The Salt Road (39 page)

‘What nonsense! What sort of man are you if you cannot even command your own daughter?’

‘It is not our way.’

‘You’re not living in a tent any more like an animal, and your daughter cannot just spread her legs for anyone she chooses. We have standards, and I’ll not have a bastard under this roof!’

Another man might have struck her, but Ousman was a Tuareg, bred to respect women no matter how annoying they might be. Instead, he turned and stalked off into the gathering night and did not return while any of the inhabitants were awake. Mariata found him the next morning when she rose early to have some time to herself before the inevitable chores started, rolled in a blanket in the salon. At first she thought there was a stranger in the house, a wandering man who had come in off the streets, for she had never seen her father without his veil before. And he had a beard! Such a thing was rare amongst their people. But when he opened his eyes she knew him.

She folded her arms, uncomfortable. ‘So, has she told you?’

Ousman uncoiled himself from the floor, retrieved his tagelmust and wound it slowly and neatly until he was decently covered once more. Only then, it seemed, did he feel able to address the subject. ‘Felicitations, Daughter.’ He inclined his head.

‘You do not seem overly happy about it.’

‘I am neither happy nor unhappy. But I worry for you.’

‘As well you might, since your new wife is intent on finding someone to destroy my baby!’

Ousman looked pained. ‘It would be better if you were to take a husband, Mariata. A man from the region, to take care of you and the child, when it comes.’

Mariata recoiled. ‘Never! How can you even think of it?’

‘Aicha will not let you live under this roof with an illegitimate baby.’

‘It is not illegitimate!’

‘Even so: there is no husband here to claim the baby as his own. No husband to protect you. And this house is not mine to rule over. I am in business with Aicha’s father, and I have my sons to think about as well as you. The best thing you can do for yourself would be to take a husband, to protect you in the eyes of this society.’

‘I don’t care what these people think of me – I despise the lot of them! Do you really think I would take as a husband one of these bare-faced men, who have no respect, no heritage and no code of
asshak
?’

‘Hush. These folk may have different ways to our own now, it’s true, but once, a long time ago, we were the same people. Our own founder came from this very region in the time of the Romans: your own ancestor, Tin Hinan. Your bloodline began here, in the soil of this place.’

Mariata stared at him in disbelief. ‘From here? No wonder she left: I would walk a thousand miles out into the desert to escape Imteghren!’

Her father sighed. ‘Mariata, there is no dishonour in marrying a man from Imteghren.’

‘I would not pass this child off as some other man’s. I had rather live on the streets.’

Ousman made the sign against the evil eye. ‘Be careful what you wish for, Daughter.’

Ousman and his new wife were reconciled: once more the quiet night air of the house was disturbed by their cries. And somehow a compromise was reached. Aicha would make it known that her stepdaughter was to be offered on the marriage market; but in the proper Tuareg tradition Mariata would be allowed to have the final say in choosing her husband from the young men put forward.

‘There is no time to waste,’ she told Hafida grimly. ‘If she’s already starting to show, how will a man accept the baby as his own if it comes too soon?’

‘Best not to choose a man who can count,’ was Hafida’s only advice.

For some reason there were far more unwed men than women in Imteghren. No one knew why exactly there should be such a shortage of girls of marriageable age, but that was how it was. In addition, the word appeared to have gone around the town that although something of a firebrand Mariata was a beauty; and men were intrigued by the possibility of taking a fiery young Tuareg girl to wife. They had heard that nomad girls were wild in more ways than one, not as shy and buttoned-up as the local girls, and Mariata’s reputation (no doubt earned by her scenes in the hammam) bore this out, and so they begged their mothers and aunts to pay their suit. Rather to her horror, Mariata found herself in some demand. Rigged out in one of Aicha’s second-best robes in pastel colours that flattered her skin colour, and a headscarf that hid her tribal braids, she gazed at her reflection in the big mirror in Hafida’s room. With kohl painted around her eyes and the creamy rouge that Hafida had rubbed into her pale cheeks, she thought she looked like one of the ugly plastic dolls she had seen in the souq: make-believe mannequins like fake miniature human beings. Her spirit rebelled at such treatment but she quelled it. ‘It is not you they are seeing,’ she told herself fiercely, ‘but only a mask.’

