So Vast the Prison

by Assia Djebar

  For the next few months I never let up in my work. Sometimes I would go home at ten o’clock at night. I would sit in silence in the children’s bedroom to watch them sleep, gazing at them: My son would grow to be such a handsome young man, with his slender, well-built body; my little daughter, though she was asleep, I could hear her crystal-clear voice: “Mummy, you didn’t play the Dussek allegretto.” She had left me a note on the piano.

  I apologized silently. In my room my husband was sleeping—lights on, newspaper dropped at the foot of the bed next to the ashtray. Suddenly I had a belated attack of neatness and tidied up. Then I lay down, exhausted.

  The early morning, before seven o’clock, still felt the same for the four of us. For me, my balcony wanderings seemed to be part of night dreams not yet entirely dissipated. Through the window I watched the entire city emerge in the reddish glow of dawn.

  After the children had gone to school, I hung around the house, left to myself. My mind wrapped itself in ribbons of sound, melodies gathered the night before; I huddled over my tape recorder as my listening resumed its flow. In those days if I had used the word passion it would only have been to describe this river inside me; every morning here at home, then at my office, it swept me far away for hours on end into a past of buried sounds.

  I either waited for the housekeeper to arrive or I would leave her instructions, because she was supposed to take care of the children after four. Shortly after midday I went out. My work life resumed. The day stretched on for me.

  I broke this rhythm. One morning I suddenly quit the research office that had been mine for six months. I felt drawn to field investigation, faces, words. I would store up a wealth of noises and sounds, then try to find some suitable way of using them—radio reports, documentary films, bilingual accounts to be published, etc.—afterward.

  Investigation first, forgetting oneself in others, the others who wait. The often silent others. I wanted to discover towns and villages: Oran, Mascara, Sidi-bel-Abb’s. Crowded projects, congested public housing full of uprooted rural populations; sometimes, in the old quarters, Moorish houses with a lemon or orange tree in the middle of the patio—a haven.

  In Béjaia especially, laughter greets me and there is a hint of escape. The port is a pocket in the hollow curve of the vast, wide-open bay. Taken by the woman who is my guide, a former militant, I happen to go into a house in an aging quarter overhanging the city. There I greet two very young women wearing sarouels and embroidered tunics; they are sitting cross-legged on mats stretched out on the floor of faded tiles. Facing them, I squat down as well. At first we speak in Arabic, then in French. I had taken them to be traditional city women: “Two young girls to be married,” my companion calls them teasingly, but I discover that they are about to complete their medical degrees in the capital.

  “These summer and spring vacations are just a forced return to the harem for us!” the first one says ironically—her vocal outburst almost a hiccough.

  Outside, I leave the woman who is taking me around. “I’ll find my way back to the hotel alone,” I say, and thank her.

  I rush down a street of stairs. Happy to be alone, and free, in this city saturated with light. Two young men are standing at the bottom of the hill. One of them approaches almost solemnly, looking me over carefully, to say that he has just made a bet and lost because of me. Seeing me from a distance (with my very short hair, my straight white trousers), he had bet that I was a young man.

  Although I am thirty-seven, I probably seem less than thirty: thin hips, a boyish haircut, flat buttocks; that day I was so proud of my androgynous silhouette. The young man had lost. I could do nothing about it, but as I went by, I made a funny face at him. “Sorry!” In that instant I knew I was being provocative.

  If he had been there to see it, would the man who never left my thoughts have laughed to see me confused with a boy and flattered by this mistake. I would have flung myself into his arms, for sure: “I really am your age! Let’s stay together forever in your house with its open doors, its abandoned yard. Let’s spend every night on the sand, if no one comes, perhaps there’ll be a storm, whatever the season …”

  Precisely because of this frivolous incident, and if my Beloved had been lucky enough to witness it, I would have been ready to surrender to every temptation. I would not have thought I was doing anything unreasonable, but rather that I was racing toward the oasis where we would finally end up, breathless. I had seen those two young girls in their temporary confinement, who one day were going to work as doctors, both of them … Virgins, no doubt, twenty-five or twenty-six at the oldest. Pale faces, diaphanous beauties, as if they were leaving their youth behind, and at the same time still awaiting it.

