I went back up to the hedge of fig trees encircling the main house. Hamid, the assistant director, is in lively negotiations with the people living there, fishermen or peasants from the nearby cooperative, in case I intend to shoot on location. I leave them. I say that the view is beautiful. I go to a door in the back. Silhouettes of women staring at us between two reed hedges. Greetings. They invite me in. Then I have my second flash of inspiration, just as secret, not very expansive.
Three women in rooms without electricity. An infant cries sporadically. And I, feeling my way around until I get used to it.
The mother, who is probably forty, looks to be fifty or older. Stern, with well-balanced features, tall; her smiling manner has a touch of reserve. She seems attentive to whatever might happen at the edge of her gaze. Two other women, a young girl — sixteen years old, with plump cheeks, named Saïda, who later will be Djamila in the film, the couple’s friendly neighbor — and another woman, whose beauty would strike any visitor.
I never knew her name. I will call her “the unknown woman at the farm,” or “the Madonna.” She was scarcely more than twenty; her balanced features were disturbing, with such a pure bloom, yet seeming, at the same time, tarnished with shadow … a half smile, not aware herself of her own sadness. The Madonna: whenever I saw her after this she was holding a baby in her arms, a sickly baby. How can I portray her first appearance, how it extended into each of the forty days spent at the farm? Forty times as I came or went through a side door (a door only I was allowed to use) between the rooms rented for the film and the rest of the house, I would see again the slender silhouette. She held herself up straight, with only her shoulders a bit sunken as if the threat of tuberculosis hung over her. The Madonna.
Sometimes with her breast out, her baby whimpering (the baby I did not look at but whose illness I felt, I heard), she would smile at me. Forty times I looked at the dazzling purity of her face, her clear gaze, her cheeks still rosy with youth, and that hollow between her shoulders.
I lingered over the Madonna. Perhaps because, several days before we started filming, I knew for sure that she would not figure in the film. By chance I had come upon a family willing to collaborate with the image and the machinery we brought, whether out of economic interest or out of a real openness (a rather rare event in the new rural world). Afterward I wondered to what extent the mother was the dominant influence. She had guessed, confident in herself and her authority over her family, that she could extract some profit from us with no moral damage. I also think that the mother had instinctively judged me and the new role I represented for them, the threat I was in a position to keep in check …
So I quickly knew that the Madonna would only exist for me, outside the “shot,” that her image could not be bought … It was as if, right from the start, she held on to her integrity for two reasons, as if her beauty concentrating the family secret had to remain inaccessible to us … There was no violent refusal when this happened, not even the Islamic prohibition that one might have expected would be aggressive. “No.” It was a calm no that the mother would put to me, and the only reason she gave seemed obvious: “No, because her husband, my son, works in the capital and is not here.”
I did not insist. I knew instantly that no would be no. Even though, during this period of cold heat prior to shooting the film, I knew that I would get everything (“everything” in my hunt for images). I was persuaded that insistence, friendliness, and solidarity, an appeal to reasonable interest, would work, and “any method” seemed honorable to me. But the crux of my confidence lay finally in this drive to make the film concrete; all the thankless or exalting work consisted of putting the documentary materials into shape. More precisely, rediscovering its original form and thus redoing mine.
I go back to the Madonna of the shadows, to her baby who nurses but is sick. She could have been the first to say, with that shy smile she gives me, “I represent all the women here that your machines will not define. I am the fringe of what is forbidden, and I like you.”
She made coffee for me every time I would come in tense and wanting to feel I was somewhere else. She was the somewhere else — and by the same token all my feminine past. Now I understand: Starting from the moment when taking her picture was denied me, precisely because of the proximity both of her beauty and of the halflight in which she constantly lived, her presence was an extension, the background that made those in the film uncertain. She evoked the persistence of things enduring back in time forever …
And I stitched it together with the women of my childhood. Drawing a parallel between the Madonna and the wife of my maternal uncle, this aunt who died at twenty in childbirth and whom I must have just barely known, and yet — because of a faded photograph (she was seated, her long face, her evanescent body, in the huge armchair of a Syrian salon whose pearly luxury intimidated me for years afterward), in my child dreams she took on a poetic, haunting presence. She was dead, they told me. I was expecting to find her again in the back of some scene; suddenly the reality would come unraveled into shadows.
And so the Madonna, during the course of this project, represented for me the grace to secretly question it. I, elusive, invisible, if I decided suddenly to appear, your moving pictures would reveal their bloodless, embryonic nature.
If I decided … I came and went from shadow to reality, from the stage to the wings, from the spotlights to the Madonna’s candle. The obvious fact that crystallized in spurts within me was that it was the others: brothers, husband, neighbors, and most of all the all-powerful mother, who maintained the barrier between the two spaces. If I decided …
The Madonna could have put her sick baby down just like that on a sheepskin or at her feet and take one step, just one step. I would open the door for her, she would have nothing to do for the cameramen, maybe just a hint of movement, her fingers pulling the neck of her gown shut, just a few steps.
Abruptly the need for this work of sounds and images would dissolve; there would be no point to the fiction because, wonder of wonders, suddenly every woman on this earth would be able to come and go.
“Finally, there are no more spying looks,” my character, Lila, says. Lila, beneath the spotlights, would reach out toward the Madonna; Lila would gradually move backward to the rear of the scene, the spotlights would go out, eyes would open wider and wider and from them the real light would finally well up as the Madonna would slip out, smiling. If I decided …
THIRD MOVEMENT: OF THE MOTHER AS LITTLE GIRL
TWENTY YEARS LATER, Fatima, daughter of the mokkadem of Saint Ahmed or Abdallah, goes back down to the city, this time for good.
During these two decades she has lived her fate as the wife of three successive husbands. (The third was my grandfather, from whom that year, 1920, she officially separated, asking the cadi for autonomy, according to Muslim law, to manage her own wealth alone.) It was also her fate to be a mother. She returns to Caesarea where her stepmother, Amna, a widow now for ten years and a devoted friend, had welcomed her in her home before.) She is accompanied by all her children, except Khadidja, her first, who at the age of sixteen was married in a nearby hamlet. Khadidja was expecting a child at the time — finally a son who will live, O merciful Allah, not like the first three, all boys as well, who each died after a few days!
Fatima: from now on everyone will call her Lla Fatima, though I, like all my cousins, call her mamané, hinting with this word at the affection that her strict bearing kept us from showing her. Lla Fatima has with her for this first move her only son. He is just barely ten, it is true, but so extraordinarily beautiful; this son, from now on, according to her will be “her only future.” And she has her three daughters, two adolescents, and the youngest child, who is two years old, the only child of the husband she is leaving. This little girl turning her back on the mountain (and leaving the Berber language) is my mother.