Visions of Isabelle (29 page)

"Read it for yourself."

He breaks the seal, looks at the paper, passes it to her. "What does it mean?"

She glances down, then back into his eyes.

"It means, dear brother, that I have become a pariah–that now I am cast out. The governor-general has seen fit to expel me from Algeria, and all French North African possessions as well. The act of expulsion is final and cannot be appealed. I have forty-eight hours to pack up and leave."

"But why?" he asks.

"They say I'm a troublemaker, but the real reason, Slimen, is that they hate me because I'm different. That's the worst crime of all–to be a vagabond, without a permanent address."

I
n the morning they sell Souf to pay for her passage to Marseilles. Then she sends a telegram to Augustin, asking him to meet her boat. At the ticket office she discovers that only men can travel at the steerage rate. In line she improvises a new name. "Pierre Mouchet, day laborer," she calls herself, savoring the coarseness of this identity which suits her wish to withdraw for a time, to hide.

The crossing is rough, the worst she's known. The winds are ferocious, and the enormous waves make the little ship
Le Berry
tremble on the sea. She finds a curious sort of splendor in the stink of the communal hold, and eloquence in the awful groans of the men. She has the feeling of sinking, losing herself in filth, wallowing in the mud.

In the night she makes her way to the pitching deck, and, standing there with feet spread apart, she screams out her rage at the injustice of her fate.

"For the mob I put on the borrowed mask of the cynic, the debauchee...No one has yet pierced this mask and seen my soul, so much purer than the degradations that please me, allow me to spit upon convention and indulge a strange need to suffer, debase my body...."

Isabelle Eberhardt

Mes Journaliers
,

January 1, 1900

W
hen Eugène Letord arrived in Marseilles in the middle of August 1901, he was struck at once by the humidity and the smell of rotting garbage that littered the streets. He quickly made his way to a tenement at 67 Rue Grignan, where he found a soiled business card attached to an apartment door. "Augustin De Moerder," it read, "Private Lessons in Russian and German."

Admitted to an ugly little drawing room where all the furniture was draped with frayed lace doilies, and a mal-functioning cuckoo clock hung on the wall, he looked for the first time upon Isabelle's brother, a young man of whom he'd heard a great deal and with whom he'd had a brief correspondence some years before.

Eugène was surprised, for Augustin De Moerder bore no resemblance to the handsome, tortured Russian youth he'd pictured in his mind. He found himself facing a balding man with a paunch, uncomfortable in a seedy business suit, patronizing in manner, who seemed, unaccountably, on the verge of rage. Beside him sat his wife, the former Madeleine Joliet, a plain little woman with distant worried eyes and black curls that were waxen and tight.

"Oh, yes," said Augustin, "she stayed here with us awhile, until she found a garret of her own. Really she was impossible–rude, insulting, especially to poor Madeleine. She flicked her cigarettes all over the floor, never helped with the housework and sat around drunk in a horrid tattered sailor suit, calling herself 'Pierre Mouchet.' It was unbelievable. I didn't recognize her; we had nothing in common at all."

"But surely," said Eugène, "she had reason to be depressed. You must know that she was nearly hacked to death by a madman, then expelled, separated from her fiancé."

"Oh, yes, we know all about that. She could hardly speak of anything else. But the more we learned the more clear it became that the whole ugly business was entirely her fault. And I must say we received a rather disagreeable impression of her precious Slimen–the 'fiancé,' as you call him. His letters were practically illiterate, though the way she moaned about him one might have thought he was the Prince of Wales."

"You can't imagine," said Madeleine, "the way she carried on, hanging around Arab cafés, scavenging cigarette butts for kif, then borrowing money from Augustin in the middle of a lesson so she could go out to some bar and drink herself sick. She was absolutely disgusting, and I wasn't the least surprised–all of them in that family were mad, except for Augustin."

They both stared at Eugène to show their outrage, and he stared back, distressed by their lack of sympathy, deeply worried about Isabelle's state of mind. But when he got up to leave, Augustin grabbed at his arm.

"There's something I want you to see," he said, motioning toward a corner and a battered steamer trunk. Augustin threw it open, exposing a mass of papers which he began to grasp up in wild flourishes and fling down upon the floor.

"See! The rubbish of my family! The residue of my crazy stepfather's estate! Look at it! Letters from that crook Samuel, claims by the Russian attorneys, documents of contests, offers of settlement, transcripts of all the hearings at the Court of Vernier. And look! Thousands of francs of unpaid bills! If only we could get our hands on that damn house, we could move out of this hole and live in a decent style. But it's hopeless. You have to be a lawyer to understand it. The whole thing's a spider web that's entangled us all."

"Terrible," said Eugène, retreating from the clutter of molding documents, aghast at the thought that the tropical garden of which he'd heard so much was now reduced to this. "But surely you can salvage something. As I understand it Trophimovsky left you and Isabelle everything he had."

"Salvage something? Do you think I haven't tried? When Isabelle came I talked to her for hours. I had a scheme, you see." His eyes began to enlarge. "We'd borrow enough to go to Russia where we'd confront Vava's widow and come to terms. But she wouldn't listen. She refused. My own sister! She said she didn't care–that she loathed the house and would be just as happy if she never saw a cent: That was the last straw. I had to throw her out!"

A
s Eugène climbed the stairs to Isabelle's attic
garçonnière
, the stink of cat urine made him flinch. She was not in, but her door was unlocked. He pushed it open and looked around.

There were few possessions: a cooking pot and a plate, and over the ratty cot a crude drawing affixed to the wall.
Miserable Eden
, it said. Eugène laughed and sat down.

