So Vast the Prison

by Assia Djebar

  Relief comes over me, relaxation that is almost muscular. “He is definitely there!” Ten minutes away. I could go to the receptionist and have him called. Then suggest that we go sit down in the bar at the luxury hotel across the street. “Let’s have coffee together. I was just passing by and wanted to hear how you were doing!” And the whole time I cheerfully spouted these banalities, my eyes, oh yes, and with a hunger whose ardor I would filter out, my eyes would devour his face, his features, the color of his eyes, right down to the defects I would find once more. Perhaps he too had grown thinner, perhaps, on the contrary …

  I muse over what I should do. I stare at the blue car—his. I am no longer enduring the acute strain of suffering; now there is only the dull void of separation, that I could do away with in a second. This is so close to where I live … Humbled, after the desert I have crossed, I am enjoying the feeling of pain. I breathe deeply: I almost relish the eternity of this landscape.

  It is four P.M. Suddenly I think of the children. Let’s go home! I tell myself. I walk with a light step. The distractions of motherhood await me. Playing the piano with my daughter.

  Late that night, in bed, my eyes open in the darkness, I am confronted again with returning pain; it is not the least bit weaker: I hurt physically! I will sleep, despite the nightmares. Tomorrow I will have to invent some other consolations—temporary, I know.

  Shortly after these days of confusion, I began to imagine a meeting that would be strange, but possible: to speak to the Beloved’s mother.

  I could readily have used some easy social strategy to meet women who were cousins of this lady or her relatives by marriage. I could have forced myself to appear on the social scene for a few days, making polite remarks to old friends or relatives. I could end up by asking to be introduced to this person I did not know. She must still be young, certainly beautiful, and with a shy reserve. Yes, I could start a conversation with her: I would show up by chance in some living room or at a party. Even the ambiguity of exchanging banal words with her would bring me pleasure, embarrassment, or at least some new nostalgia. I could hope for some respite from my arid days just because of being close to the woman who could have been but who would never be my mother-in-law. As if because I had at present a very real mother-in-law, one so tender and motherly toward me, whom I loved so much that because of her I could not imagine having to leave her son someday—as if because of this “guilty” love of mine (yes, this is a guilty love for a young man who cannot pose as my husband’s rival), a more dangerous rivalry would be generated. This invisible mother whom I wanted to meet (a mother who was Berber, still young, elegant, middle class, from the best part of town) would be pitted against my real mother-in-law, who was so traditional, so aristocratic in manner, full of Islamic gentleness and a goodness that was somewhat severe. She was the friend of the beggar-women of her city, the one who consoled repudiated women, sterile wives, and scapegoat daughters-in-law. Whenever I would visit (I spent at least one night a week at her home, on a mattress on the ground, watching her absorbed in prayer, comforted by her piety which, I was sure, would long protect us, myself and my two children), she would describe in detail the daily wretchedness of the women of this city of invisible lusts and repression. How could I ever have to leave such a friend? Suppose one day I could no longer conceal all this from my husband, he who had begun, with perfect timing, to travel in Europe, Egypt, and even farther away.

  There were other temptations that came to mind concerning his family: I remembered that the Beloved’s father was a doctor. Once, he happened to mention the neighborhood where he had his office. And I had a distant aunt whom I used to visit from time to time who lived there.

  Either apathy or fatigue made me give up on my project of being introduced to the mother. Not only did the very strong presence of my own mother-in-law raise barriers to this vaguely desired scene, but for months now I had been living a solitary life, and leaving to make some slightly risky social rounds would be painful. One morning I decided to go visit my aunt.

