Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

BEFORE THIS WAS ALL ERASED, even before the torment of the absence, there was one time when my Beloved confided in me. One time when I found him alone, when we chose to sit on the beach, in the sand.

He did the talking; I contemplated the vast sky. I studied its drifting, fleecy clouds, whose pink stripes would become streaked with blood before the purple of nightfall. The air was punctuated with short cries: a seagull crossed the azure before vanishing; and not one person walking on the beach. Turning my head halfway, I could just catch sight of two or three of the village women’s colored veils as they left their jobs at the tourist’s hotel to hurry in the direction of their hamlet, behind the hills. Silence floated around us and we would soon be submerged by the night.

My Beloved spoke — steady streams. Then he stopped. I did not speak up; I did not look at him. The dusk grew redder and redder. The voice of the man confiding in me began again.

Toward the end, cautiously turning toward him, I must have asked him one or two questions. I remember his profile — the tic like lightning twitching his cheek. It was only later that I thought to myself, with cool astonishment, that he was talking to me and coming alive again at the same time. He told me the story of a former love — he was specific right from the start that “it was five years ago”—but he had only begun to feel its pain in the present. Later, I, too, found his story moving, not because it was infectious, or even out of compassion. No. The disturbance in me came from seeing him taken from me by these recollections to some other place totally foreign to the two of us, sucked back to that other place. So he was there in front of me without being there; I no longer existed for him. He vanished into the shadow of this stranger whom he described without naming; with me present he was once again living with her, and I suffered — not as I listened to him on the beach, but later, in a sort of amazement.

Then not far from us a group of three or four women, Europeans, walked by. One of them seemed to recognize me and greeted me. I replied absentmindedly, without getting up. She said something to the women with her and one of them looked back once or twice. The group moved away.

“Wives of Belgian volunteers who live near you year-round, at the yacht basin,” I said.

I explained that the preceding week I had been at a party with my husband and several of his colleagues and had met that woman there.

“She said she has been living here for two years, and asked me all sorts of questions about myself and my work. I wondered why. Finally she admitted, ‘Ever since I’ve lived here, always at the hotel, the only examples of women from this country that I have met are the village women who clean house. They don’t speak French …’ ”

My sense of the irony began to stir in the moment of silence that followed, as I thought of that party, and I added, somewhat wearily, “She didn’t even realize that nine miles away thousands of women come and go in the city, working outside their homes, teaching, nursing … She asked skeptically if I taught at the university.”

And I shrugged my shoulders, resigned before so much ignorance; the passersby had disappeared.

After this digression the Beloved went back to how his story had concluded three years earlier. As if he knew I didn’t want to question this “before,” letting it spill out however he let it flow, according to the rhythm of his memories … As if, I thought to myself, the Belgian women taking a walk were, after all, a ghost, while the reality passed before him on the beach, sometimes smiling, sometimes melancholy, a shadow — the foreign woman whom, for at least an hour, he had been bringing back to life.

Yes, remembering his confessions, my disquiet returns, bearable while he spoke of her in my presence—“her,” this foreign woman from five years before, three years before — he would immediately plunge once again into the days of worry, excitement, or hope. (Whereas, for my part, I would scarcely find myself face-to-face with him when everything would disappear for me, my everyday life, my family attachments, my ordinary turmoil.) And he described them so well, those stormy, tormented moments, that, hearing him, I was completely inside that time as it passed, in those emotions: I was “she,” I was he.

Then he was silent. The last gleams of the setting sun had been extinguished just as suddenly a few moments before. We stood up in the darkness. A few yards behind us the door of his house was still open, the lights inside seemed to beckon.

I remember that once I was standing, I had felt some sort of weight on my shoulders. Tired. Infinitely tired: of the passion of others and because, in fact, it was the passion of others! I bent down swiftly and, with one hand, picked up the pair of espadrilles I had thrown on the damp sand. At the same moment he also bent down toward me.

“I’m cold!” I said quickly. “I need to go back to the city!”

He kept his face raised toward me as I was leaning down like that for a moment. As if, in spite of the diffuse twilight, with the reflection from the water behind us, he finally discovered I was present. His face seemed to me so close; it seemed outside all those memories that were finally dissipating. A childish smile lit up his features and he stared at me.

I reached out my hand to him. I just barely managed to stop the words on the tip of my tongue: “Take me home, or else I’ll never leave again!”

As if he were becoming close kin to me, an almost incestuous brother, I had that tender thought. I was on the verge of calling him “my darling” in Arabic, or anyway in the dialect of my maternal tribe — he would not have understood, he would not have guessed its emotional weight.

Pressed against me, he took my arm (my body, my sides, my torso arched, and became cautious, rebellious, immobile):

“Of course, I’ll take you home!” he said unequivocally. “We have just time enough to have a drink of something, then I’ll get the car from the garage.”

With his fingers he brushed my hand that was carrying the pair of espadrilles.

“Warm yourself up! You’re cold!”

“That’s it!” I said in a half-joking tone. “Warm me up with a bowl of hot milk, look after me! Afterward we’ll take our time going back!”

Next to him in his messy kitchen, sitting on a stool and putting on my shoes, accepting one of his big wool sweaters for my shoulders, in this nocturnal intimacy, I softened. However, I did not forget how he had taken me shortly before into his past, and I let him wait on me — as if reproaching him indirectly for the distance set up by his confiding in me.

He waited on me, he smiled; he became a more than thoughtful host. Probably he was expecting that after those ambiguous moments on the beach, after the things he had said that had made me both more distant and oddly more close to him, probably he hoped some impulse would finally be released in me. It is true that my gestures, maybe even my voice, seemed different that evening. Yes, that is what I think, now that I write it down for myself, after it was all erased, after the twists and turns of separation; I think that he saw into me better than I did myself, that he was foretelling the emotional demonstration that was imminent, that he was preparing for it.

The kitchen, half-lit; the little yaps of a dog outside; some neighbor’s child singing. And he and I there, occupied with almost ordinary things, the smell of the warm milk that nearly boils over: he watches me intently, my sheer pleasure as I drink. He reaches out to hand me a napkin; laughing, I wipe my lips. He is standing so close. I pull off the heavy sweater — of good red angora — I want to give it back to him. He insists I should keep it on in the car. He puts it back on my shoulders. He becomes protective; he seems affectionate. In a flash I see him clearly with “the other,” the foreigner he loved so much: but the vision does not trouble me. His attentions warm me more than this angora wool.