So Vast the Prison (27 page)

And she stopped, intimidated.

“What do you want, then, daughter?” father Ferhani exclaimed in a gruff voice, giving his wife who was just as surprised, a questioning look.

“I miss the mountains, and I like being at the
zaouia
so much! I want to go back up there and probably live there!” She sighed.

Soon afterward, Fatima, her daughter in her arms, left the city in a
barouche
.

A MONTH BEFORE
filming began, after two days of looking for locations, I got out of the car with the assistant director and went toward the farm: sheds and solidly built houses, all buried, however, behind any number of reed hedges. It was a beautiful day.

I went around the main house. Behind it and beyond a hedge of Barbary figs a large wasteland went down to the sea on the other side. There, among the pebbles and red rocks, a panorama of Chenoua mountain met one’s eyes: a wide view with the isolated mountain jutting out like a gigantic ship over the deep bay. Nobility of lines, majesty, with a sort of modesty to its various colors, and on the left, hills fading off toward the interior plain: Chenoua—a screen, almost like one in a theater, standing in front of my family’s mountains, where I have been traveling now for four months already.

I wanted this flat, open stretch to be like a balcony out over the calm and everyday countryside that the couple in the film story could see. Luckily from here one cannot make out the new patch of white, the tourist village built ten years ago.

Up behind me, surrounded by peasants, the chauffeur and the assistant director are waiting for me. It is four in the afternoon: alone here, my rendezvous is with this space. It is the space of my childhood and of something else … perhaps the space of this fiction to be created. Four o’clock in the afternoon: not even Camus and his
étranger
come to mind.

Alone I walk across this shelf. I hide my excitement by walking athletically, in sudden great strides (I am glad I have long legs for walking energetically while everything inside me churns and boils).

On this November day the air is soft and the end of autumn takes on intense hues, almost those of spring, and I am happy. I neither hide it nor show it. Not yet. I neither burst out into dancing nor yeild to the violent desire to dissolve, to fly away and disappear. Oh, these months of fierce chastity (just as fierce as were my years of sensual love)!

And thus it all began. Not the first period of quiet investigation: the endless whispering conversations with the old women of my tribe, the questions that were misleadingly banal, the words of my childhood language.

Everything really began this first day on the farm, everything. Because as I found my everyday space, this film’s existence became no longer theoretical but present. Though you might not think so, this freedom.

This space, in actual fact, is like me. So, I think, begin a film story, when the space that is right for it is really found. Go all around this space. The way they used to make the walls of the city first and then—an hour later, a day later—build the city in the middle.

So this November day my own city—that is, the house in which my three characters, Lila, Ali, and their daughter Aïcha will live—is founded.

I went back up to the hedge of fig trees encircling the main house. Hamid, the assistant director, is in lively negotiations with the people living there, fishermen or peasants from the nearby cooperative, in case I intend to shoot on location. I leave them. I say that the view is beautiful. I go to a door in the back. Silhouettes of women staring at us between two reed hedges. Greetings. They invite me in. Then I have my second flash of inspiration, just as secret, not very expansive.

Three women in rooms without electricity. An infant cries sporadically. And I, feeling my way around until I get used to it.

The mother, who is probably forty, looks to be fifty or older. Stern, with well-balanced features, tall; her smiling manner has a touch of reserve. She seems attentive to whatever might happen at the edge of her gaze. Two other women, a young girl—sixteen years old, with plump cheeks, named Saïda, who later will be Djamila in the film, the couple’s friendly neighbor—and another woman, whose beauty would strike any visitor.

I never knew her name. I will call her “the unknown woman at the farm,” or “the Madonna.” She was scarcely more than twenty; her balanced features were disturbing, with such a pure bloom, yet seeming, at the same time, tarnished with shadow … a half smile, not aware herself of her own sadness. The Madonna: whenever I saw her after this she was holding a baby in her arms, a sickly baby. How can I portray her first appearance, how it extended into each of the forty days spent at the farm? Forty times as I came or went through a side door (a door only I was allowed to use) between the rooms rented for the film and the rest of the house, I would see again the slender silhouette. She held herself up straight, with only her shoulders a bit sunken as if the threat of tuberculosis hung over her. The Madonna.

Sometimes with her breast out, her baby whimpering (the baby I did not look at but whose illness I felt, I heard), she would smile at me. Forty times I looked at the dazzling purity of her face, her clear gaze, her cheeks still rosy with youth, and that hollow between her shoulders.

I lingered over the Madonna. Perhaps because, several days before we started filming, I knew for sure that she would not figure in the film. By chance I had come upon a family willing to collaborate with the image and the machinery we brought, whether out of economic interest or out of a real openness (a rather rare event in the new rural world). Afterward I wondered to what extent the mother was the dominant influence. She had guessed, confident in herself and her authority over her family, that she could extract some profit from us with no moral damage. I also think that the mother had instinctively judged me and the new role I represented for them, the threat I was in a position to keep in check …

So I quickly knew that the Madonna would only exist for me, outside the “shot,” that her image could not be bought … It was as if, right from the start, she held on to her integrity for two reasons, as if her beauty concentrating the family secret had to remain inaccessible to us … There was no violent refusal when this happened, not even the Islamic prohibition that one might have expected would be aggressive. “No.” It was a calm no that the mother would put to me, and the only reason she gave seemed obvious: “No, because her husband, my son, works in the capital and is not here.”

