Wafa Faith Hallam
CHAPTER ONE
The Virgin Bride
Saadia on her wedding day.
She was shivering in the dark but not from
the cold. It was a warm night, in fact, but she couldn’t keep her body from shaking.
She had a long, white sleeping gown on and no seroual,
the traditional underpants she had worn all evening. Her sister and his mother
had made sure of that when they took the wedding clothes off her, slowly and
delicately, one piece at a time. She had pleaded for them to do it and not the neggafa who had dressed her and
undressed her all through the night as she changed from one costume to the
next, looking exquisite in her colorful and elaborate headdresses and jewelry.
She started crying a
little, but Zhor, her sister, scolded her, whispering in her ear to behave
herself and not make a fuss. She held a trembling hand out to Lalla, her sweet
mother-in law.
Save me! Her eyes were
imploring. Lalla gazed for a brief instant at the anguished, frail-looking
thirteen-year-old with tears in her clear gray eyes. Ever so lightly, she
touched her cheek with the back of her hand, letting her fingers linger.
“It’ll be alright,
baby, don’t worry. It will be okay, I promise,”she said softly.
And then they left the
room hurriedly, taking the wedding kaftans with them and closing the door
behind. She was trapped then and utterly lonely.
The joyful chanting of
the women assembled outside grew louder, and he entered the nuptial chamber,
dressed in a magnificent white djellaba which oddly made him look even older and
wearier than his thirty-three years. She was sitting in the bed, pale and
frightened and so small. She appeared to him like a lovely painted doll, a
little skinny doll—smaller than he remembered her, he said later. Her dark hair
was pulled back, and she still had her festive make-up; rouge on the perfect lips
and cheeks, kohl lining the already-black, fiery eyes, hands and feet decorated
with henna in intricate designs intended to bring good luck and protect her
against evil spirits.
Ironically, she
thought, her luck had just run out and she was looking at evil straight in the
eyes. But she was not looking at him, she was too afraid to. Her heart was
pounding hard in her chest, and she felt nauseous. He turned off the lantern set
on the table in the middle of the room. She heard him move in the dark, undressing
himself quickly. That’s when the quivering began; she couldn’t help it. She
lowered herself on the bed, crossing her arms on her chest, stiff as a corpse.
If only the darkness could swallow her into oblivion.
She felt him crawling
in the bed next to her.
“Don’t be afraid,” he
said gently. He didn’t touch her at first, and she kept very still, her legs
stretched tight, hoping, praying that he would just go to sleep and let her be.
She could hear the noises outside, the voices of women and their laughter. The
celebration was still going on; they were going to be serving the traditional harira for breakfast soon. For a while, he
just lay there next to her, motionless. She could hear him recite a short
prayer, and he repeated in a whisper, as if to reassure himself as much as her,
“Don’t be afraid.” He smelled of musk oil and soap and tobacco.
Finally, he seemed to
be taking a deep breath and he extended his hand under the sheet, touching her
arm. She unconsciously shielded herself from him. Her fear was palpable, her
breathing short and fast paced.
He moved closer to her, repeating again,
“Don’t be afraid... you know we must do this... It’s God’s will.” He reached
for her leg, fumbled a little with her gown, his long shirt. She could feel his
hand on her thigh and she let out a sob. No, she thought, I hate you... don’t
you know? And she tried to coil away from that prowling hand.
He stopped short, as
if he had heard the howl in her head, and he sighed. “Saadia, we must do this,
they’ll be waiting. It is God’s
design.”
He grabbed her more
firmly, trying to spread her legs apart, and moved his hand up her thigh,
reaching upward toward her groin and her soft and warm, hairless femininity.
The day before, her
older sister, Fatma, had taken her to the hammam and helped her wax herself clean,
leaving her smooth as a baby. This was not the first time, to be sure; Fatma had
started waxing her ever since she’d discovered pubic hair growth on her young
sister’s mons a few months before in the hammam. It hadn’t been pleasant
the first time, but she’d gotten somewhat used to it since.
Suddenly she felt him
grow harder against her leg and instinctively grabbed his hand and pulled it
away from her in sheer revulsion.
“Saadia,” he said
patiently, “you can’t fight me. This has to be done... just relax and it’ll be
all right.”
Raising himself on one
elbow, he tried to caress her. He touched her face and wiped the tears
streaming down her cheeks. He lowered his head to kiss her softly on the lips
but she turned away in disgust, sobbing now, a tight knot in her stomach and
what she guessed was his penis pressing against her skin. She knew she had to
let him take her... she was told he would, this was the normal course of
things, there was no escaping. She closed her eyes and wished to be dead right there,
right then.
When she opened those
eyes again, it was all over. He had turned on his side, away from her, and gone
to sleep, just like that.
She was wide awake and
strangely relieved that it was over, feeling the intense burn and soreness in
her loins and the wetness between her legs and on the sheet. She didn’t dare
touch herself, just pulled her gown down, curled her legs up against her chest
and wept quietly. She was mourning the innocent child, forsaken by her loved
ones into the crypt inside the earth’s core, only to be desecrated.
Later that day, the
women would be pleased to display the bloodstained sheet and gown in a big
round copper tray—proof of her virginity, her sacrifice at the altar of family
honor, which would thence be preserved. She had done her daughterly duty. She
had endured this unspeakable humiliation as was expected of her, allowed him to
pull her legs up, felt his awkward fingers inside her, spreading her and
guiding himself within her, and the sudden intense, searing pain as he thrust
his way deeper with a small grunt.
She was thankful for
the obscurity, that she couldn’t see his face. Besides, she had kept her eyes
shut, savagely biting her lower lip so as not to scream, her head turned to the
side, clenching the sheet in her fists, feeling his weight crushing her in
silent, helpless resignation. He was not a big man, thank God, rather thin and
slender, not at all imposing, and he was done in minutes. Panting, he had let
out a curious groan and then pulled out of her.
“I’m sorry,” he had
finally mumbled. “It had to be done.”
And that had been
all-pretty fast, really. To her surprise, she had survived her wedding night.
* **
These were the
post-war years, the early fifties, and Morocco had been divided into three
zones since 1912. Most of the Moroccan territory was under the authority of the
French protectorate—a euphemism for colonization. A smaller zone, made up of
the Northern provinces, was under Spanish control. And then there was Tangiers, at the
northwestern tip of Africa, gateway to the Mediterranean, on the shore opposite
the Strait of Gibraltar: Tangiers, once Portuguese, then British, and finally
“liberated” under a multinational statute that turned it into a free zone and
an International port in 1923.
My mother was born in
1939, at the onset of World War II , in a kingdom with a fragmented soul held
together by the French shortly before Germany invaded Poland and before France
yielded to the Nazi invasion. Slowly but surely, a Moroccan consciousness began
to surface. All it needed was a charismatic leader to drive it forward. That
emblematic figure materialized in the realm’s young sultan, literally on the
eve of my mother’s wedding, as he was taken away from his home and thrust into
the night of exile.
