So Vast the Prison (5 page)

Instead, after a silence I added in a sad voice, “I’m hanging up! Turning on the lights. Goodbye!”

The lights went on in our two offices simultaneously. An hour later we said goodbye among other colleagues, on the square at the main entrance.

I went home in a whirl, my soul overwhelmed.
What is time?
I thought.
Have I not returned if not to the time of my childhood, at least to my preadolescence? Have I not found my first cousin, the real one, the one I truly love—the other one was brash and insolent; this one would have been affectionate and conspiratorial. We would have shared all the fun and joy of that time with a twinkle in our eyes
.

I went home enriched, magnified. Full of infinite patience for the other life, the life of family awaiting me there. The children’s school assignments had to be checked, dinner had to be served. Their father was absorbed in his reading and I ended up in front of the television screen, staring but not seeing or hearing. I stayed up to tuck in my
little daughter and kiss my son, but then I was the first to bed, happy to curl up alone at first. A book fell from my hand: books, mere books, so different from my secret life. An invisible stork seemed to step softly toward me, brushing against my eyelids as I sank into a pool of oblivion.

Other times my work would keep me late. I had told them at home not to wait for me. Happy to be working so well at the top of this building at a time when almost all the employees had left, I hardly even wondered if he, on the sixth floor, was as lost in his work as I was. I was deeply absorbed. The temptation to pick up the phone never occurred to me; precisely because of my solitude, I would have felt it was improper.

There was a driver with a company car waiting for me. I could, of course, have figured out some way to let him go (even though it was his regular night schedule). I could have checked with the Beloved—who was, after all, my colleague, whose habit of working late I knew—to see if he could take me home. But the memory of that December evening in his car when I had kissed his forehead, his eyes … 
Am I crazy?
I thought, remembering this.
Is there a madwoman inside me who any minute now can surge into my life of flat calm, possessing me and sweeping everything away? Yes, am I a woman possessed?

Three times I said the name of Allah. That very evening, taking the staircase down, when I got to the sixth floor, I noticed, almost in spite of myself, that the lights were still on in my Beloved’s office in the empty corridor. The timed switch suddenly plunged the hall into darkness. I stood rigidly facing the wall, leaning my forehead against the cold wall, and this time I recited the
fatiha
from beginning to end, arming myself against any rash impulse. I groped for the switch and found it, turning the lights back on, and sighed, thinking,
Finally, the
danger is gone!
My heart drained. Slowly walking the rest of the way downstairs, leaving a heavy weight up there in the shadows.

The driver was waiting for me. “
Lalla
, Madame, I need some advice.”

He went on in Arabic recounting his family troubles to me. His ten-year-old daughter was in school and apparently very intelligent—or in any case that’s what the teacher said. But her mother, his wife, kept insisting that this beloved daughter had to stop her schooling: “ ‘She has to help me with the little ones!’ is what she says.”

He thought for a moment, then added, “Her mother can’t take it anymore!” He hesitated, unable to decide in favor of the wife or, as his heart was inclined, protecting his little girl for just a year or two longer.

“Let her have a chance!” I said.

One other evening we returned to this conversation. I lived not far away, but still he had to drive me home because, fifteen years after the war—“after the events,” in the amazingly terse expression that people still used—the black night threw a de facto curfew onto the streets of the capital. Fear ripples remained without there really being any fear, maybe just a whiff of insecurity in which the inhabitants seemed to take pleasure. Consequently, being a woman and unable to drive a car, after seven
P.M.
I could not walk even a hundred meters alone outdoors.

Shortly afterward, standing on my kitchen balcony, I guessed which window was still lit up over there on the sixth story of the tall building. The one to whom I could have gone ten minutes earlier, he to whom, this time, showing up so late, I would let myself go.

I would have said to him,
Let’s spend the night together!
And the veiled passivity that I sometimes read in his eyes when he looked at me in my confusion, his hesitation would, I imagine, have triggered my joyful enthusiasm:

Let’s go into the city, it doesn’t matter where, to a bar, to a dance hall, to a bad place or to your place, there on the beach, open the house up again for me if you have closed it. It doesn’t matter where we go, but let’s stay together all night long!

Of course I would have phoned home and told the husband,
Don’t wait up for me tonight. Tomorrow, at dawn, I’ll explain
. The next day I would have revealed everything about the state of my heart. What love does not need an arbiter, and that night, that long night, having finally decided on my judge, I would no longer have been right to keep silent about my inner struggles. Yes, that night I would have surrendered to the violent, patient attraction that I had made myself control up to this point, but then, in a single night, had let carry me away!

I fantasized this sequence of events, like water rushing through an open dam. I experienced it while standing in the darkness, on the balcony.

A while ago I had said the
fatiha
, probably for the first time in my life (I disregard occasions in my childhood or even the time that I was twenty, shaken by a passing mysticism), as if Allah alone, in the darkness of that corridor on the sixth floor, had protected me—or imprisoned me, I didn’t know which—I acted as a woman in love who finally has only the magic of religiosity to cure her. The
fatiha
said from beginning to end, forehead against the wall, my hand groping in search of the light switch. I turned on the lights; I went down the stairs.

For the next few months I never let up in my work. Sometimes I would go home at ten o’clock at night. I would sit in silence in the children’s bedroom to watch them sleep, gazing at them: My son would grow to be such a handsome young man, with his slender, well-built body; my little daughter, though she was asleep, I could
hear her crystal-clear voice: “Mummy, you didn’t play the Dussek allegretto.” She had left me a note on the piano.