  Throughout the visit, as I asked her detailed questions about her health, I was asking myself, Am I going to make an appointment with this doctor at the end of this boulevard? And tell him what? What sickness do I have? My thinness? My aunt had noticed it when I came in. Of course recently I had been on the verge of fainting several times: My usual hypotension—that’s all it was. I told my relative (as if practicing ahead of time for the questioning in the doctor’s office) about the last time I had fainted: “Day before yesterday, alone at home, I stood up all at once, to go to the kitchen, I think … Suddenly, blackness. I don’t remember anything. It seemed to me that it was a long time later that I found myself lying down on the ground. My hand felt the tile floor. It took me some time to understand: What am I doing laying on the ground? stretched out? In fact I had suddenly fainted the minute I stood up. I didn’t even get hurt! Not even a lump on the head. Nothing!”

  The aunt was worried, then affectionately: “You are not pregnant?”

  I burst out laughing. “Certainly not!”

  That seemed ludicrous to me. “No, I’ve had these fainting spells sometimes, but they come on progressively. I will start to feel weak, and lean on something while somebody is talking to me, and then suddenly I’m hearing bells; I keep on smiling at him, but his voice gets far away. Then I sit down, I eat some sugar or chocolate.”

  “Go to the doctor, the one here on my boulevard,” the aunt insisted. “He’s the one who takes care of me!”

  “Your doctor, what language do you speak to him in?”

  She exclaimed, “How do I speak to him? Come, my daughter, in the Prophet’s language of course … Are we not independent these days so that at least I can speak my own language to a doctor from my country! … But this doctor, you know, opened his office when the French were in charge, during the war.”

  I left my kinswoman and went straight to the doctor’s office. I sat down in the corner for women and children in the already overcrowded waiting room. In the hallway the doctor briefly made the rounds. One of the women whispered, “That’s him!”

  I had scarcely time to catch a glimpse of him, a stocky fifty-year-old with red hair. Engrossed in thought, he glanced about as he returned with a lady wearing a veil. When it came to be the turn of the patient ahead of me, I slipped out. What was I doing there? I had no desire at all to answer personal questions. As for my fainting spells, they had lost any interest for me after I described them to my aunt. Above all I was beginning to realize that when I met the doctor—who, in the first place, was “the father”—I would have had to undo my blouse so that he could listen to my breathing and sound my chest. The indecency! He was “the father,” not some anonymous man of science.

  I took off like a thief. Outside, my heart pounding. For one long moment at least, when I left my aunt’s and stupidly came to waste my time in this room full of sick women and wailing children, I had found release from my obsession. I had totally forgotten in those moments the image of the young man … Now, in this crowded, unfamiliar neighborhood, I thought to myself that this stocky, redheaded doctor seemed like an ordinary man with commonplace occupations. His son was a young man who was just as ordinary, the only son of a very quiet, middle-class couple. It was only this cruelly self-imposed separation that was maintaining the aura surrounding this individual! What’s more, I said to myself as I walked along, during the preceding months, the summer and the fall, whenever I sought his company and played at being so casual, whenever I repressed my emotion, endowing the young man with so much importance, did this not simply mean that I was distancing myself irreversibly from my husband—the man who for so long had seemed my other self?

  I took a taxi to return as quickly as possible to the apartment. I needed the children. I had spent half a day busy with my aunt and then with the temptation of visiting the doctor. I went home, my obsession now a lighter burden. I opened my door; I made some coffee.

  But then, going from one be
droom to the other, surrounded by laughter, I stood for a moment on the balcony to recall the pearly gray of the sky, and suddenly the soft voice, the low voice of my Beloved and his slightly ironic look came back to me: obsession renewed. During the evening it pursued me again, despite the fact that the children were preparing to celebrate their father’s return the next morning. They asked me what presents I thought he might be bringing them from Egypt; they both offered to read me the poems they had written in his honor.

  “Sunday is going to be Father’s Day!” the little girl exclaimed.

  “That’s the new style!” remarked the housekeeper, who was leaving.

  The rest of the day was spent singing and telling riddles and finally some fussing and tears.

  In my own bed I did not read any more; I turned off the light. In the darkness I lived the summer before all over again—our talking together in the morning, my three friends and I, or myself dancing on an infinite dance floor where my silhouette gradually fades away.

