So Vast the Prison

by Assia Djebar

  That is how it was. From that moment on I wanted one way or another to break the glass panes behind which I had too long been coiled.

  Why Pasolini? That is how it was, there is no more to it than that … I, an Arab woman, writing classical Arabic poorly, loving and suffering in my mother’s dialect, knowing that I have to recapture the deep song strangled in the throat of my people, finding it again with images, with the murmur beneath images, I tell myself henceforth, I am beginning (or I am ending) because in a bed where I was preparing for love, I felt—twenty-four hours later and with the whole Mediterranean Sea between us—the death of Pasolini like a scream, an open-ended scream.

  I also remember how, ten months later, my mother wept over the death of an Andalusian singer who was popular in Algiers: Dahmane Ben Achour. It was the twenty-seventh day of Ramadan. As the news was announced on the radio, a few minutes before the breaking of the fast, she simply wept, sitting up straight at the table, and we ate our dinner in the silence … I knew then, because of my mother’s long pedigree, that an artist does not die, not on the day of his death. Afterward, perhaps, after the mud and violence of others … My mother wept while the others broke the fast. And I wanted to hold on to the tears of my suddenly younger mother. I wanted to delve into the song … but how, with what unreal choreography: images of women’s bodies floating across patios, in the air trembling between marble statues, with the modulations of the baritone voice of the man who had just died!

  I am really moving toward the work of image and sound. My eyes closed, I grope in the dark, seeking the lost echo of the lamentations that made tears of love flow, back at home. I seek this rhythm in my head … Only afterward will I try to take the gaze inward, see the essence, the structures, what takes flight beneath matter.

  SECOND MOVEMENT:

  OF THE GRANDMOTHER AS

  A YOUNG BRIDE

  OF THE GRANDMOTHER as a young bride: At fourteen she is given in marriage by her father—who was scarcely more than forty—to an old man, the city’s wealthiest man, and she becomes his fourth wife … Was she a little girl? Not at all. For four years she has been nubile. She lived up in the mountain hamlet near the most ancient sanctuary in the region, the one honoring Saint Ahmed or Saint Abdallah, the most firmly entrenched saint in local history. Her father is his descendent and is therefore the mokkadem, the man whose religious baraka is respected and who administers it naturally, petty nobility of the region, proud, stubborn, and calculating. Coming down into the city from her hamlet, she is proud as can be to be wearing the veil worn by city-women of the day, the veil that swallows up shoulders, bust, hips, on a body already wearing wide, puffed–out pants, obliterating the outline of the legs, the ones they call the “going-out sarouel.“ Wool on wool, the wide pleats that slowly fall and that take so long to prepare just before one goes out across the thresholds: wool on wool, even in summer. Silk and moiré will only replace rough and opaque wool twenty or thirty years later, at the end of the First World War!

  So the little girl Fatima is like a normal adolescent as she comes to the city. It is 1896 and barely fifty years since the little city (called Caesarea, because it was formerly “Caesar’s city,” destroyed and brought back to life several times) became French, with a community of colonists from Provence and a small population of fishermen from Malta who live separately and are just barely beginning to put down roots. Ferhani, her father, has property, sharecroppers on the nearby hills, but a rather ordinary house in the ancient heart of the Arab quarter, sheltered by the ancient wall around it. He does not live there, except when he comes down on market day and spends just one night in the city. It makes him unhappy not to have a home in the city that is worthy of his rank. The people there (so many of them upstarts in these oppressive times) have absolutely no idea that up in the hills—that is, throughout the Dahra all the way to Miliana in the south and Ténès in the west—anyone who knows anything (naturally not the vagabonds and starving people wandering more and more along the roads, alas) recognizes him as the son of his father and of his father’s father and so on all the way back to the thirteenth-century saint, Ahmed or Abdallah! Consequently they kiss his hand; consequently they pay him rent when they come to the cradle of the family at the zaouia. As for Fatima, even as a young girl she had inherited a bit of her father’s pride, a less ostentatious version: timidity mixed with aloofness.

