So Vast the Prison

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.

And the siesta unfolded like old lace, its weave uncertain, sheer its whole length. And thus my sleeping woman’s body, released and abandoned, rid itself inexorably of the poison instilled inside it for thirteen months.

Must I explain the nature of this clearing away, risking in the process that some powdery spider’s web will reemerge, some tangle of silk or dust with its melancholy effect, from memory not yet rotten?

For thirteen months, in this excavation of ruins, the face of the other had seemed irreplaceable to me. He springs back to life before me the moment that I write — probably because I am writing. A face no less pure, its frank honesty still intact, but henceforth stripped of its power over my senses.

Those days it was a matter of inventing ways to parry his influence and not be weak in any way. If I unexpectedly found myself confronted with this man’s presence, I was careful to look at him without seeing him.

Looking at him as if he were just anybody. In a split second deciding to see him through a fog. However, if I was in a group or in a crowded room, I would suddenly take pity on myself (I actually was starting to beg from myself), my heart pleading convulsively, I would slip quickly back into a corner and turn around. Suddenly the face of my Beloved would appear as if from some picture frame fated to be there, he would be talking, listening, leaving. I would look at him from a distance, left to the solitude I had chosen, concentrating my burning gaze on him. Just one look so that I could recall everything later (“later” would begin as soon as separation took effect, but it felt a hundred years away)!

Under cover and distant I would note the precise line drawn by his eyebrows, the helix of his ear, his slight Adam’s apple, his somewhat projecting upper lip, and how reflected glints of green or blue-green on his jacket, his shirt — it mattered little what — played across his face. I dared move a step closer — then two steps. I lowered my eyes, as if I were thinking about something, which I was, then quickly looked up in an attempt to grasp precisely the texture of his skin, the short scar at one corner of his lips. In a split second I verified things I had seen in a blur earlier: the line of his nose set at right angles but recessed where it met his forehead, the bony planes of his profile, and the deep-set eyes that looked down his nose, creating a distant, proud physiognomy, with the ever so slight imbalance of the face of a bird. This enduring impression from our very first meeting, his particular distant look, made me want to hear the resonate voice that went with it; but his distant gaze had also kept me away from this man any number of times, proving so well the restive caution of bodies, deaf and dumb in their own ways but able to perceive, prior to any contact, the dangerous electricity that will draw two people close or drive them apart.

I had quickly pronounced him “not a very nice man.” It took weeks, a party, exceptional circumstances in short, requiring that the scenery and other things were not in their usual order, for me to become aware of something I sensed, something that would make me a prisoner for months: I felt this face harbored a strange peace. In his frail young man’s build, in the bright gaze with steely glints flickering across it when he spoke in the broken voice of a drug user (whether music, nostalgia, or hashish was the drug), this man — not yet in his thirties, still wearing hints of his slightly crazy adolescence and the offended air of youth — lay his secret before me. He was offering it to me. I alone would decipher it, share it, without letting on that this would make my heart melt. I would hope that my normally cool, clear vision would come to bear: the devastation within this man, the sense of absence, and the dream of that absence. Later he talked to me, although I was not good in the ambiguous role of confidante; he talked, as if it had been pure chance that I had turned up the moment he felt the need to confide.

I understood, in snatches of his confession, that there was a hidden crack behind this tranquil manner, so openly vulnerable yet proud. His will sharpened into a thin body and features that were too finely chiseled, into disdain for how he looked and dressed. These highly visible signs hid an earlier wound, some suffering that had not yet completely vanished. There was poetry dwelling in this face (too often youth has no connection with poetry).

I recall again how, when I would abruptly find myself in the presence of the Beloved (thinking this word in Arabic do I betray myself?), I would concentrate all my strength so as not to stare at him. For a long time I did this until my will faltered and I would give in to gaze at him for just that last second, at least, with all the violence of a starving woman! Abruptly taking in the features that were already in my heart. (If I went a day or two without meeting him, I would begin to suffer not from his absence so much as from the insidious fog clouding his image in my memory!) Some radiance of impalpable youth haloed the fragility of his appearance … So, no matter how long our encounters lasted, as soon as our separation became imminent, my attention would pounce on the vision of him, which was for me so miraculous. My memory would stock up on its nourishment, all the details, to guarantee the impression would be precise for future memory … It even seemed that, to the extent that every encounter would immediately set the raging mechanism of mnemonics in motion inside me, joy itself, the pure, wonderful joy of savoring the dear presence, would only come later. In the very first seconds of separation the memory-image, thus nourished once again and rekindled, was illuminated in all the exact detail I needed finally to be calm. Lost days when it seemed that his face would always remain!

The earliest days of discovery — still not forgotten … I took a taxi; it was fifteen kilometers from the capital to this village by the sea. The country house, its garden deep in sand … Open rooms, a terrace with mats and straw chairs; a Ping-Pong table and on the ground a game of boules lying about; laughter from friends clustered out back under the figtree.

“You’re here?”

“Because you invited me!” And I pretended I was just a neighbor on my way somewhere.

He said it again, half muttering, “You’re here!” I can still hear his voice, slightly heavy with indolence and a touch of nostalgia. It was as if he recognized something in my manner. What was it — some crazy impulse that I hid beneath nonchalance the moment I crossed the doorstep? Despite my pretense he noticed or recognized this urge because he himself had experienced it before in some other place and time … The saddened, almost disillusioned resonance to his low voice, as if he’d been sick (of course he was probably only drunk on sleepless nights of jazz). The voice of insomnia or fever …

One time when I turned up unexpectedly, he suddenly smiled at me. A broad smile that wiped the dross of this other life and its tension from his angular face. A childish smile clearly addressed to me. I forgot everything; I literally drank in his joy; I registered it inside to make the moment glow with it. It was a princely offering: I had come fifteen kilometers by taxi; but I would have come a hundred to be given this gift.

I said nothing; I didn’t move. We stood there face-to-face on the threshold for a moment. Our greetings were awkward, no touching of hands and certainly no warm kiss (in those days I still had the stiffness of a young girl, but that wasn’t the only reason that I scorned gestures of familiarity in his presence). Finally, since the house was full as usual, someone came and joined us to talk and socialize. The afternoon was spent playing games in groups, gossiping and walking on the nearby beach.

I left with one guest or another, who took me home in his car. On the way back somebody mentioned the name of our host: standing by the doorway, he had told me goodbye, he had smiled at me sweetly as if I were the only one leaving. Once, in a corner of the garden, he teased me in a patronizing voice and he seemed to be a few years older than I, whereas quite the opposite was true.

“In short, you come, you meet people, and you always leave with them! … It’s my friends you come to see, not me!”

I didn’t answer. I felt a lassitude that prevented me from keeping up the banter. “You and your friends!” is what I would have exclaimed.

I knew he knew that moments before I had had the urgent need to see him, the need to make sure he was indeed real. I was seized by a violent compulsion to verify his existence in the original and almost that very instant with my own eyes. (At that point I wasn’t thinking of the possible pleasure I would get from seeing him, and certainly I had no other feelings beyond this strange anxiety that, if it were to go on, would turn into unbearable torture: Does he really exist? Didn’t I dream him?) As soon as I stood there in his presence, my fever fell, my anxiety dissipated (I exist, everything exists, because he is real!), I became civilized again, cunning, hypocritical, and I said to myself, I was breathless when I arrived, but now I’d rather die — even for all the gold in the world I wouldn’t say that I did this because of you!

Two or three times at least, when I would show up (in the taxi I held my tongue so as not to say “Hurry, faster!”), I surprised my Beloved alone in his summer house.

He lived in the house year-round, and it was usually filled with friends, foreign visitors, people from the provinces who were passing through; it was like this from June to the end of October. Was it already at the end of autumn or even the beginning of winter that I found him alone — the sun intense, freezing cold, the air translucent and dry before dusk? I have forgotten; the truth is that I had become so distracted during that period — in so many ways. Those thirteen months, I don’t think I noticed the seasons, except perhaps, stepping out the door, I would suddenly wrap up or maybe go back mechanically to get a shawl or a raincoat or umbrella. I never even tried to use the reactions of my body, which is sensitive to cold, to locate myself in the yearly cycle — as if, since the story began in the summer, and despite all the external evidence to the contrary, I remained in that season.

My memory, benumbed, registered vaguely a few sighs from other voices in me: I’m cold! I’m hot! I don’t have on enough clothes! Why is it so damp?

I remember a visit just before winter; I probably imagined it was still the end of September, or at the latest October. As I stepped out of the taxi to see the summer village with its bungalows all closed up and its little streets seeming frozen and abandoned, I was reminded that summer was long gone. “December already,” I murmured, paying the driver; suddenly I was at a loss to find some pretext: How am I going to explain dropping by? I don’t even have the excuse of saying that I’ve come for a swim and thought I’d say hello!

Of course, in September, I had not used any such pretenses. Even when the adjoining beach was swarming with families who were there to swim, I had not even thought of saying, “I’ve come for a swim,” or, “After my swim, I’ll come by to say hello, relax a bit, and then be off again.” On the contrary, more than once I even said in an offhand manner, “I thought of you, so I took a taxi, and now here I am with all your friends!”

This time I told myself that I had thought up the most cunning ruse possible. I would tell the truth; without mincing words I would explain my real motivation, the urge that drove me to come in a taxi as fast as possible. Then, precisely because the unadorned truth was revealed, it would be played down, and I would know that my passion was concealed as deeply as possible. The other could not take what I said at face value, because then it would have been a confession! As if I had proclaimed in a faint voice (frail tones, quivering chin, and all the other signs of my soul’s secret vibration): I wanted to see you! I took a taxi. Fifteen kilometers and here I am!

How easily that passed for a fantastic notion, for the whim of a spoiled woman, flaunting an admittedly capricious desire. In fact at the same time that I was telling everything, or rather the external form of this everything, I was trying to figure it out; it seemed as if I couldn’t get over it myself. How can this be possible? I forget everything just to see your face, to convince myself that you are alive, that I’m not obsessed with a dream, I take a taxi and I come here! What is this weakness in me — and just to check on your existence! The moment I stand in your presence, I see that everything is back in order; I master my underlying fever; I am quite simply no longer suffering, everything is liquid, everything …

Thus I unveiled myself. Thus I was in search of myself. Thus I attempted to disguise myself from myself.

There were then those two or three occasions when I found this man alone when I got out of the car.

I remember the last visit in detail: The gate was closed. I had to go down toward the beach and walk clumsily through the sand. Since all the shutters were closed now, it was hard to tell the villas apart and decide which was his path and not the neighbors’. (“An ambassador!” he had told me earlier, signs of irony aquiver in the corners of his eyes. “You see, we live right in the bosom of the nomenklatura!”) From there I could go straight through to the terrace. The shades to the French doors were half down. I tapped on the wood, suddenly intimidated … In a moment he appeared, sleepy-eyed, barefoot, and wearing shorts.

“I’m disturbing you! I’ll leave! …” I spluttered.

“Not at all! Come in. I was asleep.”

There I was, right next to him in this living room with all its windows shut. Full ashtrays on the couch, a sickly sweet smell of enclosure; the record player on the tiled floor and records out of their sleeves spread around in a circle.

He left the room for a minute to get dressed. He kept on talking from the hallway in explanation:

“You came at the right time! I didn’t feel like doing anything, not even listening to music.” (He came back and waved in the direction of the records strewn all over the floor and the bulky tape recorder that was still turned on.) “I was sleeping because I was bored.”

I gazed at him, dressed now in white pants, thinner than usual, his face still tan as if summer lingered on in his buried-away house, his hair messy (my heart leaped with joy to see the way his beauty retained the carelessness of adolescence). I think I smiled at him, overcome by intense happiness. I went up to him. For the first time I took the initiative:

“Do you know what we’re going to do? We’ll go out in the backyard and play Ping-Pong! … I told you last time I’d beat you!”

He pouted lazily. Finally forgetting myself entirely, I went to take him by the hand to drag him outdoors.

“Are you sure?” he retorted, “That’s what we have to do? Don’t you want me to fix you some coffee? I’ll bring it to you, I’ll serve you … courteously.” He smiled. “I’ll put some music on for you, whatever you choose. We won’t budge! …”

I insisted, pushing and shoving him. Finally (I took him by the hand thinking as I did so: What I really want is to embrace you, to …!)

“First a game of Ping-Pong!” I persevered, pleased with my authority. “Whoever loses will fix the coffee.”

We went out into the part of the yard where there were plane trees, and a scraggly-looking figtree at the end of a path. The Ping-Pong table was dusty and a little wobbly. We found the paddles thrown in a corner against a border of wildflowers. We began the game.

Even now I can hear the sound of our laughter, my bounding joy, my aliveness … Of course, in the half-lit room inside, what opaqueness awaited us: embraces, silences, two bodies coming together, a tension knotting tighter and tighter that would surrender to the flexing of a neck, to lips seeking each other out, to bites just barely felt, perhaps to the tears of release if I come, will I come? … Soon, a bit later, in the bedroom.

Outside, however, I was not at all in turmoil. Only the present moment existed, hard in its innocence. What was it that was growing imperceptibly inside me and yet apart from me?

In the yard, lit aslant by the pale sun, in the midst of these villas almost all deserted because their occupants had gone back to their offices, their social life, their protocol there in the capital, we two were survivors of summer … My laughter grows louder, my partner lets out a disappointed curse, because I’m winning, I’m triumphant. He goes after the ball; I sing to myself; we start our game again. We are almost equals. I save a shot, I keep up my defense, then I lose ground, I burst out laughing, I’m out of breath, I’m nearly beaten, I don’t want that! … He pokes fun, takes the lead, his game turns out to be the steadier, the game seems too long for me, I’m impatient, I …

“How much fun it is, being children together!” I suddenly confess, taken aback by my discovery (with the result that I forget to parry, I lose, pretend to be sorry, I’m so far behind!) My surprise increases: Am I going to relive a past I never knew? Find myself in childhood with you? Is that the whole mystery?

I am making this truth glow in the hollows of my body, creeping all up and down my limbs (I run, I prance, my arm stretches high). Casual and carefree and absolutely, perfectly, tranquil watching you be my partner in this lightheartedness — a docile partner, one who is also leaping — I think I am six or ten years old, you are my playmate, this yard becomes the one in the village where I lived as a little girl … Where I might have met you before. No one around us would have found fault. Would you have been a cousin, or better, a paternal first cousin? You would have …

At first I didn’t even notice that the age difference (nearly ten years) should have prevented my keeping this fantasy alive: This man could not have been a child when I was! It is only just now that we are meeting! It does not matter: Is every love not a return to the first realm, that Eden? Since I could not have known him before (the prohibitions of my Muslim education having operated in two ways), I savor him as we play these games, in these first days of winter.

What time was it when we went back into the living room? I remember that we spent an hour or two in combined inertia, listening together to several records that I chose, but I refused to get involved in commentary or after-the-fact explanations of my choice. Music — to keep any dreadfully banal strategy from coming into play, we would listen to music, the prelude to our abandon!

