Mehdi takes Aïcha by the hand and they walk down to the beach. They can hear the muffled sound of applause and the beat of a French pop song. Aïcha is tipsy. She looks like a little girl about to fall asleep in the back seat of a car. She is not really listening to what Mehdi is saying. “I’d like to sit down,” she says, and lowers herself onto the sand before she has even finished her sentence. He sits beside her. He wants to touch her but doesn’t dare. He is waiting for a sign, an invitation. He picks up a handful of sand and lets it run through the gaps between his fingers. She turns toward him and he kisses her. Now, even more than before, she looks like a child, an innocent, and he is surprised by the way she kisses him back. Mouth open, her hand on his neck. There is nothing vulgar in her attitude or her movements and he does not think, as he has sometimes thought about other women, that her kisses show traces of other kisses given to other men. Her mouth opens wider and she lets Mehdi’s tongue inside. She leans forward, her long swanlike neck illuminated by moonlight. Her lips touch every inch of Mehdi’s face. Her eyes are squeezed tightly shut, as if she has withdrawn deep within herself and has, by some miracle of the night and alcohol and this starry sky, succeeded in conquering her own shyness. This drives him wild and he kisses her with the same hunger, the same passion. He senses, he feels certain, that he is the first man to awaken this passion in her. He discovers her like Columbus drawing close to the shores of the New World. This woman is a distant island, an unknown continent, a planet that nobody has ever seen before. Or at least not the way that he sees her.

  She opens her eyes. They sparkle like frost, like ice, in the morning sunlight. He was afraid that her eyes would be hazy, bleary, the eyes of a drunk woman who does not realize what is happening, who might look at him as if he were a thief, a looter, just another guy. But she is not like that at all. In fact he is troubled by the lucidity of her gaze, by her determination. There is neither defiance nor submission in the way she looks at him. She kisses him, fully aware of what she is doing, with all her strength and all her will, and this makes Mehdi’s heart overflow and he holds her in his arms as tightly as he can. He sinks his fingers into the muscles of her back and is astonished by her birdlike delicacy. He can feel every one of her ribs. Aïcha’s back is like an ancient musical instrument, a Persian zither, an Indian lyre. Now he imagines her trembling, the luminous nudity hidden beneath this thin dress, this dress so beautiful that he noticed it as soon as the music ended and, alone on the dance floor, he looked up.

  In the distance they can hear shouting, applause, a quiet roar coming from the bar where they got drunk. Mehdi and Aïcha don’t care. What is happening behind them, back there, strikes them as pointless and ridiculous; nothing can matter more than what is taking place here, on this freezing sand, a few feet away from the whisper of the waves. They belong to another geography now, to a timeline distinct from that of their friends, whose absence does not worry them.

  Young customers, faces reddened by alcohol, shirt collars soaked with sweat, keep rushing back and forth between the terrace and the bar. They look up at the sky and stare laughing at the moon. They say things like “Unbelievable” or “It’s crazy.” Some of them are lying on the damp deck chairs, and the boys, rendered pompous by the circumstances, proclaim that this night is going to change the world. From now on, nothing will be impossible for mankind. Having conquered the moon, we will bring an end to poverty and oppression, we will cure all diseases, stop all wars. The young women giggle and feel proud, even though they haven’t done anything. After all, they think, it’s true: this is not just another night. Progress has brought them this far and now it will open up a new era of freedom, and to celebrate this it is surely not asking too much that they agree to sit in the lap of the boy they love. On this night of all nights they could surely dispose of their scruples, dispose of their clothes, and go forth naked into this new world that is beginning, this nascent world full of promise. The alcohol, the dancing, the languorous movements, and that boot leaving its imprint in the dust of the moon, all of this goes to the heads of these young people who bellow in French and in Arabic on the terrace. They howl like wolves in deep, dark forests. Twenty years from now, thirty, even a hundred, people will still talk about this day when man set foot on the moon. They will say: “I remember exactly where I was.” They will tell their children about that television set on the gold-colored countertop and the music playing in the background. And each time that someone mentions this night, Aïcha will think of her first kisses and she will repeat to herself: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

  Dinner’s ready!” Mathilde shouted. No response. “It’ll go cold!” she shouted. Selim appeared, looking absent-minded, and shuffled into the dining room. Amine finally arrived too, and sat facing his son. Amine unfolded his napkin and began complaining about the farmworkers. He railed against the man who had sold him some poor-quality seed and told Mathilde: “I’m going to sue him.”

