For Kaouther

Arms brighter than the light of a long summer day,

breasts and hair to the taste of Hannibal,
ginger, hale, and supple.

“Has she no part in you, your mother?” I used to wonder aloud.

“Only where you cannot see it,” she would reply dryly while adding: “I do not wear her on the outside.”*

We would then kiss. Or rather Kaouther would kiss me. I, turning deftly, would offer the other cheek to suffer osculation.

Then she would sit and wait in silence. “O, Fool, enough! She is waiting. But what for?” I used to ask myself.

Until one day, Kaouther decided to love me while whispering in my left ear: “You must honor my offer, otherwise. . . .” A gesture, intimate and unthinking, that sealed our fate for the summer. I savored her offer then and there, but only for a brief moment, for I desperately wanted to prolong the pleasure of her visits to my house. Then, on a breezy summer afternoon when everyone was having a siesta, I sensed her arriving. Sweet and wholesome as a carrot, Kaouther bloomed out of a crowd, her nearness, like a miner’s light, going before her. Precocious mistress of the idiom of the Berber language. Virgil thought love a native of the rocks. Or did he? I, however, speak of love, not Eros, born in innocence among the tiny pearls of couscous Kaouther’s mother and the other women made for my family each summer in the High Atlas, while Kaouther and I, even we, shared events, confidences, and embraces, half-undoing months of absence. And from that day we grew up. Continue reading →