Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

Is the prince going to come in? Is the bridegroom going to lift the curtain? Fatima begins — even though the old woman guarding her as if she were an idol squats there on the threshold, keeping an eye on her (or at least on the small, silk veil half masking the girl’s face) — she begins to hope. Like so many young girl brides, she hopes, not daring to hope, that the “bride thief” will intervene. He is the one who will come in, the Adonis. Invisible to all the other women, he will slip in. He is the one who will lift the gauze veiling her face, will brush her lips, will reach out his fingers to make her stand up, and all of a sudden, two ghosts, they will float out to the vestibule where they will easily find the stairway to the terrace. They will take refuge there: facing the whole city and its port and the sea in the distance, its reflected glints of onyx.

Motionless, Fatima is dreaming when the curtain is raised. Her old guardian’s voice intones the conventional good wishes: “May happiness be upon you, O Soliman!”

And taking in her hand his generous contribution, she slips outside, letting the curtain fall as the two cedar panels close softly behind it. Fatima feels her heart stop, her body suddenly grow cold. She keeps her eyes cast down when the man — her master — raises the light veil with his fingers and brings his gray face close to the young bride’s eyes … His hand gropes, brushes Fatima’s cheekbones, her eyes, and slowly, finally, she looks at him.

Humbly, Soliman murmurs in a voice full of emotion, “A gift from God, my daughter! From God!”

Then, as is customary, he goes to the corner of the long room to begin his prayer: trembling, praying that God grant him the potency, the power — he repeats the word at the end of his invocation—“the power to enjoy the gifts of God!”

On my aunt’s balcony, beneath the jasmine and not quite a century later, I wonder if the old man in his seventies was able to deflower the virgin that first night. There is no doubt that was what everyone wanted to know the next day: the women of the extended family, young and old, and the waiting heirs: the sons, the sons’ sons, the sons-in-law, the brothers-in-law … In the morning Soliman was the first to enter his private hammam: “For ablutions,” he said, his head held high and looking proud.

Did some mystery remain at the end of this wedding celebration: Was the old man “potent” from the first night on or only after several nights of effort? By spying on the bride, the women were unable to guess, as they usually could, whether her face radiated some secret contentment, some passive or serene acceptance, or bitterness not properly kept in control … The fourth wife seemed so young, and, it must be said, so reserved, whereas the daughters-in-law and the daughters all knew that this daughter of the mokkadem of Saint Ahmed, or Abdallah, grew up in the country, free no doubt, and cherished and laughing … The day after her wedding she stood up straight and mysterious, neither bitter nor beaming with fulfillment: nor was she closed and withdrawn; she put on no airs; she concealed nothing. There, confronted with so many matrons, and heiresses, and wives of heirs, was she already facing up to the future days of mute rivalry, spying, and complicity? No. She remained the mokkadem ‘s daughter, calmly accustomed to the homage of peasant men and women in her hamlet up there, thanks to the baraka entrusted to her as well.

Did she almost think of herself as old Soliman’s daughter, or granddaughter? Did he, as the gossips imagined, all night long caress her naked body, the blossoms of her breasts, the face she offered? She said nothing. She confessed nothing. Nor did she seem to regret anything either.

Even after the next day in the hammam , when she would only tolerate bathing with her young aunt and her younger sister, she did not listen to the murmurs afterward as the wedding sheet, spattered with a long streak of crimson, passed from hand to hand among the oldest ladies seated on the deep mattresses of the reception hall facing the bedroom of the master of the house.

I stayed there, living with my aunt, the only one of my mother’s sisters still alive, although quite old, pious and gentle, and I felt fussed over. She guessed that these are transitional days in my life and was worried about it. (“So, like your grandmother you, too — but she, she does it later, for the youngest child, the third, a boy — you are leaving the man, you flee, you abandon the unlocked house to him? Is that the law, are you at least retaining your rights? … Alas, where are our rights, whether we are illiterate or educated, all of us, all women? It is as bad today as yesterday.” That is what she whispered that evening as we stood looking out over the twilight, while the sounds of the crowded street rose up to the balcony.)

Why, I mused, still dreaming about the grandmother, does feminine memory tirelessly return in concentric circles to the fathers and leave in the shadows (naturally in the silence of the unwritten as well) the real crises, the blacking out, the fall of a woman? As if that were too much, as if it undermined the very roots of strength and hope, of the future! Too much …

For example, back to father Ferhani! The man who married off his fourteen-year-old daughter but who shortly afterward hastily remarried, forcing his first wife to be present for this wedding, responsible for the meals, the proper reception of the guests, and the necessary organization of the festivities … And he required particularly (a husband’s ambiguous and strange cruelty) that she look at the bride who was younger, of course, though already widowed, and especially more fortunate because she was “the Golden Woman.” She, the wife who reigned in the other wife’s room — and who had waited beneath the candles for the husband on the verge of entering, wearing his white ceremonial cloak, dipping his shoulder at the door and smiling with happiness to the sounds of ululation — she was the first wife! But now her hands were in the butter, her face red as she bent over the bouillon for couscous in the steamy kitchen, and she watched from her own place, watching the husband repeat his entrance into the bedroom, fifteen years after her own marriage.

It had only taken fifteen years for her to change roles, for her to cease being the one set up like an idol who waited, her heart pounding. Only fifteen years for her to become the servant, the cook at the hot stove. Yes, on the same evening, the same smile from the man, making the same entrance as today, and suddenly — suddenly a long cry, followed by silence from all the women (too late, the bridegroom has already closed the door on his marriage). And she, the first wife, falls flat on the ground, right on the threshold of the pantry … All the women of the family run to her and sprinkle her face and palms with cool water, they make her sit up like a floppy doll, they repeat verses for her, they pass the ewers around and orange-flower water. But still, a week later, they carried her off, dead: “With a swollen belly,” my aunt tells me today.

“What did she have?” I feel touched, and I add, “What did the doctor say?”

“Was there a doctor for women then? No … In those days, never, not even for childbirth, would we have entered a French hospital! The women who told me about it (no, not your grandmother, she never said anything about this wedding, but instead her young sister, my aunt, whom you knew, the mother of the “great fighter” in the resistance), these women all thought that it was livid, powerless jealousy that “made her blood go bad.”

And so, father Ferhani had hardly remarried when he found himself a widower. It must be said that “the Golden Woman,” his newly-wed, turned out to have a big heart: She went back down to the city and moved into one of the houses her mother had inherited. There she regularly received her husband when he would come down, dressed in white, even more sumptuously than before, like a caïd or a bachagha . Afterward, she remained barren, but she dealt generously with her husband’s children as their stepmother.