Visions of Isabelle (14 page)

"Khadidja."

"Well, Khadidja–is this house for rent?"

The old maid nods her head.

"In that case I should like to look about."

Khadidja shows her through a maze that puts the intricacies of the medina to shame. She is led through a labyrinth of passageways, then a series of interlocking rooms, all decorated with old Andalusian tiles, and plaster cut with intricate Arabic texts. At one point, when they enter a hall without windows, Khadidja takes her hand, leads her to a high-ceilinged octagonal room whose walls are embedded with rusting mirrors. From here they make their way up a spiral stairs, climbing finally to a great domed room in the turret where she finds stained cushions placed along the walls, a table and a row of arched windows overlooking the town. She goes to them, stares down at the sunlit ruins.

"What a fantastic place! I must see the owner at once."

Khadidja directs her to a bank which has seized the house in lieu of an unpaid debt. Its manager, a stylish young Frenchman named Pierre, at first tries to discourage her from taking the place.

"The rent is extravagant," he warns, "and the house is absolutely huge. It's really ridiculous if you're going to live alone."

"Irrelevant," she says. "I've come here to be a writer. If I can work in that tower room, then I may make myself a fortune, in which case the size and the cost won't matter to me at all."

Pierre is delighted with her, orders the lease drawn and quickly establishes himself as her friend.

"You'll love Tunis. It's perfect for a writer–one of the great places in the world. Here you can bring your fantasies to life. Nothing's forbidden; anything can be arranged."

"But I hear all these awful stories..."

"Don't listen! Tunis is a city of love. Only the prudes find it scandalous. The great gift of Tunis, you see, is the way that it shows their true natures to men. You can be sure that those who detest it are the ones who fear what they find here within themselves."

"Has it helped you, then?"

He looks at her, lowers his voice, confides.

"Yes, I found myself, and my own form of love. They call it 'the love that dares not speak its name' in Europe, but here it is quite acceptable, sometimes even admired."

His own special tastes are so deviant and bizarre they startle her. He lives, he tells her, in a delightful villa where he keeps a gracious garden and two large Dalmatian dogs. The dogs and flowers are his passion. At night he likes to dress himself in polka-dot clothing, paint black and white spots on his face and, with his canine friends, sneak about his neighborhood stealing exotic plants. Then, laden with booty, but still steamy from the risk of the chase, he returns home for an erotic romp with his dogs who glaze him sensuously with their tongues.

"I don't believe you," Isabelle screams, howling with giggles. "Impossible! You've made it up!"

Pierre raises his finger. "Ah," he says. "The vices of Tunis–they are magnificent, and without end."

They are all exhibited nightly, she learns, in a quarter near the old Roman slaves' prison and the cemetery by the gate called Bab El Gorjani. Pierre takes her there the next evening to watch the parade of the prostitutes. She marvels at the carnal pacing and the seductive gestures that sweep up sailors from a dozen lands into brothels for the night.

Pierre shows her little side streets choked with boys for sale. Some are mere children, ten and eleven years old.

"Luscious flesh," says the Frenchman, dabbing with his tongue at the corner of his mouth, "but too dangerous for me–they're nearly all diseased. Tunis," he continues, "is
cornucopia sexualis
. The Englishman who likes to be whipped, and the Russian who likes to whip. Japanese girl, Persian boy, Siamese cat. All three orifices satisfied at once.

"I've prowled here often and seen many strange things. Amateurs, noblemen, sometimes, or millionaires offer themselves to the meanest trash on the street. They take a sailor's coins, and then, at dawn, throw them to the beggars. But a man who likes women must watch out for transvestites–those fiendish boys will seduce him with phony female guile, then, later, in a pitch-dark room–it'll be too late–they'll have his ass!

"Fortunately that's not my problem, though I was once tricked by a maiden I'd mistaken for a rough street boy. Her ass was sweet, but when I grabbed 'round front–nothing! We fought furiously over the money, then settled for half, which, as far as I was concerned, was all I'd got. Later I learned she was a Scottish marchioness. She'd come here to study the art of strumpetry which she hoped to practice back in London, in the style of Catherine Walters–whom, I believe, she referred to as `Skittles'."

Pierre looks around.

"The pandemonium here is about to crest, but, unfortunately, I must leave. Take care little sparrow–you look so innocent. There is love for you in Bab El Gorjani–I'm sure of it. But beware of evil."

I
nstalled in the old Turkish house she quickly makes friends with the dog. Since he has no name she calls him "Dédale," appropriately, she thinks, for the creature seems quite happy in her palatial maze.

She also befriends Khadidja whom she presents with a new djellaba, a bottle of perfume and other lavish gifts. Then she gives her instructions.

"If anyone should call at the door and ask you who I am, you are to repeat exactly the following words: `Mademoiselle Eberhardt is a Russian Moslem, and she devotes herself to literature'."

Khadidja practices the phrase several times, then wanders off. But whenever Isabelle meets her in a corridor, or on the stairs, she repeats it with a solemn face.

Determined to be a writer, she tries hard to capture the experience of kif. But it is beyond her reach–she realizes she does not yet have the skills. Looking for inspiration she buries herself in her books: Loti, Nadsón, the Russian classics of her youth. And when these provide her with nothing she turns to the journals of the brothers Goncourt, if only to savor the essence of the literary life.

If I'm successful,
she thinks,
my future is assured. I'll earn a fortune with my pen, and join the Bront
ë
s and George Sand in the elite sisterhood of literature.

