The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry

by Assia Djebar

  I still remember how I’d tremble on those rare occasions when he’d make his case like this before me. The language of a valiant man, I’d say to myself. My father was a nobleman when he spoke his mother tongue, and a worker from the lowest class when he went over into French. Except with his officers, who respected him for his knowledge of horses. Except with you, Félicie; when you met him in Le Havre, it wasn’t this ability that distinguished him, in the strictest sense of the word!

  In the past, at Beni-Rached, I felt the muscle of his eloquence when we were standing near his father’s grave. Living to 115 years of age, he had a record of longevity that was celebrated throughout the region. When my father spoke, it seemed that from afar, from the horizon behind the dunes, there were ghost warriors arriving on horses with sumptuous saddles, their sloughis—the most beautiful breed of dog in the country—following them in even, agile bounds.

  So Father spoke to me in Arabic, “his” Arabic, and I believed I could absorb it. I’ve kept . . . what, barely half of this acoustic heritage? Alas, I’ve irreversibly lost it, even more since I’ve been away and since he’s died.

  And so now, if I keep up an hour-long conversation with raw-spoken Oranians, I use a “loose speech,” as one would say in the village. My father’s, on the other hand, with its form undulating to an imperceptible beat, seemed inclined to take flight in boundless space, beyond the dunes I would stare at for hours as a child stretched out flat on my stomach at the entrance to the Beni-Rached cemetery.

  Where you will go, Félicie? In this brief respite, I’ll tell you: if you don’t wake up today, I’ll do everything to make sure you can sleep in the village cemetery forever!

  And me? I want nothing. If you don’t get up, if you don’t gaze at me with your blue, hazel-flecked eyes, if you don’t manage to smile at me for at least one or two seconds, what does my life matter, my destiny and its outcome? Buried, cremated, drowned, mutilated, or my throat slit—what does it matter to me? May my body be abandoned there where it falls, at the instant it’s trampled on.

  If you don’t wake up, O Félicie!

  6

  Maybe I’m acting like Marie, Félicie. I’m stationed in front of your body, and I bring my surplus of childhood memories to it, of scenes coming back that I thought had dissolved. Maybe I’m burdening you, even pressuring you. Do you hear me pleading with you, commanding you to wake up, smile at me, and tell me that you’ve loved me, your favorite?

  You hear me, and this must upset you. You’re busy with . . . what, deciding where to proceed? Toward my father, who was buried over there in the Beni-Rached cemetery after four days and four nights of ceremonies, dances, trances, prayers made by his peers, the warriors from long ago who reappeared for him? (I, a bystander, was forever moved by their return.) Or toward us? But you see us divided, each with our two first names, our two countries (which to disown, which to adopt?), our two religions absent or in the background, our two ages as well (always children for you, the mother, even though we are well into adulthood), each of us staggering differently through bitterness, uncertainty, or hope. You’ll leave us. Yet you hesitate: “Will I, once and for all, be rid of this brood?” You question yourself, you swim sometimes in one current, sometimes in the other, that which they call “the coma.”

  I’m acting like Marie: please forgive me.

  Marie tried to tell you, “Once you’re back up, Maman, I’m going to tell you that Algeria’s over for you! For your health, for the ten, fifteen years of the hardy old age you’re entitled to!”

  As if you were asking “to survive”! As if Algeria were over for you, when in fact your destiny there is just beginning.

  I, Titi (I hear your inflections right in these two consonants, in this caress that becomes, for you, my name), grasped this truth about you long ago.

  Long ago? The last day of Father’s funeral. I had come in among the circles of women. Three or four vast rooms were filled with visitors who were waiting in the morning’s final hour for the bearers of the funeral plank to appear.

  I passed through the rows of female relatives. Their bodies were crouched down and veiled in faded colors, in pink, gray, and white. The closest relations had taken refuge in the last room: the cousins, the forgotten aunts, the nieces who had grown up too soon. This time, none of them held back: “Karim! It’s Karim!” (Hugging and kissing.)

