The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry Page 7

  I tell you, Nawal, I write to you, suddenly wanting to cross over this frontier that hovers in the Algiers sky and truly divides us, maybe even connects us. Maybe I will sink and miraculously find the fracture, flatten my thin body between two plates of glass, then extend my hand to you, come as close as I can so we can talk, exchange our confidences: mine filled with desire, yours with altruism! Then I’ll withdraw and come back to this side, not leaving you, no, but gliding toward you and then coming back . . . back to Omar or to the bed where I still find myself next to Ali, who is bewildered and then calmed, despite this inopportune name he heard at the heights of ecstasy.

  Nawal, I’m sailing toward you, I’m writing for you, but I return, I’m reeling, attracted again by Omar. Which Omar? I was going to say, “Omar, the second in my life, just as he was the second caliph,” but I turn to Ali as a helpful sister. O Nawal, my companion as I live my life of a recluse today, three years after my heart was ablaze, now here I am undercover, remembering!

  I’d just uttered this name (as a white cloud suddenly hovers, then frays, over a lake that has long been frozen), I’d just been in these waters stirred by conjugal pleasure, when the name of this high school sweetheart—a fortunate excuse—occurred to me. This coincidence calmed the husband, battling the shadow of his mother’s death, in my arms. All of this took several long minutes, at least five, maybe ten. Yes, the name evaporated on my lips as a poisonous flower, and then a weighty sleep hit me—or rather it stretched out like peat beneath my body, and I sank into it immediately.

  I woke up an hour later. Ali had already risen. He was sitting, as he often did, at his table by the sunny window overlooking the rosebushes in our little garden.

  I approached him, brushed against his shoulder, caressed his hair. The perfectly measured tenderness that a relative would demonstrate . . . “I’ll wait until the fortieth day of mourning,” I decided. “I’ll go to the village with him, to the tomb of Lalla Salma and the two others, the couple that was gunned down. But when we return, I’ll tactfully explain, I’ll convince him. How I long—oh yes!—how I long to live alone!”

  This same day, I remember, I was tormented by a vague urgency to go to the hammam that very afternoon. With my cups of old copper, my henna in dried leaves, my pot of sandalwood, and my container filled with musk—just as my mother used to in our city in the East. Yes, I wanted to go the Turkish bath, but not to talk to any of the bathers in the cold room this time. I would stay close to the hot room, surrender to the masseuse, then get splashed at length with icy water. Essentially, I wanted to purify myself.

  I went to the bath, and the next day I contemplated my open palms, haloed in their centers with scarlet rings, almost blackened, from the henna of the day before. I inhaled the aroma of my dyed hands at length. “I can smell the scent of paradise!” I sighed, again filled with desire for Omar. As if I had prepared them—these, my open hands—for him, for caresses that they would not trace.

  Several times on this same Friday, I brought my hands to my nostrils, smelling them feverishly, my eyelids fluttering. It was almost as if they were someone else’s. But the next time we met in the studio—“tonight or tomorrow,” I told myself, ardent, impatient—would I dare to hold them out to him like this, colored with red, and say, “Omar, just smell them. I’m not asking you to kiss my hands like a man of the world!”

  He’d laugh, surprised. Take them in his own long and brown hands.

  “Smell them!” I’d insist, opening them, just like pomegranates, beneath his nose. “What do you find there, Omar?”

  “The scent . . . the scent of henna!” he’d say, holding my fingers for another minute.

  “No, the scent of paradise!”

  As if I were trying to let him know that while I’d been at the hammam the day before, I’d dreamed of nothing but him smelling my fingers like this, that I’d prepared for the dissolution of my being into his.

  Omar called me around noon that same day, when my desire had been heightened from my visit the day before to the Turkish bath.

  I heard myself saying, in an almost carefree voice, that I wanted to meet him that very afternoon. It seemed to me that his voice trembled with a sudden intensity.

  He joked, as was his habit, again calling me Lalla, or princess, and he made rhymed variations on my first name in sophisticated Arabic.

