So Vast the Prison (10 page)

I took a taxi to return as quickly as possible to the apartment. I needed the children. I had spent half a day busy with my aunt and then with the temptation of visiting the doctor. I went home, my obsession now a lighter burden. I opened my door; I made some coffee.

But then, going from one bedroom to the other, surrounded by laughter, I stood for a moment on the balcony to recall the pearly
gray of the sky, and suddenly the soft voice, the low voice of my Beloved and his slightly ironic look came back to me: obsession renewed. During the evening it pursued me again, despite the fact that the children were preparing to celebrate their father’s return the next morning. They asked me what presents I thought he might be bringing them from Egypt; they both offered to read me the poems they had written in his honor.

“Sunday is going to be Father’s Day!” the little girl exclaimed.

“That’s the new style!” remarked the housekeeper, who was leaving.

The rest of the day was spent singing and telling riddles and finally some fussing and tears.

In my own bed I did not read any more; I turned off the light. In the darkness I lived the summer before all over again—our talking together in the morning, my three friends and I, or myself dancing on an infinite dance floor where my silhouette gradually fades away.

Was it right away, the first evening of my husband’s return that I suddenly decided to speak?

Now I know that if I had had a confidante, or a man who was an old friend, or some rediscovered friend from school, perhaps I would have told it just once; with one of them I would have ceded to the temptation and pleasure of hearing myself speak my inner adventure out loud—this slow possession to which I had surrendered at first with delight, but then with pain. After all this I know that the need to speak—to a friend and hence, failing that, to the husband I thought of equally as a friend, since he was no longer a lover—intensified the bitter pleasure of hearing myself, and as a result convinced me of the reality of what preoccupied me, giving it weight and flesh. It would give it thus the reality of words if not the reality of caresses; in fact, before and during the words I spoke, I was racked with desire for that man, a new servitude.

Probably long before this, moreover, and barely even suspected by me (though there was plenty of time afterward, when it was in a sense too late to ask myself about what had gone on before!) there was the ill-timed question: Am I indeed real? Or, in the end, isn’t my suffering, the fact that I cannot get used to this separation, the only thing that is real?

That evening I definitely behaved like a raving lunatic. I asked him to listen to me, that we be willing to say “everything” in one night … This “everything” became the weight borne by my dreams, what I denied myself, especially my silent desire, and, above all, my compulsive need to talk about it. A burden of dreams and words resulting from a flirtation that lasted scarcely longer than the games of summer.

I have to see these memories through … My husband returns; my memory wants to swallow up the first evening: He and I in the bedroom, shutting myself up in the bathroom first, almost falling asleep in my bath, which is too hot. He definitely expecting me to come. It is midnight; the lights are out in the children’s bedroom. Silence thickens in the house. And I am not alone, I cannot take refuge in my dreams, and …

Everything about me said no. The stubborn pout on my face; my silence. I did not turn off the light. I forced myself to make trivial conversation just to fill the void, to try to forget what I was doing: because, there I was, taking off my dressing gown, climbing into bed in that clinging nightgown, and there was the man who had just returned, watching my every movement. I did not turn off the light.

I was panicked. I just wanted to sleep; my face said it firmly. “Leave me alone! Just leave! Go away!” How could I tell him that out loud, how … A wild obsession, and my stiffness under the covers; a fierce desire to go to the children’s room and lie down at the foot of
their bed, finding there at least, the only corner where I could let myself go and be protected in sleep … Panic:
If he touches me, if he caresses me, even if I act like I’m dead, the Beloved’s name, like a poison flower rooted deep in my waiting, is going to burst out and blossom on my lips. It will happen in spite of me and inevitably at the moment when I come—in the event that I give in out of cowardice!

I get out of bed and take refuge in the living room, in the dark. My body is shaking. So, I was going to give in to habit. No, but to what? To the husband’s silent searching, his hands, his desire, and as for myself, what horrible compassion was going to take hold of me, what apathetic indulgence would bring me to the point of sinking into his arms, his, the other’s … I shake. In the darkness, in the living room, I am seized with fury: directed at myself (would there be, therefore, some “female” part in me? anonymous and female?). Ah, if only the children were not there, were not quietly sleeping (which isn’t true, the boy is having more and more frequent nightmares), ah, if I were alone with this man who is waiting for me, who thinks I am “his” wife, his lover, who … I am shaken with rage: Break everything! Shatter it all! Here in this apartment—the lamps, the books, the glasses, trash everything together in a pile of ruins, stones, shards! But the children are sleeping. But the boy sighs in his dreams.

I turn on the light in the living room. The husband, completely dressed all of a sudden, joins me there. He opens a bottle of whiskey, helps himself to a glass, and states unequivocally,

“Despite the sleeping pills I took, I intend to drink this whiskey I got at the airport right down to the bottom of the bottle … I’m going to drink, but you are going to talk!”

“I’ll talk,” I say softly, smiling with relief. “That’s all I ask!”

No use describing the bits and pieces of theater—comedic theater, I thought—that went on almost until dawn …

How else describe my confessions, those of a late-blooming young girl? (It is true that I was racked by a sort of blank rapture: Finally I could talk about “him,” even faced with the glistening eyes and outraged stare of this listener, this intruder.)

He finished all the whiskey. He stood up. He struck. The large, wide-open French doors behind us (was he the one who opened them earlier? I don’t know who did) let in something like the impending danger of a breeze that, I thought, was likely to hurl me at the drop of a hat into that ten-story pit … He struck and I could not take refuge in the back of the room, as if the opening called me straight to it; this man who was large and athletic, with his man’s arms would blindly seize me, would fling me so I exploded outside. He struck and I slipped to the floor, an unusually sharp sense of caution on the lookout within me to figure out what was least dangerous.