  So Ferhani gave his second daughter, who was just fourteen, to an old man who was …

  “Sixty-two?” I asked.

  “Oh no,” my aunt replied. “They said he was a hundred!”

  “No,” I retort. “That’s not possible! And besides, would he have married again?”

  The aunt insists.

  “Soliman’s grandsons already had beards! They say he had just lost his third wife, whom he had married very young, a virgin from a modest family who was fifteen or sixteen while he was already more than sixty-five, I’m sure of it! At that third marriage his oldest sons had already sulked, especially the first one, who was a highly regarded man of law in another city, Koléa, I think. And Soliman had been prudent this time in not requesting the daughter of a family of notables, but one from modest people who must have felt themselves honored all the same! …

  “Well, this wife had given him four or five more children, three of whom were living. She died suddenly, giving birth once again, this time to a premature child, who took his first breaths of air, that blessing from God, and moaned once, then a second time, and was silent forever. And the unfortunate woman suffered for a whole day, despite the expertise of the old midwife, losing almost all her blood.

  “Scarcely was the burial over when apparently old Soliman went into his bedroom—the most beautiful one, on the main floor and open to the west, and he wept there—great, long sobs … His daughters-in-law, or at least the second one, the one who dared speak in his presence and sometimes stood up to him, and therefore was his favorite, came to him and chided him: ‘Lean on God’s mercy, rely on his patience! Don’t despair and don’t weep so for the poor orphans! They have brothers and sisters who are men and women! They can count on them. I myself promise that if you wish I will suckle the youngest. I will be a mother for him! …’

  “She had a big heart, this Halima, and thought to console him this way. But Soliman had always spoken his mind, and now that he was older, this habit was even more pronounced, and do you know what his reply was?

  ‘It is not for the orphans that I am weeping. No! They are little and know nothing about life! But I, I, am I going to end my life all alone?’

  “In short, you see, ten years after people thought he was too old to marry a virgin, he was complaining. He was afraid of how cold his bed would be! He wanted a woman …”

  My aunt sighs, gets up to serve the tea, then, after a thoughtful silence she goes on, her head bent into the all-absorbing past: “Of course, one could imagine that being so old (eighty, or a hundred, tell me, what is the difference?), he would at least be looking for a widow, a lady unable to have children anymore, just because his bed is cold every night and also, as they say at home, “so she can carry him,” him and his old bones! That could have seemed normal. Aren’t men after all, and especially when they get older, big egotistical children!” Suddenly she briskly recovered: “Except, may Allah forgive me, our Prophet so sweet to our heart. He and the Mourashidien, the four well-guided imams, especially Sid Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, his cousin, and—” her pious murmur became lost in a long list that her tears made incomprehensible.

  “Soliman,” she went on, calmer now. “Think especially how this would have affected his sons—there were at least ten of them alone—and his daughters, at least five or six, two of whom, the widow and the one who was repudiated, had returned to their father’s house! Not only did the old man not die (and you must not forget that he was a tough businessman, who looked after his own interests, with his heirs even more than with strangers) but he got married for the fourth time, with your gran
dmother, who was so young!”

  “Explain to me, Lalla, how the girl’s father—this Ferhani, this forty-year-old who was, you say, a mokkadem, makes the decision to give his daughter, who was so very young, to a man who could be older than his own father!”

  “It’s true.” She sighs. “If old Soliman had not had so many sons, you might think that the father, Ferhani, had reasoned that if his daughter were widowed young, he would stand to gain something himself. But in this case he knew very well that he would get very little. And besides, Fatima, who did in fact become a widow after three years of being there in the big house, had only a daughter and not a son!”

  The aunt hesitates for just a moment; she stops, gets her breath, and then starts in again, this time speaking more dispassionately: “I must say, though—why should I hide this from you, after all, he is my maternal grandfather, even if I did not know him—that this father Ferhani had a reputation for being greedy.”

