by Assia Djebar
“Go through there,” he said to the mother. “They want to see you first. I don’t know if you will get to see your son! But you can go in …”
Then, confronted by the silhouette of the visitor passing through the second doorway, he suddenly felt vicious and angry.
They took away all of the mother’s packages. “What do you think, that we’d let you bring in delicacies like this, what you call your regional cakes, dates!” But there were more than sixty of them there, including the ten old ones from the most important crackdown in Lorraine (among them Salim, “the student”), and the collective atmosphere was permeated with tension. From here on in, everyone had to be on his guard. Until when? Who knows … It was that Salim who was responsible for the literacy courses. Of course, of course!
Up to that point, as she went down the half-lit corridors, she could hear the two guards in front of her talking to each other. She knew it was about her. She could not be sure of their tone: warning or grudging, perhaps to prepare her for the final refusal! She listened with an empty heart. One single apprehension filled her: to see him, just to see him, God help me and don’t abandon me! Not like last year! And her two guides went on with their chronicle, but their voices were lower: a hum, maybe not so hostile, preceding her.
One last door opened and suddenly there was light, brilliant and intense; it was the warden’s office. The other men vanished, but it was as if some recrimination on the part of everyone, guards, attendants, the janitor, awaited her on the other side.
A man stood there in front of her and examined her. She remained standing, empty-handed, her leather bag hanging from her shoulder. They will give me back my packages when I leave, she thought, not knowing what to do with her hands, and she still did not look at the stranger, just at his office and at this light that she was finally getting used to.
“Have a seat, madame,” said the very polite voice.
She sat immediately in the leather armchair facing the large desk. She waited, her hands resting on her knees. My son … Will he let me …? she agonized, as she now had the warden himself seated facing her.
The warden spoke … She did not hear everything. She tried to understand from his features, his delivery, his tone: Was he going to let her see Salim? Would they agree to it? She peered as if through a fog at the face of this man and she thought of all of them, the crowd of others, other men, an army … Faced with all of them (suddenly, through the open window a sound rose, outbursts of voices, giving brief commands …), she must try to remain dignified, to speak French correctly when she answered, so that they would see that she was perhaps a mother like mothers in “their country,” that …
The warden repeats a question: “Did you come a long way? From Strasbourg?”
She nodded in the affirmative. Not waiting, he went on, not really hostile, she thought, beginning to hope.
“He is young, the youngest one here … He is intelligent and has character, too.”
Silence. Suddenly she thinks she is in a classroom; this man observing her discreetly through his eyeglasses could be one of her husband’s colleagues, the head not of a prison but of a school.
She knows what the conclusion will be just before he says it: “You shall see him! But here, in my office, just this once. Briefly. You have gone to a lot of trouble!”
It is true that she has come a great distance. A sudden weakness comes over her. She turns her head and would like to go to the open window, but dares not move. She breathes to overcome the faintness she begins to feel. Sounds at the door. Three silhouettes: The two guards stand there motionless, with “him” between them. Salim. Long and thin. Thinner than usual. And that strange beret like a plate on top of his head.
He looks at her. Without a word. Turns his head toward the warden. Says nothing. Waits, then hesitates and takes a step in her direction.
She has stood up. Sentences jumble together, rushing around inside her, in her throat. Strangling her. She cannot breathe. Sentences in Arabic.
“I will leave the two of you for fifteen minutes, or a bit longer!” says the warden in a loud voice, then, gesturing pompously but awkwardly, he speaks to Salim: “Embrace your mother!” He starts to add something but thinks better of it. He stands up, makes a sign to the guards. All three leave.
Finally, all at once, the sentences held back inside her, the Arabic words, tender, loving words, come out, burst out. Mixed with choked-back sobs and giggles.
Salim in her arms. He does not give himself over completely, he holds onto himself—and he is surprised (later, in his cell, he will think about it again) at her girlish exuberance. Which is what he had thought at first in the harsh light of the director’s office: So young, my mother, they must have thought that themselves! And even doubted! Later he would say to himself, When she dresses that way, like a Parisian, with gestures that are almost awkward because of her clothes, those short sleeves, the schoolgirl’s collar, all those colors, lilac, rose, fuchsia, she turns into a young girl!
She has calmed down, his mother. And now she is sitting, her serenity regained despite where they are. Maybe because, once alone with him, she had been able to let herself go in words that were Arabic. Which gradually restored her armor and decorum … Her appearance, her tone of voice, right down to the gestures of the traditional North African city-woman (her household gestures, Salim thought gently), they all returned despite the way the French clothes looked, making her brittle, making her beautiful of course, but also exposing her …
She asked him questions: about his meals, how much time he spent in the courtyard, when the doctor visited. (“Since you haven’t grown any more, if you look taller, it is because you have gotten thinner!”) Does he sleep alone in … she says “your room”? He gives a sidelong smile.
“No,” he answers. “There are three of us.”
She asks what region the others are from. Kabylia? “Not from home!” she says.
He corrects her: “The whole country is ‘home’!”