  “Mon foie, my little one!” (Then greetings with joined fingers.)

  “A true lord, the eldest son of the departed!” (I kiss the headdress of the venerable woman, who is overcome with emotion.)

  “Handsome like his mother and proud like his father!” (My intimidated smile for my youngest cousin!)

  As I pushed my way through the rows, I was given over to compliments that were high-flown, lyrical, and tender. The mourning permitted this. There was poetry mixed in, and when I thanked them or greeted so many young and not-so-young relations, my Arabic, a reeling speech that vacillated with slight vertigo, became theirs for a final time.

  They recognized me as their relative, I know it, because of my status, no doubt, as the eldest of my father’s boys who had come back just for this from Paris. But above all it was because, almost as if by miracle, I was finally conversing with them in the same colors, in the same language. Not yours, Félicie.

  My father, who would be borne away, thus pulled me to him in this way, one final time, at the ultimate hour of his corporeal presence. Because of our long conversations at the cemetery, at this instant, the others, that is, your own listened to me. Received me, “the departed’s eldest.”

  Maybe it was precisely this exaltation that led me, three days later, to tell myself that my heart was “sated” with this space, these dunes, all of these feverish and hardened faces, and that, paradoxically, “This was the most beautiful of returns! The most noble of burials! Now leave the land of your fathers forever. It’s wiser. It will never be as good again! On the contrary, the decline will come, your eyes will see it! It’s over for you, Algeria!”

  You see, Mman, unlike Kaki, I didn’t leave out of bitterness. From this day long ago, when I was twenty-one and you alone congratulated me for having assumed my liberty “without reason, really,” I had chosen a life without ties, just like my ancestors: my grandfather, my father’s first brother, who disappeared as a soldier during World War I, and his youngest brother, who was also reported missing as a maquisard. So then, all of these men of the high plateaus, these horsemen and hunters, this was how they lived—in the boundlessness of their horizons, beyond the dunes!

  I had been entitled to this paternal heritage, to its purest core . . . Even if, of that legacy, Father would have preferred to transmit his language to me (alas, it dissolves forever in my mouth), and even if he hoped to communicate the mellowed light of his Islam over the course of a year . . .

  Alone. I am a man alone, standing and blathering for days on end before your body, Félicie!

  A final remark, Mman. After this, I’ll keep quiet, I promise.

  Do you remember when I was feverishly looking for you at Father’s burial, pushing through the rows of relatives?

  “I want to see Mma,” I said. In Arabic! (The “Mman” that belongs to me in Oranian French became just scarcely rounder, a little firmer, and charged with a point of anguish to produce this Arabic “Mma” that everyone used.)

  I ended up being led into the most crowded corner of the room. You, who’d been abandoned so suddenly, looked at me without smiling. After our meeting, Mman, our brief dialogue at this moment at the heart of the crowd, I understood why I’d been gripped by the violent impulse to find you, to make sure that you weren’t alone, to tell you . . .

  I don’t remember what I mumbled to you then. But I’ll never forget your orphan look, your disarray, then these trembling words: “What will become of me, Titi?”

  You spoke to me, you bemoaned your loneliness, and I couldn’t take it. I mumbled words of protestation, of confusion, of . . . “Whatever you like,” I s
aid. “You’ll come with me tomorrow to Paris or stay in Oran, and I’ll come back for you. Then we’ll leave. The world is vast—we’ll go wherever you want!”

  I was maddened by your sadness—that of a child. I would have taken you straight away in my arms! Nothing mattered anymore but you, but. . . . But I’d understood nothing. Three days later, I went back alone; three months later, waiting for you in Paris, I set aside your place, your room, your future routines, there at my place. Yes, three months later, then six months. It was at least one year before I made the realization: “When Father was buried, Algeria wasn’t over for you! It was just the beginning.”

  You visited a year later, deciding to come to Paris and take care of your pension, of your rights in France as a French woman. The first time you landed, you were accompanied by a teenage Ourdia. One morning, having a heart-to-heart with me, even though I had shown you everything that was waiting here for you, you acted as if you had forgotten this momentary lapse down in the village just before my father had been taken away. You had retorted to me, innocently, or “cluelessly,” as Marie would have said, “But, Titi, I can’t live anywhere but down in Oran . . . back home!”