  My mind went elsewhere: I was having absolutely no success at imagining this grandparent now emerging for me from the darkness. In my childhood the only genealogy that had counted for me, through my mother’s father, who was therefore my grandmother’s third husband, had been that of this third husband. The important genealogy had been only through the father of the father of the mother, and going back, only the fathers of the preceding fathers, as if one single branch had been glorious, prestigious, heroic. Perhaps that was simply because it was the only one recorded in writing! Yet now my grandmother’s father was making an appearance, an unexpected figure, in what my aunt was saying.

  “When the father Ferhani gave his daughter in this manner, he in turn asked old Soliman for his own daughter, and obtained her, the most beloved Amna, daughter of Soliman’s second wife. She was a beauty who was twenty years old, of course, but above all she was also very wealthy through her mother—the only daughter of a caïd. This young woman was nicknamed the Golden Woman, and she had been widowed recently. A widow and with no children! So that was what had really happened: Old Soliman agreed to give the beautiful Amna to Ferhani, who, though already married, with several children, was, in short, remarrying this time for pleasure and for esteem. At the same time that he sacrificed his little girl, he became the son-in-law of the wealthy Soliman and found himself the father-in-law of the old man as well! I don’t know how they thought up this exchange. Perhaps Ferhani was the initiator of it after hearing the women talk at such length about how the old man pitied himself rather than his youngest children, who were now motherless! Probably Ferhani was already ogling Amna’s beauty and surely her wealth. In any case, at first the barter between the two men was almost secret, but shortly before your grandmother’s wedding, the town gossips discussed every detail on the terraces and in the far corners of courtyards. Yet no one became indignant. They let the little fourteen-year-old girl be carried off to spend her wedding night in the arms of the man …” The aunt hesitated, then added bluntly, “In the cold arms of a near-corpse!”

  Suddenly, decades and decades later, she seemed to be suffering in Fatima’s place as the virgin began her wedding night. Listening to my aunt chronicling the past, I felt fascinated—but also offended—I do not know why, by this more than sixty-year-old woman who was talking about her mother, dead now for fifteen years. She was delving three-quarters of a century back into her mother’s life to become, instead of a tender and bitter daughter, just one woman facing up to another woman and attempting to live through the stings and nettles in her place, to relive the ordeals of this first destiny!

  Once alone, near the balcony where the aunt takes such good care of her slender but profusely blooming jasmines, I try to imagine Fatima’s entrance into the house in Caesarea that I know so well: the most magnificent Arab residence in the city.

  In 1896, when the nuptial procession arrives (barouches and people on foot, the bride entirely swallowed up beneath her father’s flowing woolen cloak, riding on the ceremonial mule, and the line of women and children bearing candelabras, a group of black musicians walking ahead of them and keeping rhythm with their cymbals to the mournful songs, then the crowd proceeding down the very narrow streets next to the Roman theater, whose ruins had recently been excavated), Fatima descends from her mount and is carried to the first vestibule. From there she is led slowly to the main floor into the jostling crowd filling the marble and mosaic staircase—all the way to Soliman’s chamber of honor. It was a summer day, or rather night, in the last century; and yet now I myself hear the pounding heart of the mokkadem‘s daughter. She sees nothing of the women and children of the house where she is going to live. She knows she is going to sit in state (they close the shutters made of priceless cedar on the door, they give her a cup of lemonade to drink, they sprinkle perfumes from Mecca over her, an old woman intones a very shrill litany). Yes, she will live there as the mistress, as the infanta, in Caesarea’s richest dwelling.

  She will be able to look around tomorrow—or rather, not until after the seven days of interminable protocol. She will examine the banisters with their columns and arches crimped with copper, running all around the galleries of the main floor that overlook the patio below with its basin, and its floor tiled in turquoise blue and sea green. She will go down. In the reflection of the basin she will contemplate the overturned sky of the city. She will climb up to the terraces at dusk or early at night when the moon is full. From there she and the young girls of the family will spy on the neighboring terraces; she will try her hand at the game women play where messages are mimed just with moving fingers, or their bare forearms. She had already been told about this wordless language in her mountain zaouia. Apparently it is unique to the city-women, a language that, according to some, was supposed to have been brought from Andalusia, so that now the baker’s daughter, Aouicha, who is simple-minded and mute, easily understood it and participated with sudden bursts of laughter in the nocturnal conversation floating in the sky from roof to roof among the women thus set free …

