by Assia Djebar
Why, after what happened in the cabaret, do I talk to the grandmother for so long? … The film of what happened that night loops over and over again, as I lie there in full daylight: I am trying to forget the gasps of the old and formidable dying woman—she who did not love me, who preferred the daughter of her only son. I see also, and again, the face of the husband twisted in hatred—suddenly I remember that he is from the city, where married women, even in a harmonious marriage or one, in any case, with no apparent conflict, secretly call any husband “the enemy.” Women speaking among women.
Thus the husband finally returned to the role that for generations he had been assigned by the memory of the city. In his renewed rage, and because I was deliberately turning off the sound, he played the role of enemy even more easily. “My enemy.” I sighed, because enemy of my Beloved.
The young man, the formerly loved, had made an anguished gesture before the enemy standing there; a gesture that meant “screw you!” (Of course, I now grasped it: for him, this threatening husband was in the same category as the major from the mountain village who had slapped Genevieve.) He turned for a moment toward his friend the journalist; then he left.
On the third day I got up. A cold late spring dawn.
The solution obsessing me during my nights of turmoil demanded that its words be heard—French words, bizarrely wrapped in the harsh and passionate voice of the grandmother, the fearsome dead woman: Put up a door between the husband and myself. Now. Forever!
I surprised myself by concluding with a solemn oath: “In the name of God and his Prophet!” These words, in Arabic, were mine and at the same time my grandmother’s (I tell myself that I was spontaneously rediscovering the first Koranic tradition whereby women also repudiated their men!)
I quietly made a suggestion to my little girl, who had not gone to school this morning: “Get dressed and let’s go walk on the beach; would you like that?”
I went out first. Outdoors I saw that I was not wearing enough clothes. I whispered to the child who joined me: “Sweetie, I’m cold! And … I can’t go back to the house.” (I was fervently thinking, The oath is already spoken!)
“I’ll go get you a coat,” she said.
“The white coat! And bring what you need for the day!”
We walked for a long time along the sunny beach, beside a limpid sea. Was I running away, was I setting myself free?
After an hour or so, almost tired, I saw a tourist hotel perched on a hill not far away. In the hallway I asked a boy who recognized me if they could call us a taxi.
The little girl, her face all rosy, was already grinning over this escapade. I gave my old aunt’s address in her noisy working-class neighborhood; I thought especially about her balcony over the city and the scent of old jasmine that hung heavy from morning on.
In the midst of all her hugs and kisses I murmured to my relative, “I’ve come to stay with you for a few days!”
7
THE GOODBYE
THERE IS ALWAYS A GOODBYE, when the story or the stories have too much in them, are woven together with several wefts, are full to bursting with too many dreams, with excess. There is always a goodbye in a true love story. Leaving it to hang among the breezes, under the ample sky of memory.
Yes, there is always a goodbye—but never in a plot with a contorted and disfigured side to it, where its progress is jammed; or in the hyperbole of a deceptively lyrical jealousy, with its swollen hatred; or when the desire for the other is death-dealing, killing the other’s laughter, taking the other’s life. So, frequently, in what is ordinarily called a love story (often only a story of abduction where it is never really decided who is the thief and who is the one taken), the ending is settled by exhaustion, or asphyxiation. There is never the disinterested elegance of an explicit goodbye, or a goodbye blown like a kiss, sent like mercy or a gift.
Long after the day of the siesta that was my salvation, of course, and after the return to my usual lightheartedness, there was a goodbye. I said goodbye. And I smiled tenderly at my Beloved.
I remember leaving a concert of Berber music in Paris. I was standing there, part of a group, with friends. “Where shall we go and dance now?” That is always the way: seeking in vain for someplace to have a party at midnight, some empty apartment, a terrace overlooking the river.
In the crush of people leaving: a man’s face close by. In spite of the crowd’s rush the stranger stops; he is like a dam. I am getting impatient: his eyes are smiling. “You don’t recognize me anymore?”
His voice came to me first. My formerly “beloved,” a year later, I thought, a century. What was different about him, other than his voice? I bumped into his shoulders because of the crowd. We went out together.
“The singer tonight, he’s your best friend … I should have remembered.” And I went on with my banalities: “Do you live here … or are you just passing through?”
He did not answer. He smiled the same smile, studying me almost mischievously. I kept on talking, and talking: “I live here now, did you know that! Some of us live that way, destined to be tethered to two cities all our lives: split between Algiers and Paris …”
The singer, accompanied by several musicians, arrived. Once again there was a crowd. I studied the Beloved—no longer so young. Without a trace of melancholy I noticed that something about him had changed.
The star singer insisted that I join them at the brasserie across the street. The Beloved stood facing me as if he were just some friend passing through, without saying anything. He was waiting.
“Goodbye!” I said, almost merrily.
And I went serenely back home to my place, or really, our place—the place I shared with a poet who loved me.
Subsequently, in other briefer, perhaps denser stories—relationships that were if not passionate, at least based on attraction, games of ups and downs or friendships verging on tenderness, self-reliant, self-protective—there were other goodbyes. Pauses in an inner music, never to be forgotten.
