Bitter Almonds (4 page)

And after all, what Fadila needs is to read. Writing is not indispensable, whereas reading would change her life.

Édith is troubled by the way Fadila crams her papers loosely into her tote bag, then pulls them out all in a wad—summons, bills, and writing exercises all jumbled up. Every French schoolchild learns early on how to take care of papers, how to fold them properly, or better still, how to protect them in a sleeve, or a rigid folder, in other words how to be respectful of the written object, even in its loose-leaf form.

Isn't it paradoxical, thinks Édith, to want to keep everything written that comes your way, because you know it might be important, then you go and treat it as if you didn't care at all? So she buys a big notebook and explains to Fadila that from now on they will use one page after the other, so she must take the notebook home with her and bring it back for each lesson. But Fadila leaves the notebook behind. Édith brings it up again the following time. Fadila says she would rather take loose papers with her: she thinks the notebook is too heavy.

Édith has been careful not to mention schoolchildren and their notebooks, so as not to imply that there is anything childish about her work with Fadila. But Fadila has probably come up with the comparison all on her own. Maybe that is what is holding her back.

Time to get down the nitty-gritty, the combination of letters. B-a-Ba, the incredible open sesame. One letter + another letter = a phoneme, phonemes make words, there are twenty-six letters, a few dozen phonemes and with these few elements you can make an infinite number of words.

 

To make words, vowels are not enough. You need to start adding consonants.

On a sheet Édith writes,
a, e, i, o, u.
“Do you recognize these five letters now?”

Fadila nods doubtfully.

“These are the letters that sound loud,” continues Édith. “Remember? They're called vowels. In Fa-di-la, what sounds loudest is
a
,
i
,
a
. Go on, say it.”

“Fed'la,” says Fadila, the way it is pronounced in Arabic, the first
a
and the
i
sounding very much like an
e
, with hardly any stress.

“In French, we pronounce it a little bit differently, you know: Fa-di-la,” says Édith again, stressing each syllable equally, and pronouncing the
a
and the
i
in the French way.

Of the five vowels in a row on the sheet, she underlines the
a
and the
i
in red.

“Fa,” she says, pointing to the
a
, “di—”she points to the
i
—“la”—and back to the
a.

She writes
fadila
beneath the vowels. She underlines the two
a
's and the
i
in red.

“But there are other letters in
fadila,
too,” she explains, underlining the
f,
the
d
, and the
l
in green.

“These letters, listen, they make another sound, much quieter. Ffff . . . Dddd . . . Ddddi. Llll . . . Lllla . . . Do you hear it? Let's learn this letter,
f.
”

She points to the
f
at the beginning of
fadila
and writes it directly underneath.

“It's the first letter of your name, you see? It's at the beginning of Fadila.”

“Looking like 8,” says Fadila.

“You're right. You know your numbers. The
f
looks like an 8. Let's write it. It's a big letter. It takes up seven whole lines, here, look. You start on the line in the middle, do a loop at the top and a loop at the bottom, and you get
f.
”

There is no point in asking Fadila to try on her own right from the start. There is no point putting her through such an ordeal. Édith takes Fadila's right hand in hers, wedges the green felt-tip in her fingers, and makes her draw a big
f
that fits nicely within the lines over six spaces.

“It looks nice, don't you think? That's the
f
.”

“
F
,” echoes Fadila.

“You want to try to write it on your own?”

“I do at home.”

“All right. Take this sheet and copy it a few times. Let's stop now. But can we read a bit first?”

A
,
i, o
: Fadila seems to have gotten better at recognizing them. But she is tired, or fed up. She gets to her feet.

 

She doesn't stop by every time she leaves the house of the old lady in number 16. It wouldn't hurt if she did; it would make her work on her reading four times a week. In fact, after a month has gone by, Édith reckons that Fadila comes, on average, once a week in addition to the Tuesday. Twice is better than once, but it's only twice a week, and not on a regular basis.

*

By the fourth week, on a Tuesday, they've reached the point of associating consonants and vowels.

“Do you recognize this big letter?”

“It's an
f.
”

“And this one?”

“
A.
”

“Very good. Well, if we add the
a
to the
f
, like this, with the
f
first, then the
a
, we get
fa.
”

“
Fa
.”

“And if we put first the
f
, then the
o,
we get
fo.
”

Fadila manages, just about every other time, to identify the
a
, the
o
,
fa, fo,
on her sheet of paper.

But at the following session, Édith holds her hand to write an
f
with her, then attach an
a
, and she asks her: “What does that make?” And Fadila replies, “
Fa
.”

Édith takes her by the shoulders: “You've got it! That's how words are made, by attaching the letters,” and Fadila smiles.

That day, however, she leaves behind the sheet she should have taken home to work on. It's the first time.

 

The next time, Fadila has the excuse that she has forgotten her homework to get out of her fifteen minutes of reading.

 

“Why didn't you go to school? Was there too much work at home?”

Fadila doesn't understand. Édith rephrases her question: “When you were a little girl, did you have work to do at home, or in the fields? Or with the animals?”

“What work?” asks Fadila, as if stung. “Not me!”

In her family they had everything they needed. It was her father who worked, not Fadila. She was an only child. “We have everything, big house, goats, donkey . . .”

Mountains, she says. No, not very high. Fields, olive trees. “Is not far Essaouira.” But there was no school in the village. No one knew how to read or write, except for a shopkeeper—the only shopkeeper, the one who sold seeds and tools, sugar and salt.

“What did you do all day long?”

