So Vast the Prison (7 page)

He confided that he had known Leo for a year or two, that his work had taken him to Italy to Leo’s place “for a two-day marathon interview,” and that since then they had exchanged brief notes on a regular basis.

I nodded toward tonight’s audience. “All the intellectuals in the country, the old activists of sixty-eight are here! … From who’s here tonight we now know that there are three thousand people on our ‘left bank,’ a majority of them male, and often with a ‘girlfriend’ who is French. Of course, there are several apparent variations—light or dark skin, straight or curly hair—but all of them are Francophiles tonight.”

“Leophiles, rather,” my companion corrected, and I do not know if he said anything else or not.

The applause went on and on and the calls for encores became more insistent. The star wanted to appear generous, suddenly feeling younger because this youth of a nostalgic summer bore him along. (Though, perhaps, I was the only one sensitive to this nostalgia).

He was called back two, four, ten times. Leo was sitting on top of the world. He recited another piece; he sang a new song that he warned us would be “short.” They finally had to turn off half the spotlights before the amphitheater began slowly to empty out.

At one or two in the morning twenty of us go to dinner in a nearby hotel; Leo presides, drinks, listens … At three in the morning there are four of us who decide not to go home and sleep: my husband, Leo, me, and my Beloved. (At the time I am not yet calling him that, I am sure). An assistant, a secretary, and the driver as well stay with us.

Some of the discothèques stayed open until dawn, and there was one set up not far away under a huge Tuareg tent, with a band made up of four young amateurs who were overjoyed to have a prestigious guest like Leo … A few night owls remained for another hour. Three men (Leo, my husband, and the young man—like Leo’s little brother) were seated at a table in the corner; their conversation seemed professional, about the two other concerts they anticipated that weekend. I was with the secretary, a young woman of twenty-five who had already told me all about her marriage, her divorce, and how despite her heavy family responsibilities (a widowed mother, two or three younger sisters who hoped to go to the university), she lived one day at a time. We decided to go from one person to another asking, “Have you been to the concert?” “Will you go back tomorrow? …” People invited us to dance; I declined. I felt I was floating in astonishing exhilaration, in gleefulness free as air; soon the sun would rise, we were never going to sleep ever again. This evening at the theater took place for me outside of any territory; it was neither in France nor in my own country but in an in-between that I was suddenly discovering. Those three or maybe four thousand fans of Leo’s had been engrossed in a romanticism that was as much anarchy as French, despite seven years of bloody battles still fresh in our minds. I saw this as the strange end of an era.

I myself was neither here nor there, not seeking my own place, nor even worried about it, but still I could not help feeling there were clouds approaching, storms in the forecast. The country, it seemed to me, was becoming a freighter that had already begun to drift into unknown seas …

Leo’s wholehearted success seemed to me enough of a gift from the past, and yet those there were all young men, old young men who had gone somewhere together to reassure themselves. What more
could one ask of a true bard, a troubadour, a troublemaker, than to feel for ten minutes, or for an hour, like a family with shared memories, with equal parts irony and nostalgia.

I would have liked to talk about these ideas further with the only one of the trio who was still there, the Beloved. He sat in silence opposite Leo and my husband, listening to them. The young secretary said she was going home and had the driver take her. A few revelers departed, but three or four stayed on along with some foreign tourists; they asked for slow music to dance to.

“No, not a tango,” I suddenly said to the nearby musicians. “A pavane, please!”

“A pavane? What’s that?” a small fat man exclaimed, not getting my joke. He began to look at me shiftily.

“Any dance,” I said, “just not a tango!”

The saxophonist launched into a South American tune and there I was out on the floor. Avoiding the little fat man who wanted to ask me to dance, I insisted, “I always dance alone!”

