Assia Djebar - So Vast the Prison

But the way I related to the exposure of my exterior self to others is another story.

Back to the young man. Looking at me so intensely. And when I try to remember “the first time, and when it mattered to me,” I don’t know what to say. One scene comes up, one summer day, no, a night rather. I’ll call it the night of the dance.

I did not know right away that this young man, with his almost ordinary appearance, with his words (left hanging sometimes like smoke in the air), his nonchalance and apparent casualness, would ever mean so much to me.

Three men showed up as a group; I took them to be journalists. Although their ages and profiles differed, they had in common a sort of elegance we were not used to seeing in these parts, some reserve in their bearing, and aloofness as well. They were not excessively familiar, which right from the start relaxed me, tempering my habitual defensiveness … The camaraderie established right away between this trio and myself seemed out of the ordinary, a game among old adolescents.

There were two of these three new friends who amused me — the one who seemed the oldest, the other almost a kid at twenty. These two men drank a lot and joked endlessly; I would smile at them when I met them sometimes outside a cafe or beside the pool where they might be any time from morning on, and they would call me over. I laughed with these two accomplices over nothing, or over something funny they would say unexpectedly. Sometimes I felt I was back in the schoolyard. The eldest possessed an encyclopedic knowledge and used it in a snobby manner. I reproached him for his pedantry. In this group, however, the silent one, who was also the most distinguished and well bred, always wore a teasing smile on his face and never spoke unless the discussion came around to the music of upcoming programs.

So I listened to them. We decided right off the bat to stay together, my three companions and me; seated on the highest tier, we watched the evening’s show. I don’t know how it happened, but after several days I felt as if we were a family. In other days, in school, we would call groups that had mysteriously bonded like this “cliques”; in fact, I had gone through adolescence in boarding school mistrusting the gregarious instinct that drove girls to stick together that way.

Now it was not a need for a group; for me it was, rather, a nostalgia for that lost age: for not having had boys as friends, for having missed that light hearted, disinterested conspiring with the other sex …

After twenty years I finally suppressed the taboo; better late than never. We sat together in the tiers that filled up with families who came down from the capital often in their Sunday best — always in couples with children, sometimes babies (occasionally with a grandmother wearing a turban, a veiled aunt …). When our row became too crowded, we alone, my “three musketeers” I called them (myself the fourth), would leave our row and go to the gallery reserved for the press. We mischievously acted like special guests, privileged spectators!

In the afternoon, as the sun was painting the stone of the theater antique gold, the four of us would watch the star rehearse, usually someone from France here for the performance … And it is true that we hardly ever expressed opinions, either in praise or in doubt; we might only make some vague assumptions about the singer’s quality, on how the audience, whose taste was sometimes not very refined, would like him.

I would leave them to go home to dinner, “to be a wife and mother,” I would say, as if another role actually awaited me there. About two hours later I would meet them again as the crowd gradually filled the open theater and night approached.

It was not until a few weeks had passed, it seems to me, that I began suddenly to think about the Beloved separately … Perhaps those evenings (probably twenty or thirty in six or seven weeks), during which the straightforward warmth of the group grew progressively stronger, were my enticement; or perhaps my desire had already awakened and I was unaware of it … In reality, I felt so completely happy to have found three friends. “Writers and artists,” I used to call them when, in the afternoon, we would go for a drink and to watch the families; we were always on the lookout for some trivial drama at the swimming pools, another show.

One day the reticent young man must have remarked, “When we go back, back to the university, I mean, you are going to snub us. You won’t recognize us anymore! You won’t even say hello … madame!”

He was the only one who teased me this way, suddenly ending a sentence with feigned ceremony: “madame.” His friends — the very young one who could have been a student and the oldest who could have been my schoolmate — both called me quite naturally by my first name … There was a sort of confident familiarity tying our group together — even though it is true that we conversed only in French, and that I could only imagine using the formal “you” when we spoke, as if that remained a privilege of my age … Was I the eldest? I don’t really know. The journalist, whose erudition and affectation I made fun of, looked several years older than me because of his wrinkled face and his leathery neck. Still, that wasn’t certain. He was the only one who drank a lot; too much. The few times I would meet up with the group late in the morning, I had to affectionately reproach this “elder” sitting there at the table: “Midday, and already you’re drinking straight whiskey!”

“And it’s not the first,” sharply retorted his friend, the one I suddenly fixed upon as if the echo of his words really took a while to resonate inside me, as if some unusual, strange nuance was getting lost along the way …

So was that the first time I noticed some nervous quiver showing through the cheekbones of this face later so deeply engraved within me? Of course, the remark was revealing of a friend’s worry; it was a reproach meant to be discreet … I thought I grasped with difficulty what bound these two companions together, the one who drank so much and the younger man in his thirties. But I was suddenly stymied by something else — as if both by its very transience and by some ineffable sadness, behind the curtain of disquiet lay another face of this man with the vaguely saucy gaze … I turned my attention back to the glass of whiskey and suggested to the man who was letting himself be taken to task, “Pretty please for my beautiful eyes, please, take it half and half with water!”

“For your beautiful eyes, madame!” the journalist exclaimed grandly, his eyes red, and with a sardonic shrug. “Here it is Friday, almost prayer time, and I am drunk already! I’ll leave the rest of you and go take a nap so that I can rejoin you tonight, fresh as a rose.”

He left, and the twenty-year-old student went with him (I had baptized him “the student” once and for all); then to the third I quietly added, “A student, of course, but beautiful as an angel.”

We stayed there alone, the two of us, not particularly wanting to talk, watching the rather ordinary crowd at our leisure …

Definitely I have returned now to the “first scene.” To the one that could have begun the logical and well-organized story of the unfolding of this passion. But why would something so blindly experienced be revealed today with no detours, no sidestepping, no desire for a labyrinth?

So, the first time … Not the first time I saw his face, but let us say the first time his presence had reality for me, when he began to “matter.” Perhaps also it was when I felt him look at me; when the desire to be looked at by him awoke in me. Let us get back to the facts, because they are in danger of dissolving, fraying into shabby threads.