3
Following the success of The Pillar of Salt, Memmi’s second novel, Agar—named after Hagar, Abraham’s non-Jewish concubine, and translated as Strangers—recounts the trials and travails of a mixed marriage between a Tunisian Jewish doctor and his French Catholic wife. Winner of the Prix Fénéon, it was inspired by Memmi’s marriage to Germaine. The novel dramatizes the colonial relationship in a single couple’s lives. The unnamed narrator has recently returned home from his studies in France after several years, now married to Marie, a blond Catholic from Alsace. He has changed, causing friction with his family. Strangers spotlights the couple’s relationship, which proves unable to withstand the clashes that arise due to their deep cultural differences and the attendant social pressures. The selection stages a visceral scene in their conflict near the end of the novel.
We lived like this for another month. Nothing much happened, just details, but they meant a living death.
When I could, anticipating the nervous hurricane that was about to descend upon us, I used to get out of the house. Sometimes she would stare at me and say:
“Nice and easy, isn’t it? When you’ve had enough, off you go . . . to that beastly town where I cannot get away from myself—or from you!”
So then I used to put my things down and just stay, a prisoner too of her solitude.
These escapes of mine moreover brought me nothing. I went down to the town in quest of a face that I could not find. I used to look hard at buildings and not recognize them, like some tourist who must put his questions to a foreign country. And tired out by these long rounds, I used to return more tense, more discouraged than when I set out. And there she was, intact, sarcastic:
“Well, was it a nice walk?”
She made no attempt now to hide her contempt. I didn’t answer, went to my room till the meal was ready.
One Saturday evening we returned from a stroll with my young brother in the town. And once again we were back in our zone of silence, with its rarefied air. We went to the one bed, but we embarked on two different vessels. To forget her presence, to leave the world where she had her being, loud with storms, I took a book—two books, newspapers. When at last I took off my spectacles, the haze before my tired eyes prevented me from seeing her at all.
But I was deceived, and I knew it, for all the precautions I had taken. How to rid myself of her presence, this load on my legs and arms? How to plunge again into reading when the print refused? There we were, stretched out, so close to one another, lying in a stillness so out of tune with the night, and rest, and our sleeping child. This confrontation of our two silences made me grind my teeth.
She was lying on her back, eyes open, her limbs stiff, like some animal awaiting an unknown death. She was steeped in bitterness and my pity began to flow. But how was I to get out of my own isolation which walled her in?
Silence. The tempo of our battle was preparing. Presently she said:
“I did not mean to hurt you. I wasn’t trying to be spiteful.”
She had spoken gently, with concern in her voice, and I felt almost disarmed, sorrowful.
“I’m not angry with you. I can’t stand anything now. Everything bowls me over.”
“What did I say that was so serious?”
“I don’t know—you were ironical, critical, you went on and on.”
“I was amused.”
“No,” I said, hardening. “You were irritated; in the movies, you were furious with the audience, called them ill-behaved, badly brought up.”
Her face darkened as she remembered what had annoyed her:
“Yes, they were whistling and shouting. One couldn’t hear anything.”
“Next you attacked the people drinking on the terrace outside the cafes. You called them guzzlers.”
“I was just astonished to see what they were putting down.”
“It’s their way of celebrating! And then it was the turn of the children: intolerable, you called them, capricious.”
“I pitied their mothers, that was all.”
“Then it was the coarseness and vulgarity of the crowd, and then—”
“Really, it’s nothing to fuss about!”
“Maybe. But I can’t bear it. You won’t understand. Violence isn’t the only thing that destroys; gradual wearing down can do it too. Anyone under such steady erosion would go to pieces. Did you notice how my brother reacted? First he said nothing, then he tried to criticize you; he said you were walking too slowly, stopping too long at shop windows—little things like that. The fact is, he felt he was attacked, so he tried biting back. Well, I’ve been under this shower of arrows ever since married life began! For three years now, everything that I feel, everything I am, has been riddled and turned over.”
She listened to all this, there was more than she could answer. And talking about it somehow eased my soreness. And there, for that evening, the argument might have stopped. But I had been leaving her own suffering lying numbed, and now—she could not help it—it revived:
“I am stifled,” she murmured, “I am hardly alive. I watch every word I say, my gestures, my thoughts. Everything that I say you criticize, see in the unfriendliest light. Often, I admit, I go too far, and this humiliates me but doesn’t help, merely grates on your nerves. But when I live as my natural self, then you find yourself hurt, and I seem an enemy to you, a sort of alien!”