  As for myself, in those days I was virtually returning to my reawakened childhood. If in the past, just once, I had played with a brother or a boy cousin on the roads or in the forest, perhaps this nostalgia would not come back to me like this, like an undertow, magnifying my attraction to this man!

  Was I searching for some fever in him, a fever I knew within myself? A fever that, on this sunny day in Béjaia, would have been transformed into a cascade of finally willing happiness.

  4

  THE DANCE

  THERE IS ONE SCENE, or maybe there are two that emerge from the preceding summer as the background to this early winter and this restless autumn. Perhaps my memory, to battle its own insidious, fatal dissolution, is attempting to raise some stele like a mark for “the first time.” When was the first time I saw this man, or rather, what is the first image that triggered my first emotion? What events, what light, what words ruled over this disturbance—as if passion disturbed, rather than suddenly put things in order and somehow set the soul straight, restoring to one’s impulses their original reactions, their purity. As if any love so blindly experienced—completely swathed in prohibitions, hence unwarranted, hence superfluous, or childish, as it may seem to some people—as if any love, arising like an earthquake of silence or fear, did not lead, as the disintegrating surface order collapsed, to original geology … These vague notions about psychology are, of course, only digressions from the story I am pulling from the ruins more than ten years afterward.

  Despite my efforts at remembering, I have only a blurry notion of the specific first day of the first meeting, and whether the encounter was insignificant or important between these two characters I describe. (It is not fiction I desire. I am not driven to unfurl a love story of inexhaustible arabesques.) No, I am only gripped by a paralyzing fear, the actual terror that I shall see this opening in my life permanently disappear. Suppose it were my luck suddenly to have amnesia; suppose tomorrow I were hit by a car; suppose some morning soon I were to die! Hurry! Write everything down, remember the ridiculous and the essential; write it, orderly or muddled, but leave some record of it for ten years from now … ten years after my own forgetting.

  There is only one real question that looms for me. When, precisely, did this story, which transpired either inside or outside of me—and I don’t know which—when did it take hold? It was summer. A blazing summer with cool dawns, gentle twilights, mild nights. The nights above all were densely populated with echoes: shows and dances, lots of people walking in groups along the unending and often deserted beaches that had recently become fashionable for swimming, an hour from the capital.

  Every evening in the large stone theater that had opened recently, concerts were scheduled—light music, jazz or folk from bands coming successively from a number of African countries or countries in the East. To finish off the night, journalists, artists, couples who were friends, vacationers from nearby beaches, young women more westernized than the Westerners, would all get together in groups in various discothèques, while I went with my husband, who was the director of this “cultural complex.”

  During the months of July and August I drowned myself in the music, the laughter, and the playful conversations of others—as a witness; I would slip lethargically into this or else I
would sleep; during the day I read in the calm apartment whose French doors opened onto steep rocks.

  This is how I spent my vacation, gradually aware that, this summer or next winter, despite my slenderness and my inexhaustible appetite for walks and dreams, my youth was coming to an end … No, I told myself drowsily, what people call “youth” can be lived endlessly like a block of motionless years.

  I watched my husband directing and making decisions; however, well before all the turmoil, I no longer enjoyed talking with him. We were no longer a couple, just two old friends who no longer knew how to talk to each other. I was happy that, with this new distance (not deserted for me, so much as spacious), there were so many people passing through, so many guests in an evening who would seek us out, and especially so much foreign music surrounding us. So there I was, a spectator, and I thought I was perhaps ready to set out. For the first time also, probably for the first time in my life, I felt I was “visible,” not the way I felt during my adolescence, nor after I was twenty, when I would smile at some compliment, some flattery from a man, either a friend or a stranger, thinking then, It’s my semblance, my ghost you are seeing, not myself, not really me … I myself am in disguise, I wear a veil, you cannot see me.