I listened. Seated at the other end of the room with my head turned toward the French doors opening onto the vast beach. After quite a while I just stood up all of a sudden; I announced I wanted to leave. Outside, the evening was growing dark, gray and rose.

My Beloved got his car out to take me back. Driving back; night beginning. I was silent for the entire length of the trip; it seemed to me that we were going to drive all night long, to faraway lands.

When we got there, he stopped the engine and turned toward me: Did he have any idea how good I felt? Or share the feeling? His face, his eyes were so close in the intimacy of the car. His eyes shone and he said softly, “Did I disappoint you?” … barely uttering my first name.

“Disappoint me? How?” I replied, uncomprehending, then suddenly I embraced him: “I’ll give you a kiss,” I said, and I kissed him on his forehead, on his eyes, I stopped, I pulled away, I opened the car door.

He said my name again; I was halfway out and I added, almost cool, “I kissed you because tomorrow I’m taking a plane. I’ll be gone ten days or maybe twenty. I’m going to miss you!”

“You’re leaving! Where are you going?”

“Canada. Goodbye!”

I fled. Only then did my heart begin to beat uncontrollably. I stood there transfixed after the car left, swallowed up in the garden’s shadows; I waited for my breathing to return to its normal rhythm.

In the elevator I shook for the entire ten floors.

It all comes back to me; nothing is forgotten; but the acid of obliteration inexorably does its work anyway. I was thirty-seven at the time; ever since the age of twenty I had experienced a calm, enriching love, full of ambiguities I did not understand; the story, in its own way, could go on. What was the meaning of this great wave, this swell inside me? Why, I wondered, did I have this mad desire to relive childhood, or rather to be finally fully alive?

I thought, in the elevator, that I was shivering with cold, and I said to myself tearfully, Don’t come back from Canada. Go somewhere even farther, flee, get lost, never come back! I don’t want to slide into a wretched novel when I return!

I never pronounced the word passion. I didn’t dwell on either the word or the idea. I did not even guess that I was in the first stages of this strange illness that, for better or worse, would follow its own course.

3. SPACE, DARKNESS

WHEN I RETURNED, my confusion was gone and I considered the episode laughable, a passing weakness. It turned out I had to work in the same place as the Beloved.

Usually by chance, sometimes out of professional necessity, surrounded by other people, at least once a day we would meet for five minutes or an hour. I could have prolonged our meetings under some pretext but didn’t think of it. Working under the same roof together! He was on the sixth floor and I was on the ninth, occupying offices almost identically arranged. I was struck by this, as if our parallel work spaces maintained some complicity between us (and so, in the snares of mutual attraction, the least details swell with exaggerated importance).

I remember how using the office phones made me want to talk to him, my voice low as if he were close by, because he was close by:

“Are you alone?” I would have asked.

“Yes!”

“Let’s talk!”

At least once a day, whenever work let up, I had this temptation to speak to him; an urge drilling into my heart. I usually brushed aside this desire. The sun-dazzled love affair that was all in my mind lay in wait deep within, but an inexplicable seriousness was taking shape inside me and gaining the upper hand.

At other times the danger, even though I knew I would not give in to it, was harrowing and persistent; there would be long moments of suffering. I would finally get up and cross my office to open the window, imagining that I could turn into a mermaid swimming in the blue. In just a few strokes I’d be there outside his window, invisible, to spy on him or rather fill my eyes with the image of him … I would return to my chair, and to my work, without enthusiasm.

Sometimes, uncontrollably distracted, I would abruptly stop everything, go out, take the elevator, and leave the building. Flee! Walk fast as far as possible, keep going on and on to lose myself forever, because back there at work, in my thoughts, I had found myself lost.

This upsurge turned into anger at myself, against what, as I rushed down a noisy boulevard, I took to be unacceptable weakness. And my mind, falling into the rhythm of my energetic walk, would be set in motion. What justified my being so stirred up? What was feeding my attraction? What was it about him? What was so extraordinary about this young man who was, after all, ordinary? This world, and this country in particular, were full of driven and inspired adventurers, unknown heroes wrapped in rare humility, this city itself — fifteen years earlier oozing bloodshed and lyricism — still contained at least ten or maybe twenty men, now living anonymous lives, who had shown how exceptional they were in their courage, their altruism, their Roman virtue, their …

Gradually I would grow calmer and get back to work. I did not forget that on the sixth floor an ordinary young man was working — a man whose voice never left me, whose gaze had come from childhood to pursue me. This man had power over me even if I was determined not to give in to it. That same day, a couple of hours later, meeting up with my Beloved in the elevator, I would smile innocently at him, happy to see him without having sought him out, reassured by my earlier victory over myself — something he was never to know about.

Nonetheless, two or three times in the course of these five or six months (I was starting research in musicology in this building whose musical archive was great treasure), I could not resist dialing his office number, feigning casualness in my gay tone of voice. I said, “Let’s talk! Let’s have recess, like at school!”

“Well, then, come down!”

“I can’t. Let’s talk on the phone. Whoever gets interrupted will instantly hang up, without saying goodbye. The other will understand.”

He agreed. We exchanged small talk, things we had read, bits of the past that came up willy-nilly. He was usually the one to remember: a fragment of adolescence, a walk, a trip. I listened and kept quiet. I felt that the way I listened encouraged him. One evening it seemed to me that his reminiscence was becoming so personal that I began to fear for him; I interrupted, calling him by his first name: “Listen, what if someone is listening on the line?” I ventured.

“You’re right!” he admitted; the conversation took off in another direction.

Once we must have talked for more than two hours straight. Finally I had the illusion that we were in the same room, each at a different end of it, settled into the darkness, and in fact we were so oblivious that I hadn’t turned on the office lights and night had crept in and swallowed me up. He confessed to the same thing.

I remarked that if one of our colleagues were to come, and hear us speaking softly on the telephone in the dark, what plotting he would suspect! We laughed like two kids on vacation …

“Did you ever know anyone like me? In a village? The sirocco would be blowing outside and all the children had been sent to take a nap and stay there … It seemed to me just now that I was whispering from my corner of the darkened room to my first cousin at the other end!”

He murmured, amused: “So, I’m your first cousin! Pleased to discover the bond!”

I went on, now speaking in Arabic; at the other end of the line I felt a pause or hesitation, so I went back to French: “Could you be my paternal uncle’s son? (that is what I had just said in Arabic). No, it’s not possible. I’ve just remembered that my father is the only son, because he lost his adolescent brother in a bus accident a long time ago. You might be the son of my maternal uncle, though! You know that the paternal branch is what counts for inheritance, and consequently, in a marriage for money, whereas the maternal line is, on the other hand, the line of tender emotions, affection, and …”

I was going to add “love,” but in this conversation about this and that, the French word would have seemed obscene to me.

“You’re teaching me all sorts of things, professor!” he joked.

Taken aback by his ignorance, I dared my first personal question: “Really? Didn’t you have an Arab childhood?” Then I added, without thinking, “Maybe your mother is French, or …”

I was ashamed at being so indiscreet.

“No, not French,” he replied. “She was Berber, or in any case a speaker of Berber. But she always spoke to me in French, nothing but French!” He laughed and added somewhat roughly, “Didn’t you notice that I only speak French? Not a single Arabic or Berber word comes into my sentences. Nothing, no exception, no asides!” He laughed nervously. “Let’s say I talk like a pied-noir. I speak English very well if you want variety.” Silence; he mused. “I was twelve at Independence … I shut myself off completely from Arabic—’dhe national language,’ as they call it here. And I don’t think that I’ll develop a taste for the official language. I’m not planning a career!”

I listened to him but I did not retort as I should have: Those eight or nine years by which I am older than you mark a changing era. When I was fifteen I lived in a country at war! Arabic was the language of flames — not of governmental power, as it is now. When one learned Arabic, outside of school, it was not to have a career but to be willing to die! Oh, how I wanted to go off into the mountains then!

Instead, after a silence I added in a sad voice, “I’m hanging up! Turning on the lights. Goodbye!”

The lights went on in our two offices simultaneously. An hour later we said goodbye among other colleagues, on the square at the main entrance.

I went home in a whirl, my soul overwhelmed. What is time? I thought. Have I not returned if not to the time of my childhood, at least to my preadolescence? Have I not found my first cousin, the real one, the one I truly love — the other one was brash and insolent; this one would have been affectionate and conspiratorial. We would have shared all the fun and joy of that time with a twinkle in our eyes.

I went home enriched, magnified. Full of infinite patience for the other life, the life of family awaiting me there. The children’s school assignments had to be checked, dinner had to be served. Their father was absorbed in his reading and I ended up in front of the television screen, staring but not seeing or hearing. I stayed up to tuck in my little daughter and kiss my son, but then I was the first to bed, happy to curl up alone at first. A book fell from my hand: books, mere books, so different from my secret life. An invisible stork seemed to step softly toward me, brushing against my eyelids as I sank into a pool of oblivion.

Other times my work would keep me late. I had told them at home not to wait for me. Happy to be working so well at the top of this building at a time when almost all the employees had left, I hardly even wondered if he, on the sixth floor, was as lost in his work as I was. I was deeply absorbed. The temptation to pick up the phone never occurred to me; precisely because of my solitude, I would have felt it was improper.

There was a driver with a company car waiting for me. I could, of course, have figured out some way to let him go (even though it was his regular night schedule). I could have checked with the Beloved — who was, after all, my colleague, whose habit of working late I knew — to see if he could take me home. But the memory of that December evening in his car when I had kissed his forehead, his eyes … Am I crazy? I thought, remembering this. Is there a madwoman inside me who any minute now can surge into my life of flat calm, possessing me and sweeping everything away? Yes, am I a woman possessed?

Three times I said the name of Allah. That very evening, taking the staircase down, when I got to the sixth floor, I noticed, almost in spite of myself, that the lights were still on in my Beloved’s office in the empty corridor. The timed switch suddenly plunged the hall into darkness. I stood rigidly facing the wall, leaning my forehead against the cold wall, and this time I recited the fatiha from beginning to end, arming myself against any rash impulse. I groped for the switch and found it, turning the lights back on, and sighed, thinking, Finally, the danger is gone! My heart drained. Slowly walking the rest of the way downstairs, leaving a heavy weight up there in the shadows.

The driver was waiting for me. “Lalla, Madame, I need some advice.”

He went on in Arabic recounting his family troubles to me. His ten-year-old daughter was in school and apparently very intelligent — or in any case that’s what the teacher said. But her mother, his wife, kept insisting that this beloved daughter had to stop her schooling: “ ‘She has to help me with the little ones!’ is what she says.”

He thought for a moment, then added, “Her mother can’t take it anymore!” He hesitated, unable to decide in favor of the wife or, as his heart was inclined, protecting his little girl for just a year or two longer.

“Let her have a chance!” I said.

One other evening we returned to this conversation. I lived not far away, but still he had to drive me home because, fifteen years after the war—“after the events,” in the amazingly terse expression that people still used — the black night threw a de facto curfew onto the streets of the capital. Fear ripples remained without there really being any fear, maybe just a whiff of insecurity in which the inhabitants seemed to take pleasure. Consequently, being a woman and unable to drive a car, after seven P.M. I could not walk even a hundred meters alone outdoors.

Shortly afterward, standing on my kitchen balcony, I guessed which window was still lit up over there on the sixth story of the tall building. The one to whom I could have gone ten minutes earlier, he to whom, this time, showing up so late, I would let myself go.

I would have said to him, Let’s spend the night together! And the veiled passivity that I sometimes read in his eyes when he looked at me in my confusion, his hesitation would, I imagine, have triggered my joyful enthusiasm:

Let’s go into the city, it doesn’t matter where, to a bar, to a dance hall, to a bad place or to your place, there on the beach, open the house up again for me if you have closed it. It doesn’t matter where we go, but let’s stay together all night long!

Of course I would have phoned home and told the husband, Don’t wait up for me tonight. Tomorrow, at dawn, I’ll explain. The next day I would have revealed everything about the state of my heart. What love does not need an arbiter, and that night, that long night, having finally decided on my judge, I would no longer have been right to keep silent about my inner struggles. Yes, that night I would have surrendered to the violent, patient attraction that I had made myself control up to this point, but then, in a single night, had let carry me away!

I fantasized this sequence of events, like water rushing through an open dam. I experienced it while standing in the darkness, on the balcony.

A while ago I had said the fatiha, probably for the first time in my life (I disregard occasions in my childhood or even the time that I was twenty, shaken by a passing mysticism), as if Allah alone, in the darkness of that corridor on the sixth floor, had protected me — or imprisoned me, I didn’t know which — I acted as a woman in love who finally has only the magic of religiosity to cure her. The fatiha said from beginning to end, forehead against the wall, my hand groping in search of the light switch. I turned on the lights; I went down the stairs.

For the next few months I never let up in my work. Sometimes I would go home at ten o’clock at night. I would sit in silence in the children’s bedroom to watch them sleep, gazing at them: My son would grow to be such a handsome young man, with his slender, well-built body; my little daughter, though she was asleep, I could hear her crystal-clear voice: “Mummy, you didn’t play the Dussek allegretto.” She had left me a note on the piano.

I apologized silently. In my room my husband was sleeping — lights on, newspaper dropped at the foot of the bed next to the ashtray. Suddenly I had a belated attack of neatness and tidied up. Then I lay down, exhausted.

The early morning, before seven o’clock, still felt the same for the four of us. For me, my balcony wanderings seemed to be part of night dreams not yet entirely dissipated. Through the window I watched the entire city emerge in the reddish glow of dawn.

After the children had gone to school, I hung around the house, left to myself. My mind wrapped itself in ribbons of sound, melodies gathered the night before; I huddled over my tape recorder as my listening resumed its flow. In those days if I had used the word passion it would only have been to describe this river inside me; every morning here at home, then at my office, it swept me far away for hours on end into a past of buried sounds.

I either waited for the housekeeper to arrive or I would leave her instructions, because she was supposed to take care of the children after four. Shortly after midday I went out. My work life resumed. The day stretched on for me.

I broke this rhythm. One morning I suddenly quit the research office that had been mine for six months. I felt drawn to field investigation, faces, words. I would store up a wealth of noises and sounds, then try to find some suitable way of using them — radio reports, documentary films, bilingual accounts to be published, etc. — afterward.

Investigation first, forgetting oneself in others, the others who wait. The often silent others. I wanted to discover towns and villages: Oran, Mascara, Sidi-bel-Abb’s. Crowded projects, congested public housing full of uprooted rural populations; sometimes, in the old quarters, Moorish houses with a lemon or orange tree in the middle of the patio — a haven.

In Béjaia especially, laughter greets me and there is a hint of escape. The port is a pocket in the hollow curve of the vast, wide-open bay. Taken by the woman who is my guide, a former militant, I happen to go into a house in an aging quarter overhanging the city. There I greet two very young women wearing sarouels and embroidered tunics; they are sitting cross-legged on mats stretched out on the floor of faded tiles. Facing them, I squat down as well. At first we speak in Arabic, then in French. I had taken them to be traditional city women: “Two young girls to be married,” my companion calls them teasingly, but I discover that they are about to complete their medical degrees in the capital.

