So Vast the Prison

by Assia Djebar

  Did she almost think of herself as old Soliman’s daughter, or granddaughter? Did he, as the gossips imagined, all night long caress her naked body, the blossoms of her breasts, the face she offered? She said nothing. She confessed nothing. Nor did she seem to regret anything either.

  Even after the next day in the hammam, when she would only tolerate bathing with her young aunt and her younger sister, she did not listen to the murmurs afterward as the wedding sheet, spattered with a long streak of crimson, passed from hand to hand among the oldest ladies seated on the deep mattresses of the reception hall facing the bedroom of the master of the house.

  I stayed there, living with my aunt, the only one of my mother’s sisters still alive, although quite old, pious and gentle, and I felt fussed over. She guessed that these are transitional days in my life and was worried about it. (“So, like your grandmother you, too—but she, she does it later, for the youngest child, the third, a boy—you are leaving the man, you flee, you abandon the unlocked house to him? Is that the law, are you at least retaining your rights? … Alas, where are our rights, whether we are illiterate or educated, all of us, all women? It is as bad today as yesterday.” That is what she whispered that evening as we stood looking out over the twilight, while the sounds of the crowded street rose up to the balcony.)

  Why, I mused, still dreaming about the grandmother, does feminine memory tirelessly return in concentric circles to the fathers and leave in the shadows (naturally in the silence of the unwritten as well) the real crises, the blacking out, the fall of a woman? As if that were too much, as if it undermined the very roots of strength and hope, of the future! Too much …

  For example, back to father Ferhani! The man who married off his fourteen-year-old daughter but who shortly afterward hastily remarried, forcing his first wife to be present for this wedding, responsible for the meals, the proper reception of the guests, and the necessary organization of the festivities … And he required particularly (a husband’s ambiguous and strange cruelty) that she look at the bride who was younger, of course, though already widowed, and especially more fortunate because she was “the Golden Woman.” She, the wife who reigned in the other wife’s room—and who had waited beneath the candles for the husband on the verge of entering, wearing his white ceremonial cloak, dipping his shoulder at the door and smiling with happiness to the sounds of ululation—she was the first wife! But now her hands were in the butter, her face red as she bent over the bouillon for couscous in the steamy kitchen, and she watched from her own place, watching the husband repeat his entrance into the bedroom, fifteen years after her own marriage.

  It had only taken fifteen years for her to change roles, for her to cease being the one set up like an idol who waited, her heart pounding. Only fifteen years for her to become the servant, the cook at the hot stove. Yes, on the same evening, the same smile from the man, making the same entrance as today, and suddenly—suddenly a long cry, followed by silence from all the women (too late, the bridegroom has already closed the door on his marriage). And she, the first wife, falls flat on the ground, right on the threshold of the pantry … All the women of the family run to her and sprinkle her face and palms with cool water, they make her sit up like a floppy doll, they repeat verses for her, they pass the ewers around and orange-flower water. But still, a week later, they carried her off, dead: “With a swollen belly,” my aunt tells me today.

  “What did she have?” I feel touched, and I add, “What did the doctor say?”

  “Was there a doctor for women then? No … In those days, never, not even for childbirth, would we have entered a French hospital! The women who told me about it (no, not your grandmother, she never said anything about this wedding, but instead her young sister, my aunt, whom you knew, the mother of the “great fighter” in the resistance), these women all thought that it was livid, powerless jealousy that “made her blood go bad.”

  And so, father Ferhani had hardly remarried when he found himself a widower. It must be said that “the Golden Woman,” his newly-wed, turned out to have a big heart: She went back down to the city and moved into one of the houses her mother had inherited. There she regularly received her husband when he would come down, dressed in white, even more sumptuously than before, like a caïd or a bachagha. Afterward, she remained barren, but she dealt generously with her husband’s children as their stepmother.

