The Last Patriarch

by Najat El Hachmi

  I was so afraid that I said goodbye and left; he was still staring at me. Goodbye, goodbye.

  Laia said why don’t you say something to Arumí? I think he really likes you. I said no, no, no, you’re pulling my leg. That’s what father said, all men are only after one thing from you and when they’ve got it, they’ll throw you away like a dirty rag. Don’t ever trust a man, do you hear me? Any man.

  I went to buy bread whenever we needed some and my heart still raced, but I tried to avoid his gaze and only wanted to run off somewhere else. Listen, he said one day, you want to go out with me? You’re so cruel, I replied, and he can’t have understood anything and I understood even less. I didn’t know what to do with my feelings or all that flutter-flutter I could feel.

  I even called him an idiot, but it was fiesta time in the barris and there was a dance in the Horta Vermella district on Sunday evening. A dance full of grandfathers and grandmothers, and mother let me go with Laia and Marta. He was there with his little gang and when the song ‘My Love is Sweet Fifteen’ rang out he came after me. I’m fourteen now, I told him, but you’ll soon be fifteen, he told me, and I never discovered how he’d found out. He offered a hand, inviting me to dance and I said no, no. Don’t you like me just a little bit? I said no and I know it’s all a joke, you and your friends only want to make fun of me. They must be splitting their sides, I bet? No, I told you, I want to go out with you.

  I walked off and didn’t see him again. Only in the window of his house, I sometimes thought he was staring down at me from up there, but he was too far away, and all I could do was get into bed and cry.

  Until it was fiesta time in our barri and I sat on the seats and watched people dance. Someone came behind me and sang in my ear, Próxim Supermarkets, the quick buy. Próxim Supermarkets. I laughed so much I went all goosepimply and he blew on the nape of my neck. Quad, relative to quads. Quadern, an exercise book. Quaderna, that’s much too complicated.

  19

  This isn’t my world

  All our neighbours must have wondered why we took so many things with us when we travelled. That big plastic-covered heap on top of the car, the backseats full of boxes, so stuffed there was hardly room for us. The fact is if you’re going down there, that’s how it’s got to be, we’d explain, we have to take things and go loaded up like this.

  We’d drive off at dusk, to avoid the heat and kilometre-long tailbacks. Father said a drop more and mother, acting as co-driver, filled his glass from the coffee thermos. Time and again, but he was still very sleepy because father has always been a big sleeper.

  I let myself be lulled by the rush-rush of the road, but didn’t know where to put my legs among so many parcels and presents for this person and that. Mother had been incubating Diogenes Syndrome ever since she’d found out we were going that summer. Soap, if there was a special offer on bars of that herb-scented soap in a yellow wrapping, go on, buy thirty or more. Good quality coffee, but not the best. Eau de cologne in litre bottles only for the grandparents and aunts, towels Soumisha had brought her from the market at a knock-down price, men’s shirts, two-metre cloth, double width, for making kaftans. Cloth of every colour, and white for grandmothers who didn’t realise it was used for making curtains here. Chocolate bars, Nocilla, cheese wedges, biscuits, sweets purchased wholesale.

  We had to be like the kings from the Orient when we arrived, and I thought it was too much, after so long. And we’d had to buy clothes for children and adults, so they didn’t think we didn’t dress well where we lived. Father took us to a shop where I didn’t even dare translate the prices for mother, though the clothes were really pretty. I chose fluorescent skirts and trousers above the knee.

  In the port men were washing their feet in the fountains and praying by the sea. Mother told me I’d soon catch up on the prayers I’d not said. Father slept until the boat swallowed our car and family.

  The border made me feel strange, as did the taste of the air, which was so earthy. It was all familiar and yet strange. Father put on music cassettes from his youth before we reached the slope to the white house and I remembered I’d lived so long between those whitewashed walls.

  It was all kisses, hugs, emotions that were too much, grandmother who felt dizzy and grandfather whose beard scratched you. Cousins I didn’t know, who said great to see you again, and I said to mother they can’t be, my eyes are playing tricks on me.