“Of course,” she says, but she would feel less worried if her son, who is so young, were with men who were, if not from his town, at least from the surrounding area, some neighboring town … He is slightly annoyed, slightly ironic. She sees it, apologizes, stops talking, then considers the strange headgear, the beret that is too flat, too round, and flat as a plate.
“Can’t you take it off?”
She laughs: she thinks he looks, not exactly like a bandit or a hoodlum but, really, in the end—a prisoner. She says “prisoner” again in Arabic, then, with a sigh, “Prison!”
She reaches her arm out, hesitates, then, determined, she takes off this headgear, this … She runs her fingers through his short, curly hair.
Salim blinks. He sits down to face her but only when she focuses on his prisoner’s beret. He tells her, in a low voice, in Arabic, “They have left the door open!”
His voice sounds wary. If the director comes in behind him, he shouldn’t find the two of them confiding and talking like this in Arabic. He quickly asks for news of his father and his sisters.
She, in turn, starts talking again, but in French; he notices her careful enunciation, how much progress she has made. She speaks correct French now and almost without an accent! He could tell her this; he knows it would please her, this young mother who has come from so far away. He feels touched, but he says nothing. He smiles with his eyes. He listens to her.
She has launched in; she does not stop.
“Back at the Trois-Épis, I told the man in charge, you know, that I would just take one afternoon a week to go to Strasbourg! Now I have to go see my son in Metz. I need two days! This time and one other!” Then she says in a lower voice, as if it were a secret, some funny, harmless incident, “I added, naturally, ‘My son is a prisoner!’ ” Then she went on, louder and almost gaily, “A political prisoner!”
The warden stood there at the door. Salim stood up at once. His hand quickly replaced the beret on his curly hair.
The mothe
r, who abruptly cut short what she was saying, looked up at her son. He looked now like a stranger again, like a young man wrapped, she felt, in a lack of respectability, some peasantlike and willful clumsiness. This boy, she thought to herself later, who was so stylish and elegant in adolescence—maybe it is the “politics,” or to make himself older, he is trying to look like a “real Arab,” like one of his cousins just barely out of the mountain zaouia!
Her face is twitching with sorrow; she does not notice it. She looks at the warden coming toward them.
Salim says softly in Arabic, “Goodbye, mother.”
He does not even bend toward her to embrace her. He will not embrace her in front of the warden and the guards behind him.
He studies the face of his mother. Clouded with a delicate sadness. He assumes an air of severity: “Be calm!” he seems to say, “in front of them. Them!”
She understands. She is unable to say a word. She does not even smile. The warden says in a voice that means to be understanding: “You have to tell your son goodbye, madame! … you will have to wait for visiting hours next time.”
Salim turns partway around. His mother stands up right next to him: she comes up to his face. He does not look at her. Just a gesture of his hands, touching her lightly on her shoulders. “Goodbye,” he repeats in secret, in Arabic.
Then abruptly he turns his back on her. He goes toward the guards. He disappears.
She, standing, empty arms dangling by her side. The warden sits down, watches her as he had in the beginning: almost the way an ethnologist watches, A Moorish woman? This young woman who is so well dressed? Those are the words he thinks as he stares at her.
She listens carefully to the information about visiting, thanks him, takes a sheet of paper with the schedule on it. She murmurs goodbye.
She shuts the door, follows the two guards who have reappeared so close to her down the gray corridors. The hubbub all around her: Like at the hammam, she thinks, and this persistent odor of dampness, her son stuck here for good! She hardens herself, keeps going at her own pace, goes past the attendant, who hands her back her original packages. She starts to refuse them, then takes them: She will mail them. Of course they will open them, but at least they will give him the underwear. She and her son have agreed that for spending money she will send him a money order; he’ll have it to buy his cigarettes.
She finds herself outside again, takes a few steps into the sunlight at the foot of the high wall; then, finally, a little farther along, like a little girl, she lets her silent tears slowly fall.
She will see nothing of the city; she returns directly to the station. She drinks a cafe au lait and eats a piece of fruitcake at the snack bar while she waits for the next train. It is almost night when she arrives in Strasbourg. And there, in the little hotel room near the station, she finally feels herself collapsing, there, lying on the narrow bed, she hears all over again the stir of the prison.
So she only saw her son for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, and that was after a year and a half of waiting and several months of anxiety. All alone, huddled in the cold bed (she has stomach cramps because she hasn’t eaten, she was not brave enough to go into a restaurant alone so late), she turns out the light—she listens to the hubbub of the prison that follows her and suddenly reassures her. Does it not bring back the moment he was present, my little boy—suddenly she thinks of Salim in those words.
The light is out now, and completely dressed, in the dark, she cries: gently, with stifled sobs, then in gasps that tear at her for a long time, and again in floods of soft tears … The pain does not stop, glows like blood she is losing, or milk … Like sadness going away? No, enveloping her, invading the half-light of the anonymous room, mingling with the hubbub-memory of Metz …
Gasps, sobs that she still tries to hold back. Can’t let go. How long she has been standing up, such a long time, up and standing, and firm! But she is alone and lying down and lost in a strange city. Still no.
