So Vast the Prison (24 page)

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.

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! …

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.

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!