Amour Provence (8 page)

Filou heard the sound of a waterfall, and then around the bend came the hulking figure of Manu Dombasle.

“Filou!” he shouted. “Thank God it's you! Berti's hurt and we didn't know how to get her down. Eva and Seb sent me to get help.”

“What happened?”

“She fell on the rocks and her head's all bloody,” said Manu. “Eva wrapped her wounds up in Seb's shirt, but she hasn't woken up.” Filou started to run, pushing the young man ahead of him to speed him up.

It was a long hike down for Filou with Berti in his arms. After he'd ascertained that she had no broken bones, he'd lifted her up, but the unconscious girl was a deadweight. A deep twilight had already set in, making it hard to see. Filou's feet lost all feeling from being constantly immersed in the river's flow. The kids followed along, Eva holding on to Seb and Manu trailing behind. Filou thought of Pierrette and what she would do if either Gaspard or Françoise had been hurt. Suddenly the idea of no longer living beneath the same roof with the mother of his children made him shiver with pain as he made his way down through the treacherous waters.

When they reached his
camionnette
, Filou's hands shook with exhaustion as he gripped the steering wheel. Manu gave him an odd look when for a moment his frozen feet forgot the sense memory of clutch and gas, so when he started up the engine, the car jerked and stalled. Eva and Seb cradled Berti in their arms in the backseat. When they got to the hospital, various parents were telephoned. Liliane was the first to arrive. She was alone, without her husband, Clément, who, she explained, was still entertaining the group from the
préfecture.
Filou explained things and waited
with her until a doctor came to tell them that Berti had a concussion, but that she'd briefly awakened, which was good news. Still, they planned to hold her for observation until the morning. Liliane arranged to have a cot set up next to her daughter so she could spend the night.

Outside in the calm dark, Filou had a great desire for a smoke, though he hadn't had a cigarette in years. The illuminated sign of the
tabac
indicated that it was still open on the square below. He decided on a pack of Gitanes, the brand he'd smoked as a teenager, and as he lit up he thought of going to Gautier Marcassin's house to beat him to a pulp. The cigarette tasted acrid, but he puffed it anyway, wishing he could just go home. Then he walked back up the hill to the hospital entrance, marked
URGENCES
, where his truck was parked. The night sky appeared dark as espresso with a thin edge of pale cream at the horizon. On the square below, he saw a car turn up the street toward the hospital. It was an Opel like the one Pierrette drove. He let the cigarette fall and crushed it with the heel of his boot. The car pulled up in front of him. Gaspard and Françoise were kneeling in the backseat, their hands pressed like starfish against the window. Pierrette leaned toward him, and without saying a word, she reached over and opened the front door.

F
or her birthday Mohammed gave her a necklace made of gold. After fastening it beneath the tumble of her dark hair, he stepped back to look at his young wife, still amazed that he'd had the good luck to marry a gentle beauty like Rachida, with her smooth almond-scented hair and skin light as café crème. Since her arrival in France three years before, Mohammed had made an effort to help Rachida fit in as he had, still aware of their Moroccan roots but eager to make the best of life in a new country.

“You should have the same things Frenchwomen do,” he told her.

Rachida hesitated before touching the slender links that moved like the scales of a serpent beneath her fingers.

“But this is too much, Hamidou,” she exclaimed. Rachida called Mohammed by his pet name, Hamidou, but she was the only one. He was chief of field hands at a large
vineyard, and everyone there, his employer and fellow workers alike, called him Mohammed as a sign of respect.

The gift came as a shock because Rachida and Mohammed were always careful about money. He'd often told her he hoped to save enough to one day build them a home back in Morocco for when he retired, a promise that seemed to Rachida impossibly distant. Instead, she wished that they could simply move out of the lean-to shack in the tiny village of Beaucastel where they now lived and into some other, nicer place. Even in Morocco, a hut like theirs was fit only for livestock. But Mohammed told her that it was hard for Arabs to find acceptable places to live because the French didn't want to rent to them, and for anything decent the prices were far too high. Still, he promised Rachida that soon they would find something better.

