Free Amour Provence by Constance Leisure Page A

often told her he hoped to save enough to one day build them a home back in Morocco for when he retired, a promise that seemed to Rachida impossibly distant. Instead, she wished that they could simply move out of the lean-to shack in the tiny village of Beaucastel where they now lived and into some other, nicer place. Even in Morocco, a hut like theirs was fit only for livestock. But Mohammed told her that it was hard for Arabs to find acceptable places to live because the French didn’t want to rent to them, and for anything decent the prices were far too high. Still, he promised Rachida that soon they would find something better.
    She touched the necklace again and wondered what Mohammed had spent on it. In her hometown near Fez, women wore only silver jewelry because Islam taught that gold was too luxurious for personal adornment. Rachida felt a pang of guilt as she examined herself in the mirror and saw the way the lustrous chain drew attention to itself like a living thing against her throat.
    Mohammed embraced her, then placed his hands on her shoulders, gazing down into her face. At twenty, Rachida was quite a few years his junior. He was in his late thirties, tall and slender, with an elongated face that he knew no one would call handsome. But Rachida didn’t seem to mind. She told him that she was happy because he was always considerate with her, and never lost his temper, unlike her father, who had ruled her family by fear. When Rachida stood onher toes to kiss him, Mohammed felt his eyes burn, but he managed to hold in check the grateful feeling that welled up in his chest. It wasn’t the custom for a man to show too much emotion. But Rachida must have seen the change in his face and she took his hand and caressed it, feeling with her soft fingers the roughness of his palm put there by hard work.
    Mohammed had come to France as a teenager following the death of both of his parents. Through an uncle who lived in Toulon, he was able to obtain a visa and, upon his arrival, find a job picking grapes with a team of itinerant workers, mostly Arabs originally from Morocco, Tunisia, or Algeria. Later, he’d been employed as a field hand at the domaine where he was now foreman.
    Rachida’s own life had changed dramatically when, in 1993, she married Mohammed and immediately returned with him to France. In this new country, she was no longer obliged to conceal herself beneath long robes, or wrap carefully arranged veils around her head to cover her hair, as had been the custom in the small village where she’d grown up. At her job cleaning house twice a week, she dressed in loose black pants and a long blouse that billowed modestly over her hips. And each day she simply twisted her long hair up into a plastic clip without any sort of head covering at all. Her employer, Corinne Chave, owned the vineyard where Mohammed worked, and Rachida walked to her house, just a few kilometers down the weedy river road. Corinne’s field hands were mostly Arabs from the North African Maghreb, all longtime expatriates who had lived and worked in France for a good part of their lives.
    Rachida was now a part of that workforce, a free and equal woman, she reminded herself each time she saw the words engraved in stone above the entrance to the town hall proclaiming: LIBERTÉ! ÉGALITÉ! FRATERNITÉ! But Mohammed was against too much liberty for his young wife and didn’t want her out and about like Amina, Rachida’s closest friend, who had multiple jobs and was always on the run. He felt Amina had been coarsened by the experiences she’d had working in places where she wasn’t always treated with respect, and he didn’t want that for Rachida. “I make a good living so you don’t have to work like a dog for others,” Mohammed had told her more than once.
    But Rachida admired the way Amina had arranged her life. She’d raised two sons, and her husband, Tariq, worked in the