“How sad!” I said to Ben Aouda, one of the Bach-Agha’s three grown-up sons. “I thought she was your mother.”
“My mother and my brothers’ mother has been dead a long time,” he replied. “That one”—and I distinguished a shade of contempt in his voice—“only gave my father daughters—feeble creatures who died young.”
If an Arab woman wishes to retain any power she may ever have had over her husband, she must first be a mother, and, secondly, the mother of male children, strong and lusty. There are, of course, exceptions; I knew of one at Laghouat later. The two longed for a family. They made pilgrimages to all sorts of outlandish places. In accordance with Arab superstitions, the husband tore the still-throbbing heart out of countless jackals’ palpitating bodies and devoured it warm, while his wife wore all sorts of horrible fetishes round her neck and drank the blood of hyenas. It was all of no avail, but despite the advice and worrying of his family he refused to divorce her or to take another wife, as the law allowed him. But he was a very rare exception to the general rule.
Besides the Bach-Agha’s, I used to visit at the rival house, where lived descendants of other rulers of Laghouat. Here I was often amused by the harmless little intrigues I came across. The master of the house possessed three very pretty and very young wives, ruled and guarded by his mother—one of the jolliest, gayest old ladies I have ever met. She was always draped in a spotless fine woollen melhafa, bordered with green.
It was extraordinary, seeing the secluded life they led, how familiar these young wives were with Laghouat society.
Peeping through their closely-latticed window, looking on to the road, they would say: “Ah! there goes Lieutenant This, or Captain That,” and then they would tell me stories concerning these officers that I had no idea of, and enjoy my surprise.
“We may be shut up, but we know everything that goes on and have plenty of fun,” they would say. One day when I arrived, however, I found their harmony disturbed. Zohra, an Algiers Moor, kept apart, silent and sullen, darting looks of hatred at Aicha, who was happily nursing her lately-born son.
Hennia, the youngest, following my gaze, whispered: “She is mad with jealousy because Aicha has a son, and our lord is pleased with Aicha and angry with Zohra, who has been four years married and has given him no offspring.”
“And you?” I inquired.
She shrugged her slender shoulders. “It is only six months since he brought me to his house, and the last wife is never the least until many moons have waned.”