So Vast the Prison (14 page)

The next day he came back early and said in no uncertain terms that he was going to take me out to eat. It was sunny.

On the Place des Vosges we talked for a long time about the sanctuary where he used to take the cook every Friday. Back home!

Julien who, shortly afterward, fell painfully in love with my closest friend … Julien who, six months later, set out on his third trip to Tibet. A new trail had been opened on the peaks of the Himalayas. He went with two mountain-climbing friends.

“Take care of yourself!” I told him suddenly, finally using the intimate form of address.

Although I was used to seeing him as vigorous and invulnerable, I let myself be gripped by some vague apprehension.

“I’m entrusting you with all the photos I took when we were looking for locations last summer,” he replied.

I kissed him.

That was not yet goodbye.

Two or three weeks later I had a card from him: a photograph he had taken of a young woman seated on the slope of a hill in front of her tumble-down house and playing with her baby, in light that was iridescent … On the other side Julien had written a few lines: In this village where he had studied scenes like this all day long, he thought about me, about the spring before when we had worked, “had looked,” he wrote, so well. And at the end he said:
Tomorrow it’s the Himalayas and the new trail. I’m happy. See you later, boss!

That was goodbye. For the first time in our friendship, he used this ironically polite tone with me: “boss.”

It would be a while before I knew that, as I read his card, as I admired the young Tibetan mother he had watched one sunny afternoon, Julien already lay inside an infinity of snow where, three days after writing me, he and his companions were brought by a sudden avalanche. His goodbye? My friend is not dead. He is sleeping beneath the depths of eternal snow. One day I know someone will go to look for his body and will bring it back. Then they can call me finally to contemplate his unchanged beauty, the expatriate Viking, and then, only then will I weep for him.

I remarried.

Feeling young again and free of worry, I rediscovered the streets of Paris.

Each day I would dream, wandering two or three hours daily: alone or paired. The austerity of my material life expressed the relief I felt. Suddenly I went back to writing: what was the shade I sought? Back and forth in what in-between place?

Three or perhaps four years living the carefree life of a couple. At almost forty I was once again twenty years old: sometimes the days stretched out in a kind of purifying vacation and sometimes they were overburdened with work … then this joint rhythm unraveled. Conflicts and unhappiness—or rather, anger. One evening just as night descended, emerging from depression, I rediscovered what might have been the equilibrium of my age: my face hard, I stated unequivocally, “I will not have you in my room anymore!”

But to myself—only to myself—I spoke vehemently:
You love to share things, you want to discover things and laugh and die in a couple, so are you not carrying your own prison along with you?

A few months went by. Paris was a desert, but happily I still had my wanderings and all they reaped. And there was also work, making one deaf, deaf and dumb, in the richness of absence.

Once in the middle of the night my husband opened my door, letting the light from the hallway filter in. He quietly slipped in to look for a book on the shelves opposite my bed.

I kept my eyes closed. I was not pretending to be asleep: I felt asleep and conscious at the same time. I heard him come in, take a book, some guidebook or dictionary, then go to leave and shut the door again. He stopped. He came back, close to my low bed placed on a rug from the Aurès Mountains. I felt him right next to me.

Leaning down, he brushed a light kiss across my forehead. Stepped away. Closed the door carefully.

In the total darkness I opened my eyes. The obvious became clear:
His last kiss. That is really goodbye!

I fell asleep again rather quickly. A bit later he left the house. He had left it almost lovingly when he imparted what he thought was a secret kiss that night.

The Beloved—really, “the formerly beloved”—and I had yet another encounter. On a vast stage, as if our coming face-to-face were something arranged secretly in advance by a magician.

It was the middle of summer, I think, after the vacationers had all left the city en masse. I can see the esplanade of the new Montparnasse station at the beginning of a rather hot afternoon. Few strollers; the rare tourist; one or two groups of young people sitting on benches or on the ground.

Myself emerging into that space. I was in no rush. I was on my way to my sister’s, not far from there; in short I moved like someone used to being there, at ease. Probably because I was hurrying off to
celebrate my nephew’s birthday, I was feeling at home, despite the fact that I was in Paris.

At the far end of the station, leaving it: the silhouette of a traveler, bag in hand or on his shoulder. I myself was heading diagonally toward this isolated shadow clearly outlined against the sunlight.

Almost blinding light this afternoon. Not a sound: none from any bus behind me, none from any crowd—the people were sparsely scattered.

So that summer day I was walking along, strolling unhurriedly, and my heart, I remember, was filled with peace, or, as it so frequently is, gently submerged in the mere joy of existing. Halfway to where I was going I recognized him: It was he, the passionately Beloved,
the Beloved
, I thought,
not “the formerly beloved.”
While the man who loved me, to whom I blithely returned every evening, was waiting for me somewhere else in the city.

So I recognized him; and he, changing pace, came quickly to meet me. No visible surprise, either on his part or on mine.

I shook his hand; hesitated before kissing him in a friendly way. He kept hold of my hand for a moment. We looked at each other.

Full of a new affection, I looked at him calmly: his face was heavier; his cheeks were tanned. He had gotten larger; his shoulders seemed wider.

