The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry Page 5

  So I, the friend of Nawal—blown up, dismembered, effaced Nawal—I introduce myself: Isma. What kind of name is that? I’m searching for my name, for his. But Isma will do. When we meet for the first time, I even tell him my age.

  “Thirty-six!”

  “Incredible,” said the man.

  I made a face. “Sometimes being short and small has its advantages.”

  But I remember being twenty, when I had a grumbling manner that really served to shield my shyness. Coming from my fortress city in the East, I wasn’t used to “talking to boys,” as people used to say. I’d speak to them, have conversations, but at the merest use of the informal tu, I’d cloak my awkwardness, sometimes my panic, with my austere demeanor. As the twenty-year-old student who had just arrived in the capital, I must have seemed at least five or six years older!

  I told this to the man, but without going into detail.

  The “man”? I should have referred to him as the “musician.” I’d heard about him a week before. The colleague who had recommended me for this odd job insisted, “You’re the most knowledgeable about the Southern dialects! That’s what this ethnologist is looking for!”

  “Ethnologist or musician?” I had retorted. “Do it for me. It’s at the radio station,” said the friend. “He’s expecting you at five in the afternoon. Don’t be late. I know you. You wander, you dillydally. He seems to be in a hurry. He’s just passing through here. He’s going back in ten days, I think. Maybe he’ll have to come back. You’ll see. His foreign sponsor will pay you well!”

  I went there without dawdling and was right on time. As a joke, I repeated “five in the afternoon” to myself in Spanish.

  He introduced himself and welcomed me. With his first words, a fascination took hold of me, though my face remained impassive. How can I describe it to you, Nawal? What I’m writing is the truth. Don’t laugh! His sharp attention bored into me, and then there were the eyes—my eyes—demanding. I couldn’t look away from his face, his features, his hands, his nervousness, his pauses. I remained cold and neutral. By a heroic effort of discretion, I dimmed the sparkle in my eyes. My gaze dwelled on the merest details of his image, taking them apart, analyzing them. I had to make sure that my eagerness was rerouted within, that this stranger not sense how avidly I was looking at him! It was as if I had begun to drink him silently with my eyes, and as if each second had become infinite, as if that moment was never going to end, as if . . .

  My voice, slow, came out somewhat cold. Fortunately, it spoke French, a language in which it knew how to disguise everything—to veil, to tame, to be tamed—and so to chat in a neutral tone. In my dialect, on the other hand, my voice—the same voice—would get carried away . . .

  And Nawal would smile at me, will smile at me, when she’s here one day, in a year or in ten. She’s the one, Nawal, my childhood friend, who will read what I’ve written.

  I hear her laughing . . . What can I be thinking? That if this notebook stays here, and yes, if Nawal, in two years, when the city has recovered its nonchalant and frivolous peace, rereads these words emitting little laughs and stifled shouts—my words in French (fortunately, my French, when written, no longer disguises itself . . . it gets carried away, it chomps at the bit, as with my dialect)—if Nawal reads this, would that mean that the two age-old friends are reading one another’s words, confiding in each other and whispering over there in the kingdom of the shades? Talking to one another, pouring out our feelings, wanting to relate our stories. What can I be thinking? That to tell the story over there in the world beyond the Lethe would be to open the story now, to feel it tremble, hoping for a spark, for the unexpected, for happiness, for . . . ?

  II

  A man of medium stature, slender, with a lean face, his coloring almost black. A Somalian or a Mauritanian, maybe half Fula. Frizzy hair, narrow eyes, with a jet-black, glittering, piercing gaze. Long and delicate hands.

