Desert Divers (10 page)

Michel has concluded his story. His friends remain lying silently on the roof beneath the stars.

Then the silence is unexpectedly broken by Marceline who is with them on the roof, concealed by the dark night.

‘Now let me tell you what really happened,’ she says. ‘I didn’t die in Touggourt, as Michel maintains. I’d had enough. I left him.

‘Michel had married me to please his father. His mother died when he was fifteen and since then he and his father had lived in a very close and confident relationship. To the extent that the son acquired an old-fashioned air about him.

‘He once said he had within him forces “which have retained all their secretive youthfulness”. That was laughable coming from a twenty-five-year-old – but as I was married to him, I was able to refrain from laughing.

‘After the wedding we went straight to his apartment in Paris, where two separate bedrooms were ready for our wedding night. His father’s funeral and the wedding had exhausted Michel, and the honeymoon simply increased his exhaustion. In Tunisia he spat blood, and he arrived in Biskra unconscious. I had hoped to become a mother and found instead I was about to become a widow.

‘That was why I loved the children in Biskra. Michel was angry at first, then more and more interested. To me he said with the conventional rhetoric of love: “Marceline, my wife, my life.” But he didn’t see me, he was looking past me at the Arab boy I had with me, at his tongue which was “rosy pink like a cat’s”, he said as he leant over and touched his narrow shoulder.

‘He never touched me. But it was wonderful to see his will to live come back. He started eating again, he slept by the open window, and he was soon going out for walks with the children.

‘During his entire recovery, he was much occupied with his own body. He sunbathed, exercised, looked at himself in the mirror with pleasure. I often wondered what moved inside him, but it appeared to be something vulnerable he wanted to keep to himself. By respecting his secrets – and even his lies – I hoped I would eventually gain his confidence.

‘Sexually, I was still taboo to him. He appeared to be impotent. But once when I was out riding in a carriage, the driver had drunk rather too much and the horses bolted. Michel was beside himself with rage and thrashed the man, tied him up and took him back to town. More violence than the situation demanded, I thought; but it had an excellent effect on Michel’s manhood. That night I became, as they say, “his”.

‘Perhaps it was that night which Michel always tried to live over again in our life together, though its reflection grew weaker and weaker for every repetition.

‘Nonetheless, I managed to get pregnant. We returned to France and settled on an estate that had belonged to Michel’s mother. Then suddenly he began to react to me like a child to his mother. He didn’t see me as a fellow human being, but as an authority he had to defy, a supervisor he had to escape from.

‘He couldn’t remember his childhood, had never had any youth, and now he was slipping out into the woods night after night to partake in a kind of boyish adventure which would have been criminal if it hadn’t been directed at himself. I pretended not to notice. I was absorbed in the expectation of
the child – until my pregnancy was terminated by a miscarriage.

‘When I was nursing Michel during his illness, I already knew, of course, that I was risking infection. And yet it came as a shock to me when I realized that I also had consumption.

‘Now the tables were turned. Michel nursed me – with a tenderness his sick conscience made hectic and frightening. The more I needed him, the less he needed me. In the middle of his most tender care, he could exclaim: “I loathe compassion. All kinds of infections are concealed inside it. One ought not to feel sympathy for anyone but the strong!”

‘Why shouldn’t “one”? Because all compassion is as false and exaggerated as what Michel was now showing me? Because an unforced natural sympathy can only be aroused by the strong?

‘That certainly isn’t true of every “one”. My own sympathy is aroused to its most irresistible by the frail and the vulnerable.

‘It was because of that I loved Michel, who even in his newly won strength was so frail. I loved precisely what was vulnerable about him, what made him admire strength.

‘“Now I understand your faith,” I said. “Maybe it is beautiful, but it subjugates the weak.”

‘“That’s just as it should be,” he replied swiftly and involuntarily.

‘It was horrible to feel the way he observed not only with “anxiety” but also with “expectation” the way my strength was
fading. Full of consideration, he was forever taking me to new places which would be better for my health. But those exhausting journeys only took me closer to death – which Michel secretly had begun to long for as part of his own liberation.

‘He wanted to go to Biskra. But his return was a terrible disappointment to him.

