During the war, while his regiment was advancing eastward, Amine had thought about his domain the way other men thought about wives or mothers left behind. He was afraid that he would die before he had time to honor the promise he’d made to fertilize that land. In the war’s long moments of boredom the men would play cards or read novels or look through stacks of letters covered in stains. As for Amine, he would open a book about botany or a specialist magazine on new irrigation methods. He’d read that Morocco was going to become like California, that American state filled with sunlight and orange trees, where the farmers were millionaires. He confidently told Mourad, his aide-de-camp, that the kingdom was about to go through a revolution, to escape these dark times when farmers feared razzias or preferred to raise sheep rather than plant wheat because sheep could run away if someone attacked them. Amine fully intended to turn his back on the old methods and make his farm a model of modernity. He’d recently been bowled over by the account of a certain H. Ménager, a former soldier who, after the end of the First World War, had planted eucalyptus trees in the barren plain of Gharb. This man had been inspired by the report of a mission to Australia, ordered by Lyautey in 1917, and he’d compared the qualities of the earth and the region’s rainfall totals to those of that faraway continent. Of course, he’d been mocked. This pioneer, who wanted to plant vast fields with ugly gray trees that gave no fruit, had been laughed at by Frenchmen and Moroccans alike. But H. Ménager managed to convince the Department of Rivers and Forests and soon everyone had to acknowledge that he was right: the eucalyptus trees put an end to the sandstorms; they allowed the purification of cesspools where parasites proliferated; and their deep roots could draw sustenance from the water table that would otherwise have been inaccessible to the simple peasants. Amine wanted to be part of that wave of pioneers for whom agriculture was a mystical quest, an adventure. He wanted to walk in the footsteps of those wise, patient men who had carried out experiments in hostile soils. All those farmers denounced as madmen had steadfastly planted orange trees from Marrakech to Casablanca, and they were going to turn this dry, sterile country into a land of plenty.
Amine returned to Morocco in 1945, aged twenty-eight, victorious and married to a foreign woman. He fought to regain possession of his domain, to train his laborers, to sow, harvest, to “see far and wide,” as Marshal Lyautey had once said. At the end of 1948, after months of negotiations, Amine got his land back. First he had to renovate the house: make new windows, create an ornamental garden, pave a courtyard behind the kitchen for washing and hanging laundry. The terrain to the north sloped downward and he had to build some pretty stone steps and an elegant French window that opened on to the dining room. From there they could admire the magnificent outline of the Zerhoun mountain and the vast wild expanses that had for centuries been trampled and grazed by passing animals.
During the farm’s first four years they would encounter every imaginable disappointment and life would begin to feel almost biblical. The colonist who’d rented the property during the war had lived on a small plot of cultivable land, but all the rest needed a huge amount of work. First they had the exhausting job of ridding the earth of dwarf palms. Unlike the colonists on the neighboring farms, Amine had no tractors, so his laborers had to spend months digging into the hard earth with pickaxes to dislodge those vicious, tenacious little trees. Next they spent weeks clearing away stones, before plowing the rockless soil. They planted lentils, peas, beans, and whole acres of barley and wheat. Then the farm was attacked by a plague of locusts. A rattling, reddish-brown cloud swooped down on their fields and devoured all their crops, all the fruit from their trees. It was like something from a nightmare. Amine grew angry at his laborers, who did nothing more to frighten away the parasites than hitting tin cans with sticks. “You ignorant fools! Is that all you can think to do?” he yelled at them, before teaching them to dig ditches and fill them with poisoned bran.
The following year there was a drought. The harvest was a time of mourning, because the ears of wheat were as empty as the peasants’ bellies would be for months to come. In the douars the workers prayed for rain—the same prayers that had been muttered for centuries without any evidence of their effectiveness. But they prayed anyway, in the hot October sun, and nobody cursed God’s deafness. Amine ordered a well dug: this necessitated a huge amount of work and swallowed up part of his inheritance. But the tunnels kept filling up with sand and the peasants couldn’t pump water for irrigation.
Mathilde was proud of him. And even though she raged at his absences and blamed him for leaving her alone in the house, at least she knew he was honest and hardworking. Sometimes she thought that all her husband lacked was luck and a certain instinct. Her father had been blessed with those gifts. Georges was less serious and determined than Amine. He drank until he forgot his name and all the basic rules of decency and decorum. He played cards until dawn and fell asleep in the arms of large-breasted women who smelled of butter. He fired his accountant on an impulse, forgot to hire another one, and let the letters pile up on his old wooden desk. He invited the bailiffs to have a drink with him and they ended up rubbing their bellies and singing old songs together. Georges had a remarkable sixth sense, an instinct that never failed him. That was just how it was; even he couldn’t explain it. He understood people and there was something in his character—a sort of tender, benevolent pity for mankind (himself included)—that always aroused the sympathy of strangers. Georges never negotiated out of greed but purely as a game, and if he ever conned anybody it wasn’t deliberate.