“Little boy,” she repeats. Then there is no more Salim, the noise of the prison in Metz has faded and the darkness of the hotel room, and her own goings and comings (the bus, the train, the boat) in this France of theirs, where the prisons are full of her son’s friends … No, everything goes, comes unraveled, recedes, but she cries, the tears flow, the moans now form one long, single, formless howl, and it is such a long sorrow, but one without origins. “My little boy,” she repeats, before sinking into loosely woven sleep where the spaces between the threads grow larger, bending and curving as if on a screen of beige and mauve, of many harmonious nuances intermingling.
She does not understand, she does not want to understand, that she is merely reliving another sorrow from the past, that she is pouring out other women’s tears that have never flowed. She knows it, she will know it, but no, she sinks, soft, weary, completely given over this time to smooth, unruffled sleep carrying her off to the shores of the next day.
Arable Woman II
THE FIRST SHOT: Lila is sleeping. A face with perfect features, a red scarf knotted over her forehead in the traditional manner … The actress, my friend, squatting on the carpet in front of the big copper mirror (brought for this purpose from my mother’s house—it had belonged to my grandmother in Caesarea), had earlier tied the scarf slowly over her forehead to hide her hair.
I took a wide-angle shot as she did so; lit by several candles, her blue-flowered Kabylian dress stood out against the half-light. I watched her gesture from behind—the gesture of all the women in the too-full houses of my childhood, in the midst of their brood, the shrieks, the steam from couscous cooking, and the sighs, my God, the sighs … The gesture of their raised arms to make the scarf as tight as possible across the brow. (“I bind up my head, I bind up my misfortune!” No use speaking. When one is out of patience, tightening this red cloth is like clenching one’s teeth.)
Now Lila sleeps in the bed, watched by Ali, her husband, who will try to get out of his wheelchair on crutches, will try to make it over the steps at the threshold, will fall back down into his chair …
The point of view has changed. At the other end of the room, the camera is now the voyeur following the man as he stands up at this impossible threshold. An actor from the theater, he mimes the muscular effort, he hoists himself, he rests his head on the cold doorframe, he … I tell him to fall back into his chair. And we do several takes: the first fall, the second …
Gradually I begin to come closer and closer to Ali’s body to direct his fall. Yes, with his crutch he has to feel for the best spot to support himself as he gets up … Yes, let him be figuring out where he will balance best as he tries to stand upright. In fact it is not with one’s features that suffering is expressed, but always with subtle movements of the shoulder, the torso, the way one holds one’s head. The actor who plays Ali is patient, I want to have all the patience in the world, as together we discover the way to map these gestures hidden in shadows.
Before this working dialogue begins, I am aware, as I reflect for a moment, that I am directing silently and humbly; I am happy to be working with a natural actor, and I direct him by being an accomplice.
Yes, for a moment, noticing this, I am happy and regal. I have a calm power that comes from my sense of being forty (the age when every day one lives all the ages; the age of political majority, according to the Romans; the age for verbal prophecy, thought the Arabs; and for me, as it happened, the age when I entered into filmmaking, “realizing” through image and sound). I “direct,” therefore the way that, in bed, I would show the motions of love to someone, whose inexperience I would pardon, happy to lead him because I feel secure in the kingdom of fluidity. What strange work, what peace!
All the technicians are on the set. The generators that power the projectors deafen us with their constant rumbling. Silence inside me. I seem cold, neutral; just barely friendly. In any case, the others think of me as an “intellectual.” I know they are disoriented, of course, because for the first time a woman is “
boss.”
But that is not where the distance between them and me lies. There is no one here who suspects that, after the months of preparation as I thought about this work, now, at the moment of “filming”—that is, of creating some new space—I am working as a woman. My quest is immersed in my physical rhythm, and listens to my ever more subtle sensations. What does “filming” mean for me if not trying to look every time with the first look, listen with the first listening? “Filming”: that is, first closing the eyes to hear better in the dark, and then opening them again only for the flickering instant of birth.
Two or three months before starting this work, I heard the news of Pasolini’s death on the radio. I was getting ready for a voluptuous siesta one Sunday afternoon after an excursion into the Sahel of Algiers along the blue-gray November roads. Pasolini dead. Instantly this bed was a place of confinement.
Ax stroke in my personal history (admittedly, the previous few months had been lived in conjugal blur … No! I thought to myself, if only the man I loved so much, who loved me so much, had made some gesture, a word, an impulse: Yes, Pasolini is dead and I am going to love you,—if he had kissed my eyelids as he murmured, Yes, Pasolini is dead. Grief-stricken, I told myself again, Good Lord, even couples have brotherly shadows, or else, what is the use? We would just see ourselves turn into the two sides of an oyster that closes! No, not my personal history! Never again the dream that lets its light drain away.
It may seem ridiculous that an Arab woman, one in love and loved too long—alas beloved and cursed with loving—one day decides, No, I will no longer make love this way because I have just learned that Pasolini was murdered! I do not care, they can make fun, you can make fun of me and say, “An Italian homosexual filmmaker has been murdered and you think you have somehow been the one hit …” I went on: Because they are going to rush to spit on his corpse: they killed him and they will aim to smear him. The fine moral order spreading its display all over the world! …