Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

I would have liked to interrupt him: Why? Does it only take you a year to forget? Isn’t it rather that while you were apart, you were bent on keeping her so close but, face-to-face, you found she was different, matured, sorrowful? Stripped of her child, expelled from the land of sunshine in which your love flourished? Was the magic gone for her too? Shouldn’t you have persevered, stayed together to thumb your nose at the major — former member of the Resistance, former husband, former who knows what?

I no longer remember how these confidences came to an end … Genevieve, image of the sacrificed woman whom I would never know, whom I already imagined as some new, distant relative.

I remember, on the other hand, that he kept saying that he couldn’t live in France “for more than a month,” that he had quickly returned home, that his mother had turned over their summer house to him, and that he liked it there, staying put like a hermit, especially during the winter and spring. The flood of people from the capital having not yet arrived, he routinely spent time with the men from the nearby hamlet.

Afterward , I say to myself — no longer knowing whether by that I mean “after making a final break with my Beloved,” or after the scene I then lived through with my husband the night I made my ridiculous confession. The consequences of this outrageous event I, of course, imposed in haughty silence upon my confused parents, who naïvely saw this brutality and conjugal havoc as either a remnant of the old ways of doing things or else as the result of some corrupt modernism. And — one of my cousins reported to me what they had said, while all I could do was hold my tongue — they trusted my “upright” character.

Afterward … This incredible thing, I can’t quite understand why I did it! In fact two or three weeks after this breakup, I agreed, yes, agreed to return to my life as a wife — only not in the usual apartment, as if that were the only place still retaining the poisons of the recent chaos. I went back to the seashore, to the house my husband had there near the now-deserted open theater. The harshness of the rocks it overlooked agreed with me.

I accepted, yes. I see once again the sequence of my return unfolding and — now that it is all over, now that all connections are broken, my passion evaporated — disintegrating.

In short, hardly had I bandaged the wounds on my body when I instantly returned to my prison — why? how? I am trying now to discover what temptation could move me to say to myself, You are going back to where the danger lies, to understand, or rather to confirm: Is it really dangerous there — at the point of delirium, during that night of violence, when the husband meant to blind you?

It is true that I had barely escaped his rage when I had stated categorically to myself, It’s my fault! Not that I meant him to do it, but I was wrong not to have foreseen his jealousy! As if the confession I laid out before him to lessen my own torment had triggered an almost legitimate husband’s rage. My fault! I kept repeating, afterward.

Still I wanted to be sure: Was my obsession with the image of my Beloved an inner madness isolating me, or was there more to it, something ambiguous in its complexity? Did my husband’s violence deprive him of any significance for me, even though in the gesticulations of a hyperbolic passion whose real sense escaped me, he forced his way back into the foreground?

Yes, I went back to prison.

Before … an evening spent in the restaurant of one of the best hotels — my son who for the past few weeks has insisted on staying with his father has come to find me and then to convince me to come to dinner. A touching messenger. So there the three of us are. Then child slips away at dessert. And I find myself listening to a long plea — not really listening actually, but registering with astonishment that this man who is pleading with me, who, as soon as he is alone with me, begs me to return, this man whose face I am not even focused on is speaking to me from another shore.

Is this really the man I lived with for thirteen, fourteen years straight, sharing innumerable nights of love I thought I carried within me, invisible treasures that, as I imagined for so long, made me glow secretly? With this man, really?

I tried to listen to him. I kept my eyes downcast: concerned about how my mother would greet me shortly — she had been worried seeing me leave. How could I tell this man, “It is not a matter of pardoning or forgetting … Perhaps it really is my fault!” I was tempted to say that.

In fact, after less than three weeks of convalescence, I found it comforting to have only one struggle to face from then on: the fight over my possession by the other, the Beloved I mean. My passion was again looking for a chance to quickly take over the void that had settled into my life. Would this, then, be the final struggle or, on the contrary, the prelude to a likely and licit surrender? For me these were the only important questions. I could not keep my mind on any others.

But then, on the other side of the table, there was the husband from whom I was separating (I was considering the formalities of divorce — I even told him, “So that it will go faster, and since the law is on your side, well, then just repudiate me! The important thing is to straighten it all out as quickly as possible!”). This man who was pleading with me spoke from the other side of a gaping rift.

At the most, in a final weak moment, I should have thought of this gulf between us with nostalgia: “fate,” I later would say, “time” alone caused it!

And all of a sudden …

All of a sudden I listened to him — this man who, a moment earlier seemed almost irreversibly a stranger.

He was talking about his day today: in his old parents’ small town. In the morning his father, an imam of the hanéfite rites — rarely practiced in the region — had expounded a long moral discourse: recommendations of justice and fairness. With no beating around the bush he had, in the presence of his son, spoken of his daughter-in-law’s “qualities as a woman,” the confidence he had in her feminine lineage. “What is essential,” he said — it was one of his leitmotivs—“is what affects the education of the children and the future of the couple,” and so on. I, of course was his daughter-in-law, and “my feminine pedigree” had been carefully examined at the beginning of our union. We had found it amusing in those days. So he was harking back to something said earlier, that was all — not offering advice or suggesting direct intervention in his son’s present life. He then returned to his little old mosque in the old city. It was a Friday.

“And the upshot,” said the son of this stern imam , “was that I had a great urge to take the baths!”

He had then asked his mother to prepare his linens for him. He had hurried to the baths “as if before a feast day,” he added in an eager voice. I tried not to look at him but to pay attention and listen carefully.

He described how he had gone into the warm room, how he had tended to his body, how he had asked the most experienced masseur for the longest massage. He even added — remember, our son was now gone and we were alone — that he had wanted to have all the hair removed from his entire body, that he had perfumed himself with musk and jasmine, that he had rested there for half an hour, enough time to sweat abundantly, and then he had dressed himself in the cold room.

He had gone home in a taxi. His mother had, as usual, fixed him the sugared beignets that he loved; there were pomegranates, some of them with the seeds plucked out, others simply parted, awaiting him on the low table. It was five in the afternoon. One of his sisters, married and living in the city, had just arrived; she had taken off her veils intending to make herself comfortable beside him.