So Vast the Prison by Assia Djebar

twists and turns of separation; I think that he saw into me better than I did myself, that he was foretelling the emotional demonstration that was imminent, that he was preparing for it.
    The kitchen, half-lit; the little yaps of a dog outside; some neighbor’s child singing. And he and I there, occupied with almost ordinary things, the smell of the warm milk that nearly boils over: he watches me intently, my sheer pleasure as I drink. He reaches out to hand me a napkin; laughing, I wipe my lips. He is standing so close. I pull off the heavy sweater—of good red angora—I want to give it back to him. He insists I should keep it on in the car. He puts it back on my shoulders. He becomes protective; he seems affectionate. In a flash I see him clearly with “the other,” the foreigner he loved so much: but the vision does not trouble me. His attentions warm me more than this angora wool.
    “Let’s go!” I whisper, in a final gesture of caution.
    I follow him to the garage, I sit down next to him, and I think once again that the trip will last all night long; that we are leaving, that’s all. That nothing will be over.
    Together we two return in a silence that envelops everything, even the engine’s purr. In the middle of the trip, to have some music, I push a button.
    “John Coltrane! ‘Naïma’!” I say as the music plays, becoming the only reality we have.
    The car stops in front of the second door of the building where I live, near the tall palm and the ash trees. The concierge and his two grown boys, squatting on a step: their stares bore into me, the lady who at ten in the evening has herself calmly brought back home where, upstairs, the husband and children, already in bed are waiting. “Today the order of things is upside-down!” the fierce doorkeeper will say behind my back, and one of his strapping youths will spit to the side. At the moment the concierge is standing ceremoniously erect and waiting for the car to leave.
    Though conscious of the hostility of these guardians of suspicion, up to the last minute I remain absorbed only by the presence of the man at the steering wheel, who is smiling at me. His eyes glisten. Our fingers brush together in the car; not one word is murmured before we part. I know that he is amazed now that, during the entire evening, as well as during the time we sat there before the twilight on the beach,
nothing, in the end, happened between us!
    Does he really say these ordinary words? Or did he just think it in the abstract? I feel it vaguely in the somewhat amused, indulgent look he gives me and a diffuse tenderness—which has nothing to do with the changeable fabric of the turmoil I am managing to hide.
    So I smile at him at the last minute, happy to strengthen our secret bond, our mutual attraction whose rhythm is so different for each of us. I am afraid of the wave that might sweep me away, hence preoccupied with building a dam against it. He—I understand in this moment of goodbye—nonchalantly letting the things that began tobe detected between us sweep over him: the comings and goings of my capricious dance around him, his house, the days of respite, the lazy days. He is, in short, passively preparing to wait for me. “When, finally, will you really be close? I wanted to dispose of yesterday’s tumult and reveal my history to you just so you would know that everyone has a turn at experiencing intoxication and passion, no matter how he or she resists. Everyone goes through the mill. Everyone, even you! Let yourself go! Come, come softly! I’m making no demands and I’m not pushing you; I’m simply waiting for you!”
    Was this what he was preparing to tell me when he was done confiding on the beach? I put all this together—or invented it—after I left him, after his car took off, and after I had been followed by the stares of the concierge and his two sons, the watchmen of bourgeois respectability.
    In the elevator, my eyes shut, I say to myself,
He gave me