THE ROAD FROM MOROCCO Read online

  My two aunts understood very little of what Independence meant or would bring to their daily lives; they were nonetheless elated by my birth. Fatma was the oldest of her ten siblings and twenty years older than my mother. She knew first-hand what infertility could lead to.

  My mother hadn’t yet been born, when Fatma became her first husband’s first wife. When, after a couple of years, she was unable to conceive, he had taken a second wife. Barely a couple of years apart in age, the two young women lived under the same roof. Naturally, each had her own room, but they quickly became best friends. This was not at all unheard of. But these two got along so well that they fell into the unfortunate habit of conspiring against, and ganging up on, their spouse together, plotting to get their way every which way they could. They took turns nagging and annoying him until he could no longer put up with it all. By then, his second bride had become pregnant; the frustrated man took the unprecedented decision to get rid of the two of them by repudiating them both and marrying… the maid.

  For the family, this was recalled as a tragic yet irresistibly comical incident. Fatma, of course, felt she had been unjustly and abjectly disowned when she was sent packing by her first husband at nineteen. She had, however, suffered disgrace and derision with dignity and had just about accepted her new fate.

  After only a few months, a widowed older gentleman, with grown children, asked for her hand in a second marriage. The union not only restored her pride, it also gave her great happiness and a new appreciation for life. Uncle Mehdi, her new husband, was a kind man with a good sense of humor and a fun-loving streak. He was quickly embraced by the family and remained a much-loved figure throughout his life, long after the passing of my aunt of a cardiac attack some forty years after he took her as a wife.

  When I was born, Fatma lived with him in Sidi Kacem, thirty miles west of Meknes, but she was able to take long leaves of absence to help her little sister during the delivery and first difficult postpartum weeks. Uncle Mehdi didn’t mind. He took full advantage of such opportunities by paying extended visits to his married daughter and grandchildren who also resided in Meknes.

  My second aunt, Zhor, on the other hand, childless too, had been fortunate enough at seventeen to marry my father’s brother, Uncle Mokhtar, a laid-back, handsome man with intense green eyes and a lust for life. His family was too honorable to consider repudiation as an acceptable answer to barrenness. Besides, he was knowledgeable enough to know that it could very possibly be coming from him, as turned out to be the case when a medical exam later confirmed it. Thank God for that. My aunt was far too jealous to tolerate living with a second wife. She adored him and lavished him with astonishing care and affection, working tirelessly to provide him with all the comforts she believed he deserved, treating him as the child they could not produce and the companion she could not live without.

  Astoundingly, until her death in the summer of 2006, they had never once spent a night apart from each other, never travelled anywhere if they could not do it together, and she could not eat a meal without presenting him with the best morsels first, even when they were the guests of others. My aunt’s extreme attachment made her the object of much teasing within the family. But she did not mind in the least, and even if she did, she could not help herself. She literally was unable to enjoy the smallest of pleasures if her husband didn’t partake in it. And he, guiltlessly and without embarrassment, enjoyed her adulation all his life.

  During the sixty years they were married, he was rumored to have indulged in a few illicit pleasures of the flesh on occasion. Moreover, he was not the hardest working of men. He relied on her, not only for all the household chores, but also for most of the hard work and responsibility involved in running their farm—a small agricultural property she had bought in the sixties, with savings from her former occupation as a seamstress and a loan from one of her brothers. Neither of them was a farmer, and so she learned the job the hard way, overcoming adversity and taking on the vast majority of the workload—and he let her assume it with no apparent remorse.

  Their life was a remarkable love story and undermined most arguments against arranged marriages, as most were, for whatever reason, pretty successful as a whole, and a few, very lucky ones, were nothing short of amazing. And so it was that my aunt Zhor never spent a night in our house unless her husband was there, too. Since he was also my dad’s brother, their visits turned into family reunions welcomed by both my parents.

  Of course, there were also conspicuous failures, as was my third aunt’s marriage. My aunt Aisha was too busy with her own family and children to be involved with anything outside her household. Her three sisters had married men of similar backgrounds—of mixed Arab and Berber descent, whose Moorish ancestors had invaded Spain as early as 711 and stayed until the 1500s. Their families had lived in Granada and Cordoba and were predominantly urban dwellers. So when they fled the final Christian re-conquest of Andalucía, which expelled the last remaining Moors of Granada, they naturally settled in the urban centers of Morocco, like Fez, Meknes, Salé, Rabat, and Tetouan, which others before them had made their homes.

  Aisha, in contrast, was married to a member of one of the Berber tribes native to Agadir in the far south of Morocco. A successful merchant, this proud Berber had settled up north in Rabat on the other shore of the Bou-Regreg River across from Salé, the original hometown of my grandparents, and had met my grandfather in the course of doing business. The two men were mutually impressed by each other’s fortitude and they built a cordial relationship. This naturally led my grandfather to grant him his third daughter’s hand in marriage, his rural Berber heritage not disqualifying him in the least.

