Assia Djebar: So Vast the Prison

How good it’s going to be to be alive from now on , I think that very first evening — I remember that there was a man I liked, who put me at ease, a man I liked, who leaned toward me and began at that very moment to court me — very cautiously. He spoke slowly, I think; he spoke slowly and I didn’t hear him. It’s good to be alive! I say again to myself, and my whole face is smiling.

It is going to be so delicious to walk, to like walking for the sake of walking, to admire the purplish white of whitewashed façades at the crack of dawn, to listen to the splashing laughter of children as it beads off the balconies, their showers bursting in my face …

To hear and let oneself be carried along by nearby voices, colors, surging impetuously in disorder, gushing, springing! How intoxicating it will be to become a simple spectator once more, with no attachments or particular desire! Everything improvisation, in outbursts or just waiting. How good it will be to prepare oneself really to live, since the process of living is both leaping and standing still simultaneously.

The evening ends in a rumpled dream, gaiety giving way to fatigue. The next morning I experienced all over again a pure, ineffable, eager awakening. An unsullied light enveloped me exactly as it had the day before after my siesta. At daybreak or late midmorning in days to come, the fleeting and certain impression would return that I was coming closer and closer to some secret throb of excitement, freed from convention. The tempo of life: a spring flowing into chiaroscuro and the fullness of silence. Later the rhythm of these days blurred together to establish a beat that lingered stubbornly inside me.

So thirteen months had been exhausted in a long drawn-out battle, harried by a blind-faced passion whose life had dried up. Thirteen months were wiped out in my sleep that November day.

NO, THE IMAGE OF THE other will not change. Only his power over me, which I confessed neither to him nor to myself, his charm — in its magical sense — unexpectedly vanished that November afternoon, dissolved into the gray waters of my siesta.

As if sleep were navigation. As if, through the muscles of relaxed limbs — the body at rest, responsive and braced, jumping or tensing in response to some dream, or prone and barely breathing, hardly more than a warm corpse — as if the fibers and nerves of the whole organism were haunted by a memory turned inside out, a coiled animal now stretched out on its back in the half-light, belly offered, eyes blinded and mouth open, grimacing and obscene … Body both overpowered by sleep and overpowering it, in a watchful, sun-drenched brightness filtered through half-closed shutters.

And the siesta unfolded like old lace, its weave uncertain, sheer its whole length. And thus my sleeping woman’s body, released and abandoned, rid itself inexorably of the poison instilled inside it for thirteen months.

Must I explain the nature of this clearing away, risking in the process that some powdery spider’s web will reemerge, some tangle of silk or dust with its melancholy effect, from memory not yet rotten?

For thirteen months, in this excavation of ruins, the face of the other had seemed irreplaceable to me. He springs back to life before me the moment that I write — probably because I am writing. A face no less pure, its frank honesty still intact, but henceforth stripped of its power over my senses.

Those days it was a matter of inventing ways to parry his influence and not be weak in any way. If I unexpectedly found myself confronted with this man’s presence, I was careful to look at him without seeing him.

Looking at him as if he were just anybody. In a split second deciding to see him through a fog. However, if I was in a group or in a crowded room, I would suddenly take pity on myself (I actually was starting to beg from myself), my heart pleading convulsively, I would slip quickly back into a corner and turn around. Suddenly the face of my Beloved would appear as if from some picture frame fated to be there, he would be talking, listening, leaving. I would look at him from a distance, left to the solitude I had chosen, concentrating my burning gaze on him. Just one look so that I could recall everything later (“later” would begin as soon as separation took effect, but it felt a hundred years away)!

Under cover and distant I would note the precise line drawn by his eyebrows, the helix of his ear, his slight Adam’s apple, his somewhat projecting upper lip, and how reflected glints of green or blue-green on his jacket, his shirt — it mattered little what — played across his face. I dared move a step closer — then two steps. I lowered my eyes, as if I were thinking about something, which I was, then quickly looked up in an attempt to grasp precisely the texture of his skin, the short scar at one corner of his lips. In a split second I verified things I had seen in a blur earlier: the line of his nose set at right angles but recessed where it met his forehead, the bony planes of his profile, and the deep-set eyes that looked down his nose, creating a distant, proud physiognomy, with the ever so slight imbalance of the face of a bird. This enduring impression from our very first meeting, his particular distant look, made me want to hear the resonate voice that went with it; but his distant gaze had also kept me away from this man any number of times, proving so well the restive caution of bodies, deaf and dumb in their own ways but able to perceive, prior to any contact, the dangerous electricity that will draw two people close or drive them apart.

I had quickly pronounced him “not a very nice man.” It took weeks, a party, exceptional circumstances in short, requiring that the scenery and other things were not in their usual order, for me to become aware of something I sensed, something that would make me a prisoner for months: I felt this face harbored a strange peace. In his frail young man’s build, in the bright gaze with steely glints flickering across it when he spoke in the broken voice of a drug user (whether music, nostalgia, or hashish was the drug), this man — not yet in his thirties, still wearing hints of his slightly crazy adolescence and the offended air of youth — lay his secret before me. He was offering it to me. I alone would decipher it, share it, without letting on that this would make my heart melt. I would hope that my normally cool, clear vision would come to bear: the devastation within this man, the sense of absence, and the dream of that absence. Later he talked to me, although I was not good in the ambiguous role of confidante; he talked, as if it had been pure chance that I had turned up the moment he felt the need to confide.

I understood, in snatches of his confession, that there was a hidden crack behind this tranquil manner, so openly vulnerable yet proud. His will sharpened into a thin body and features that were too finely chiseled, into disdain for how he looked and dressed. These highly visible signs hid an earlier wound, some suffering that had not yet completely vanished. There was poetry dwelling in this face (too often youth has no connection with poetry).

I recall again how, when I would abruptly find myself in the presence of the Beloved (thinking this word in Arabic do I betray myself?), I would concentrate all my strength so as not to stare at him. For a long time I did this until my will faltered and I would give in to gaze at him for just that last second, at least, with all the violence of a starving woman! Abruptly taking in the features that were already in my heart. (If I went a day or two without meeting him, I would begin to suffer not from his absence so much as from the insidious fog clouding his image in my memory!) Some radiance of impalpable youth haloed the fragility of his appearance … So, no matter how long our encounters lasted, as soon as our separation became imminent, my attention would pounce on the vision of him, which was for me so miraculous. My memory would stock up on its nourishment, all the details, to guarantee the impression would be precise for future memory … It even seemed that, to the extent that every encounter would immediately set the raging mechanism of mnemonics in motion inside me, joy itself, the pure, wonderful joy of savoring the dear presence, would only come later. In the very first seconds of separation the memory-image, thus nourished once again and rekindled, was illuminated in all the exact detail I needed finally to be calm. Lost days when it seemed that his face would always remain!