Visions of Isabelle (39 page)

"Need you for important mission. Please meet me in Beni-Ounif."

The cloud of depression in which she's been mired for months quickly falls away. With a new rage to live she throws her clothes into a suitcase, says quick good-byes and travels to Oran to join a troop train bound for the south. She stops a day in Aïn Sefra, sensing a different mood. It is a depot now, a place for tending wounds and sorting troops. There is no more talk of an imminent collapse. Lyautey, who's been made a general, has moved his headquarters to Colomb-Béchar.

Waiting for him at Beni-Ounif she frequents the canteens where she finds the conversation as sophisticated as in Algiers. The officers talk endlessly about the implications of the
entente cordiale,
by which Britain, in return for a free hand in Egypt, has agreed not to interfere with the Moroccan designs of France.

Lyautey arrives a few days later in an elegantly appointed railway car. There are fanfares at the station, an honor guard, the unfurling of his personal ensign. When she meets him finally at the fort, she feels she's being ushered into the presence of a Bonaparte.

"So," she says, looking him up and down, "now you're
General
Lyautey!"

"You like my uniform?"

"Very much."

He smiles. "You'd be surprised at how much difference it makes. Now the Marabouts want to kiss my ring."

She bows, takes his hand, kisses his ring and gives him an ironic look.

"Algiers was boring. I missed the war."

"Cities are bad for you, Si Mahmoud. You need the desert–you really don't look well at all."

"I know. It was a bad time for me. But never mind about that. Tell me about yourself."

"Bou-Amama is quiet, and pacification is going well. Right now I'm considering another 'frontier correction' at Berguent."

"May I wire Barrucand?"

"Absolutely not! The foreign minister will be down here personally to hang me from a tree."

"So–you are really softening Morocco up."

"It's only a matter of time." Then he shakes his head. "Still, I wonder sometimes. These people give us no quarter, but when we finally tame them, I shall feel sad and maybe a little ashamed. They're so magnificent in their barbarism. They have the passion of wild stallions, and when we seize Morocco–as I'm sure we shall–I hate to think that all of that will end."

"Don't worry," she says. "In a hundred years the European conquest will be forgotten. On this desert only Islam can survive."

"Ah, Si Mahmoud, you always have an answer. You help me because you love adventure, but you don't believe at all in the French cause."

She laughs. "How well you understand me."

"But you're not a hypocrite."

"No. And this time I've come a long way to help. I hope this mission you have for me is interesting."

"It is. About twenty kilometers west of Béchar there's a holy town–Kenadsa. It's built around a monastery of the Ziania sect. The Marabout, Sidi Brahim Ould Mohamed, is an extremely powerful sheik whose influence extends to Fez."

"I've heard of him."

"I was sure you had. But he's no ordinary tribal Marabout. No, Si Mahmoud–this man is a completely different experience, a Moroccan first of all–and they're a different breed. A deeply devout and truly mystical man. It's not possible to put on a banquet, call in some musicians and expect him to be impressed."

"You want me to talk to him?"

"Yes. But your dealings with the others were mere rehearsals. I want you to go to his monastery as Si Mahmoud, a Tunisian student searching for enlightenment and spiritual truth. He'll be expecting you–my people will see to that. No question, of course, of fooling him with the disguise. He'll know who you are and that you've been sent by me. But you will both act out the pretense. You can expect to stay with him for weeks, even months, and it's possible you may rarely speak. I ask nothing more than that you study the character of this man. Then you can advise me at the proper time."

"I take it he's important to you."

Lyautey nods. "With him I could stabilize the south and move on to other things. Without him I tie up nearly all my men. But neither of us is ready for the other yet. When we are, Si Mahmoud, I want to know who I'm dealing with, and I want you to help me make all the meanings clear."

"You realize," she says, after lighting up her pipe, "that you're giving me the opportunity of my life."

"I'd hoped you'd see it that way. That's one reason I called you. Another is that there's no one else. Think of it, Si Mahmoud–I'm sending you to spend the summer in a holy place where you need think of nothing but Sufism and religious truth."

On her way out of his quarters she gasps with delight. Suddenly there are possibilities, an adventure that will take her to the heart of Islam.
And
, she thinks,
with luck I may find tranquility and peace.

W
ith a Spahi scout as guide she passes through the gorges of Ben-Zireg, black arid gullies screaming with flies. The hills on either side are sharp as saw's teeth, but after Hassi-el-Haouari the stones end, and the metallic basalt gives way to a sinuous caressing terrain of red dunes.

Here the heat is even more intense than on the infamous Desert of Black Stones. After hours of staring at an oscillating horizon, she is relieved to see a stripe of blue mirroring the sun. But riding closer she discovers it's only a mirage mocking at her thirst.

It takes her five days to reach Colomb-Béchar. She rests and then begins the trek to Kenadsa, guided by a tall black slave named Embarek, sent by the monastery as a courtesy to an honored guest. They leave before dawn and after several hours mount a small hill strewn with chips of flint and slate. There, spread before them, wrapped in a pinkish haze, is Kenadsa, holy city, Moroccan and unknown, marked by a crumbling minaret.

Descending from the dunes they move into a vast cemetery. This is her welcome to the dusty brown mud town, closed upon itself, untouched, offering no compromise to the traveler coming from the sand.

They pass through gates to a small square where women flutter away like nuns and a few squatting men look grudgingly up. They enter the walls of the ksar, move through the winding passages of the Jewish mellah, and then into a labyrinth toward the mysterious monastic ancient heart.

She feels a building up of tension as they pass beneath covered alleyways, a sense that there is something that will change her life at the center of this maze.

