Translating Nouzha Fassi Fihri's La Baroudeuse: A Case Study in ...

metaphysics of this love. They wanted to find an explanation for their wasted
lives.
of God.
Still, these were useless investigations, trying to penetrate the secret ways
They stayed awake late into the night, sharing memories. He lay on his
side, leaning on his arm, lifting his face toward her. She sat straight, cross-legged,
hanging on his every word, the tassels on her headdress nodding with each phrase.
Together they went back through the years they had spent apart from one
another, practically their whole adulthood compressed into the single, painful
reality of their separation.
Each one laughed the laugh and shed the tears of the other. Each
applauded and disapproved of events that were twenty or thirty years old. Each
was caught up in the joy or smothered in the grief the beloved had lived decades
before.
They stiffened with the bite of jealousy when their respective conjugal
relations were mentioned, even though they knew how loveless these unions
were.
Never had a night been so long or so charged with emotions, enough to fill
a lifetime. Love, hate, pleasure, sensuality, anger, bitterness, feelings of success
and failure, of pride and humiliation, of vanity and humility, all were exorcised,
bared so that nothing of their forty years of parallel life should remain hidden.
They lived their agony together, an "after-life" confession, and they felt the life
that was left to them slowly dripping away in their heavy tears. Pitiful fragile old
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