  “He died honored by all men and all women?” I asked tongue-in-cheek. “This Ferhani who,” I stressed, “was the one responsible for the death of his wife!”

  “Oh!” My aunt was surprised. “In those days men were naturally harsh! Often without even being aware of it … And others, of course—Moh’, your mother’s half brother, comes to mind, and M’hamed, the younger half brother—others keep their hearts untarnished. Sometimes they even love just one woman in their lifetime! Ferhani died in the sanctuary. I remember hearing the news of his sudden death; I was a little girl. As for the saint’s tomb, what is left of it? Nothing, only ruins, the result of the war of liberation! Today’s “people in high places,” as you well know, make fun of our marabouts … Because they themselves have no lineage.” She muttered in displeasure, shrugged her shoulders, then was silent.

  Now, during the week following the final breakup of my first marriage, as I plunged into the maze of my genealogy—the genealogy of my mother and of the grandmother whom I used to feel was so terrifying—I reconstruct this memory.

  I wanted to conjure up the grandmother when, just before 1900, old Soliman died: What was the day like when the seventeen-year-old widow left this house that later would be so familiar to me?

  The entire extended family, numbering so many, is there after the third day of the funeral. The women have returned from the rustic cemetery, the one overlooking the city and close enough to the Roman baths on the west that the dead of recent generations are getting in the way of the digs that scientists from the capital consider necessary!

  Soliman’s sons, his daughters, and his grandsons respect the standard custom, keeping the house (which, for many, during these times of deprivation, seems the last remaining little Arabian palace) in joint ownership and favoring the eldest along with the most energetic (or at least the least lethargic) of the younger ones. Oddly, several of Soliman’s sons, unlike the founding father, will prove to be dreamers and given to pleasure, frequenting musical evenings or spending their time in the company of fishermen in secluded inlets. So “the most capable” are allowed to manage the surrounding farms and orchards.

  The hierarchy of the heirs was visible in the new division of the domestic quarters: The second floor, the most splendid (because the father lived there), with its four long, deep bedrooms each of which had its separate kitchen and “Turkish” toilet, and galleries covered by luminous mosaics, with banisters whose twisted columns were made of cedar and pine from Aleppo, was reserved for the sons of the first marriage, or at least the ones who remained in the city. The rooms on the ground floor were more numerous but more shady, wide open to the patio, with its basin and fountain rippling their tiny, honeyed music. These were reserved, half for the daughters (the repudiated one and several grandchildren, adolescent girls) and half for the two younger sons who remained bachelors … (I imagine them from puberty on feeling vaguely disgusted, or merely uncomfortable, with the “vitality”—in marriages and descendants—of their omnipresent father!)

  This new division of the space must have been made easier when Fatima, the young widow, had let them know—either through one of the old women (one of those poor relations living there two or three months at a time before finding shelter somewhere else, in another of the “great houses” of the city) or telling the eldest daughter-in-law directly—her decision. “I shall not remain with you. You are my family of course. But I have sent for my father to come for me and my little daughter.”

  The daughter-in-law replied, “This house is your house, O Lalla.” Because even if the young widow was not yet twenty, she was still the o
nly widow of old Soliman and had a sizable share in the inheritance.

  Fatima looked at Halima for a long time, Halima, always the most eloquent one in the sadness of these restricted days: “I thank you, O Halima. This house will be a haven for my daughter, Khadidja; she will be well off here among you, among her brothers and sisters. There are many of them, thanks be to God! But please, tell your husband that I have sent for my father. Because tomorrow I want to return home with him.”

  Halima emotionally kissed the widow’s hand and cheeks. She had had the opportunity to confirm Fatima’s character and maturity. (“Just sixteen!” Halima thought to herself. “If only the dead man’s sons, the ones who are already forty, had the lucidity of this adolescent!”)