  I was laughing on the telephone. I admitted that I couldn’t resist him whenever he joked like that in our mother tongue.

  Tonight, three years after this sparkling day, you seem so present to me, Nawal. Not a sisterly shadow or a half-hidden twin. Nawal, I want to relive this meeting, which I thought would be our last, through your eyes.

  It was a long, sunny afternoon. Omar had announced that he would be leaving the next morning at the break of day. First to Paris, then to Amsterdam. “In a month or so, if I have you called to Amsterdam or Rotterdam, if the foundation that funds me sends you a ticket and an invitation to come work with me for a week, would you accept?”

  “I’ll tell you then! I don’t know yet.”

  We didn’t talk about it any more, Nawal. I knew that maybe it was our last day. It started to rain. The violent downpour forced us to seek shelter in a popular café, which was filled with men only. I felt the looks of groups seated at neighboring tables.

  Nonetheless, I was relishing my happiness, heightened by a sense of the ephemeral (“maybe really the last day, the last . . .”), and always this condensed silence, ever present, from the next tables. I lowered my eyes, lifting them just long enough to capture the image of his features again, of his hands, of . . . I was listening to him, even though there were others who were watching.

  We started to talk about some setbacks in the work we’d done. He expressed his surprise at the many deficiencies he had perceived: the total absence of music instruction, the loss (“alas, irretrievable”) of the transmission of traditional genres, because the scholarly folklore musicians of old had been turned into administrators at the state-run radio with its massive, stick-in-the-mud staff and no cultural orientation whatsoever.

  He went on about the shortcomings and disappointments, despite my silence (not yet sadness, for I remained riveted to this present, which was going to fritter away, even managing to ignore the ravenous curiosity coming from the neighboring tables!). Then . . .

  “It’s not raining anymore!” I observed.

  He apologized, smiled at me. Moved his fingers forward to feel the wet locks of hair at my neck. I immediately noticed that this had amplified the others’ attention. His fingers had brushed against my neck, and the emotion I felt made my heart lurch.

  “Let’s get out of here!” I demanded.

  He paid. We stood up. It wasn’t until this moment that he cast a distracted look at the entire room, certainly understanding why I was uneasy. Here I was, the only woman among them all, here with the only foreigner.

  He wrapped his arm around my shoulders.

  “Let’s walk!” I said, outside. “The sun is out now. Look!”

  Nawal, I’m approaching the instant that remains . . . That, three years later, makes my heart pound . . . Nawal, when I see you again, when we finally talk together again . . .

  We crossed the noisy boulevard. “Let’s go to the waterfront!” he suggested. I hadn’t pulled away from his arm. Then, as we moved out of pedestrian crossings, I would hold him to avoid a cyclist or a pushcart. We found ourselves at the other side, laughing. I turned my back on a bus that was brimming with a crowd of people, their numerous round eyes certainly following the couple we formed. He was elegant, his face darkly tanned—but that wasn’t so extraordinary here. His easy manner with me, however, seemed unusual. And then there was me, so short on my high heels, and my hair a disordered mass.

  I had finally forgotten about the others entirely. Pausing in front of the guardrail, we were quiet. The ocean, the activity of the port under our eyes, the sun returning over the immense bay. Puddles of mud at our feet.

&n
bsp; “You’ll come . . . to Holland?” he asked, and he took my hands. Turning toward the panorama, toward the vast sky, we obliterated all the others, and considered ourselves alone.

  So, I don’t know why (Nawal, it was a little as if, not being able to take refuge in his arms, in his embrace, I had to do something else, what to tell him to . . . to expose what was inside of me, turn myself inside out for him . . . Nawal, listen to me, my fever was rising, briskly, and with animal eyes), suddenly, yes, I had the irrepressible desire, the need to confess. “I’d like to tell you, Omar . . .”

  I had just used the familiar form of address with him in French—the tu. I lowered my head, concentrated, hesitated. He sensed a confession . . .

  “Yes,” he murmured, “what’s the matter?”

