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

sour aftertaste when it was re-heated, it was eaten with the pleasure of knowing it
had not been wasted.
She had even seen photographs of him dressed in European clothes, hardly
willing to recognize him in these barbarous garments. They made him look like
the Englishmen she saw passing by in the new city with stinking, smoking sticks
in their mouths, or like some famous Egyptian actor who proudly imitated these
heretics and even drank alcohol.
She had learned about the birth of his children as they were born, and each
time it had been like so many whiplashes to her heart. As for his wife, she was
unworthy of the least interest. Kenza's neurotic mind had never condescended to
focus on this ugly growth. She saw her as a somewhat bothersome but benign
tumor, as a factor that was irrelevant in their irreversible attachment.
Her cousin confirmed her presumptuous judgment. "You have been my
only joy, my first and last dream. You and I, we symbolize humanity going
toward a point of light which gets further and further away, in spite of our
determined march, a point where mirages dance. We have both experienced the
same delirium.
"You might have thought to return, whatever the sacrifice! How often I
repeated this obsessive thought! It possessed my consciousness."
"At first I did not return because of your father, then because of what
people would say, and . . . because of hurt pride. Afterwards, the world reached
out its tentacles and imprisoned me in the monotony of daily routines!"
She understood and pardoned him.
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