“These summer and spring vacations are just a forced return to the harem for us!” the first one says ironically — her vocal outburst almost a hiccough.

Outside, I leave the woman who is taking me around. “I’ll find my way back to the hotel alone,” I say, and thank her.

I rush down a street of stairs. Happy to be alone, and free, in this city saturated with light. Two young men are standing at the bottom of the hill. One of them approaches almost solemnly, looking me over carefully, to say that he has just made a bet and lost because of me. Seeing me from a distance (with my very short hair, my straight white trousers), he had bet that I was a young man.

Although I am thirty-seven, I probably seem less than thirty: thin hips, a boyish haircut, flat buttocks; that day I was so proud of my androgynous silhouette. The young man had lost. I could do nothing about it, but as I went by, I made a funny face at him. “Sorry!” In that instant I knew I was being provocative.

If he had been there to see it, would the man who never left my thoughts have laughed to see me confused with a boy and flattered by this mistake. I would have flung myself into his arms, for sure: “I really am your age! Let’s stay together forever in your house with its open doors, its abandoned yard. Let’s spend every night on the sand, if no one comes, perhaps there’ll be a storm, whatever the season …”

Precisely because of this frivolous incident, and if my Beloved had been lucky enough to witness it, I would have been ready to surrender to every temptation. I would not have thought I was doing anything unreasonable, but rather that I was racing toward the oasis where we would finally end up, breathless. I had seen those two young girls in their temporary confinement, who one day were going to work as doctors, both of them … Virgins, no doubt, twenty-five or twenty-six at the oldest. Pale faces, diaphanous beauties, as if they were leaving their youth behind, and at the same time still awaiting it.

As for myself, in those days I was virtually returning to my reawakened childhood. If in the past, just once, I had played with a brother or a boy cousin on the roads or in the forest, perhaps this nostalgia would not come back to me like this, like an undertow, magnifying my attraction to this man!

Was I searching for some fever in him, a fever I knew within myself? A fever that, on this sunny day in Béjaia, would have been transformed into a cascade of finally willing happiness.

4. THE DANCE

THERE IS ONE SCENE, or maybe there are two that emerge from the preceding summer as the background to this early winter and this restless autumn. Perhaps my memory, to battle its own insidious, fatal dissolution, is attempting to raise some stele like a mark for “the first time.” When was the first time I saw this man, or rather, what is the first image that triggered my first emotion? What events, what light, what words ruled over this disturbance — as if passion disturbed, rather than suddenly put things in order and somehow set the soul straight, restoring to one’s impulses their original reactions, their purity. As if any love so blindly experienced — completely swathed in prohibitions, hence unwarranted, hence superfluous, or childish, as it may seem to some people — as if any love, arising like an earthquake of silence or fear, did not lead, as the disintegrating surface order collapsed, to original geology … These vague notions about psychology are, of course, only digressions from the story I am pulling from the ruins more than ten years afterward.

Despite my efforts at remembering, I have only a blurry notion of the specific first day of the first meeting, and whether the encounter was insignificant or important between these two characters I describe. (It is not fiction I desire. I am not driven to unfurl a love story of inexhaustible arabesques.) No, I am only gripped by a paralyzing fear, the actual terror that I shall see this opening in my life permanently disappear. Suppose it were my luck suddenly to have amnesia; suppose tomorrow I were hit by a car; suppose some morning soon I were to die! Hurry! Write everything down, remember the ridiculous and the essential; write it, orderly or muddled, but leave some record of it for ten years from now … ten years after my own forgetting.

There is only one real question that looms for me. When, precisely, did this story, which transpired either inside or outside of me — and I don’t know which — when did it take hold? It was summer. A blazing summer with cool dawns, gentle twilights, mild nights. The nights above all were densely populated with echoes: shows and dances, lots of people walking in groups along the unending and often deserted beaches that had recently become fashionable for swimming, an hour from the capital.

Every evening in the large stone theater that had opened recently, concerts were scheduled — light music, jazz or folk from bands coming successively from a number of African countries or countries in the East. To finish off the night, journalists, artists, couples who were friends, vacationers from nearby beaches, young women more westernized than the Westerners, would all get together in groups in various discothèques, while I went with my husband, who was the director of this “cultural complex.”

During the months of July and August I drowned myself in the music, the laughter, and the playful conversations of others — as a witness; I would slip lethargically into this or else I would sleep; during the day I read in the calm apartment whose French doors opened onto steep rocks.

This is how I spent my vacation, gradually aware that, this summer or next winter, despite my slenderness and my inexhaustible appetite for walks and dreams, my youth was coming to an end … No, I told myself drowsily, what people call “youth” can be lived endlessly like a block of motionless years.

I watched my husband directing and making decisions; however, well before all the turmoil, I no longer enjoyed talking with him. We were no longer a couple, just two old friends who no longer knew how to talk to each other. I was happy that, with this new distance (not deserted for me, so much as spacious), there were so many people passing through, so many guests in an evening who would seek us out, and especially so much foreign music surrounding us. So there I was, a spectator, and I thought I was perhaps ready to set out. For the first time also, probably for the first time in my life, I felt I was “visible,” not the way I felt during my adolescence, nor after I was twenty, when I would smile at some compliment, some flattery from a man, either a friend or a stranger, thinking then, It’s my semblance, my ghost you are seeing, not myself, not really me … I myself am in disguise, I wear a veil, you cannot see me.

Why all of a sudden, did a smile or bit of praise distress me so? (“What a pretty dress,” some man would say, his fingers about to touch the cloth, and I would tense up, but hide it. Or: “This hairdo suits you,” another poorly timed compliment from someone else — an incongruous familiarity that I blamed on the excitement of the theater atmosphere.) Of course, I avoided any contact whatsoever, but something else disturbed me: They are really talking about me! I’m ashamed; I smile not to seem prudish, but I’m ashamed. They go so far as to touch me with their fingers! … I can protect myself from it, appear “civilized,” and remain elusive. But something else has me disoriented, or makes me sad, I don’t know which. It is that they can truly see me!

But the way I related to the exposure of my exterior self to others is another story.

Back to the young man. Looking at me so intensely. And when I try to remember “the first time, and when it mattered to me,” I don’t know what to say. One scene comes up, one summer day, no, a night rather. I’ll call it the night of the dance.

I did not know right away that this young man, with his almost ordinary appearance, with his words (left hanging sometimes like smoke in the air), his nonchalance and apparent casualness, would ever mean so much to me.

Three men showed up as a group; I took them to be journalists. Although their ages and profiles differed, they had in common a sort of elegance we were not used to seeing in these parts, some reserve in their bearing, and aloofness as well. They were not excessively familiar, which right from the start relaxed me, tempering my habitual defensiveness … The camaraderie established right away between this trio and myself seemed out of the ordinary, a game among old adolescents.

There were two of these three new friends who amused me — the one who seemed the oldest, the other almost a kid at twenty. These two men drank a lot and joked endlessly; I would smile at them when I met them sometimes outside a cafe or beside the pool where they might be any time from morning on, and they would call me over. I laughed with these two accomplices over nothing, or over something funny they would say unexpectedly. Sometimes I felt I was back in the schoolyard. The eldest possessed an encyclopedic knowledge and used it in a snobby manner. I reproached him for his pedantry. In this group, however, the silent one, who was also the most distinguished and well bred, always wore a teasing smile on his face and never spoke unless the discussion came around to the music of upcoming programs.

So I listened to them. We decided right off the bat to stay together, my three companions and me; seated on the highest tier, we watched the evening’s show. I don’t know how it happened, but after several days I felt as if we were a family. In other days, in school, we would call groups that had mysteriously bonded like this “cliques”; in fact, I had gone through adolescence in boarding school mistrusting the gregarious instinct that drove girls to stick together that way.

Now it was not a need for a group; for me it was, rather, a nostalgia for that lost age: for not having had boys as friends, for having missed that light hearted, disinterested conspiring with the other sex …

After twenty years I finally suppressed the taboo; better late than never. We sat together in the tiers that filled up with families who came down from the capital often in their Sunday best — always in couples with children, sometimes babies (occasionally with a grandmother wearing a turban, a veiled aunt …). When our row became too crowded, we alone, my “three musketeers” I called them (myself the fourth), would leave our row and go to the gallery reserved for the press. We mischievously acted like special guests, privileged spectators!

In the afternoon, as the sun was painting the stone of the theater antique gold, the four of us would watch the star rehearse, usually someone from France here for the performance … And it is true that we hardly ever expressed opinions, either in praise or in doubt; we might only make some vague assumptions about the singer’s quality, on how the audience, whose taste was sometimes not very refined, would like him.

I would leave them to go home to dinner, “to be a wife and mother,” I would say, as if another role actually awaited me there. About two hours later I would meet them again as the crowd gradually filled the open theater and night approached.

It was not until a few weeks had passed, it seems to me, that I began suddenly to think about the Beloved separately … Perhaps those evenings (probably twenty or thirty in six or seven weeks), during which the straightforward warmth of the group grew progressively stronger, were my enticement; or perhaps my desire had already awakened and I was unaware of it … In reality, I felt so completely happy to have found three friends. “Writers and artists,” I used to call them when, in the afternoon, we would go for a drink and to watch the families; we were always on the lookout for some trivial drama at the swimming pools, another show.

One day the reticent young man must have remarked, “When we go back, back to the university, I mean, you are going to snub us. You won’t recognize us anymore! You won’t even say hello … madame!”

He was the only one who teased me this way, suddenly ending a sentence with feigned ceremony: “madame.” His friends — the very young one who could have been a student and the oldest who could have been my schoolmate — both called me quite naturally by my first name … There was a sort of confident familiarity tying our group together — even though it is true that we conversed only in French, and that I could only imagine using the formal “you” when we spoke, as if that remained a privilege of my age … Was I the eldest? I don’t really know. The journalist, whose erudition and affectation I made fun of, looked several years older than me because of his wrinkled face and his leathery neck. Still, that wasn’t certain. He was the only one who drank a lot; too much. The few times I would meet up with the group late in the morning, I had to affectionately reproach this “elder” sitting there at the table: “Midday, and already you’re drinking straight whiskey!”

“And it’s not the first,” sharply retorted his friend, the one I suddenly fixed upon as if the echo of his words really took a while to resonate inside me, as if some unusual, strange nuance was getting lost along the way …

So was that the first time I noticed some nervous quiver showing through the cheekbones of this face later so deeply engraved within me? Of course, the remark was revealing of a friend’s worry; it was a reproach meant to be discreet … I thought I grasped with difficulty what bound these two companions together, the one who drank so much and the younger man in his thirties. But I was suddenly stymied by something else — as if both by its very transience and by some ineffable sadness, behind the curtain of disquiet lay another face of this man with the vaguely saucy gaze … I turned my attention back to the glass of whiskey and suggested to the man who was letting himself be taken to task, “Pretty please for my beautiful eyes, please, take it half and half with water!”

“For your beautiful eyes, madame!” the journalist exclaimed grandly, his eyes red, and with a sardonic shrug. “Here it is Friday, almost prayer time, and I am drunk already! I’ll leave the rest of you and go take a nap so that I can rejoin you tonight, fresh as a rose.”

He left, and the twenty-year-old student went with him (I had baptized him “the student” once and for all); then to the third I quietly added, “A student, of course, but beautiful as an angel.”

We stayed there alone, the two of us, not particularly wanting to talk, watching the rather ordinary crowd at our leisure …

Definitely I have returned now to the “first scene.” To the one that could have begun the logical and well-organized story of the unfolding of this passion. But why would something so blindly experienced be revealed today with no detours, no sidestepping, no desire for a labyrinth?

So, the first time … Not the first time I saw his face, but let us say the first time his presence had reality for me, when he began to “matter.” Perhaps also it was when I felt him look at me; when the desire to be looked at by him awoke in me. Let us get back to the facts, because they are in danger of dissolving, fraying into shabby threads.

Everyone looked forward to hearing one star that summer — a poet-singer who later returned three seasons in a row. The posters for his show already covered several walls in the capital, and one morning he arrived.

At four that afternoon I took my seat, alone this time, to watch the rehearsal. I was perched way up high and, though it was unusual, I was the only one watching in this theater that held two thousand. So this is how I saw Leo for the first time, looking down upon him, a robust man in his sixties with a monkey’s wrinkled face lit by the sun. On the huge stage, Leo adjusted the mike, talking with the stagehands in a very low voice. Then he tested the acoustics pointblank by calling out to the empty tiers, to the whole village behind and, it suddenly seemed to me, to the whole country, young and clumsy with its thirteen years of independence …

“Those eyes that watch you through the night, through the day

Eyes they say fix on numbers and hatred

The forbidden things, the things you crawl toward

That will be yours

When you close

the eyes of oppression!”

His voice, accustomed to speaking, to lampooning, curled a cappella higher and higher, unfurling the text. Sitting there, I listened. I knew that this night was going to be the event of the summer.

My three “musketeers,” it turns out, were standing in the wings. I later learned that they had gone to the airport to meet the singer very early; that they had all had breakfast together. “So Leo was the fourth musketeer that I was waiting for,” I said, laughing, when I found them after the rehearsal.

The evening was strange, at least for me. On a sudden whim I had agreed to introduce “Leo who needs no introduction” to the two thousand spectators (there must have been three thousand that night) who had come from the capital … Then I twisted my ankle after having improvised one or two gay sentences of warm introduction. There in front of everyone Leo kissed me on the cheek and I twisted my ankle taking a half-step backward. I took off my shoes with a wave and left the much-too-big stage to rejoin my three friends in the wings. The eldest holding me up by the shoulders, the other two smiling affectionately at me, we stood there, spectators bound together in the darkness, for the whole first part of the concert.

I saw, for the first time, a French poet address three thousand of my compatriots, and for three hours. At intermission I went to perch at the top of the amphitheater to study the audience intently. They all looked alike tonight; everyone seemed to be thirty years old — all had been barely fifteen or twenty during the war, and therefore they had all hummed the same French songs (Brassens, Brel, and Mouloudji, and Montand, and so on.). They had hummed them at the same time as they scanned the newspaper to see how many members of the Resistance had been killed, at the same time as they worried about a cousin arrested and tortured, at the same time as they fell in love, with a “Frenchwoman, a leftist,” who believed, it is true, in the future of decolonized peoples, but also in the beauty of the black eyes of her Romeo and his fervent voice!

They had all come together tonight to sing the refrains with Leo, to prompt him with a line when he feigned hesitation, when he stamped impatiently, when he shouted, whenever … Back in the wings, “Is he a ham, or is he a poet of the people, or is he just a real performer?” I asked the young man, the one of all the three who suddenly did not leave me anymore.

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.