First he insulted. Then he struck. Protect my eyes. Because his frenzy was proving to be strange: He intended to blind me.

“Adulteress,” he muttered, in his hands the whiskey bottle broken in two. All I could think of were my eyes and the danger represented by the too-wide-open window.

Then I heard him, as if echoing from within a prison cell in which he found himself, in which he wrestled, in which he was trying to keep me. From inside this nightmare space, inside this bodily fear, my eyes closed, and hidden under my arms, under my lifted elbows, under my already bloody hands, I heard and I would almost have answered with a laugh, not a madwoman’s laugh nor one of tearfulness, but the laugh of a woman who was relieved and struggling to free herself. “Adulteress!” he repeated, “Anywhere, except this city of iniquity, you would deserve to be stoned!”

“Eyes, light,” I sighed two or three days later as I lay there at my parents’ home, my face swollen, my hands in bandages, my body broken.

The image of man has eyes, but the moon, she has light
. I would have liked to be able to repeat this line from Hölderlin in its original German.

Throughout my convalescence, for seven days, I no longer knew I was in Algiers. No. Rediscovering the old books I used to have at my bedside in this house, I plunged into
Sylvie
by Gérard de Nerval. I imagined wandering with the poet all over Europe; I fled to the Orient, to Cairo, where I suddenly dreamed of becoming the captive slave that the poet bought in the market, who got in his way so badly!

6
BEFORE, AFTER
 

BEFORE THIS WAS ALL ERASED
, even before the torment of the absence, there was one time when my Beloved confided in me. One time when I found him alone, when we chose to sit on the beach, in the sand.

He did the talking; I contemplated the vast sky. I studied its drifting, fleecy clouds, whose pink stripes would become streaked with blood before the purple of nightfall. The air was punctuated with short cries: a seagull crossed the azure before vanishing; and not one person walking on the beach. Turning my head halfway, I could just catch sight of two or three of the village women’s colored veils as they left their jobs at the tourist’s hotel to hurry in the direction of their hamlet, behind the hills. Silence floated around us and we would soon be submerged by the night.

My Beloved spoke—steady streams. Then he stopped. I did not speak up; I did not look at him. The dusk grew redder and redder. The voice of the man confiding in me began again.

Toward the end, cautiously turning toward him, I must have asked him one or two questions. I remember his profile—the tic like lightning twitching his cheek. It was only later that I thought to myself, with cool astonishment, that he was talking to me and coming alive again at the same time. He told me the story of a former love—he was specific right from the start that “it was five years ago”—but he had only begun to feel its pain in the present. Later, I, too, found his story moving, not because it was infectious, or even out of compassion. No. The disturbance in me came from seeing him taken from me by these recollections to some other place totally foreign to the two of us, sucked back to that other place. So he was there in front of me without being there; I no longer existed for him. He vanished into the shadow of this stranger whom he described without naming; with me present he was once again living with her, and I suffered—not as I listened to him on the beach, but later, in a sort of amazement.

Then not far from us a group of three or four women, Europeans, walked by. One of them seemed to recognize me and greeted me. I replied absentmindedly, without getting up. She said something to the women with her and one of them looked back once or twice. The group moved away.

“Wives of Belgian volunteers who live near you year-round, at the yacht basin,” I said.

I explained that the preceding week I had been at a party with my husband and several of his colleagues and had met that woman there.

“She said she has been living here for two years, and asked me all sorts of questions about myself and my work. I wondered why. Finally she admitted, ‘Ever since I’ve lived here, always at the hotel, the only examples of women from this country that I have met are the village women who clean house. They don’t speak French …’ ”

My sense of the irony began to stir in the moment of silence that followed, as I thought of that party, and I added, somewhat wearily, “She didn’t even realize that nine miles away thousands of women come and go in the city, working outside their homes, teaching, nursing … She asked skeptically if I taught at the university.”

And I shrugged my shoulders, resigned before so much ignorance; the passersby had disappeared.

After this digression the Beloved went back to how his story had concluded three years earlier. As if he knew I didn’t want to question this “before,” letting it spill out however he let it flow, according to the rhythm of his memories … As if, I thought to myself, the Belgian women taking a walk were, after all, a ghost, while the reality passed before him on the beach, sometimes smiling, sometimes melancholy, a shadow—the foreign woman whom, for at least an hour, he had been bringing back to life.

Yes, remembering his confessions, my disquiet returns, bearable while he spoke of her in my presence—“her,” this foreign woman from five years before, three years before—he would immediately plunge once again into the days of worry, excitement, or hope. (Whereas, for my part, I would scarcely find myself face-to-face with him when everything would disappear for me, my everyday life, my family attachments, my ordinary turmoil.) And he described them so well, those stormy, tormented moments, that, hearing him, I was completely inside that time as it passed, in those emotions: I was “she,” I was he.

Then he was silent. The last gleams of the setting sun had been extinguished just as suddenly a few moments before. We stood up in the darkness. A few yards behind us the door of his house was still open, the lights inside seemed to beckon.

I remember that once I was standing, I had felt some sort of weight on my shoulders. Tired. Infinitely tired: of the passion of others
and because, in fact, it was the passion of others! I bent down swiftly and, with one hand, picked up the pair of espadrilles I had thrown on the damp sand. At the same moment he also bent down toward me.