  “Sit up straight,” he said to Selim, who replied that he wasn’t a child anymore. “Act like it, then.” While her husband and son insulted each other, Mathilde watched the lentils going cold. The sauce would not taste the same, she thought, and the meal would be ruined. Losing patience, she grabbed their plates herself and served them. She wanted them to shut up and eat but they kept arguing, ignoring the pleasant smell of the dish she had prepared. “You didn’t even manage to get your baccalauréat at the second attempt!” Amine grumbled. “If you keep lazing around like this, I have the solution, believe me. I’ll send you off to do your military service. Then you’ll understand what being a man is all about. I was at war when I was your age!” Selim rolled his eyes and Mathilde stopped listening. She wanted them to eat, that was all she wanted.

  “Why didn’t you let Sabah live here instead of sending her to that horrible boarding school?” Selim demanded.

  “Your mother and I raised our children. We worked for years so you would never lack anything. We deserve some peace. Selma just needs to look after her daughter instead of strutting around Rabat. All she’s ever brought to this family is shame and disappointment.”

  Selim threw his napkin onto the table. “I’ve lost my appetite. I’m going out.”

  * * *

  • • •

  That day, leaning over a saucepan, Mathilde wondered: How many times have I watched water boil? How much time have I spent shopping for this family? She looked up at the fridge as if it were her worst enemy. She swore that cold, white beast swallowed up the food she put in it. Like those pierced barrels in Greek mythology that Danaus’s daughters were doomed to constantly refill. Mathilde was the same: always having to start again and again. Always repeating the same actions, with nothing to show for it. She felt so ashamed. She thought about all the years that had passed, about her life with her family and the tons of food they had guzzled. She imagined a room filled from floor to ceiling with pieces of meat, loaves of bread, boiled vegetables. She felt sickened, by them and by herself. And to think she had believed all those idiotic tales about the girl in rags who becomes a princess. Poor Cinderella, who had spent her youth cleaning up after her sisters, who had not been allowed an education, and who, having married her prince, must have brooded over her shattered dreams for the rest of her miserable life.

  Mathilde could look at a man now and instantly know how many women he depended upon in his life. One for placing a bowl of steaming food in front of him, another to make his bed, to clean the mirror he used every morning to check his hair. Behind every ironed shirt, every polished shoe, behind every fat belly hanging over a tightened belt, she saw the hands of women. Hands plunged in icy water, rubbing soap against sauce-stained sleeves. Hands covered with little burn marks or wounds that never healed. She could spot a man with no women in his life too. They were the easiest of all to recognize. She sought them out, desired them. Single men, forever betrayed by a frayed collar, scuffed shoes, a missing button.

  Mathilde had just turned forty-three. She felt old, useless. Like damaged goods. She felt certain that the best years of her life were already over and that nothing remained to her now but the long wait for death, demanding from her even more patience and self-sacrifice than she had shown up until now. Single men did not look at her and the idea of love had become humiliating. Love? Who could love her now? Who could desire this body, grown fat from years of stuffing herself? Amine criticized her for not doing anything, for spending money on junk and wasting her time having tea with stupid women. He imagined her gulping down cakes, taking long naps, reading books about people who had never existed and events that had never happened. In the evenings he often found her sitting at the kitchen table, one hand resting on the plastic tablecloth, staring into space. Dinner was ready, the house was clean. She had put away the invoices and account books. In the clinic, the trash was full of Betadine-soaked compresses, bandages stained with dried blood.