Standing before the young man like this I was aware in that instant — in a blinding flash, but then it flowed for thirteen months — that he had begun to be the Beloved for me the night before, the intensely Beloved.

5. THE ABSENCE

AFTER MY JOURNEY into the interior of the country, two months went by. I could have resumed my earlier work (listening to sound archives, reflecting on the accumulated material …) in that ninth floor office. But I didn’t want to do that. It was now the time for separations, for amputation performed on myself by myself. I had to push forward in a move that I experienced as a painful necessity. I accepted a teaching job again (going three mornings down into the center city, as the sunny winter cleared the dawn skies). That would be another journey for me, a change of scenery that would console me.

It was as if another self rushed through the traffic of the narrow, noisy streets, then spoke in the lecture hall, questioning the students. Afterward I did not go back to our apartment; while I was in my stride, I kept on working, otherwise weakness was imminent.

I would be absorbed for three or four hours straight at the Bibliothèque nationale. I literally went back in time to live the centuries: the various stages in which the Almohades became established in the east and center of North Africa, cavalcades, the displacement of tribes, the toppling of entire regions … The strange and fascinating twelfth century. In the middle of that same century Ibn ’Arabi was born at Murcie, and toward the end of it Averroës, persecuted, was called to Marrakech, where he died.

With these storms inside my head I would walk back up along a raised boulevard that circles the city’s amphitheater, its ancient harbor squeezed in down below like a woman’s genitals underneath, a sweeping landscape. I had to walk faster; dusk was about to spread the gray or reddish glow of its whiteness. The balconies and terraces in the city radiated for the last time. The long, noisy parade of cars and overcrowded buses turned into a grayish dream scenery; I was the walker, my eyes reflecting only clouds, the architecture hung there in front of the sky, it seemed that I was walking alongside another humanity that was parallel to mine, yet so strange, by its very proximity.

As I returned home and as the century of the Almohades gradually dissipated like the blood-streaked clouds dispersing on the horizon of the setting sun, I felt I was back in my real life, my only life, back, that is, to the wound I felt in those days.

I thought “wound,” or sometimes “separation” (and I said to myself that, literally as well as figuratively, I was right at the edge of an endless precipice …), because I had already provided the love story with a brutal ending, whereas, stuck in its preliminaries, it had never even taken place.

I have forgotten exactly when the long, slow, inexorable gnawing of absence began and then, second by second, would not let itself be forgotten. Had my Beloved vanished? Into what void? Was I not the one, rather, who found myself shifted into another reality? I wandered, with this mark on my heart, seeking along the slopes of this boulevard, in the mists of this espaliered city, some ghost … Had the very city itself not split in two in some obvious metamorphosis that everyone saw but me? So my Beloved lived on one shore and I on another, never again would we meet! I would go on seeking him indefinitely; my body longed only to walk and that was the reason; perhaps it would end up by crossing the hidden frontier, finding itself on the other side, in another city — real or unreal, but at least the one in which my Beloved also lived!

I wondered if, at this very moment, he was working there, if he still had the same daily routine. Had time frozen for him as it had for me? Rather, should I not accept that he was laughing, joking, that he came and went, thoughtless and carefree? He must have just barely noticed that his neighbor at work had vanished with no token courtesy, with no goodbye. Yes, obviously, he was laughing, he was alive; he went home to his girlfriend every night.

And this is the moment to talk about the woman he lived with: a young woman whom I had seen two or three times with him; then alone, later rather frequently so. Was she an actress or a musician or the editor of some weekly known for its arts columns? I did not know. I had never asked any questions and no one introduced us to each other. She had not been there all summer or for last season’s shows: she must have been away on vacation in France. Later someone or other told me specifically that she had been “living with” the Beloved for two or three years. I gazed at her for a long time, my heart weighed heavily.

Even before knowing this, the aching, sickly air of her bony, not very pleasant face had struck me; it seemed crumpled and shrunk by long illness. And there I was reacting to this physical lack of grace (a sort of shadow, a gray veil enveloping her) by feeling bad myself.

I can see it all again: the first time I caught sight of the couple together, just a few yards from me. I saw him from the back, launching into some animated speech; she was frozen, staring wide-eyed at him. This gaze hit me all at once: She loved him, she loved him and at that moment was devastated by this love. I looked away, I felt bad for her, or for myself, as if I saw at the other end of an invisible chain the results of a passion entirely surrendered to the other … A sense of uneasiness dug the ground from under me: Was this man not just like any other trying awkwardly to shake off some hindrance?

Two or three times after this I ran into the woman and soon knew her first name: Leïla. We looked at each other; I looked down without approaching her.

Once without thinking I asked my journalist friend, my somewhat snobbish cohort, who was always alone when I encountered him this fall, “Was she pretty?”

He and I had never discussed either the preceding summer or our common friend. He was cheerful; he used to invite me to the same comfortable bar whose terrace looked out on a glorious garden, a good place for conversation. This comrade of mine was, of course, courting me ever so slightly, but it cheered me up and was so offhand that the game seemed not to compromise me, just a way to pass the time — I heard myself ask, because Leïla went by in the distance, “Was she pretty?”

“So you are cruel, though not treacherous,” the journalist commented. “Cruel since you are the queen.”

“Please,” I excused myself miserably. “I didn’t want to be mean … I’m touched by Leïla; I see she isn’t well; is this maybe something recent?”

“She’s been like that ever since I’ve known her!” he retorted. “Some people like to suffer.”

Leïla went away. Another time the Beloved had stopped and turned away when I was also there on the square in front of that huge building and I heard him tell someone, “No, it’s all over, I’m not coming!” The other kept insisting in a low voice. We had all left the elevator together as a group and were going to part with great formality.

He came back in my direction, I stared at his features: A nervous spasm passed slowly across them — was it just anger? Or was there a trace of pain? I looked away. I felt I was there at a bad moment, and wished I were far away. Why would he absolutely not console her, why …?

I must have turned my back, preparing to leave. Then I heard him call me rather softly by my first name. He was calling me. It was the first time like this. He took a step. I turned around and said warmly, “Finally, I’m no longer ‘madame.’ ”

He stammered. I saw something like a faint wrinkle creasing his features again. For a second I thought he was really present in his gaze, in his thought. He had called me as if calling for help … Being with me would make him forget whatever his lover was begging for, I did not know what, some duty, some obligation.

He said my first name again more softly. Clearly. I think I was filled with a stunning bolt of joy; I lit up, I was about to take his hand: “Let’s leave, let’s go away!” This would assuage the thin face lifted toward me.

Suddenly a black curtain fell inside me. “Her.” Without seeing her I instantly knew she was behind me. Her whole being submerged in sadness. There would be other occasions for us, some other moment; everything between my Beloved and myself had to remain bright and clean. Another day, another century!

“Excuse me,” I finally murmured, and slowly turned away.

I felt him not move for a moment, seeing I had pulled back and understanding the reason.

A month later my friend, the journalist, insisted on telling me that Leïla had not been his mistress for at least a year: “After she attempted suicide,” he said, “she was still just as desperate!” I interrupted his explanations. Why did I need to know? Let the pain and joy of others be private … I was still filled with thoughts of the Beloved. Not once did I ever ask myself how he was attached to Leïla, if he loved her. I was troubled instead to know that he had such a power over her. As if I felt I was partly responsible, though indirectly, for this woman’s torment.

The image of the unhappy lover faded away: something from long ago that preceded my summer of music, dance, and excitement, and had died slowly for lack of air, long before my present suffering began to run its arid course.

Another month taken up by the same uncertainty and its accompanying exhaustion went by. Spring made a chilly start in the city; violent downpours left the landscape sparkling afterward with a translucent light like infinite dawn.

I walked constantly, feeling myself travel from stage to stage of endless insomnia. Every now and then some remark by a friend or a relative would rip through my emptiness:

“Your eyes are glistening!”

“You are sad, thinner!”

“You always seem to be somewhere else!”

I heard myself with my little girl, laughing long and hard the way we did before. We still kept secrets, sometimes at night and sometimes when we took short walks in the nearby park.

But I would suddenly wake up in the middle of the night; a dark, knotty dream — though I could not remember it — kept on dumping me into the swells … To calm down and go back to sleep more peacefully, I told myself, as if I were both the storyteller and the child who needed to be settled down: “Tomorrow, surely, I’ll run into him! … and suddenly stopping his car, interrupting my walk through the crowd, he will come up to me politely: ‘You are so tired, I’ll come with you!’ Tomorrow, for sure.” And I would go back to sleep feeling sorry for myself, in my constant walking through the city, in my despair. “Tomorrow, for sure!” As I gradually fell back asleep, I thought that I was becoming my own little girl!

I resumed my hours of work at the Bibliothèque nationale. Sometimes I would go there humming the popular laments of Abou Madyan, the saint of Béjaia: melodies that were melancholy and tender, snatches of which, when I was a child, my sweet, sad, maternal aunt used to teach me … Then, as if I were looking for something to give me pain, I would abandon the research I had planned. With my aunt’s voice in my ear I would plunge in, seeking some faint secret, some calming water; I ardently went through the chronicles of the luminous Maghrebian and Andalusian twelfth century:

“On that day,” I read, “the sheik mounted his horse and ordered me, as well as one of my companions, to follow him to Almontaler, a mountain in the region surrounding Seville. Following the afternoon prayer, the sheik suggested that we return to the city. He mounted his horse and set out while I walked beside him holding on to the stirrup. Along the way he told me about the virtues and miracles of Abou Madyan.

“As for myself, I never took my eyes off him, I was so absorbed by what he was saying that I completely forgot my surroundings. Suddenly he looked at me and smiled; then, spurring on his horse, he quickened the pace and I hastened my step to keep up with him. Finally he stopped and said to me, ‘Look what you have left behind you!’ Turning around I saw that the entire path we had traversed was nothing but brambles that came half-way up my body.”

Gripped by Ibn ’Arabi’s tale describing his adolescence and the years of his mystical education in Andalusia, I saw in precise detail his route — lit with passion — as it led him toward Seville. I imagined the sheik Abou Yacoub Youssef, one of Abou Madyan’s closest disciples, on horseback, and Mahieddine Ibn ’Arabi running along holding on to the stirrup, and seeing none of the brambles in the path because he was so intoxicated by the account of the saint’s graces.

It was this mystical poet from Béjaia whom generations of Maghrebian women — my aunt and my mother its most recent link — passed on with their saddened voices, like a last whiff of the fragrance that was so fresh and green that day, on the road to Seville, where the Sufi master on horseback, despite the thorns on the path, initiated a young man who was already predestined.

I left the library and found myself back on the circular boulevard along the heights of the city. Of all this contemporary metropolis the only thing I kept with me as I set out on my walk was its hum, the faint echo of its roar. I walked and I became the spectator of a day in 1198, probably a spring day, on the outskirts of Béjaia … Sidi Abou Madyan, almost eighty, prepares to leave his city; thousands of the faithful are there, trying in vain to keep him from going. Will they ever see him again? He is so sick. He resigns himself to going to Marrakech, where the Almohade sultan with the fearsome reputation has summoned him.

Surrounded by the sultan’s guards who are waiting for the old man to tear himself away from his disciples, he is ready to go; he seems serene. Suddenly he makes a prediction: “Obeying the sultan,” he begins, “I obey God, glory be to Him! But I shall not reach the sultan; I shall die along the way, in front of Tlemcen!”

“Then mysteriously, they say, he whispered (was this meant for the ruler of Marrakech? like a statement of the obvious) ‘He, moreover, will follow me shortly!’ ”

I had only been to Tlemcen once. Striding along with the flow of honking automobiles and crowded buses, I kept my face turned toward the espaliered slopes. Small houses from the beginning of the century were interspersed with apartment buildings that were too high and full of people, and here and there a vaguely Byzantine chapel or an ancient mosque stood next to a vacant lot full of garbage but also full of bunches of children tormenting a cat or playing soccer. I skimmed lightly through the shocks of the present. I kept on going, living far back in the past, this time there for the arrival of the saint in the area surrounding Tlemcen. At the entrance of a modest town, Abou Madyan faints, people come running from all over: “The great Abou Madyan is going to die! … He is dying! May the salvation of God …” Decades later, centuries later, the faithful will flock to this place of pilgrimage, and do so still! I feel tired, I look for a public square, a bench, and end up sitting down for five minutes in a men’s cafe, just enough time to have some mint tea. I am sad that I have to suspend my daydream because I am no longer walking, because my feet are dragging. Then, suddenly, my torment returns, like an abscess only half anesthetized, erupting now again.

I set off once more. The sun dims; I have to get up there and reach home before nightfall. In vain I look for a taxi.

And along the way I lost the accompanying shadow of the saint of Béjaia, dead at the entrance to Tlemcen and shortly followed, as he predicted, by the sultan who died at the height of his powers … I am no longer protected by my ghosts; they are replaced by my own sense of loss, which crops up again, harsh, pointed, sharpened, this severing I have borne for weeks. It is simultaneously a hardening that bolsters me and the latent danger of falling; how can I just find “him,” even at a distance? Even in secret? No, I won’t go where he works. I could find a hundred pretexts. No, I won’t take any of them! Luck is what I need, and I don’t have it. And he, how can he live like this, how has he gotten used to not seeing me anymore, how … Already I am inventing an imaginary argument, a lovers’ quarrel, suddenly paying no attention to the fact that nothing has happened, that the attraction has remained implied, scarcely begun, that my cool façade finally seemed to have taken flawless control of me. My eyes search the crowd; I begin to watch all the cars — usually just boxes to me. I am only looking for one color — a particular dirty blue and a chassis rather rarely seen here. Even though I cannot recall any of the makes of cars, I would recognize his immediately, I’m sure of it.

Twice, in a trivial conversation this summer, my Beloved, or his friend, had mentioned the make of the car I was looking for now, whose name at least I was trying to remember; this car that had driven me home two or three nights — if it went by I would recognize it … But then, would he even see me making my way through this crowd of passersby?

The next day at home, stretched out, inactive, I was so devoured by the pain of absence that I did not even feel strong enough to stand up — how much I would have preferred having a toothache, a sneaky, low-level one or the kind that paralyzes your face with its intensity, at least there would be some anesthetic that would do some good! Would I be able to go to my classes tomorrow? Going down into the center city to work for my own pleasure seemed uncalled for, a dismal sham concocted for myself. I ended up hanging around in the empty apartment: like in the theater, where time is suspended while you await a fate decided in advance.

I realized that I was the one who had straight away cut short yesterday’s rhythm. Suppose I started working there again, in the place where my Beloved existed, imagining perhaps a necessary breathing space for myself. I was “in withdrawal” from the sight of him. What inquisitor could reproach me for granting myself a slight indulgence? I would make a show of my cool absentmindedness just as I had in the past; there would be a languid quality extending my reserve; he would never suspect I might return for his sake — just to see him, his silhouette leaving the elevator. I promised myself somberly, No more conspiratorial conversations in the dark on the phone! I debated this possibility within myself as if bargaining with my conscience and then began to breathe more deeply again; but suddenly I put an end to this future. I killed the temptation; some hidden instinct made me want to act against the fever inside. Had I not foreseen that the painful but exciting gnawing produced by our being together at work was an imperceptible slope down which I would plunge? Did I not fear the fall?