Have two years really gone by?
I wondered.
In any case, he has become a handsome man!

He told me that he had just returned that very day from a distant country: “A year,” he said, “working in an exchange program abroad—in New Zealand!”

I was somewhat distracted and now I wonder whether he didn’t say Australia instead.

I smiled, my heart quickening again.
So
, I began my internal dialogue
with him, as I had before, using the familiar form of address in my silence—
you have been to the ends of the earth and the day you return, I show up at the exit of this Paris station to welcome you back!

I was not surprised. I believed in the miracle of some invisible master of ceremonies summoned to bring us together this final time.

This time I gazed unabashedly at my formerly beloved. Suddenly, then I was aware—unless rather, it was only after I left him that I understood this—that seeing him thus grown into a vigorous and seductive man my heart was filling with love that was really maternal! I felt he was happy and ready, at that moment, to take the time to tell me about his life in Australia … 
I love him
, I said to myself,
like a young mother! As if, even though he was far away, I had contributed to transforming him, to bringing him to this mature state!

Consequently my silent love, formerly so hard to control, changed in nature; it was still there within me, still secret, but it no longer had the fragility that had troubled me for so long. The young man stood there before me, radiant in his new beauty.

He asked for my phone number. I wrote it down for him and said something friendly. Then I just said, “We’ll see each other again!”

That was the goodbye. I knew that right away as I walked off.

I go back to those days before the siesta, to those thirteen months. I do not know why I have drained these springs of self, with so many convolutions, in a disorder that is willfully not chronological, when I should have let them wither on the vine, or at least kept their growth in check.

And that man, who was neither foreign to me nor someone inside me, as if I had suddenly given birth to him, almost an adult; me suddenly trembling against his chest, me curled up between his shirt and his skin, me all of me close against the profile of his face tanned by
the sun, me his voice vibrant within my neck, me his fingers on my face, me gazed upon by him and immediately afterward going to look at myself to see me through his eyes in the mirror, trying to catch sight of the face he had just seen, as he saw it, this “me” a stranger and another, becoming me for the first time in that very instant, precisely because of this translation through the vision of the other. He, neither foreign to me nor inside me, but so close, as close as possible to me, without touching me, but still wanting to reach me and taking the risk of touching me, the man became my closest relative, he moved into the primary vacancy laid waste around me by the women of the tribe, from the days of my childhood and before I reached nubility, while I took the first shaky step of my freedom.

Him, the one closest to me; my Beloved.

1
THE SLAVE IN TUNIS
 

GOOD OLD THOMAS D
’
ARCOS!
He is more than sixty years old and up to this point has led a rather pleasant life: Born in the somewhat troubled times of 1565 in La Ciotat, near Marseilles, when he is very young, he goes up to Paris, where he becomes secretary to the cardinal de Joyeuse, brother of the favorite of Henry III.

Suddenly, who knows why, he quits high society, returns to his sunny Provence, travels, learns languages, is seized with literary or scholarly ambitions: research on the history of Africa, a project to chronicle Ottoman customs (written in Spanish), as well as commentaries on Turkish and Moorish music. He is full of unmethodical but unflagging curiosity. He seduces women, of course, when he is young, then he straightens up and marries a local beauty in Sardinia. Does he mean to settle down there or in Marseilles, or in Carpentras?

Good old Thomas d’Arcos! Guess what! More than sixty years old and pirates from Tunis capture him aboard a sailboat. Thus in 1628 he finds himself in that city, a slave of the Turks.

Despite adversity he has unflagging energy. Does he not like oriental languages, antique coins and medals, rare objects, old books? He succeeds—no one knows how, probably by cashing in on his knowledge and gifts as an interpretor—yes, in two or three years he succeeds in putting together enough for his ransom. Free now, will he return to Marseilles or to the home of his wife in Sardinia? No; he settles in Tunis, where he will die.

That is when the story begins for us—after 1630. From Tunis he writes to a magistrate, an important local personage named Peiresc, who serves as counselor to the king at the parliament of Provence in Aix. (The famous Gassendi will later write a biography of this notable who was his friend.) He also corresponds with M. Aycard, a royal equerry and a friend of Peiresc’s as well, but above all a scholar living in Toulon, where, thanks to traffic with Smyrna, Constantinople, all of the Levant, and Barbary, he is the recipient of manuscripts, antique medals, cameos, foodstuffs, and exotic things.

Thomas d’Arcos goes back and forth throughout the Regency, the Muslim states of northwest Africa, and he seems happy. He must be engaging in trade or barter to live well; no doubt he likes this life in the sun, probably easier and less expensive! … Has his wife not forgotten him, as his friends at the court of France, the nobility of Joyeuse, had done before?

He must admit to himself that, as far as his peace and pleasure are concerned, he is better off among the “Turks,” the infidels, finishing this
Relation de l’Afrique
, his most important project, and after that his volume in Spanish. He is learning a lot here. He roams about and, even though he suffers from bad eyesight, he also writes. He teaches himself other languages. He is a scholar in Tunis, and certainly among the lower classes and perhaps among the notables, the foreign traders,
the dragomans and celebrities who pass through, Thomas, good old Thomas d’Arcos, commands some respect here, enjoys some honors.