Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

He stayed there barely long enough to drink the coffee that had been prepared and inquire after his sister’s children and husband, but did not sit down. His mother was praying in the back room when he left.

He could not wait, he said. He decided to return to the capital and ordered his son, who was playing in the courtyard with the neighbors’ children, to accompany him.

He drove very fast, too fast, and in an hour the car had swallowed up the miles.

When he left the baths, he said in conclusion, he felt sure he could convince me — to return to our life together, to speak no more of the past. To start all over again, like a young couple! … Had he not gone to the baths in preparation for our next night, a new wedding night?

Finally I looked at him: I faced up to his passion, his eyes of desire, the trembling of his fingers.

This, then, is how he loved me, or simply desired me. This, then, is how he came alive again, in my presence.

But for my part? … Verging on somewhat fearful respect, I had listened to his story. I almost envied him for having experienced this fever, for hoping this way. I would have liked to be in his place: deciding, as he did, to go to the baths, plunging myself into the mists of the steam room, burning myself in the heat and the cold, shivering, removing all the hair from my body, my naked body smudged with the greenish mud, then returned to its translucent ivory. Then I would have liked to perfume all the hollows and joints before receiving the blessings of the bathers at the first door, I would have liked to wrap myself in any number of towels at the second door, entwining my hair with garlands of jasmine and roses at the third door, dressing myself and brushing my hair, my cheekbones pink and head enturbaned with sequined taffeta to cross the last threshold! I, too, would have liked to be welcomed home by oranges, half-opened pomegranates, and steaming tea for everyone on a low table. I would have liked, after these long hours of relaxation for my body and muscles, to fall asleep, without speaking, with caresses, in the arms of my Beloved.

The arms of my Beloved, of course!

And I lowered my eyes there before the husband. I heard myself say then, “Yes. I’ll come back!” He did not move. I still did not fix my eyes upon him; I went on:

“Not tonight, however! I have to tell my parents! And make them understand. I will join you tomorrow with my daughter on one condition — that we not return to the apartment for a long time but live in your house at the seashore.”

He accompanied me to my parents’ house, and when we reached it, his face was bright and he wanted to embrace me. I surrendered my hands, my shoulders, my closed eyes to him.

Silently, without saying anything to him, and because once again I could not understand my decision at all (what contagion from his fever was I seeking?), I asked him for forgiveness.

And thus I returned to prison.

Long winter weeks, or spring beginning but too cold. The children would be off early with the chauffeur to the distant city while I stayed idly at home — usually stretched out on a mattress on the floor of my little girl’s room (as if to tell the truth that I was once again merely a guest passing through!). It fascinated me to contemplate the gray sky; belatedly I realized that I had unintentionally become my Beloved’s neighbor again, that I shared this sky with him closely enough to be aroused by the proximity, that he knew none of this but that I knew it for both of us. That I was snared again like a bird in a net but that it gave me a feeling like euphoria … This is how I would conquer the time, and the absurdity of the situation into which I had once again fallen, waiting for what? Fording what? Across to where? To what unknown? The stillness of my days seemed deceptive; to aggravate the point even further, I sent word to the university that I was ill. Besides, was I not really ill? Or rather “quarantined”—I was coming to understand myself as a “quarantined woman,” the way wives who were repudiated and yet not freed formerly were in Kabyle villages!

One night scene from this period stands out, luminous and dreamlike, a still scene whose sound, for no reason, I had cut off — leaving wide-open mouths in the masks of the protagonists, amplifying their passionate gestures, emphasizing the silent density of their angry gaze.

First a burst of temper. Rage from the husband, whom I had finally agreed to go out with one night, to one of the dance halls where a few young, amateur musicians performed in the off season.

I agreed, but I grumbled: “If there is music I like and the band is not too loud, I am going to dance! I’ll dance as I please! … Too bad,” I announced, confronting the look of impotent annoyance he shot in my direction, “too bad if the others think that because I’m the ‘wife of the director,’ I shouldn’t make a spectacle of myself or dance. As for you,” I went on to add, “now you know the despair and fire that I keep buried and silent within me! If the music pleases me, how can I not seek to give my body, at least, some relief?”

I dressed. I kept on my jeans from the morning; I put on a loose-fitting blouse of gauze or silk, and I took a big scarf in case the night was cold.

I went out with my husband. The only time during this period after what had happened. The only night.

A scene from a bad dream, frozen in a wan light.

A scene from a melodrama whose sound I cut deliberately.

The Beloved, practically back from the dead, actually reappeared in this night space, into the depths of boundless despair I was struggling to bear, believing this to be my fate — this raw pain, this expectancy opening onto nothing, opening onto the impasse of this life I had chosen for myself.

He turned up in that cabaret.

I was dancing alone. The dance floor was rather small, the band a student quintet. I was smiling at the trumpeter.

Not many clients this weeknight. The cabaret manager and two or three of his assistants quickly focused their attention on my husband. As much for the sake of avoiding this party as because I was happy to see that the place looked almost deserted, I decided to dance. Only the musicians existed, only the trumpet solo whose flow would carry me along.

I paid no attention either to the first group or to the second when they came through the rear doors. I was still dancing when I heard a diffuse murmur swell and spread. One of the musicians signaled unobtrusively to me; I turned to look toward the far end of the room.

My husband was standing surrounded by his four companions; facing them was the trio composed of my three summer friends. I was completing a dance figure when it slowly dawned on me that the Beloved — whom I had not seen for three or four months — was there, very present! No doubt he had glanced at the dance floor and lingered for a second to see me move (as he had in the height of summer, that first night when Leo came). No doubt.

Loud voices in the back. I had stopped; I took one step, then two. I cannot remember what came next. Except what was at the bottom of it all. Except the moment of open rupture.

My husband: his mask of rage. He seemed to have spoken out loud … For me his mask was silent. A gesture. The mask: eyes huge and almost bloody. Then an arm shot out, a hand: to strike or curse. The mask is upright, very tall. The faces around are stunned, frozen or sucked into a kind of vertigo, a great, unexpected blast.

My gaze settled upon “him”: his silhouette, his body, a collection of vertical lines but on an angle, a poplar on the verge of bending to the storm, just before bowing, before breaking, just before.

Then I looked straight at his back. I mean the back of the man who occupied my soul, who for months and months had been clawing at my heart. A fleeing back.