She has launched in; she does not stop.
“Back at the Trois-Épis, I told the man in charge, you know, that I would just take one afternoon a week to go to Strasbourg! Now I have to go see my son in Metz. I need two days! This time and one other!” Then she says in a lower voice, as if it were a secret, some funny, harmless incident, “I added, naturally, ‘My son is a prisoner!’ ” Then she went on, louder and almost gaily, “A political prisoner!”
The warden stood there at the door. Salim stood up at once. His hand quickly replaced the beret on his curly hair.
The mother, who abruptly cut short what she was saying, looked up at her son. He looked now like a stranger again, like a young man wrapped, she felt, in a lack of respectability, some peasantlike and willful clumsiness. This boy, she thought to herself later, who was so stylish and elegant in adolescence — maybe it is the “politics,” or to make himself older, he is trying to look like a “real Arab,” like one of his cousins just barely out of the mountain zaouia!
Her face is twitching with sorrow; she does not notice it. She looks at the warden coming toward them.
Salim says softly in Arabic, “Goodbye, mother.”
He does not even bend toward her to embrace her. He will not embrace her in front of the warden and the guards behind him.
He studies the face of his mother. Clouded with a delicate sadness. He assumes an air of severity: “Be calm!” he seems to say, “in front of them. Them!”
She understands. She is unable to say a word. She does not even smile. The warden says in a voice that means to be understanding: “You have to tell your son goodbye, madame! … you will have to wait for visiting hours next time.”
Salim turns partway around. His mother stands up right next to him: she comes up to his face. He does not look at her. Just a gesture of his hands, touching her lightly on her shoulders. “Goodbye,” he repeats in secret, in Arabic.
Then abruptly he turns his back on her. He goes toward the guards. He disappears.
She, standing, empty arms dangling by her side. The warden sits down, watches her as he had in the beginning: almost the way an ethnologist watches, A Moorish woman? This young woman who is so well dressed? Those are the words he thinks as he stares at her.
She listens carefully to the information about visiting, thanks him, takes a sheet of paper with the schedule on it. She murmurs goodbye.
She shuts the door, follows the two guards who have reappeared so close to her down the gray corridors. The hubbub all around her: Like at the hammam, she thinks, and this persistent odor of dampness, her son stuck here for good! She hardens herself, keeps going at her own pace, goes past the attendant, who hands her back her original packages. She starts to refuse them, then takes them: She will mail them. Of course they will open them, but at least they will give him the underwear. She and her son have agreed that for spending money she will send him a money order; he’ll have it to buy his cigarettes.
She finds herself outside again, takes a few steps into the sunlight at the foot of the high wall; then, finally, a little farther along, like a little girl, she lets her silent tears slowly fall.
She will see nothing of the city; she returns directly to the station. She drinks a cafe au lait and eats a piece of fruitcake at the snack bar while she waits for the next train. It is almost night when she arrives in Strasbourg. And there, in the little hotel room near the station, she finally feels herself collapsing, there, lying on the narrow bed, she hears all over again the stir of the prison.
So she only saw her son for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, and that was after a year and a half of waiting and several months of anxiety. All alone, huddled in the cold bed (she has stomach cramps because she hasn’t eaten, she was not brave enough to go into a restaurant alone so late), she turns out the light — she listens to the hubbub of the prison that follows her and suddenly reassures her. Does it not bring back the moment he was present, my little boy—suddenly she thinks of Salim in those words.
The light is out now, and completely dressed, in the dark, she cries: gently, with stifled sobs, then in gasps that tear at her for a long time, and again in floods of soft tears … The pain does not stop, glows like blood she is losing, or milk … Like sadness going away? No, enveloping her, invading the half-light of the anonymous room, mingling with the hubbub-memory of Metz …
Gasps, sobs that she still tries to hold back. Can’t let go. How long she has been standing up, such a long time, up and standing, and firm! But she is alone and lying down and lost in a strange city. Still no.
“Little boy,” she repeats. Then there is no more Salim, the noise of the prison in Metz has faded and the darkness of the hotel room, and her own goings and comings (the bus, the train, the boat) in this France of theirs, where the prisons are full of her son’s friends … No, everything goes, comes unraveled, recedes, but she cries, the tears flow, the moans now form one long, single, formless howl, and it is such a long sorrow, but one without origins. “My little boy,” she repeats, before sinking into loosely woven sleep where the spaces between the threads grow larger, bending and curving as if on a screen of beige and mauve, of many harmonious nuances intermingling.
She does not understand, she does not want to understand, that she is merely reliving another sorrow from the past, that she is pouring out other women’s tears that have never flowed. She knows it, she will know it, but no, she sinks, soft, weary, completely given over this time to smooth, unruffled sleep carrying her off to the shores of the next day.
Arable Woman II
THE FIRST SHOT: Lila is sleeping. A face with perfect features, a red scarf knotted over her forehead in the traditional manner … The actress, my friend, squatting on the carpet in front of the big copper mirror (brought for this purpose from my mother’s house — it had belonged to my grandmother in Caesarea), had earlier tied the scarf slowly over her forehead to hide her hair.
I took a wide-angle shot as she did so; lit by several candles, her blue-flowered Kabylian dress stood out against the half-light. I watched her gesture from behind — the gesture of all the women in the too-full houses of my childhood, in the midst of their brood, the shrieks, the steam from couscous cooking, and the sighs, my God, the sighs … The gesture of their raised arms to make the scarf as tight as possible across the brow. (“I bind up my head, I bind up my misfortune!” No use speaking. When one is out of patience, tightening this red cloth is like clenching one’s teeth.)
Now Lila sleeps in the bed, watched by Ali, her husband, who will try to get out of his wheelchair on crutches, will try to make it over the steps at the threshold, will fall back down into his chair …
The point of view has changed. At the other end of the room, the camera is now the voyeur following the man as he stands up at this impossible threshold. An actor from the theater, he mimes the muscular effort, he hoists himself, he rests his head on the cold doorframe, he … I tell him to fall back into his chair. And we do several takes: the first fall, the second …
Gradually I begin to come closer and closer to Ali’s body to direct his fall. Yes, with his crutch he has to feel for the best spot to support himself as he gets up … Yes, let him be figuring out where he will balance best as he tries to stand upright. In fact it is not with one’s features that suffering is expressed, but always with subtle movements of the shoulder, the torso, the way one holds one’s head. The actor who plays Ali is patient, I want to have all the patience in the world, as together we discover the way to map these gestures hidden in shadows.