I apologized silently. In my room my husband was sleeping—lights on, newspaper dropped at the foot of the bed next to the ashtray. Suddenly I had a belated attack of neatness and tidied up. Then I lay down, exhausted.

The early morning, before seven o’clock, still felt the same for the four of us. For me, my balcony wanderings seemed to be part of night dreams not yet entirely dissipated. Through the window I watched the entire city emerge in the reddish glow of dawn.

After the children had gone to school, I hung around the house, left to myself. My mind wrapped itself in ribbons of sound, melodies gathered the night before; I huddled over my tape recorder as my listening resumed its flow. In those days if I had used the word
passion
it would only have been to describe this river inside me; every morning here at home, then at my office, it swept me far away for hours on end into a past of buried sounds.

I either waited for the housekeeper to arrive or I would leave her instructions, because she was supposed to take care of the children after four. Shortly after midday I went out. My work life resumed. The day stretched on for me.

I broke this rhythm. One morning I suddenly quit the research office that had been mine for six months. I felt drawn to field investigation, faces, words. I would store up a wealth of noises and sounds, then try to find some suitable way of using them—radio reports, documentary films, bilingual accounts to be published, etc.—afterward.

Investigation first, forgetting oneself in others, the others who wait. The often silent others. I wanted to discover towns and villages: Oran, Mascara, Sidi-bel-Abb’s. Crowded projects, congested public
housing full of uprooted rural populations; sometimes, in the old quarters, Moorish houses with a lemon or orange tree in the middle of the patio—a haven.

In Béjaia especially, laughter greets me and there is a hint of escape. The port is a pocket in the hollow curve of the vast, wide-open bay. Taken by the woman who is my guide, a former militant, I happen to go into a house in an aging quarter overhanging the city. There I greet two very young women wearing
sarouels
and embroidered tunics; they are sitting cross-legged on mats stretched out on the floor of faded tiles. Facing them, I squat down as well. At first we speak in Arabic, then in French. I had taken them to be traditional city women: “Two young girls to be married,” my companion calls them teasingly, but I discover that they are about to complete their medical degrees in the capital.

“These summer and spring vacations are just a forced return to the harem for us!” the first one says ironically—her vocal outburst almost a hiccough.

Outside, I leave the woman who is taking me around. “I’ll find my way back to the hotel alone,” I say, and thank her.

I rush down a street of stairs. Happy to be alone, and free, in this city saturated with light. Two young men are standing at the bottom of the hill. One of them approaches almost solemnly, looking me over carefully, to say that he has just made a bet and lost because of me. Seeing me from a distance (with my very short hair, my straight white trousers), he had bet that I was a young man.

Although I am thirty-seven, I probably seem less than thirty: thin hips, a boyish haircut, flat buttocks; that day I was so proud of my androgynous silhouette. The young man had lost. I could do nothing about it, but as I went by, I made a funny face at him. “Sorry!” In that instant I knew I was being provocative.

If he had been there to see it, would the man who never left my thoughts have laughed to see me confused with a boy and flattered by this mistake. I would have flung myself into his arms, for sure: “I really am your age! Let’s stay together forever in your house with its open doors, its abandoned yard. Let’s spend every night on the sand, if no one comes, perhaps there’ll be a storm, whatever the season …”

Precisely because of this frivolous incident, and if my Beloved had been lucky enough to witness it, I would have been ready to surrender to every temptation. I would not have thought I was doing anything unreasonable, but rather that I was racing toward the oasis where we would finally end up, breathless. I had seen those two young girls in their temporary confinement, who one day were going to work as doctors, both of them … Virgins, no doubt, twenty-five or twenty-six at the oldest. Pale faces, diaphanous beauties, as if they were leaving their youth behind, and at the same time still awaiting it.

As for myself, in those days I was virtually returning to my reawakened childhood. If in the past, just once, I had played with a brother or a boy cousin on the roads or in the forest, perhaps this nostalgia would not come back to me like this, like an undertow, magnifying my attraction to this man!

Was I searching for some fever in him, a fever I knew within myself? A fever that, on this sunny day in Béjaia, would have been transformed into a cascade of finally willing happiness.

4
THE DANCE
 

THERE IS ONE SCENE
, or maybe there are two that emerge from the preceding summer as the background to this early winter and this restless autumn. Perhaps my memory, to battle its own insidious, fatal dissolution, is attempting to raise some stele like a mark for “the first time.” When was the first time I saw this man, or rather, what is the first image that triggered my first emotion? What events, what light, what words ruled over this disturbance—as if passion disturbed, rather than suddenly put things in order and somehow set the soul straight, restoring to one’s impulses their original reactions, their purity. As if any love so blindly experienced—completely swathed in prohibitions, hence unwarranted, hence superfluous, or childish, as it may seem to some people—as if any love, arising like an earthquake of silence or fear, did not lead, as the disintegrating surface order collapsed, to original geology … These vague notions about psychology are, of course, only digressions from the story I am pulling from the ruins more than ten years afterward.

Despite my efforts at remembering, I have only a blurry notion of the specific first day of the first meeting, and whether the encounter was insignificant or important between these two characters I describe. (It is not fiction I desire. I am not driven to unfurl a love story of inexhaustible arabesques.) No, I am only gripped by a paralyzing fear, the actual terror that I shall see this opening in my life permanently disappear. Suppose it were my luck suddenly to have amnesia; suppose tomorrow I were hit by a car; suppose some morning soon I were to die! Hurry! Write everything down, remember the ridiculous and the essential; write it, orderly or muddled, but leave some record of it for ten years from now … ten years after my own forgetting.