So Vast the Prison (2 page)

The word spoken by the older woman in her veil who had been smiling just minutes before, certainly no victim, but comfortable in her role as a city-dweller, peaceable and somewhat affected, this word—not one of hatred, no, rather one of despair long frozen in place between the sexes—this word left in its wake within me a dangerous urge to self-erasure …

This lady from the baths left in a dignified manner. Shortly afterward my mother-in-law and I followed. I, speechless and, as the next few years would show, stripped bare, drowned mourning for things unknown and for hope.

Was that why I began to mistrust writing? It had no shadow? It dried things up so fast? I discarded it.

Those years were not really years of silence or depression: Inside my ear and heart grated the gift of the unknown woman whose voice tormented me. Through her the mother tongue had shown me her teeth, inscribing within me a deadly bitterness … Where was I to find the thick undergrowth within from now on, how was I to open a narrow corridor into the warm, black tenderness, whose glowing secrets and gleaming words piled thick and deep?

Would I not have to beg, plunged into the darkness of the lost language and its hardened heart that I had found at the
hammam
that day?

1
THE SIESTA
 

A SIESTA, A LONG SIESTA
, one day in early November … as if this rest came after six, nine months, no, a year, or to be precise thirteen months, thirteen months of soaking—the rising of an insidious flood with moments of inertia, a growing inner swell, swelling in imperceptible vibrations, in prickles. Moments of respite intervene, bright intervals of apathy, a flash of sudden winter sun inside the heart, and once again the fever rises, its exhausted gnawing away, its relaxation of laboring muscles … And the fierce refusals of I don’t know what, the repressed trembling, something obscurely digging away inside me, my hard refusal in no way conquering the urgent tide, softly violent, obstinate, an anonymous infiltrating passion carving its design. A mask, that’s it. Heroically I manage to keep the mask on. My words are veiled and I can make my laughter—when it’s not fake, when it’s not afraid to zigzag along—burst out higher up, along some beam of distant light, against the breaking seas of scattered conversations … Yes, after burying everything dug up deep inside me, the darkness of
turmoil engulfed in civility, behind my everyday activities and my absent body’s comings and goings, after thirteen long, slow months passed in this manner, after all that, a siesta, just one siesta, one November day in the family house—an Andalusian song plays on the radio, a rebec hoarsely accompanying the baritone’s voice, and from the kitchen I can hear dishes clattering, the dull thump of cans, then a steady stream of water; they must be washing the tiles, at the door a jingling bell rings, whoever has just arrived stops and stands in the vestibule, a child whines, the polite voices of relatives intertwine their greetings; a moment later, in the room next to me, the rustle of an adolescent girl folding silky underthings, her light laughter cut short as she cautiously closes the nearby door. I doze throughout, my body crumpled in sudden lassitude as if exhausted from a race stretching on for days on end, nonstop, like breathlessness that has reached its limit, and I plunge irrevocably into the blur of a voracious nap.

I am lying on a narrow divan in my father’s library; his prayer rug is tossed partly across a nearby chair; the shutters facing me are closed; behind them I feel the presence of the staircase to the little garden with its jasmine and hollyhocks flattened, no doubt, by the not yet fading sun. I can hear the dog outside, chasing flies—and I lose myself, sinking down into sleep inside this house that is also a boat. A two- or three-hour siesta. One sunny day in November. An unadventurous day.

I awake to the layered silence of the house, which suddenly seems deserted. Someone must have thrown a rough wool blanket over me. Astonished, I sit straight up. What’s going on? A moment of uncertainty: the light coming through the window is different, not weaker, different. I make an effort to try to understand, then very gradually, uneasily, I sense finally with certainty, something both new and
vulnerable, a beginning of something, I don’t know what, something strange. Is it color, sound, odor? How can I isolate the sensation? And this “something” is inside me and at the same time it envelops me. I am carrying some change inside me, and it floods through me.

Everything around me, the furniture, the rustic library, the white room, everything seems lit by some pure iridescence. All because in that instant I feel new. I discover an amazing and abrupt revitalization within.

Awake and happy at five in the afternoon. Awake, washed, arisen as if from a long illness. Azure space envelopes me, the air still. The facing window is still there, unchanged, behind it the stone staircase and its jasmine, its hollyhocks. The dog comes back, I hear him again … Life goes on, distant. The world stands still and trembles like some invisible, giant creature about to become a statue; I stare wide-eyed. Space gapes open around me; I sit, still dazed. In front of the shutters a diagonal strip of golden dust sparkles. Everything fits.

Then life takes off once more, flooding; glissando. I feel I grasp its weave, the beating of a secret heart, bursting with darkness … There had been this brief halt to revive me! Here I am, awake now, resuscitated, my body intact and serene, at five in the afternoon.

