thief” is still there, he is hiding, endowed with every evil power, to gather her to himself and take her off into the forest! Some of these brides were waiting, I knew, their hearts pounding, for this
khettaf el-arais
. Many of them would have preferred this thief with all the beauty of the devil to the appointed groom!
He listened to me, this man who would not be my “thief,” and we returned to his past. He had lost his passport for almost a year. Finally he was able to locate Genevieve in France—only now, toward the end of his story did he call her by name. “Then, over there, more than a year later, not far from her parents, I had to acknowledge that we could no longer be happy … Not like before. She constantly feltguilty that her son had been taken away. She had joined a group of foreign mothers who, like her, are actively undertaking a legal battle. It was all over for the two of us.”
I would have liked to interrupt him:
Why? Does it only take you a year to forget? Isn’t it rather that while you were apart, you were bent on keeping her so close but, face-to-face, you found she was different, matured, sorrowful? Stripped of her child, expelled from the land of sunshine in which your love flourished? Was the magic gone for her too? Shouldn’t you have persevered, stayed together to thumb your nose at the major—former member of the Resistance, former husband, former who knows what?
I no longer remember how these confidences came to an end … Genevieve, image of the sacrificed woman whom I would never know, whom I already imagined as some new, distant relative.
I remember, on the other hand, that he kept saying that he couldn’t live in France “for more than a month,” that he had quickly returned home, that his mother had turned over their summer house to him, and that he liked it there, staying put like a hermit, especially during the winter and spring. The flood of people from the capital having not yet arrived, he routinely spent time with the men from the nearby hamlet.
Afterward
, I say to myself—no longer knowing whether by that I mean “after making a final break with my Beloved,” or after the scene I then lived through with my husband the night I made my ridiculous confession. The consequences of this outrageous event I, of course, imposed in haughty silence upon my confused parents, who naïvely saw this brutality and conjugal havoc as either a remnant of the old ways of doing things or else as the result of some corrupt modernism. And—one of my cousins reported to me what they hadsaid, while all I could do was hold my tongue—they trusted my “upright” character.
Afterward … This incredible thing, I can’t quite understand why I did it! In fact two or three weeks after this breakup, I agreed, yes, agreed to return to my life as a wife—only not in the usual apartment, as if that were the only place still retaining the poisons of the recent chaos. I went back to the seashore, to the house my husband had there near the now-deserted open theater. The harshness of the rocks it overlooked agreed with me.
I accepted, yes. I see once again the sequence of my return unfolding and—now that it is all over, now that all connections are broken, my passion evaporated—disintegrating.
In short, hardly had I bandaged the wounds on my body when I instantly returned to my prison—why? how? I am trying now to discover what temptation could move me to say to myself,
You are going back to where the danger lies, to understand, or rather to confirm: Is it really dangerous there—at the point of delirium, during that night of violence, when the husband meant to blind you?
It is true that I had barely escaped his rage when I had stated categorically to myself,
It’s my fault! Not that I meant him to do it, but I was wrong not to have foreseen his jealousy!
As if the confession I laid out before him to lessen my own torment had triggered an almost legitimate husband’s rage.
My
khettaf el-arais
. Many of them would have preferred this thief with all the beauty of the devil to the appointed groom!
He listened to me, this man who would not be my “thief,” and we returned to his past. He had lost his passport for almost a year. Finally he was able to locate Genevieve in France—only now, toward the end of his story did he call her by name. “Then, over there, more than a year later, not far from her parents, I had to acknowledge that we could no longer be happy … Not like before. She constantly feltguilty that her son had been taken away. She had joined a group of foreign mothers who, like her, are actively undertaking a legal battle. It was all over for the two of us.”
I would have liked to interrupt him:
Why? Does it only take you a year to forget? Isn’t it rather that while you were apart, you were bent on keeping her so close but, face-to-face, you found she was different, matured, sorrowful? Stripped of her child, expelled from the land of sunshine in which your love flourished? Was the magic gone for her too? Shouldn’t you have persevered, stayed together to thumb your nose at the major—former member of the Resistance, former husband, former who knows what?
I no longer remember how these confidences came to an end … Genevieve, image of the sacrificed woman whom I would never know, whom I already imagined as some new, distant relative.
I remember, on the other hand, that he kept saying that he couldn’t live in France “for more than a month,” that he had quickly returned home, that his mother had turned over their summer house to him, and that he liked it there, staying put like a hermit, especially during the winter and spring. The flood of people from the capital having not yet arrived, he routinely spent time with the men from the nearby hamlet.
Afterward
, I say to myself—no longer knowing whether by that I mean “after making a final break with my Beloved,” or after the scene I then lived through with my husband the night I made my ridiculous confession. The consequences of this outrageous event I, of course, imposed in haughty silence upon my confused parents, who naïvely saw this brutality and conjugal havoc as either a remnant of the old ways of doing things or else as the result of some corrupt modernism. And—one of my cousins reported to me what they hadsaid, while all I could do was hold my tongue—they trusted my “upright” character.
Afterward … This incredible thing, I can’t quite understand why I did it! In fact two or three weeks after this breakup, I agreed, yes, agreed to return to my life as a wife—only not in the usual apartment, as if that were the only place still retaining the poisons of the recent chaos. I went back to the seashore, to the house my husband had there near the now-deserted open theater. The harshness of the rocks it overlooked agreed with me.
I accepted, yes. I see once again the sequence of my return unfolding and—now that it is all over, now that all connections are broken, my passion evaporated—disintegrating.
In short, hardly had I bandaged the wounds on my body when I instantly returned to my prison—why? how? I am trying now to discover what temptation could move me to say to myself,
You are going back to where the danger lies, to understand, or rather to confirm: Is it really dangerous there—at the point of delirium, during that night of violence, when the husband meant to blind you?
It is true that I had barely escaped his rage when I had stated categorically to myself,
It’s my fault! Not that I meant him to do it, but I was wrong not to have foreseen his jealousy!
As if the confession I laid out before him to lessen my own torment had triggered an almost legitimate husband’s rage.
My
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