  I only wanted to sleep, it was all too much, too different yet too similar to so many other things we’d lived since.

  They’d overdone the preparations. Grandmother had whitewashed all the outside walls of the house, which had been spouting mud all winter, put blue skirting board in all the bedrooms and bought new tables when she knew that at last, at last her firstborn boy was returning, and her grandchildren and beloved daughter-in-law. And grandchildren she didn’t yet know but already loved. She must be feeling God had made his peace with her, after taking her daughter away before he’d taken her, because they say the worst thing that can happen to you is to outlive one of your children.

  The cousins washed our clothes in the river, the dishes in the middle of the yard, cleaned the fish and sliced the greens. They’d not let mother do a thing and she wore pretty kaftans, because that’s how wives of rich, important men had to dress. We were now rich, it seems.

  Initially I thought it was fun, but I soon decided I wanted to go home. That had to be the place I knew best in the world, and a lump came to my throat when darkness fell.

  Father was a very different man, in the midst of his sisters and grandmother. He turned into a devout Muslim and even had a sense of humour. He wore a djellaba over his trousers and said he’d grow a beard except it only grew in patches on his face and he’d have looked more Jewish than Muslim. He sat among them and was more powerful than ever. I thought about those ants of his and what they’d say if they’d known him like that, but it made no difference because father had handed his money round to them all and, anyway, he’d been born to be a great patriarch.

  He only had the occasional unpleasant encounter with grandfather, when he said look, you should be with the men you invited to dinner and not be so much with the women. Father didn’t reply, he’d just send objects flying. One glass smashed against a wall and tiny bits of glass fell on a newborn baby, the son of an aunt of ours, but he was asleep and oblivious. It was a miracle he wasn’t hurt; he could have been, but not even the boy’s mother was angry with father. She said that stuff about my brother, he’s not right, is he?

  The women seemed to understand him. But I didn’t. He suddenly said I don’t like your clothes even though he’d been the one to come shopping with me. He said what’s that fellow doing here? referring to a cousin who lived nearby and often came to do electrical repairs. Sure he looked at me the way boys do and cracked little jokes and winked at me, but I didn’t know if it was because he was my cousin or what. What’s he doing here, can’t you see how he’s looking at her? And I didn’t understand at all, because he had invited him and I was embarrassed to have a father who was so contradictory.

  He started making me go into the bedrooms when one of my cousins came, when there’s quite a patriarchal law that allows you to greet one another, because he is what he is, the son of your father’s brother or sister, and it starts from the premise he’ll never stain your honour because he’d be staining his own. Father decided to take it further, I don’t want you talking to those vultures, I know what men are like and at this age they start taking advantage of girls. He liked to dwell on things too much, and I simply wanted to go home.

  Until I heard him say something in one of those exchanges with his sisters and began to think this wasn’t my world and never would be. I still don’t know whether father was joking or not. They all burst out laughing and he said come here, we must talk. You know, you’re of an age to marry. True enough, said his sisters, of course, she’s a grown woman now. I’d never told you, but I spoke to your aunt several times, may she be with G
od in paradise, and we thought we loved each other so much it would be a good idea if her son married you. What do you think? I still didn’t understand and was already thinking this was definitely not my world. Better marry him than end up in a strange family you don’t know at all. I don’t want to marry. My aunts laughed, everyone marries sooner or later, you don’t want to get left on the shelf. I don’t intend marrying now or ever. And they laughed and laughed because they couldn’t understand how somebody could have an alternative to marriage. But father was laughing too, and I didn’t know if it was one of those things he said with a laugh and then it turned out to be deadly serious, like when he ended up burning my headscarf on the stove. That’s agreed, I’ll talk to his father and we’ll arrange the ceremony to ask for your hand next summer. Rabada, an area of the heart. Rabadá, a boy who helps the shepherd. Rabassa, part of a tree trunk.

