Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

“Sunday is going to be Father’s Day!” the little girl exclaimed.

“That’s the new style!” remarked the housekeeper, who was leaving.

The rest of the day was spent singing and telling riddles and finally some fussing and tears.

In my own bed I did not read any more; I turned off the light. In the darkness I lived the summer before all over again — our talking together in the morning, my three friends and I, or myself dancing on an infinite dance floor where my silhouette gradually fades away.

Was it right away, the first evening of my husband’s return that I suddenly decided to speak?

Now I know that if I had had a confidante, or a man who was an old friend, or some rediscovered friend from school, perhaps I would have told it just once; with one of them I would have ceded to the temptation and pleasure of hearing myself speak my inner adventure out loud — this slow possession to which I had surrendered at first with delight, but then with pain. After all this I know that the need to speak — to a friend and hence, failing that, to the husband I thought of equally as a friend, since he was no longer a lover — intensified the bitter pleasure of hearing myself, and as a result convinced me of the reality of what preoccupied me, giving it weight and flesh. It would give it thus the reality of words if not the reality of caresses; in fact, before and during the words I spoke, I was racked with desire for that man, a new servitude.

Probably long before this, moreover, and barely even suspected by me (though there was plenty of time afterward, when it was in a sense too late to ask myself about what had gone on before!) there was the ill-timed question: Am I indeed real? Or, in the end, isn’t my suffering, the fact that I cannot get used to this separation, the only thing that is real?

That evening I definitely behaved like a raving lunatic. I asked him to listen to me, that we be willing to say “everything” in one night … This “everything” became the weight borne by my dreams, what I denied myself, especially my silent desire, and, above all, my compulsive need to talk about it. A burden of dreams and words resulting from a flirtation that lasted scarcely longer than the games of summer.

I have to see these memories through … My husband returns; my memory wants to swallow up the first evening: He and I in the bedroom, shutting myself up in the bathroom first, almost falling asleep in my bath, which is too hot. He definitely expecting me to come. It is midnight; the lights are out in the children’s bedroom. Silence thickens in the house. And I am not alone, I cannot take refuge in my dreams, and …

Everything about me said no. The stubborn pout on my face; my silence. I did not turn off the light. I forced myself to make trivial conversation just to fill the void, to try to forget what I was doing: because, there I was, taking off my dressing gown, climbing into bed in that clinging nightgown, and there was the man who had just returned, watching my every movement. I did not turn off the light.

I was panicked. I just wanted to sleep; my face said it firmly. “Leave me alone! Just leave! Go away!” How could I tell him that out loud, how … A wild obsession, and my stiffness under the covers; a fierce desire to go to the children’s room and lie down at the foot of their bed, finding there at least, the only corner where I could let myself go and be protected in sleep … Panic: If he touches me, if he caresses me, even if I act like I’m dead, the Beloved’s name, like a poison flower rooted deep in my waiting, is going to burst out and blossom on my lips. It will happen in spite of me and inevitably at the moment when I come — in the event that I give in out of cowardice!

I get out of bed and take refuge in the living room, in the dark. My body is shaking. So, I was going to give in to habit. No, but to what? To the husband’s silent searching, his hands, his desire, and as for myself, what horrible compassion was going to take hold of me, what apathetic indulgence would bring me to the point of sinking into his arms, his, the other’s … I shake. In the darkness, in the living room, I am seized with fury: directed at myself (would there be, therefore, some “female” part in me? anonymous and female?). Ah, if only the children were not there, were not quietly sleeping (which isn’t true, the boy is having more and more frequent nightmares), ah, if I were alone with this man who is waiting for me, who thinks I am “his” wife, his lover, who … I am shaken with rage: Break everything! Shatter it all! Here in this apartment — the lamps, the books, the glasses, trash everything together in a pile of ruins, stones, shards! But the children are sleeping. But the boy sighs in his dreams.

I turn on the light in the living room. The husband, completely dressed all of a sudden, joins me there. He opens a bottle of whiskey, helps himself to a glass, and states unequivocally,

“Despite the sleeping pills I took, I intend to drink this whiskey I got at the airport right down to the bottom of the bottle … I’m going to drink, but you are going to talk!”

“I’ll talk,” I say softly, smiling with relief. “That’s all I ask!”

No use describing the bits and pieces of theater — comedic theater, I thought — that went on almost until dawn …

How else describe my confessions, those of a late-blooming young girl? (It is true that I was racked by a sort of blank rapture: Finally I could talk about “him,” even faced with the glistening eyes and outraged stare of this listener, this intruder.)

He finished all the whiskey. He stood up. He struck. The large, wide-open French doors behind us (was he the one who opened them earlier? I don’t know who did) let in something like the impending danger of a breeze that, I thought, was likely to hurl me at the drop of a hat into that ten-story pit … He struck and I could not take refuge in the back of the room, as if the opening called me straight to it; this man who was large and athletic, with his man’s arms would blindly seize me, would fling me so I exploded outside. He struck and I slipped to the floor, an unusually sharp sense of caution on the lookout within me to figure out what was least dangerous.

First he insulted. Then he struck. Protect my eyes. Because his frenzy was proving to be strange: He intended to blind me.

“Adulteress,” he muttered, in his hands the whiskey bottle broken in two. All I could think of were my eyes and the danger represented by the too-wide-open window.

Then I heard him, as if echoing from within a prison cell in which he found himself, in which he wrestled, in which he was trying to keep me. From inside this nightmare space, inside this bodily fear, my eyes closed, and hidden under my arms, under my lifted elbows, under my already bloody hands, I heard and I would almost have answered with a laugh, not a madwoman’s laugh nor one of tearfulness, but the laugh of a woman who was relieved and struggling to free herself. “Adulteress!” he repeated, “Anywhere, except this city of iniquity, you would deserve to be stoned!”

“Eyes, light,” I sighed two or three days later as I lay there at my parents’ home, my face swollen, my hands in bandages, my body broken.

The image of man has eyes, but the moon, she has light . I would have liked to be able to repeat this line from Hölderlin in its original German.

Throughout my convalescence, for seven days, I no longer knew I was in Algiers. No. Rediscovering the old books I used to have at my bedside in this house, I plunged into Sylvie by Gérard de Nerval. I imagined wandering with the poet all over Europe; I fled to the Orient, to Cairo, where I suddenly dreamed of becoming the captive slave that the poet bought in the market, who got in his way so badly!