by Assia Djebar
In fact, after less than three weeks of convalescence, I found it comforting to have only one struggle to face from then on: the fight over my possession by the other, the Beloved I mean. My passion was again looking for a chance to quickly take over the void that had settled into my life. Would this, then, be the final struggle or, on the contrary, the prelude to a likely and licit surrender? For me these were the only important questions. I could not keep my mind on any others.
But then, on the other side of the table, there was the husband from whom I was separating (I was considering the formalities of divorce—I even told him, “So that it will go faster, and since the law is on your side, well, then just repudiate me! The important thing is to straighten it all out as quickly as possible!”). This man who was pleading with me spoke from the other side of a gaping rift.
At the most, in a final weak moment, I should have thought of this gulf between us with nostalgia: “fate,” I later would say, “time” alone caused it!
And all of a sudden …
All of a sudden I listened to him—this man who, a moment earlier seemed almost irreversibly a stranger.
He was talking about his day today: in his old parents’ small town. In the morning his father, an imam of the hanéfite rites—rarely practiced in the region—had expounded a long moral discourse: recommendations of justice and fairness. With no beating around the bush he had, in the presence of his son, spoken of his daughter-in-law’s “qualities as a woman,” the confidence he had in her feminine lineage. “What is essential,” he said—it was one of his leitmotivs—“is what affects the education of the children and the future of the couple,” and so on. I, of course was his daughter-in-law, and “my feminine pedigree” had been carefully examined at the beginning of our union. We had found it amusing in those days. So he was harking back to something said earlier, that was all—not offering advice or suggesting direct intervention in his son’s present life. He then returned to his little old mosque in the old city. It was a Friday.
“And the upshot,” said the son of this stern imam, “was that I had a great urge to take the baths!”
He had then asked his mother to prepare his linens for him. He had hurried to the baths “as if before a feast day,” he added in an eager voice. I tried not to look at him but to pay attention and listen carefully.
He described how he had gone into the warm room, how he had tended to his body, how he had asked the most experienced masseur for the longest massage. He even added—remember, our son was now gone and we were alone—that he had wanted to have all the hair removed from his entire body, that he had perfumed himself with musk and jasmine, that he had rested there for half an hour, enough time to sweat abundantly, and then he had dressed himself in the cold room.
He had gone home in a taxi. His mother had, as usual, fixed him the sugared beignets that he loved; there were pomegranates, some of them with the seeds plucked out, others simply parted, awaiting him on the low table. It was five in the afternoon. One of his sisters, married and living in the city, had just arrived; she had taken off her veils intending to make herself comfortable beside him.
He stayed there barely long enough to drink the coffee that had been prepared and inquire after his sister’s children and husband, but did not sit down. His mother was praying in the back room when he left.
He could not wait, he said. He decided to return to the capital and ordered his son, who was playing in the courtyard with the neighbors’ children, to accompany him.
He drove very fast, too fast, and in an hour the car had swallowed up the miles.
When he left the baths, he said in conclusion, he felt sure he could convince me—to return to our life together, to speak no more of the past. To start all over again, like a young couple! … Had he not gone to the baths in preparation for our next night, a new wedding night?
Finally I looked at him: I faced up to his passion, his eyes of desire, the trembling of his fingers.
This, then, is how he loved me, or simply desired me. This, then, is how he came alive again, in my presence.
But for my part? … Verging on somewhat fearful respect, I had listened to his story. I almost envied him for having experienced this fever, for hoping this way. I would have liked to be in his place: deciding, as he did, to go to the baths, plunging myself into the mists of the steam room, burning myself in the heat and the cold, shivering, removing all the hair from my body, my naked body smudged with the greenish mud, then returned to its translucent ivory. Then I would have liked to perfume all the hollows and joints before receiving the blessings of the bathers at the first door, I would have liked to wrap myself in any number of towels at the second door, entwining my hair with garlands of jasmine and roses at the third door, dressing myself and brushing my hair, my cheekbones pink and head enturbaned with sequined taffeta to cross the last threshold! I, too, would have liked to be welcomed home by oranges, half-opened pomegranates, and steaming tea for everyone on a low table. I would have liked, after these long hours of relaxation for my body and muscles, to fall asleep, without speaking, with caresses, in the arms of my Beloved.
The arms of my Beloved, of course!
And I lowered my eyes there before the husband. I heard myself say then, “Yes. I’ll come back!” He did not move. I still did not fix my eyes upon him; I went on:
“Not tonight, however! I have to tell my parents! And make them understand. I will join you tomorrow with my daughter on one condition—that we not return to the apartment for a long time but live in your house at the seashore.”
He accompanied me to my parents’ house, and when we reached it, his face was bright and he wanted to embrace me. I surrendered my hands, my shoulders, my closed eyes to him.
Silently, without saying anything to him, and because once again I could not understand my decision at all (what contagion from his fever was I seeking?), I asked him for forgiveness.
And thus I returned to prison.