Despite the failures, despite the arguments and the poverty, Mathilde never thought that her husband was lazy or incompetent. Every day she saw Amine wake at dawn and leave the house with a look of determination, and every evening she saw him come home, his boots covered with earth. Amine walked miles and never got tired. The men of the douar admired his endurance, even if they were sometimes annoyed with their brother for his contempt toward the old ways of farming. They watched him crouch down, feeling the earth with his fingers, placing his hand on the bark of a tree as if he hoped that nature was going to reveal its secrets to him. He wanted it to happen quickly. He wanted to succeed.
Around this time, in the early fifties, the nationalist fever was on the rise and the colonists were widely hated. There were kidnappings, killings, farms set on fire. The colonists responded by forming white defense organizations and Amine knew that their neighbor, Roger Mariani, belonged to one of these groups. “Nature doesn’t care about politics,” Amine said one day, to explain the visit he was planning to make to his inflammatory neighbor. He wanted to find out the secret behind Mariani’s stunning prosperity, learn what types of tractors he used, what irrigation system he’d opted for. Amine also imagined that he might be able to sell cereals to Mariani for the colonist’s pig farm. The rest didn’t matter to him.
One afternoon Amine crossed the road that separated their two properties. He walked past large warehouses filled with modern tractors, past stables filled with fat, healthy pigs, past the wine cellar where the grapes were processed using the same methods as in Europe. Everything here radiated hope and wealth. Mariani was standing on the front steps of his house, holding two fierce yellow dogs on a leash. Occasionally he would be jerked forward, losing his balance, and Amine couldn’t tell if the dogs really were stronger than him or if Mariani was just pretending they were to demonstrate the threat they posed to any unwelcome visitors. Amine, nervous, stammered as he introduced himself. He pointed toward his property. “I need advice,” he said, and the colonist smiled as he eyed this timorous Arab.
“First let’s have a drink, neighbor! We have plenty of time to talk business later.”
They walked through a luxuriant garden and sat in the shade on a terrace with a view of the Zerhoun. A thin man with black skin put some bottles and glasses on the table. Mariani poured his neighbor an anisette and when he saw Amine hesitate—because of the heat and the work that awaited him—he burst out laughing. “Oh, you don’t drink?” Amine smiled and took a sip of the whitish liquid. Inside the house the telephone rang but Mariani ignored it.
The colonist didn’t let him get a word in. It struck Amine that his neighbor was a lonely man and that this was, for him, a rare opportunity to confide in someone. With a familiarity that made Amine ill at ease, Mariani complained about his workers; he’d trained two generations of them but they were still as lazy and filthy as ever. “My God, the filth!” From time to time he looked up with rheumy eyes at his handsome guest and added with a laugh: “I’m not saying this about you, of course.” And without giving him a chance to respond, he went on: “They can say what they like, but this place will be a shithole once we’re no longer here to make the trees bloom, to turn over the earth, to water it with our sweat. What was there here before we arrived, eh? Nothing. There was nothing at all. Look around you. Centuries of human beings and not one who could be bothered to cultivate this land. Too busy fighting. We’ve been through hunger here, we’ve buried people. We’ve sown fields, dug graves, built cradles. My father died of typhus in this dump. I ruined my back from days and days spent sitting on my horse, surveying the plain, negotiating with the local tribes. My spine was so messed up I couldn’t lie on a bed without screaming out in pain. But I have to tell you: I owe this place a lot. It took me to the heart of things, it reconnected me with the vital life force, with brutality.” Mariani’s face turned red and his speech grew slower as the alcohol took effect. “In France, I would have had a queer’s life, a narrow little existence with no ambition, no triumph, no grandeur. This country gave me the chance to live a man’s life.”
Mariani called the servant, who came trotting along the terrace. He scolded him in Arabic for his slowness and slammed his fist onto the table so hard that it knocked over Amine’s glass. The colonist spat on the ground as he watched the old servant disappear into the house. “Watch and learn! I know these Arabs! The workers are morons; how can you not want to give them a good thrashing? I speak their language, I know them inside out. I’ve heard all the talk about independence, but no bunch of troublemakers is going to steal years of sweat and hard work from me.” And then, laughing, he picked up some of the little sandwiches that the servant had left, and repeated: “I’m not saying this about you, of course!” Amine almost gave up then; he almost got to his feet and walked away, forgetting the idea of making this powerful neighbor his ally. But Mariani, whose face was strangely similar to those of his dogs, turned to him and—as if sensing that Amine felt hurt—said: “You want a tractor, right? That could be arranged.”