Besides, she would soon see off any suitors and their crow-like mothers. Of that she had no doubt. And the longer she played along with Aicha’s ridiculous scheme, the longer her baby would be safe.

Her brothers found the whole idea of their sister being paraded for sale offensive and demeaning, and for a short time Mariata’s hopes were raised that Azaz and Baye might talk their father round; but they were soon to find that Aicha had a greater hold over Ousman than his own kin.

It was not long before the mothers and aunts and cousins of certain young men of the town came calling. They would spend an hour or so sitting in the salon with Aicha and her grandmother, sipping mint tea and extolling the virtues of their sons and nephews – so handsome, so hard-working, the eldest of ten, or eight, or seven; such a good man, so pious and good with children, and with his hands, and able to pay three thousand dirham and some goats for the right bride. And then Mariata, in her alien disguise, would be trotted out and made to sit hemmed in by her hated new family, nodding and smiling and inwardly seething as the women asked Aicha about her skills. Could Mariata make good bread? And keep a clean house? Did she rise before cockcrow: was she a hard worker? Could she make goat’s cheese and card wool? Did she embroider and sew clothes? Could she make a proper couscous and did she know the secret of
harissa
paste? Could she recite the Qur’an and observe Ramadan and the prayer times like a proper Muslim? And, with lowered voices as if she had no ears or wasn’t even there, was she a clean girl, and possessed of an unbroken hymen? To all these questions, Aicha looked them in the eye and answered yes, and yes, and yes, while Mariata flushed to the roots of her hair and dreamt of flinging off her borrowed robes and setting about the lot of them with a large stick, whooping Tuareg war-cries all the while. But for her child’s sake she endured the shame and the fury: now let the young men come.

A few days later, the first suitor – Hassan Boufouss – turned up in his best white going-to-mosque robe and skullcap, accompanied by his two grandmothers, father and three sisters. In the guest salon Hassan’s large lugubrious eyes roamed in panic over the smooth-plastered walls, the shelf of plates and ornaments, the coloured rug and fretted windows, and returned constantly to the open door as if he might at any moment bolt out of it.

Aicha ushered Mariata in ahead of her. The Tuareg girl’s headwrap was askew and her cheeks were flushed, as if there had been a tussle preceding this entrance. She cast a contemptuous gaze over the gathered crowd and turned to Aicha. ‘Who are all these people?’ She folded her arms. ‘I’m not going to do this with all of them staring at me.’

The old women exchanged glances.

‘Forgive the girl: she’s shy and not used to our ways,’ explained Aicha, pushing Mariata in the back.

‘I am certainly not shy!’ Mariata tore off the offending scarf, uncovering her tribal braids.

The throng gazed on, frozen by shock. Then one of the grandmothers grabbed Hassan by the arm. ‘She has no modesty, this one,’ she declared, and dragged him to his feet.

Mariata smiled and stood aside to let them pass. Led by his grandmother, Hassan went like a docile calf, though his gaze flickered wonderingly over the Tuareg girl as he left, as if she represented to him a glimpse of a forbidden world; a world from which he would ever be excluded.

The next day, undeterred by the whispers that at once circulated throughout the town following Mariata’s untoward conduct, Bachir Ben Hamdu and his parents arrived. Bachir was a very different proposition to his cousin, Hassan. Mariata was shocked by the immodesty of his clothing. Not only did he bare his face in the way of all the men here, but the garment on his lower half would normally be worn only as underclothing amongst her people, clinging as it did in a shamelessly revealing manner to every part of him. She stared at him, stone-faced, keeping her eyes fixed carefully on a point between his chin and his waist as he stood under the gaze of the portrait of King Hassan II, making his greetings. He told her his name and that he was delighted to make her acquaintance and hoped soon to know her better. He did not wink or in any other way accompany this last remark with a salacious gesture, but she felt his palm, hot and sweaty, as he touched her hand, and went rigid with disgust.

Aicha was delighted. ‘That went very well,’ she declared after he had gone. ‘I think he will offer for you.’

‘Offer? For me? What, am I a camel to be bought and sold?’

Aicha laughed mirthlessly. ‘Sadly, nothing so useful.’

