Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

In Béjaia especially, laughter greets me and there is a hint of escape. The port is a pocket in the hollow curve of the vast, wide-open bay. Taken by the woman who is my guide, a former militant, I happen to go into a house in an aging quarter overhanging the city. There I greet two very young women wearing sarouels and embroidered tunics; they are sitting cross-legged on mats stretched out on the floor of faded tiles. Facing them, I squat down as well. At first we speak in Arabic, then in French. I had taken them to be traditional city women: “Two young girls to be married,” my companion calls them teasingly, but I discover that they are about to complete their medical degrees in the capital.

“These summer and spring vacations are just a forced return to the harem for us!” the first one says ironically — her vocal outburst almost a hiccough.

Outside, I leave the woman who is taking me around. “I’ll find my way back to the hotel alone,” I say, and thank her.

I rush down a street of stairs. Happy to be alone, and free, in this city saturated with light. Two young men are standing at the bottom of the hill. One of them approaches almost solemnly, looking me over carefully, to say that he has just made a bet and lost because of me. Seeing me from a distance (with my very short hair, my straight white trousers), he had bet that I was a young man.

Although I am thirty-seven, I probably seem less than thirty: thin hips, a boyish haircut, flat buttocks; that day I was so proud of my androgynous silhouette. The young man had lost. I could do nothing about it, but as I went by, I made a funny face at him. “Sorry!” In that instant I knew I was being provocative.

If he had been there to see it, would the man who never left my thoughts have laughed to see me confused with a boy and flattered by this mistake. I would have flung myself into his arms, for sure: “I really am your age! Let’s stay together forever in your house with its open doors, its abandoned yard. Let’s spend every night on the sand, if no one comes, perhaps there’ll be a storm, whatever the season …”

Precisely because of this frivolous incident, and if my Beloved had been lucky enough to witness it, I would have been ready to surrender to every temptation. I would not have thought I was doing anything unreasonable, but rather that I was racing toward the oasis where we would finally end up, breathless. I had seen those two young girls in their temporary confinement, who one day were going to work as doctors, both of them … Virgins, no doubt, twenty-five or twenty-six at the oldest. Pale faces, diaphanous beauties, as if they were leaving their youth behind, and at the same time still awaiting it.

As for myself, in those days I was virtually returning to my reawakened childhood. If in the past, just once, I had played with a brother or a boy cousin on the roads or in the forest, perhaps this nostalgia would not come back to me like this, like an undertow, magnifying my attraction to this man!

Was I searching for some fever in him, a fever I knew within myself? A fever that, on this sunny day in Béjaia, would have been transformed into a cascade of finally willing happiness.

THERE IS ONE SCENE, or maybe there are two that emerge from the preceding summer as the background to this early winter and this restless autumn. Perhaps my memory, to battle its own insidious, fatal dissolution, is attempting to raise some stele like a mark for “the first time.” When was the first time I saw this man, or rather, what is the first image that triggered my first emotion? What events, what light, what words ruled over this disturbance — as if passion disturbed, rather than suddenly put things in order and somehow set the soul straight, restoring to one’s impulses their original reactions, their purity. As if any love so blindly experienced — completely swathed in prohibitions, hence unwarranted, hence superfluous, or childish, as it may seem to some people — as if any love, arising like an earthquake of silence or fear, did not lead, as the disintegrating surface order collapsed, to original geology … These vague notions about psychology are, of course, only digressions from the story I am pulling from the ruins more than ten years afterward.

Despite my efforts at remembering, I have only a blurry notion of the specific first day of the first meeting, and whether the encounter was insignificant or important between these two characters I describe. (It is not fiction I desire. I am not driven to unfurl a love story of inexhaustible arabesques.) No, I am only gripped by a paralyzing fear, the actual terror that I shall see this opening in my life permanently disappear. Suppose it were my luck suddenly to have amnesia; suppose tomorrow I were hit by a car; suppose some morning soon I were to die! Hurry! Write everything down, remember the ridiculous and the essential; write it, orderly or muddled, but leave some record of it for ten years from now … ten years after my own forgetting.

There is only one real question that looms for me. When, precisely, did this story, which transpired either inside or outside of me — and I don’t know which — when did it take hold? It was summer. A blazing summer with cool dawns, gentle twilights, mild nights. The nights above all were densely populated with echoes: shows and dances, lots of people walking in groups along the unending and often deserted beaches that had recently become fashionable for swimming, an hour from the capital.

Every evening in the large stone theater that had opened recently, concerts were scheduled — light music, jazz or folk from bands coming successively from a number of African countries or countries in the East. To finish off the night, journalists, artists, couples who were friends, vacationers from nearby beaches, young women more westernized than the Westerners, would all get together in groups in various discothèques, while I went with my husband, who was the director of this “cultural complex.”

During the months of July and August I drowned myself in the music, the laughter, and the playful conversations of others — as a witness; I would slip lethargically into this or else I would sleep; during the day I read in the calm apartment whose French doors opened onto steep rocks.

This is how I spent my vacation, gradually aware that, this summer or next winter, despite my slenderness and my inexhaustible appetite for walks and dreams, my youth was coming to an end … No, I told myself drowsily, what people call “youth” can be lived endlessly like a block of motionless years.

I watched my husband directing and making decisions; however, well before all the turmoil, I no longer enjoyed talking with him. We were no longer a couple, just two old friends who no longer knew how to talk to each other. I was happy that, with this new distance (not deserted for me, so much as spacious), there were so many people passing through, so many guests in an evening who would seek us out, and especially so much foreign music surrounding us. So there I was, a spectator, and I thought I was perhaps ready to set out. For the first time also, probably for the first time in my life, I felt I was “visible,” not the way I felt during my adolescence, nor after I was twenty, when I would smile at some compliment, some flattery from a man, either a friend or a stranger, thinking then, It’s my semblance, my ghost you are seeing, not myself, not really me … I myself am in disguise, I wear a veil, you cannot see me .

Why all of a sudden, did a smile or bit of praise distress me so? (“What a pretty dress,” some man would say, his fingers about to touch the cloth, and I would tense up, but hide it. Or: “This hairdo suits you,” another poorly timed compliment from someone else — an incongruous familiarity that I blamed on the excitement of the theater atmosphere.) Of course, I avoided any contact whatsoever, but something else disturbed me: They are really talking about me! I’m ashamed; I smile not to seem prudish, but I’m ashamed. They go so far as to touch me with their fingers! … I can protect myself from it, appear “civilized,” and remain elusive. But something else has me disoriented, or makes me sad, I don’t know which. It is that they can truly see me!