So Vast the Prison (6 page)

There is only one real question that looms for me. When, precisely, did this story, which transpired either inside or outside of me—and I don’t know which—when did it take hold? It was summer. A blazing summer with cool dawns, gentle twilights, mild nights. The nights above all were densely populated with echoes: shows and dances, lots of people walking in groups along the unending and often deserted beaches that had recently become fashionable for swimming, an hour from the capital.

Every evening in the large stone theater that had opened recently, concerts were scheduled—light music, jazz or folk from bands coming successively from a number of African countries or countries in the East. To finish off the night, journalists, artists, couples who were friends, vacationers from nearby beaches, young women more westernized than the Westerners, would all get together in groups in various discothèques, while I went with my husband, who was the director of this “cultural complex.”

During the months of July and August I drowned myself in the music, the laughter, and the playful conversations of others—as a witness; I would slip lethargically into this or else I would sleep;
during the day I read in the calm apartment whose French doors opened onto steep rocks.

This is how I spent my vacation, gradually aware that, this summer or next winter, despite my slenderness and my inexhaustible appetite for walks and dreams, my youth was coming to an end … No, I told myself drowsily, what people call “youth” can be lived endlessly like a block of motionless years.

I watched my husband directing and making decisions; however, well before all the turmoil, I no longer enjoyed talking with him. We were no longer a couple, just two old friends who no longer knew how to talk to each other. I was happy that, with this new distance (not deserted for me, so much as spacious), there were so many people passing through, so many guests in an evening who would seek us out, and especially so much foreign music surrounding us. So there I was, a spectator, and I thought I was perhaps ready to set out. For the first time also, probably for the first time in my life, I felt I was “visible,” not the way I felt during my adolescence, nor after I was twenty, when I would smile at some compliment, some flattery from a man, either a friend or a stranger, thinking then,
It’s my semblance, my ghost you are seeing, not myself, not really me
 … 
I myself am in disguise, I wear a veil, you cannot see me
.

Why all of a sudden, did a smile or bit of praise distress me so? (“What a pretty dress,” some man would say, his fingers about to touch the cloth, and I would tense up, but hide it. Or: “This hairdo suits you,” another poorly timed compliment from someone else—an incongruous familiarity that I blamed on the excitement of the theater atmosphere.) Of course, I avoided any contact whatsoever, but something else disturbed me:
They are really talking about me! I’m ashamed; I smile not to seem prudish, but I’m ashamed. They go so far as to touch me with their fingers!
 … 
I can protect myself from it, appear
“civilized,” and remain elusive. But something else has me disoriented, or makes me sad, I don’t know which. It is that they can truly see me!

But the way I related to the exposure of my exterior self to others is another story.

Back to the young man. Looking at me so intensely. And when I try to remember “the first time, and when it mattered to me,” I don’t know what to say. One scene comes up, one summer day, no, a night rather. I’ll call it the night of the dance.

I did not know right away that this young man, with his almost ordinary appearance, with his words (left hanging sometimes like smoke in the air), his nonchalance and apparent casualness, would ever mean so much to me.

Three men showed up as a group; I took them to be journalists. Although their ages and profiles differed, they had in common a sort of elegance we were not used to seeing in these parts, some reserve in their bearing, and aloofness as well. They were not excessively familiar, which right from the start relaxed me, tempering my habitual defensiveness … The camaraderie established right away between this trio and myself seemed out of the ordinary, a game among old adolescents.

There were two of these three new friends who amused me—the one who seemed the oldest, the other almost a kid at twenty. These two men drank a lot and joked endlessly; I would smile at them when I met them sometimes outside a cafe or beside the pool where they might be any time from morning on, and they would call me over. I laughed with these two accomplices over nothing, or over something funny they would say unexpectedly. Sometimes I felt I was back in the schoolyard. The eldest possessed an encyclopedic knowledge and used it in a snobby manner. I reproached him for his pedantry. In this group, however, the silent one, who was also the
most distinguished and well bred, always wore a teasing smile on his face and never spoke unless the discussion came around to the music of upcoming programs.

So I listened to them. We decided right off the bat to stay together, my three companions and me; seated on the highest tier, we watched the evening’s show. I don’t know how it happened, but after several days I felt as if we were a family. In other days, in school, we would call groups that had mysteriously bonded like this “cliques”; in fact, I had gone through adolescence in boarding school mistrusting the gregarious instinct that drove girls to stick together that way.

Now it was not a need for a group; for me it was, rather, a nostalgia for that lost age: for not having had boys as friends, for having missed that light hearted, disinterested conspiring with the other sex …

After twenty years I finally suppressed the taboo; better late than never. We sat together in the tiers that filled up with families who came down from the capital often in their Sunday best—always in couples with children, sometimes babies (occasionally with a grandmother wearing a turban, a veiled aunt …). When our row became too crowded, we alone, my “three musketeers” I called them (myself the fourth), would leave our row and go to the gallery reserved for the press. We mischievously acted like special guests, privileged spectators!

In the afternoon, as the sun was painting the stone of the theater antique gold, the four of us would watch the star rehearse, usually someone from France here for the performance … And it is true that we hardly ever expressed opinions, either in praise or in doubt; we might only make some vague assumptions about the singer’s quality, on how the audience, whose taste was sometimes not very refined, would like him.

I would leave them to go home to dinner, “to be a wife and mother,” I would say, as if another role actually awaited me there.
About two hours later I would meet them again as the crowd gradually filled the open theater and night approached.