She touched the necklace again and wondered what Mohammed had spent on it. In her hometown near Fez, women wore only silver jewelry because Islam taught that gold was too luxurious for personal adornment. Rachida felt a pang of guilt as she examined herself in the mirror and saw the way the lustrous chain drew attention to itself like a living thing against her throat.

Mohammed embraced her, then placed his hands on her shoulders, gazing down into her face. At twenty, Rachida was quite a few years his junior. He was in his late thirties, tall and slender, with an elongated face that he knew no one would call handsome. But Rachida didn't seem to mind. She told him that she was happy because he was always considerate with her, and never lost his temper, unlike her father, who had ruled her family by fear. When Rachida stood on
her toes to kiss him, Mohammed felt his eyes burn, but he managed to hold in check the grateful feeling that welled up in his chest. It wasn't the custom for a man to show too much emotion. But Rachida must have seen the change in his face and she took his hand and caressed it, feeling with her soft fingers the roughness of his palm put there by hard work.

Mohammed had come to France as a teenager following the death of both of his parents. Through an uncle who lived in Toulon, he was able to obtain a visa and, upon his arrival, find a job picking grapes with a team of itinerant workers, mostly Arabs originally from Morocco, Tunisia, or Algeria. Later, he'd been employed as a field hand at the domaine where he was now foreman.

Rachida's own life had changed dramatically when, in 1993, she married Mohammed and immediately returned with him to France. In this new country, she was no longer obliged to conceal herself beneath long robes, or wrap carefully arranged veils around her head to cover her hair, as had been the custom in the small village where she'd grown up. At her job cleaning house twice a week, she dressed in loose black pants and a long blouse that billowed modestly over her hips. And each day she simply twisted her long hair up into a plastic clip without any sort of head covering at all. Her employer, Corinne Chave, owned the vineyard where Mohammed worked, and Rachida walked to her house, just a few kilometers down the weedy river road. Corinne's field hands were mostly Arabs from the North African Maghreb, all longtime expatriates who had lived and worked in France for a good part of their lives.

Rachida was now a part of that workforce, a free and equal woman, she reminded herself each time she saw the words engraved in stone above the entrance to the town hall proclaiming:
LIBERTÉ! ÉGALITÉ! FRATERNITÉ!
But Mohammed was against too much liberty for his young wife and didn't want her out and about like Amina, Rachida's closest friend, who had multiple jobs and was always on the run. He felt Amina had been coarsened by the experiences she'd had working in places where she wasn't always treated with respect, and he didn't want that for Rachida. “I make a good living so you don't have to work like a dog for others,” Mohammed had told her more than once.

But Rachida admired the way Amina had arranged her life. She'd raised two sons, and her husband, Tariq, worked in the same vineyard as Mohammed. Amina was free to do as she pleased, and because of her various jobs, she had plenty of money to spend. As for herself, Rachida was often alone and idle, increasingly aware that there were plenty of people ready to hire an energetic young Moroccan woman to do a variety of chores. But whenever she discussed her desire to get a full-time job, Mohammed always replied, “You hope to conceive a child. We both want that, Rachida. Please be patient and wait a little longer before you make any decisions.”

Rachida had never mentioned to her husband that she secretly worried about the fact that after nearly three years of marriage she had not become pregnant. Her sister had waited even longer before conceiving and now had four children, so Rachida comforted herself with that fact and hoped it would be the same for her. But recently, in addition
to the normal monthly discomfort that was always a bother, she had begun to experience new sorts of pain. She sometimes found herself doubled over, pressing her belly, hoping to assuage the unpleasant feeling. But these symptoms were things she kept to herself, not even telling her friend Amina. She hadn't considered seeing a doctor because she'd heard that French doctors often treated Muslim women as if they were ignorant animals and prescribed medicines that did more harm than good.

