I understand what people are saying. It’s painful, I’m not used to it. I hate it. People talk, I hear without having to listen and I understand. It’s hellish. I feel like I’m interfering in something that’s none of my business. Besides, I’m not interested, I don’t want to know.
At first, I didn’t understand anything. At all. Because you see, I’m a woman, and in this country, women stay at home, their longest journey is the 20 or 30 kilometres they have to travel to change valleys, maybe, to get married.
Some of the men speak a little French, a little more English, the men speak Arabic as well as their mother tongue, but the women have only their mother tongue, which isolation is gradually transforming into as many dialects as there are valleys. One man told me that during the occasional large gatherings of the whole tribe, with families coming from up to 50 kilometres away, the women sometimes can’t really understand each other.
So you can imagine!
Fortunately, he had worked in Europe for a few years and his singing English was even better than mine. With his help, I understood the men, too, but since we’ve been married, I’ve become a woman of the tribe, subject to the code of honour that has governed them for thousands of years.
And so that my husband doesn’t have to draw his long silver dagger, which he carries at all times, I have to stay with the women, away from any man who isn’t from our close family.
So I gradually shut myself up in silence. The laughter of these women is like the crystalline songs of waterfalls in the mountains, their voices high and harmonious like the chirping of birds, but I couldn’t understand a word of it. They talk too fast, there are always more than one of them, they put their money where their mouth is, and they make fun of each other.
But I like being with them, looking at them, exchanging smiles. With gestures, they’ve taught me the basics of what I have to do, whether it’s preparing a meal or weaving wool – I seem to have been judged as incapable of spinning, and I’m happy about that. I’ve been allowed to keep my pastels and brushes, and every time my husband goes to town he brings me colours and paper, and I’ve got used to this idleness much more easily.
Instead of talking, I dream. I sing in my head, I remember little by little the poems of my childhood. And I try to understand what they’re saying.
You see, my problem was quite simple: I’m not very good at languages, so to learn I need to read, write and repeat. Some people have the intuition of the great translators, those who can reconstruct a sentence from a word.
I don’t have that.
And there is no manual for their language. Maybe men can translate certain things for me, but not what women say. The two worlds are so separate, and when by chance a man enters our floor, there’s a sudden silence, the chirping stops as if a great hawk were passing by.
My mother-in-law used to say all sorts of things to me, and I always smiled sweetly at her and tried to do as she said. Her crude gestures on my still-flat belly, like groping a heifer that’s not producing enough, told me how much she cared, and I was beginning to be really glad that I couldn’t hear her. I understood my grandfather, who had isolated himself for so long in his deafness, always forgetting about his hearing aids.
Three weeks ago I fell ill. Very ill.
In our little remote village, a few hours’ drive from the city, there wasn’t much they could do for me. The very idea of setting off in a 4×4 on stony tracks made me use up the last of my strength in a barely stammered refusal.
For the occasion, my husband was allowed to stay on the women’s floor. There had been a whole consultation, and in the end it was less shocking for him to enter our home than for me to be put down on the ground floor, among the men, where the visitors also went.
I was delirious with fever, very delirious, I could hear my mother-in-law lamenting, she had already lost sons and daughters, she wanted to keep me, she called on the village saint to help her, but only God could do anything for me.
My husband’s youngest sister also cried a lot, telling me how much she loved me, that I had to stay and smile at them again, and paint them as no one else had the right to do. The other women remained silent.
Somewhere in my lucidity I was aware of my delusion, but I clung to it. This old woman made me feel like my mother, I didn’t want to upset her, I wanted to stay, to tear myself away from my indolence. I was made to drink bitter herbs, magic words were sung around me as I was smeared with ointments that I could only recognise as rose and saffron, and I ended up sinking into unconsciousness.
When I woke up, still exhausted, I pecked at what my husband fed me. I was exhausted and skinny as a rail, but I was surviving at last. And then I heard the eldest of his sisters-in-law mumbling as she swept the broom: “It’s about time we put an end to that good-for-nothing girl who brings her husband here. When I lost my son in childbirth fever, it wasn’t such a big deal. And she doesn’t even have a child!” she concluded, giving me an unfriendly look.
I trembled, thinking my fever and hallucinations had returned, and then I saw my husband’s face close.
I’ll never know… I’m sure God gave me this language to understand this mother’s pain, to make me want to cling to life.
But now I understand the harem. I hear the daily, petty quarrels, the malice, I know what people think of me behind the smiles. My birds of paradise have turned into harpies. All day long I hear them tearing each other apart, complaining, rekindling quarrels that go back to the time of their ancestors. And if I say a word, I’ll be taken to task, summoned to give my opinion, to sort out the endless village imbroglios.
Oh no, I don’t want that. I used to be quiet, I had to look at them carefully to understand them. Now I hear them without listening, without even being able to close my ears….
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This text was written as part of Samantdi’s Autumn Hourglass and originally published on my personal blog, Trassagère.
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