Long winter weeks, or spring beginning but too cold. The children would be off early with the chauffeur to the distant city while I stayed idly at home—usually stretched out on a mattress on the floor of my little girl’s room (as if to tell the truth that I was once again merely a guest passing through!). It fascinated me to contemplate the gray sky; belatedly I realized that I had unintentionally become my Beloved’s neighbor again, that I shared this sky with him closely enough to be aroused by the proximity, that he knew none of this but that I knew it for both of us. That I was snared again like a bird in a net but that it gave me a feeling like euphoria … This is how I would conquer the time, and the absurdity of the situation into which I had once again fallen, waiting for what? Fording what? Across to where? To what unknown? The stillness of my days seemed deceptive; to aggravate the point even further, I sent word to the university that I was ill. Besides, was I not really ill? Or rather “quarantined”—I was coming to understand myself as a “quarantined woman,” the way wives who were repudiated and yet not freed formerly were in Kabyle villages!
One night scene from this period stands out, luminous and dreamlike, a still scene whose sound, for no reason, I had cut off—leaving wide-open mouths in the masks of the protagonists, amplifying their passionate gestures, emphasizing the silent density of their angry gaze.
First a burst of temper. Rage from the husband, whom I had finally agreed to go out with one night, to one of the dance halls where a few young, amateur musicians performed in the off season.
I agreed, but I grumbled: “If there is music I like and the band is not too loud, I am going to dance! I’ll dance as I please! … Too bad,” I announced, confronting the look of impotent annoyance he shot in my direction, “too bad if the others think that because I’m the ‘wife of the director,’ I shouldn’t make a spectacle of myself or dance. As for you,” I went on to add, “now you know the despair and fire that I keep buried and silent within me! If the music pleases me, how can I not seek to give my body, at least, some relief?�
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I dressed. I kept on my jeans from the morning; I put on a loose-fitting blouse of gauze or silk, and I took a big scarf in case the night was cold.
I went out with my husband. The only time during this period after what had happened. The only night.
A scene from a bad dream, frozen in a wan light.
A scene from a melodrama whose sound I cut deliberately.
The Beloved, practically back from the dead, actually reappeared in this night space, into the depths of boundless despair I was struggling to bear, believing this to be my fate—this raw pain, this expectancy opening onto nothing, opening onto the impasse of this life I had chosen for myself.
He turned up in that cabaret.
I was dancing alone. The dance floor was rather small, the band a student quintet. I was smiling at the trumpeter.
Not many clients this weeknight. The cabaret manager and two or three of his assistants quickly focused their attention on my husband. As much for the sake of avoiding this party as because I was happy to see that the place looked almost deserted, I decided to dance. Only the musicians existed, only the trumpet solo whose flow would carry me along.
I paid no attention either to the first group or to the second when they came through the rear doors. I was still dancing when I heard a diffuse murmur swell and spread. One of the musicians signaled unobtrusively to me; I turned to look toward the far end of the room.
My husband was standing surrounded by his four companions; facing them was the trio composed of my three summer friends. I was completing a dance figure when it slowly dawned on me that the Beloved—whom I had not seen for three or four months—was there, very present! No doubt he had glanced at the dance floor and lingered for a second to see me move (as he had in the height of summer, that first night when Leo came). No doubt.
Loud voices in the back. I had stopped; I took one step, then two. I cannot remember what came next. Except what was at the bottom of it all. Except the moment of open rupture.
My husband: his mask of rage. He seemed to have spoken out loud … For me his mask was silent. A gesture. The mask: eyes huge and almost bloody. Then an arm shot out, a hand: to strike or curse. The mask is upright, very tall. The faces around are stunned, frozen or sucked into a kind of vertigo, a great, unexpected blast.
My gaze settled upon “him”: his silhouette, his body, a collection of vertical lines but on an angle, a poplar on the verge of bending to the storm, just before bowing, before breaking, just before.
Then I looked straight at his back. I mean the back of the man who occupied my soul, who for months and months had been clawing at my heart. A fleeing back.
And I, petrified, defeated. What shame! How could I ever have been attracted that way to someone whose back I am seeing now? Because he is running away, is it possible? Because he is leaving, he is afraid, can this be true?
I looked at his back. Then I turned to look at the other. Only then, behind me, did the trumpeter suddenly stop his melody. He alone had accompanied me in this desert, he alone tacitly asked, “When, now, will you ever have the heart to dance?”
And so I continued to see this back after it had vanished. Inside me a colorless voice: I loved a child, an adolescent, a young brother, a cousin, not a man. I did not know it yet. The voice spun out clear and hard; it did not speak in French or Arabic or Berber but in some language from the hereafter spoken by women who had vanished before me and into me. The voice of my grandmother who died a week after independence and who vehemently addressed me from the depths of my raging, my astonishment:
He did not face up, the voice went on, not even for me! He could have turned toward me. Faced with my husband seeking out his ridiculous duel, I would have made a lightning decision: I would have gone to you, you, Beloved of my heart, I would have gone toward your hesitation and even your fear, in front of everyone I would have held out my hand to you. “Let’s go! Let’s leave!” I would have said without question.
And he, the young man who was not quite a man, would have found the courage. Past the shrieking and the insults and the silence of others, we would have left.
