So Vast the Prison (13 page)

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
.

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.