And I think of Julien. Back then, when he was introduced to me for the first time in the southern capital, he bowed, his tall silhouette that of an expatriate Viking: “Julien!” I exclaimed, repeating his first name. “Were your parents Stendhal scholars?”
He was an extremely thoughtful comrade throughout the months I was working with the peasant women of my maternal tribe. Julien wanted to be the photographer in order to accompany us, myself and the ten or so technicians, in our research and my wanderings. So, often I liked to go off with him at dawn. He was always silent as he drove, and we liked “looking at things together.” I would tell the others we were “looking for locations”!
Julien and I worked with the same rhythm and our searches for settings were extremely fruitful. We would return like conspirators with bundles of images between us.
On days of rest, in the inn where just a few of us were lodged, far from the tourist hotels, Julien got up a little before dawn to go with the cook and her children to the nearby sanctuary: It was Friday.
So there was Julien—such affectionate company, so unassuming with me and two or three others around me! … One day when I was in despair—this time it was in Paris—over some rough patch or misunderstanding with others (a male blunder, a proposition whose vulgar haste had struck me dumb at first), one day when finally alone in his car I burst into tears—sitting in the backseat and hiccuping: “Julien, just drive straight ahead! I’ll calm down!” he drove the whole length of the shining black river. Then, dropping me off at the hotel and opening the car door for me, he silently kissed both my hands. I was no longer crying; I went in.
The next day he came back early and said in no uncertain terms that he was going to take me out to eat. It was sunny.
On the Place des Vosges we talked for a long time about the sanctuary where he used to take the cook every Friday. Back home!
Julien who, shortly afterward, fell painfully in love with my closest friend … Julien who, six months later, set out on his t
hird trip to Tibet. A new trail had been opened on the peaks of the Himalayas. He went with two mountain-climbing friends.
“Take care of yourself!” I told him suddenly, finally using the intimate form of address.
Although I was used to seeing him as vigorous and invulnerable, I let myself be gripped by some vague apprehension.
“I’m entrusting you with all the photos I took when we were looking for locations last summer,” he replied.
I kissed him.
That was not yet goodbye.
Two or three weeks later I had a card from him: a photograph he had taken of a young woman seated on the slope of a hill in front of her tumble-down house and playing with her baby, in light that was iridescent … On the other side Julien had written a few lines: In this village where he had studied scenes like this all day long, he thought about me, about the spring before when we had worked, “had looked,” he wrote, so well. And at the end he said: Tomorrow it’s the Himalayas and the new trail. I’m happy. See you later, boss!
That was goodbye. For the first time in our friendship, he used this ironically polite tone with me: “boss.”
It would be a while before I knew that, as I read his card, as I admired the young Tibetan mother he had watched one sunny afternoon, Julien already lay inside an infinity of snow where, three days after writing me, he and his companions were brought by a sudden avalanche. His goodbye? My friend is not dead. He is sleeping beneath the depths of eternal snow. One day I know someone will go to look for his body and will bring it back. Then they can call me finally to contemplate his unchanged beauty, the expatriate Viking, and then, only then will I weep for him.
I remarried.
Feeling young again and free of worry, I rediscovered the streets of Paris.
Each day I would dream, wandering two or three hours daily: alone or paired. The austerity of my material life expressed the relief I felt. Suddenly I went back to writing: what was the shade I sought? Back and forth in what in-between place?
Three or perhaps four years living the carefree life of a couple. At almost forty I was once again twenty years old: sometimes the days stretched out in a kind of purifying vacation and sometimes they were overburdened with work … then this joint rhythm unraveled. Conflicts and unhappiness—or rather, anger. One evening just as night descended, emerging from depression, I rediscovered what might have been the equilibrium of my age: my face hard, I stated unequivocally, “I will not have you in my room anymore!”
But to myself—only to myself—I spoke vehemently: You love to share things, you want to discover things and laugh and die in a couple, so are you not carrying your own prison along with you?
A few months went by. Paris was a desert, but happily I still had my wanderings and all they reaped. And there was also work, making one deaf, deaf and dumb, in the richness of absence.
Once in the middle of the night my husband opened my door, letting the light from the hallway filter in. He quietly slipped in to look for a book on the shelves opposite my bed.
I kept my eyes closed. I was not pretending to be asleep: I felt asleep and conscious at the same time. I heard him come in, take a book, some guidebook or dictionary, then go to leave and shut the door again. He stopped. He came back, close to my low bed placed on a rug from the Aurès Mountains. I felt him right next to me.
Leaning down, he brushed a light kiss across my forehead. Stepped away. Closed the door carefully.
In the total darkness I opened my eyes. The obvious became clear: His last kiss. That is really goodbye!
I fell asleep again rather quickly. A bit later he left the house. He had left it almost lovingly when he imparted what he thought was a secret kiss that night.
The Beloved—really, “the formerly beloved”—and I had yet another encounter. On a vast stage, as if our coming face-to-face were something arranged secretly in advance by a magician.
