So Vast the Prison (35 page)

A double public gaze, exclusively masculine: Europeans gathered on the terraces for their apéritifs and seasonal workers, whom hostility bound together to contemplate the leisure time of others.

It would have been unthinkable for my father to permit “a lady” from where we came from to parade past, even rapidly! These potential gawkers would be incapable of seeing the innate distinctions: This masked figure, made mysterious because of her very sophisticated veils, in the Caesarean style, had to be imagined as extremely beautiful in theory even though they could not see her! Why do them the honor, even for the five minutes it would take the Citroën to drive around the little square and arrive in front of our apartment building?

After all, the wealthiest settler of the plains, an all-powerful colonial master—with his farms, his hundreds of acres of vineyards, his army of workers—the man who decided the mayor’s election, who chose local elected officials, to whom one bowed very low on those rare occasions that he deigned to show himself, this secret master kept his wife and daughters hidden. He spared them the need to go through the village, just as a jealous sultan would have done.

Of course it was not a matter either of male jealousy or of prohibition, merely disdain. The lady of the manor—or “the queen,” as
she was called by the Europeans playing bowls and the natives playing dominos—stayed invisible, except …

“Except on August fifteenth,” the baker at the wheel reminded him in a low voice, as he took us on a big detour to the south, then along the far eastern side, to return by the alley that was almost empty at this time of day, passing one side of the church and ending up, finally, in front of where we lived.

As we drove home, through all the detours, I heard my father muttering, as if in a duel with the all-powerful settler whom so many visitors from Belgium, from northern lands and even farther away, came to see. (They came to admire the highly technical nature of his farms, his sowing by helicopter, his mechanized vineyards. They never, however, ventured into the innermost recesses, into the hidden corners they were unaware of, where ramshackle huts were reserved for his serfs.) “Because he does treat them like serfs!” my father remarked, furiously, there next to the baker. I think now that it was for my benefit that he would let fly this way in his usual diatribe against the local despot …

As if, right at the beginning of my adolescence, he called me as a witness: “Your mother, my wife, has a special status, at least equal to ‘their’ lady of the manor, and it is as it should be that all those men—the ‘others’ and ours—do not deserve to see her go by. And I”—(this is the father speaking as I imagine it later)—“following the example of ‘their’ master, will not expose my wife either—the very heart of myself. She is of course entirely wrapped in her stiff and immaculate veils, and following our customary ways, she remains silent outside, her eyes lowered beneath the face veil! And I am just a schoolmaster. The only native schoolmaster for native boys. Pretty stiff and inflexible I am, too, and tough-minded under my fez. When I was a young man, I admired Atatürk because with a leader like him we certainly would not have been colonized—in our own country without being
in our own country. Then, your mother, like the Turkish ladies of the former aristocracy, could have taken off the Islamic veil and worn Paris skirts. She might even have been able to drive the Citroën herself, as breezily as any sportswoman—because it is clear I will never be able to drive a vehicle! In that case, well then, she would deserve to be photographed!

“Here women would have emulated the ladies in Turkey, but also the ladies of Damascus or Egypt, Cairo and Alexandria, the first emancipated Muslim women.” (My father was thinking then of how many of his friends, doctors, teachers, lawyers, who, like him, had dreamed ten or fifteen years too soon of “unveiling” their wives, traveling with them!)

But we were living in a colonized country. Sétif, Tébessa, Guelma, tumultuous cities—thousands of men dead, then thousands imprisoned on May 8, 1945—that was two or three years earlier … Algeria at war, thank God, had other matters of urgency. It was perhaps even a stroke of luck that in these little ancient cities the families were huddled together like this, and the women of the city were trembling but safe in the warmth of women’s apartments.

We returned to our apartment.

By this time my paternal grandmother, who had lived with us, was dead. Only her ghost remained of her, nostalgically floating through the rooms … It was the period in which my sister, the youngest, about six years old, was just beginning to feel unwell—a long illness that made her weak for over a year. I remember the next summer, spent in a verdant mountain city so that the fresh air would make her get well soon.

