M’Barka really knew how to wail and that was the right thing to do. That’s what saved her every time.

Hysteria is an illness I know quite well.

Sometimes our nearest neighbors intervened as well. They would knock on the door and ask whoever answered: “What’sgoing on with your mother? Is your father abusing her again?”

How could I respond to such hypocrisy? How could I defend my mother’s honor? What could I say to these peoplewho acted like our saviors and then, peddlers that they were,hastened to hawk the most ruinous gossip about our family?

No, my mother wasn’t being abused by my father. Their love life was like that, complex, violent, tortured. True love,the kind that lasts and survives for years, is always full ofpassion and craziness. Mohamed never beat M’Barka. Hejust pretended, he knew he couldn’t do it. He would raisehis first, but he never brought it down. My mother, ofcourse, exaggerated her screams to the utmost. A good comedienne, she knew everything about play-acting.

How could I get her out of there? How could I spring her from that prison and that paradise, yank her away from myfather’s furious jealousy, from that angel turned demon? Howcould I recover her safe and sound, and bring her back to ourroom, to us, to her place among us?

Without even thinking about it, we would all start banging on the door, crying, begging Mohamed to spare her this time,just this once. We pounded. We yelled too. And we alwaysended up breaking down the door, the door that had weakenedover time, that had lost its center. A door with no guts, anempty fra me. Then we’d find both of them, like two shamefulkids caught playing some off-limits game, my father in his longjohns, my mother almost naked beneath her transparent nightgown. Then Abdelkébir would save her. Mohamed would staysilent, letting his oldest son do what he had to do. Abdelkébirwould fold M’Barka in his arms as if to cover her and wouldbring her back to our room. We’d form a procession behindthem, and follow them into our room. A little while later, without a word, we would turn off the lights and pretend to sleep.

Silence again. A total silence, heavy, restless. Short lived.

In the dark, a few minutes after this temporary lull, the smoke from Mohamed’s cigarettes would cross his room, thepatio, and reach us conveying his confusion, his regrets andsometimes his sobs. Mohamed was finally talking to us! Wethought of him as being very sexual, he was, in fact, first andforemost, a romantic.

Mohamed wasn’t a bad father. He was a lover. And that justified everything in my eyes.

Back then, I was convinced that M’Barka was telling the truth. Saleh was just her cousin, no more than that. I couldn’timagine her cheating on my father with him.