  But when he spoke, his French accent wasn’t an African’s. Surprised, I tried to make out the origin of this aberrant speech, but I couldn’t. I’d ask later. In any case, he seemed to hesitate in this language, as if he hadn’t been speaking it for very long. When he slipped into my mother tongue for a particular turn of phrase, there was a flurry inside of me. I froze. In this language, his voice was also colored by an accent, but not a drawl; it fluctuated rather imperceptibly with a slight pitch. It was an Arabic from a somewhat remote place—remote, but not foreign! He resumed his explanations in French. I said to myself, “A French that’s neither Anglo-Saxon nor German. Why am I trying to locate this accent in Europe?” Then he made a somewhat clumsy mistake that he quickly corrected, and as he did so, he added that he had learned French in Austria. Yet it was the echo of the other language that stayed with me, made him feel familiar to me. His language was my own, but coiled, murmured, as if capable of lending itself to effusions, to bawdiness. That could caress words (letting others languish), touch lightly on echoes, promise confessions. Confessions of innocence, of course. “Here I am returned to childhood,” I observed to myself, alarmed. And with this, my heart capsized.

  Nawal, I beg you to be patient, to listen to me so you can understand the origins of this extraordinary emotion. Though I ought to relate the circumstances, the words exchanged, the work asked for . . . Nawal, wait! We have plenty of time! Writing makes everything unfold. Everything sets off again, everything vacillates. What will happen between the young woman who, at thirty-six, “looks like a student” [the man said] and the foreigner—not completely a foreigner, considering his two overlapping language—who has just learned French in Austria. And why there? What’s he doing here? Why this research of “audio archives” from Mzab, Laghouat, Biskra—he names off the cities. “These are different worlds. And as for Mzab,” I point out, “they use a different language, the oldest in the peninsula!” I had adopted the rigid tone of someone giving a class, who specifies the limits of her knowledge from the outset. “In Mzab, I understand their Berber, but I don’t speak it!”

  He listened to me with a smirk. “I’m not completely ignorant!” he offered. I had scarcely detected the irony in his tone before his mobile, almost black face transformed it into tenderness: yes, yes, yes, Nawal, I was sight-reading his face, grasping his fleeting thoughts as they passed. I was initiated with his subtle charm from the start.

  Nawal, if I don’t get right to the point, it’s because I first want to describe, for you who will read me or listen to me [and if what I now write, with nervousness, almost at a gallop, is in preparation for my conversation with you, if . . .]—the most important thing will be to have you share what it was like, this state of intoxication.

  We have time. Look at the city before us, beyond these clouds: it would normally look like an ugly, darkened city . . . But from where we contemplate it together, from where we soar, voyeurs in parallel, it sends the illusion of its former beauty to us. On the bay, the lights from the immobilized boats, the cranes, the double line of lights on the waterfront give the city the belt of a sultana or a prostitute.

  He and I talked of work, revealing ourselves to each other, gradually seeing eye-to-eye. I listened to this man give a brief explanation of why he was traveling in the Maghreb. He had been exiled from his country for years, with the added injury of not even being able to talk with his mother on the phone. He said she was a poet who had a rich knowledge of culture and had mastered the Arabic of the Koran. For entire evenings, she used to improvise on archaic, simple Somalian music, which he was now attempting to rediscover.

  I felt a rhythm beating between us that was trying to work itself out. “A way of being both simple and poor,” he said, speaking of his family, ruined by local authoritarianism. And I perceived a contrast between his raw ardor and the sophistication of faded colors in his speech . . .

  How long did we talk this first time, Nawal? I can’t recall now. We talked of life here, of its dangers. From the beginning, his visitor’s gaze perceived an urgency everywhere on the city�
�s streets, in faces that were so inscrutable, so sad. He noticed that sometimes there was a rawness, that there was violence or exaggeration when people bumped into each other, or in arguing voices, or . . . He searched for the right word. “Vehemence, yes, that’s what I find here. Not anger, no. Vehemence!” He made his observations and then, astonished, checked with me to see if his impressions were accurate. I would smile and could only confirm.

