Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

Two or three times after this I ran into the woman and soon knew her first name: Leïla. We looked at each other; I looked down without approaching her.

Once without thinking I asked my journalist friend, my somewhat snobbish cohort, who was always alone when I encountered him this fall, “Was she pretty?”

He and I had never discussed either the preceding summer or our common friend. He was cheerful; he used to invite me to the same comfortable bar whose terrace looked out on a glorious garden, a good place for conversation. This comrade of mine was, of course, courting me ever so slightly, but it cheered me up and was so offhand that the game seemed not to compromise me, just a way to pass the time — I heard myself ask, because Leïla went by in the distance, “Was she pretty?”

“So you are cruel, though not treacherous,” the journalist commented. “Cruel since you are the queen.”

“Please,” I excused myself miserably. “I didn’t want to be mean … I’m touched by Leïla; I see she isn’t well; is this maybe something recent?”

“She’s been like that ever since I’ve known her!” he retorted. “Some people like to suffer.”

Leïla went away. Another time the Beloved had stopped and turned away when I was also there on the square in front of that huge building and I heard him tell someone, “No, it’s all over, I’m not coming!” The other kept insisting in a low voice. We had all left the elevator together as a group and were going to part with great formality.

He came back in my direction, I stared at his features: A nervous spasm passed slowly across them — was it just anger? Or was there a trace of pain? I looked away. I felt I was there at a bad moment, and wished I were far away. Why would he absolutely not console her, why …?

I must have turned my back, preparing to leave. Then I heard him call me rather softly by my first name. He was calling me. It was the first time like this. He took a step. I turned around and said warmly, “Finally, I’m no longer ‘madame.’ ”

He stammered. I saw something like a faint wrinkle creasing his features again. For a second I thought he was really present in his gaze, in his thought. He had called me as if calling for help … Being with me would make him forget whatever his lover was begging for, I did not know what, some duty, some obligation.

He said my first name again more softly. Clearly. I think I was filled with a stunning bolt of joy; I lit up, I was about to take his hand: “Let’s leave, let’s go away!” This would assuage the thin face lifted toward me.

Suddenly a black curtain fell inside me. “Her.” Without seeing her I instantly knew she was behind me. Her whole being submerged in sadness. There would be other occasions for us, some other moment; everything between my Beloved and myself had to remain bright and clean. Another day, another century!

“Excuse me,” I finally murmured, and slowly turned away.

I felt him not move for a moment, seeing I had pulled back and understanding the reason.

A month later my friend, the journalist, insisted on telling me that Leïla had not been his mistress for at least a year: “After she attempted suicide,” he said, “she was still just as desperate!” I interrupted his explanations. Why did I need to know? Let the pain and joy of others be private … I was still filled with thoughts of the Beloved. Not once did I ever ask myself how he was attached to Leïla, if he loved her. I was troubled instead to know that he had such a power over her. As if I felt I was partly responsible, though indirectly, for this woman’s torment.

The image of the unhappy lover faded away: something from long ago that preceded my summer of music, dance, and excitement, and had died slowly for lack of air, long before my present suffering began to run its arid course.

Another month taken up by the same uncertainty and its accompanying exhaustion went by. Spring made a chilly start in the city; violent downpours left the landscape sparkling afterward with a translucent light like infinite dawn.

I walked constantly, feeling myself travel from stage to stage of endless insomnia. Every now and then some remark by a friend or a relative would rip through my emptiness:

“Your eyes are glistening!”

“You are sad, thinner!”

“You always seem to be somewhere else!”

I heard myself with my little girl, laughing long and hard the way we did before. We still kept secrets, sometimes at night and sometimes when we took short walks in the nearby park.

But I would suddenly wake up in the middle of the night; a dark, knotty dream — though I could not remember it — kept on dumping me into the swells … To calm down and go back to sleep more peacefully, I told myself, as if I were both the storyteller and the child who needed to be settled down: “Tomorrow, surely, I’ll run into him! … and suddenly stopping his car, interrupting my walk through the crowd, he will come up to me politely: ‘You are so tired, I’ll come with you!’ Tomorrow, for sure.” And I would go back to sleep feeling sorry for myself, in my constant walking through the city, in my despair. “Tomorrow, for sure!” As I gradually fell back asleep, I thought that I was becoming my own little girl!

I resumed my hours of work at the Bibliothèque nationale. Sometimes I would go there humming the popular laments of Abou Madyan, the saint of Béjaia: melodies that were melancholy and tender, snatches of which, when I was a child, my sweet, sad, maternal aunt used to teach me … Then, as if I were looking for something to give me pain, I would abandon the research I had planned. With my aunt’s voice in my ear I would plunge in, seeking some faint secret, some calming water; I ardently went through the chronicles of the luminous Maghrebian and Andalusian twelfth century:

“On that day,” I read, “the sheik mounted his horse and ordered me, as well as one of my companions, to follow him to Almontaler, a mountain in the region surrounding Seville. Following the afternoon prayer, the sheik suggested that we return to the city. He mounted his horse and set out while I walked beside him holding on to the stirrup. Along the way he told me about the virtues and miracles of Abou Madyan.

“As for myself, I never took my eyes off him, I was so absorbed by what he was saying that I completely forgot my surroundings. Suddenly he looked at me and smiled; then, spurring on his horse, he quickened the pace and I hastened my step to keep up with him. Finally he stopped and said to me, ‘Look what you have left behind you!’ Turning around I saw that the entire path we had traversed was nothing but brambles that came half-way up my body.”

Gripped by Ibn ’Arabi’s tale describing his adolescence and the years of his mystical education in Andalusia, I saw in precise detail his route — lit with passion — as it led him toward Seville. I imagined the sheik Abou Yacoub Youssef, one of Abou Madyan’s closest disciples, on horseback, and Mahieddine Ibn ’Arabi running along holding on to the stirrup, and seeing none of the brambles in the path because he was so intoxicated by the account of the saint’s graces.

It was this mystical poet from Béjaia whom generations of Maghrebian women — my aunt and my mother its most recent link — passed on with their saddened voices, like a last whiff of the fragrance that was so fresh and green that day, on the road to Seville, where the Sufi master on horseback, despite the thorns on the path, initiated a young man who was already predestined.

I left the library and found myself back on the circular boulevard along the heights of the city. Of all this contemporary metropolis the only thing I kept with me as I set out on my walk was its hum, the faint echo of its roar. I walked and I became the spectator of a day in 1198, probably a spring day, on the outskirts of Béjaia … Sidi Abou Madyan, almost eighty, prepares to leave his city; thousands of the faithful are there, trying in vain to keep him from going. Will they ever see him again? He is so sick. He resigns himself to going to Marrakech, where the Almohade sultan with the fearsome reputation has summoned him.