I do not let go of the kid’s hand and, in spite of all the noise, talk to her softly. Near the little bed (one brought from my mother’s house, the bed in which her three children slept), I take off Aichoucha’s shoes, which the widow had insisted she wear. Her feet, alas, are still covered with mud, too bad! There is no time for us to wash them for her (whereas maybe that, in fact, would be the real poetry, the shepherdess with muddy feet washed under the spotlights).
I pick up Aichoucha, put her down in the bed with the white sheets that will now get stained; forget that detail, the child’s eyes fill me with emotion, I stroke her and whisper to her that she should really go to sleep, we only need her dark curls on the pillow. The shot begins.
Aichoucha, an eight-year-old shepherdess, the other indisputable beauty of this place. I met two queens here: the absent Madonna and the little shepherdess who is our first extra. Later she will become more and more present, but in silhouette, running after her sheep.
I return to my abrupt entrance into the cabin that night. Nine o’clock: no oil lamp, no candle; somebody brings a light. I catch sight of the mother’s face, still young, with huge eyes, and a swarm of children hanging on to the folds of her baggy pants. Aichoucha, whom I take with me, has the same eyes as her mother: large, slightly round, fastening you with their slow, ceaseless gaze …
The next day I insisted on going back so that they would offer me coffee and I could sit in the midst of the little family and spend some time with them.
The widow is thirty-two or thirty-three, maybe less, she does not know her exact age. Because she is tired and worn out, she seems already old, but her brow, her gaze, are those of an adolescent. Despite the morning sun outside, the cabin is immersed in shadow; the furniture is rudimentary: a Berber chest, a few pieces of pottery, a charcoal-burning kanoun, a few sheepskins, and yet also two scraggy, Western-style chairs that are too high. Seated on one of them while the children scattered on the mat stare at me, I drink the coffee; I protest that they should not have begun to make bread on my account; above all I listen. Moments later, warm bread in my hands, Aichoucha like a cat at my feet, I listen to the mother’s story.
She relives the day her husband died: he was in charge of maintaining the machines at the cooperative. She describes the cause of the accident — a truck, apparently, whose brakes failed; she tells me how she got the news, shouted over the fields. She gives the details, the weeping, the family, the neighbors; there is only one essential word of comfort after all that: insurance.
This key word — spoken like a Frenchwoman — is still her hope and her despair: The formalities have dragged on for almost three years. The five children are growing up; the eldest, a fourteen-year-old boy, is the only one who goes to school, but their misfortune has made him the head of the family. He is employed as an apprentice from time to time, his daily salary, at half-pay, provides some income in addition to the meager support paid by the cooperative while they wait for the insurance to come through.
It surprises me to learn that none of the other children goes to schooclass="underline" The farm and its neighboring cabins are on the border between two districts. For our project we dealt with the community council in Tipasa: They have an active president and have energetically attacked the problems of schooling in the remote mountain hamlets that are geographically dependent on this district. All the children, including girls up to the age of fourteen (the real revolution in this rural society), are able to take the school bus free of charge.
But these houses, just two kilometers away from this district, are in an area where no such public service is guaranteed. With the very concrete result: This widow, whose resources are pathetic, is unable to pay two dinars a day per child for the bus that would take them to school. In other places, I will find out, the transportation fees can be waived for boys; for the girls there are only a few families, and not necessarily the most well-to-do peasants, who can bring themselves to pay.
Aichoucha consequently does not go to school. What is the point of our being here? I suddenly say to myself this morning. Are we just going to move in for as long as it takes to expose enough film footage?
I hear myself explaining the modest pay for extras provided for in our estimates, but why not use the boy, the “head of the family,” as an assistant? I take some more coffee and say nothing more. Did I really come last night like a shadow thief for this child with the eyes of a doll and muddy feet?
Two days later I find out by chance that the technical crew has taken up a collection to cover part of this period while the widow waits for the insurance, and that she insisted on making couscous for them for the lunch break. I only learned the details of this exchange of favors by accident when someone kept insisting that I taste this couscous that, he said, “was a good sign.”
Ambiguity, my problems make me look the other way … I see, in what the crew did, the usual altruism of the beginnings of a shoot (as if we were mindful of placing ourselves under favorable auspices), but also the technicians’ indirect way of somehow thanking me. They learned of the crisis through my conversation and they were vaguely beginning to forgive my rhythm of work, whose apparent improvisation astonished them.
Ambiguity, I said … That would be the real story: darkness in the humble lodging; myself, entering at night to take away the little girl with her dirty feet and her hands red with henna, the mother overburdened but saying nothing, the next day an ordinary conversation … Then, behind the hedge and because they are affected by this story, the nineteen members of the technical crew (seventeen of them men) would create their own scenario to deal with this long, hard wait for the insurance.
Suddenly this bothers me: Why is it that all these intentions, obviously born of collective generosity, do not result in social aid?
Whereas we, nineteen other people and myself, are coming with a camera, that is, a gaze, that is, “the” Gaze. Whereas what must be caught is the first wrinkle, the whispering at the moment when, like the Ogress in legends, I come to take away the little girl, the beauty with innocent eyes. Whereas the camera must catch the gaze of the widow when, in the morning, she tells about the accident, the husband who no longer provides protection, the boy-child who can only be a temporary defense. The camera has to record the silence of my pupils: when one has nothing to say in the face of misfortune, it is hard not to turn a blind eye oneself when confronted with the other who is blinded by misfortune.
Yet the camera takes nothing. The nineteen people, who should know that they are nineteen facets of the spying eye, feel rather that they are endowed with a kind heart. Like everybody, they have a clear conscience when the widow offers them this “couscous of the sun” with her blessings.
I do not feel my conscience is clear.
Aichoucha, during the next two months, became a smiling dream friend. I frequently caught myself gazing at her, dividing her time as she did between coming to see us work and then dashing off immediately after one of her animals that had strayed. She came and went but stuck to her job of keeping the sheep, observing us afterward without real curiosity but rather with fond indulgence.