So Vast the Prison (38 page)

I finally understand that the pure passion that I first revived through words aimed at oblivion was for me a second birth. This began, as is often the case, at least for women finally reaching maturity, when
there is a strong sense of feminine solidarity, when my mother first came to talk to me: seeming, in a single scene, to bring closure to this move I was making in my life.

So I had taken refuge at my aunt’s house—this aunt was my mother’s half sister; hers was the jasmine on the balcony that accompanied my daydreams during these days of transition and torpor. I slept opposite the balcony and the sky, to the sounds of the working-class apartments across the street. My aunt served me in silence, spoke very little, prayed beside my bed. It was only as we sat together in the evening that she would talk: detailed anecdotes about the women who were her neighbors and whose nagging voices sometimes reached us. In the evening twilight, just on the verge of falling asleep, I would recall the past affection of my aunt in Caesarea. She had been so vociferous, but still the reserve of the aunt who was present made me think of her.

One morning my mother came to find me. She came alone by car to the place where I was staying; she had learned to drive in the early days of Algerian independence and liked to set herself up as my chauffeur. She thought I was having a breakdown; she ate with us. I watched how full of energy she was and understood that she was preparing for combat, but in what battle? I left the aunt to go with my driver. Once outside, after she had begun to drive, and as she was slowly returning to center city, she asked briskly, “What are you going to do now with your life, your children, or …”

I was silent for a moment, then I forced myself to say what I was feeling: that my divorce was a repudiation on my part. She was startled by the Arab word,
repudiation
, that I had used!

“Irrevocable,” I added, “because it was pronounced three times! I know. I am the one who made the vow!”

She went on driving. How, I thought to myself, could my decision,
hard and straight as steel, be transformed into words for the others? We went along for a good while in silence.

“All I know,” I said with difficulty, “is that I will not go back. Not at any price! If I did he might try to take away the children whom I would not give up! The children are growing up.”

“What do you wish to do … to defend your rights?” She repeated these words
your rights
. Then she assumed the position of official adviser: She proposed to take me right away to a lawyer, either someone close to the family or someone else. I would talk to him privately. She would wait outside. She added, “There are laws in this country! Defend yourself!”

The whole time she was taking me to her friend, a woman lawyer who was the one we had to have, my mother was not looking at me. In fact she never got over her amazement: So here was her eldest daughter, whom she thought was thoroughly clad in armor, paralyzed and unable to speak. In a totally traditional modesty that feared the brilliant light of the sun on intimate things, this daughter wants to struggle and release herself but would rather do so in a half-light, consequently in confusion.

We arrived. She chose to wait for me nearby at the home of one of her cousins, a woman of almost forty who was pregnant again. “She is making babies at the same time as her daughter-in-law, and in the same apartment!” she commented disapprovingly.

My mother was my guide. She led me, outside, in the jungle of the city, in the minefield of new laws, without suspecting that this time it was the energy of her own mother, now departed, that had driven me forward, almost with my eyes blindfolded.

A few days later I appeared before the
cadi
for the scene known as “the attempt at reconciliation.” I see myself seated facing the magistrate’s
desk; my husband, who came in shortly after me, is seated to the side. I feel him; I do not look at him.

The representative of the law spouted a long speech in a form of Arabic that is referred to as literary. All that I got of it was its stiffness and its hollow circumlocutions while the man’s eyes, prying and suspicious behind black-framed glasses, goaded me. I take myself somewhere else: It is such a beautiful day, outside the window!

Then the husband and the
cadi
speak together, man to man: I am vaguely aware that this humming sound is a spider’s web being put in place. The judge asks me one last question, which he repeats. I merely say
“Lla!”
(“No”!) because I have the ludicrous and in fact ill-timed notion that this is the beginning of the
chahadda
—according to them, the words of submission. So I will only say one word in their learned language: no,
non, lla!

I also remember that my innocence as a woman finally dawned on me and seemed obvious:
I shall add nothing
, I decided. I erased this face of justice from my sight, and at once my heart flew far away, outside the window, like swallows in flight. I tried to contain the smile that was about to break out on my face. The
cadi
examined the beginnings of this glow relaxing my features, or he saw into it.

Then I told my lawyer, who had waited at the door, how I had maintained my silence and why. It was this shadow of a smile, she explained to me later, that justified for the magistrate a verdict of separation, ruling that the “fault was mine” as well. As for myself, when I left this
mahakma
at midday, all I saw outside was the sun. And a second later I felt its actual heat, its vibration almost exploding against me, right in the chest.

My mother went with me the next day to the airport: In Paris my young sister had just given birth.

When I entered the room in the Paris clinic, the first thing I saw was the baby: She was up and naked and her head was covered with curly hair. The nurse laughed heartily as she wrapped the blanket around her flushed skin. My niece was less than two days old. I did not dare touch her then or caress her … For the next week I slept listlessly at my sister’s. Forget everything. Especially do not discuss with her any of the upheaval in my life. My lawyer, whose sister, Djamila, is very close to my sister, had asked me, “Have you talked to your sister about … about the night of the crisis?”

“Yes,” I said. I had talked to her about it in an ironic manner. My face was not swollen anymore, my hands were out of their bandages, but how could one explain this on the telephone, from so far away? I felt only cold irony about my stupidity. Because we could not spend hours on the telephone, I had shortened the story. I tried to think of some novels we had read together, or one of us first, then the other, at home … I ended up explaining: “You know, without being aware of it, I started to act out the princess of Cleves with my husband! Well, everybody—and he first among them—believed that I had chosen to play the part of the domesticated shrew! A simple mistake of repertory!” Then I laughed.

I laughed for the first time, after having spent days waiting to recover, my body more or less intact, and my face where, thank God, my eyes could still see!

