Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

What was this movement simultaneously inside and outside of me that my body, prompted earlier by the sax, seemed to have released? In what muffled, liquid mystery had he reluctantly introduced himself? I understood, plainly and simply, that I was becoming aware of someone else. Thus a man had watched me dance and I had been “seen.”

And even more than that, I was keenly, consciously, happily aware of myself (nothing to do with self-love, or narcissistic vanity, or laughable interest in one’s appearance …) as being truly “visible” for this almost adolescent young man with the wounded gaze.

Visible for him alone? My visibility for him made me visible to myself.

I lagged behind Leo and my husband on the road. They were still talking — their voices worn out with exhaustion … I, however, was blithely ready to tackle the new day. I would never sleep. I would walk the length of the beach indefinitely. I smiled at the first glimmers of light in the sky.

I kissed Leo, who sighed. “How can a person come to your beautiful country and sleep all alone, without a woman!”

Leo was sincere in his protests. Imagine not guaranteeing our guests, over and above bed and board, a beautiful odalisque!

“You’ll find her all by yourself tomorrow!” my husband assured him. “Don’t forget that I’ll come to get you in three or four hours!”

The next evening I took my place docilely beside the young man on our last tier. I was there for Leo’s second concert. And once again I was with two thousand other fans, or the two thousand from the night before … the young man thoughtful beside me.

At the end, when we rose to go and rejoin Leo in the wings, my companion said to me quietly, “Tonight, will you dance like yesterday?”

It wasn’t quite a request.

“You know,” I replied in a deceptively playful tone, “even when it can’t be seen, I dance. I dance all the time! I dance in my head!”

Naturally, throughout last night’s improvised choreography, it was my passion that was in ferment. I did not yet call it by that name. What else could I say to my Beloved, besides; what could I say to myself?

“I’m going to be good and return to the fold,” I whispered without even a trace of sadness.

I smiled at him with the unexplained first stirrings of happiness inside me, like a suddenly gushing spring that took me by surprise.

Standing before the young man like this I was aware in that instant — in a blinding flash, but then it flowed for thirteen months — that he had begun to be the Beloved for me the night before, the intensely Beloved.

AFTER MY JOURNEY into the interior of the country, two months went by. I could have resumed my earlier work (listening to sound archives, reflecting on the accumulated material …) in that ninth floor office. But I didn’t want to do that. It was now the time for separations, for amputation performed on myself by myself. I had to push forward in a move that I experienced as a painful necessity. I accepted a teaching job again (going three mornings down into the center city, as the sunny winter cleared the dawn skies). That would be another journey for me, a change of scenery that would console me.

It was as if another self rushed through the traffic of the narrow, noisy streets, then spoke in the lecture hall, questioning the students. Afterward I did not go back to our apartment; while I was in my stride, I kept on working, otherwise weakness was imminent.

I would be absorbed for three or four hours straight at the Bibliothèque nationale. I literally went back in time to live the centuries: the various stages in which the Almohades became established in the east and center of North Africa, cavalcades, the displacement of tribes, the toppling of entire regions … The strange and fascinating twelfth century. In the middle of that same century Ibn ’Arabi was born at Murcie, and toward the end of it Averroës, persecuted, was called to Marrakech, where he died.

With these storms inside my head I would walk back up along a raised boulevard that circles the city’s amphitheater, its ancient harbor squeezed in down below like a woman’s genitals underneath, a sweeping landscape. I had to walk faster; dusk was about to spread the gray or reddish glow of its whiteness. The balconies and terraces in the city radiated for the last time. The long, noisy parade of cars and overcrowded buses turned into a grayish dream scenery; I was the walker, my eyes reflecting only clouds, the architecture hung there in front of the sky, it seemed that I was walking alongside another humanity that was parallel to mine, yet so strange, by its very proximity.

As I returned home and as the century of the Almohades gradually dissipated like the blood-streaked clouds dispersing on the horizon of the setting sun, I felt I was back in my real life, my only life, back, that is, to the wound I felt in those days.

I thought “wound,” or sometimes “separation” (and I said to myself that, literally as well as figuratively, I was right at the edge of an endless precipice …), because I had already provided the love story with a brutal ending, whereas, stuck in its preliminaries, it had never even taken place.

I have forgotten exactly when the long, slow, inexorable gnawing of absence began and then, second by second, would not let itself be forgotten. Had my Beloved vanished? Into what void? Was I not the one, rather, who found myself shifted into another reality? I wandered, with this mark on my heart, seeking along the slopes of this boulevard, in the mists of this espaliered city, some ghost … Had the very city itself not split in two in some obvious metamorphosis that everyone saw but me? So my Beloved lived on one shore and I on another, never again would we meet! I would go on seeking him indefinitely; my body longed only to walk and that was the reason; perhaps it would end up by crossing the hidden frontier, finding itself on the other side, in another city — real or unreal, but at least the one in which my Beloved also lived!

I wondered if, at this very moment, he was working there, if he still had the same daily routine. Had time frozen for him as it had for me? Rather, should I not accept that he was laughing, joking, that he came and went, thoughtless and carefree? He must have just barely noticed that his neighbor at work had vanished with no token courtesy, with no goodbye. Yes, obviously, he was laughing, he was alive; he went home to his girlfriend every night.

And this is the moment to talk about the woman he lived with: a young woman whom I had seen two or three times with him; then alone, later rather frequently so. Was she an actress or a musician or the editor of some weekly known for its arts columns? I did not know. I had never asked any questions and no one introduced us to each other. She had not been there all summer or for last season’s shows: she must have been away on vacation in France. Later someone or other told me specifically that she had been “living with” the Beloved for two or three years. I gazed at her for a long time, my heart weighed heavily.

Even before knowing this, the aching, sickly air of her bony, not very pleasant face had struck me; it seemed crumpled and shrunk by long illness. And there I was reacting to this physical lack of grace (a sort of shadow, a gray veil enveloping her) by feeling bad myself.

I can see it all again: the first time I caught sight of the couple together, just a few yards from me. I saw him from the back, launching into some animated speech; she was frozen, staring wide-eyed at him. This gaze hit me all at once: She loved him, she loved him and at that moment was devastated by this love. I looked away, I felt bad for her, or for myself, as if I saw at the other end of an invisible chain the results of a passion entirely surrendered to the other … A sense of uneasiness dug the ground from under me: Was this man not just like any other trying awkwardly to shake off some hindrance?