  “I’d like to tell you what happened to me yesterday . . . You remember: I told you . . . My husband had left for his village. His grandmother there died . . . He was very attached to her . . . And I blame myself, I should have gone!”

  We were up against the railing. One or two passersby bumped into us. Omar lowered his head, took one of my hands again, and despite the noise around us, he listened to the stream of my words.

  “He came back yesterday.”

  I said everything, Nawal, and with a calm, though implacable, brazen-ness. I told him about the husband’s desire, an escape from the death that surrounded him. How, under the effect of a somewhat abstract compassion, I couldn’t refuse . . .

  “What I wanted to tell you was after, or during. I was somewhere else, I didn’t even know it . . . At the moment that was the most . . . at the crucial moment,” I amended, “I wasn’t there for him, for me maybe . . . Then, in the silence, without my having wanted it, your name came out from my lips. Out loud!”

  The silence around us. The crowd around us. Omar’s gaze was perplexed; his somber eyes looked into mine. His hands squeezed my fingers. The silence around us froze. The crowd reeled.

  I had forgotten the bay below, the port and its tumult. The only thing that existed for me was the blue liquid of the sky.

  He reassumed the protective gesture of his arms around my shoulders.

  “Let’s walk!”

  And we went on.

  The downpour had left mud puddles on the sidewalk, and in some places we couldn’t step over them but instead had to go down, our steps in tandem, onto the road. Shortly after, we’d go back onto the sidewalk. This way, we broke through the increasingly dense crowd.

  “Isma,” he resumed, “will you come? We’ll work somewhere else. Not in this city. Far away! And we’ll finally have time for each other.”

  On the immense public square, at the bottom of the Casbah and next to the austere, all-white Pesach mosque, on this populous esplanade—the public square that used to be known as “du Cheval” because of the bronze horse with its rider, son of the king of France, a statue that was knocked over on the first day of independence—we joined a circle of onlookers surrounding a bard, a Bedouin holding a tam-tam and improvising a flamboyant lament about his beloved, about her disappearance, “she, the gazelle, when she chose the richest suitor . . . the traitor.”

  His rough voice blazed. I couldn’t make out the end of the verses that he fired into the friendly crowd. The goual chanted his poem with a mute rhythm, monotone and rather slow.

  Omar held me more tightly. I took his hand. A little farther off, we had to part, without even embracing, without kissing.

  In the glow of the erupting sunset, I was getting ready to hail a taxi, thinking, “it’s over, we have to part!” when Omar said to me, still looking at the bard, then slowly turning back toward me:

  “And we, O princess”—ya Lalla, but he wasn’t joking anymore!—“when, O yes, when will the night we’re destined for come?”

  It was a famous verse. He had half hummed it, a smile on his lips, his eyes sparkling. But his expression was serious.

  I went up on my tiptoes. Rapidly, in a gap in the crowd, I advanced my mouth, as if we were alone. I kissed him on the lips. A fast, feverish, brushing kiss—too brief, burning. His eyes, which I can no longer see, closed for a moment.

  “Good-bye!” I sighed, and I slipped away from him. I ran. On the other side, just across, a taxi I’d signaled stopped.

  When it started off, I turned around. Omar remained alone on the sidewalk. I don’t know if he smiled at me, but he made a farewell gesture with his upraised arm.

  In the taxi, I caught my breath. Ah, to finally let myself go, to feel myself lacerated by the long, steel tip of rupture!

  VI

  (Letter found among Isma’s papers)

  I’m starting this letter to you on the plane to Rotterdam. You’ll only read this letter under one condition: once I feel that you are in symbiosis with me. Then I’ll unveil myself. And tell you, with both discomfort and pleasure, that I’m one step ahead of you.

  I notice that I speak with the calm expectation of this day, as if I were certain that it will arrive—yet since yesterday I’ve been gripped with doubt.

  No, I don’t want to disclose myself to you, I want to avoid an effect of contagion, which would, in all likelihood, be short lived . . .

