Xala by Ousmane Sembène Read Free Book Online Page A

was intense. She hated the woman for having turned her brother into a sheep.
    â€˜Babacar, you must go and see El Hadji and help him,’ ordered Mam Fatou, addressing her husband.

    â€˜Where will I find him?’ he asked.
    â€˜At his office. A woman can’t talk to a man about such things,’ said N’Gone’s mother.
    â€˜She’s right,’ said Yay Bineta.
    The old man closed his Koran, folded his mat in two and got to his feet.
    â€˜And the car?’
    â€˜It’s outside their front door. Here are the keys and the licence. It’s his wedding present, so the car belongs to N’Gone,’ the Badyen explained.
    Babacar went out, wearing his slippers. When they were left alone the two women put their heads together. They suppressed their mutual dislike in order to confront the ill-will of El Hadji’s wives together.

    An empty, cloudless sky. The torrid, stifling heat hung in the air. Clothes stuck to damp bodies. Everyone was returning to work after lunch, so the streets were very busy. Mopeds, bicycles and pedestrians streamed in the same direction towards the commercial centre of the city.
    Old Babacar had returned home. He had waited all morning in vain for El Hadji Abdou Kader Beye. After Tisbar, the midday prayer, Mam Fatou had insisted he try again. ‘He is your son-in-law after all,’ she had told him. Walking close to the walls and the balconies he tried to protect himself from the sun’s onslaught. He hoped he would find El Hadji.
    The secretary-saleslady recognized him. She took him for a cadger come to collect his ‘share’ of the wedding. She told him to take a seat and returned to her work. She had three customers to see to. Others came after them.
    The hours passed.
    The old man listened to the beggar’s chanting. He liked it. ‘What a fine voice,’ he thought.
    The second wife, Oumi N’Doye, came in and without preamble spoke to the secretary bossily in French.
    â€˜Is he in?’
    Madame Diouf looked up. A stray lock of her black wig hung
down over her narrow forehead. She recognized the newcomer. She pushed back the hair with her finger.
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜He left nothing for me?’
    â€˜No. But if you’d care to wait... This gentleman is also waiting.’
    Oumi N’Doye sat on a chair, crossed her legs and opened the woman’s magazine she had just bought. The secretary eased the fan towards her. Feeling the gusts of cool air the second wife thanked her with a sour smile.
    Oumi N‘Doye was a great expert on overseas women’s fashions, those of the grands couturiers and the film stars. Photo-novelettes were her daily reading. She devoured them, believing everything in them, and dreamed of passionate love affairs she would have liked to experience. She had felt uneasy since the previous day. She found her husband’s third marriage intolerable; it devalued her. The thought that she was a second choice, an option, enraged her. The middle position, giving her a kind of intermediate role, was unbearable for a co-wife. The first wife implied a conscious choice, she was an elect. The second wife was purely optional. The third? Someone to be prized. When it came to the moomé, the second wife was more like a door-hinge. She had given a lot of thought to her position in the man’s marital cycle and she realized that she was in disgrace.
    Oumi N‘Doye could not overcome her feeling of ill-will towards Adja Awa Astou. ‘Why doesn’t she show disapproval of this marriage? She must be pleased about it, the old monkey-skin,’ she muttered to herself. She, Oumi N’Doye, had been El Hadji’s favourite. There had been times when she had kept the man longer than the code of polygamy allowed. There had been times too, at the height of her reign as the favourite, when she had robbed Adja Awa Astou of whole days and nights. The first wife had never complained, never demanded what