  In fact, when he questioned me in this way, I responded with surprise. He had come along with his acute hearing and hunter’s eyes, and through these sensations he was trying to approach a familiar universe that he had lost. “I want to make associations between images, to find the sounds of my past again, but somewhere else.” Then he amended, “But not far away!” A bond quickly developed between us. The affinity felt innocent, completely unambiguous. If there hadn’t been this imbalance of accents and these light touches of his Arabic every so often, all of these expressions . . . I listened closely. Something in me was laid open. My attention from the first moments grew even more intense, a kind of fever veiled in a vague impulse to run away . . .

  I observed the clarity of his black eyes, the delicacy of his smoke-stained fingers. Without any warning, a sudden silence unfurled between us.

  I return to you, Nawal. I need you to be my memory from now on. Even though there are threats, I wish you were here, at these moments as I write. You’re on the run, no doubt. You no longer call me, you’re no longer laughing, but you’re still here, so close, living . . . Oh yes! . . . You’ll divine the beatings of my heart, even three years after this passion developed, this passion that invigorates me still, even though I’m living as a prisoner, as a persecuted woman!

  We must have talked for two hours. I don’t remember anymore. We’d left the radio station for a somewhat noisy cafeteria nearby. When I was with him, I never for a second thought, “How does he see me?” Almost as if I weren’t visible. I was all attention, my gaze focused . . .

  When we parted, I noted that it was October 11, cherishing the date like a fetish. Then I took a long, aimless walk from the middle of the afternoon until nightfall.

  I was happy to be here on this threshold. Happy to be alive and free on this day. Happy to carry his face, his features, his faint wrinkles, his lips, his fingers along with me as I walked. Had my eyes really so devoured his face during our meeting? I couldn’t remember. Maybe I had furtively recorded his image, before he could see me looking at him so I could register the existence of this face and be sure to have it later on!

  And most important of all, Nawal, was to walk in such a way as to harbor his voice, which follows me, pursues me, which traces my way before me—his voice in the first language, then in the second, and the slow, reeling imbalance . . . How to preserve it for later, in detail, how not to forget? As we’d said our good-byes, we’d agreed to see each other in four days.

  Yes, I walked in the gentle, bluish twilight. Despite the humming from the streets and all the racket, the mists from the nearby sea floated around and with me—me, a shadow. No. Me, still alive . . .

  III

  Four days later, I showed the Somalian the collection I’d made of women’s “sayings.” They were from cities that he seemed to know about and had mentioned. I had chosen an ancient, rather well-known Ibadi women’s song. Early in the century, a French ethnologist who spent time in the five cities of the Mzab had recorded and translated it.

  “All year round, men emigrate to the North in great numbers,” I explained, “or even farther abroad. But they return to Ghardaïa, to Beni Isguen, to Ouargla at least for the three or four most important annual feasts: the Big Feast of Abraham’s sacrifice and Ashura, as well as for circumcisions and weddings!” I said this dreamily. “The day of return, when the husband—or the beloved—is approaching, the women, until now cloistered in the austerity of home and work for all the long months of separation, the women finally rejoice! Almost as soon as they’ve heard the horsemen’s steps and the cracks of gunpowder from farther off, all over they start to intone this song of return!”

  “Tell me the translation! Then I’ll read it in its original Berber,” said the musician, having drawn closer to me.

  I began:The powder exploded in Azouil,

  They told me, “The caravan has arrived!”

  O my Lord,

  My Lord has riding mares

  Fifty loads of wheat

  Sixty loads of barley

  And six hundred armed men!

  I stopped, caught my breath, smiled at the musician.

  “Well, go on!” he said. “Your voice is already singing, and it’s only the translation!”

  “If you keep this poem, the work will be Djamila’s, not mine!”

  “O my Lord.” I hesitated, looked at him, then resumed:My Lord has arrived

  I hear the sound of the caravan!

  I recited in a lower voice, as if I were suddenly inventing it myself:My heart is packed like a pomegranate1

  My heart trembles like a reed

  My heart grows green like the new grass!