  20

  Two kisses

  I don’t ever want to see you in the street with a boy, never ever. But what if your best friend happens to be a boy? What if he’s the one you spend your breaks with at school, the one you kiss when it’s your turn to kiss the one you like most? What if you had to do some schoolwork and he was in your group and you had to go up the Rambla to the library with him? You couldn’t say you walk on one side and I’ll take the other and see you there, not really. And even less so if he had creamy-coloured eyes and you knew he’d eaten Nocilla for breakfast, lunch and dinner for ages. Let alone if he made you laugh and you spent less time reading the dictionary.

  You were lucky father couldn’t come into school, into your classroom, and that was a real haven for you. Until you were reading in bed and he came in, so quietly, but you could see his temples throbbing. He said tell me it’s not true what I’ve heard, just tell me it’s not true and I’ll believe you. They say they’ve seen you with a boy, you were walking with him along the Rambla, a boy with long hair. I said I wasn’t, who told you? Swear you weren’t, you only have to swear to me and I’ll believe you, and I could see myself being kicked downstairs, my life in danger, so I lied and said I swear. Swear by your mother, and I swore by my mother and would have sworn by anything at all.

  Then one day he came and said I’ve bought you a present. A skirt and a blouse that I thought were for mother. I couldn’t help laughing, where do you think I’m going dressed like that? I want you to dress decently, for fuck’s sake, and not in those tight trousers. And it was a viscose skirt down to my ankles and a flowery blouse with tight cuffs and pointed lapels. You don’t expect me to go to school in that? I couldn’t care less, you’ll wear them to go out with me on Sundays, I don’t want to see you dressed in that!

  He didn’t realise my trousers had just got too small for me, that I’d not chosen them because they were tight-fitting. What could I do if my bum just grew and grew? Nothing, get bigger sizes, although they’d turn out too big round the waist. Get yourself longer jerseys, longer blouses, and he’ll leave you alone, mother would say. But everything that was longer at that time belonged to Granny and I’d have died rather than go to school like that.

  He said I don’t want to see you talking to boys, but when there was an invoice to take to one of his customers, it was take this to Josep or Quintana or so and so, and I couldn’t understand why I was restricted to not speaking to boys of my own age, as if the men he knew never looked at me the way he said all men looked at me.

  I was lucky I had that friend who was a school mistress and I could speak to her about love and such things, though I didn’t talk to her about other matters I thought were too serious. She listened to me and chopped up my confusion into such small pieces all I could do was laugh. She gave me music that moved me, poems to read that said it’s you we’re talking about, it’s you. Books that went beyond the limitations of words, that explained life’s other meanings.

  I spent a lot of evenings walking home with her or in her car; I could spend hours on he said this to me, he did this to me, I felt this, I noticed that, what do you think he meant by that or why did he look at me like that. Hours, and afterwards I listened to ‘I have only one blue unicorn and even if I had two, I only want that one’.

  She said I must introduce you to him and he did or said, or didn’t do or say things we tried to decipher every evening although Tous les matins du monde or baroque music was playing in the car. He wants to meet you, I’ve told him so much about you and he’s really desperate to. And he kissed me twice when he saw me and I’m not sure if it was the first time a man kissed me twice. I thought about father, I thought if he found out I’d soon be dead for sure, I thought about lots of things, but only smelled the smell of cleanliness, warm breath, different to all the women who’d kissed me four or five times, if not even more. Perhaps I even fell a bit in love with him, but perhaps it was just because he was a man. ‘A woman with a hat.’

  My classmates said I was teacher’s pet because I was the only pupil who went out with a teacher, what they didn’t know was that if it hadn’t been for what she brought into my life, the new horizons she offered me, I’d have died, perhaps to the outside world, but within myself, for sure.

  So I’d walk up the Rambla with them both and go for a coffee in the square. But shaking for most of the time, thinking I was dead for sure, I couldn’t feel my legs. I came face to face with him on the bend by school, when we were crossing the new bridge, him in his van, and he opened his eyes wide, stared after me and couldn’t believe his eyes.

  The problem was the way we were walking: her, him and me. He’d asked me something and I’d turned towards him and smiled, was talking to him. That was the exact moment I’d never be able to justify and I no longer heard their voices or mine as I tried to act normally, because he smelled too sweetly to spoil it all by explaining what a patriarch was and how I, his daughter, had to behave. No. Sa, sana, enjoying good health. Saba is a liquid that circulates through the vascular tissue of plants. Sabadellenca, belonging or relative to Sabadell.

