To all the women whose names have never been written but whose hands have nourished the world. In Lhajja Fatima.
“She didn’t know how to write her name. But she knew how to create gold. »
Prologue What the stones hold
There are hours, in the mountains of Idmine, when time ceases to obey. The sun sinks behind the ridges like a slow wound. It sets the sky ablaze with this crimson, earthy color, which only Morocco knows how to mix, and the wind then rises: this wind from nowhere and everywhere, which has sculpted the argan trees into tormented old men since the beginning of the ages. It carries an odor. A smell of hand-pressed oil. Sweat dried on women's foreheads. Red earth after the downpour, this earth which does not give what is asked of it but which jealously guards what has been entrusted to it. In this smell, for those who know how to remain silent long enough, there is a voice. The voice of Lhajja Fatima Ait Moussa. She left. Her body rests under the earth of the mountains that she loved, worked, watered with her tears. But his breath has not left Idmine. He lives in the cracking of the hulls under the stone. In the laughter of women who work shoulder to shoulder. In the eyes of a man who, every morning, gets up before dawn to keep a promise he never made. This story is not a success story. This is not a carefully sanitized account of a successful business. It’s something much older, much truer. It is the story of a woman whom injustice has forged as fire forges metal by heat, by pressure, by pain. It is the story of a son who carries on his shoulders the heaviest of inheritances: not a fortune, not a name, but a promise made to a dead woman. Read slowly. How we drink hot tea when the cold bites. This story deserves to be given time.