  Was it right away, the first evening of my husband’s return that I suddenly decided to speak?

  Now I know that if I had had a confidante, or a man who was an old friend, or some rediscovered friend from school, perhaps I would have told it just once; with one of them I would have ceded to the temptation and pleasure of hearing myself speak my inner adventure out loud—this slow possession to which I had surrendered at first with delight, but then with pain. After all this I know that the need to speak—to a friend and hence, failing that, to the husband I thought of equally as a friend, since he was no longer a lover—intensified the bitter pleasure of hearing myself, and as a result convinced me of the reality of what preoccupied me, giving it weight and flesh. It would give it thus the reality of words if not the reality of caresses; in fact, before and during the words I spoke, I was racked with desire for that man, a new servitude.

  Probably long before this, moreover, and barely even suspected by me (though there was plenty of time afterward, when it was in a sense too late to ask myself about what had gone on before!) there was the ill-timed question: Am I indeed real? Or, in the end, isn’t my suffering, the fact that I cannot get used to this separation, the only thing that is real?

  That evening I definitely behaved like a raving lunatic. I asked him to listen to me, that we be willing to say “everything” in one night … This “everything” became the weight borne by my dreams, what I denied myself, especially my silent desire, and, above all, my compulsive need to talk about it. A burden of dreams and words resulting from a flirtation that lasted scarcely longer than the games of summer.

  I have to see these memories through … My husband returns; my memory wants to swallow up the first evening: He and I in the bedroom, shutting myself up in the bathroom first, almost falling asleep in my bath, which is too hot. He definitely expecting me to come. It is midnight; the lights are out in the children’s bedroom. Silence thickens in the house. And I am not alone, I cannot take refuge in my dreams, and …

  Everything about me said no. The stubborn pout on my face; my silence. I did not turn off the light. I forced myself to make trivial conversation just to fill the void, to try to forget what I was doing: because, there I was, taking off my dressing gown, climbing into bed in that clinging nightgown, and there was the man who had just returned, watching my every movement. I did not turn off the light.

  I was panicked. I just wanted to sleep; my face said it firmly. “Leave me alone! Just leave! Go away!” How could I tell him that out loud, how … A wild obsession, and my stiffness under the covers; a fierce desire to go to the children’s room and lie down at the foot of their bed, finding there at least, the only corner where I could let myself go and be protected in sleep … Panic: If he touches me, if he caresses me, even if I act like I’m dead, the Beloved’s name, like a poison flower rooted deep in my waiting, is going to burst out and blossom on my lips. It will happen in spite of me and inevitably at the moment when I come—in the event that I give in out of cowardice!

  I get out of bed and take refuge in the living room, in the dark. My body is shaking. So, I was going to give in to habit. No, but to what? To the husband’s silent searching, his hands, his desire, and as for myself, what horrible compassion was going to take hold of me, what apathetic indulgence would bring me to the point of sinking into his arms, his, the other’s … I shake. In the darkness, in the living room, I am seized with fury: directed at myself (would there be, therefore, some “female” part in me? anonymous and female?). Ah, if only the children were not there, were not quietly sleeping (which isn’t true, the boy is having more and more frequent nightmares), ah, if I were alone with this man who is waiting for me, who thinks I am “his” wife, his lover, who … I am shaken with rage: Break everything! Shatter it all! Here in this apartment—the lamps, the books, the glasses, trash everything together in a pile of ruins, stones, shards! But the children are sleeping. But the boy sighs in his dreams.

  I turn on the light in the living room. The husband, completely dressed all of a sudden, joins me there. He opens a bottle of whiskey, helps himself to a glass, and states unequivocally,

  “Despite the sleeping pills I took, I intend to drink this whiskey I got at the airport right down to the bottom of the bottle … I’m going to drink, but you are going to talk!”

