The Salt Road (25 page)

Habiba’s family home was bland and modest, two storeys of rendered breeze-block with small windows covered by dusty iron grilles and a doorway surrounded by garish factory-made tiles. The door was open: Taïb walked right in, calling out as he entered.

A woman came running out of a room, drawing a veil over her head. As she saw who her first visitor was, her anxious expression changed to one of utmost delight. Taïb strode forward and kissed her four times on the cheek, an effusive greeting, intimate and warm, containing little of the usual reserve I had thought characterized relations between men and women in this country. I watched as she held his hands still between her own as they talked, their heads close together, and felt like a voyeur.

Then she looked past his shoulder and saw me and for a moment her eyes narrowed.

When Taïb turned back to us, his face was grave. ‘Lallawa is very sick, but Habiba says that we must come in and see her.’ His tone implied that it might be the last chance to do so.

‘Perhaps I’ll wait outside,’ I said. Habiba’s glance had made me feel like an outsider intruding into a private world of sickness and pain. But Taïb was having none of it. As Azaz also greeted his cousin, rather less intimately, it seemed to me, Taïb ushered me into the living room. In there, sitting on the low couches that lined three walls of the gloomy little room, were half a dozen women in black robes and head-coverings, and between them an unmoving figure lay on a pallet on the floor. They looked like crows gathered around a corpse, but as soon as they saw Taïb and Azaz the sombre mood changed and suddenly they were all on their feet, chattering. Kisses all round and the pressing of hands; then Taïb knelt by the prone figure. I craned my neck. For a moment, I thought she was dead, then a hand rose slowly and patted his face. Azaz knelt too and the old woman turned her face first to one, then the other, and smiled gummily at them. Her skin was the colour of spent charcoal, as if most of the life had already gone out of it. The sclera of her eyes was a bright, unhealthy yellow, and the pupils were milky with cataracts. At last Azaz gestured for me to come forward and I heard my name as Taïb explained to her who I was. I knelt awkwardly. ‘
Salaam
,’ I said, putting to use what I had absorbed from the glossary in the back of the guidebook, and extended my hand. Her fingers grazed my palm as lightly as a butterfly’s wings, the touch frail and papery. ‘
Salaam aleikum
, Lallawa.’

The filmy eyes fixed on me with fierce attention and her fingers closed around mine like claws. I tried to pull away, but she held on, her grip surprisingly strong for one so ill. Her lips formed a shape, but the sound that came out seemed more like a gurgle than a word.

‘Show her the amulet,’ Taïb urged.

‘Are you sure? She seems very ill and I don’t feel right bothering her with it.’

‘No, please.’ Habiba appeared beside Taïb, resting a hand on his shoulder in a gesture that seemed at once relaxed and proprietary. ‘It will remind her of the good life she has lived. It will delight her, really.’

I took out the amulet, and the claw-like hand fumbled for mine and brought the amulet so close to her face that her breath misted the silver. Then she pressed it to her lips with a sigh. When she laid her head back down on the pillow, one corner of her mouth turned up while the other lay lax, and I realized belatedly that she must have suffered a stroke. She made an indistinct sound; frowned and tried again.
‘A … daa
.’

‘Adagh?’ Taïb asked and she nodded. He opened the compartment and took out the piece of paper, then handed the amulet back to me, carefully unfurled the paper and held it out.

Habiba shook her head. ‘She won’t be able to make it out: she’s almost blind now.’

But the old woman seemed determined. We watched as she narrowed her eyes and strained, her head coming up off the pillow as if the effort of trying to engage with the inscription was a physical fight. She touched the marks and mumbled. Taïb leant closer so that the paper was barely an inch away from her face. I could see the frustration in her eyes as she tried and failed to focus; and at last a fat tear squeezed out of one eye and ran in a deep runnel down the side of her nose.

‘Stop,’ I said softly. ‘You’re upsetting her.’

Taïb patted the old woman gently on the cheek and sat back on his heels. ‘
Tanmirt
, Lallawa.
Tanmirt
.’

He rolled the parchment up and replaced it as the amulet sat in the palm of my hand. His fingers brushed my own and I felt a sudden charge of electricity run up my arm. Bemused by this sensation, I was slow to respond to Habiba as she touched my shoulder. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘Come with me.’