It was the middle of summer, I think, after the vacationers had all left the city en masse. I can see the esplanade of the new Montparnasse station at the beginning of a rather hot afternoon. Few strollers; the rare tourist; one or two groups of young people sitting on benches or on the ground.
Myself emerging into that space. I was in no rush. I was on my way to my sister’s, not far from there; in short I moved like someone used to being there, at ease. Probably because I was hurrying off to celebrate my nephew’s birthday, I was feeling at home, despite the fact that I was in Paris.
At the far end of the station, leaving it: the silhouette of a traveler, bag in hand or on his shoulder. I myself was heading diagonally toward this isolated shadow clearly outlined against the sunlight.
Almost blinding light this afternoon. Not a sound: none from any bus behind me, none from any crowd—the people were sparsely scattered.
So that summer day I was walking along, strolling unhurriedly, and my heart, I remember, was filled with peace, or, as it so frequently is, gently submerged in the mere joy of existing. Halfway to where I was going I recognized him: It was he, the passionately Beloved, the Beloved, I thought, not “the formerly beloved.” While the man who loved me, to whom I blithely returned every evening, was waiting for me somewhere else in the city.
So I recognized him; and he, changing pace, came quickly to meet me. No visible surprise, either on his part or on mine.
I shook his hand; hesitated before kissing him in a friendly way. He kept hold of my hand for a moment. We looked at each other.
Full of a new affection, I looked at him calmly: his face was heavier; his cheeks were tanned. He had gotten larger; his shoulders seemed wider.
Have two years really gone by? I wondered. In any case, he has become a handsome man!
He told me that he had just returned that very day from a distant country: “A year,” he said, “working in an exchange program abroad—in New Zealand!”
I was somewhat distracted and now I wonder whether he didn’t say Australia instead.
I smiled, my heart quickening again. So, I began my internal dialogue with him, as I had before, using the familiar form of address in my silence—you have been to the ends of the earth and the day you return, I show up at the exit of this Paris station to welcome you back!
I was not surprised. I believed in the miracle of some invisible master of ceremonies summoned to bring us together this final time.
This time I gazed unabashedly at my formerly beloved. Suddenly, then I was aware—unless rather, it was only after I left him that I understood this—that seeing him thus grown into a vigorous and seductive man my heart was filling with love that was really maternal! I felt he was happy and ready, at that moment, to take the time to tell me about his life in Australia … I love him, I said to myself, like a young mother! As if, even though he was far away, I had contributed to transforming him, to bringing him to this mature state!
Consequently my silent love, formerly so hard to control, changed in nature; it was still there within me, still secret, but it no longer had the fragility that had troubled me for so long. The young man stood there before me, radiant in his new beauty.
He asked for my phone number. I wrote it down for him and said something friendly. Then I just said, “We’ll see each other again!”
That was the goodbye. I knew that right away as I walked off.
I go back to those days before the siesta, to those thirteen months. I do not know why I have drained these springs of self, with so many convolutions, in a disorder that is willfully not chronological, when I should have let them wither on the vine, or at least kept their growth in check.
And that man, who was neither foreign to me nor someone inside me, as if I had suddenly given birth to him, almost an adult; me suddenly trembling against his chest, me curled up between his shirt and his skin, me all of me close against the profile of his face tanned by the sun, me his voice vibrant within my neck, me his fingers on my face, me gazed upon by him and immediately afterward going to look at myself to see me through his eyes in the m
irror, trying to catch sight of the face he had just seen, as he saw it, this “me” a stranger and another, becoming me for the first time in that very instant, precisely because of this translation through the vision of the other. He, neither foreign to me nor inside me, but so close, as close as possible to me, without touching me, but still wanting to reach me and taking the risk of touching me, the man became my closest relative, he moved into the primary vacancy laid waste around me by the women of the tribe, from the days of my childhood and before I reached nubility, while I took the first shaky step of my freedom.
Him, the one closest to me; my Beloved.
PART TWO
ERASED IN STONE
“I had buried the alphabet, perhaps. In the depths of I do not know what darkness. Its gravel crunched underfoot. An alphabet that I did not use to think or to write, but to cross borders …”
—CH. DOBZYNSKI
Prologue à Alphabase
1
THE SLAVE IN TUNIS
GOOD OLD THOMAS D’ARCOS! He is more than sixty years old and up to this point has led a rather pleasant life: Born in the somewhat troubled times of 1565 in La Ciotat, near Marseilles, when he is very young, he goes up to Paris, where he becomes secretary to the cardinal de Joyeuse, brother of the favorite of Henry III.
Suddenly, who knows why, he quits high society, returns to his sunny Provence, travels, learns languages, is seized with literary or scholarly ambitions: research on the history of Africa, a project to chronicle Ottoman customs (written in Spanish), as well as commentaries on Turkish and Moorish music. He is full of unmethodical but unflagging curiosity. He seduces women, of course, when he is young, then he straightens up and marries a local beauty in Sardinia. Does he mean to settle down there or in Marseilles, or in Carpentras?