She had to get some sleep. Tomorrow she would look like shit; she would have dark rings under her eyes in the wedding photographs. But all the world’s mothers have insomnia the night before their daughter’s wedding. There was no way around this. Oh well, she would just have to ask her hairdresser to tie her hair in a high bun, a chignon so extravagant that nobody would notice her drawn features, her pallid complexion. The anxiety had been gnawing at her for days. What if the guests were bored? What if the musical group from Casablanca she had hired did not turn up? What if the heat was so bad that it spoiled the mayonnaise she was planning to serve with the fish? What on earth had she been thinking, choosing all that fish and oysters and seafood for the banquet? There would never be enough ice and all the guests would end up getting sick. Years from now people would still be talking about that wedding at the Belhajes’ where the guests had eaten rotten prawns and vomited in the bushes. And now, the night before the wedding, with all these fears tormenting her, Amine decided he wanted to make love! “Oh Mathilde, I couldn’t live without you!” What was going on? What could possibly have driven him to speak her name? And to say it like that, in that languorous voice? Was he expecting her to say something in reply? She repeated the phrase inside her head. She wanted to laugh. Amine was covered in sweat. Drops of the stuff were running down his neck and his forehead. The window was open but there was not even the hint of a breeze to cool them down. She was going to suffocate in this heat, her body crushed beneath her husband’s. He frowned, his jaw tensed, he stared at the ceiling. He was about to groan. At last he came and Mathilde felt suddenly relieved, almost giddy. There, she had done her duty. The task was behind her and she felt pleased that she had managed to get through it without showing the reluctance she had felt. Tomorrow he would be in a wonderful mood. Nice and relaxed.

  Mathilde woke at dawn, her legs hot and swollen. She got up without making any noise. Not daring to open a drawer, she put on a beige slip that she found lying across a chair. She had to get outside and breathe, to wash the night off her skin, to rid herself of this smell of sweat. She walked barefoot through the house and out to the garden. The clouds, pink in the first light, glided above Zerhoun, which looked in outline like a woman lying on the ground, her breasts pointing up at the sky. Mathilde loved the smell of morning, the smell of wet earth, of geraniums and oleanders. She walked down the steps into the swimming pool, feeling the cold water like a blessing. Her body was reborn, filled with vigor again after the night’s heat had left it tumid and lethargic. She lay face down, legs straight, arms outstretched. Her blond hair spread across the surface like seaweed in a Japanese pond. Even as a child she had loved holding her breath in the freezing Rhine, and when Selim had joined the sailing club she had taught him breath-holding exercises to improve his lung capacity. The first time, Selim had been so impressed by his mother that he’d applauded. He didn’t have a stopwatch, but he could have sworn that she had stayed underwater for, what, a minute, maybe more, without coming up for air. Since he had gone away, since her son had disappeared, Mathilde had pushed herself to new limits. The most important thing was not to move. To be perfectly still, not even to think, to free yourself from anything that might weigh you down. To float like a water lily on the surface of this pool she had so desired. She surrendered to weightlessness. Eyes open, she observed her shadow at the bottom of the pool. She could keep going even longer. Jaw and fists clenched, she swore she would hold her breath as long as possible, beat her own record. Then she felt something grab hold of her foot. Frightened, she thought of the rats and grass snakes she had often seen swimming on the water’s surface, and imagined it was some foul creature touching her ankle. She lifted her head and found herself staring into her daughter’s face. Aïcha was in her wedding dress, waist-deep in the water.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Mathilde yelled. “Look at your dress!”

  “What am I doing? I saw you lying there completely still in the water. I thought you were dead!”

  “Get out of the pool! Out, right now! You’ll ruin your dress.”

  Mathilde helped her daughter out of the swimming pool and the two of them sat together in the grass.

  “Who goes swimming in their slip at this time of day? Are you completely crazy or what?”

  “Me? What about you? Why are you wearing your wedding dress?”