I followed her out of the room, past the black-clad women who watched me curiously with their bright black eyes, down a long corridor where doorways gave off into other small, dark rooms, and at last we emerged into a small square courtyard roofed unevenly with reeds through which the sun slatted down in sharp white contrast to the dark shadows. In the middle of the courtyard sat a dry fountain. Habiba gestured me towards this, then flicked a switch on the wall and with a rumble a pump started up and a trickle of water began to fill the conduit that ran to the fountain.

‘I’m sorry you’ve travelled so far for no good reason. Her sight’s been failing for a couple of months now and her latest attack seems to have made it worse. Wash your hands and your amulet in there,’ she said. ‘The running water will appease the spirits.’

Spirits? Such superstition. But I hobbled over and did as she suggested, washing my hands, then rubbing my wet fingers across the etched silver and glass, making sure no water got into the hidden compartment. Something about the ritual of this act was obscurely comforting; although maybe it was just the silky-cold feeling of the water on my hands on such a hot day after the gloomy confines of the sickroom. Habiba passed me a towel and I dried my hands and the amulet carefully.

‘It is a beautiful thing,’ she said. ‘Lallawa has pieces like this. I remember when she lived with us when I was a very small child, and I found her jewellery hidden beneath her sleeping mat and took it all out and put it on and looked at myself in the mirror. I thought I looked like a Tuareg princess, but she caught me and smacked me.’ She gave me a smile that transformed her face. ‘I screamed and ran to Mother to complain; but she said Lallawa was right to smack me because every woman’s property is her own, no matter how low her estate. She is very old, Lallawa; no one knows how old, least of all Lallawa herself. She has had a very long life, and a good life, too, considering what happened to her. She really loved the desert. Before her latest stroke I promised her she would see it one more time –’ Her voice hitched and I realized that she was fighting tears, and abruptly found my own eyes pricking. ‘I promised she would take the salt road one more time before she died. But, as you see, she is too ill now.’

‘The salt road?’

‘The desert tracks to the salt mines in the depths of the Sahara, the routes the traders took with their caravans of camels. The roads to and from the markets at which slaves were bought and sold, exchanged for salt and other goods. The Tuareg often use the term to mean “the road of life”, or even “the road of death”. And sometimes it is used to mean all those things at once. I feel bad that I cannot do this one last thing for her; it will be harder for her to die in peace. But your amulet has brought a little of the desert to her.’

I felt something wet upon my face and a moment later realized the tears I had felt pricking my eyes were running down my cheeks. I could not remember the last time I had cried: I had come to despise such sentimentality. Part of me felt infuriated by myself; but another part – some new aspect I had developed, or perhaps one that had been long-since buried – was unashamed.

Habiba, though, turned away from me to gather mint from an overflowing tub outside the kitchen door. Then she beckoned me inside and I watched as she set about making tea, boiling water over a single butane ring, warming the silver pot, adding a handful of gunpowder tea, a generous handful of the fresh mint and three huge bars of sugar. ‘My God, is that the amount of sugar that goes into every pot of mint tea?’ I thought of all the glasses of this stuff I had drunk since arriving in Morocco, and shuddered.

She laughed. ‘I was going easy on you: you Europeans don’t like too much sugar – I have noticed how even Taïb’s tastes have changed since he went away to Paris.’

There was a certain sharpness to her tone as she said this, and I found myself wondering what it meant, or whether I had imagined it. ‘Do all the young men go away? To work, I mean.’

‘It’s hard to make a living in the area. You’ve seen it: it’s poor and dry, and getting poorer and drier by the day. There’s no work here, no money, no luxuries. So, yes, the young men – and often the young women nowadays – go away to get an education and a job and send money home to the ones left at home. It’s how we do things in Morocco.’

‘It’s hard on those left behind,’ I said, watching as she tipped the first glass she had poured back into the pot and swirled the ingredients around. ‘Especially the women.’

‘It’s hard on everyone. Sometimes they don’t come back.’

‘Like Taïb?’

She shot me a hard look. ‘Taïb and I were promised to each other when we were children.’

‘That’s a very long engagement.’

‘We put off the wedding until we had the means to set up house. I went to Agadir to continue my education and to train as a teacher; Taïb went to France. And, well, he stayed there. He likes the … lifestyle, I think.’