“Living as your natural self! What does that mean? Criticizing my people, calling them uncivilized, coarse and vulgar?”
Suddenly she exploded, her face aflame:
“But they are! There’s not a single one that I care to approach! I don’t like these people and I hate this town! I shall never get used to it, never!”
I had a sense of release, I was almost glad of these insults. My anger could come back now, it was justified.
“So there we are: your real thoughts at last. Well, this town that you hate is my town; I wanted to live in it; these people you don’t like are my people, I am one of them, and when you despise them you’re despising me too.”
“That’s absurd! You don’t belong to them! You’re utterly different!”
“That concerns me. I cannot, I will not desert them, and that’s all.”
It was indeed all. Once again we were making out the impossible inventory. Could I tell her she must stop rejecting what she thought contemptible? Was I to tolerate all through life this contempt for my kin and their kind, for whom I felt answerable?
Why, if we had been borne away a thousand leagues, we would still have our torments on our backs! Was she never to open her mouth again on the subject of my kin, my town, the Mediterranean, the sun, the East, the colonial races and colored peoples—all this world that made me what I was, the very sum of things that divided us?
“And now I would like to sleep,” I declared.
I turned over on my other side, not really for sleep, but as if I was acting a part, knowing very well that we had scarcely begun.
Her sobs, which I was expecting, broke off. The absurd mechanism was getting to work again.
“Oh, I hate them, I hate them! They are savages! I can’t stand their medieval customs, their primitive religion! And they dare to reject me!”
Bitterly she wailed:
“But you think as they think! And as you defend them you become like them! You reject me too!”
Ah, if only I could become like them again! My sorrow is that I am no longer like anyone! I cannot even withstand the self-disgust which she lays bare in me, disgust that fills me, that I approve!
There was no hope, no other way of making her stop, so I shouted louder still:
“Enough! I’m sick of these horrible scenes, sick of this farce!”
It wasn’t exactly what I wanted to say: tragedy would have been nearer the truth!
To my amazement she did stop, then, taken aback, repeated:
“A farce? You say it’s a farce?”
My anger, scarcely up again, stood still; I waited to see what her astonishment would bring. Then up went her hand and whipped down with a sting on my face.
Both of us remained quite still; we were observers of a phenomenon already passed. Probably it had actually taken place, because there we were looking at each other, she with eyes wide, I with burning cheek. We waited. It was true. That was where we had got to. For the first time in our married life we had made use of violence.
She got out of bed and went towards the door. I didn’t move, but then suddenly I was afraid.
“Where are you going?”
She didn’t answer. I yelled: “Where are you going? Answer!”
My yell caught up with her, made her hesitate: but like a somnambulist, she went on walking. I followed her. She wasn’t going anywhere; she reached the bathroom and stood in the middle of the floor.
“Come now,” I said gently; “come to bed.”
The sound of my own voice, the familiar phrase, made unreality shift back a little; for her too I suppose, for at last she broke out into sobs:
“Oh, how I would like to die!”
“Come, hush now; come along.”
“Oh, I am so ashamed! Ashamed!”
I was ashamed too, and not only for being slapped. What did she think of me, to dare such a thing? She sat down on the stool, an unusual position among the glittering nickel and the glaze. And for what nightmare turn, in this theatrical small-hours light, with its hard gleam on every tile?
Ah, this was it. With a fearful break in her voice, without transition, her sobbing turned into a laugh which rang and went echoing through the house, almost empty of furniture.
“Stop!” I implored. “Stop!”
She hiccupped:
“I c-can’t!”
She gathered in her feet and legs in a complete concentration of her body, her shoulders shaking, jerking, as she was heaved by these waves of laughter.
“Stop, or I’ll hit you! I shall beat you!”
Her words could hardly get out of her mouth in the contortions of her face:
“Yes—do—hit me! It will do me—good!”
My teeth were chattering, I was near to raving. I dared not strike, lest I might lose all self-control and go on beating her, beating, then strangle her.
“If you don’t stop, then I’ll go away—leave you by yourself! I feel I’m going mad!”
And I would have gone away, if her laughing fit had not begun to peter out slowly, like a spring losing recoil.
I shivered. She must be cold. I went and fetched a dressing gown and covered her shoulders. She was half dazed and did not interfere.
“Come to bed.”
She tried to get up.
“I can’t; my legs won’t obey me.”
I carried her to the bed. Then, mechanically, I went through the ritual: eased the pillow, covered her over, tucked her in. She no sooner stretched out than her breathing became even and soon I also sank into the same sleep.