I did not insist. I knew instantly that no would be no. Even though, during this period of cold heat prior to shooting the film, I knew that I would get everything (“everything” in my hunt for images). I was persuaded that insistence, friendliness, and solidarity, an appeal to reasonable interest, would work, and “any method”
seemed honorable to me. But the crux of my confidence lay finally in this drive to make the film concrete; all the thankless or exalting work consisted of putting the documentary materials into shape. More precisely, rediscovering its original form and thus redoing mine.

I go back to the Madonna of the shadows, to her baby who nurses but is sick. She could have been the first to say, with that shy smile she gives me, “I represent all the women here that your machines will not define. I am the fringe of what is forbidden, and I like you.”

She made coffee for me every time I would come in tense and wanting to feel I was somewhere else. She was the somewhere else—and by the same token all my feminine past. Now I understand: Starting from the moment when taking her picture was denied me, precisely because of the proximity both of her beauty and of the halflight in which she constantly lived, her presence was an extension, the background that made those in the film uncertain. She evoked the persistence of things enduring back in time forever …

And I stitched it together with the women of my childhood. Drawing a parallel between the Madonna and the wife of my maternal uncle, this aunt who died at twenty in childbirth and whom I must have just barely known, and yet—because of a faded photograph (she was seated, her long face, her evanescent body, in the huge armchair of a Syrian salon whose pearly luxury intimidated me for years afterward), in my child dreams she took on a poetic, haunting presence. She was dead, they told me. I was expecting to find her again in the back of some scene; suddenly the reality would come unraveled into shadows.

And so the Madonna, during the course of this project, represented for me the grace to secretly question it.
I, elusive, invisible, if I decided suddenly to appear, your moving pictures would reveal their bloodless, embryonic nature
.

If I decided …
I came and went from shadow to reality, from the stage to the wings, from the spotlights to the Madonna’s candle. The obvious fact that crystallized in spurts within me was that it was the others: brothers, husband, neighbors, and most of all the all-powerful mother, who maintained the barrier between the two spaces.
If I decided …

The Madonna could have put her sick baby down just like that on a sheepskin or at her feet and take one step, just one step. I would open the door for her, she would have nothing to do for the cameramen, maybe just a hint of movement, her fingers pulling the neck of her gown shut, just a few steps.

Abruptly the need for this work of sounds and images would dissolve; there would be no point to the fiction because, wonder of wonders, suddenly every woman on this earth would be able to come and go.

“Finally, there are no more spying looks,” my character, Lila, says. Lila, beneath the spotlights, would reach out toward the Madonna; Lila would gradually move backward to the rear of the scene, the spotlights would go out, eyes would open wider and wider and from them the real light would finally well up as the Madonna would slip out, smiling.
If I decided …

TWENTY YEARS LATER
, Fatima, daughter of the
mokkadem
of Saint Ahmed or Abdallah, goes back down to the city, this time for good.

During these two decades she has lived her fate as the wife of three successive husbands. (The third was my grandfather, from whom that year, 1920, she officially separated, asking the
cadi
for autonomy, according to Muslim law, to manage her own wealth alone.) It was also her fate to be a mother. She returns to Caesarea where her stepmother, Amna, a widow now for ten years and a devoted friend, had welcomed her in her home before.) She is accompanied by all her children, except Khadidja, her first, who at the age of sixteen was married in a nearby hamlet. Khadidja was expecting a child at the time—finally a son who will live, O merciful Allah, not like the first three, all boys as well, who each died after a few days!

Fatima: from now on everyone will call her Lla Fatima, though I, like all my cousins, call her
mamané
, hinting with this word at the affection that her strict bearing kept us from showing her. Lla Fatima has with her for this first move her only son. He is just barely ten, it
is true, but so extraordinarily beautiful; this son, from now on, according to her will be “her only future.” And she has her three daughters, two adolescents, and the youngest child, who is two years old, the only child of the husband she is leaving. This little girl turning her back on the mountain (and leaving the Berber language) is my mother.

Of my mother as a little girl? She never spoke of this day from her early childhood when she entered the first house in Caesarea. Does she even remember it? She probably does not want to, why recall the sharpness of the separation? The country house they had left behind whose many low rooms were painted in purplish-blue whitewash every spring, that had two yards and a row of fig trees and, in the middle, two very majestic zen oaks. There were children scattered everywhere. A separation from laughter and the vast horizon … Without transition there they were living in town, in a high building with imposing walls; at the bottom one huge, bleak bedroom into which they all squeezed. The mother is endlesly conferring. To begin with, she is given some advice by an old cleric connected with the family. Soon afterward she sells all her jewels to buy an old house a little higher up and not far from the walls, still in the Arab quarter. Consequently Lla Fatima will be almost Amna’s neighbor, in the neighborhood of her former home where Soliman lived. His daughters, moreover, who are older now, some of them already grandmothers, come to visit her and congratulate her on her move: She is the model of feminine decisiveness and intelligence. They call her aunt or
amti
, that is, “paternal aunt.” Out of respect.