Read Bitter Almonds for Free Online

as she’s concerned, she can just sleep a little later in the morning.
    â€œIs why I put on the television in my room,” says Fadila.
    Ã‰dith asks her to confirm what she has said: “You watched television with her?”
    No. It’s in her own room that Fadila watches television at night. She leaves it on, with the sound off, all night long, systematically—and not just on nights when she doesn’t feel good. “Other way I no sleeping,” she says.
    But sometimes it’s not enough, despite the luminous screen, the colors, the people moving and faces talking: not only can she not sleep, she has to get out.
    Â 
    Ã‰dith has her write (writes with her)
fa,
then
fadi,
then
fadila,
spelling them, nothing more.
    â€œWhat does this say, here?” she asks her.
    â€œFadila, course.”
    Â 
    But the next time when she shows her the
l
and the
o
, naming them, and then writing
lo,
and she asks, “What does this make?”
    â€œFa,” says Fadila.
    Â 
    Ã‰dith must not be going about it in the right way. She cannot figure out how to get the key to work. An old educational saw comes to mind: “To teach Johnny to read, first you have to get to know Johnny.”
    One aspect of Fadila’s behavior that Édith finds completely extraordinary is the way she tidies. The bathroom, which is where she does the ironing, has a tall thin closet with one drawer for the iron, the extension cord, and the distilled water that is used only with the iron; another for clean rags that can be used as damp cloths if necessary; and a third one is for the abrasives and detergents, and so on. But Fadila completely disregards Édith’s organization. She piles the iron, the rags, and the water dispenser all together in the same drawer, not necessarily the same one each time, and never in the same manner.
    Fadila does not classify objects according to their nature or into distinct categories, she doesn’t resort to any sort of order. She crams everything in, her only concern, it would seem, to make them take up as little space as possible. Her tidying principle is not distributive but spatial.
    Ã‰dith imagines this must be due to a chest-based economy. The chest was the only piece of furniture in traditional Moroc­can interiors. One chest per room, no separate buffet for dishes, or wardrobe for coats; no chest of drawers for shirts, or rack for the shoes.
    Can a habit like this eventually form a person’s cast of mind? Could it have something to do with a difficulty in learning to read and write, in other words, in learning how to separate and order things according to their nature?

7
    One day when Fadila again says that the
f
“is like number 8,” Édith seizes her chance: “You know your numbers well. Can you read them?”
    â€œYes, I read,” says Fadila.
    Sure enough, on the page in the textbook devoted to the ten digits, Fadila can read them. She reads in order: perhaps she knows them by heart, in that order, but after all, that is where counting begins.
    â€œThis is three,” she says, holding up three fingers of her left hand, “This is two,” holding up two fingers of her right hand. She crosses her hands and continues: “Two and two is four. Four and four is eight. Eight and eight is eighty.”
    There are six apples in a basket on the table: she counts them, pointing each time with her forefinger, and says, “Seven.”
    No matter: she has a rough idea of the ten digits and their increasing value. She knows how to count, more or less. She seems to know that sixty is more than twenty-five, and 310 is more than 200.
    The numbers she masters best of all are the numbers of her regular buses, the 80 and the 43. She can identify them without hesitation. But write them? No, she can’t write them.
    Â 
    Fadila stops by on Friday. She seems pleased about something. Before even taking off her coat she reaches into her bag for