  Father Ferhani, adorned in his two togas, the one of Tlemcen wool and the heavy woolen one from Fez, arrived that very evening. He bore regretfully a message from his wife (whether he admired or loved her I do not know; perhaps he was also afraid of her): Amna the Golden Woman, made known to her half brothers that she would not take part in the discussions concerning the inheritance, that they should inform the cadi of this. Allah had assured her—thanks to her mother’s wealth alone. which her father, it is true, had luckily made profitable—of a comfortable and peaceful life. She was content with that. She had no descendants. Her husband, thanks be to God, was noble and “beloved of God.” Consequently his house and “the caïd’s orchards” (the most beautiful olive trees on the hillsides as well as an orange grove at oued el-Mellah) were enough for him: for his comfort and for the alms that she would now give increasingly. She would take care of the youngest of her sisters, Khadidja, who was scarcely two, the daughter of Fatima, and, by lucky accident, the granddaughter of her husband whom she so much respected … Let Fatima come to her home and live there, where she would be surrounded by peace and serenity!

  And so Fatima packed her bags: three willow trunks lined with pink satin, several others that were wooden and painted in the Algerian style, her gowns, and above all her jewels, the ones from her marriage and the ones that Soliman liked to buy her almost every month, because toward the end he had become more and more extravagant with his young wife.

  Fatima takes her little daughter in her arms, even though she is as heavily veiled as when she arrived for the wedding night three years before.

  During the three years that she lived there, she left the big house regularly once a week on the eve of Friday to go to her father and her stepmother’s house. From the beginning she had told Soliman, “My father is used to having me be the one to bring him the copper cup for his ablutions and then the towels every Friday morning, and having me unfold his antique rug from Fez for him. I do this for his dawn prayer because the second prayer he makes in public, though not like his father. In earlier days his father would descend from the zaouia just to pray at the great and venerable mosque, the mosque “with a hundred columns” and built of green marble—alas, this sacred place was turned into a common hospital by the French! But my father goes now to the oldest remaining mosque, the one most people go to.”

  Soliman, in the bedroom—this was around the tenth day after the wedding and already Fatima knew how to make her desires known—had listened to his child wife’s wish: “Oh, I wouldn’t like for my father, the mokkadem, not to have me there at dawn every Friday!” Then Soliman, to everyone’s astonishment, agreed, with the excuse that Fatima was descended from mokkadems (and thus blessed). Every Thursday evening she went to spend the night in Amna’s house with her father; she stood there at her father’s bedside at dawn, even before the faintest voice from the most distant muezzin could be heard.

  So this time, accompanied by her daughter, she went back to her father’s home. She stayed there until the next day, Friday. Saw to Ferhani’s prayer … Then, seven days and seven nights later, she heard herself say to him as well as to his wife who sat beside him, radiant, “Forgive me, both of you! As God is my witness I would like to live my whole life beside you! And you are my daughter’s true guardians! But …”

  And she stopped, intimidated.

  “What do you want, then, daughter?” father Ferhani exclaimed in a gruff voice, giving his wife who was just as surprised, a questioning look.

  “I miss the mountains, and I like being at the zaouia so much! I want to go back up there and probably live there!” She sighed.

  Soon afterward, Fatima, her daughter in her arms, left the city in a barouche.

  Arable Woman III

  A MONTH BEFORE filming began, after two days of looking for locations, I got out of the car with the assistant director and went toward the farm: sheds and solidly built houses, all buried, however, behind any number of reed hedges. It was a beautiful day.

  I went around the main house. Behind it and beyond a hedge of Barbary figs a large wasteland went down to the sea on the other side. There, among the pebbles and red rocks, a panorama of Chenoua mountain met one’s eyes: a wide view with the isolated mountain jutting out like a gigantic ship over the deep bay. Nobility of lines, majesty, with a sort of modesty to its various colors, and on the left, hills fading off toward the interior plain: Chenoua—a screen, almost like one in a theater, standing in front of my family’s mountains, where I have been traveling now for four months already.

