I used to love saddling up some wild fantasy and slipping into the parallel lives that loomed out of the whispering darkness, away from the cold sheets of my bed, and see myself cantering off to that place where things end, where real life begins. At their most intense, these reveries could wake me with a savage jolt, like a demon dropped into a font of holy water, my throat choked with anguished cries. In our eagerness to dream, we living dead have a tendency to forget that a mere glimpse of life can be fatal to us. Afterwards, I tell myself that such affectations are unseemly, but then I remind myself that to dream only of the life we know is to darken our days. I was panting and dripping with sweat as I listened to the dying echo at the foot of the stairs as it descended into the cellar like a corpse suddenly conjured or ascended the attic to pass away in among things long forgotten and never to be exhumed. Then I would sink back into the silence, my ears still quivering, and fashion this spontaneous commotion into a skilfully orchestrated tragedy. Sometimes, when the silence was filled with strange noises, I was so terrified I would rush out of the house in my slippers. There, in the sullen shadows of the poplar trees, I would slowly get my bearing. I was alone, lost in the jungle with darkness my only guide. The aim was for my excitements to go hand in hand with reality, and so sometimes I would lay it on thick. I have some rather manly ways of exciting myself, not all of which succeed. A heroine in carpet slippers, a dressing gown and a headscarf is pathetic. I reminded myself of Miss Marple aggravating her arthritis running around spreading gossip. But pain has its own pathways, strange shortcuts that I discover from time to time when it pounces unexpectedly and makes me howl. Then there is the dread, the muffled dread that torments me the way needless fears torment a hypochondriac. Trapped within my hallucinations, I would curl up like an animal, everything inside me quivering and pulsing, and sometimes I could feel my eyes shine with the comforting resignation of death. My life is measured out in long prostrations on the terrace at the far end of my little garden, or in the bathroom where I would scrub myself like a dog to suppress the breathless panting of my soul. Eventually, overwhelmed by the absurd, I would wind up at the foot of my bed, at the end of the night with my dreams, my rebellions. Silence was my refuge and wandering my quest. My life was both rich and poor. And a little histrionic. I asked nothing of it, and it gave me nothing, it was a curious symbiosis, and it was enough. The days shambled past, I abandoned myself to abandonment, everything was fine. How reassuring a barren wilderness can be when the path is well trodden!
And yet it frightened me, that solitude. Jealous, vindictive, it wanted me all to itself, its walls closed in on me, scowling. Would it leave me an open window? I felt myself fade as the life-force guttered inside me. But still I longed to live, to live like a madwoman, to dance like a heretic, to scream exultantly, to get drunk on happiness, to embrace all the misfortunes, all the wild dreams in the world.
I was mad but did not realise it. Kind souls, in their own way, would tell me as much with a reticent look, a pitying smile on their lips like an offering. I would respond with a gale of laughter which merely paved the way for truly malicious gossip which would eventually get back to me, from other, more authoritative mouths, from great-aunts weighed down with victuals and wise maxims who were quick to show up with hot news and remonstrate, from visiting female cousins with hearts so placid I feared for their health, and even from perfect strangers who gaily appeared uninvited pretexting some family connection as tenuous as it was unverifiable, each of them blessed with husbands, legitimate progeny and the assurance that experience gives them the right to speak of good and evil. Behind their words was a vehement dislike, behind their eyes a warning. This was an Islamic country, not a holiday camp. I took it badly, censure calls down the Last Judgment. To be mad does not mean to be unnatural, to live alone is not a crime, it is not the indulgence of the depraved! Could Allah be afraid of a poor forsaken woman?
My work takes up eight, ten, twelve hours a day. I don’t count, I work on cases triaged as urgent while other colleagues — guys with a string of high-flown titles after their name — lie around sunning themselves or stalk the hospital corridors. Sometimes, I feel like I’m a skivvy, it’s humiliating. I arrive first thing in the morning and get home last thing at night or vice versa, constantly rushing. I button and unbutton my white coat on the go. But then again I’m not paid to stand around and daydream. Paediatrics is sheer slavery, by far the most taxing branch of medicine. Children are charlatans; if they’re not crying out of pain, they cry out of sheer spite. And the Hôpital Parnet is hardly a shining example of medical care in Algiers. I spend half my time telling off snotty brats and the other half at loggerheads with the fools in administration. It wears you down. At thirty-five, I’ve got the wrinkles of a sixty-year-old. They call me ‘The Old Woman’, pretending it’s an affectionate nickname to sugar the pill. I don’t take it well. For a doctor, such signs of deterioration are the first steps on the road to ruin, and for a woman who is still young and beautiful it is like being thrown on the scrapheap.