Visions of Isabelle (30 page)

"Come on, Eugène. I've had enough of garbage men. They're brutes in bed, and they stink like hell. Make love to me. I crave the embraces of a French officer–the class that hates me and has cast me out."

He complied with pleasure, and when they were finished, she stared up at the peeling ceiling and smoked a cigarette. "Admit it–I confuse you a lot."

"Oh you do, Mouchet, you do, indeed."

"Tell me why."

"I don't know. You're kind and good-natured and you have a marvelous presence. You're full of passion and energy and you're brave when things go wrong. You don't pity yourself, and you do what you want. But the way you live seems so misguided. Of course I'm just a French officer, and in no position to judge, but it seems to me that you're living a romantic illusion of sensation and adventure and self-made myth. What do you really want? If you could tell me, then I think I could help."

"Don't try, Eugène. I'm too fatalistic. That's a classic Russian fault."

"And you're Moslem, too."

"Yes, and so I must submit. That's the great consequence of my faith, you see. I must submit to my destiny, for everything in my life has been written, and there's nothing I can do to change the words."

"But you can't just let life wash you about, as if you were some flotsam on the sea."

"Listen," she said, sitting up on the cot, crossing her legs beneath her, brushing away some loose feathers that escaped from the quilt. "All my life people have told me I'm extreme. But to me only the extreme forms of life are worth living. All the greedy colonialists in Algeria, and their stupid, spoiled society wives, would envy my miserable rags, this wretched garret, the awful food I eat–if they only knew. They'd envy me for the love I have with Slimen–a love completely untainted by any question of advantage–and the way I took possession of the desert, and the way I feel about the wind and the sun and the stars. And they'd envy me most for the way I've let myself be possessed by my life, and have reveled in it more fully than any king ever reveled in his power. Listen–when I think of people in Paris making witticisms in brilliant salons, when I think of them laughing in boxes in the theaters and talking nonsense at spectacular balls, I'm filled with pity for their useless, unfeeling lives, and I crumple the stuff of all their dreams in my fist."

Suddenly she took her cigarette and started to grind it out against the back of her hand. Eugène wanted to stop her, but he found himself paralyzed, fascinated by the horror, and the smile that never left her lips.

"You see–I can enjoy even that." She brushed away the ash and showed him the scar. "Because it's real, and I can feel it. I'd rather be a garbageman in the port of Marseilles than those silly fools in Constantine who mock me even now. I'd rather roll in the gutter than live at the norm. Give me pain or give me ecstasy, but don't ever let me become like my poor ruined brother Augustin. Now do you understand? Do you see it now, Eugène? Do you? Do you understand me now?"

The next morning when he escorted her to the docks for the form-up of the harbor sanitation crews, saw her standing straight and proud in the mob of burly, heavily muscled men, he was still not sure he understood her, but he was no less determined to try.

His last glimpse was of her poised at the square end of a retreating barge, waving at him with a shovel which she held like an ensign above her head.

A
month after Eugène Letord left, Slimen was transferred to a Spahi regiment near Marseilles. Isabelle was done then with the role of "Pierre Mouchet." She threw out the costume of the matelot, left her job and began to walk again in burnoose and boots.

On October the first Slimen was released from the army–earlier than expected on account of ill health. On October 17, 1901, he and Isabelle were legally married in the Hotel de Ville of Marseilles, and, immediately afterward, under Islamic law, in a decrepit carriage house that the Algerian workers on the docks had turned into a mosque.

Isabelle wore the clothes of a European woman, and a tawdry and quickly purchased yellow wig to cover her close-cropped hair. Augustin stood beside her, wincing at the grotesquerie of his sister's garb, while the strange guttural language and the mysterious atmosphere of the mosque made Madeleine afraid.

It was sunny and cool when the four of them walked back to the De Moerder apartment for a wedding feast of grilled bass and a toast of Beaujolais. There were no gifts, but afterward, as she and Slimen walked home, Isabelle stopped at a store and convinced its Corsican proprietor to give her a bottle of absinthe on account.

Back at the
garçonnière
, Slimen was anxious to make love, but Isabelle was solemn, made him sit down, then lit the candles and poured them each a drink.

"It's time to be serious," she said. "No nuptial rites for us."

Slimen swallowed the liqueur, began to unbutton his blouse.

"No, brother–no games tonight. We must talk about the future."

"But, Si Mahmoud–tonight of all the nights..."

"Yes! Tonight! Tonight we begin." She pulled out a batch of papers, spread them out on the cot. "I have great plans. There are books you must read. You're going to apply for a position in the Algerian administration. With my help you'll pass the exam, and then you'll have a career!"

"But, Si Mahmoud..."

"No 'buts.' This isn't just for you. It's for all the Arabs, all our brothers. We're going to show the French that the Arabs can perform. No more useless uprisings in the desert. Arabs must learn to beat the French at their own game. You're going to be an administrator. By following my course you'll take the first step, and no one will ever call you an Arab halfwit again." Her eyes widened. "Look at me, Slimen. You'll be just the first. Others will follow, hundreds, thousands, until you strangle the French with your numbers and your skills. This is how we shall serve Islam, and we start tonight!"

She poured him another drink, drank off a glass herself, scoffed when he protested he was too tired. Roughly, she handed him a list of words.

"Above all else the French respect a man who can talk. You must learn to dazzle them with your language, smother them with your lucidity. First you must learn pronunciation. No more native accents. Start at the top. Say
'Gouverneur Général.
' "

He tried. She laughed. He tried again. She gently slapped his face.

"No, no. Listen to my 'r's, and 'l's. Work up a pompous expression. Let the syllables roll and give a little quiver at the end. Yes–better. But you must
work!"