It was not until a few weeks had passed, it seems to me, that I began suddenly to think about the Beloved separately … Perhaps those evenings (probably twenty or thirty in six or seven weeks), during which the straightforward warmth of the group grew progressively stronger, were my enticement; or perhaps my desire had already awakened and I was unaware of it … In reality, I felt so completely happy to have found three friends. “Writers and artists,” I used to call them when, in the afternoon, we would go for a drink and to watch the families; we were always on the lookout for some trivial drama at the swimming pools, another show.

One day the reticent young man must have remarked, “When we go back, back to the university, I mean, you are going to snub us. You won’t recognize us anymore! You won’t even say hello … madame!”

He was the only one who teased me this way, suddenly ending a sentence with feigned ceremony: “madame.” His friends—the very young one who could have been a student and the oldest who could have been my schoolmate—both called me quite naturally by my first name … There was a sort of confident familiarity tying our group together—even though it is true that we conversed only in French, and that I could only imagine using the formal “you” when we spoke, as if that remained a privilege of my age … Was I the eldest? I don’t really know. The journalist, whose erudition and affectation I made fun of, looked several years older than me because of his wrinkled face and his leathery neck. Still, that wasn’t certain. He was the only one who drank a lot; too much. The few times I would meet up with the group late in the morning, I had to affectionately reproach this “elder” sitting there at the table: “Midday, and already you’re drinking straight whiskey!”

“And it’s not the first,” sharply retorted his friend, the one I suddenly fixed upon as if the echo of his words really took a while to resonate inside me, as if some unusual, strange nuance was getting lost along the way …

So was that the first time I noticed some nervous quiver showing through the cheekbones of this face later so deeply engraved within me? Of course, the remark was revealing of a friend’s worry; it was a reproach meant to be discreet … I thought I grasped with difficulty what bound these two companions together, the one who drank so much and the younger man in his thirties. But I was suddenly stymied by something else—as if both by its very transience and by some ineffable sadness, behind the curtain of disquiet lay another face of this man with the vaguely saucy gaze … I turned my attention back to the glass of whiskey and suggested to the man who was letting himself be taken to task, “Pretty please for my beautiful eyes, please, take it half and half with water!”

“For your beautiful eyes, madame!” the journalist exclaimed grandly, his eyes red, and with a sardonic shrug. “Here it is Friday, almost prayer time, and I am drunk already! I’ll leave the rest of you and go take a nap so that I can rejoin you tonight, fresh as a rose.”

He left, and the twenty-year-old student went with him (I had baptized him “the student” once and for all); then to the third I quietly added, “A student, of course, but beautiful as an angel.”

We stayed there alone, the two of us, not particularly wanting to talk, watching the rather ordinary crowd at our leisure …

Definitely I have returned now to the “first scene.” To the one that could have begun the logical and well-organized story of the unfolding of this passion. But why would something so blindly experienced be revealed today with no detours, no sidestepping, no desire for a labyrinth?

So, the first time … Not the first time I saw his face, but let us say the first time his presence had reality for me, when he began to “matter.” Perhaps also it was when I felt him look at me; when the desire to be looked at by him awoke in me. Let us get back to the facts, because they are in danger of dissolving, fraying into shabby threads.

Everyone looked forward to hearing one star that summer—a poet-singer who later returned three seasons in a row. The posters for his show already covered several walls in the capital, and one morning he arrived.

At four that afternoon I took my seat, alone this time, to watch the rehearsal. I was perched way up high and, though it was unusual, I was the only one watching in this theater that held two thousand. So this is how I saw Leo for the first time, looking down upon him, a robust man in his sixties with a monkey’s wrinkled face lit by the sun. On the huge stage, Leo adjusted the mike, talking with the stagehands in a very low voice. Then he tested the acoustics pointblank by calling out to the empty tiers, to the whole village behind and, it suddenly seemed to me, to the whole country, young and clumsy with its thirteen years of independence …

His voice, accustomed to speaking, to lampooning, curled a cappella higher and higher, unfurling the text. Sitting there, I listened. I knew that this night was going to be the event of the summer.

My three “musketeers,” it turns out, were standing in the wings. I later learned that they had gone to the airport to meet the singer very early; that they had all had breakfast together. “So Leo was the fourth musketeer that I was waiting for,” I said, laughing, when I found them after the rehearsal.

The evening was strange, at least for me. On a sudden whim I had agreed to introduce “Leo who needs no introduction” to the two thousand spectators (there must have been three thousand that night) who had come from the capital … Then I twisted my ankle after having improvised one or two gay sentences of warm introduction. There in front of everyone Leo kissed me on the cheek and I twisted my ankle taking a half-step backward. I took off my shoes with a wave and left the much-too-big stage to rejoin my three friends in the wings. The eldest holding me up by the shoulders, the other two smiling affectionately at me, we stood there, spectators bound together in the darkness, for the whole first part of the concert.

I saw, for the first time, a French poet address three thousand of my compatriots, and for three hours. At intermission I went to perch at the top of the amphitheater to study the audience intently. They all looked alike tonight; everyone seemed to be thirty years old—all had been barely fifteen or twenty during the war, and therefore they had all hummed the same French songs (Brassens, Brel, and Mouloudji, and Montand, and so on.). They had hummed them at the same time as they scanned the newspaper to see how many members of the Resistance had been killed, at the same time as they worried about a cousin arrested and tortured, at the same time as they fell in love, with a “Frenchwoman, a leftist,” who believed, it is true, in the future of decolonized peoples, but also in the beauty of the black eyes of her Romeo and his fervent voice!

They had all come together tonight to sing the refrains with Leo, to prompt him with a line when he feigned hesitation, when he
stamped impatiently, when he shouted, whenever … Back in the wings, “Is he a ham, or is he a poet of the people, or is he just a real performer?” I asked the young man, the one of all the three who suddenly did not leave me anymore.