I get up from the divan. I contemplate the blank day. I make no plans, I move about for the sheer pleasure of it. I dress in order to feel my legs, my arms, my shoulders, my skin beneath the cool cloth. There is no need to look at myself in a full-length mirror. I walk through the other rooms greeting my relatives; I listen to the muffled and politely appropriate things they say. I answer, distant, but not at all absentminded, somewhat ceremonious myself in turn, but really there, satisfied with this conventional present moment yet seeing at the same time its precariousness. The others’ façades; they could be
simulacra: bizarre projections, moving along and reveling in some ephemeral realm. Nonetheless I join in the usual things, ridiculous though they are, and, overcome by some unwarranted benevolence, I am amused by them. Perhaps we will all be caught up in a whirlwind, some instant dissolution: do we not in fact live on the edge of unforeseeable collapse, under the threat of imminent disaster?

All this time I cannot forget the strangeness, the miracle of my awakening in the library. I gradually learn how to inhabit myself, in the first stages of calm stability: the reassuring density of others floods back, as well as the weight of things. I slowly confirm this for myself as if, before, their physical shape and substance had been their mere obstructions.

One more instant and I might have thought I was the prisoner of some strange, huge picture projected against the void. What if I experimented by rebelling against appearances?

Relief sweeps over me: I am no longer living “before,” I am no longer ill, I have left the dream. A thirteen-month-long dream. How comforting it is just to exist: an empty room; the distant voices of the family women; a visitor saying goodbye; outside, the sun setting suddenly, the first lamp glowing. I get dressed; I choose a new blouse; tonight I’m dining at the home of friends. Probably there will be people I don’t know: the ordinary events of social life—its reassuring little surprises!

The evening is spent in chatter and smoke, in a lull of laughter and few words, in bursts of music that make you want to dance, and every now and then the vividness of my earlier vision as I emerged from my siesta returns. In this room, amid faces that are indifferent or polite, I can see that, ever since this afternoon’s awakening, I am free of influence, I am myself, full of emptiness, available and tranquil,
starving for the outside and serene … Not like before! “Before”—what was that like? What was I then, what person? How was I incomplete? What obsession tormented me? What was that uncontrollable quivering of skin, of mouth, the fingers of a hand kept out of sight, the shawl suffocatingly tight … What was that, over and over, at least once a day, or ten times the same day? That was “before”: the inner opacity that had to be stifled deep inside and smothered. Before, there was a struggle with neither enemy nor object; before, there was passion fiercely denied, fervor churning through you and the heart reeling.

How good it’s going to be to be alive from now on
, I think that very first evening—I remember that there was a man I liked, who put me at ease, a man I liked, who leaned toward me and began at that very moment to court me—very cautiously. He spoke slowly, I think; he spoke slowly and I didn’t hear him.
It’s good to be alive!
I say again to myself, and my whole face is smiling.

It is going to be so delicious to walk, to like walking for the sake of walking, to admire the purplish white of whitewashed façades at the crack of dawn, to listen to the splashing laughter of children as it beads off the balconies, their showers bursting in my face …

To hear and let oneself be carried along by nearby voices, colors, surging impetuously in disorder, gushing, springing! How intoxicating it will be to become a simple spectator once more, with no attachments or particular desire! Everything improvisation, in outbursts or just waiting. How good it will be to prepare oneself really to live, since the process of living is both leaping and standing still simultaneously.

The evening ends in a rumpled dream, gaiety giving way to fatigue. The next morning I experienced all over again a pure, ineffable, eager awakening. An unsullied light enveloped me exactly as it
had the day before after my siesta. At daybreak or late midmorning in days to come, the fleeting and certain impression would return that I was coming closer and closer to some secret throb of excitement, freed from convention. The tempo of life: a spring flowing into chiaroscuro and the fullness of silence. Later the rhythm of these days blurred together to establish a beat that lingered stubbornly inside me.

So thirteen months had been exhausted in a long drawn-out battle, harried by a blind-faced passion whose life had dried up. Thirteen months were wiped out in my sleep that November day.

2
THE FACE
 

NO, THE IMAGE OF THE
other will not change. Only his power over me, which I confessed neither to him nor to myself, his charm—in its magical sense—unexpectedly vanished that November afternoon, dissolved into the gray waters of my siesta.

As if sleep were navigation. As if, through the muscles of relaxed limbs—the body at rest, responsive and braced, jumping or tensing in response to some dream, or prone and barely breathing, hardly more than a warm corpse—as if the fibers and nerves of the whole organism were haunted by a memory turned inside out, a coiled animal now stretched out on its back in the half-light, belly offered, eyes blinded and mouth open, grimacing and obscene … Body both overpowered by sleep and overpowering it, in a watchful, sun-drenched brightness filtered through half-closed shutters.