So Vast the Prison Read Online Free Page B

Casual and carefree and absolutely, perfectly, tranquil watching you be my partner in this lightheartedness—a docile partner, one who isalso leaping—I think I am six or ten years old, you are my playmate, this yard becomes the one in the village where I lived as a little girl … Where I might have met you before. No one around us would have found fault. Would you have been a cousin, or better, a paternal first cousin? You would have …
    At first I didn’t even notice that the age difference (nearly ten years) should have prevented my keeping this fantasy alive: This man could not have been a child when I was! It is only just now that we are meeting! It does not matter: Is every love not a return to the first realm, that Eden? Since I could not have known him before (the prohibitions of my Muslim education having operated in two ways), I savor him as we play these games, in these first days of winter.
    What time was it when we went back into the living room? I remember that we spent an hour or two in combined inertia, listening together to several records that I chose, but I refused to get involved in commentary or after-the-fact explanations of my choice. Music—to keep any dreadfully banal strategy from coming into play, we would listen to music, the prelude to our abandon!
    I listened. Seated at the other end of the room with my head turned toward the French doors opening onto the vast beach. After quite a while I just stood up all of a sudden; I announced I wanted to leave. Outside, the evening was growing dark, gray and rose.
    My Beloved got his car out to take me back. Driving back; night beginning. I was silent for the entire length of the trip; it seemed to me that we were going to drive all night long, to faraway lands.
    When we got there, he stopped the engine and turned toward me: Did he have any idea how good I felt? Or share the feeling? His face, his eyes were so close in the intimacy of the car. His eyes shone and he said softly, “Did I disappoint you?” … barely uttering my first name.
    “Disappoint me? How?” I replied, uncomprehending, then suddenly I embraced him: “I’ll give you a kiss,” I said, and I kissed himon his forehead, on his eyes, I stopped, I pulled away, I opened the car door.
    He said my name again; I was halfway out and I added, almost cool, “I kissed you because tomorrow I’m taking a plane. I’ll be gone ten days or maybe twenty. I’m going to miss you!”
    “You’re leaving! Where are you going?”
    “Canada. Goodbye!”
    I fled. Only then did my heart begin to beat uncontrollably. I stood there transfixed after the car left, swallowed up in the garden’s shadows; I waited for my breathing to return to its normal rhythm.
    In the elevator I shook for the entire ten floors.
    It all comes back to me; nothing is forgotten; but the acid of obliteration inexorably does its work anyway. I was thirty-seven at the time; ever since the age of twenty I had experienced a calm, enriching love, full of ambiguities I did not understand; the story, in its own way, could go on. What was the meaning of this great wave, this swell inside me? Why, I wondered, did I have this mad desire to relive childhood, or rather to be finally fully alive?
    I thought, in the elevator, that I was shivering with cold, and I said to myself tearfully,
Don’t come back from Canada. Go somewhere even farther, flee, get lost, never come back! I don’t want to slide into a wretched novel when I return!
    I never pronounced the word
passion
. I didn’t dwell on either the word or the idea. I did not even guess that I was in the first stages of this strange illness that, for better or worse, would follow its own course.

3
SPACE, DARKNESS
 
    WHEN I RETURNED , my confusion was gone and I considered the episode laughable, a passing weakness. It turned out I had to work in the same place as the Beloved.
    Usually by chance, sometimes out of professional necessity, surrounded by other people, at least