  “I wanted to try it on. I was looking for you so you could help me button it up.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. I do it because it relaxes me. I’m teaching myself to hold my breath.”

  “Does Papa know you do that?”

  “Why? Are you going to tell on me?”

  The two women looked at each other and simultaneously burst out laughing. Mathilde laughed loudly, her mouth wide open, and she wrung out the hem of her slip. Aïcha, in her soaked dress, was shaken by silent spasms. She laughed at the hilarity of the situation, and even then the two of them were probably thinking delightedly of what a funny story they would have to tell the others. But they also laughed to chase away evil spirits, to drown their own fears in forgetting. What kind of omen did such an event signify? They sensed that there was, in this false death, a warning, a threat, whose exact nature they were unable to decipher.

  “At least you didn’t get your hair wet,” Mathilde said. She led her daughter into the house. The wedding dress slopped across the tiled floor, leaving a damp streak behind. They locked themselves in the bathroom and Mathilde undressed her daughter. Aïcha crossed her thin arms over her breasts and sat naked on the edge of the bathtub. While Mathilde rinsed the dress in fresh water—“We can’t have people saying that the bride smelled of chlorine!”—she remembered the day she had found Aïcha, still a little girl at the time, wrapped in a white sheet that she had folded over her head in lieu of a veil. Her daughter had been pacing around her bedroom, taking care not to trip over her train. Mathilde had laughed, then leaned down and asked: “Are you pretending to be a bride?”

  “No,” Aïcha had answered. “I’m practicing for my communion.”

  Mathilde had lost her temper and ordered the little girl to get dressed again. “You’d better forget that idea,” she’d said, “because it’s not going to happen.” If Amine had found out, he would have been furious. He had let his daughter go to the convent school and he had grudgingly accepted the crucifix she had hung on the wall of her room. But a communion? That would have killed him.

  Never before had Amine earned as much money as he did that year. In Spain frost had destroyed the harvests, and the Belhaj domain had been buried under an avalanche of orders. Amine set aside that money for his daughter. He wanted everyone to know that she had succeeded: Aïcha was a doctor and she was marrying a man with a great future. Mathilde spent months writing down ideas for menus and decorations in little graph-paper notebooks. She followed Amine everywhere he went, asking him for his opinion. To everything he replied: “Tell me how much it costs and I’ll pay it.” Mathilde lost all sense of proportion. She cut photographs of society weddings out of magazines, and in the boutiques she visited she would show the saleswomen those images and say: “That’s what I want.” She bought ivory velvet ribbons by the yard and tied bows in the palm trees. From the branches of the other trees she hung strings of lights and Chinese lanterns. At a caterer’s in Casablanca she ordered crockery and silver cutlery, which she had delivered by van the day before the wedding. She sent a vellum invitation to everyone in town, featuring a watercolor painting by a local artist of the cypresses on the Belhaj estate.

  On the advice of a saleswoman who told her that it would “bring out her eyes,” Mathilde bought a green silk dress for the ceremony. She tore out pages from magazines lauding the unparalleled effectiveness of the latest crash diets. She refused to look like a whale in her outrageously expensive dress. She refused to have people making fun of her behind her back. “What on earth has she been eating to put on so much weight?” In the weeks preceding the wedding she ate nothing but tomatoes and pineapples. Her stomach burned and she had constant diarrhea, which left her pale and exhausted. She started doing gymnastics, and the farmworkers became used to seeing her run through the fields, making peculiar movements with her arms.

  * * *

  Now, at last, the big day was here. Mathilde oversaw the arrangement of the tables in the garden. She explained to the two boys who would be working behind the bar how they should behave, and insisted that they should never let a glass remain empty. “Never!” In the kitchen Tamo was sulking. Strangers had taken over her territory and she was reduced to chopping garlic and parsley. She had to obey the orders of a fat woman from Casablanca with skin as black as the charcoal they used for grilling meat. All the same, she did her best to work hard. The party was for Aïcha, after all, and unlike these strangers Tamo had known the bride all her life. She had seen Aïcha grow up, transforming from a little savage to a woman of the world. She still couldn’t get over the sight of that long, supple chestnut hair that hung down the middle of the bride’s back.