The way she said the word ‘lifestyle’ carried such a weight of disapproval that I could hear all the contempt of the Islamic world for the wayward, selfish, loose-moralled ways of the West in it. Needled, I asked, ‘So, you’re a qualified teacher now, and he’s made enough money to be driving around in a brand-new car, so when are you getting married, then?’

She pressed her lips together, as if holding back a retort, and with a furious flourish poured out a stream of bubbling golden liquid into the first of the decorated glasses on the tray. ‘Who
do
you think you are to judge us? It’s not always about money,’ she said scathingly. ‘I lay no claim to Taïb now beyond the bounds of kinship. You’re perfectly free to sleep with him if you want to.’

Actually, ‘sleep with’ is my euphemism. Her use of the French verb
baiser
struck me as hard as a slap in the face. I saw the flash of triumph in her eye as I registered the word; then she turned, swept up the tea tray and marched off to the salon, where the crow-like women awaited their refreshments, leaving me to stumble along behind her, bemused, astounded and not a little outraged.

I wanted to grab her by the shoulder and spin her around so that that lethally sweet tea flew everywhere and demand what she meant by that remark. Of course, I did nothing of the sort, but sat meekly on the edge of one of the couches and sipped the horrible tea and did not meet her eye or say a word to her, or to anyone. I did not need to: they jabbered away in their hellish language without a thought for my presence; but every so often I found the unseeing gaze of the dying woman upon me, peculiarly intent, unblinking and unsettling. I was relieved when, long hours later, we left.

18

‘You looked uncomfortable in there,’ Taïb said to me in the car.

I shrugged. ‘Things to think about.’

He nodded slowly. ‘Yes, I know what that is like. I too have much to think about.’ But he did not say what.

Habiba’s attack had shaken me, though my initial anger at the insult had long since subsided. She was, I had decided, a jealous woman who saw me as a threat and I wondered whether she and Taïb were still formally linked, whatever she had said. Their warmth towards one another had seemed genuine, but it was difficult for me to judge how much emotion their kissed greeting masked, or contained. And had she read into his gestures towards me something that simply did not exist? Or did her hostility spring from feeling that she had lost him to France and its women? Given her straitened circumstances, buried away in that dusty little village, in that gloomy house with its contingent of beady-eyed old women and its dying guest, I could understand her frustration. How easy it would be to envy a modern European woman who waltzed (well, hobbled) in on the arm of the man you had expected to marry, her hair immodestly uncovered, a Longines watch on her tanned wrist and a Prada handbag over her shoulder, a woman who could (if she chose) take her pleasures where she would, with no social censure or other unwanted consequences, and move on. But a thought nagged at me: that it had not been jealousy, or not only jealousy, that I sensed in the tenor of her attack but a deep-seated and haughty contempt. What was it that Habiba had seen in me that had triggered such disgust? I had, I thought, been polite and respectful, for all my Western trappings and bare head. True, I did not speak her language, and it is common to regard foreigners who cannot understand or communicate with you as ignorant. But there was more to it than that: her attitude had not been merely dismissive but pointed. It had involved a judgement, as if she perceived in me someone who had made the wrong choice in life, someone who had stepped from the true path into a moral morass.

I was used to being treated with a certain level of respect, I realized. I moved in a world in which I was viewed within a social spectrum, a professional hierarchy. At work, I was defined by my role within the company, by the authority I carried, by the important clients I dealt with and the superior salary I earned. Even outside work, on the streets of the capital, I was used to people reading the signifiers of my appearance – my well-groomed hair, my manicured hands, my expensive clothes, my discreet but high-quality accessories, my manner and my confidence – and deducing from those my social standing. Even I derived my sense of self-worth, I realized, from these shallow trappings. But just who was Isabelle Treslove-Fawcett? Who was I really? When examined closely the successful edifice seemed fragile and behind it I felt insubstantial, like a dream of myself. The money was all very well, but money in itself means nothing: it represents only a covenant with the future, and what was my future? I had no family, few friends and no faith, in any god, or in anything much beyond my own experience. I had, I realized, closed myself off from the world all my life, had kept its difficult and random elements at bay so that it could not damage me, had walled around myself with financial independence and a job that involved no emotional input. There were good reasons behind the defensive position I had so painstakingly erected to protect myself, I knew, and the strategy I had chosen had got me thus far in life apparently unscathed; but Habiba had rocked its foundations.