  I wanted this flat, open stretch to be like a balcony out over the calm and everyday countryside that the couple in the film story could see. Luckily from here one cannot make out the new patch of white, the tourist village built ten years ago.

  Up behind me, surrounded by peasants, the chauffeur and the assistant director are waiting for me. It is four in the afternoon: alone here, my rendezvous is with this space. It is the space of my childhood and of something else … perhaps the space of this fiction to be created. Four o’clock in the afternoon: not even Camus and his étranger come to mind.

  Alone I walk across this shelf. I hide my excitement by walking athletically, in sudden great strides (I am glad I have long legs for walking energetically while everything inside me churns and boils).

  On this November day the air is soft and the end of autumn takes on intense hues, almost those of spring, and I am happy. I neither hide it nor show it. Not yet. I neither burst out into dancing nor yeild to the violent desire to dissolve, to fly away and disappear. Oh, these months of fierce chastity (just as fierce as were my years of sensual love)!

  And thus it all began. Not the first period of quiet investigation: the endless whispering conversations with the old women of my tribe, the questions that were misleadingly banal, the words of my childhood language.

  Everything really began this first day on the farm, everything. Because as I found my everyday space, this film’s existence became no longer theoretical but present. Though you might not think so, this freedom.

  This space, in actual fact, is like me. So, I think, begin a film story, when the space that is right for it is really found. Go all around this space. The way they used to make the walls of the city first and then—an hour later, a day later—build the city in the middle.

  So this November day my own city—that is, the house in which my three characters, Lila, Ali, and their daughter Aïcha will live—is founded.

  I went back up to the hedge of fig trees encircling the main house. Hamid, the assistant director, is in lively negotiations with the people living there, fishermen or peasants from the nearby cooperative, in case I intend to shoot on location. I leave them. I say that the view is beautiful. I go to a door in the back. Silhouettes of women staring at us between two reed hedges. Greetings. They invite me in. Then I have my second flash of inspiration, just as secret, not very expansive.

  Three women in rooms without electricity. An infant cries sporadically. And I, feeling my way around until I get used to it.

  The mother, who is probably forty, looks to be fifty or older. Stern, with well-balanced features, tall; her smiling manner has a touch of reserve. She seems attentive to whatever might happen at the edge of her gaze. Two other w
omen, a young girl—sixteen years old, with plump cheeks, named Saïda, who later will be Djamila in the film, the couple’s friendly neighbor—and another woman, whose beauty would strike any visitor.

  I never knew her name. I will call her “the unknown woman at the farm,” or “the Madonna.” She was scarcely more than twenty; her balanced features were disturbing, with such a pure bloom, yet seeming, at the same time, tarnished with shadow … a half smile, not aware herself of her own sadness. The Madonna: whenever I saw her after this she was holding a baby in her arms, a sickly baby. How can I portray her first appearance, how it extended into each of the forty days spent at the farm? Forty times as I came or went through a side door (a door only I was allowed to use) between the rooms rented for the film and the rest of the house, I would see again the slender silhouette. She held herself up straight, with only her shoulders a bit sunken as if the threat of tuberculosis hung over her. The Madonna.

  Sometimes with her breast out, her baby whimpering (the baby I did not look at but whose illness I felt, I heard), she would smile at me. Forty times I looked at the dazzling purity of her face, her clear gaze, her cheeks still rosy with youth, and that hollow between her shoulders.

  I lingered over the Madonna. Perhaps because, several days before we started filming, I knew for sure that she would not figure in the film. By chance I had come upon a family willing to collaborate with the image and the machinery we brought, whether out of economic interest or out of a real openness (a rather rare event in the new rural world). Afterward I wondered to what extent the mother was the dominant influence. She had guessed, confident in herself and her authority over her family, that she could extract some profit from us with no moral damage. I also think that the mother had instinctively judged me and the new role I represented for them, the threat I was in a position to keep in check …