  While her daughter was at college, while Selma was living her life in Rabat, she was here, in this kitchen, breathing in the smell of the damp tablecloth. What can anyone learn in a kitchen? Century after century, women have worked in kitchens to cure the sick and raise children, to console the sad and to spread happiness. They have made decoctions to soothe the agonies of old people approaching death and to solve the problems of young pregnant women. They have warmed up oil to be rubbed into the belly of a child with colic and, with nothing but flour, water, and a bit of fat, have kept whole families alive and kicking. And all of that was nothing? Hadn’t women learned anything?

  In such moments, she wanted to explain it all to Amine. Tell him that it might look like she was resting, but that he was mistaken. He thinks she does all of this out of love and she wants to yell at him: “What you call love is actually work!” Were women really so filled with affection and kindness that they could spend an entire lifetime—yes, an entire lifetime—taking care of others? When Mathilde thought about this, it made her almost enraged. There was something wrong here, a trap into which she had fallen but whose name she could not remember. She didn’t talk about this to her friends at the Rotary Club with whom she had tea. No, she smiled, she licked the cream from her lips with the tip of her tongue, she put a hand to her belly to check whether she had put on weight. She ate like someone punishing herself.

  * * *

  • • •

  Sometimes, in the house, she no longer felt at home. And in those moments she never imagined another house that would feel more attuned to her, less hostile. She understood that every house was a trap that would close around her. Chaos was not a sad or even frightening idea; it was the only thing Mathilde wished for, the only thing that might give her back some semblance of exaltation.

  Selim got on his moped and rode into town. He hung around the empty, baking streets of Meknes. It was the end of July, the shops on the avenue had closed for the summer and his friends had all left for the seaside. As he came out of a garage in the medina, Selim heard a woman yelling in a language that sounded like German. She was arguing with a group of boys who had surrounded her and were shouting insults at her. Selim walked toward them. The young woman was wearing a pair of skintight pants, low-waisted and held up by a drawstring. Her white, muscular stomach was exposed to the eyes of the world and her cotton tunic covered only her shoulders and her breasts. She was tall, as tall and blond as Mathilde, but so thin that Selim could see her ribs. He heard one of the boys calling her a whore and without thinking he grabbed the boy by his hair. “What did you say? You should be ashamed of yourself!” The kid fought back, kicking Selim, and his friends joined in. They encircled Selim and swore at him, eyes bulging, all of them in a fury. They beat their chests and one of them spat on the ground and swore that this would not end here.

  Selim went up to the oldest and calmest of the boys and asked him who this woman was. “She walks around like that in the medina, looking for hash. What does she expect, the stupid hippie? You can’t do that here.” Selim explained that she was just a foreigner, a girl on her own, probably lost, with no understanding of the country’s morals. The boys stared at him incredulously, apparently shocked that this huge, blond boy could speak Arabic so fluently. Selim seemed to know their codes, their insults; twice he mentioned God, and eventually the swarm of boys dispersed. One of them shouted “Go home!” in English and spat on the ground. Throughout this conversation the young woman had not moved. She did not appear frightened and she had even smiled when Selim lifted the boy up by his hair. She thanked him in French, her accent obviously Germanic. She asked him if he was from here and said she had never imagined Moroccans could look like he did. He told her his mother was from Alsace but that he had grown up here, on a farm.

  He felt bad just abandoning her there, in her ludicrous, dangerous garb, but he wasn’t in the mood for a long conversation and he sensed something clingy about this girl. A propensity to impose herself on people, to insinuate herself into others’ lives. She followed him as he walked away and told him she was from Denmark and her name was Nilsa. One month ago, some friends from college had written to her: they were staying in Tangier, and they invited her to join them. So she had packed her suitcase and left Europe for the Third World. She stopped for a moment and leaned over a stall selling dried roses and black soap. She asked the price and the vendor put a few pieces of rhassoul clay in her hand.