Fadila didn't think much of Édith's question. She was busy, the way you are busy when you don't work: you're with others, you talk, play, cook, laugh. She spent her time with her mother. “I love my mother. Since she die is all finish with me.”

As a child she was as happy as could be.

“Now other people my age all reading,” she says, changing her tone. She's seen it on television. There are schools everywhere, now. The king launched a major adult literacy campaign, and it included women. If she had stayed in Morocco she would know how to read.

They work on the word
fadila. Fa-di-la. D, l. D, i, di .L, a, la.
Together they write, over and over,
a, i, f, d. La, li, fa, di, da, fi.

A word is a gold mine. The day Fadila knows exactly how to read a word, how to deconstruct it into letters and syllables, how to write the six letters and the entire word, then combine the letters and syllables in other ways, she will know how to read and write. The rest of the learning process will be a breeze.

For the time being, what worries Édith is that she is not at all sure that Fadila has understood how the letters are combined. There are days when it's clear to her, but others, not at all.

 

Fadila comes in, murmurs hello and sets to work.

She reappears an hour later. She has to leave, she says.

“Shall we do a bit of reading?” says Édith tentatively, pointing to the textbook and the papers that now have their regular place on the sofa in front of the window closest to the table.

“No, today I no doing.” Fadila's expression is impenetrable. “I no can sleeping last night. I going outside two times.”

“You went out twice last night? To go to the pharmacy?”

That wasn't it, explains Fadila, it was her anxiety. She has such terrible panic attacks that she has to get some fresh air. She cannot stay in her room. She goes out into the courtyard of her building. Sometimes she'll go and wake up a friend who lives nearby, and spend the rest of the night at her place.

“What's wrong?” asks Édith.

It's nothing new, says Fadila. Ever since she came to France, it has been happening on a regular basis. “Is the family.” She doesn't give any details.

“Is not easy stay all alone at night in the little room,” she adds.

“When you sleep at your children's, do you have panic attacks there, too?”

“Of course not!” She shrugs, as if that were perfectly obvious.

 

She can copy certain letters, even syllables, with varying degrees of success. But she still cannot write a single letter from memory.

She holds the pen awkwardly, with four fingers and not three. Édith has to push her hand down to remind her to place it on the paper. How does she hold the pen when she is trying to write at home?

At times she makes a gesture of annoyance when she sees what she has written. At least she can see the difference between the model letter and the letter she has copied herself.

When Édith writes there before her, Fadila raises her hand in admiration. “Look at that!”

“But I've been writing for forty years,” says Édith, “and you've been writing for five weeks!”

 

One Tuesday bus number 80 doesn't show up, so Fadila decides not to go to work that day. To make up for it she goes on Wednesday. But Édith is away that morning. On Friday Fadila does not have the time to stop by Édith's. They do not meet that week.

 

“This one is a
d
. You know it. Do you remember where it is in
fadila?
That's right, there it is. If I add the
i
to it, what does that make? Look,
d
and
i.
”

“
Fa
,” says Fadila.

 

Édith decides that maybe the whole language method might not be so bad after all. If Fadila cannot grasp that
d
and
i
make
di
, she'll have to go on showing her
di
until she recognizes it (and
fa
, and
la
). Maybe later she will understand that
di
is made up of
d
and
i, fa
of
f
and
a,
and so on.

From time to time Fadila brings in a sheet with letters she has written herself on the days she happens to wake up very early, she says. She's fine with the
i
, now. The
a
less so. The
f
seems totally out of reach. The
o
remains a pleasure.

 

One Tuesday Édith spends all day at UNESCO. When she gets home there is a message from Fadila on the answering machine: “Like other day is no good. I no coming yesterday, I going to my friend in the night, at midnight I going out my house. I no can do all alone. Excuse me. Even if I coming I no strong enough to work is no good.”

 

Three days later she comes by without having let Edith know. She is feeling better. The friend whose door is open to her at all hours is an elderly Moroccan woman who is retired and has stayed in France. She has a room near the Place de Clichy, half an hour's walk from where Fadila lives. If someone wakes her up in the middle of the night—if Fadila wakes her up in the middle of the night—it's no big deal as far as she's concerned, she can just sleep a little later in the morning.

“Is why I put on the television in my room,” says Fadila.

Édith asks her to confirm what she has said: “You watched television with her?”

No. It's in her own room that Fadila watches television at night. She leaves it on, with the sound off, all night long, systematically—and not just on nights when she doesn't feel good. “Other way I no sleeping,” she says.

But sometimes it's not enough, despite the luminous screen, the colors, the people moving and faces talking: not only can she not sleep, she has to get out.

 

Édith has her write (writes with her)
fa,
then
fadi,
then
fadila,
spelling them, nothing more.

“What does this say, here?” she asks her.

“Fadila, course.”

 

But the next time when she shows her the
l
and the
o
, naming them, and then writing
lo,
and she asks, “What does this make?”

“Fa,” says Fadila.

 

Édith must not be going about it in the right way. She cannot figure out how to get the key to work. An old educational saw comes to mind: “To teach Johnny to read, first you have to get to know Johnny.”

One aspect of Fadila's behavior that Édith finds completely extraordinary is the way she tidies. The bathroom, which is where she does the ironing, has a tall thin closet with one drawer for the iron, the extension cord, and the distilled water that is used only with the iron; another for clean rags that can be used as damp cloths if necessary; and a third one is for the abrasives and detergents, and so on. But Fadila completely disregards Édith's organization. She piles the iron, the rags, and the water dispenser all together in the same drawer, not necessarily the same one each time, and never in the same manner.