  I took a second breath:Yesterday, I didn’t tell just anyone of my sorrow,

  Yesterday, I confided my turmoil only to those close

  to me,

  Yesterday, only the Master of the Worlds taught me

  patience!

  O my Lord,

  My Lord has arrived,

  I hear the sound of the caravan!

  “We have lots of work ahead of us, Isma!” murmured the musician, facing me. I held out the sheets of the original Berber to him.

  “My heart is packed like a pomegranate!” I resumed, standing very close. I stopped, then continued, my voice even lower: “My heart grows green like the new grass!”

  My eyes on his, I added the three Berber words of this final verse, which I’d memorized the day before: “Izizu uliok chekçil!” I sighed.

  “You’ll be here, of course, to oversee the singer’s diction when she’s rehearsing!” he added.

  My dear Nawal (as I repeat this poem, I’m confiding in you alone), I said to myself, “How strange . . . I just told him my first words of love, and it wasn’t in my native language or in the language of his mother’s poetry—she who’s waiting for him in a faraway land, but to whom I feel so close!”

  I had amassed an abundance of poems from all the regions of Algeria, and he quickly read through the others in silence. Yet he decided that, with its ancient simplicity, this song of the beloved’s return, the first that I’d recited for him, would be the one the contralto would perform with the music he’d composed for the transverse flute.

  Djamila arrived. I had met her once before. Reserved and severe, with her opulent hair drawn into a chignon at the nape of her neck, her demeanor seemed to match the gravity of her voice.

  She and I started to talk about the women from Mzab, a region she didn’t know very well.

  I said, “I dream of spending a part of the year there on a regular basis, at least the winter months, of living among the women there, speaking to them in Arabic (for they all know the Koran), then gradually learning their Berber!”

  The musician was coming back toward us, and he heard me talking about the strict rules that had regulated this feminine society for generations: “They have five priestesses. I say ‘priestesses,’ but they’re really washers of the dead, ghassalines. The most important of them, who has the greatest knowledge of Koranic exegesis, has formidable religious authority over all of the women: the right of tebria!”

  “Of tebria?” Djamila inquired.

  “Yes, the right to excommunicate, which is by far the gravest punishment. Mamma Sliman—the most respected washer because of her skill, her justice, and her moderation—was once able to decree this for any rebellious woman who did not repent!”

  “Is it that serious, this tebria?” Djamila wondered, after a silence.

  “Yes,” I affirmed. “When you die, not to be washed according to Koranic law, to be buried alone, without
the prayers or the love of one’s own. What on earth could possibly be more terrible?”

  “There’s exile,” the musician interjected. He hesitated, then amended, “At least, exile without the hope of return! And consider this, dear Isma. It’s a tebria of a living heart, not of a dying body!”

  There was a shudder in his brown face. He turned around, addressed himself to Djamila. “Let’s begin the sight-reading!”

  He took me by the arm, his cajoling smile back again. “It’s Isma who will take care of the words. For this first rehearsal, she’ll have authority over us!”

  He suddenly seemed almost tender. As we entered the studio together, he teased, “Did you live as an Ibadi woman, Lalla Isma? I’d imagine you were either the appointed washer of the dead, with all of the authority, or one of the ones who were excommunicated!”

  “I’m not from a Mzab oasis,” I protested, sitting down next to them. “I was born in the heights of Cirta!”

  IV

  He spent two weeks recording music along with the text I’d translated for him. I’d go to the studio every day in the late afternoon after leaving my lycée.

  I went into the rehearsal room and greeted everyone. I waited, and when he came up to me toward the end we touched hands (sometimes he would hold my fingers, distractedly), and he said some sweet things to me in “our” language. A game.

  In French, he added, “You see, I have a whole repertoire of poetry that I learned before, thanks to my mother. I had forgotten it. Now I know that these poems were for me to say to you!”