Visions of Isabelle (37 page)

Her guard stops, drinks, then dismounts and gives her water. Relief, then, for a minute or two, but after that the pain begins again, the beating down, hard, blinding, which starts a dull thudding tom-tom in her brain. Quarter hour by quarter hour it gets worse, until it takes all her strength to keep from crying aloud.

The next time her guard drinks, he does not bother to dismount but motions for her to walk beside his horse. Then with a gesture that is more weary than mean he pours her ration upon her face. Most of the precious liquid splashes away, and she must dab about desperately with her tongue. She catches little of it, finds salt caked around her lips. She opens her mouth again, squinting at him, whispering a plea for more, but brusquely he motions her back, and then enrages her by a harsh jerk he gives the rope.

They are moving toward the base of the Antar Mountains, through what the French maps call "the Desert of Black Stones." This is a place of uneven rocks that bite into her boots. She keeps her head down, afraid she'll stumble, but raises it often so she'll not miss Desforges if he should look back. What she hadn't realized before is that, winter sun or not, it is one thing to sit on a horse, barely moving, lulled by the animal's gait, holding one's face to any glimmer of a breeze, and quite another to move one's body, take step after step, at a pace set by others, with no choice but to follow or be dragged.
It's the moving that's killing me
, she thinks,
having to move my whole body at every step.
For she knows this law of the desert well: wasted motion means a depletion of moisture, and every movement is agony beneath the sun.

As it rises higher she is struck by an increase in her pain. Now her wrists, her feet, her eyes, her lips, her face and legs and back all ache; an entire torment wracks her body, threatening to make her cry and fall. There is a temptation, then, to call out for Desforges–she's proved her point; surely now she can be released. She knows better–that he has set the terms, and she must meet them or else admit she's Isabelle and not Si Mahmoud.

She turns her face up to the blinding whiteness of the sky, can tell by the position of the sun that it's not yet eleven o'clock. The worst, she knows, is still to come–at least two more hours of marching, finally broken by the midday rest. After that the sun will not give so much pain, but the ground, the stones, the thongs, the rope–they will take their turn.

She decides to divide her punishment into segments, see each one through and decide then how to go on to the next. Maybe this way, she thinks, she'll manage to survive the day. The first segment will last until the shadow of her guard's horse falls directly beneath its belly; the next, at the midday stop. Her skin feels as if it's being ripped away by white-hot solar tongs. She gives up waiting for Desforges to turn, decides to concentrate on the stones beneath her feet. Just then her toe, connecting with a rock, gives violent pain. She hops on one foot, stumbles and a moment later feels the rip of the rope against her wrists. Both shoulders are pulled out hard, stretched until she screams. Her black guard turns, stops his horse, halts and when she's up, starts again.
How compassionate he is
, she thinks, for she knows how little such men care about another's pain.

He gives her water then, poured more carefully than before, and smiling she nods her gratitude. For a moment her guard looks into her face, and then he turns away his eyes. It occurs to her that she may not be presenting a pleasant sight.

By noon, when the sun is directly overhead and her own shadow is concentrated to a moving puddle at her feet, her suffering reaches a new and heightened pitch. Everything is pure pain, and the worst of it is that she cannot lie down and find relief in coma or sleep. She must march on, step after step, or else be dragged and bruised upon the stones. No question now of giving in, crying out for mercy, begging pity and relief. She hasn't even a voice for that, as she learns the second time she falls and tries to call to her guard for a moment of respite. Her black horseman is sleeping in his saddle, lulled by the monotony of the terrain. When the rope goes taut he simply removes his foot from his stirrup and nudges at his horse. Somehow she pulls herself up, then stumbles after him to slacken the rope.

Pulled along now, across a field of pointed stones, her wrists numb, her arms sore, her shoulders wrenched, her lips scalding, blistering, her whole face and head resounding with a beating ache, she searches for some inner power to help her to endure. Other men, she knows, have suffered worse. It takes, she thinks, some kind of mental magic, some interior adjustment to blank out the pain.
I must submerge myself, forget, seek oblivion, become like these rocks, these mountains. I must disappear, bury the part of me that feels, become a thing, a wheel, perhaps, that merely rolls where it is led.

But no matter how she tries she does not know the way to self-annihilation; she doesn't yet possess that mystic power that comes so easily to primitive desert men. She has no notion of how to make herself an unfeeling stone, and it is not possible, she knows, to learn such a thing in a single day. But then, as she falls forward again, this time opening cuts in her knees, a new thought suddenly occurs.

I must try to seek out the pleasure in this pain.
She feels a trickle of warm blood rushing from her knees.
I must begin
, she decides,
by forcing the agony off my face. Smile, smile, laugh if I can
. And at that she manages to let out with a dry unhappy gasp.
Think of ecstasy, think of joy
. She fastens on the torment in her shoulders.
They feel good.
Then, like a litany, she begins a dialogue with herself.
Do my arms feel light? Yes, they feel light. And my shoulders–are they sore? No, they are not sore. My whole body–it's in ecstasy. Oh, God, help me find the pleasure in this unbearable pain. Help me find the will to turn it around. Smile, laugh. Make each step a pleasure. Let the bite of every rock become a sweet caress.

H
er guard unties the rope from his stirrup but leaves her hands bound. Ignoring her eyes, he leads her to the shade of a boulder, drinks, gives her water, helps himself to bread, then breaks up small pieces and puts them one by one between her lips. He says nothing to her, but before he sleeps ties the other end of her rope around his waist. She looks about. The rest of the men are spread in the shade of other boulders in a vast amphitheater of basaltic rocks. Sentries are posted, and she sees Karim resting with the camels beside a well. She doesn't even look for Desforges, doesn't even think of him. Trying to recall the last hour of marching before the halt, she can remember nothing at all.