Finally they dismount, enter the monastery by an ordinary door, and once inside she is immediately suffused by an impression of otherworldliness and peace. Several gentle, mute slaves armed with curved daggers, moving with a refinement that suggests an elegant culture of the past, lead her to a chamber where a gigantic black man approaches to kiss the cords that bind her turban to her head. He leads her, in turn, through an empty silent courtyard to a small cell-like room where a rug is spread, perfumed water is poured upon her hands, she is served with coffee and left by herself to rest.

When she opens her eyes she finds Sidi Brahim watching her carefully from another corner of the room. She is struck by his aura of health and strength. He is vigorous, middle-aged, with a strong Berber face framed by a graying beard. His clothes are pure white, and when he speaks, she notices his Moroccan lisp. As he asks discreet questions about her journey, she feels him measuring her with a kindness she cannot resist. He welcomes her to his monastery and then withdraws, suggesting she refresh herself with a walk in the garden and then a long night's sleep.

D
ays pass and she falls into a languorous life, observing the people who live in the
zaouïa
, watching the work in the granaries, enjoying the calm rhythms of this paradise where life flows gently and time stands still. She meets with Sidi Brahim every day, listens as he explains that the Sufistic mystery, the attainment of vision, is not some trick that can be quickly taught. It can only come through a long process of silent meditation which in time will lead her to the ecstatic moment when she will rend the veil that separates herself from God.

This veil, which alternates in her thoughts between a soft mist with the opacity of smoke, and a thin membrane which can be split by a single insightful slash, becomes, as she ponders it, a compelling mystery whose solution she hopes will finally free her from her pain. It is the cloud of confusion that surrounds her life–the mystery that has driven her for so many years to take refuge in disguise. She must pierce this taut fabric, tear it away, for she knows that if she can see the face of God she will also, in that instant, see herself.

She explains her need to Sidi Brahim who hears her with sympathy, then tells her she has a long road to traverse.

"You
will
see God, Si Mahmoud–one day you will see Him, and then you will understand everything about yourself with all the clarity you dream. It's possible, for a moment, the ecstasy is sublime, and the insight will never fade. Come–come to the window."

He leads her to a slit looking down upon a courtyard. Men are unloading bags from donkeys' backs.

"Do you see that man?" He points to an old man staggering under a heavy sack of grain. "He came as a novice in my father's time, the wandering son of a great family in Meknes. And he's remained here ever since, learning, working, striving for the vision that will give him peace. He's a great man, perhaps a saint, though no one knows that he is. He's been silent for thirty years."

She peers closely now. He moves like a peasant, with a graceful blend of resignation and strength.

"Look at his face. Make your face like his, Si Mahmoud, and you will be happy. God is in him and he is rid of nearly everything else."

"How? How do I change my face?"

"You must begin by purifying yourself."

T
ime seems to stand still. She rises, eats, walks, thinks and sleeps in a cell with a slave lying before the door. Very quickly Lyautey and the practical world he represents become lost in the meditations that consume her days. He and Sidi Brahim are totally opposed, the one concerned with conquest, power, manipulating men, the other with the nature of being, submission to destiny and fate.

One day she receives an urgent summons to Sidi Brahim's room. This is the only time he speaks to her of anything but the road to spiritual insight. He greets her with trembling hands and an agonized face, hands her a letter and watches as she reads. It is from a Marabout in Fez and tells of the murder of another sheik.

"Our lands," he says to her, when she hands him the letter back, "are convulsed by hate. With honest holy men being killed by fanatics, and impostors like Bou-Amama inciting ignorant hordes, I doubt that Morocco can long survive. The infidels will conquer us, and if that is our destiny then we must submit."

Is this
, she wonders,
his way of telling me that he is willing to cooperate with the French?
It is too delicate a point, and she hesitates to ask. She looks at Sidi Brahim and lowers her eyes to show her compassion for his pain.

W
eeks pass and she receives his permission to leave the monastery to explore the town and the surrounding dunes. She wanders the Jewish quarter, discovers a place where kif smokers congregate to share their fantasies and dreams. She learns about a mystical place, a dune named Barga that dominates the town, where the colors are like a kif dream, and where, in a cell carved out of rock, there lives an "illuminated one"–a man with an emaciated body and a burned-out face who continuously murmurs certain mystical invocations which have held him in a state of ecstasy for twenty years. She peers into the face of this Saharan hermit, sees a look she knows from the portals of Gothic cathedrals in France–a gaze of joy at having seen eternity, a sight from which there is no return to earthly things.

That night, returning to her cell, she spends hours pondering the meaning of her life. She has a wish now to stop the war inside, the struggle between sensuality and stoicism, the longing for adventure, the strange obsession with disguise and erotic pain. The calm of Kenadsa has softened the tempest, and she longs to become, as Sidi Brahim has advised, a still cool lake, deep and clear, reflecting truth.

It seems to her that she has been wandering all her life in search of something that she can only find within–that the force that has pulled her down so many roads has only diverted her from this journey she must make into herself. It is time, she thinks, to live in stillness, away from corporal pleasures, away from kif and alcohol and sex. No point in using intoxicants to relieve the pain–it must be faced and pierced, just as she passed through the physical agony when she marched across the Desert of Black Stones.

I
n the middle of August fever strikes her. It is malaria again, but with a new force–more virulent and withering than before. It ravages, convulses, then subsides, only to reappear a week later, and send her to her bed where she alternates between heat and chill with a frightening rapidity that leaves her weakened, awaiting the next attack. During shivering, perspiring, delirious nights, she loses her sense of time, often waking to find Sidi Brahim's soothing presence by her side. He speaks to her, whispers encouragement, and his words are like a cool hand upon her burning face.