My husband, his face full of hatred, would have stepped forward of course. He would have wanted to strike. He would have struck: he, who was larger, more athletic, more threatening than you the fragile, high-strung, sharp one, you next to me, myself trembling but steady, my husband more threatening than both of us together—but us together! … He would have hit the young man; he would have spared me, tried to pull me by the hand to put me back in the cage.
Myself with the loser. Resolute. Myself going away with the man being beaten by my husband and the other men.
An hour later I collapsed in my daughter’s room. Onto the mattress on the floor. Alone. I was not leaving this place anymore. One day, maybe two, I lay there. I was staring at my Beloved’s back before me—and because I had seen his back, I said to myself he was “my formerly Beloved.”
At the time I was still my grandmother’s grandchild—though she had been dead for fifteen years.
“What is a man?” her harsh and, toward the end, somewhat sepulchral voice used to exclaim, her hoarseness caused by occasional fits of coughing. The women of the town, the young girls and the little ones, used to wait for her pulse and breath to become regular again. Lying there on her sick bed, later her deathbed, she breathed with a death rattle that would become freer toward the end. She would fix her gaze on us one after the other, and, with unspeakable bitterness but also undeniable pride—as if, throughout the eventful journey of her life, she and she alone in our ancient city had had the rare privilege of having married, after all, “only men”—she would say it again: “What is a man?” Then, a ragged breath would tear through her that was even worse than her spasmodic coughing and she would say, “A man is someone whose back one does not see!” Then she would repeat it, staring especially at the granddaughters whose wedding day she would never see—“Someone,” she went on more specifically, “whose back the enemy never sees!”
Thus, at the age of forty, lying there like a vulnerable and shamefully enamored adolescent, I could not stop hearing my grandmother gasping for breath before me, stubbornly harassing me, fifteen years later. Maybe it is fate, maybe on this earth we women who know “what a man should be” have to bear this as our curse: We are no longer able to find any men!
She spoke to me. She said “we” because she continued to carry on within me. Because she was living through my defeat. As for myself, I was trying to free myself from her. I was no longer seeking liberation from the husband with his melodramatic mask, but trying to get away from the virile grandmother, away, at least, from this bitter, virile woman, and I wanted to retort, You speak of “our present lot, no longer being able to find any men! No longer having anything to do with men!” … But as for me, that is not my problem: myself, I love. I love and I did not think that I was guilty; I thought I was sick. Not at all because there was the husband from whom I had to distance myself, from whom in fact I discovered that I had long been distant. No, I thought that I loved and that it was itself a strange illness! He was so young, at least he was younger than me, a sort of young brother or cousin from my maternal line whom I discovered too late … And yet he is the one, in an awful moment, my Beloved (silently: my Beloved) whose back I saw!
I am trying, because of you, thanks to you, to get out of this mess, and at the same time perhaps to free myself from the spell of my obsession. Help me, grandmother, but not with your bitterness or harshness. No! Speak to me, confess the passions you felt as a young girl, your emotions: Was it the second husband, or the third, my grandfather, whom you loved every night? … My grandfather, I have always known, never showed his back to anyone, either in battle or in any sort of confrontation—only the murderer saw his back when he shot him from behind the day the grandfather invited him into his orchard and served him with his own hands each dish, receiving him as a guest at his meal. My forty-year-old grandfather’s back, in the orchard:
the murderer took dead aim, then disappeared forever.
Who is the murderer for me? Shooting my silent passion, my hope, in the back? Today is it my own eyes that cannot stop seeing the young man, not quite a man, run away?
If it is not from your bitterness, then, is it from this languishing after him, O grandmother, that I must recover, you whose face lies deep in the earth, there where someday I hope to meet you again? … (Even though, in fact, I am desperately seeking the lover, to make love night after night beside him, but above all, when all is said and done, seeking to die beside him, before or after him, to meet him again in the earth, to lie within him for eternity.) O grandmother, whose face is buried in the earth, most likely I shall meet you again for want of this final love, this passion to the point of death that I seek. Because there is no Isolde in Islam, because there is only sexual ecstasy in the instant, in the ephemeral present, because Muslim death, no matter what they say, is masculine. Because to die, like my grandmother and like so many other women who know instinctively, through their struggles and torments, what is a man, one “whose back one never sees,” is to die like a man. In Islam all these women, the only ones who are alive right up to the moment they die—in a monotonous transmutation that I am beginning to regret grievously—the dead women become men!
In this sense death, in Islam, is masculine. In this sense, love, because it is only celebrated in sensual delights, disappears as soon as the first steps of heralded death are danced. This first approach to the sakina, that is to full and pure serenity, is feminine moreover. But after this introduction, which is light as a woman’s breath, death seizes the living, living men and women, to plunge them as equals—and suddenly all of them masculine—into the abysses inhabited by souls “obedient to God.”
Yes, of course, O grandmother, Muslim death is masculine. But then, as for myself, I want still to be loving with my last sigh; yes, I want to feel, even when borne off on the shoulders of funerary bearers, on that plank, I want to feel myself going toward the other, I want still to love the other in my decay and my ashes. I want to sleep, I want to die in the arms of the other, the other corpse who will go before me or who will follow me, who will welcome me. I want.