Visions of Isabelle (8 page)

"What's wrong?" Archivir demanded. "What the hell's so funny?"

"But she–she's–" The words were cut by another convulsion. The girl was wiping tears from her eyes. Her mouth was edged by a rim of foam. The laughter went on, out of control.

"This is preposterous!" Isabelle turned on Archivir.

"Please, both of you, stay calm..."

"Yes Yes! Preposterous! So it is! Indeed it is!" The girl finally stopped laughing, wriggled in her seat.

"Well, what's so funny?" asked Archivir.

"But, my dear, she's so young. So incredibly young. How could you think...? She's nothing but a child." A look of amused pity swept her 'face. "But don't you see what I mean? My God, Rehid, you must be insane. We can't do a thing like that with her. If she isn't still a virgin, then she was when you skewered her last week. Look at her! She's absurd! She looks like a boy! I may be a hard old dyke, but this little piece is not for me."

She smiled again at Isabelle with a combination of pity and scorn. Archivir, too, was looking at her closely. They were both undressing her, deflowering her with their eyes.

"Yes," said Archivir, finally. "Yes. Of course. You're right."

"Well, of course, darling." And then to Isabelle: "Poor child. Can you imagine?"

"Who are you?" Isabelle demanded.

"Now don't be rude, dear. You were still in pigtails when I was fucking Swedish nuns. If anyone should be angry, it should be me. I came here, after all, in excellent faith."

Isabelle looked to Archivir. She could not believe he was allowing this woman to speak to her this way.

"Is this–this creature–is she a whore?"

"How dare you!"

"I think she's a whore. I think you wanted us to do it with a whore!" She was screaming at Archivir, but he looked away.

"Now just a minute, sweetie!"

"Get out!" Isabelle cried, but the girl only settled back and broadened her smile.

"Get her out!" she shouted at Archivir, but he neither moved nor said a word.

The girl was staring at the ceiling, bored. Isabelle saw an expression on Archivir's face that reminded her of Vava on Christmas day. Craftiness and shame–she recognized the combination and felt a terrible disgust well up.

She stood there for a moment waiting for something to change. Nothing changed–the three of them were riveted in a
tableau vivant.
After that there was nothing to say. She left.

O
n the first of May, heartbroken but unbowed, Isabelle Eberhardt went back by herself to the photographer's studio near the Cathedral St. Pierre. In the dressing room she pieced together an eclectic costume from odds and ends: Russian short jacket, Bulgarian blouse, Hindu cummerbund, Bedouin cape. She snatched up a string of Moslem prayer beads and tapped onto her head a ratty Turkish tarboosh. While the photographer set his lamps and prepared the slide, she suddenly jolted him with a stream of oaths in a mélange of all the languages she knew.

"Deceiving bastard! Stinking Turkish swine! Cocksucker! Assfucker! Cuntlicking Levantine worm! Monster! Wretch! Hideous piece of shit!"

The insults toppled out in a venomous stream. When she was done, she pursed her lips, cocked her head and stared off into space with cold derision. She pretended that she was facing a firing squad, determined to go down with honor intact. The moment she heard the shutter click, she waved about at the powder of the flash and instructed Jacques to send the photo to Rehid Bey.

"When you deliver it," she said, "tell him I spit in his eye."

A
week later there was delivered to Villa Neuve a huge box of chocolates bound in ribbons and bows. On a card she found the following words written in a familiar Arabic script: "You are magnificent and I shall always remember you well. Conquer the world! Your admiring Archivir."

She laughed; and then, much later, she wept.

I
n June 1895, depressed by Vava's latest gardening initiatives and still dazed by her adventure with Archivir, Isabelle bought a magazine filled with columns in which lonely persons advertised for lovers and friends. Over a weekend she wrote a score of letters under a variety of assumed names (Sasha, Vera, Eunice, Nadia) and within a month received back her first replies:

Dear Sasha,

I am a middle-aged banker in Hamburg, in an excellent position to give substantial security to an attractive young lady willing to relocate and share her life with me.

It is best to tell you from the start that marriage is out of the question, since I am already married and the father of seven children, including one son who is a certified engineer.

It will be necessary to arrange an interview, someplace equidistant between our residences. May I suggest Darmstadt, which I shall be visiting on a business trip in July? I know a hotel there that provides excellent lodgings. You will, of course, have to travel at your own expense...

Most of the others seemed to follow this line, though some, with bizarre variations, gave Isabelle a chill. An English viscount was searching for a young woman with the manner of a governess and "a strong hand." A fireman in Milan who'd lost his sight in an accident begged her to be his nurse. There was a sailor in the Romanian navy who wanted to learn how to cut women's hair, and a Chinese girl in Warsaw who solicited news of Geneva's "theatrical life." The oddest of them all was from the representative of a group of Bulgarian deaf-mutes who were raising money to establish a Utopian community in Wisconsin in the United States. It seemed to Isabelle that they had been badly misinformed, since they spoke of a tropical climate and of friendly Indians who would take their handicrafts in exchange for food.

These letters gave her the feeling of being a scavenger, a dustman rifling through the garbage of Europe. She was about to throw away the rest, still unopened, when her eyes fastened upon an envelope with an exotic return address. She opened it and found a beautiful letter inside, which she rushed to show to Augustin:

Dear Nadia,

Thank you for your exceedingly pleasant note. As I stated in my ad, I am a young French officer stationed in the Sahara and bored to death. There is no one here I can talk to. The other officers despise the local people, have no sympathy at all for them or any wish to improve the terrible conditions under which they live. I am most disturbed by the plight of the children–there are no doctors, disease is rampant, and most people seem stricken by sores and worms. Yet the doctors in my garrison are unwilling to share their knowledge, and all the men hold these poor people in the highest contempt.