“I laughed,” I said again to my lawyer, who ventured a more specific question: “Your sister listened; do you know how she reacted afterward?”

“No,” I said, “There was a long silence on the other end … I hung up finally; I did not want to upset her too much!”

“I found out later, through Djamila, who saw her in Paris. Your sister began to cry. Silently crying. She didn’t have the strength to
speak to you. She cried, she told Djamila, because of her earlier fear and also because she was relieved!”

I remained silent there with my lawyer: my new friend—she whose sister seemed so close to my young sister, who for the past two years had been happily married in Paris, now with a magnificent baby. It was then, I think, that I decided to go and spend a week with her. To reassure myself that she was happy.

Sisterhood: Would that be the hidden, but calm, and infinitely open, eye that waits beneath the silent tide of friendship?

Sisterhood does not mean being permeable to each other, and certainly not sharing each others gloom. No. It just initiates some friability of emotion, where emotion flickers in two places at once.

Hands, gestures, smiles are slow to speak. A resemblance that, despite kinship or a shared childhood, is gradually revealed, abruptly unveiled: a sun after rain.

The days in Paris were good for me, a brief spell in which I was always outside. Carefree and relieved to be free; above all happy to have kept my sight. Walking in the crowd and looking greedily, to the point where I forgot myself. The wonder and elation of knowing I, a woman, was an anonymous passerby, a foreign passerby! As a result of seeing new things, multitudinous things, the repetition of landscapes and faces, I become nothing but gaze!

I returned home. I decided to propose a “semi documentary” project finally, one that would feed on my investigations and my research with sound.

In the building where I had once worked for several months, I introduced myself and the twenty-page dossier I was championing to the man responsible for production.

“What title do you have for your outline?” the producer asked indifferently.

“Arable Woman
,” I replied.

Algiers once again, home base. Going somewhere else, and always coming back! On one of these later homecomings I recall the face of a neighbor, a young woman living like myself on the fringes of transience in this oblique city, this capital always on the brink of some fever.

Why would I suddenly linger over this neighbor, my only friend in the old days? The old days, in my other life, that is, before the breach introduced by this passion in the process of being obliterated (during which I was alone, but also so little receptive to others …). Swallowed up in my youth, that is, absent in some way, or distracted, or immobile: The only things I seemed to put myself into were the air, the clouds, the unknown faces floating before me! As if I had no roots, as if I never touched the ground, except at night, sometimes, and in the revived voluptuousness of love …

And yet this friend suddenly appeared. Hania, which means the peaceful or the pacified: anyhow she sought her peace however she could. Her round face with large, shining eyes, a thick short nose, high cheekbones, jet-black hair that hung to her waist or was arranged in two soft braids that her hands would play with; her always-questioning eyes … Hania could not forget her oasis near Biskra. Like André Gide, who was preyed on by temptations in an earlier time, she would return there regularly believing that only there was she really herself.

She lived in a crowded, low-rent building, where I would come for her regularly. She asked me about my life, and then about my
work: photographing the peasant women from the mountains of my childhood, what was I going to do with that? she demanded to know. I tried to say how much I liked to look at the people, as if I were seeing them for the first time, when I came “home.” “The people?” she said, looking at me with her devouring gaze.

“The people out there!” I answered. “Old people, children, little girls, adolescent girls, people who are out there, and outside this city with its incessant noise!” She listened to me.

I had to explain that, apart from my students and a few technicians, while I did my research during the past few months, I had seen practically no one. My parents. The children. Five or six friends, men and women. That was all. I felt I was living a full life.

“And all the others?” She made a face and a mocking gesture, her arm in the air.

I did not understand. She made the gesture again, a bit like a clown, suddenly so expressive.

“The people ‘upstairs’?” I translated.

“The ones in charge,” she said. “The ones who have
solta!
”

I smiled. I remembered the expression that was several centuries old. I said it in Arabic, its music resounding like steel. “
Dhiab fi thiab!
As el Maghroui said!” To myself I repeated, bitterly,
Wolves in men’s clothing!

She laughed for a long time. And with that she right away became my friend. And so she poured out her life story. All I can remember of it now is one detail that leaped in my face.

She gave birth regularly every two years, sometimes with even greater frequency than that. All her pregnancies wore her out; no, she would not have an IUD inserted, “a steel thread in my belly, oh no!” As for the Pill, she did not know how to count the days of her cycle. So, once again, she laughed, then suddenly stopped her shrill laughter, looked at me, finally unburdened herself:

“The nausea had just begun, I am in the second month, hardly farther along, I ask my husband”—(she said in fact, “I ask Him”!)—to go there, to the
douar
that is my home. He refuses: his mother also refuses, because with me gone she will have to take care of the children—four, soon five now! In the fourth month, or a bit later, without meaning to, I lose my voice! Oh, I am normal, I work, I face the work. It is only that, once my belly becomes heavy, my voice goes away … And I know what it is doing, it has left and gone to the oasis, ahead of me! The children cry because they can’t hear me anymore; sometimes one of them refuses to eat, another gets sick. My mother-in-law is the one, finally, who pleads for me: ‘Let her go back to the oasis long enough to give birth!’

“And every time it is the same thing: I leave this city, I go to my people; when I am there, I speak hardly at all, but my voice comes back like a trickle, a tiny, thin trickle. Above all, I give birth among my sisters, with my mother and my aunt at my bedside. On the seventh day, after having finally presented the baby to the day and naming him, we dance the whole night long beneath the palm trees near the
oued!
I revive! And the baby then is so beautiful, full of vigor. I come home full of confidence. Every morning I sing …” (She is silent.) “But hardly have I weaned my child—at six months or a little older—and feeling light hearted, when unfortunately, in no time at all, the nausea is back; I’m pregnant all over again!”