So Vast the Prison (36 page)

I cry, I weep (willing these tears to fall endlessly in protest), and
my mourning, galloping at the same time as I race through space, becomes exacerbated and then splits in shreds like the great tapestry of my rebellion itself. It ends up vanishing because the women, all wearing white headdresses and squatting on carpets—the neighbor women have come to pay their respects—finally take me onto their laps.

Two, three years later, during the same period that I lose my amulets, I see my mother, merry as a child, chatting conspiratorially with the woman we called “the nurse” who, ever since her second son was born, worked for us as housekeeper. In the village everyone, right down to those in the poorest hovels, referred to her by the imposing title “the general’s wife.” Her husband, who was very old and never left his bed anymore, must have been some sort of handyman, the caretaker of equipment in the army, or perhaps the navy … Someone must have called him the “general caretaker,” and the term, at first said jokingly, in fun, stuck to him. Decades later he bore this nickname with not a trace of self-consciousness; sometimes, seeing the nurse and hearing her nickname, someone would ask, “Was her husband a sergeant? Sergeant general?” Nobody knew anything more about it. The “general’s wife” was a dark-skinned villager in her fifties with a face that radiated jovial kindness (despite the huge, ugly wart on one cheekbone that, upon the insistence of my mother, she allowed our family doctor to remove using local anesthesia).

I see my mother, on a Thursday afternoon, sitting recovering from the fatigue resulting from her weekly session at the Turkish baths. The nurse, the general’s wife, has made fritters the way I like them. The warmth of the house after the cold of the cold room at the
hammam
, where we had been offered pomegranates, oranges, and clementines already peeled and sectioned. At home the nurse’s thoughtful welcome …

I remember that particular Thursday. And my mother, in league with the nurse, suddenly asking me, “Yesterday you were in our room, sitting on the floor at the foot of our bed: you were reading that library book you had just brought home. Then, from the kitchen, I heard you crying … You were sobbing, but softly, a bit as if you were singing! I sneaked in to see, to understand.” In fact she was talking for the benefit of the village woman. “Explain this to me, my daughter. I think there is something mysterious going on. I read the words to the old songs in Arab, I sing them and sometimes weep to them in my heart … But still I am singing!

“But you, I was fascinated watching you from a distance: your little hands turning page after page, you stopped crying for a moment; then suddenly, after a second, your voice—or, it was almost like the voice of someone else—began to moan. Moan? No, sob, but softly, a sort of lament!” She turned once again toward the nurse, who was smiling doubtfully. “You understand, it wasn’t because she sang and cried at the same time, no, it was that she never stopped reading, and when she wept that way, she seemed to be enjoying it. Isn’t that strange?”

She admitted a little later, disturbed, “You made me regret I cannot read French! It is good that I’m learning to speak it now, but what I would like is to read it like that! One is never alone then, I think …”

The nurse listened, then, in her tranquil way, spoke, her eyes first on one (my mother), then on the other (her little girl): “Come now, what are you saying, Lla Bahia! Human beings are never alone. God is always looking down upon them, isn’t he!”

“Of course,” my mother murmured sadly, turning her attention toward me, apparently discouraged by the village woman’s remark. And also, perhaps, by her unshakable calm.

Scattered scenes from a childhood I left behind at the age of ten to become a boarder at a school in the nearby city.

The year I was thirteen, soon to turn fourteen, how distant the day seemed when I was seven and, softly sobbing, read my first novel, brought home from the library: Hector Malot’s
Sans famille!

My early adolescence at boarding school was influenced by my strong friendship with a girl who was half Italian, a boarder like myself who went back to her coastal village every Saturday.

Together we discovered in the school library the correspondence of Alain-Fournier and Jacques Rivière, who were adolescents at a Parisian preparatory school before the First World War. This bookish and passionate friendship, dating from a half century earlier, became our entry (probably it was not just by chance that our tacit friendship was formed in the mirror of this dialogue between two young people from the past) to everything we later read. A wide-open realm, an expanded space …

We emulated them daily as the ten months of the school year unfolded and we read. During recess we had almost clandestine conversations about Gide’s novels and about the theater, play after play by Claudel. Next I plunged into Giraudoux’s short, clear, and cutting novels, especially because my French teacher had seen productions of his plays that year in Paris. Despite our intense nightly conversations, my friend and I had our differences: She made fun of my pleasure in finding Claudel’s uncompromising heroines to be a reflection of something familiar, but what? My maternal culture, my tendency at the time to be religious? Our friendship intensified later when, after Rimbaud and Apollinaire, we were dazzled to discover the poetry of Michaux. And I suddenly began to seek out translations of ancient Arab and Iranian poems for my
pied-noir
friend.

I mention quickly our sharing of this first literary repast because it is connected with another day I still remember, the day that I was fourteen.

I had come home from boarding school. No one had thought to turn this first day of summer vacation (we were probably waiting to go to Caesarea shortly, to the family home) into a birthday celebration for me. My young brother had said ironically one day (or was this later?), “Celebrate a birthday? Just because we are neighbors with the French, does that mean we are going to adopt their customs?”

Why, ultimately, does this unforgotten day I turned fourteen come up? Because I decided to celebrate it alone with a new undertaking beginning—my journal. Maybe I thought,
Like Alain-Fournier, like Jacques Rivière!

This is my life’s project … at least until I am thirty
.