  Nonetheless, there was a cultural difference of sorts between the two milieus, which may have contributed to the divide between the new bride and her taciturn groom. I remember him as a man with an aloof temperament, who did not seem to have much in common with my other uncles. He was handsome but cold and he looked like a man with a secret life. And indeed, he was reported to have had multiple extramarital affairs until he was too old and too sick to enjoy them.

  There is no doubt that my aunt grew to love and respect him deeply, but he caused her much sorrow. He was said to be living under the same roof, even sharing her bed, and yet not say a word to her for weeks at a time. A sweet and mild-tempered woman, she never complained openly of her lot, but the sad smile on her lips, and wounded gaze in her eyes, betrayed her profound unhappiness. The fact that she lost two daughters and a granddaughter in the most horrifying circumstances in later years did nothing to improve her disposition.

  Hence, only my childless aunts, Fatma and Zhor, were there to help and assist my mother on multiple occasions during her childbearing years. They were surrogate mothers to her and her progeny and provided needed comfort whenever they could. Nonetheless, it was her faithful Jewish neighbor Rachel who really was there almost daily to lend her a hand and cheer her up. The two women became very close and enjoyed long afternoons into each other’s confidence.

  At the same time, the relationship between my parents went from bad to worse. My dad’s nightly outings and drinking binges intensified and his periodic spiritual escapades were increasingly intolerable to my mom. He was a faithful practicing Muslim, and one of his greatest pleasures at the time was to attend special religious festivals, known as “Moussems,” in honor of great saints. One of his very favorites was the Moussem of Moulay Idriss Al Azhar in Zerhoun, a picturesque little town only a few miles from Meknes overlooking the magnificent old ruins of Volubilis, an ancient Roman City.

  Zerhoun, also called Moulay Driss, is known as the First Muslim city in North Africa and it kept its character of sacred city to this day. In fact, its access was forbidden to non-Muslims up until 1917. For an entire week at the end of August, millions of pilgrims, coming from all over the country, gather to celebrate the Saint in prayers and festivities. One month after my birth, my father, unable to resist the lure of the Moussem, left for Zerhoun for a
few days in defiance of his family’s silent disapproval.

  Not surprisingly, my parents’ financial situation was made the more difficult by his conduct and my mother was not the type to take it quietly. She greeted him with hostility, and the more she did the greater the alienation between them.

  On a rare visit home to her parents in Sidi Kacem, she was so obviously dejected that her father felt compelled to reevaluate his decision to keep her married to my dad. He offered to have her return home and he wrote my dad asking him to divorce her, to which my dad replied that he would consent if she would agree to let him keep custody of their baby daughter. My mother was not willing to give me up, even as her father, who was by now ever so sorry to have been the cause of her unhappiness, kept pressing her to do so. This decision, she was not fully conscious then, was going to seal her destiny and the course of her existence and mine.

  Indeed, only three months after I was born, my mother was with child for the second time. My little sister Nezha came to the world in August 1957, just as I was beginning to walk around everywhere, babbling ceaselessly and driving my mother insane with my insatiable curiosity and boundless energy. In contrast, my sister was an angelic baby, calm and easygoing; she didn’t even talk until she was about three years old, just observed the life around her in silence, probably turned off by her bigger sister’s overly active temperament.

  Exactly a year after my sister’s birth, my brother was conceived, and he was in such a hurry to come to the world that he came much too early. He was a premature baby, born after only twenty-eight weeks of gestation. Too small and too weak to survive on his own outside the womb, he was kept in an incubator for weeks, which forced my mother to spend all her days at the hospital with him. My aunts, and Rachel, took turn caring for her small daughters at home while she was gone day after day.

  Like many preemies, my baby brother Abdu suffered multiple health complications, the worst of which was a condition known as respiratory distress syndrome, a potentially life-threatening breathing problem that caused him, throughout his childhood, to endure, among other things, numerous agonizing asthmatic episodes.

  I vividly remember for years being awakened in the middle of the night by the terrifying sound of my little brother sitting up in his bed, in total darkness, gasping for air and yet not crying or calling out for help, so accustomed was he to his affliction.

  When the French doctor who treated him ordered his release from the hospital, he warned my mother that the boy’s health would continue to be very frail. He sternly told her to be vigilant and take him back to the hospital at the first alarming sign of distress. She was relieved her baby had survived and to finally be able to take him home. But his fragile health remained a source of worry during the weeks that followed and the lack of financial means did not permit her to get him the optimal treatment he needed.

  Luckily, one of her brothers, Abderrahim, having heard of her grim situation, paid her an unexpected home visit. He found his little nephew in ill health and his sister’s living conditions so inadequate that he arranged for the whole family to move to the city’s modern neighborhood. Somewhat reluctantly, my father agreed to the move to a new home.

  This was a lovely French villa on the hills overlooking the old medina of Meknes, not far from the hospital. Her brother had not only found the house he was also paying the rent; and he did not stop there. He also arranged to pay for Abdu’s medical bills, insisting that his nephew be provided with the best health care and treatment available. This was the same brother who later helped their sister Zhor with the down payment on her farm.

