So Vast the Prison (34 page)

The first scene was acted by the mother in bed with the child. The director of photography, whose impressive bearing gave him the nickname “John Wayne of Belcourt,” was tall and kind-hearted, but impatient, father of five children himself, but impatient, this photo director whose lights had been ready for some time, now mutters a question to me: “How old is that child?”

“Five, Sheik.”

“By the time we get through this scene, she will certainly be twelve!”

“You have to be patient, Sheik!”

I am delighted. Ferial is not only the first one to play the star but, in her own way, also the first to put “feminism” into practice.

“Your film is about women?” she asks me.

“Of course,” I say … “You have your mother, really your pretend mother; you two are in bed and you play together … whatever you want to play!”

That suits her, but it does not suit her to get undressed in front of the others. I take her somewhere else—into the room of the Madonna, who smiles at her in silence.

“Is that your friend?”

“That is my friend.”

She makes an appearance in a fancy nightgown … Okay, it suits her to cavort about and play on the bed with Lila and listen to stories, okay. I watch first the pretend mother, then the real one who is watching somewhat anxiously not far away.

“Leave!” Ferial says firmly, speaking to the technical crew (I can feel that she is about to add “They are men,” as if all of a sudden we had returned to a traditional childhood of marble patios and fountains …) “Tell them all to leave!”

“Leave!” I said, feigning resignation.

They leave.

“Even me?” asks Sheik, who this time must have adopted some vaguely Valentino-style manner.

Ferial, the flirt, says, “Okay, you, you stay …”

Once she begins her cavorting about, some of the technical crew will be able to sneak back onto the set. The child-king plays, laughs, imagines her present as she goes along, in spite of the spotlights, and now, despite the people watching. Lila, with her caresses, begins to be the element of stability in this exuberance. Ferial laughs.

The camera, ravenous, catches it.

“Ferial, go closer to your mother!”

I almost destroy the spell.

“Not my mother,” shouts Ferial instantly in a temper, “my pretend mother. My mother is right there next to you!”

And I, made patient by the little game, I say “Yes,” of course, “your pretend mother.” Why not play games when one is happy? Real life is also an illusion, the illusion of childhood given free rein …

Ferial expends great energy, Ferial jumps, Ferial is always on the move. The camera, poor thing, dragging its crew behind it, has trouble keeping up with the expression of so much life.

It resembles a dance. Lila, like a good partner, picks things up when they die down, keeps the bursts of rhythm contained. Flares of laughter spark and soar. Ferial is in charge, she knows she is in charge. Suddenly she does not care that the whole technical crew is there, congregated as if to watch the show. She knows she is the star, she can do whatever she wants, she does whatever she wants, and it is still grace and pure joy, and life, unrestricted, following its life line. But the camera is no longer following …

“We’re filming! We’re still filming …”

Now film Ferial’s fatigue, let her laze around on the big bed: she knows she is sleepy; she would rather have her real mother beside her. I beg her and try to trick her too. “They will forget about you …”

“I’m sleepy,” she pouts.

“What about this bed?”

“No, I want my own bed.”

I argue with her, discovering great stores of diplomacy within myself: “No, not your bed in Algiers; very soon you will be sleeping with me in my hotel room, we agreed on that, didn’t we?” She agrees. “Now rest a little, no one will pay any attention to you now.” Finally I get what I was vaguely after: her languid, indolent movements—
the little girl lying on her back and the slender leg bending, raising. The camera takes the last pictures of the night: childish sensuality, within a hair’s breadth of entering the secret kingdom, that we will leave in shadow for the young mother of the story.

THE DANCE ON THE PATIO:
I was slightly more than thirteen, not yet fourteen … Why does this wedding of my first cousin, the third of them, come back to me? Perhaps because of a summer dress: I remember perfectly the black fabric sprinkled with purple flowers. I had dared ask the seamstress to make it so that my back, as well as my arms and shoulders, were left completely bare.

“In short, practically a beach dress,” the lady remarked as she smilingly listened to me insist on an extraordinarily full skirt.

I was happily surprised to find that my mother agreed, on condition that the seamstress add a bolero with little sleeves that would cover me up when I went outside.

“For a wedding, just among women,” she said, “why should she not have a low-cut dress?”

Still it seemed to me that my mother was suddenly allowing an astonishing bit of daring—“because among women!”

Was it because I wore this dress that I still remember with something of an adolescent’s strong sense of style my first real dress, that I had the courage to accept the invitation? At the height of the festivities, deep inside the house where Soliman’s daughters lived, a house full to bursting with a crowd of guests, in front of the band composed of the town’s women musicians, yes, I agreed to stand up. And then in a few minutes forgetting myself, right in front of everyone, my back and arms bare, I was riding astride the rhythm and discovering the new pleasure of my body, despite the spectators and their eyes, in this most ancient of homes where long ago the grandmother made her entrance as a young bride (while I accentuate the twists and turns of my hips, my shoulders, and the fluid freedom of my arms like vines), yes, disregarding the kinswomen, all those spectators turning into a single multiple being, voracious, buzzing …

My mother smiled at the compliments elicited by the black dress baring the girl. Well, but there it is, the twirling, irrepressible body quivers all over before the women on the alert. Too bad if two or three boys with even perhaps, a young man among them, are hidden away in some closed room where they become voyeurs behind half-open shutters.