They worked on through the night, reviving themselves with the bitter searing absinthe until they collapsed in the morning, exhausted, drunk. But she had him up at noon, drilled him more, encouraged, cajoled, showed irritation, anger and disgust. She used all the techniques that Vava had used with her, making him work to please her because only then would she let him rest.

The work went on, every afternoon and night, day after day, until Slimen began to control the words. She did not allow him a free moment, forced him to read aloud to her from Balzac and Montaigne, Descartes and Charles Baudelaire. Though she fell asleep at times when he was reading, she was careful always to face away, and to wake herself every so often to catch him in a fault or compliment him on a well-read line.

They worked hard, hour after hour, until she forgot her misery, thought only of the man she was making of this friendly mediocre boy she'd met in an oasis and told herself she loved. Though she wondered at times if he ever would pass the exam, she kept at him, pleading, correcting, giving complaints and praise, never allowing herself to show her doubts.

They were interrupted only once. In the middle of December, Augustin came bursting in, waving a letter, ranting insanely of betrayal and revenge. Villa Neuve had been sold for thirty thousand francs. This money, all that was left of the Trophimovsky estate, had been distributed in accordance with a formula devised by a Swiss court. After the deduction of all legal fees and other attendant costs, including Vava's debts, their own notes and the interest that had accrued, they were informed by notaire Samuel that each of them owed him sixty francs.

His letter urged them to pay this debt at once. Otherwise, he warned, he would be forced to seek remedy in the courts.

T
he town of Ténès is situated on the Mediterranean coast halfway between Algiers and Oran. When the Slimen Ehnnis arrive by stagecoach on the afternoon of July 7, they are struck at once by the serenity of the place. Cultivated terraces mount the hills. Wild pine forests sweep down to the sea. There are fishing villages along the coast, an old town with ancient ramparts, an occasional Roman ruin, a bucolic sense of peace. They explore until sunset and are well satisfied, but within forty-eight hours Isabelle turns to Slimen and says:

"We are trapped, my brother. This place is a ball of snakes."

And to that he most sadly agrees.

They have come so that Slimen can take up his position as a functionary in the city hall. But Isabelle quickly feels oppressed by a web of small-town gossip, and the sneers and frowns of colonialists' wives. At the market strangers turn to one another and hiss out epithets:

"Wife of an Arab!"

"Russian transvestite!"

"Adventuress!"

The stigma of Behima, the stain upon her name, are still evident, though it has been a year since the trial in Constantine. She shudders at the insults and turns away, fearing less for herself–she can endure the jeers of fools–than for poor Slimen, so unsophisticated in the cruelties of European gossip, so innocent in this nest of petty intrigue.

Oblivious to the stares she struts the streets dressed like a cavalier in snow-white burnoose and her treasured red boots. Preceded by two newly acquired Alsatian dogs, she walks to the beaches, the forests and back into the hills slashed by gorges and cascading streams. The region is beautiful, but reminds her of the Haute-Savoie–it is too rich, belongs to the romantic period of her adolescence when Alpine woods and valleys could move her soul. She recognizes that she is harder now, and craves the Africa of great deserts and dazzling light. She misses the mystery of bewitching Saharan towns which can move her by their savagery and the splendor of their pain.

Slimen has been appointed
Khodja
–the official link between his people and the French. But he is used only as an interpreter, and soon finds he has no function at all.

"You must push for power," she tells him. "Find an injustice, make an issue out of it and create yourself as a political force."

"I must bide my time," he says. "No point in risking a thousand francs a year!"

She looks at him then in wonder, asks herself if all her training for his exams has reduced him to the state of a fearful bureaucrat.

"I detest the way you kowtow to these Philistines," she tells him one day. "Do you think these French officials are important because they wear tight trousers and ridiculous hats?"

"I do my job."

"And you do it much too well."

"It was you who wanted me to be the link."

"The link–yes. Their servant–never!"

In October, when harsh winds blow in from the west, and the people of Ténès turn even more sullen and mean, she finds herself seized by fits of melancholia, and spends long hours brooding on the beach. She feels stifled by the pernicious atmosphere of the town, has trouble sleeping and begins to quarrel with Slimen. He looks back at her without comprehension, proud that he has a job, hurt by her irritation, her dark moods.

"Can't you see," she asks him, "that these French treat you like a fool? They want you to imitate them–which you do–and then they laugh at you behind your back. The more you slobber over them, the harder they laugh. Don't you see?"

"It was you who taught me to imitate."

"Just the pronunciations, my brother–not their high and mighty airs."

"France has the greatest culture in the world."

"Ridiculous!"

"It's true!"

She looks at him hard, can't believe her ears.

"There's nothing sillier," she says, "than an Algerian who apes his masters' manners and leaves behind his Arab soul."

"You brought me this far, Si Mahmoud, and now you're angry that I want to go further on my own. I may have been a savage when you met me, but now I want to become a civilized man."

"Oh," she cries out, "poor beloved savage–you're not becoming civilized. You're becoming a docile little clerk!"

She decides, then, to leave him for a few days, to make a trip to Algiers, where she can be alone and think out the meaning of what she's done.

W
hen her name is announced to Victor Barrucand, editor of
Les Nouvelles
, the only paper in the colony to protest her expulsion the year before–he prepares himself to meet an arrogant Amazon–beautiful, Russian, rich. Instead a pale, slim young woman in a turban and an Arab robe strides into his office and begins to mesmerize him with her nasal, rasping voice. Throughout their interview she leans forward, supporting her head between her fists while her elbows rest upon her knees. She chain-smokes cigarettes and stares at him with piercing hazel eyes which do not waver for a moment, remaining fixed with burning intensity upon his own.