Knowing she must work, but discovering not a single idea for a story in her head, she forces upon herself a vast literary project, a series of tales about the destroyed people of Tunis–the beggars, cripples, lepers, syphilitics, dwarfs and other deformed specimens she knows so well from her marches through the town. Though before she has gone to great lengths to avoid them, crossing streets, darting down alleys, doing anything possible to escape their wails, she resolves now to make a point of hovering near, hoping that by wallowing in their foulness she may somehow learn to relinquish her disgust.

She tries a story, modeling her style on Loti, then shows the draft to Pierre. He reads it, and abruptly throws it down.

"No, Isabelle–no! You must forget about other writers. Walk, ride, explore until you have something to say."

He gives her a little book by an obscure author named André Gide. It is called
Les Nourritures Terrestres
, and she dips into it many times, feeling that it has been written especially for her.

This book, which urges its readers to sever themselves from all restraints, satisfy all cravings and live at fever pitch, implies that nothing can really be learned from books, even from
Les Nourritures Terrestres.
Watching the sun rise through the arches of her tower bedroom, she recalls an admonition from Gide's
Envoi
: "Throw away my book. Tell yourself it is but one of the thousand ways of confronting life, and seek out your own."

Seized, after a night of warring thoughts, by a new confidence that comes with the dawn, she takes the book, and the rest of her library as well, packs them up, rents a horse and rides out to Carthage where, from a high cliff, she flings them all into the sea.

"Now I am done with books," she says aloud. "I shall live my life and I shall write only of my adventures and myself."

B
ut if she is to seek inspiration in the streets, she has a problem, for though she speaks the language, is Moslem and even looks something like a boy, she is still a European woman in an Arab town. There is only one solution and she seizes upon it:
disguise
.

It becomes her passion, for it seems the only way she can fully penetrate the forbidden Arab world so dominated by men. Thinking of how she used to dress up for Archivir's photographer, she smiles and shakes her head. It is one thing to cut her hair short and wear men's clothes. It is quite another, she knows, to actually pass herself off as an adolescent boy.

This requires more than the affectation of male qualities. It requires their subtle display, a certain way of walking and standing still, of perching on the steps of a mosque, of holding a cigarette and hoisting a glass of tea.

The first few times she tries it, she fears the consequences if someone should see through her charade. But gradually she realizes she's in a land where she can have things both ways: from those who accept her as a boy she receives the insights she requires, and from those who realize she is not, she receives acceptance, too, on account of the polite Arab convention that one accepts a man on the terms he sets himself.

She begins, then, to do strange things, even to chance discovery by wrestling with boys on the streets. She tries to put herself in situations where bizarre adventures will occur. She rides about on a horse with a cigarette dangling from her lips, hoping to set off a confrontation or a fight. And there does come a moment one day when she wriggles with fear–in conversation at a café with another youth who suddenly suggests they relieve themselves in each other's ass.

When, finally, despite all her provocations, she still has no ideas for stories, and is about to give up looking for experiences in the streets, a strange adventure unexpectedly occurs. Recalling it later, she gives it a name: "The Incident of the Red Boots."

I
t begins one night when she's resting in her tower, staring at candles she's set up all around. She moves to the windows and peers out at the full moon–African, brilliant, washed at its center by a small drift of clouds. She stares out at the cemetery of Bab Menara, bathed in silvery light, then looks down at the ruins below her house where she sees a young man, wrapped in a white burnoose, sitting still as a statue, silent as a ghost.

And then, as she watches, he begins to sing a mournful Andalusian ballad that reaches her as if it comes from within a cave. When the song is finished, the figure glides softly into the ruins, then disappears behind a broken wall. She waits a long time for him to reappear at its other side, but he does not, seems simply to vanish in the night.

The next morning she asks Khadidja if she heard the young man sing. When she nods, Isabelle asks who he is. The old maid shakes her head.

"No one can know," she says, and then, in a trembling voice, "no one but God, of course."

T
hat evening Isabelle walks to Bab El Gorjani, and after an hour or so of inspecting the love market, she turns into a café to rest.

The place is not familiar to her–there is a certain roughness about the clientele, and a terrible aroma, too, that issues from the armpits of a band of Spanish sailors, mingles with the kif smoke and the smell of burning paraffin, and threatens to make her sick. She feels menace in the café–flickering candles, strange sounds, looming bodies, erotic parade outside–and is about to leave when a boy brings her a glass of tea. She feels better the moment she sips, orders kif, stuffs her pipe, and settles back on the mats to dream.

After a while all menace is diffused. The stink of the Spaniards turns earthy, the candles tint everything with a golden glow. Isabelle begins to slip into a haze when she is seized by a sensation that she's being watched. Slowly she turns to meet the gaze of a thin high-cheeked youth whom she recognizes as the boy who sang beneath her house.

Their eyes lock. Isabelle smiles and then he subtly purses his lips. Someone in the café produces a guitar, and the Spanish sailors begin to sing. A Sicilian woman snaps her fingers. One of the sailors ties knives to the feet of a stool, while another strips off his shirt to make a cape.

Both of them are smiling now. Then the youth toasts her with his glass of tea. She raises her own glass, and, with her other hand, makes an elaborate gesture, a delicate rendition of flowing water, a desert greeting as she imagines it would be made by characters in the Arabian Nights.

The Spaniards now are lunging with the knife-legged stool, playing
toro
and
torero
to everyone's delight. Isabelle watches, and when she turns again the young man is no longer there. She dashes to the door, looks up and down the street. A matelot with filthy pompon lumbers by, stops, backtracks, then huddles with a prostitute beneath an arch. Someone in a room above pulls a curtain, and for a moment a shaft of light falls upon the pair. Isabelle peers around–the boy has vanished again.

Wondering then if he really was her singer, or merely a hallucination induced by kif, she wanders back through the alleys, finding her way by familiar sounds, the squeak of a public pump, the tune of a wheel turning before a sewer cascade.