Mother Country by Jacinda Townsend

Author:Jacinda Townsend [Townsend, Jacinda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

XV. Essaouira

Souria wants the cold to solidify her into an immovable statue, but she wants Yu to stay warm, for the rest of her life warm, and she’s bundled her daughter through two Moroccan winters. Nasr has given her fabric remnants to wrap the child’s ears against the wind that blows around this knot on the side of Africa. It’s wind like no other on the planet: from November to February, it blows the sand on the beach straight up into their faces as they walk, trying in vain to see the cold ocean. Even in summer, the door to their flat knocks all day against its own frame. Still, Souria loves this town for being the ocean’s echo to the desert; the wind kills all other sound. The boundless sea, stretching out as far as she can see, and the eternal roar of the waves. At night, she can see the moon out her window, ringed with a corona of ice that obscures the stars on either side. She sleeps under a warm quilt with bleached sheets, and has never known a bed so free of struggle.

They are conquerors, she and Yu. She makes sometimes seventy-five dirham a day, and they have a place of their own, inside a modern building with concrete walls and a sturdy roof, out of reach of pimps or johns or the vicious storms that roll up past the continental shelf. In late summer, when she has extra money, she takes three dirham and buys Yu a giant punch balloon from the Senegalese who sells them on the beach. She sits in the sand while Yu plays, watching the throngs of tourists. The Casablancais and the Saouiris, she can pick out—they’re dressed in light jackets and sweatshirts, for coastal weather. The Frenchwomen lie topless on the beach, their breasts so age-ravaged as to be perfectly inoffensive. They’re trying to have a vacation, but they’ll go back to Paris with chest colds. This isn’t a beach like a beach on the television.

Older boys swim in the harbor that fills on the days the tide keeps itself at sea, and other children, smaller ones, stand on the passenger bridge, leaning over the white railing that keeps them from falling in. They marvel at the spotted brown fish with their winglike fins, flying underwater like long, spotted birds. During the Festival Gnaoua, the little town fills, and is so happy, so filled with possibilities, that Souria almost feels that she, too, might one day live for nothing save smiling and fun. If she could find a righteous man of the Prophet (peace be upon him). A husband, with his own proper flat. If she could last long enough in this country, she could be a grandmother of many happy children.

When the town empties, Souria loses this faith. She begins again to believe that save for having to carry this small girl all the way, she might walk down the beach in the direction the Frenchman said would lead her back to Mauritania.

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