No. I would not go back there again. No, I would not create any such easily discoverable pretext! All the torment that I inflicted on myself by this separation could not weaken my lucidity. The illness possessing me since, at least, the end of summer had taught me something; I could no longer fool myself, I had to keep from slipping into some unpredictable state. No, I concluded with a seriousness that provided a brief burst of new strength, caution was my saving grace and the absence I had imposed the only remedy. I would not go back there again!

I wandered around the house. If only, I thought, groping down the hallways, drinking innumerable glasses of water, abandoned to strange bouts of nausea, if only I could find some short-lived balm! What would console me, besides my walks through the city, my escapes to the sun? What else was left?

I got dressed. I wanted at least to see the car, “his” car; that way I would know if he was there, at work. I remembered the outside parking lot, reserved for technicians, right next to a pine grove. Let me at least go and check on the shadow of a shadow: I would become calmer. I would know he exists, that therefore I exist, my only problem is that I am languishing.

Twice I think, preoccupied in this manner, I go down into the city. Fifteen minutes later I arrive at the ramp above the parking lot. I lean on the railing, pretending to admire the famous view: the sunlit bay, proud as a favored lover; in the distance any number of boats and cargo ships wait because the port is crowded. At my feet, a hundred yards or so down, there is a stretch of parking lot laid out in a small triangle, enough for a few dozen ordinary cars. Eagerly my eye seeks out the characteristic shape and dirty blue of the car I know.

Relief comes over me, relaxation that is almost muscular. “He is definitely there!” Ten minutes away. I could go to the receptionist and have him called. Then suggest that we go sit down in the bar at the luxury hotel across the street. “Let’s have coffee together. I was just passing by and wanted to hear how you were doing!” And the whole time I cheerfully spouted these banalities, my eyes, oh yes, and with a hunger whose ardor I would filter out, my eyes would devour his face, his features, the color of his eyes, right down to the defects I would find once more. Perhaps he too had grown thinner, perhaps, on the contrary …

I muse over what I should do. I stare at the blue car — his. I am no longer enduring the acute strain of suffering; now there is only the dull void of separation, that I could do away with in a second. This is so close to where I live … Humbled, after the desert I have crossed, I am enjoying the feeling of pain. I breathe deeply: I almost relish the eternity of this landscape.

It is four P.M. Suddenly I think of the children. Let’s go home! I tell myself. I walk with a light step. The distractions of motherhood await me. Playing the piano with my daughter.

Late that night, in bed, my eyes open in the darkness, I am confronted again with returning pain; it is not the least bit weaker: I hurt physically! I will sleep, despite the nightmares. Tomorrow I will have to invent some other consolations — temporary, I know.

Shortly after these days of confusion, I began to imagine a meeting that would be strange, but possible: to speak to the Beloved’s mother.

I could readily have used some easy social strategy to meet women who were cousins of this lady or her relatives by marriage. I could have forced myself to appear on the social scene for a few days, making polite remarks to old friends or relatives. I could end up by asking to be introduced to this person I did not know. She must still be young, certainly beautiful, and with a shy reserve. Yes, I could start a conversation with her: I would show up by chance in some living room or at a party. Even the ambiguity of exchanging banal words with her would bring me pleasure, embarrassment, or at least some new nostalgia. I could hope for some respite from my arid days just because of being close to the woman who could have been but who would never be my mother-in-law. As if because I had at present a very real mother-in-law, one so tender and motherly toward me, whom I loved so much that because of her I could not imagine having to leave her son someday — as if because of this “guilty” love of mine (yes, this is a guilty love for a young man who cannot pose as my husband’s rival), a more dangerous rivalry would be generated. This invisible mother whom I wanted to meet (a mother who was Berber, still young, elegant, middle class, from the best part of town) would be pitted against my real mother-in-law, who was so traditional, so aristocratic in manner, full of Islamic gentleness and a goodness that was somewhat severe. She was the friend of the beggar-women of her city, the one who consoled repudiated women, sterile wives, and scapegoat daughters-in-law. Whenever I would visit (I spent at least one night a week at her home, on a mattress on the ground, watching her absorbed in prayer, comforted by her piety which, I was sure, would long protect us, myself and my two children), she would describe in detail the daily wretchedness of the women of this city of invisible lusts and repression. How could I ever have to leave such a friend? Suppose one day I could no longer conceal all this from my husband, he who had begun, with perfect timing, to travel in Europe, Egypt, and even farther away.

There were other temptations that came to mind concerning his family: I remembered that the Beloved’s father was a doctor. Once, he happened to mention the neighborhood where he had his office. And I had a distant aunt whom I used to visit from time to time who lived there.

Either apathy or fatigue made me give up on my project of being introduced to the mother. Not only did the very strong presence of my own mother-in-law raise barriers to this vaguely desired scene, but for months now I had been living a solitary life, and leaving to make some slightly risky social rounds would be painful. One morning I decided to go visit my aunt.

Throughout the visit, as I asked her detailed questions about her health, I was asking myself, Am I going to make an appointment with this doctor at the end of this boulevard? And tell him what? What sickness do I have? My thinness? My aunt had noticed it when I came in. Of course recently I had been on the verge of fainting several times: My usual hypotension — that’s all it was. I told my relative (as if practicing ahead of time for the questioning in the doctor’s office) about the last time I had fainted: “Day before yesterday, alone at home, I stood up all at once, to go to the kitchen, I think … Suddenly, blackness. I don’t remember anything. It seemed to me that it was a long time later that I found myself lying down on the ground. My hand felt the tile floor. It took me some time to understand: What am I doing laying on the ground? stretched out? In fact I had suddenly fainted the minute I stood up. I didn’t even get hurt! Not even a lump on the head. Nothing!”

The aunt was worried, then affectionately: “You are not pregnant?”

I burst out laughing. “Certainly not!”

That seemed ludicrous to me. “No, I’ve had these fainting spells sometimes, but they come on progressively. I will start to feel weak, and lean on something while somebody is talking to me, and then suddenly I’m hearing bells; I keep on smiling at him, but his voice gets far away. Then I sit down, I eat some sugar or chocolate.”

“Go to the doctor, the one here on my boulevard,” the aunt insisted. “He’s the one who takes care of me!”

“Your doctor, what language do you speak to him in?”

She exclaimed, “How do I speak to him? Come, my daughter, in the Prophet’s language of course … Are we not independent these days so that at least I can speak my own language to a doctor from my country! … But this doctor, you know, opened his office when the French were in charge, during the war.”

I left my kinswoman and went straight to the doctor’s office. I sat down in the corner for women and children in the already overcrowded waiting room. In the hallway the doctor briefly made the rounds. One of the women whispered, “That’s him!”

I had scarcely time to catch a glimpse of him, a stocky fifty-year-old with red hair. Engrossed in thought, he glanced about as he returned with a lady wearing a veil. When it came to be the turn of the patient ahead of me, I slipped out. What was I doing there? I had no desire at all to answer personal questions. As for my fainting spells, they had lost any interest for me after I described them to my aunt. Above all I was beginning to realize that when I met the doctor — who, in the first place, was “the father”—I would have had to undo my blouse so that he could listen to my breathing and sound my chest. The indecency! He was “the father,” not some anonymous man of science.

I took off like a thief. Outside, my heart pounding. For one long moment at least, when I left my aunt’s and stupidly came to waste my time in this room full of sick women and wailing children, I had found release from my obsession. I had totally forgotten in those moments the image of the young man … Now, in this crowded, unfamiliar neighborhood, I thought to myself that this stocky, redheaded doctor seemed like an ordinary man with commonplace occupations. His son was a young man who was just as ordinary, the only son of a very quiet, middle-class couple. It was only this cruelly self-imposed separation that was maintaining the aura surrounding this individual! What’s more, I said to myself as I walked along, during the preceding months, the summer and the fall, whenever I sought his company and played at being so casual, whenever I repressed my emotion, endowing the young man with so much importance, did this not simply mean that I was distancing myself irreversibly from my husband — the man who for so long had seemed my other self?

I took a taxi to return as quickly as possible to the apartment. I needed the children. I had spent half a day busy with my aunt and then with the temptation of visiting the doctor. I went home, my obsession now a lighter burden. I opened my door; I made some coffee.

But then, going from one bedroom to the other, surrounded by laughter, I stood for a moment on the balcony to recall the pearly gray of the sky, and suddenly the soft voice, the low voice of my Beloved and his slightly ironic look came back to me: obsession renewed. During the evening it pursued me again, despite the fact that the children were preparing to celebrate their father’s return the next morning. They asked me what presents I thought he might be bringing them from Egypt; they both offered to read me the poems they had written in his honor.

“Sunday is going to be Father’s Day!” the little girl exclaimed.

“That’s the new style!” remarked the housekeeper, who was leaving.

The rest of the day was spent singing and telling riddles and finally some fussing and tears.

In my own bed I did not read any more; I turned off the light. In the darkness I lived the summer before all over again — our talking together in the morning, my three friends and I, or myself dancing on an infinite dance floor where my silhouette gradually fades away.

Was it right away, the first evening of my husband’s return that I suddenly decided to speak?

Now I know that if I had had a confidante, or a man who was an old friend, or some rediscovered friend from school, perhaps I would have told it just once; with one of them I would have ceded to the temptation and pleasure of hearing myself speak my inner adventure out loud — this slow possession to which I had surrendered at first with delight, but then with pain. After all this I know that the need to speak — to a friend and hence, failing that, to the husband I thought of equally as a friend, since he was no longer a lover — intensified the bitter pleasure of hearing myself, and as a result convinced me of the reality of what preoccupied me, giving it weight and flesh. It would give it thus the reality of words if not the reality of caresses; in fact, before and during the words I spoke, I was racked with desire for that man, a new servitude.

Probably long before this, moreover, and barely even suspected by me (though there was plenty of time afterward, when it was in a sense too late to ask myself about what had gone on before!) there was the ill-timed question: Am I indeed real? Or, in the end, isn’t my suffering, the fact that I cannot get used to this separation, the only thing that is real?

That evening I definitely behaved like a raving lunatic. I asked him to listen to me, that we be willing to say “everything” in one night … This “everything” became the weight borne by my dreams, what I denied myself, especially my silent desire, and, above all, my compulsive need to talk about it. A burden of dreams and words resulting from a flirtation that lasted scarcely longer than the games of summer.

I have to see these memories through … My husband returns; my memory wants to swallow up the first evening: He and I in the bedroom, shutting myself up in the bathroom first, almost falling asleep in my bath, which is too hot. He definitely expecting me to come. It is midnight; the lights are out in the children’s bedroom. Silence thickens in the house. And I am not alone, I cannot take refuge in my dreams, and …

Everything about me said no. The stubborn pout on my face; my silence. I did not turn off the light. I forced myself to make trivial conversation just to fill the void, to try to forget what I was doing: because, there I was, taking off my dressing gown, climbing into bed in that clinging nightgown, and there was the man who had just returned, watching my every movement. I did not turn off the light.

I was panicked. I just wanted to sleep; my face said it firmly. “Leave me alone! Just leave! Go away!” How could I tell him that out loud, how … A wild obsession, and my stiffness under the covers; a fierce desire to go to the children’s room and lie down at the foot of their bed, finding there at least, the only corner where I could let myself go and be protected in sleep … Panic: If he touches me, if he caresses me, even if I act like I’m dead, the Beloved’s name, like a poison flower rooted deep in my waiting, is going to burst out and blossom on my lips. It will happen in spite of me and inevitably at the moment when I come — in the event that I give in out of cowardice!

I get out of bed and take refuge in the living room, in the dark. My body is shaking. So, I was going to give in to habit. No, but to what? To the husband’s silent searching, his hands, his desire, and as for myself, what horrible compassion was going to take hold of me, what apathetic indulgence would bring me to the point of sinking into his arms, his, the other’s … I shake. In the darkness, in the living room, I am seized with fury: directed at myself (would there be, therefore, some “female” part in me? anonymous and female?). Ah, if only the children were not there, were not quietly sleeping (which isn’t true, the boy is having more and more frequent nightmares), ah, if I were alone with this man who is waiting for me, who thinks I am “his” wife, his lover, who … I am shaken with rage: Break everything! Shatter it all! Here in this apartment — the lamps, the books, the glasses, trash everything together in a pile of ruins, stones, shards! But the children are sleeping. But the boy sighs in his dreams.

I turn on the light in the living room. The husband, completely dressed all of a sudden, joins me there. He opens a bottle of whiskey, helps himself to a glass, and states unequivocally,

“Despite the sleeping pills I took, I intend to drink this whiskey I got at the airport right down to the bottom of the bottle … I’m going to drink, but you are going to talk!”

“I’ll talk,” I say softly, smiling with relief. “That’s all I ask!”

No use describing the bits and pieces of theater — comedic theater, I thought — that went on almost until dawn …

How else describe my confessions, those of a late-blooming young girl? (It is true that I was racked by a sort of blank rapture: Finally I could talk about “him,” even faced with the glistening eyes and outraged stare of this listener, this intruder.)

He finished all the whiskey. He stood up. He struck. The large, wide-open French doors behind us (was he the one who opened them earlier? I don’t know who did) let in something like the impending danger of a breeze that, I thought, was likely to hurl me at the drop of a hat into that ten-story pit … He struck and I could not take refuge in the back of the room, as if the opening called me straight to it; this man who was large and athletic, with his man’s arms would blindly seize me, would fling me so I exploded outside. He struck and I slipped to the floor, an unusually sharp sense of caution on the lookout within me to figure out what was least dangerous.

First he insulted. Then he struck. Protect my eyes. Because his frenzy was proving to be strange: He intended to blind me.

“Adulteress,” he muttered, in his hands the whiskey bottle broken in two. All I could think of were my eyes and the danger represented by the too-wide-open window.

Then I heard him, as if echoing from within a prison cell in which he found himself, in which he wrestled, in which he was trying to keep me. From inside this nightmare space, inside this bodily fear, my eyes closed, and hidden under my arms, under my lifted elbows, under my already bloody hands, I heard and I would almost have answered with a laugh, not a madwoman’s laugh nor one of tearfulness, but the laugh of a woman who was relieved and struggling to free herself. “Adulteress!” he repeated, “Anywhere, except this city of iniquity, you would deserve to be stoned!”

“Eyes, light,” I sighed two or three days later as I lay there at my parents’ home, my face swollen, my hands in bandages, my body broken.

The image of man has eyes, but the moon, she has light. I would have liked to be able to repeat this line from Hölderlin in its original German.

Throughout my convalescence, for seven days, I no longer knew I was in Algiers. No. Rediscovering the old books I used to have at my bedside in this house, I plunged into Sylvie by Gérard de Nerval. I imagined wandering with the poet all over Europe; I fled to the Orient, to Cairo, where I suddenly dreamed of becoming the captive slave that the poet bought in the market, who got in his way so badly!