How exactly did I pass from my childhood to my preadolescence? It was before I was thirteen, or rather before I was ten, when I left for
boarding school in the nearby city. (“The city of roses,” André Gide called it fifty years before I arrived. But he was there fifty years after the painter Fromentin, the first one to write a French account of this Arab city.) I see myself still half submerged in the mists of innocent childhood while all that surrounds my coming of age—the unknown, the ambiguous—marked by an ardor with no words to express it in an Islamic land, was making itself known to me.

What were the early scenes, experienced with the passivity of blind innocence, during which I partly left the family cocoon, the warm protection assured me by the affection of a group of women (an affection not without its acrid moments)? “Coming of age”: this term applied to women, to girls who reached physical maturity, is in the maternal dialect laden with threats. In the masculine plural, however, the
kharidjines
, the men said to be “of age,” are dissidents, indeed bearers of a religious freedom that occasionally turns out to be a cause of war, but the beginning of a collective adventure that starts a new phase … In the feminine singular, the girl “coming of age” promises only pure danger, sometimes reduced to a gratuitous fuss and bother. When did I, then, come of age out of limbo?

The
caïd
had three daughters: This triad is at the heart of my village memories.

My usual playmate is the youngest of these sisters, a year or two older than me. Our confederacy is reinforced every Thursday or Sunday in the back of their rustling garden by frequent disputes with her brothers, one in particular who was about ten. He used to climb the trees and trap birds. With a cruel grin, he would bring us their trembling, wounded bodies. “I am going to slit their throats according to the ritual right now and fix them for you to eat. You’ll be licking your fingers when they’re plucked and grilled, you’ll see!” His teasing eyes
stared right at me; his calm cruelty made me uncomfortable … I stood stock-still; his sister never let up berating him.

Before all this teasing, before our screaming—little girls scandalized by this boy we used to call a hoodlum—there is a sense of disquiet that remains and comes back to me, indelible.

Was I six then, or was I seven? I think I had left nursery school. The youngest of the
caïd
’s daughters, following my example, was also now being sent to the French school. Whenever I visited, her sisters, who were oddly inquisitive about me, would pounce and trap me in a corner. There they would lift up my skirt or my dress to examine—my slip! It was a piece of lingerie they had never seen before. My mother was so style conscious that she insisted on buying me European clothes for little girls from a young Spanish woman who used to travel the length and breadth of the plains in her small truck selling underwear and various fineries to the village women shut up in their homes or living in isolated places.

The
caïd
’s daughters, who were dressed in traditional clothing, did not dare speak openly to my mother of their compulsive curiosity. But no sooner would I find myself delivered to them in their house than, in a great state of excitement, they were immediately compelled to feel the satin slip I was wearing, even its embroidery if possible. I struggled. I had the feeling that what they were so eager to know through this feminine underwear was French womanhood itself. Because I went to school and was therefore disguised as a little French girl, they would have liked to caress, and feel through me, the whole body belonging to these distant ladies who seemed to them arrogant but so precious. “To know,” they exclaimed as they encircled me without seeing me, “to know what they wear, how they doll themselves up, underneath!” The fervent sigh that went with
underneath
made me want to throw up.

I got away. I pulled their youngest sister with me. The two of us ran off together to the far end of the orchard. Being touched in this way was an assault that brought tears to my eyes. My friend was surprised at how strongly I reacted and in the end I said I was not going to come back alone to see her.