Even with Mohammed's attentiveness, not everything had been as smooth for Rachida as he might have wished. When she first began working at Corinne Chave's house, Rachida had been surprised that there was no man in residence, a fact that would have been considered an oddity in Morocco, where women in the countryside never lived alone. There was always a brother, a cousin, or an uncle to step in as head of the household in the absence of a husband or a father. More confusingly, Corinne had a roommate named Sophie d'Aigouze, a small woman with thick rough hair, white as a baby goat, who worked as an accountant in the nearby town of Fenosque. One morning, while Rachida was ironing, she'd glanced out the window as the two women were leaving for work and saw them in the driveway embracing, not a simple
bisou
on the cheek, but lips upon lips like man and wife! At first, Rachida had been so shocked that she had hidden behind the curtain, wondering if she should sneak away and never come back. But then she thought it better to wait to see what Mohammed would say. After all, he'd known Corinne for fifteen years and was bound to know more than Rachida concerning his employer's
life. Still, a part of Rachida felt that such behavior was
haraam
, forbidden in the same way eating pork or drinking alcohol was prohibited for Muslims.

That night as she tended the couscous they would eat with dinner, her words began to erupt like the steam from beneath the cover of the
couscousière
. “Hamidou, do you know that Corinne Chave and her friend Sophie live together like a married couple!”

“That's not your business,” Mohammed replied. “Corinne has always been fair to me, probably better than a man would be. Her private life is none of my concern. Remember, Rachida, France isn't Morocco and we can't judge people by the same standards that we would if we were home.”

That was her husband's answer to the majority of her questions about the differences between the two countries. “You can't compare them as if they were loaves of bread,” he often told her. “It's much more complicated. You will come upon many things that surprise you, and then you must make your own judgment about what you accept and what you don't.”

So that's what Rachida tried to do, simply accept that Sophie and Corinne were Frenchwomen free to live life the way they saw fit in accordance with the words on the town hall that proclaimed their liberty.

When Rachida had first arrived in France three years before, even the air had felt different. As she and Mohammed drove from the port of Algeciras up through Spain and arrived at France's Mediterranean coast, she'd smelled the briny sea along with the aroma of wild herbs and a hint of pungent fruit from the grapevines that stretched in ordered
rows off into the distance. Those aromas had been quite a change from her parents' farm with its sharp odor of donkey and camel dung, and the musky scent of sand and desert brought by hot, dry winds. Yet there was always a place of repose in her father's shady orange grove and in season the sweetest scent of blossom imaginable. Rachida looked for orange trees along the highway, but saw none.

Upon arriving in her new home in Beaucastel, a Provençal village of four hundred people, Rachida had been so shy that she'd spent her first days sitting in Mohammed's car parked beside Corinne Chave's vineyard. During that time, she would listen to the radio and try to make out the strange sequences of words repeated over and over in a continuing cycle on
France Info
, a news station that Mohammed turned on for her. But after nearly three years, though her language ability had improved, she had still not gotten used to being alone in the little house built into the rocky hillside where there was no garden to tend or animals to care for, and no friends and family with whom she might pass her days. She had accepted her husband's will that for now they would continue to live in the simple place whose back wall was rough rock face long ago carved out by troglodytes, the cave dwellers who had once inhabited the steep hillside. She used the hollow indentations as shelves to store food and arrange her few cooking utensils, an earthenware tagine, a steamer, and a flat pan for the morning's bread that she made fresh each day. A single spigot jutted over a stone sink, the only water source except for a closet that hid a toilet. The double burner fueled by a propane tank and a
minuscule refrigerator were her sole appliances. Even for a person who had been raised in the Moroccan countryside, the place was primitive.

One hot July day, shortly after Rachida's birthday, her friend Amina arrived at her door with an excited look on her face.

“The man who just bought the château at the top of the village is interested in hiring you,” she announced. Rachida thought of the splendid castle that stood at the town's crest surrounded by a verdant park filled with trees. “I cooked for him on Saturday,” Amina continued. “His name is Monsieur Descoing. He pays well and wishes to hire another woman. I told him you would be perfect!”