6. BEFORE, AFTER

BEFORE THIS WAS ALL ERASED, even before the torment of the absence, there was one time when my Beloved confided in me. One time when I found him alone, when we chose to sit on the beach, in the sand.

He did the talking; I contemplated the vast sky. I studied its drifting, fleecy clouds, whose pink stripes would become streaked with blood before the purple of nightfall. The air was punctuated with short cries: a seagull crossed the azure before vanishing; and not one person walking on the beach. Turning my head halfway, I could just catch sight of two or three of the village women’s colored veils as they left their jobs at the tourist’s hotel to hurry in the direction of their hamlet, behind the hills. Silence floated around us and we would soon be submerged by the night.

My Beloved spoke — steady streams. Then he stopped. I did not speak up; I did not look at him. The dusk grew redder and redder. The voice of the man confiding in me began again.

Toward the end, cautiously turning toward him, I must have asked him one or two questions. I remember his profile — the tic like lightning twitching his cheek. It was only later that I thought to myself, with cool astonishment, that he was talking to me and coming alive again at the same time. He told me the story of a former love — he was specific right from the start that “it was five years ago”—but he had only begun to feel its pain in the present. Later, I, too, found his story moving, not because it was infectious, or even out of compassion. No. The disturbance in me came from seeing him taken from me by these recollections to some other place totally foreign to the two of us, sucked back to that other place. So he was there in front of me without being there; I no longer existed for him. He vanished into the shadow of this stranger whom he described without naming; with me present he was once again living with her, and I suffered — not as I listened to him on the beach, but later, in a sort of amazement.

Then not far from us a group of three or four women, Europeans, walked by. One of them seemed to recognize me and greeted me. I replied absentmindedly, without getting up. She said something to the women with her and one of them looked back once or twice. The group moved away.

“Wives of Belgian volunteers who live near you year-round, at the yacht basin,” I said.

I explained that the preceding week I had been at a party with my husband and several of his colleagues and had met that woman there.

“She said she has been living here for two years, and asked me all sorts of questions about myself and my work. I wondered why. Finally she admitted, ‘Ever since I’ve lived here, always at the hotel, the only examples of women from this country that I have met are the village women who clean house. They don’t speak French …’ ”

My sense of the irony began to stir in the moment of silence that followed, as I thought of that party, and I added, somewhat wearily, “She didn’t even realize that nine miles away thousands of women come and go in the city, working outside their homes, teaching, nursing … She asked skeptically if I taught at the university.”

And I shrugged my shoulders, resigned before so much ignorance; the passersby had disappeared.

After this digression the Beloved went back to how his story had concluded three years earlier. As if he knew I didn’t want to question this “before,” letting it spill out however he let it flow, according to the rhythm of his memories … As if, I thought to myself, the Belgian women taking a walk were, after all, a ghost, while the reality passed before him on the beach, sometimes smiling, sometimes melancholy, a shadow — the foreign woman whom, for at least an hour, he had been bringing back to life.

Yes, remembering his confessions, my disquiet returns, bearable while he spoke of her in my presence—“her,” this foreign woman from five years before, three years before — he would immediately plunge once again into the days of worry, excitement, or hope. (Whereas, for my part, I would scarcely find myself face-to-face with him when everything would disappear for me, my everyday life, my family attachments, my ordinary turmoil.) And he described them so well, those stormy, tormented moments, that, hearing him, I was completely inside that time as it passed, in those emotions: I was “she,” I was he.

Then he was silent. The last gleams of the setting sun had been extinguished just as suddenly a few moments before. We stood up in the darkness. A few yards behind us the door of his house was still open, the lights inside seemed to beckon.

I remember that once I was standing, I had felt some sort of weight on my shoulders. Tired. Infinitely tired: of the passion of others and because, in fact, it was the passion of others! I bent down swiftly and, with one hand, picked up the pair of espadrilles I had thrown on the damp sand. At the same moment he also bent down toward me.

“I’m cold!” I said quickly. “I need to go back to the city!”

He kept his face raised toward me as I was leaning down like that for a moment. As if, in spite of the diffuse twilight, with the reflection from the water behind us, he finally discovered I was present. His face seemed to me so close; it seemed outside all those memories that were finally dissipating. A childish smile lit up his features and he stared at me.

I reached out my hand to him. I just barely managed to stop the words on the tip of my tongue: “Take me home, or else I’ll never leave again!”

As if he were becoming close kin to me, an almost incestuous brother, I had that tender thought. I was on the verge of calling him “my darling” in Arabic, or anyway in the dialect of my maternal tribe — he would not have understood, he would not have guessed its emotional weight.

Pressed against me, he took my arm (my body, my sides, my torso arched, and became cautious, rebellious, immobile):

“Of course, I’ll take you home!” he said unequivocally. “We have just time enough to have a drink of something, then I’ll get the car from the garage.”

With his fingers he brushed my hand that was carrying the pair of espadrilles.

“Warm yourself up! You’re cold!”

“That’s it!” I said in a half-joking tone. “Warm me up with a bowl of hot milk, look after me! Afterward we’ll take our time going back!”

Next to him in his messy kitchen, sitting on a stool and putting on my shoes, accepting one of his big wool sweaters for my shoulders, in this nocturnal intimacy, I softened. However, I did not forget how he had taken me shortly before into his past, and I let him wait on me — as if reproaching him indirectly for the distance set up by his confiding in me.

He waited on me, he smiled; he became a more than thoughtful host. Probably he was expecting that after those ambiguous moments on the beach, after the things he had said that had made me both more distant and oddly more close to him, probably he hoped some impulse would finally be released in me. It is true that my gestures, maybe even my voice, seemed different that evening. Yes, that is what I think, now that I write it down for myself, after it was all erased, after the twists and turns of separation; I think that he saw into me better than I did myself, that he was foretelling the emotional demonstration that was imminent, that he was preparing for it.

The kitchen, half-lit; the little yaps of a dog outside; some neighbor’s child singing. And he and I there, occupied with almost ordinary things, the smell of the warm milk that nearly boils over: he watches me intently, my sheer pleasure as I drink. He reaches out to hand me a napkin; laughing, I wipe my lips. He is standing so close. I pull off the heavy sweater — of good red angora — I want to give it back to him. He insists I should keep it on in the car. He puts it back on my shoulders. He becomes protective; he seems affectionate. In a flash I see him clearly with “the other,” the foreigner he loved so much: but the vision does not trouble me. His attentions warm me more than this angora wool.

“Let’s go!” I whisper, in a final gesture of caution.

I follow him to the garage, I sit down next to him, and I think once again that the trip will last all night long; that we are leaving, that’s all. That nothing will be over.

Together we two return in a silence that envelops everything, even the engine’s purr. In the middle of the trip, to have some music, I push a button.

“John Coltrane! ‘Naïma’!” I say as the music plays, becoming the only reality we have.

The car stops in front of the second door of the building where I live, near the tall palm and the ash trees. The concierge and his two grown boys, squatting on a step: their stares bore into me, the lady who at ten in the evening has herself calmly brought back home where, upstairs, the husband and children, already in bed are waiting. “Today the order of things is upside-down!” the fierce doorkeeper will say behind my back, and one of his strapping youths will spit to the side. At the moment the concierge is standing ceremoniously erect and waiting for the car to leave.

Though conscious of the hostility of these guardians of suspicion, up to the last minute I remain absorbed only by the presence of the man at the steering wheel, who is smiling at me. His eyes glisten. Our fingers brush together in the car; not one word is murmured before we part. I know that he is amazed now that, during the entire evening, as well as during the time we sat there before the twilight on the beach, nothing, in the end, happened between us!

Does he really say these ordinary words? Or did he just think it in the abstract? I feel it vaguely in the somewhat amused, indulgent look he gives me and a diffuse tenderness — which has nothing to do with the changeable fabric of the turmoil I am managing to hide.

So I smile at him at the last minute, happy to strengthen our secret bond, our mutual attraction whose rhythm is so different for each of us. I am afraid of the wave that might sweep me away, hence preoccupied with building a dam against it. He — I understand in this moment of goodbye — nonchalantly letting the things that began to be detected between us sweep over him: the comings and goings of my capricious dance around him, his house, the days of respite, the lazy days. He is, in short, passively preparing to wait for me. “When, finally, will you really be close? I wanted to dispose of yesterday’s tumult and reveal my history to you just so you would know that everyone has a turn at experiencing intoxication and passion, no matter how he or she resists. Everyone goes through the mill. Everyone, even you! Let yourself go! Come, come softly! I’m making no demands and I’m not pushing you; I’m simply waiting for you!”

Was this what he was preparing to tell me when he was done confiding on the beach? I put all this together — or invented it — after I left him, after his car took off, and after I had been followed by the stares of the concierge and his two sons, the watchmen of bourgeois respectability.

In the elevator, my eyes shut, I say to myself, He gave me that slightly surprised look, as if I were his younger sister, always behind, still paralyzed by taboos. Yet it was a tender look, and I got his message: I’m waiting for you! You’ll take the time you need. I’m waiting!

But then I did not take the time. No.

His love for this Frenchwoman, five years earlier.

“I was settling down in this country again, after studying in England. My father paid for that, one advantage of being an only son!” he said, half apologizing. “I still wasn’t doing much; I was twenty-five, without a girlfriend or even a fiancée in reserve for me among the cousins of the tribe … I remember my hunger for traveling the country: December spent in the Mzab, the next months in the Sahara, summer preferably on the beaches in the west … And again, the oases, the ones in the east: escaping the new society,” and he laughed. “There,” he said, nodding his head toward his house behind us, “there is where I found them again, the people I was running away from. I couldn’t do anything else! Ah,” he went on, “those wonderful years of living single, as a nomad.”

He stopped. Then he described their meeting. A woman a few years older than him. With a ten-year-old child, and a husband.

“A major,” he sneered, then, more lenient, he smiled. “Of course, when she met him, he was a mathematics or physics student taking courses in her own provincial city, in Alsace, I think.”

I mused over the many couples I knew. The romanticism of yesterday’s nationalist war was not over yet. It still created an aura around love affairs between Algerian men and French women. But it was not long before the former “fighter” was “promoted,” becoming a director of some ministry, or a diplomat, or in this case a high-ranking military officer.

“She was bored at home. We fell in love … And after that it was nothing but catastrophe, one long summer of catastrophe! First happiness: she left her husband and son. We hid ourselves away in a mountain village in the Aurès. We lived in a summer cottage loaned by a friend …” He paused, steeling himself. “We should have escaped to Europe, right from the beginning! But she was afraid of permanently losing custody of her child.”

She was afraid, I thought. Imagine living happiness this way, streaked with fear!

He went on: “The major used all his connections to find us: the chief of police, a director of the interior, who knows? … But however he did it, they showed up one morning very early, with the police. They handcuffed me like a criminal to take me away. And then this husband, so certain of his rights, slapped her right there in front of me! And my hands were in shackles!”

He broke off his story. Was that when the Belgian ladies passed us on the beach and I told him about them? To let the present dissipate the miasmas of the past nightmare.

He went on, not describing the crisis, but rather the days that followed. “Almost a year!” he said. And the young woman ended up being expelled, stripped of her rights “for loose behavior.”

Now, I thought to myself, the major is remarried to some young native-born woman “from a good family,” of course.

“As for me,” he went on, “I spent three days in jail.”

He suddenly guffawed. “You should have heard my mother when she arrived with a lawyer from the family; her passionate diatribe against what she said was tyranny. In addition, she said, the crime of bride theft is not provided for in the Constitution!

He asked me how you say “bride thief” in Arabic. I told him and merrily recounted the fantasies that we children used to find so exciting when we attended weddings. They would shut the bride away, concealing her from everyone’s gaze. Even on the threshold of the bedroom an old woman stood guard to see that she was not left alone for a single second until her husband entered; until he tremulously lifted the silk veil covering her precious face. Because “the thief” is still there, he is hiding, endowed with every evil power, to gather her to himself and take her off into the forest! Some of these brides were waiting, I knew, their hearts pounding, for this khettaf el-arais. Many of them would have preferred this thief with all the beauty of the devil to the appointed groom!

He listened to me, this man who would not be my “thief,” and we returned to his past. He had lost his passport for almost a year. Finally he was able to locate Genevieve in France — only now, toward the end of his story did he call her by name. “Then, over there, more than a year later, not far from her parents, I had to acknowledge that we could no longer be happy … Not like before. She constantly felt guilty that her son had been taken away. She had joined a group of foreign mothers who, like her, are actively undertaking a legal battle. It was all over for the two of us.”

I would have liked to interrupt him: Why? Does it only take you a year to forget? Isn’t it rather that while you were apart, you were bent on keeping her so close but, face-to-face, you found she was different, matured, sorrowful? Stripped of her child, expelled from the land of sunshine in which your love flourished? Was the magic gone for her too? Shouldn’t you have persevered, stayed together to thumb your nose at the major — former member of the Resistance, former husband, former who knows what?

I no longer remember how these confidences came to an end … Genevieve, image of the sacrificed woman whom I would never know, whom I already imagined as some new, distant relative.

I remember, on the other hand, that he kept saying that he couldn’t live in France “for more than a month,” that he had quickly returned home, that his mother had turned over their summer house to him, and that he liked it there, staying put like a hermit, especially during the winter and spring. The flood of people from the capital having not yet arrived, he routinely spent time with the men from the nearby hamlet.

Afterward, I say to myself — no longer knowing whether by that I mean “after making a final break with my Beloved,” or after the scene I then lived through with my husband the night I made my ridiculous confession. The consequences of this outrageous event I, of course, imposed in haughty silence upon my confused parents, who naïvely saw this brutality and conjugal havoc as either a remnant of the old ways of doing things or else as the result of some corrupt modernism. And — one of my cousins reported to me what they had said, while all I could do was hold my tongue — they trusted my “upright” character.

Afterward … This incredible thing, I can’t quite understand why I did it! In fact two or three weeks after this breakup, I agreed, yes, agreed to return to my life as a wife — only not in the usual apartment, as if that were the only place still retaining the poisons of the recent chaos. I went back to the seashore, to the house my husband had there near the now-deserted open theater. The harshness of the rocks it overlooked agreed with me.

I accepted, yes. I see once again the sequence of my return unfolding and — now that it is all over, now that all connections are broken, my passion evaporated — disintegrating.

In short, hardly had I bandaged the wounds on my body when I instantly returned to my prison — why? how? I am trying now to discover what temptation could move me to say to myself, You are going back to where the danger lies, to understand, or rather to confirm: Is it really dangerous there — at the point of delirium, during that night of violence, when the husband meant to blind you?

It is true that I had barely escaped his rage when I had stated categorically to myself, It’s my fault! Not that I meant him to do it, but I was wrong not to have foreseen his jealousy! As if the confession I laid out before him to lessen my own torment had triggered an almost legitimate husband’s rage. My fault! I kept repeating, afterward.