  Yes, under her wedding veil, her hands and feet brilliantly stained with henna, her face wearing the traditional makeup with sequins glued between her eyebrows and the glistening triangles on the top of her cheekbones, yes, Fatima, her eyes downcast, expects that in a moment the “prince” will enter! Fatima imagines the whole heart, the whole body of the house, a sort of small palace, where, as mistress of the premises she is supposed to reign starting tomorrow … She knows that it is Soliman, her husband, who oversaw its entire construction a long long time ago, providing lodging for the best craftsmen in the country. He had marble brought from Italy, crockery from Morocco, maybe even from Holland. Then he inaugurated this house when he celebrated his second marriage and went on to celebrate his third there as well … Little Fatima suddenly felt how little she was, how isolated: her mother did not come, stayed behind in the hills to weep. But her proud, rough aunts, with their countrywomen’s tawny scarves are there, coldly studying the copper and marble, all this luxury, and trying not to seem impressed. The crowd of women speed up their excited, spasmodic moaning: ululu.

  Is the prince going to come in? Is the bridegroom going to lift the curtain? Fatima begins—even though the old woman guarding her as if she were an idol squats there on the threshold, keeping an eye on her (or at least on the small, silk veil half masking the girl’s face)—she begins to hope. Like so many young girl brides, she hopes, not daring to hope, that the “bride thief” will intervene. He is the one who will come in, the Adonis. Invisible to all the other women, he will slip in. He is the one who will lift the gauze veiling her face, will brush her lips, will reach out his fingers to make her stand up, and all of a sudden, two ghosts, they will float out to the vestibule where they will easily find the stairway to the terrace. They will take refuge there: facing the whole city and its port and the sea in the distance, its reflected glints of onyx.

  Motionless, Fatima is dreaming when the curtain is raised. Her old guardian’s voice intones the conventional good wishes: “May happine
ss be upon you, O Soliman!”

  And taking in her hand his generous contribution, she slips outside, letting the curtain fall as the two cedar panels close softly behind it. Fatima feels her heart stop, her body suddenly grow cold. She keeps her eyes cast down when the man—her master—raises the light veil with his fingers and brings his gray face close to the young bride’s eyes … His hand gropes, brushes Fatima’s cheekbones, her eyes, and slowly, finally, she looks at him.

  Humbly, Soliman murmurs in a voice full of emotion, “A gift from God, my daughter! From God!”

  Then, as is customary, he goes to the corner of the long room to begin his prayer: trembling, praying that God grant him the potency, the power—he repeats the word at the end of his invocation—“the power to enjoy the gifts of God!”

  On my aunt’s balcony, beneath the jasmine and not quite a century later, I wonder if the old man in his seventies was able to deflower the virgin that first night. There is no doubt that was what everyone wanted to know the next day: the women of the extended family, young and old, and the waiting heirs: the sons, the sons’ sons, the sons-in-law, the brothers-in-law … In the morning Soliman was the first to enter his private hammam: “For ablutions,” he said, his head held high and looking proud.

  Did some mystery remain at the end of this wedding celebration: Was the old man “potent” from the first night on or only after several nights of effort? By spying on the bride, the women were unable to guess, as they usually could, whether her face radiated some secret contentment, some passive or serene acceptance, or bitterness not properly kept in control … The fourth wife seemed so young, and, it must be said, so reserved, whereas the daughters-in-law and the daughters all knew that this daughter of the mokkadem of Saint Ahmed, or Abdallah, grew up in the country, free no doubt, and cherished and laughing … The day after her wedding she stood up straight and mysterious, neither bitter nor beaming with fulfillment: nor was she closed and withdrawn; she put on no airs; she concealed nothing. There, confronted with so many matrons, and heiresses, and wives of heirs, was she already facing up to the future days of mute rivalry, spying, and complicity? No. She remained the mokkadem‘s daughter, calmly accustomed to the homage of peasant men and women in her hamlet up there, thanks to the baraka entrusted to her as well.