far from the clichéd mid-life crisis one often hears about.

  Out of work and out of sorts, I still needed to figure out what I actually desired out of life. I subsisted in existential limbo and wallowed in swamplands of murky uncertainty. Angst had become my enduring state of being and permeated the air that filled my lungs with every breath.

  Professionally, I had achieved financial success, the so-called “American dream” that my mother had dreamed for me. Intellectually, I had come close to achieving the doctorate my father had once foreseen for me. To be sure, I had always believed those were my own desires and ambitions. So why was I still feeling empty and unfulfilled?

  The veil over my eyes was soon to be lifted, for on my horizon was the dawn of my awakening. As the light of day follows the darkness of night, it arrived without warning or fanfare, in the form of a mundane telephone call that tore up the quiet of my home and threw me into the radiance of being, transforming my life forever.