Assia Djebar: So Vast the Prison

The earliest days of discovery — still not forgotten … I took a taxi; it was fifteen kilometers from the capital to this village by the sea. The country house, its garden deep in sand … Open rooms, a terrace with mats and straw chairs; a Ping-Pong table and on the ground a game of boules lying about; laughter from friends clustered out back under the figtree.

“You’re here?”

“Because you invited me!” And I pretended I was just a neighbor on my way somewhere.

He said it again, half muttering, “You’re here!” I can still hear his voice, slightly heavy with indolence and a touch of nostalgia. It was as if he recognized something in my manner. What was it — some crazy impulse that I hid beneath nonchalance the moment I crossed the doorstep? Despite my pretense he noticed or recognized this urge because he himself had experienced it before in some other place and time … The saddened, almost disillusioned resonance to his low voice, as if he’d been sick (of course he was probably only drunk on sleepless nights of jazz). The voice of insomnia or fever …

One time when I turned up unexpectedly, he suddenly smiled at me. A broad smile that wiped the dross of this other life and its tension from his angular face. A childish smile clearly addressed to me. I forgot everything; I literally drank in his joy; I registered it inside to make the moment glow with it. It was a princely offering: I had come fifteen kilometers by taxi; but I would have come a hundred to be given this gift.

I said nothing; I didn’t move. We stood there face-to-face on the threshold for a moment. Our greetings were awkward, no touching of hands and certainly no warm kiss (in those days I still had the stiffness of a young girl, but that wasn’t the only reason that I scorned gestures of familiarity in his presence). Finally, since the house was full as usual, someone came and joined us to talk and socialize. The afternoon was spent playing games in groups, gossiping and walking on the nearby beach.

I left with one guest or another, who took me home in his car. On the way back somebody mentioned the name of our host: standing by the doorway, he had told me goodbye, he had smiled at me sweetly as if I were the only one leaving. Once, in a corner of the garden, he teased me in a patronizing voice and he seemed to be a few years older than I, whereas quite the opposite was true.

“In short, you come, you meet people, and you always leave with them! … It’s my friends you come to see, not me!”

I didn’t answer. I felt a lassitude that prevented me from keeping up the banter. “You and your friends!” is what I would have exclaimed.

I knew he knew that moments before I had had the urgent need to see him, the need to make sure he was indeed real. I was seized by a violent compulsion to verify his existence in the original and almost that very instant with my own eyes. (At that point I wasn’t thinking of the possible pleasure I would get from seeing him, and certainly I had no other feelings beyond this strange anxiety that, if it were to go on, would turn into unbearable torture: Does he really exist? Didn’t I dream him? ) As soon as I stood there in his presence, my fever fell, my anxiety dissipated ( I exist, everything exists, because he is real! ), I became civilized again, cunning, hypocritical, and I said to myself, I was breathless when I arrived, but now I’d rather die — even for all the gold in the world I wouldn’t say that I did this because of you!

Two or three times at least, when I would show up (in the taxi I held my tongue so as not to say “Hurry, faster!”), I surprised my Beloved alone in his summer house.

He lived in the house year-round, and it was usually filled with friends, foreign visitors, people from the provinces who were passing through; it was like this from June to the end of October. Was it already at the end of autumn or even the beginning of winter that I found him alone — the sun intense, freezing cold, the air translucent and dry before dusk? I have forgotten; the truth is that I had become so distracted during that period — in so many ways. Those thirteen months, I don’t think I noticed the seasons, except perhaps, stepping out the door, I would suddenly wrap up or maybe go back mechanically to get a shawl or a raincoat or umbrella. I never even tried to use the reactions of my body, which is sensitive to cold, to locate myself in the yearly cycle — as if, since the story began in the summer, and despite all the external evidence to the contrary, I remained in that season.

My memory, benumbed, registered vaguely a few sighs from other voices in me: I’m cold! I’m hot! I don’t have on enough clothes! Why is it so damp?

I remember a visit just before winter; I probably imagined it was still the end of September, or at the latest October. As I stepped out of the taxi to see the summer village with its bungalows all closed up and its little streets seeming frozen and abandoned, I was reminded that summer was long gone. “December already,” I murmured, paying the driver; suddenly I was at a loss to find some pretext: How am I going to explain dropping by? I don’t even have the excuse of saying that I’ve come for a swim and thought I’d say hello!

Of course, in September, I had not used any such pretenses. Even when the adjoining beach was swarming with families who were there to swim, I had not even thought of saying, “I’ve come for a swim,” or, “After my swim, I’ll come by to say hello, relax a bit, and then be off again.” On the contrary, more than once I even said in an offhand manner, “I thought of you, so I took a taxi, and now here I am with all your friends!”

This time I told myself that I had thought up the most cunning ruse possible. I would tell the truth; without mincing words I would explain my real motivation, the urge that drove me to come in a taxi as fast as possible. Then, precisely because the unadorned truth was revealed, it would be played down, and I would know that my passion was concealed as deeply as possible. The other could not take what I said at face value, because then it would have been a confession! As if I had proclaimed in a faint voice (frail tones, quivering chin, and all the other signs of my soul’s secret vibration): I wanted to see you! I took a taxi. Fifteen kilometers and here I am!

How easily that passed for a fantastic notion, for the whim of a spoiled woman, flaunting an admittedly capricious desire. In fact at the same time that I was telling everything, or rather the external form of this everything, I was trying to figure it out; it seemed as if I couldn’t get over it myself. How can this be possible? I forget everything just to see your face, to convince myself that you are alive, that I’m not obsessed with a dream, I take a taxi and I come here! What is this weakness in me — and just to check on your existence! The moment I stand in your presence, I see that everything is back in order; I master my underlying fever; I am quite simply no longer suffering, everything is liquid, everything …

Thus I unveiled myself. Thus I was in search of myself. Thus I attempted to disguise myself from myself.

There were then those two or three occasions when I found this man alone when I got out of the car.

I remember the last visit in detail: The gate was closed. I had to go down toward the beach and walk clumsily through the sand. Since all the shutters were closed now, it was hard to tell the villas apart and decide which was his path and not the neighbors’. (“An ambassador!” he had told me earlier, signs of irony aquiver in the corners of his eyes. “You see, we live right in the bosom of the nomenklatura! ”) From there I could go straight through to the terrace. The shades to the French doors were half down. I tapped on the wood, suddenly intimidated … In a moment he appeared, sleepy-eyed, barefoot, and wearing shorts.