Still I wanted to be sure: Was my obsession with the image of my Beloved an inner madness isolating me, or was there more to it, something ambiguous in its complexity? Did my husband’s violence deprive him of any significance for me, even though in the gesticulations of a hyperbolic passion whose real sense escaped me, he forced his way back into the foreground?

Yes, I went back to prison.

Before … an evening spent in the restaurant of one of the best hotels — my son who for the past few weeks has insisted on staying with his father has come to find me and then to convince me to come to dinner. A touching messenger. So there the three of us are. Then child slips away at dessert. And I find myself listening to a long plea — not really listening actually, but registering with astonishment that this man who is pleading with me, who, as soon as he is alone with me, begs me to return, this man whose face I am not even focused on is speaking to me from another shore.

Is this really the man I lived with for thirteen, fourteen years straight, sharing innumerable nights of love I thought I carried within me, invisible treasures that, as I imagined for so long, made me glow secretly? With this man, really?

I tried to listen to him. I kept my eyes downcast: concerned about how my mother would greet me shortly — she had been worried seeing me leave. How could I tell this man, “It is not a matter of pardoning or forgetting … Perhaps it really is my fault!” I was tempted to say that.

In fact, after less than three weeks of convalescence, I found it comforting to have only one struggle to face from then on: the fight over my possession by the other, the Beloved I mean. My passion was again looking for a chance to quickly take over the void that had settled into my life. Would this, then, be the final struggle or, on the contrary, the prelude to a likely and licit surrender? For me these were the only important questions. I could not keep my mind on any others.

But then, on the other side of the table, there was the husband from whom I was separating (I was considering the formalities of divorce — I even told him, “So that it will go faster, and since the law is on your side, well, then just repudiate me! The important thing is to straighten it all out as quickly as possible!”). This man who was pleading with me spoke from the other side of a gaping rift.

At the most, in a final weak moment, I should have thought of this gulf between us with nostalgia: “fate,” I later would say, “time” alone caused it!

And all of a sudden …

All of a sudden I listened to him — this man who, a moment earlier seemed almost irreversibly a stranger.

He was talking about his day today: in his old parents’ small town. In the morning his father, an imam of the hanéfite rites — rarely practiced in the region — had expounded a long moral discourse: recommendations of justice and fairness. With no beating around the bush he had, in the presence of his son, spoken of his daughter-in-law’s “qualities as a woman,” the confidence he had in her feminine lineage. “What is essential,” he said — it was one of his leitmotivs—“is what affects the education of the children and the future of the couple,” and so on. I, of course was his daughter-in-law, and “my feminine pedigree” had been carefully examined at the beginning of our union. We had found it amusing in those days. So he was harking back to something said earlier, that was all — not offering advice or suggesting direct intervention in his son’s present life. He then returned to his little old mosque in the old city. It was a Friday.

“And the upshot,” said the son of this stern imam, “was that I had a great urge to take the baths!”

He had then asked his mother to prepare his linens for him. He had hurried to the baths “as if before a feast day,” he added in an eager voice. I tried not to look at him but to pay attention and listen carefully.

He described how he had gone into the warm room, how he had tended to his body, how he had asked the most experienced masseur for the longest massage. He even added — remember, our son was now gone and we were alone — that he had wanted to have all the hair removed from his entire body, that he had perfumed himself with musk and jasmine, that he had rested there for half an hour, enough time to sweat abundantly, and then he had dressed himself in the cold room.

He had gone home in a taxi. His mother had, as usual, fixed him the sugared beignets that he loved; there were pomegranates, some of them with the seeds plucked out, others simply parted, awaiting him on the low table. It was five in the afternoon. One of his sisters, married and living in the city, had just arrived; she had taken off her veils intending to make herself comfortable beside him.

He stayed there barely long enough to drink the coffee that had been prepared and inquire after his sister’s children and husband, but did not sit down. His mother was praying in the back room when he left.

He could not wait, he said. He decided to return to the capital and ordered his son, who was playing in the courtyard with the neighbors’ children, to accompany him.

He drove very fast, too fast, and in an hour the car had swallowed up the miles.

When he left the baths, he said in conclusion, he felt sure he could convince me — to return to our life together, to speak no more of the past. To start all over again, like a young couple! … Had he not gone to the baths in preparation for our next night, a new wedding night?

Finally I looked at him: I faced up to his passion, his eyes of desire, the trembling of his fingers.

This, then, is how he loved me, or simply desired me. This, then, is how he came alive again, in my presence.

But for my part? … Verging on somewhat fearful respect, I had listened to his story. I almost envied him for having experienced this fever, for hoping this way. I would have liked to be in his place: deciding, as he did, to go to the baths, plunging myself into the mists of the steam room, burning myself in the heat and the cold, shivering, removing all the hair from my body, my naked body smudged with the greenish mud, then returned to its translucent ivory. Then I would have liked to perfume all the hollows and joints before receiving the blessings of the bathers at the first door, I would have liked to wrap myself in any number of towels at the second door, entwining my hair with garlands of jasmine and roses at the third door, dressing myself and brushing my hair, my cheekbones pink and head enturbaned with sequined taffeta to cross the last threshold! I, too, would have liked to be welcomed home by oranges, half-opened pomegranates, and steaming tea for everyone on a low table. I would have liked, after these long hours of relaxation for my body and muscles, to fall asleep, without speaking, with caresses, in the arms of my Beloved.

The arms of my Beloved, of course!

And I lowered my eyes there before the husband. I heard myself say then, “Yes. I’ll come back!” He did not move. I still did not fix my eyes upon him; I went on:

“Not tonight, however! I have to tell my parents! And make them understand. I will join you tomorrow with my daughter on one condition — that we not return to the apartment for a long time but live in your house at the seashore.”

He accompanied me to my parents’ house, and when we reached it, his face was bright and he wanted to embrace me. I surrendered my hands, my shoulders, my closed eyes to him.

Silently, without saying anything to him, and because once again I could not understand my decision at all (what contagion from his fever was I seeking?), I asked him for forgiveness.

And thus I returned to prison.

Long winter weeks, or spring beginning but too cold. The children would be off early with the chauffeur to the distant city while I stayed idly at home — usually stretched out on a mattress on the floor of my little girl’s room (as if to tell the truth that I was once again merely a guest passing through!). It fascinated me to contemplate the gray sky; belatedly I realized that I had unintentionally become my Beloved’s neighbor again, that I shared this sky with him closely enough to be aroused by the proximity, that he knew none of this but that I knew it for both of us. That I was snared again like a bird in a net but that it gave me a feeling like euphoria … This is how I would conquer the time, and the absurdity of the situation into which I had once again fallen, waiting for what? Fording what? Across to where? To what unknown? The stillness of my days seemed deceptive; to aggravate the point even further, I sent word to the university that I was ill. Besides, was I not really ill? Or rather “quarantined”—I was coming to understand myself as a “quarantined woman,” the way wives who were repudiated and yet not freed formerly were in Kabyle villages!

One night scene from this period stands out, luminous and dreamlike, a still scene whose sound, for no reason, I had cut off — leaving wide-open mouths in the masks of the protagonists, amplifying their passionate gestures, emphasizing the silent density of their angry gaze.

First a burst of temper. Rage from the husband, whom I had finally agreed to go out with one night, to one of the dance halls where a few young, amateur musicians performed in the off season.

I agreed, but I grumbled: “If there is music I like and the band is not too loud, I am going to dance! I’ll dance as I please! … Too bad,” I announced, confronting the look of impotent annoyance he shot in my direction, “too bad if the others think that because I’m the ‘wife of the director,’ I shouldn’t make a spectacle of myself or dance. As for you,” I went on to add, “now you know the despair and fire that I keep buried and silent within me! If the music pleases me, how can I not seek to give my body, at least, some relief?”

I dressed. I kept on my jeans from the morning; I put on a loose-fitting blouse of gauze or silk, and I took a big scarf in case the night was cold.

I went out with my husband. The only time during this period after what had happened. The only night.

A scene from a bad dream, frozen in a wan light.

A scene from a melodrama whose sound I cut deliberately.

The Beloved, practically back from the dead, actually reappeared in this night space, into the depths of boundless despair I was struggling to bear, believing this to be my fate — this raw pain, this expectancy opening onto nothing, opening onto the impasse of this life I had chosen for myself.

He turned up in that cabaret.

I was dancing alone. The dance floor was rather small, the band a student quintet. I was smiling at the trumpeter.

Not many clients this weeknight. The cabaret manager and two or three of his assistants quickly focused their attention on my husband. As much for the sake of avoiding this party as because I was happy to see that the place looked almost deserted, I decided to dance. Only the musicians existed, only the trumpet solo whose flow would carry me along.

I paid no attention either to the first group or to the second when they came through the rear doors. I was still dancing when I heard a diffuse murmur swell and spread. One of the musicians signaled unobtrusively to me; I turned to look toward the far end of the room.

My husband was standing surrounded by his four companions; facing them was the trio composed of my three summer friends. I was completing a dance figure when it slowly dawned on me that the Beloved — whom I had not seen for three or four months — was there, very present! No doubt he had glanced at the dance floor and lingered for a second to see me move (as he had in the height of summer, that first night when Leo came). No doubt.

Loud voices in the back. I had stopped; I took one step, then two. I cannot remember what came next. Except what was at the bottom of it all. Except the moment of open rupture.

My husband: his mask of rage. He seemed to have spoken out loud … For me his mask was silent. A gesture. The mask: eyes huge and almost bloody. Then an arm shot out, a hand: to strike or curse. The mask is upright, very tall. The faces around are stunned, frozen or sucked into a kind of vertigo, a great, unexpected blast.

My gaze settled upon “him”: his silhouette, his body, a collection of vertical lines but on an angle, a poplar on the verge of bending to the storm, just before bowing, before breaking, just before.

Then I looked straight at his back. I mean the back of the man who occupied my soul, who for months and months had been clawing at my heart. A fleeing back.

And I, petrified, defeated. What shame! How could I ever have been attracted that way to someone whose back I am seeing now? Because he is running away, is it possible? Because he is leaving, he is afraid, can this be true?

I looked at his back. Then I turned to look at the other. Only then, behind me, did the trumpeter suddenly stop his melody. He alone had accompanied me in this desert, he alone tacitly asked, “When, now, will you ever have the heart to dance?”

And so I continued to see this back after it had vanished. Inside me a colorless voice: I loved a child, an adolescent, a young brother, a cousin, not a man. I did not know it yet. The voice spun out clear and hard; it did not speak in French or Arabic or Berber but in some language from the hereafter spoken by women who had vanished before me and into me. The voice of my grandmother who died a week after independence and who vehemently addressed me from the depths of my raging, my astonishment:

He did not face up, the voice went on, not even for me! He could have turned toward me. Faced with my husband seeking out his ridiculous duel, I would have made a lightning decision: I would have gone to you, you, Beloved of my heart, I would have gone toward your hesitation and even your fear, in front of everyone I would have held out my hand to you. “Let’s go! Let’s leave!” I would have said without question.

And he, the young man who was not quite a man, would have found the courage. Past the shrieking and the insults and the silence of others, we would have left.

My husband, his face full of hatred, would have stepped forward of course. He would have wanted to strike. He would have struck: he, who was larger, more athletic, more threatening than you the fragile, high-strung, sharp one, you next to me, myself trembling but steady, my husband more threatening than both of us together — but us together! … He would have hit the young man; he would have spared me, tried to pull me by the hand to put me back in the cage.

Myself with the loser. Resolute. Myself going away with the man being beaten by my husband and the other men.

An hour later I collapsed in my daughter’s room. Onto the mattress on the floor. Alone. I was not leaving this place anymore. One day, maybe two, I lay there. I was staring at my Beloved’s back before me — and because I had seen his back, I said to myself he was “my formerly Beloved.”

At the time I was still my grandmother’s grandchild — though she had been dead for fifteen years.

“What is a man?” her harsh and, toward the end, somewhat sepulchral voice used to exclaim, her hoarseness caused by occasional fits of coughing. The women of the town, the young girls and the little ones, used to wait for her pulse and breath to become regular again. Lying there on her sick bed, later her deathbed, she breathed with a death rattle that would become freer toward the end. She would fix her gaze on us one after the other, and, with unspeakable bitterness but also undeniable pride — as if, throughout the eventful journey of her life, she and she alone in our ancient city had had the rare privilege of having married, after all, “only men”—she would say it again: “What is a man?” Then, a ragged breath would tear through her that was even worse than her spasmodic coughing and she would say, “A man is someone whose back one does not see!” Then she would repeat it, staring especially at the granddaughters whose wedding day she would never see—“Someone,” she went on more specifically, “whose back the enemy never sees!”

Thus, at the age of forty, lying there like a vulnerable and shamefully enamored adolescent, I could not stop hearing my grandmother gasping for breath before me, stubbornly harassing me, fifteen years later. Maybe it is fate, maybe on this earth we women who know “what a man should be” have to bear this as our curse: We are no longer able to find any men!

She spoke to me. She said “we” because she continued to carry on within me. Because she was living through my defeat. As for myself, I was trying to free myself from her. I was no longer seeking liberation from the husband with his melodramatic mask, but trying to get away from the virile grandmother, away, at least, from this bitter, virile woman, and I wanted to retort, You speak of “our present lot, no longer being able to find any men! No longer having anything to do with men!” … But as for me, that is not my problem: myself, I love. I love and I did not think that I was guilty; I thought I was sick. Not at all because there was the husband from whom I had to distance myself, from whom in fact I discovered that I had long been distant. No, I thought that I loved and that it was itself a strange illness! He was so young, at least he was younger than me, a sort of young brother or cousin from my maternal line whom I discovered too late … And yet he is the one, in an awful moment, my Beloved (silently: my Beloved) whose back I saw!

I am trying, because of you, thanks to you, to get out of this mess, and at the same time perhaps to free myself from the spell of my obsession. Help me, grandmother, but not with your bitterness or harshness. No! Speak to me, confess the passions you felt as a young girl, your emotions: Was it the second husband, or the third, my grandfather, whom you loved every night? … My grandfather, I have always known, never showed his back to anyone, either in battle or in any sort of confrontation — only the murderer saw his back when he shot him from behind the day the grandfather invited him into his orchard and served him with his own hands each dish, receiving him as a guest at his meal. My forty-year-old grandfather’s back, in the orchard: the murderer took dead aim, then disappeared forever.

Who is the murderer for me? Shooting my silent passion, my hope, in the back? Today is it my own eyes that cannot stop seeing the young man, not quite a man, run away?