I must have danced more than an hour without stopping … The rest of the audience was enveloped in a half-light. There were one or two other dancers, and also a couple who joined me in monopolizing the dance floor lit by a dim red light. Then I do not know if they went to sit down or if they left. Whenever I stopped for a moment on the edge of the circle of light, one of the four musicians would make a conspiratorial sign to me and set off again with a new beat that he seemed able to guess in advance would be the rhythm of my body … I was off again, I twirled, time enough to smile at the musicians, my accompanying shadows, my night guides. At the same time, I felt I was alone, suddenly bursting out of a long night and, under these red spotlights, finally reaching shore. The saxophone player, the drummer,
the flute player, and the guitarist stood there, lone interdependent ghosts facing me on these fringes—a night quartet.

I danced on. I danced. I feel I have been dancing ever since. Ten years later I am still dancing in my head, within myself, sleeping, working, and always when I am alone.

The dance inside me is interrupted when someone, man or woman, begins to speak, really to speak, relating some joy, some suffering, some glimpse of a hurt. Then the rhythm inside me stops: I listen, surprised or shaken, I listen to bring myself back, suddenly to feel this brush with reality. Sometimes I also listen to ways people have of staying silent … I listen and I try—but I don’t know, I never dare—to make the other person, the person who has forgotten himself or herself and spoken, or someone whose silence speaks for them, feel that this imperceptible shock has seeped into my eyes, my hands, my memory. The next instant the dance begins again: under my skin, in my legs, up and down my arms, all along the inertia of my face. Yes, it was that night under the tent that the dance began, in that instant: Leo and my husband chatting in a corner and suddenly the young man coming closer and closer, pulled in by the weak, still reddish lights, drawn perhaps by my dancing body. (I knew then, but only vaguely, of my power over this man, that it was beginning, that it would hover for a long time, that I would let it hover, then fray and dissipate.) So the young man came to the edge of the darkness; he sat down and looked in my direction without really staring at me; he didn’t move.

I danced on. I danced. I have been dancing ever since.

In the twenty years that went before, say from when I was sixteen to when I was thirty-six, I had of course played my role within circles
of women, guests, neighbors, and cousins, young girls or mature women. There was a protocol to this: Each woman would slowly dance in the manner traditional to the town she came from. When the body was burdened with jewels, belts, tunics embroidered in gold, stiff and sparkling moiré, the dancing was ceremonious. It was frenzied, or I was going to say lustful, when, in special instances, in defiance or the pleasure of showing off, the rhythms were those of a village or from the high plateaus or deep Africa. This often took place when the orchestra was no longer one of established musicians but rather women who were amateurs; with two
derboukas
and a drum, with their rasping voices and brilliant eyes, they would launch into some ancestral refrain.

The urban ritual became more disorganized: Six to ten women would step forward together to see who best showed off her shape, her curvaceous hips, her abundant breasts, her voluminous hindquarters, shaking them frenetically until they hurt, until the ululating, bursting solo voice convulsed.

So I had participated in all those slow, formal ceremonies, even if, when my turn came, I could never keep myself from doing some nervous, hybrid dance, leaping or moving around with only my feet tracing a whimsical choreography, that shook my calves and intertwined my bare arms. Thus I would transform this constraint into a solitary dance, fleeting and “modern”—as the women called it, disappointed by my imagination, which seemed to them a betrayal … Betrayal of what? Without analyzing it, I think that the important thing was the challenge my engulfed body made by expecting to improvise the movements. The important thing was to distance myself as much as possible from the collective frenzy of those women, my relatives—I felt I could not accept for myself the almost funereal joy of their bodies, verging on a fettered despair.

As an adolescent and a young girl I had danced often and long, always in these groups of women and in crowded patios during the traditional festivals that we looked forward to.

Once, at a wedding, one of my female cousins went to get my husband so that he could hide in a window and watch what she called my “personal style of dancing.” My heart had pounded from shyness, or some unaccountable distress, as if this man with whom I had been sharing almost everything for ten years had willingly become a voyeur, just because he was a man and had caught me in my dance among women.

Strange theater, the binding of eyes and soul that resulted from the rituals of my childhood.