Some hours later he heard her clumping up the stairs. When she appeared in the doorway, he was certain he'd made a mistake. Then he recognized her, though she was dressed in the filthy costume of a matelot, and her face and hands were black with soot.

"Pierre Mouchet, I presume," he said.

"Eugène!"

Her blackened face burst into a smile. She came to him on the cot, planted a great masculine kiss against his cheek. "So long since I've seen a friend–at last, at last!"

She began at once to peel off her clothes, which she threw into a corner as fast as she could get them off. Without any modesty at all, she stood before him dirty and naked to the waist.

"Look," she said, "look at what they've done."

He stared at her saber scars and shuddered at the marring of her flesh.

"See how angry they are," she said, running her fingers along the ridges on her shoulder and her arm. "This is what comes of going to the desert with a head full of illusions. I thought I'd find freedom–I found madness instead."

She wrapped her arms around herself to cover her nakedness, and he was moved by the pain in her face. She went downstairs to wash, and when she returned she was wearing a burnoose, had a black band wrapped around her forehead and a necklace of desert corals hanging from her neck.

"Now tell me everything," she said. "Tell me first of all about my dearest Slimen."

"He was getting a hard time from his officers for a while, but I spoke to them and now I think things will settle down."

"Poor darling–he doesn't know how to cope with those vicious colonial types."

"The trial was a scandal, as you know. People still talk about it. Your defenders are few, but we're extremely vociferous. There's even been some mention in the press that you were unfairly treated."

"Good! Good! And the transfer?"

"I think it'll happen soon. I've been in touch with a colonel here who's sympathetic. He'll have Slimen transferred to his regiment, and when he comes he'll give you permission to marry. Then, as the wife of a French soldier, you'll be French yourself, the expulsion order will be voided, and you can go back to Algeria again."

"Eugène, you bring me miracles. How good to see a kind face!"

"I went to see your brother this afternoon. He and his wife were hostile. They said some strange things."

"I'm sure they filled your head with tales of my miserable deeds. God, they make me sick–phony-proper, self-righteous, petit bourgeois worms. They're everything Augustin and I used to laugh at and despise. He made a bad marriage, and is horribly changed. You wouldn't believe their bickering–the pettiness in their voices–ugh!"

"So–how do you survive?"

"I have a job. I'm in the sanitation corps. I work on a garbage scow shoveling muck all day long."

"That's horrible! How do you manage with your injured arm?"

"It's a kind of hell, yes, but I enjoy it all the same. They're a few other women, and we work as hard as the men. Everyone's quite kind. Between the stops they share their wine with me. They think I'm a real character because I keep insisting they call me 'Mouchet.'"

She laughed then, put her arm around him, hugged him, rumpled his hair.

"Where, for God's sakes, did you get that name? `Si Mahmoud' was quite adequate, and I rather liked `Nadia' who used to sign all your letters, and `Isabelle' who's nearly forgotten now, beneath all these layers of disguise...."

She laughed again, then explained.

"Si Mahmoud was badly wounded at Behima, Eugène, and for a time it was necessary for him to rest. So Pierre Mouchet came along and took his place. Now let me tell you about Mouchet–he's a real rat, ugly and mean, and a hell of a drunk...."

H
e took her out to a decent restaurant; she asked him a thousand questions about Slimen. He answered them all, but studied her at the same time–she amazed him; he couldn't make her out.

"You know," he said finally, "your whole condition here is too extreme. I don't understand this horrible job."

"Yes, yes, you probably think I'm mad. But really it's what I want–to roll around for a while in the mud. I want to inspire people's disgust. I want them to cross to the other side of the street when they see me. I feel loathed and unhappy, miserable and alone, and I want to proclaim that to the world."

"But nobody cares, except a few friends like me."

"I care," she cried. "I have to do it. And now I know what it's like to be an Arab in French Algeria–to be ridiculed and despised."

"Ah, Pierre–Pierre Mouchet!" He whistled the words to her, as if they were beautiful music that melted his heart.

"It's a good name, isn't it? Of course everyone knows who I am. But it gives them something to talk about. They can go home and tell all their dull friends that they know a Russian girl who was stabbed in the desert, and now wears a sailor suit and calls herself 'Pierre.' What the hell! I told you last year that I'd decided I wouldn't write–that I was going to live my life like a novel, be a passionate character swept about by fate."

"I remember."

"Well this, my dear Eugène, is the blackest of the chapters–the one where the heroine is dumped onto the dung."

T
hat night he spent hours caressing her scars, saddened by the hardness of her manner, her cynicism about life.

"No," she told him proudly, "I'm not cynical at all. The only thing I regret is being deprived of Slimen and my precious Moslem earth. But it doesn't matter. He'll come here soon, we'll get married, and then, when his enlistment expires, we'll go back and try again. I have great plans for him, and every confidence that he'll carry them out. The only thing that bothers me is the speed at which everything rushes by. When I'm having a good time, I always pray that it'll last. But it always seems to pass quickly, and then the whirlwind spins me around again. Why is that, Eugène? Why aren't the great moments long, and the bad ones quick? Why can't it be the other way around?"

She bent over him, planted kisses all over his face, but he lay rigid, deep in thought.

"You're like a camel," she said suddenly, giggling against his chest.

"What?"

"Yes, a camel."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because male camels don't like sex. In the desert there are men who specialize in arousing them. Camel-stimulators. They do things like this."

She reached down and tickled him in a private place. He was furious at the distraction, and amused at the same time.