  21

  A truck without a handbrake

  Then the time came when mother must have realised there wasn’t much time left to make a good wife and respectable lady of me (the sort that did housework, thought I) and wanted me to spend hours every day preparing for that role rather than reading books or listening to Silvio Rodríguez. I wasn’t interested, not because I didn’t want to learn to do all those tasks that sooner or later would be useful, but I just thought if I started so young, I’d spend my life mopping, ironing, etc. Nothing ever led me to think I might end up having someone to do that kind of thing for me.

  I’d take one of my brother’s Walkmans and switch on a tape and then everything would seem more bearable. Ojalá or Ah, la música kept me going while I passed the mop over the brightly-coloured tiles. Sometimes it was El tren de mitjanit, or that song which says you meet all kinds in the Estació de França, well-behaved, nice folk as well as rude. And what usually happened when mother or I were mopping was father would come back from work mid-morning or afternoon, it made no difference, and walk over the wet floor to leave keys, coins or a packet of cigarettes on the dining room sideboard. Then he’d go back to the door and shut it, because he must have left it open when he came in. Then he’d go to the dining table to open his mail and walk into the kitchen and tell mother bring me a cup of coffee. I’d rest my chin on the mop handle and watch him undo all the work I’d done in the last half hour, and I’d stare at him and think I’d take the handle and start beating him about the head with it until he’d cry that’s enough, that’s enough, I won’t do it again. But I’d say nothing, only stare at him, and he’d ask what’s the matter, and I’d reply, well, look, pointing at the floor. Oh, he’d exclaim and keep on walking over the clean floor that was clean no longer. I’d occasionally tried to put down newspaper, but obviously the route I’d mapped out for him was insufficient and he’d jumped over it without even giving it a glance. It was this kind of thing that made me wonder if I was beginning to hate him or if it was just adolescence.


  I avoided him as much as I could, I couldn’t tolerate his presence, the way he spoke, and I hated mother loving him despite what he did. His big paunch, the weight he kept putting on, the trousers mother had to keep shortening for him, not because he was getting smaller but because he kept doing them up lower and lower, the noises he made eating, the Terence Hill and Bud Spencer films he watched day after day: in the Wild West, playing at being twins belonging to a couple of Portuguese aristocrats or something of the sort, or conmen, or policemen, whatever, they always ended up throwing punches that sent others reeling over the tables at the first exchange, because they felt like it. And even so they were in the right, and father laughed as wildly as ever though he’d watched the same scene two hundred times. He discovered the rewind button and slow motion button and it got even worse.

  I couldn’t tell whether I was the one changing or just that I could stand him less and less. Perhaps it’s the way I am but he was getting to be unbearable. He was the one who loved me so much, and I felt so bad because I couldn’t love him, however hard I tried. Or perhaps he didn’t love me anymore?

  He’d give the two little ones what he called pigeon pecks and they complained but it was part of our daily life. Before he left, a few of those smackers, now you, now him. I was disgusted on their behalf.

  Until the incident with the truck when I started to think that that could be my destiny, our destiny, or anyone’s.

  It was summer and they’d let father have a truck. He parked it in front of the garage door, but left the keys in the ignition. The two boys were playing outside and nobody noticed as they opened the vehicle’s door and started to pretend they were driving. Go on, it’s my turn to be behind the wheel, one of them probably said. No, you be the co-driver, right? And the co-driver, it seemed, couldn’t stand all that inactivity and lifted that little lever that always went thss when father touched it, who knows what it was for. And it was the lever that kept the truck still, but they weren’t to know that and they suddenly found themselves hurtling down the road, into a neighbour’s car, and before they crashed one of them said jump and they did, just like in the movies. They weren’t injured. When we heard the din and ran out we were relieved to see they were unhurt and mother said what a fright they’ve had, look, they’ve gone all white, quick, splash some water on the back of their necks and wrists, quick, don’t let the fright get into them. Water.