  At four o’clock in the afternoon the regiment of hairdressers and makeup artists arrived, armed with their vanity cases filled with bottles of varnish, hairpins, and hot rollers. Aïcha and Monette stayed in the bedroom, where, from time to time, Mathilde would burst in and eye the employees with a steely glare. She was annoyed about all the money she had spent. Then the waiters put on their white jackets and tied the black bow ties around their necks. They were each given a silver platter shining like a mirror and they took up their positions in the garden. The musical group turned up late and Mathilde told Amine: “You should say something to them. If I do it they won’t take me seriously.” So Amine went to see them. He found himself face to face with four long-haired Moroccan boys who were busy unpacking their instruments. The name of the group was emblazoned on the skin of the bass drum: The Strangers. They were laughing among themselves, glancing wryly around at the flashy decorations in the garden.

  Two sweaty farmworkers guided guests to the parking lot and then toward the entrance. Mathilde had given them two of Amine’s old jackets, and the peasants, proud of their elegance, played their role with absolute seriousness. They ran along the dirt path waving their arms at the drivers, who went very slowly because they were afraid of damaging their cars’ bodywork. The farmworkers rushed over to open car doors for ladies who emerged holding up the hems of their dresses, perched on high heels which sank into the earth. The peasants had never seen such dresses before and they stared idiotically at the heavy jewelry hanging from the women’s ears. One of them said: “I bet they can hear the music all the way out in the douar.” The other one started laughing. He thought this music was a bit stupid.

  * * *

  • • •

  Mathilde and Amine stood at the entrance for two hours, smiling and concentrated. At that moment they were unaware that there were three or four future ministers among their guests. How could they have imagined that the group’s drummer would become a governor, or that the drunken boy hiding behind the big palm tree to smoke a joint would die a few months later in a secret torture center? They shook hands. They graciously accepted compliments about the decoration of the garden and thanked the guests for praying for their children’s future. Now and then they would turn and look at each other. Each knew what the other was thinking: about the pile of rocks that this farm had once been. About the dinners that Mathilde had made, almost out of thin air, when Aïcha was a child. About the patched clothes they had worn, the bills that used to give them nightmares, the howling of jackals on those pitch-black nights. It was with awe that they measured the scale of their achievements, and from the heights of their success, he in his tuxedo and she in her silk dress, their past humiliations and sorrows appeared to them more painful than ever. They looked at each other and neither of them could really believe it.

  But tonight they had to forget all of that. And when the photographer came to find them so he could take a family portrait, they held hands and walked toward the swimming pool. “Parents in the middle.” Flanking them stood Mehdi, in his white suit with bell-bottomed pants, and Aïcha in her long-sleeved dress. Selma had come from Rabat, and she placed her hand on her daughter’s shoulder. Sabah, for her part, had a fringe so long that it covered her eyes. Omar stood behind them, in his dark suit. They had all agreed on an official version of events to be given regarding Selim. He was in Paris, where he had a good job, but his employers had refused to let him take the time off. And when a guest remarked that it was “such a shame Selim couldn’t be with us,” every member of the Belhaj family would tilt their head to one side and give a sigh of vexation: “Ah, those French! Clearly they don’t have the same family values as we do.”