  Why all of a sudden, did a smile or bit of praise distress me so? (“What a pretty dress,” some man would say, his fingers about to touch the cloth, and I would tense up, but hide it. Or: “This hairdo suits you,” another poorly timed compliment from someone else—an incongruous familiarity that I blamed on the excitement of the theater atmosphere.) Of course, I avoided any contact whatsoever, but something else disturbed me: They are really talking about me! I’m ashamed; I smile not to seem prudish, but I’m ashamed. They go so far as to touch me with their fingers! … I can protect myself from it, appear “civilized,” and remain elusive. But something else has me disoriented, or makes me sad, I don’t know which. It is that they can truly see me!

  But the way I related to the exposure of my exterior self to others is another story.

  Back to the young man. Looking at me so intensely. And when I try to remember “the first time, and when it mattered to me,” I don’t know what to say. One scene comes up, one summer day, no, a night rather. I’ll call it the night of the dance.

  I did not know right away that this young man, with his almost ordinary appearance, with his words (left hanging sometimes like smoke in the air), his nonchalance and apparent casualness, would ever mean so much to me.

  Three men showed up as a group; I took them to be journalists. Although their ages and profiles differed, they had in common a sort of elegance we were not used to seeing in these parts, some reserve in their bearing, and aloofness as well. They were not excessively familiar, which right from the start relaxed me, tempering my habitual defensiveness … The camaraderie established right away between this trio and myself seemed out of the ordinary, a game among old adolescents.

  There were two of these three new friends who amused me—the one who seemed the oldest, the other almost a kid at twenty. These two men drank a lot and joked endlessly; I would smile at them when I met them sometimes outside a cafe or beside the pool where they might be any time from morning on, and they would call me over. I laughed with these two accomplices over nothing, or over something funny they would say unexpectedly. Sometimes I felt I was back in the schoolyard. The eldest possessed an encyclopedic knowledge and used it in a snobby manner. I reproached him for his pedantry. In this group, however, the silent one, who was also the most distinguished and well bred, always wore a teasing smile on his face and never spoke unless the discussion came around to the music of upcoming programs.

  So I listened to them. We decided right off the bat to stay together, my three companions and me; seated on the highest tier, we watched the evening’s show. I don’t know how it happened, but after several days I felt as if we were a family. In other days, in school, we would call groups that had mysteriously bonded like this “cliques”; in fact, I had gone through adolescence in boarding school mistrusting the gregarious instinct that drove girls to stick together that way.

  Now it was not a need for a group; for me it was, rather, a nostalgia for that lost age: for not having had boys as friends, for having missed that light hearted, disinterested conspiring with the other sex …

  After twenty years I finally suppressed the taboo; better late than never. We sat together in the tiers that filled up with families who came down from the capital often in their Sunday best—always in couples with children, sometimes babies (occasionally with a grandmother wearing a turban, a veiled aunt …). When our row became too crowded, we alone, my “three musketeers” I called them (myself the fourth), would leave our row and go to the gallery reserved for the press. We mischievously acted like special guests, privileged spectators!

  In the afternoon, as the sun was painting the stone of the theater antique gold, the four of us would watch the star rehearse, usually someone from France here for the performance … And it is true that we hardly ever expressed opinions, either in praise or in doubt; we might only make some vague assumptions about the singer’s quality, on how the audience, whose taste was sometimes not very refined, would like him.

  I would leave them to go home to dinner, “to be a wife and mother,” I would say, as if another role actually awaited me there. About two hours later I would meet them again as the crowd gradually filled the open theater and night approached.