I lifted my hand from the page.
After that
, I thought,
I shall be old!
I did not know how one was supposed to live after thirty, or if it was even possible to have projects …

But thirty years hence? I saw myself then as halfway through my life—or at least the life I believed worth living: in my reading adventure I completely disregarded the restricted space of the home in which I was growing up. And, in the same way, I had not yet been struck by the injustice of the confinement of the women in my family. I felt only their poetry, their warmth which was sometimes not without sadness; only the pride of my mother, an aristocrat in my eyes, in her stiff silk veil—like Zoraidé, of course, in
Don Quixote
, which I do not think I had read yet.

Consequently, though isolated between two extremes in this village established by colonizers, I did not think of myself as alone.
What should my life project be?
I asked myself grandly. I wrote, and even now I remember these words from a journal that was, moreover, very soon interrupted, and rediscovered by chance in an old pile of stuff. I read the lines again with amused indulgence, and the scene of what we might call “the first writing” rises up intact.

I want to obey
, I wrote,
my own rule of life, the one I choose for myself today, at the age of fourteen, and I promise to do so
.

Behind me stood the poets who had become my friends over the last few months, backing me just as much probably as the acrid pride of Lla Fatima and that of her daughter Bahia, exiled for the time being in this village. Behind me, before I spoke these words of a juvenile vow, the familiar saints from past centuries made their presence known, the ones whose sanctuaries I had only rarely visited when I was very young: the Berkanis, father and son, buried side by side, and Ahmed or Abdallah, whom I had so long ignored … Behind me, but why did I stubbornly persist in looking “behind” my first commitment for ghosts who, the instant they were invoked, crumbled away into dust, or rotted there in neglected tombs. Why “behind,” why not look for what was ahead, toward death in the distance, toward the last time one takes flight, the final departure?

I write. Beside me in the small living room my father talks at length with a neighbor, an employee who is “native” like himself and who has recently come from our city, Caesarea. My father is talking to this young man about the need to send “our daughters to school, all our daughters, in these villages and in the old cities as well, where traditions benumb them.”

I wrote at the beginning of this journal (which had no sequel beyond the notes I took on my readings then)
I make this commitment, and to this rule of life I will remain faithful because I think it is the purest:

The following year, this time alone, I plunged into mystical writings, Islamic ones as well as those I found in my reading at school: In
the wake of Claudel’s heroes, I moved to Pascal, then Francis of Assisi … Finally, thanks to having mastered ancient Greek, I landed in Greece, as if home at last!

These emotions kept me occupied while I was in boarding school but also when I was in the family harems in Caesarea the next summer, then for another whole year … Eventually an intoxication with poetry, a secret exaltation of sentiment, was all I retained of this. As a result soon afterward, and too quickly, I fell into love for the first time, absolutely. That lasted seventeen years …

Not happiness, but joy
, I wrote in my youthful wisdom—and presumption.

More than twenty years later, when, just before turning forty, I leave my first marriage, the only part of this precociously written law that I have left is simple joy, thick of course and slow, joy in space each time it opens up, unscathed joy.

Even today all that I seek, far from “salvation” and for want of “grace,” is the feel of passages—sometimes they are too slight, but even then, at least, they may be too narrow, but then, at least, they let my searching gaze arrive ahead of me.

THE FIFTH DAY OF FILMING
. The sun has returned; the light is delicate. I am not sure that the photography director can feel how it shimmers, like some questioning iridescence … How—seeing certain dim blues, with hints of gray in them, the flat green of leaves on Barbary figs that bring out sudden, overlapping nuances—one wants to cover up and at the same time to float, eyelids half closed in this winter radiance.

Early January in my country on the Mediterranean coast. Sensation of light on my body, a purely feminine sensation. As if I believed, in mid-winter, that I had left winter behind, this light felt like emerging from the darkness of the harem each time I felt it … I resign myself to the thought that the technical crew, being men, imposing their bodies on space, have not the slightest idea that one can slip through it softly and stealthily as if breaking and entering.

I stroll among them; I have pointed out a specific way to frame the landscape; I am going to lapse into sadness. I would have liked to tell them that this morning more than ever the space is not empty; something rare is happening here that one could try to look at really,
densely. Nature this morning seems young; the shepherd children, now used to us, run freely around in the distance or among us—the biblical freshness of these images.

When will we make films with blind people propelled by the fierce desire to see truly? Expecting to show what is there in the first lull, in this first pause that is, if not esthetic, then pagan! Lesson of space first, then lesson of colors.

In the beginning it was a matter of knowing how to get silence. Making one want to enter space the way mimes do, their hands in front, body slowly floating and imperceptibly resisting. Yes, I ask myself again, when
are
we going to use the blind, or people who have been blind, to make films? Then I smile, thinking there is some hope perhaps, hope for the next century, for the decade to come. When all the many women emerging from all the harems, whose eyes have been too cramped in the shadows of walls, will take flight into the blue and want to melt into the light they have won back.

Feeling in this way the brilliance of dawns, the blinding weight of middays, feeling the wantonness of freedom. Freedom is not necessarily a path, it is an ether into which one plunges, where one sleeps on one’s feet, where one dances either half bowing or scarcely bent without moving, where one merges with what was held back from ecstasy. Light fingering the whole body …

I will obtain none of this reality, not a trace, though it was not dreamed but intensely perceived. Must I be permanently saddened by this?

Full sunlight while we work on the location shots; in the picture this light ought to “develop” in the same way that Ali’s view of Lila develops, and Lila’s view of the places and faces that she discovers around her develops.