I dance. A few others are dancing as well, mature women. Gradually, in spite of themselves, they are dancing their grief and their need to get out, to fling themselves into the distance, into the beating sun. And I, I wheel around with my eyes closed (beginning to feel dizzy), offering who knows what image to these sequestered women, the ones crouched there, already prepared to repudiate me.

“She goes out, she reads, she goes to the cities like that, naked, her father, bizarre, lets her … She goes into the homes of those other people there and walks around like that in the enemies’ world, well, in fact, the free world, but far away, so far away! She makes her way
around in it—her poor parents when they find out that she will never come back! What good is the caravel that sails far out to sea after whatever riches and brings none of them back? What good is the caravan out beyond the deserts that takes the wrong road home and becomes lost in the sands? Oh what reckless parents this girl has!

“Look how her face is stiff because she is both timid and too ardent; she dances, but too vigorously, her manner is too lively. How should one put it? She dances blithely! She has not yet understood and never will understand because she will never be part of our houses, our prisons, she will be spared the confinement and as a result our warmth also and our company! She will never know that when the lute and high-pitched voice of the blind mourner make us get up and almost go into a trance, it is because our grief makes us mourn, our hidden grief.

“She dances, and is dancing for us, that is true; before us, well but there it is, she is expressing her joy in life. How strange that is. Where does she come from, just where has she been? Really, she is not one of us!”

“And yet,” said one of the matrons, the wealthiest, very high and mighty, “if her father put her back in her place … really, if he made her wear the veil, and sent her back into the darkness and protection of our homes, I would not hesitate to ask for her in marriage for my eldest son! I would describe her to my son just the way she is now, her waist, her bearing, and all the fire in her eyes! Definitely! I would ask for her and I know my son would be happy I did!”

Someone reported what was said to the girl’s mother, and told her who said it. The mother made a little face. The woman, who would have liked to present herself as future mother-in-law (on the condition, it is true, that the father lead his daughter back to strict Muslim orthodoxy), well, the narrator’s mother did not consider her station to be high enough for them. “Them,” that is herself, her mother, her
paternal lineage with the saint in the mountains, who was so much a presence for them all, men and women. How could she even think of making an alliance with this bourgeois woman who was so “high and mighty”? And out of her depth!

“Besides,” one of the mother’s friends said ironically (evidence, it is true, of her cramped conformity), “a forty-year-old woman, looking at a thirteen-year-old girl and wanting to describe her to her son herself. Is that proper?”

“She would do that herself?” the mother exclaimed in innocent amazement.

As if everyone did not know that any mother, especially a young mother, would also be modest in the presence of her eldest son, or any of her sons as soon as they entered the world of their father!

“That is not how we do things!” replied the other.

The mother would have been inclined to think that the woman’s remark was rather pleasant because she had been thinking about the happiness of her son, and before he yet desired it, she wished him to have a beautiful girl “with fire in her eyes”!

Suddenly she had doubts. She had to ask the neighbor who was friendly and knew more than she about how people said things, “My daughter, my eldest daughter, how would you describe her eyes?”

The neighbor used the typical terms and metaphors to praise the adolescent girl’s features, her eyes, her hair.

At which point the mother stopped the conversation: “In any case, the father will let his daughter complete her studies. Tell that lady to look somewhere else for a daughter-in-law!”

Once back in the village the mother boasted about this possibility of arranging her first child’s marriage while she was still so young. She talked about it with the only family she received in her home or whom she herself would visit: the
caïd
’s.

He was a widower; the eldest of his three daughters who was divorced did not want to remarry because she wanted to attend to her very young sisters and two brothers. The last of the orphan girls had just finished elementary school and, as was customary, was now cloistered at home awaiting some future suitor.

The
caïd
’s eldest daughter was the mother’s only friend. Upon her return from the city, Bahia described her niece’s wedding to this somewhat rural audience with discreet satisfaction. These womanly conversations, especially when they took place in the
caïd
’s house, looking out upon a deep orchard on the outskirts of the village, would end with musical sessions. One of the women brought a derbouka, a little girl had a tambourine, and the rather unpolished, somewhat nasal repertory of la Mitidja, could be heard beneath the trees, close to a hedgerow of almond trees—hostesses and guests all sitting on carpets laid out on the grass, the children all around, in the background some animals: a rooster and a peacock, kids, some very skinny cats, and even a rather terrifying wolf-dog that frightened the mother, a city-woman …

At nightfall my father came to get us in a Citroën that he and the Kabylian baker had bought together. The baker used it all week, but when he was not at work, he agreed to chauffeur my father, who was incapable of driving it.

The baker had closed up shop. He arrived accompanied by my impassive father. The car was parked. One of the little boys came and told us they were here. We climbed in back: my mother engulfed beneath her veils; myself at thirteen, stiff because I was on display; and my very little sister.

My father then signaled to his chauffeur partner (or perhaps they had decided between them to do this long before) that they had to go the long way around in the car. It was “apéritif time” (my father’s phrase seemed mysterious to me, I never asked what the words
meant). The two large cafes in the center of the village would be filled with men who were
pieds-noirs
, while on benches just across the way the native men, Kabylians and Arabs, congregated in angry, silent confrontation.

Consequently, even with two men in the front, we could not drive there. A wife would immediately be the focus of all eyes: As if my mother, a lady who was of course veiled in silk, with embroidered organza over her nose masking almost her entire face, must not, because of her very worthiness, be thus exposed to the gaze of such spectators.