I feel cut off in a way I never dreamed. When my assignment first came through I was looking forward to a life of action and contemplation in the great emptiness of the North African desert. I am from a literate family where music is a way of life. Our home has always been filled with books, but here, besides manuals of gunnery and a few volumes of military history, there is no literature at all–not even a volume of Montaigne. I don't wish to sound bitter about my lot. I know that bitterness is a contemptible state of mind. But I need a companion, even if she is a thousand miles away, who will exchange letters on a fairly regular basis, and will be sympathetic to my plight. I long for a correspondent with whom I can share my doubts about the path I have chosen in life, a young lady who can also keep me informed of the latest music and books.

Please, if you are interested, write me as soon as you can. Tell me about yourself, your family, your studies, your dreams. I promise I shall answer by return post.

Yours sincerely,

Eugène Letord

Augustin agreed that Letord's letter was magnificent and she should answer it at once. Together they burned the other letters, and then, over the signature of "Nadia," she wrote him ten pages about her life.

She also asked him for details about the Sahara, the hardships of the desert people and the process of "pacification" in which she knew, from the newspapers, the French expeditionary force in North Africa was then engaged. Six weeks later she received back a long reply in which he answered all her questions and ended with a paragraph of personal revelation.

I am fascinated, Nadia, by your family. I can tell that you love them, all of them, but to an outsider, your description would seem apt for a chamber of horrors. There seems to be something ghoulish about your brother V., and I feel pity for your mother and all the hardships she must endure. I understand your longing to get away. I volunteered for desert service to escape from a personal unhappiness. It's a long saga but suffice to say it involved my relations with a young lady to whom I was once engaged. I wanted to go as far away as possible. I could not bear to be in a place where the seasons changed. They reminded me of joys I had and would never have again. I wanted dryness, simplicity, an uninhabited land.

Perhaps I thought that the terrible desert heat would finally dry my tears. But, alas, things are not so easily resolved. For the lonelier I become (and it is very lonely here) the more I brood about my unhappy past. Remember this, Nadia–the desert is a place where all one's ghosts reappear in a mirage. In the silent desert nights they come back to haunt one's tent.

Surrounded by Frenchmen deprived of women (a situation that brings out the worst facets of my race) I feel the same sorrow I used to feel at dusk by the banks of the Seine. People crossed the bridges hurrying home from work, people together while I stood alone. And even when I walked with them pretending to have some motive in my stride, I felt a loneliness that here, the place where I've escaped, is doubled and redoubled each lonely night.

Write me more–pages more. I feel most fortunate. I never expected that my pathetic request, hidden in the columns among all those other pleas of unhappy people, would find the eye of one so tender and humane.

Eugène

Dear Eugène:

I am most touched by your letter. It is imperative that we be frank. Only then can we achieve the intimacy we both so clearly need. So I shall write you tonight about an unhappiness of my own, how a violent young man of enormous charm seduced me, lifted me to heights of romantic bliss, and then deceived me as cruelly as any heroine in any story I have ever read. But first let me tell you how I imagined you when I wrote you the first time. Thinking of you, a lonely young French officer stationed in the Sahara, caused me to break out of the firm wrappings of my reserve. I imagined a man tall and lean and deeply tanned by sun, wearing a tan kepi and desert shorts which showed off his strong young legs. I expected, too, a roughness that concealed a poetic nature. I imagined a man who wrote crude verse which he kept hidden beneath his linens in the bottom of his trunk.

Well, we misjudged each other. I can see now that you really are an excellent poet, that poetry is engraved upon your soul. And, my dear Eugène, you have misjudged me, too. I am far less tender than you think, about as soft and feminine as a mountain oak. But enough of that–let me tell you of my own unhappiness.

Isabelle

The correspondence between Isabelle Eberhardt and Eugène Letord grew over the summer months. Each wrote lengthy letters and spent hours on replies. After the first exchange of confidences, she wrote him of the books she'd read, thoughts that flashed through her mind, adventures of which she dreamed. She told him more about her family and introduced him to Augustin who began to enclose notes of his own.

Eugène, in turn, corrected their misconceptions about desert life, but in his minute descriptions of the little settlements he visited, the oases, the inner workings of the Moslem faith, there grew in Isabelle and Augustin a vision even more seductive and exotic than any they had held in the past. Their dreams of escape, which had always centered on the south, were now concentrated on North Africa. Through the eyes of Eugène Letord they felt they knew it well, could feel its dry sun, could taste the acrid water of its closely guarded wells.

With each other now they began to speak more openly of escape. They decided, finally, to write to Letord and solicit his aid. Their letter went unanswered for many weeks. When Letord finally did reply it was not, as they'd assumed, to cut them off, but to apologize for being unable to help.

He'd been transferred to an even more remote garrison, was isolated except for mail which reached him only every other month. He begged them to wait. He felt that the time was not yet right for them, that "Nadia" was still too young to break away and that Augustin must stay with her, not leave her alone in the "evil garden." They wrote back at once expressing their gratitude. They felt, for the first time, that they had an ally in the outside world.