  I was living in a state of upheaval until you left. I felt that my desire for you (how else to designate it, other than with the most naked of words) would be revived and would persist even after I’d gone home. Until yesterday, I felt for you an attraction, an affection that could possibly be explained by my state of availability at the time.

  It all began that day when I was free and came to hear the music you had started working on. I’d expected to find a flirtation going on between you and Djamila, what with the pick-up artist I’d seen in you, that I’d found funny. I was coming, for my part, as a professional.

  The pleasure of taking these deserted streets to come to you. You told me, “Djamila, the actress, recorded her poem. I’ll have you listen to it in just a second.”

  We took a rather long time to eat. While inhaling the smells of fried fish in this open-air café, I wondered, “Why am I chattering so much? And with words that are so unnecessary!”

  I understood that I was avoiding really looking at your face, and at that moment, I had a rather fuzzy vision of you. I was doing this on purpose. As a precaution.

  I finally observed you in the studio—but from afar—as I was getting ready to listen. I contemplated your silhouette, so thin, and your body, your gestures. Just watching you exist, I was overcome with a sense of tranquility.

  Certainly, there was the fact that this had been your place these two past weeks, that you had been doing your creative work here. Before your music started, I discovered there was a kind of fervor in you and felt myself turning into a pure bystander.

  You could have been more handsome or younger; you could have been ugly or old. That, in a sense, no longer mattered. You were present, and I felt fulfilled by your existence.

  That first time, Djamila’s contralto vocals blended fluidly with the intensity of the woven text and its tones! This raspy female voice, on the verge of quavering with sorrow . . . Numbed, I told myself, “You have to leave.” I was afraid of disturbing you, because it seemed to me that the fever of my listening would be too much! Too much in relation to the powerful surge of Djamila’s song; you became the captain of this tidet . . .

  I asked myself, “Will I ask him if I might listen to the vocals again and leave afterward, with my soul forever replete with his music?”

  This second time I listened, I was overwhelmed. When I described my agitation to you the next day, it was because I was trying to understand. These six minutes you directed became a fathomless pit where my memory rushed in . . .

  Two days later, I didn’t know where I stood. Was it “my” past (if it was that, may as well scatter it overboard) or something about you (a violence, a darkness from your life) that shook me up and left me emptied?

  I’m not launching into an examination of my conscience, O my beloved. I’m trying to rememb
er, but my senses are practically anesthetized! Still now, in this plane that brings me to you, the recollection of this unexpected emotion unnerves me anew.

  After listening the second time, I’d said, “Let’s leave!” I remember crossing the hall, a moment of cottony fog. I spoke to you, yet I couldn’t speak. The effort to control myself, the irrational desire within to run ahead blindly and to tear myself apart! I must have leaned on your arm or your shoulder. Then there was this sentence that you repeated (I don’t seem to really hear it except when I write to you; while in the corridor, it seemed like a voice from a dream), then, your words or your sigh: “Isma, you’re provoking me!” I didn’t know how or why. But now I see that with this agitation, we could have wound up in one another’s arms there . . .

  I remember that as we fumbled together in the dim light, we accidentally opened a door leading to a black space (an audition room, you said). For a moment I had the desire to crouch there, even on the floor, it didn’t matter, and give in to the tears.

  They came to me as soon as we were outside in the little square and your back was turned. You ran toward a taxi. I had made a “no” of the head, telling you, half-smiling, “I’m returning on foot.” You disappeared, your questioning look on me through the glass. In return, I made a farewell gesture to you. I sat down on a bench in the little garden. Everything came out all at once, the rain after the storm. I hadn’t cried like this for years. For several long minutes, my hand let the black, tight fringe of my shawl come down on my forehead, my eyes. At the same time, I felt as if something in me was being born. Something connected to you or to your voice. If you had come back to me, having forgotten to tell me God knows what, oh yes, how I would have embraced you, how I would never have left you again!

  I remember that about half an hour later, an elderly man came and sat at the other end of the bench. He was mumbling, looking at me. I heard him say in scholarly French (he had taken me for a European woman): “Madame, I ask you, aren’t the red roses the most beautiful?”