By mid-afternoon the worst rage of the sun is past. She marches three more hours, smiling the whole time, serene in her accomplishment, her defeat of pain. At the camp her wrists are finally untied and she collapses in a heap.

Later she sits apart, with her hands still pressed together, watching as the men prepare the fires and the food. She eats a little and afterward runs her hands over her face. Her skin is badly scorched, her lips are puffed, the sockets of all her joints are sore. She removes her boots and examines her feet. They are blistered, cut in many places, and the caked blood on her knees is black.

As she is contemplating her wounds, marveling at her martyrdom and the fact that she's survived, a sergeant comes to fetch her to Desforges' tent. Wearily, she replaces her boots, then follows him toward the black hexagon lit up strangely by the fires of the camp.

She stands before the closed black flaps, willing up an anger at this man who has caused her so much pain. In her mind, now, he is more than a man–he is a font of power, absolute, a dark force whose field she can feel even in the cold night desert air. The sergeant opens the flap, she stoops, enters and rises to face her enemy at last.

He inspects her strangely. She watches as his eyes roam her baked-out face, her ruined lips, then search her torn knees and feet.

"You look like you've been barbecued, like a piece of roasted lamb, a
mechoui.
Did you like it?"

His sneer, his vile choice of words, conjures a rush of hate. With all her force she spits into his face.

"Cunt! Whore!"

He slashes at her with the back of his hand. She falls before the blow, and then turns to see him standing above her quivering with rage.

She lowers her eyes, has lost all interest now in meeting his menacing gaze. She feels his hard body come upon her, feels him ripping at her robe. His strong fingers tear at her djellaba, snatch it away to bare her breasts. She turns her head as he takes her on the stony sand with savage strokes. She is conscious of nothing except the image of the sentry outside, a silhouette against the dark wool wall of the tent. When Desforges grinds her down against the rocks, she does not even flinch. She is amazed. It's as if the Desert of Black Stones has made her so hard she's become immune even to annihilation by a lover–a sensation she's always craved.

She spends the night beside him, curled up upon herself against the cold, her back, bruised and marked, in touch with his dark warm skin. He wakes up several times to caress her absently, brush his lips against her neck and cheeks. But it is as if he is not even there. In her numbness, she thinks that nothing is what she is, that love and torment are the same, that pain is good, that submission is conquest, and that he who has tortured her is now her slave.

Before dawn she creeps over his sleeping body, arranges her clothes. When he wakes up she is sitting on his stool, staring down at him, smiling, smoking a cigarette.

"I'll be riding back to Beni-Ounif today," she says.

"You want to leave–now?"

She nods.

"But I can show you action, anything you want."

She shakes her head, pitying him with her smile.

"We can be friends now. Comrades. I respect you. You can sleep with me or outside if you like, as one of the men."

Again she shakes her head.

"Si Mahmoud!"

She grins, reaches for his hand, gives it a hearty shake. "Thank you, Lieutenant Desforges. Thank you for your time and everything else."

Then she stands up and walks out of the tent, down to the fires where she helps herself to coffee and bread.

Awhile later, when she is watering her horse, an armed Berber tribesman appears at her side.

"I am your escort, Si Mahmoud. The lieutenant has ordered me to guide you back."

She nods and a few minutes later they start their trek across the silent Desert of Black Stones toward the camp at Beni-Ounif.

A
few days after her return to Aïn Sefra, Isabelle is summoned to Lyautey's house.

"How did it go?" he asks. "Any interesting adventures?"

"Yes," she replies. "Now I can write about the lives of our soldiers
en marche
. I'm very happy to have had the experience. Thank you."

Lyautey smiles.

"But I'd heard–oh, well..."

"Yes?"

"It's just that I received a report. Nothing important. A small unpleasantness. But since you don't mention it, well..."

She looks at him, sees him searching her face.

"Oh," she says. "That! It's not worth mentioning–a small unpleasantness, as you say."

"It must have been frightful. If I'd known, then of course..."

"Don't even think about it."

"But, my dear, you must have suffered."

"Yes," she says, "but in the end I rather enjoyed it, too."

He shakes his head.

"Poor Si Mahmoud."

They talk awhile longer, about his progress with the Marabouts. There have been some setbacks, but generally he's satisfied.

As she leaves she's struck by a sudden thought: that he might have been behind the entire episode with Desforges, might have set him up as a proxy lover to discipline and seduce her at the same time.

But a moment later she knows this is impossible. Lyautey is too civilized a man. Though he's as ruthless as Sidi Lachmi, and as cunning, he is not the sort to turn upon a friend.

A
t the Foreign Legion canteen in Beni-Ounif, a mixture of infantrymen, Spahis, Camel Corps soldiers and legionnaires have been drinking through the night. They are shouting good-natured insults, boasting of the exploits of their units.

Isabelle sits at a table in the center, dazed by a night of absinthe and several pipes of potent kif. She feels miserable, tired, disappointed with her life. As the brawling becomes louder and the insults of the soldiers more obscene, she suddenly swipes her glass onto the floor.

Someone kicks it away and it breaks against the wall. The brawling continues while she lies with her head upon the table, oblivious, ignored.

At dawn the soldiers disappear. She is alone, asleep, in the smoky room.

I
n the souk at Tirkount everything is dusty and brown: the earth, the clothes of the inhabitants, the pottery they make and sell. Donkeys stand about unfettered. The people crush the sellers. Their bargaining is not intense or shrill; it blends into the hushing wind.