  Today, I repeat this to myself, this phrase of a consoled widow who was traveling, returning to Oran. “Back home,” you said.

  You’ll wake up, Mman. You’ll talk to me. And this remark, made almost ten years ago, you’ll say it to me again, repeat it exactly. Oh yes, Mman!

  7

  The day comes!

  Ourdia has been here since morning (she got tired of shopping, of exploring her sister’s neighborhood). She doesn’t prattle on as she did before. When I come in, she’s standing up straight; she’s mumbling as I creep up on her. Her eyes don’t move from your bed.

  “Now you’re talking to yourself?” I remark gently.

  “No, Titi, I’m talking to Mman! If she hears our voices, maybe things would be better for her, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe Ourdia is right,” I told you, put the question to you, as was my habit in this underlying silence where I believed I was pursuing . . . our meeting? Our dialogue? Is this, O Félicie, my silent one, nothing more than a prolonged delusion on my part?

  The weather’s nice today, with the scent of a premature spring floating in the air. My little sister’s welcome has made me feel tenderness toward her . . . Without consulting each other, we decide that we have all the time in the world.

  I watch as Ourdia proceeds to comb your hair with movements that are maternal, so to speak. It appears that before I came in, she had applied cream to your face; a bluish bottle of eau de toilette remains open.

  She undoes your chestnut braids. She brushes them slowly, passes her fine fingers through them. Then she braids your long hair, where the gleaming white strands are still rare . . . Now she wipes off your cheek-bones with the bluish water and a handkerchief.

  “Tomorrow is Friday!” she remarks, her voice hushed. (Is she talking to you or me?) “You didn’t notice, I do her hair once or twice a week.” Then to you she murmurs, “I wouldn’t have left you with the nurses. To go more quickly, they wanted to put a bonnet on you! A bonnet!”

  “I’ll wait for you in the hallway!” I decide.

  Ourdia comes out and approaches me. I suggest to her, “Let’s go to the cafeteria!”

  “You’re right. Her breathing is steadier! It’s as if she were taking her siesta!”

  Straight away, I chase the gnarled thoughts that had been assailing me: while I only had words for you, letting the memory of our past days, of our joys, unravel . . . she, your daughter, she “carries you”—as one says in dialectical Arabic about someone taking care of another’s suffering body. Not helping, but “carrying” an old father or mother, an ailing spouse, and, of course, a child given over to the series of childhood illnesses.

  Your daughter “carried you” all these days, despite the nurses’ attentions and in addition to their watchful eyes. Me, I only regret that you can’t move and watch out for a fold, a wrinkle to possibly ripple through your doll’s face! My only hope is for the floodgates of your gaze to open once more.

  Ourdia with her beauty products for you, with her special hairbrush (for children, she says, so you don’t feel it), her ribbons and barrettes for your long braids. With her perfumes, the ones you’d always use. She’d gone looking for them in distant boutiques: jasmine, violet, a concentrate of musk.

  All the way up to the kohl and antimony powder, which you wore in the past, using moderation. My father and his sisters were pleased (“like a Moor,” they’d say, “a fair-haired Moor!”). I saw Ourdia bring two or three bottles, all silver with an original mirwad for each one. One Sunday, she tried them in front of us, inscribing blackened or bluish dashes on the back of her hand, smelling the powder, announcing with disdain, “She wouldn’t like any one of these three. Not Maman! She’s become a connoisseur, a real Oranian woman!”

  I made fun of her then. I noticed that she had put some on too thickly. Certainly a coquette, Félicie, but not all the time . . . not “like an Oranian woman,” at any rate!

  Reflecting in the hallway today, Félicie, I was moved by your daughter’s meticulous and fussy attentions. In a fit of hope, I wondered, “When you wake up, when you leave, weakened and stumbling from the hospital, who will watch over you by your bedside?” Impulsively, I said: “Me!” But I had to admit, “Let’s not kid around! It’ll be Ourdia!”