  “I’ll talk,” I say softly, smiling with relief. “That’s all I ask!”

  No use describing the bits and pieces of theater—comedic theater, I thought—that went on almost until dawn …

  How else describe my confessions, those of a late-blooming young girl? (It is true that I was racked by a sort of blank rapture: Finally I could talk about “him,” even faced with the glistening eyes and outraged stare of this listener, this intruder.)

  He finished all the whiskey. He stood up. He struck. The large, wide-open French doors behind us (was he the one who opened them earlier? I don’t know who did) let in something like the impending danger of a breeze that, I thought, was likely to hurl me at the drop of a hat into that ten-story pit … He struck and I could not take refuge in the back of the room, as if the opening called me straight to it; this man who was large and athletic, with his man’s arms would blindly seize me, would fling me so I exploded outside. He struck and I slipped to the floor, an unusually sharp sense of caution on the lookout within me to figure out what was least dangerous.

  First he insulted. Then he struck. Protect my eyes. Because his frenzy was proving to be strange: He intended to blind me.

  “Adulteress,” he muttered, in his hands the whiskey bottle broken in two. All I could think of were my eyes and the danger represented by the too-wide-open window.

  Then I heard him, as if echoing from within a prison cell in which he found himself, in which he wrestled, in which he was trying to keep me. From inside this nightmare space, inside this bodily fear, my eyes closed, and hidden under my arms, under my lifted elbows, under my already bloody hands, I heard and I would almost have answered with a laugh, not a madwoman’s laugh nor one of tearfulness, but the laugh of a woman who was relieved and struggling to free herself. “Adulteress!” he repeated, “Anywhere, except this city of iniquity, you would deserve to be stoned!”

  “Eyes, light,” I sighed two or three days later as I lay there at my parents’ home, my face swollen, my hands in bandages, my body broken.

  The image of man has eyes, but the moon, she has light. I would have liked to be able to repeat this line from Hölderlin in its original German.

  Throughout my convalescence, for seven days, I no longer knew I was in Algiers. No. Rediscovering the old books I used to have at my bedside in this house, I plunged into Sylvie by Gérard de Nerval. I imagined wandering with the poet all over Europe; I fled to the Orient, to Cairo, where I suddenly dreamed of becoming the captive slave that the poet bought in the market, who got in his way so badly!

  6

  BEFORE, AFTER

  BEFORE THIS WAS ALL ERASED, even before the torment of the absen
ce, there was one time when my Beloved confided in me. One time when I found him alone, when we chose to sit on the beach, in the sand.

  He did the talking; I contemplated the vast sky. I studied its drifting, fleecy clouds, whose pink stripes would become streaked with blood before the purple of nightfall. The air was punctuated with short cries: a seagull crossed the azure before vanishing; and not one person walking on the beach. Turning my head halfway, I could just catch sight of two or three of the village women’s colored veils as they left their jobs at the tourist’s hotel to hurry in the direction of their hamlet, behind the hills. Silence floated around us and we would soon be submerged by the night.

  My Beloved spoke—steady streams. Then he stopped. I did not speak up; I did not look at him. The dusk grew redder and redder. The voice of the man confiding in me began again.

  Toward the end, cautiously turning toward him, I must have asked him one or two questions. I remember his profile—the tic like lightning twitching his cheek. It was only later that I thought to myself, with cool astonishment, that he was talking to me and coming alive again at the same time. He told me the story of a former love—he was specific right from the start that “it was five years ago”—but he had only begun to feel its pain in the present. Later, I, too, found his story moving, not because it was infectious, or even out of compassion. No. The disturbance in me came from seeing him taken from me by these recollections to some other place totally foreign to the two of us, sucked back to that other place. So he was there in front of me without being there; I no longer existed for him. He vanished into the shadow of this stranger whom he described without naming; with me present he was once again living with her, and I suffered—not as I listened to him on the beach, but later, in a sort of amazement.