Free So Vast the Prison by Assia Djebar

excitement, and had died slowly for lack of air, long before my present suffering began to run its arid course.
    Another month taken up by the same uncertainty and its accompanying exhaustion went by. Spring made a chilly start in the city; violent downpours left the landscape sparkling afterward with a translucent light like infinite dawn.
    I walked constantly, feeling myself travel from stage to stage of endless insomnia. Every now and then some remark by a friend or a relative would rip through my emptiness:
    “Your eyes are glistening!”
    “You are sad, thinner!”
    “You always seem to be somewhere else!”
    I heard myself with my little girl, laughing long and hard the way we did before. We still kept secrets, sometimes at night and sometimes when we took short walks in the nearby park.
    But I would suddenly wake up in the middle of the night; a dark, knotty dream—though I could not remember it—kept on dumping me into the swells … To calm down and go back to sleep more peacefully, I told myself, as if I were both the storyteller and the child who needed to be settled down: “Tomorrow, surely, I’ll run into him! … and suddenly stopping his car, interrupting my walk through thecrowd, he will come up to me politely: ‘You are so tired, I’ll come with you!’ Tomorrow, for sure.” And I would go back to sleep feeling sorry for myself, in my constant walking through the city, in my despair. “Tomorrow, for sure!” As I gradually fell back asleep, I thought that I was becoming my own little girl!
    I resumed my hours of work at the Bibliothèque nationale. Sometimes I would go there humming the popular laments of Abou Madyan, the saint of Béjaia: melodies that were melancholy and tender, snatches of which, when I was a child, my sweet, sad, maternal aunt used to teach me … Then, as if I were looking for something to give me pain, I would abandon the research I had planned. With my aunt’s voice in my ear I would plunge in, seeking some faint secret, some calming water; I ardently went through the chronicles of the luminous Maghrebian and Andalusian twelfth century:
    “On that day,” I read, “the sheik mounted his horse and ordered me, as well as one of my companions, to follow him to Almontaler, a mountain in the region surrounding Seville. Following the afternoon prayer, the sheik suggested that we return to the city. He mounted his horse and set out while I walked beside him holding on to the stirrup. Along the way he told me about the virtues and miracles of Abou Madyan.
    “As for myself, I never took my eyes off him, I was so absorbed by what he was saying that I completely forgot my surroundings. Suddenly he looked at me and smiled; then, spurring on his horse, he quickened the pace and I hastened my step to keep up with him. Finally he stopped and said to me, ‘Look what you have left behind you!’ Turning around I saw that the entire path we had traversed was nothing but brambles that came half-way up my body.”
    Gripped by Ibn ’Arabi’s tale describing his adolescence and the years of his mystical education in Andalusia, I saw in precise detail hisroute—lit with passion—as it led him toward Seville. I imagined the sheik Abou Yacoub Youssef, one of Abou Madyan’s closest disciples, on horseback, and Mahieddine Ibn ’Arabi running along holding on to the stirrup, and seeing none of the brambles in the path because he was so intoxicated by the account of the saint’s graces.
    It was this mystical poet from Béjaia whom generations of Maghrebian women—my aunt and my mother its most recent link—passed on with their saddened voices, like a last whiff of the fragrance that was so fresh and green that day, on the road to Seville, where the Sufi master on horseback, despite the thorns on the path, initiated a young man who was already predestined.
    I left the library and found myself back on the circular boulevard along the heights of the city. Of all this contemporary