I told my mother why, and must even have wept. I think this experience still makes me instinctively back away, restive and anxious, when faced with the slightest physical contact in the most ordinary social situations (except in love. No, on the contrary, in love, too, which requires such a long preamble before I reach it) … Later on, when I was about twenty or thirty in fact, I discovered Western customs: coeducation, where the sexes mixed in apparent neutrality; the exchange of kisses on the cheek that no longer meant anything more than an easy, often immediate familiarity. The same is true of unrestrained public shows of affection between a boy and his girlfriend that other people pretend not to watch. Later I will approach this language of bodies, their display, sometimes their flaunting, with the eyes of a primitive. So often, I will find myself forced to turn away, in a reaction that made it look like I was a prude when in fact I was just “oriental”; that is, my bared eyes were sensitive, desiring above all to drink in the world as it truly revealed itself: secret, lit by the beauty of beginnings.

I return to my conversation with my mother: “I won’t go to their house alone again! Even to play … I don’t want them to touch me!” I screamed. “I don’t want to be touched!”

My mother came to an unexpected conclusion. Still in charge of my getting dressed every morning, she decided to take off my amulets (two squares and one triangle of silk, a present from my paternal grandmother, now dead). I wore them underneath my dress or pullover; I remember the thread braided in the old-fashioned way, more precious to me than any simple hidden necklace. I recall some
classes vividly precisely because, while my attention was turned to the blackboard or to the teacher sitting beside it, I was in the habit of touching these squares or triangles of magical writing I wore on my chest. (“These amulets will protect you from the envy of others!” my grandmother told me, imagining that the world of the French school was hostile.) At night I would proudly wear these ornaments, finally on display, on my nightgown.

Did these night jewels still connect me to my grandmother, who was so sweet, a second mother to me? Probably, as she had said many times, I was convinced that these silk adornments, with their dull colors, gray, dark blue and black, were “protecting” me … I would go to sleep feeling safe, as if the grandmother were still there beside me. And throughout the day, without any of my schoolmates knowing, and in spite of them, I was under a second protection: an invisible and ancient eye that looked lovingly down upon me from afar …

But now my mother decided—I do not remember if it was in the morning or in the evening, all I remember is the room where I stood, undressed, maybe in my nightgown or maybe in the process of preparing for school—yes, she decided to strip me of them: she must have argued and explained. She said it was because the doctor was going to visit the school sometime in the next few days. How would I look, what would I say, parading these magical squares and triangles in front of the other girls, foreigners?

“But still! It’s the writing of the Koran!” I must have protested.

But had I yet discovered the argument of legitimization? I do not know: I must have talked about the gold crosses that they wore, the other girls—not hidden like my amulets! It was clear to my mother that the ridicule I might experience would be far more serious than wearing these holy writings, which was, she said, not particularly orthodox. They would call me a pagan, me, the one who was native, there with all the French girls, me the Muslim!

I must have given in. I was stripped, I might as well have been naked. And it was my mother who, caught up in a fit of rationality, took this first writing away from me.

During this same period, however, when the elementary school let out, I attended Koranic school. My mother liked to have a party with the nurse and the
caïd
’s family to mark each level I achieved in learning the Sacred Book—three
suras
, then ten others, then twenty more. My walnut tablet, decorated by the sheik with numerous examples of calligraphy, was conspicuously displayed to all the women. How beautiful, the guests would exclaim! They claimed that this tablet was so elegant that it was a foreshadowing of “my wedding dress” that would come later!

My mother enthusiastically brought us pastries and recited the verses with me. The celebration—with the
caïd
’s daughters all there, in our house this time—ended with musical improvisations.

I have only lamented one death, that of my paternal grandmother, the silent one; I mourned her, screaming and shouting in the oldest street of Caesarea. I ran down this street, leading down from the humble house where my father was a child and where his married sister who was always sick lived, until, sobbing, I arrived at the maternal family’s wealthy and half-European dwelling (with its windows and balconies on the main floor). I arrived where “they” lived, thinking this somewhat spitefully, because at that moment I was only the daughter of the woman who had held me when it was cold and dark, who had embraced me silently, who had not dared speak in front of the Frenchwomen who were our neighbors in the village. I am, first of all, the daughter of this mute affection, she, the grandmother that I saw as humble (why did this grieve me?)—humble and modest …