  Of course, I’d ensure that you’d have a nurse at home, but Ourdia wouldn’t accept it. She’ll dress you, she’ll lift you carefully out of your bed, she’ll take care of changing your underclothes, which you like so well kept. Ever since I caught her caressing your face with this lotion, it’s easy to imagine her slowly massaging your entire body with her fine hands, her thin arms.

  At such a suggestion, she’d exclaim, “A stranger to take care of mother? Never!”

  I feel it, Félicie. When you were visiting, years after Father’s death, you yourself confided to me, “The final six months, with your father getting weaker (he was growing thinner and thinner), especially when he started to lose his memory, I couldn’t do it anymore, Titi! Ourdia stepped forward energetically. ‘I’ll carry my father!’ she had decided . . . She was twenty-four!

  “She had just moved into her own place, not very far from us, also in Eckmul. Every day she got away for Môh . . . She ‘carried’ him like a child. Brave Ourdia. She was, in a manner of speaking, becoming her father’s mother! During those six months, you remember, I called you three times: ‘Come quickly! Your father is dying!’ You arrived the next day. He was growing thin, and the only one he recognized was his youngest daughter.” She hesitated. “And me, when I touched him.” She started to cry suddenly.

  “This is why I no longer left his bedside. He would call out to me with a voice that was getting weaker and weaker: ‘Félicie . . . Félicie!’ I would lightly stroke his hand, his forehead, his cheeks! Ourdia assumed the full burden! He would eat the little that he could swallow only with her. At night, she slept on a mattress at his feet!”

  I had listened to you evoke this ordeal. The only thing that truly pained me were your tears. I dried them away, and then I’d take you out, as though you were my fiancée: a good restaurant, a walk on the wharf. Anything but your tears!

  And now, remembering these family scenes today here in the hallway, what ends up coming to me are the “baby’s” gestures, her attentions, her devotion—only now. For Ourdia is “carrying” you, Félicie.

  In the cafeteria, we keep talking about you cheerfully . . . Your faults, your tastes, the periods from before, which Ourdia, who’d been a little girl at the time, doesn’t know about. I happily, good naturedly describe the things you used to want. “Did you know that Mman would have loved to have had a dog, a boxer, at the house?”

  “No!” My sister is surprised.

  “You know what Félicie said?” And I’m already laughing. “She started like this in Mascara and then when we were in
Oran: ‘What irritates me about the Arabs is that they don’t like dogs! At least, no dogs at the house. Dogs just for the hunt!’ She’d sigh and look out the window, then resume, ‘Here, they have sun, they have gaiety’ (I point out that she said this when in Oran), she even said, you know, with her audacity, ‘they have love’ (yes, yes, yes, Félicie would say this with a look). ‘And most of all,’ she would add, but never in Father’s presence . . .”

  “Most of all?” Ourdia asks, her eyes round.

  “Most of all,” I add tenderly, hearing her voice from before, as if it were today, “‘they have . . . the mascara!’”

  “The mascara?”

  “Yes, Algeria’s best wine. She came to Mascara from her native Normandy. That’s where the best wine of the country is made, ‘the’ mascara! . . . Does this shock you?”

  “No,” Ourdia admits, reticent but still cheerful.

  “Even recently, she sometimes liked us to bring back a liter of mascara to the house!”

  “A liter?”

  “In my time, from when I was ten to when I was twenty, I saw her drink more! And she was never drunk: only jolly, cocky, her cheeks blazing . . . When they’d argue, it was because Father had discovered the bottle of mascara, which he’d immediately pour out into the sink. She would treat him like a ‘dirty Arab’; one day, she even threatened him: ‘I’ll turn you in to the civil court, tell them that you help the fellaghas! They’ll put you in prison, and I’ll be able to drink as I please!’”

  There would be these outbursts in their room, and then a silence would settle in. I’d say to myself, “They’ve calmed down.” Now I know how!