  It was not until a few weeks had passed, it seems to me, that I began suddenly to think about the Beloved separately … Perhaps those evenings (probably twenty or thirty in six or seven weeks), during which the straightforward warmth of the group grew progressively stronger, were my enticement; or perhaps my desire had already awakened and I was unaware of it … In reality, I felt so completely happy to have found three friends. “Writers and artists,” I used to call them when, in the afternoon, we would go for a drink and to watch the families; we were always on the lookout for some trivial drama at the swimming pools, another show.

  One day the reticent young man must have remarked, “When we go back, back to the university, I mean, you are going to snub us. You won’t recognize us anymore! You won’t even say hello … madame!”

  He was the only one who teased me this way, suddenly ending a sentence with feigned ceremony: “madame.” His friends—the very young one who could have been a student and the oldest who could have been my schoolmate—both called me quite naturally by my first name … There was a sort of confident familiarity tying our group together—even though it is true that we conversed only in French, and that I could only imagine using the formal “you” when we spoke, as if that remained a privilege of my age … Was I the eldest? I don’t really know. The journalist, whose erudition and affectation I made fun of, looked several years older than me because of his wrinkled face and his leathery neck. Still, that wasn’t certain. He was the only one who drank a lot; too much. The few times I would meet up with the group late in the morning, I had to affectionately reproach this “elder” sitting there at the table: “Midday, and already you’re drinking straight whiskey!”

  “And it’s not the first,” sharply retorted his friend, the one I suddenly fixed upon as if the echo of his words really took a while to resonate inside me, as if some unusual, strange nuance was getting lost along the way …

  So was that the first time I noticed some nervous quiver showing through the cheekbones of this face later so deeply engraved within me? Of course, the remark was revealing of a friend’s worry; it was a reproach meant to be discreet … I thought I grasped with difficulty what bound these two companions together, the one who drank so much and the younger man in his thirties. But I was suddenly stymied by something else—as if both by its very transience and by some ineffable sadness, behind the curtain of disquiet lay another face of this man with the vaguely saucy gaze … I turned my attention back to the glass of whiskey and suggested to the man who was letting himself be taken to task,
“Pretty please for my beautiful eyes, please, take it half and half with water!”

  “For your beautiful eyes, madame!” the journalist exclaimed grandly, his eyes red, and with a sardonic shrug. “Here it is Friday, almost prayer time, and I am drunk already! I’ll leave the rest of you and go take a nap so that I can rejoin you tonight, fresh as a rose.”

  He left, and the twenty-year-old student went with him (I had baptized him “the student” once and for all); then to the third I quietly added, “A student, of course, but beautiful as an angel.”

  We stayed there alone, the two of us, not particularly wanting to talk, watching the rather ordinary crowd at our leisure …

  Definitely I have returned now to the “first scene.” To the one that could have begun the logical and well-organized story of the unfolding of this passion. But why would something so blindly experienced be revealed today with no detours, no sidestepping, no desire for a labyrinth?

  So, the first time … Not the first time I saw his face, but let us say the first time his presence had reality for me, when he began to “matter.” Perhaps also it was when I felt him look at me; when the desire to be looked at by him awoke in me. Let us get back to the facts, because they are in danger of dissolving, fraying into shabby threads.

  Everyone looked forward to hearing one star that summer—a poet-singer who later returned three seasons in a row. The posters for his show already covered several walls in the capital, and one morning he arrived.

  At four that afternoon I took my seat, alone this time, to watch the rehearsal. I was perched way up high and, though it was unusual, I was the only one watching in this theater that held two thousand. So this is how I saw Leo for the first time, looking down upon him, a robust man in his sixties with a monkey’s wrinkled face lit by the sun. On the huge stage, Leo adjusted the mike, talking with the stagehands in a very low voice. Then he tested the acoustics pointblank by calling out to the empty tiers, to the whole village behind and, it suddenly seemed to me, to the whole country, young and clumsy with its thirteen years of independence …