  Amine proved himself to be a wonderful host. He went from one group to another, glass in hand, and the waiters followed him around to make sure he always had something to drink. He invited his daughter to dance with him, and the guests formed a circle around them. The women smiled, their hands covering their mouths, and it was hard to tell if they were moved by a father’s tenderness toward his daughter or if they envied Aïcha for the hands that held her by the waist. Amine laughed and Aïcha stared at his white teeth, surprised to discover that her father was an excellent dancer. At eleven o’clock dinner was served and the guests gathered around the buffet. They elbowed one another, knocking a spoon to the ground, asking for a little more mayonnaise. Amine, who stood apart from the crowd, noticed a movement in the bushes. He walked over and spotted a group of peasants behind the trees. They were watching the party. Women and children sat beneath the big rubber tree, staring open-mouthed at the dancers, stunned by such beauty. There was a look of wonder on their faces, as if they were seeing the ocean for the first time or marveling at the workings of some sophisticated machine. Amine headed toward them. He recognized Achour from his limp and the dead right arm that had hung uselessly by his side ever since he’d had his stroke. In the darkness Amine could not distinguish his face, deformed by the paralysis, but he saw Rokia, his wife, and two of their sons leaning against a tree trunk. He couldn’t have said how many there were altogether. Ten, perhaps? All of them wore dark clothes and the branches of the rubber tree hid them from view. They were betrayed only by the sound of their shoes in the dry grass and the whisperings of the children who were excited by the music. All Amine would have had to do was wave his arm or whistle loudly and they would have scattered like wild cats, but he didn’t. He drew back. Although he couldn’t have explained why, he saw in the peasants’ discreet, respectful presence a vague menace that he was too fearful to confront. He went to find Mathilde. “There are people watching us.” She reassured him: “Don’t worry, it’s all in hand. We’re going to give them something—so they can enjoy the party too.”

  A dark and burning anguish took hold of Amine. He turned to the house. The silhouettes of his guests were reflected in the glass doors, giving the illusion of a vast, endless crowd. He looked at those people, listened to the music, the English words pronounced with a Moroccan accent, and he thought that something was not quite right. All these young people were speaking French, drinking whiskey with ice cubes, and swinging girls between their legs while they danced. Mathilde hadn’t wanted a traditional Moroccan group. “I hate that kind of music—it gives me a headache.” Amine was suffocating. He ran a finger around the inside of his collar and struggled to follow the conversations of his guests. Idle chatter irritated him. Smiling, he said: “Back in a minute,” before slipping away. He felt ridiculous, as if he had been forced to wear someone else’s clothes and shoes, and they were too small for him. A cloud passed overhead, veiling the silvery glitter of the stars. Beneath the trees the farmworkers were still sitting and watching. Mathilde had sent them plates of chicken and bottles of Coca-Cola. Amine wondered if they had ever tasted oysters or prawns. If they even knew what such creatures were. Was it possible they suspected that their severe and silent boss had himself been married in church to a woman dressed in white, that he had knelt before a priest? The photographs of that wedding were hidden in a box under Mathilde’s bed. And they must never get out. Amine had forbidden her to show them to anyone, never mind to frame one and put it on the pedestal table in the dining room. Even the children had never seen them.

  A waiter came over to fill his glass, but Amine brusquely refused. He had to keep a clear head. He had to protect his family. He did not take his eyes off the peasants sitting in the grass, eating chicken with their hands. The children bit into the wings and sucked their fingers. Amine imagined that something bad might happen to him. A misfortune. An attack. The farmworkers, maddened by this exhibition of wealth, would charge into the middle of the party. They would throw themselves at that extravagant buffet, smashing the bottles of alcohol and spitting at the bourgeois women who had so much time and money to waste. They would call them whores, kiss them on their mouths and necks. And it would excite them, the smell of perfume, the taste of imported lipstick. They would tear the white velvet bows off the palm trees and use the ribbons to lynch the guests. Their bodies would hang from the tree branches like marionettes, figures in tuxedos and embroidered kaftans. The peasants would stuff their pockets with necklaces and earrings, which they would sell in town on market day. They would roll around laughing on the sofas. Then the most violent among them, the heads of families, would round up the troops. They would send men to fetch weapons—pitchforks, rakes, spades, sticks—and soon the swimming pool would fill with blood. Even the waiters would have their throats slit.