Of course, traditional though I was, I had ended up seemingly adopting Western dance steps before this summer in the seaside resort: Two or three times, in front of everybody, in the arms of my husband, a waltz or a slow fox trot perhaps had made us just one couple lost in the midst of others. I kept my eyes down, and kept him from holding me tight (“Others can see!”), agreed to none but the lightest touch, and finally, obeying the rhythm all alone, rejected my “escort,” in “their” words.

No, despite the fashions I
had
to escape that, I had to avoid being “touched” in such a manner by a man, no matter what man, in a crowd … The secret of the body and its autonomous rhythm, the velvety texture inside the body, and, in the dark, in the emptiness, the music goading me on.

This night, then, I could not stop. I would leap and then suddenly feel like moving more slowly: my feet marking the rhythm unchecked but almost dryly, my hips or my torso applied to stepping back from the excess of this rhythm, playing down the ways it
interlaced, transforming its oriental character into figures that were sparing, faithful of course, but neither lyrical nor overabundant. Tonight my arms alone became lianas, drawing arabesques, in the half-light only my bare arms moving now like serpents and now like calligraphy …

I danced for a long time. The saxophone player, eagerly backing me up, sometimes moved one or two steps forward to follow me or bring me back toward him; for a long time I danced. I am still dancing.

I have forgotten if it was the musician who decided it was over or if, just like that, I left the dance floor first. I remember one person sitting there as witness, his eyes toward the light, his eyes turned toward the ephemeral, ever-changing nature of my figures, my Beloved. I remember that I went in the opposite direction, away from his silence.

The spotlights went off under the tent and we left. I was at Leo’s side. He took my arm in a friendly manner (Leo, the man I felt was so available this night; he had come such a distance not to give something but to receive … receive some secret—what was it?—from my opaque country that was starting its transformation). My husband came alongside me and it was then that my witness, my young man, left, speaking low to the three of us, “Goodbye. I live just two steps away.”

The first light was dawning.

As he went off (I could not help turning my head in his direction … he went along the beach to reach his house, which he had shown me one day was not far!), I finally felt the concentration of his presence vanish as the night drew to a close.

What was this movement simultaneously inside and outside of me that my body, prompted earlier by the sax, seemed to have
released? In what muffled, liquid mystery had he reluctantly introduced himself? I understood, plainly and simply, that I was becoming aware of someone else. Thus a man had watched me dance and I had been “seen.”

And even more than that, I was keenly, consciously, happily aware of myself (nothing to do with self-love, or narcissistic vanity, or laughable interest in one’s appearance …) as being truly “visible” for this almost adolescent young man with the wounded gaze.

Visible for him alone? My visibility for him made me visible to myself.

I lagged behind Leo and my husband on the road. They were still talking—their voices worn out with exhaustion … I, however, was blithely ready to tackle the new day. I would never sleep. I would walk the length of the beach indefinitely. I smiled at the first glimmers of light in the sky.

I kissed Leo, who sighed. “How can a person come to your beautiful country and sleep all alone, without a woman!”

Leo was sincere in his protests. Imagine not guaranteeing our guests, over and above bed and board, a beautiful odalisque!

“You’ll find her all by yourself tomorrow!” my husband assured him. “Don’t forget that I’ll come to get you in three or four hours!”

The next evening I took my place docilely beside the young man on our last tier. I was there for Leo’s second concert. And once again I was with two thousand other fans, or the two thousand from the night before … the young man thoughtful beside me.

At the end, when we rose to go and rejoin Leo in the wings, my companion said to me quietly, “Tonight, will you dance like yesterday?”

It wasn’t quite a request.

“You know,” I replied in a deceptively playful tone, “even when it can’t be seen, I dance. I dance all the time! I dance in my head!”

Naturally, throughout last night’s improvised choreography, it was my passion that was in ferment. I did not yet call it by that name. What else could I say to my Beloved, besides; what could I say to myself?

“I’m going to be good and return to the fold,” I whispered without even a trace of sadness.

I smiled at him with the unexplained first stirrings of happiness inside me, like a suddenly gushing spring that took me by surprise.