  “So,” asked Selim, “have you found them?”

  “No, when I got to Tangier they’d already left. I took the bus here, with the chickens and peasants, you know? Tomorrow I leave again and I go south. You know the south?”

  No, Selim did not know the south. And he did not think it was possible for such a young, pretty woman to travel through a foreign country by bus. He wondered if Nilsa was mad or if he was the one who had no understanding of life, of all the possibilities open to a human being. Nilsa took hold of his arm and moved her lips very close to his ear. “Could you find me some hashish?” He asked her where she was staying and she gave him the name of a seedy hotel in the medina where, Selim imagined, she had been sleeping in a filthy, cockroach-infested bed. “I’ll see what I can do. I’ll drop by your hotel tomorrow, okay?”

  He accompanied her to the central market, where she was planning to find something to eat. She seemed to think everything here was wonderful. She kept repeating: “It’s so different from Denmark. Back there, everything is gray. Here, wherever you go, there are so many colors.” Selim had never thought about this before, about the grayness of the other world and the colors of this one. While Nilsa bought some olives and some candied carrots, he looked at the people around them. The pink djellaba worn by a woman with a child in her arms. The saffron-colored slippers worn by an old man sitting in the entrance to the patisserie, where pyramids of pistachio-green cakes were on display. Nilsa talked a lot and she couldn’t stop touching Selim: squeezing his arm, hugging him whenever she saw something surprising. She shouted: “Fantastic!,” her arms thrown wide open, and passersby stared in horror at her naked belly.

  Selim left her there. Night was falling and as he rode the moped back to the farm he felt slightly guilty. What would become of her in that dark, hostile medina, in that hotel where someone might try to rape her or beat her? He thought about this all night, seeking reassurance in the idea that she was crazy and not even a very nice person, and besides he wasn’t responsible for her or her senseless urge to discover Africa.

  The next day, after his chemistry class, he approached a group of boys he very rarely spoke to, because he felt certain they would be able to provide him with what he needed. Selim saw one of them, a skinny kid called Roger with an acne-scarred face, walking through the school courtyard, so he drew him aside. He was momentarily at a loss for words. How to phrase his request? He was afraid that Roger would make fun of him or sell him some adulterated crap for twice the normal amount. “Do you know where I could get hold of some hashish?”

  Roger frowned at him. “You smoke hash?”

  “It’s not for me, it’s for a friend.”

  “Piss off. I don’t know you and I don’t want any trouble.”

  Selim decided not to go to any more classes that day, and when the bell rang he took advantage of the general chaos to slip out through the back door of the school. Without even thinking about it, without having made a decision, he headed toward Nilsa’s hotel. Outside the front door sat a small dog with gray fur so tangled that it looked painful. There was no lobby or reception desk inside the hotel, but there was a man sitting in a chair at the far end of a dark room, and Selim asked him if the Danish girl was still there. The man leaped to his feet and began shouting. There was no Danish girl here and he wasn’t the type of man to let women stay in his hotel; these accusations were baseless and he would make this blond bastard regret ever saying such a thing to him. Selim apologized and left. He had no idea what was going on. Had he misunderstood what Nilsa had told him the night before about where she was staying? Had she set off earlier than expected with her friends, headed for adventure in the south? Selim was alone in the street now, the gray dog following at his heels. An immense sadness weighed down on him. A sadness he could not explain but which made it hard to breathe. He started crying and his tears burned the freckles that covered his cheeks. He didn’t want to go back to school or the farm, and he abandoned himself completely to his sorrow. He thought about Selma, who had lit some fire inside him, a desire to live and to love, only to leave him with no outlet for that desire. He felt even more regretful that he had not managed to find the drugs for Nilsa, because at that moment it was the only thing he felt like doing. Drinking, smoking, drifting aimlessly through a fog of forgetfulness . . .