  After the death of their father, following his long illness in the fall of 1958, Abderrahim, my mother’s third older brother, felt compelled to assist his sisters whenever he could. He had taken over his father’s warehouses in Sidi Kacem and he was rapidly prospering in various trades. Through hard work, good fortune, and steely determination, he had built an empire that, today, makes him one of the richest men in Morocco. My aunts often told how harshly their father used to discipline him as a teen, beating him with his belt buckle and leaving him confined for days in one of his storerooms as punishment for some wrongdoing.

  Early on, he had married Simone, his first wife, a Frenchwoman who gave him four children, and raised them in an entirely European lifestyle. They barely spoke Arabic as children. If that bothered Abderrahim, he never showed it. But then he never really developed significant ties with his siblings either. He was, still is, an aloof man. His deliberate union to a foreigner had only deepened his isolation from a family still strongly bound to its Islamic heritage. He was a complex individual, a man of few words, tall and good looking, with an especially shy nature and a very sensitive personality.

  Then as now, he could alternatively show great generosity or utter indifference, sometimes even meanness, and no one really knew what made him tick, save perhaps his wife. He never opened up emotionally to his sisters, though they all had the deepest affection for him, admiring him, even revering him, as if he were a demigod. The one thing that can be said about him with certainty is that he never failed to be there for his family, particularly in moments of great urgency, of sickness and death.

  My mother was not only grateful to him, she was jubilant that end of summer 1959 as she entered her new house. She was carrying her five-month-old boy cuddled in her arms. Rachel, who had offered to come along, was holding hands with her two toddlers in tow.

  My mother could not believe her eyes. It was the most perfect little house she could have dreamed of. Built by a French teacher and his wife on the hilltops of Bellevue, a well-kept French neighborhood, it had dark-green wooden shutters and French doors opening onto a small lawn bordered by colorful flower beds. The freshly painted white walls that separated the house from its neighbors were covered with yellow, red, and purple bougainvillea, and in the far corner of the garden stood a majestic mimosa tree from which hung a creaky swing.

  As she walked up the alley that led from the front gate to the house door, she handed the sleepy little boy to Rachel and pushed open the door. A dark heavyset woman in her late thirties immediately welcomed her, explaining she had been hired as her new maid by her brother. She, and an old gardener with a toothless smile, were finishing cleaning the house and had been expecting her and the children. My mother could barely hear the maid’s words, so happy she was to discover her new home.

  She opened the doors, one after the other, turning the lights and the water faucets on and off and flushing the toilet all with a wondrous smile on her face. I ran gleefully after her, shrieking with delight, insisting on imitating her in all she did. Meanwhile, my little sister kept holding on to Rachel’s dress, intently sucking on her right thumb while she took in the scene around her.

  The little villa had only two bedrooms, a larger one for the parents, and a second one big enough for the children. Both rooms shared a single bathroom with a tub, shower, and sink and an adjoining but separate toilet. The living room had a wood-burning fire place and opened directly onto the sunny garden with its flower alleys.

  “This is going to be our family room,” said my mother in a cheerful voice. Open into the living room was a large rectangular dining room, which my mother immediately anticipated was going to be perfect for her traditional Moroccan sofas instead, making it a nice-sized salon for guests and visitors.

  Directly adjacent to the dining room was the large kitchen with its sink and counter top. It was equipped with an old stove and a small refrigerator, slightly rusty, but in working order. A long wooden table and chairs sat along one of the walls. The kitchen led to a sunny paved backyard set with a laundry basin and clotheslines. All these amenities and appliances, she knew, were going to change her life. At long last, she felt welcomed into the “civilized” world.

  We had been settled in the new house for no more than a couple of months when my mother discovered to her chagrin that once again she was expecting. She was already exhausted from the rearing of three yo
ung children; she could not imagine having yet another one. Rachel had hinted to her of a medical procedure that could help her interrupt her pregnancy, and she immediately agreed to resort to it without informing my father.

  The botched operation almost cost her an arm, and in the end it did not succeed in terminating her pregnancy completely. Although she had conceived of twins this time, in the early summer of 1960, she gave birth to only one of them, a scrawny yet healthy little boy, her fourth child. His twin did not survive.

  I was four years old when my second brother, Larbi, was born; my sister was three, and my ailing premature brother just sixteen months. My mom had survived a traumatic episode, had put on a lot of weight, and was tired and depressed. The bungled abortion attempt had angered my dad, and the tension between them had only grown worse. She was full of rage and squarely blamed him for not being more careful.

  She had tried time and again to get him to practice withdrawal, as Rachel had taught her, but he was not very good at it, not that he tried very hard, she was sure. He did not see things that way. After all, his mother had given birth to thirteen children, ten of whom had survived, and so had her mother.

  “It’s God’s will,” my father reminded her, “it’s up to Him alone to decide how many offspring we’re going to have, and who’s going to live or die, not you.”

  His pious arguments infuriated her even more, she hated his religiosity. It was always God who willed it all. Her husband never had anything to do with anything. But she was the one who, within five years, had carried four children, birthed them, breast-fed them all, and nursed them to health. What had he ever done really? He hardly was around at all… what with their dismal financial situation. If it weren’t for her brother they wouldn’t even be able to afford their medical care, or the maid, or even, for that matter, the roof over their head…