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

people, so vulnerable and ancient, so close to death and yet so far from having
lived, they cried with dried up tears, returning to childhood in their senile love.
If death is the tribute of life, what can be said of them whose existence had
been nothing more than a series of small, daily deaths? They had loved each other
beyond marriage, time, distance and reason. They loved each other on the strength
of their memories, like soldiers in the heat of battle who think of childhood
drawings or fights with neighborhood children. And like these warriors, they
could not be sure of their future, except that they were both still alive, which was
reason enough to hope.
One would not have been able to survive without the other, even as the
earth could not outlive the sun. Can anyone imagine constant night, dawn without
a brightening sky, morning without curtains of light?
She had watched him grow from a literate man into a businessman. From a
distance she had followed his social success, his introduction to the outside world,
his trips, the contacts he established with Europe and the Middle East. He lived in
a modern house, she had been told–mail periodically passed between the two
zones–with European furnishings like those she saw in the offices of the French
doctors. He had a kitchen with a refrigerator and a gas stove. She was still cooked
on charcoal braziers.
Yet, she was content to store her leftovers under a wooden box to keep
away the roaches. And in the summer, lifting the lid of a pot, one would gag on
the acrid odor of food that had fermented during the night. To keep the dish from
going sour, they put it on a window sill in the cool evening air, and even if it left a
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