If it is not from your bitterness, then, is it from this languishing after him, O grandmother, that I must recover, you whose face lies deep in the earth, there where someday I hope to meet you again? … (Even though, in fact, I am desperately seeking the lover, to make love night after night beside him, but above all, when all is said and done, seeking to die beside him, before or after him, to meet him again in the earth, to lie within him for eternity.) O grandmother, whose face is buried in the earth, most likely I shall meet you again for want of this final love, this passion to the point of death that I seek. Because there is no Isolde in Islam, because there is only sexual ecstasy in the instant, in the ephemeral present, because Muslim death, no matter what they say, is masculine. Because to die, like my grandmother and like so many other women who know instinctively, through their struggles and torments, what is a man, one “whose back one never sees,” is to die like a man. In Islam all these women, the only ones who are alive right up to the moment they die — in a monotonous transmutation that I am beginning to regret grievously — the dead women become men!

In this sense death, in Islam, is masculine. In this sense, love, because it is only celebrated in sensual delights, disappears as soon as the first steps of heralded death are danced. This first approach to the sakina, that is to full and pure serenity, is feminine moreover. But after this introduction, which is light as a woman’s breath, death seizes the living, living men and women, to plunge them as equals — and suddenly all of them masculine — into the abysses inhabited by souls “obedient to God.”

Yes, of course, O grandmother, Muslim death is masculine. But then, as for myself, I want still to be loving with my last sigh; yes, I want to feel, even when borne off on the shoulders of funerary bearers, on that plank, I want to feel myself going toward the other, I want still to love the other in my decay and my ashes. I want to sleep, I want to die in the arms of the other, the other corpse who will go before me or who will follow me, who will welcome me. I want.

Why, after what happened in the cabaret, do I talk to the grandmother for so long? … The film of what happened that night loops over and over again, as I lie there in full daylight: I am trying to forget the gasps of the old and formidable dying woman — she who did not love me, who preferred the daughter of her only son. I see also, and again, the face of the husband twisted in hatred — suddenly I remember that he is from the city, where married women, even in a harmonious marriage or one, in any case, with no apparent conflict, secretly call any husband “the enemy.” Women speaking among women.

Thus the husband finally returned to the role that for generations he had been assigned by the memory of the city. In his renewed rage, and because I was deliberately turning off the sound, he played the role of enemy even more easily. “My enemy.” I sighed, because enemy of my Beloved.

The young man, the formerly loved, had made an anguished gesture before the enemy standing there; a gesture that meant “screw you!” (Of course, I now grasped it: for him, this threatening husband was in the same category as the major from the mountain village who had slapped Genevieve.) He turned for a moment toward his friend the journalist; then he left.

On the third day I got up. A cold late spring dawn.

The solution obsessing me during my nights of turmoil demanded that its words be heard — French words, bizarrely wrapped in the harsh and passionate voice of the grandmother, the fearsome dead woman: Put up a door between the husband and myself. Now. Forever!

I surprised myself by concluding with a solemn oath: “In the name of God and his Prophet!” These words, in Arabic, were mine and at the same time my grandmother’s (I tell myself that I was spontaneously rediscovering the first Koranic tradition whereby women also repudiated their men!)

I quietly made a suggestion to my little girl, who had not gone to school this morning: “Get dressed and let’s go walk on the beach; would you like that?”

I went out first. Outdoors I saw that I was not wearing enough clothes. I whispered to the child who joined me: “Sweetie, I’m cold! And … I can’t go back to the house.” (I was fervently thinking, The oath is already spoken!)

“I’ll go get you a coat,” she said.

“The white coat! And bring what you need for the day!”

We walked for a long time along the sunny beach, beside a limpid sea. Was I running away, was I setting myself free?

After an hour or so, almost tired, I saw a tourist hotel perched on a hill not far away. In the hallway I asked a boy who recognized me if they could call us a taxi.

The little girl, her face all rosy, was already grinning over this escapade. I gave my old aunt’s address in her noisy working-class neighborhood; I thought especially about her balcony over the city and the scent of old jasmine that hung heavy from morning on.

In the midst of all her hugs and kisses I murmured to my relative, “I’ve come to stay with you for a few days!”

7. THE GOODBYE

THERE IS ALWAYS A GOODBYE, when the story or the stories have too much in them, are woven together with several wefts, are full to bursting with too many dreams, with excess. There is always a goodbye in a true love story. Leaving it to hang among the breezes, under the ample sky of memory.

Yes, there is always a goodbye — but never in a plot with a contorted and disfigured side to it, where its progress is jammed; or in the hyperbole of a deceptively lyrical jealousy, with its swollen hatred; or when the desire for the other is death-dealing, killing the other’s laughter, taking the other’s life. So, frequently, in what is ordinarily called a love story (often only a story of abduction where it is never really decided who is the thief and who is the one taken), the ending is settled by exhaustion, or asphyxiation. There is never the disinterested elegance of an explicit goodbye, or a goodbye blown like a kiss, sent like mercy or a gift.

Long after the day of the siesta that was my salvation, of course, and after the return to my usual lightheartedness, there was a goodbye. I said goodbye. And I smiled tenderly at my Beloved.

I remember leaving a concert of Berber music in Paris. I was standing there, part of a group, with friends. “Where shall we go and dance now?” That is always the way: seeking in vain for someplace to have a party at midnight, some empty apartment, a terrace overlooking the river.

In the crush of people leaving: a man’s face close by. In spite of the crowd’s rush the stranger stops; he is like a dam. I am getting impatient: his eyes are smiling. “You don’t recognize me anymore?”

His voice came to me first. My formerly “beloved,” a year later, I thought, a century. What was different about him, other than his voice? I bumped into his shoulders because of the crowd. We went out together.

“The singer tonight, he’s your best friend … I should have remembered.” And I went on with my banalities: “Do you live here … or are you just passing through?”

He did not answer. He smiled the same smile, studying me almost mischievously. I kept on talking, and talking: “I live here now, did you know that! Some of us live that way, destined to be tethered to two cities all our lives: split between Algiers and Paris …”

The singer, accompanied by several musicians, arrived. Once again there was a crowd. I studied the Beloved — no longer so young. Without a trace of melancholy I noticed that something about him had changed.

The star singer insisted that I join them at the brasserie across the street. The Beloved stood facing me as if he were just some friend passing through, without saying anything. He was waiting.

“Goodbye!” I said, almost merrily.

And I went serenely back home to my place, or really, our place — the place I shared with a poet who loved me.

Subsequently, in other briefer, perhaps denser stories — relationships that were if not passionate, at least based on attraction, games of ups and downs or friendships verging on tenderness, self-reliant, self-protective — there were other goodbyes. Pauses in an inner music, never to be forgotten.

And I think of Julien. Back then, when he was introduced to me for the first time in the southern capital, he bowed, his tall silhouette that of an expatriate Viking: “Julien!” I exclaimed, repeating his first name. “Were your parents Stendhal scholars?”

He was an extremely thoughtful comrade throughout the months I was working with the peasant women of my maternal tribe. Julien wanted to be the photographer in order to accompany us, myself and the ten or so technicians, in our research and my wanderings. So, often I liked to go off with him at dawn. He was always silent as he drove, and we liked “looking at things together.” I would tell the others we were “looking for locations”!

Julien and I worked with the same rhythm and our searches for settings were extremely fruitful. We would return like conspirators with bundles of images between us.

On days of rest, in the inn where just a few of us were lodged, far from the tourist hotels, Julien got up a little before dawn to go with the cook and her children to the nearby sanctuary: It was Friday.

So there was Julien — such affectionate company, so unassuming with me and two or three others around me! … One day when I was in despair — this time it was in Paris — over some rough patch or misunderstanding with others (a male blunder, a proposition whose vulgar haste had struck me dumb at first), one day when finally alone in his car I burst into tears — sitting in the backseat and hiccuping: “Julien, just drive straight ahead! I’ll calm down!” he drove the whole length of the shining black river. Then, dropping me off at the hotel and opening the car door for me, he silently kissed both my hands. I was no longer crying; I went in.

The next day he came back early and said in no uncertain terms that he was going to take me out to eat. It was sunny.

On the Place des Vosges we talked for a long time about the sanctuary where he used to take the cook every Friday. Back home!

Julien who, shortly afterward, fell painfully in love with my closest friend … Julien who, six months later, set out on his third trip to Tibet. A new trail had been opened on the peaks of the Himalayas. He went with two mountain-climbing friends.

“Take care of yourself!” I told him suddenly, finally using the intimate form of address.

Although I was used to seeing him as vigorous and invulnerable, I let myself be gripped by some vague apprehension.

“I’m entrusting you with all the photos I took when we were looking for locations last summer,” he replied.

I kissed him.

That was not yet goodbye.

Two or three weeks later I had a card from him: a photograph he had taken of a young woman seated on the slope of a hill in front of her tumble-down house and playing with her baby, in light that was iridescent … On the other side Julien had written a few lines: In this village where he had studied scenes like this all day long, he thought about me, about the spring before when we had worked, “had looked,” he wrote, so well. And at the end he said: Tomorrow it’s the Himalayas and the new trail. I’m happy. See you later, boss!

That was goodbye. For the first time in our friendship, he used this ironically polite tone with me: “boss.”

It would be a while before I knew that, as I read his card, as I admired the young Tibetan mother he had watched one sunny afternoon, Julien already lay inside an infinity of snow where, three days after writing me, he and his companions were brought by a sudden avalanche. His goodbye? My friend is not dead. He is sleeping beneath the depths of eternal snow. One day I know someone will go to look for his body and will bring it back. Then they can call me finally to contemplate his unchanged beauty, the expatriate Viking, and then, only then will I weep for him.

I remarried.

Feeling young again and free of worry, I rediscovered the streets of Paris.

Each day I would dream, wandering two or three hours daily: alone or paired. The austerity of my material life expressed the relief I felt. Suddenly I went back to writing: what was the shade I sought? Back and forth in what in-between place?

Three or perhaps four years living the carefree life of a couple. At almost forty I was once again twenty years old: sometimes the days stretched out in a kind of purifying vacation and sometimes they were overburdened with work … then this joint rhythm unraveled. Conflicts and unhappiness — or rather, anger. One evening just as night descended, emerging from depression, I rediscovered what might have been the equilibrium of my age: my face hard, I stated unequivocally, “I will not have you in my room anymore!”

But to myself — only to myself — I spoke vehemently: You love to share things, you want to discover things and laugh and die in a couple, so are you not carrying your own prison along with you?

A few months went by. Paris was a desert, but happily I still had my wanderings and all they reaped. And there was also work, making one deaf, deaf and dumb, in the richness of absence.

Once in the middle of the night my husband opened my door, letting the light from the hallway filter in. He quietly slipped in to look for a book on the shelves opposite my bed.

I kept my eyes closed. I was not pretending to be asleep: I felt asleep and conscious at the same time. I heard him come in, take a book, some guidebook or dictionary, then go to leave and shut the door again. He stopped. He came back, close to my low bed placed on a rug from the Aurès Mountains. I felt him right next to me.

Leaning down, he brushed a light kiss across my forehead. Stepped away. Closed the door carefully.

In the total darkness I opened my eyes. The obvious became clear: His last kiss. That is really goodbye!

I fell asleep again rather quickly. A bit later he left the house. He had left it almost lovingly when he imparted what he thought was a secret kiss that night.

The Beloved — really, “the formerly beloved”—and I had yet another encounter. On a vast stage, as if our coming face-to-face were something arranged secretly in advance by a magician.

It was the middle of summer, I think, after the vacationers had all left the city en masse. I can see the esplanade of the new Montparnasse station at the beginning of a rather hot afternoon. Few strollers; the rare tourist; one or two groups of young people sitting on benches or on the ground.

Myself emerging into that space. I was in no rush. I was on my way to my sister’s, not far from there; in short I moved like someone used to being there, at ease. Probably because I was hurrying off to celebrate my nephew’s birthday, I was feeling at home, despite the fact that I was in Paris.

At the far end of the station, leaving it: the silhouette of a traveler, bag in hand or on his shoulder. I myself was heading diagonally toward this isolated shadow clearly outlined against the sunlight.

Almost blinding light this afternoon. Not a sound: none from any bus behind me, none from any crowd — the people were sparsely scattered.

So that summer day I was walking along, strolling unhurriedly, and my heart, I remember, was filled with peace, or, as it so frequently is, gently submerged in the mere joy of existing. Halfway to where I was going I recognized him: It was he, the passionately Beloved, the Beloved, I thought, not “the formerly beloved.” While the man who loved me, to whom I blithely returned every evening, was waiting for me somewhere else in the city.

So I recognized him; and he, changing pace, came quickly to meet me. No visible surprise, either on his part or on mine.

I shook his hand; hesitated before kissing him in a friendly way. He kept hold of my hand for a moment. We looked at each other.

Full of a new affection, I looked at him calmly: his face was heavier; his cheeks were tanned. He had gotten larger; his shoulders seemed wider.

Have two years really gone by? I wondered. In any case, he has become a handsome man!

He told me that he had just returned that very day from a distant country: “A year,” he said, “working in an exchange program abroad — in New Zealand!”

I was somewhat distracted and now I wonder whether he didn’t say Australia instead.

I smiled, my heart quickening again. So, I began my internal dialogue with him, as I had before, using the familiar form of address in my silence—you have been to the ends of the earth and the day you return, I show up at the exit of this Paris station to welcome you back!

I was not surprised. I believed in the miracle of some invisible master of ceremonies summoned to bring us together this final time.

This time I gazed unabashedly at my formerly beloved. Suddenly, then I was aware — unless rather, it was only after I left him that I understood this — that seeing him thus grown into a vigorous and seductive man my heart was filling with love that was really maternal! I felt he was happy and ready, at that moment, to take the time to tell me about his life in Australia … I love him, I said to myself, like a young mother! As if, even though he was far away, I had contributed to transforming him, to bringing him to this mature state!

Consequently my silent love, formerly so hard to control, changed in nature; it was still there within me, still secret, but it no longer had the fragility that had troubled me for so long. The young man stood there before me, radiant in his new beauty.

He asked for my phone number. I wrote it down for him and said something friendly. Then I just said, “We’ll see each other again!”

That was the goodbye. I knew that right away as I walked off.

I go back to those days before the siesta, to those thirteen months. I do not know why I have drained these springs of self, with so many convolutions, in a disorder that is willfully not chronological, when I should have let them wither on the vine, or at least kept their growth in check.

And that man, who was neither foreign to me nor someone inside me, as if I had suddenly given birth to him, almost an adult; me suddenly trembling against his chest, me curled up between his shirt and his skin, me all of me close against the profile of his face tanned by the sun, me his voice vibrant within my neck, me his fingers on my face, me gazed upon by him and immediately afterward going to look at myself to see me through his eyes in the mirror, trying to catch sight of the face he had just seen, as he saw it, this “me” a stranger and another, becoming me for the first time in that very instant, precisely because of this translation through the vision of the other. He, neither foreign to me nor inside me, but so close, as close as possible to me, without touching me, but still wanting to reach me and taking the risk of touching me, the man became my closest relative, he moved into the primary vacancy laid waste around me by the women of the tribe, from the days of my childhood and before I reached nubility, while I took the first shaky step of my freedom.

Him, the one closest to me; my Beloved.