One day a man knocked at the door. No one was in but Mariata and Mama Erquia, who was asleep. Mariata peered through the window grille beside the door. Outside stood a thickset man wearing a frayed brown robe, a bloodstained apron and a knitted hat pulled down low over his ears. His sleeves were too short, stopping three or four inches above the wrist to reveal large, hairy forearms; his hands looked filthy.

Not liking the look of him, Mariata called through the grille, ‘Who are you and what do you want?’

‘My name is Mbarek Aït Ali,’ the man replied gruffly, ‘and I have some business with the lady of the house.’

‘Aicha Saari is not here at present, but she’ll be back later,’ Mariata told him sharply, hoping he would go away. There was a musty scent to him, deep and animal, that was wafting through the window. She wrinkled her nose.

‘I’ll wait for her.’

‘You can do what you like,’ Mariata said curtly.

The man cocked his head. ‘To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?’ His accent was rough: the polite phrasing sounded sarcastic.

Mariata drew herself up. ‘I am Mariata ult Yemma of the Kel Taitok.’

The man took a step closer and applied an eye to the grille. Affronted, Mariata took a step back. ‘I see they do not lie,’ he said after a moment, and went away, laughing to himself.

When Aicha returned, Mariata said, ‘There was a man here looking for you. He said his name was Mbarek Aït Ali.’

Aicha looked surprised. ‘But he knew I would not be at home: I passed his shop on the edge of the souq an hour ago and he asked how Mama Erquia was.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Did you let him in?’

‘He smelt disgusting,’ Mariata said, ‘and he was wearing a bloodied apron; of course I didn’t let him in.’

A little while later there came another knock at the door and Aicha bustled off to answer it. Curious, Mariata slipped into the side room to see who it might be. It was a man with a deep voice that she thought she recognized. The usual greetings were exchanged and then Aicha said, ‘Mariata told me you had called by.’

‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘I came to make you a proposition.’ He sounded very pleased with himself.

‘A proposition?’

‘An important proposition.’

‘Are you sure it is not my husband you want to see?’

‘I believe these matters are usually brokered by the women of the house. Unfortunately, I have no female intermediaries I can ask to act for me since Mother died.’

‘Well,’ said Aicha, sounding perplexed, ‘I suppose you had better come in, then.’ But, after a look at his grubby shoes and frayed robe, she ushered him into the utility room rather than the guest salon, Mariata following at a safe distance.

Mbarek cast a sardonic glance around the shabby room. ‘Is this where you conduct all your marriage discussions, Mistress Saari?’ he asked, amused.

‘Marriage?’ Aicha sounded surprised. ‘I thought you’d come to sell me meat.’

At her listening post, Mariata gasped. A butcher? A butcher had the gall to come and offer for a princess descended from Tin Hinan? She remembered the bull-necked man in the bloody apron and laughed aloud.

The sound alerted Aicha. ‘One moment,’ she told the butcher. ‘Go through to the salon and I’ll bring us some tea.’

In the kitchen Aicha caught Mariata trying to escape into the courtyard. ‘Come with me,’ she said sternly. ‘And be civil.’

‘You expect me to be civil to a man like that? A common butcher, with animal blood on his hands and slaves’ blood in his veins?’ Outrage drew out of her generations of Tuareg snobbery.

‘Beggars can’t be choosers!’ Aicha snapped. ‘Now, go and fetch a headscarf to hide those wretched rat-tails!’‘

I realize it is not the done thing for a man to come into a house of women or to press his own suit,’ the butcher said, draining his glass of mint tea in a single mighty slurp, ‘but I have no female relatives I can call on to carry out such sensitive business. You must excuse my plain appearance and my plain words. I like to run all my own affairs, and in the same straightforward way.’ He placed the tea glass back on the tray and leant forward, hands clasped.

Mariata could not help but notice the caked black blood beneath his fingernails. At least, she thought contemptuously, seeing the balled-up cloth between his dusty naked feet – which looked huge and monstrous and yellow-taloned against the delicate colours of the best rug – he had taken off his bloodstained apron before coming in.

‘So, in the spirit of honourable business, I have come to make you a good offer for the girl.’ He nodded towards Mariata, but kept his eyes on Aicha. ‘She’s a nomad, I know, but I won’t hold that against her. I’m sure I can soon civilize her, eh?’ He spread his hands apologetically. ‘Not that you haven’t already done a fine job of that, I’m sure.’