Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

It is four P.M. Suddenly I think of the children. Let’s go home! I tell myself. I walk with a light step. The distractions of motherhood await me. Playing the piano with my daughter.

Late that night, in bed, my eyes open in the darkness, I am confronted again with returning pain; it is not the least bit weaker: I hurt physically! I will sleep, despite the nightmares. Tomorrow I will have to invent some other consolations — temporary, I know.

Shortly after these days of confusion, I began to imagine a meeting that would be strange, but possible: to speak to the Beloved’s mother.

I could readily have used some easy social strategy to meet women who were cousins of this lady or her relatives by marriage. I could have forced myself to appear on the social scene for a few days, making polite remarks to old friends or relatives. I could end up by asking to be introduced to this person I did not know. She must still be young, certainly beautiful, and with a shy reserve. Yes, I could start a conversation with her: I would show up by chance in some living room or at a party. Even the ambiguity of exchanging banal words with her would bring me pleasure, embarrassment, or at least some new nostalgia. I could hope for some respite from my arid days just because of being close to the woman who could have been but who would never be my mother-in-law. As if because I had at present a very real mother-in-law, one so tender and motherly toward me, whom I loved so much that because of her I could not imagine having to leave her son someday — as if because of this “guilty” love of mine (yes, this is a guilty love for a young man who cannot pose as my husband’s rival), a more dangerous rivalry would be generated. This invisible mother whom I wanted to meet (a mother who was Berber, still young, elegant, middle class, from the best part of town) would be pitted against my real mother-in-law, who was so traditional, so aristocratic in manner, full of Islamic gentleness and a goodness that was somewhat severe. She was the friend of the beggar-women of her city, the one who consoled repudiated women, sterile wives, and scapegoat daughters-in-law. Whenever I would visit (I spent at least one night a week at her home, on a mattress on the ground, watching her absorbed in prayer, comforted by her piety which, I was sure, would long protect us, myself and my two children), she would describe in detail the daily wretchedness of the women of this city of invisible lusts and repression. How could I ever have to leave such a friend? Suppose one day I could no longer conceal all this from my husband, he who had begun, with perfect timing, to travel in Europe, Egypt, and even farther away.

There were other temptations that came to mind concerning his family: I remembered that the Beloved’s father was a doctor. Once, he happened to mention the neighborhood where he had his office. And I had a distant aunt whom I used to visit from time to time who lived there.

Either apathy or fatigue made me give up on my project of being introduced to the mother. Not only did the very strong presence of my own mother-in-law raise barriers to this vaguely desired scene, but for months now I had been living a solitary life, and leaving to make some slightly risky social rounds would be painful. One morning I decided to go visit my aunt.

Throughout the visit, as I asked her detailed questions about her health, I was asking myself, Am I going to make an appointment with this doctor at the end of this boulevard? And tell him what? What sickness do I have? My thinness? My aunt had noticed it when I came in. Of course recently I had been on the verge of fainting several times: My usual hypotension — that’s all it was. I told my relative (as if practicing ahead of time for the questioning in the doctor’s office) about the last time I had fainted: “Day before yesterday, alone at home, I stood up all at once, to go to the kitchen, I think … Suddenly, blackness. I don’t remember anything. It seemed to me that it was a long time later that I found myself lying down on the ground. My hand felt the tile floor. It took me some time to understand: What am I doing laying on the ground? stretched out? In fact I had suddenly fainted the minute I stood up. I didn’t even get hurt! Not even a lump on the head. Nothing!”

The aunt was worried, then affectionately: “You are not pregnant?”

I burst out laughing. “Certainly not!”

That seemed ludicrous to me. “No, I’ve had these fainting spells sometimes, but they come on progressively. I will start to feel weak, and lean on something while somebody is talking to me, and then suddenly I’m hearing bells; I keep on smiling at him, but his voice gets far away. Then I sit down, I eat some sugar or chocolate.”

“Go to the doctor, the one here on my boulevard,” the aunt insisted. “He’s the one who takes care of me!”

“Your doctor, what language do you speak to him in?”

She exclaimed, “How do I speak to him? Come, my daughter, in the Prophet’s language of course … Are we not independent these days so that at least I can speak my own language to a doctor from my country! … But this doctor, you know, opened his office when the French were in charge, during the war.”

I left my kinswoman and went straight to the doctor’s office. I sat down in the corner for women and children in the already overcrowded waiting room. In the hallway the doctor briefly made the rounds. One of the women whispered, “That’s him!”

I had scarcely time to catch a glimpse of him, a stocky fifty-year-old with red hair. Engrossed in thought, he glanced about as he returned with a lady wearing a veil. When it came to be the turn of the patient ahead of me, I slipped out. What was I doing there? I had no desire at all to answer personal questions. As for my fainting spells, they had lost any interest for me after I described them to my aunt. Above all I was beginning to realize that when I met the doctor — who, in the first place, was “the father”—I would have had to undo my blouse so that he could listen to my breathing and sound my chest. The indecency! He was “the father,” not some anonymous man of science.

I took off like a thief. Outside, my heart pounding. For one long moment at least, when I left my aunt’s and stupidly came to waste my time in this room full of sick women and wailing children, I had found release from my obsession. I had totally forgotten in those moments the image of the young man … Now, in this crowded, unfamiliar neighborhood, I thought to myself that this stocky, redheaded doctor seemed like an ordinary man with commonplace occupations. His son was a young man who was just as ordinary, the only son of a very quiet, middle-class couple. It was only this cruelly self-imposed separation that was maintaining the aura surrounding this individual! What’s more, I said to myself as I walked along, during the preceding months, the summer and the fall, whenever I sought his company and played at being so casual, whenever I repressed my emotion, endowing the young man with so much importance, did this not simply mean that I was distancing myself irreversibly from my husband — the man who for so long had seemed my other self?

I took a taxi to return as quickly as possible to the apartment. I needed the children. I had spent half a day busy with my aunt and then with the temptation of visiting the doctor. I went home, my obsession now a lighter burden. I opened my door; I made some coffee.

But then, going from one bedroom to the other, surrounded by laughter, I stood for a moment on the balcony to recall the pearly gray of the sky, and suddenly the soft voice, the low voice of my Beloved and his slightly ironic look came back to me: obsession renewed. During the evening it pursued me again, despite the fact that the children were preparing to celebrate their father’s return the next morning. They asked me what presents I thought he might be bringing them from Egypt; they both offered to read me the poems they had written in his honor.