‘Michel was fifteen when his mother died. That seemed to be a boundary he never crossed. As long as Charles, the bailiff’s son, was fifteen, he interested Michel, but a year later he suddenly seemed foolish, ugly and indifferent.

‘The same with the children in Biskra. Three years ago they had been under fifteen and delightful. Now they were simply repugnant.

‘I begged him to stay in Biskra. He wouldn’t listen. During the journey to Touggourt, he had eyes only for that boy prostitute fawning for his attention. I was a burden he was about to throw off.

‘When he left me in that filthy, fly-blown hotel room and slipped out into the night, with an expression so secretive that it concealed nothing, I had suddenly had enough. I gathered up all my instinct for survival and left him for ever.

‘Was that wrong of me? Could I have saved our marriage?

‘If so, what should I have done? Can you see any possibility I didn’t see?’

No, Marceline, I see no possibility.

I think at best your marriage could have been a mutual
pregnancy. Two people becoming pregnant with each other and finally giving birth to each other.

Some pregnancies last longer than others – the elephant’s and the whale’s. There are marriages which last for decades. But the aim is not to extend the pregnancy at any cost. The aim is that out of inevitable birth pains, two people will rise, each one freer and happier than they could be together.

In your case, there were not two people pregnant, but one. You gave birth to Michel. He could not do the same for you.

‘In Africa and particularly in the Sahara, there are practically no signs of the presence of oil,’ said Gulf’s senior geologist in 1949. Seven years later, oil was gushing from a depth of 3,329 metres in Hassi Messaoud. Since then, the poverty-stricken Sahara has supported Algeria.

The road to Hassi Messaoud is lined with bits of black rubber, the corpses of giant tyres that once bore steel pipes, enormous caterpillar track front-loaders, and bulldozers.

Nearer the oil fields, the road crosses a marshalling yard of black oil pipes half buried in the yellow sand. The actual production area can be made out at a great distance, from the light of vast torches and the smoke rising over the horizon – they are burning off the gas, the pressure of which forces the oil up to the surface.

It is a perverse sight; hot flames against an already overheated sky, brilliant beneath a sun already providing more than enough light.

The town has a small square, with a few quick-growing trees and some concrete benches. The cool winter wind smells of sulphur.

Under a shared metal roof is a row of shop-huts, a small café where they sell a thin brown coffee-like drink and ochre-coloured lemonade, and a little post office where everyone ahead of me is surprised and embarrassed when I take my place at the end of the queue. They solve the problem by leaving. Soon I am at the head of the queue because I am the only one left.

The bookshop is advertising Rabia Ziana’s new novel,
The Impossible Happiness
– an appropriate read for a night at the Hotel C.A.S.H. in Hassi Messaoud.

I crawl through the barbed-wire fence into a house which is at the same time half finished and an abandoned ruin. The barbs catch me. It’s no use closing my eyes. It’s no use covering my eyes. The light penetrates everywhere and so do the barbs.

Then a desert dune drifts in and covers the barbed wire. My lacerated eye sockets fill with flying soft warm sand. It is very pleasant. I was already blind. Now at last I can enjoy it.

André Gide went to North Africa for the first time in 1893. Twelve years earlier, the French had occupied Tunisia. Gide travels in Tunisia without mentioning the occupation. The conquest of Algerian Sahara is at its height. Gide does not mention it. In the occupied oases, military commanders rule like absolute monarchs and the Arab population is kept down with an iron hand. Gide sees nothing.

Others saw. Isabelle Eberhardt saw.

She was in North Africa while Gide was writing
The Immoralist
. She shows in her stories how France takes land from Arab small farmers, forcing them to work for the new French owners – who can’t understand why their farm workers go around with such sly, sullen expressions.

She sees how those who object are taken away in chains to the prison in Tadmit. The guards force them to walk barefoot on the ridge of sharp stones formed between the wheeltracks on the road. ‘With no verdict from the courts, punished by French administrators or local collaborators, with no chance of appeal, they are sent away to years of lonely suffering, with no hope of mercy.’

For Isabelle, like Gide, North Africa is primarily an erotic experience. When she falls in love with a young Tunisian, she leaves everything and goes with him, although he is a tax collector for the French. But her love affair does not stop her from seeing and reacting:

Gide at Biskra, 1893. (
Collection Roger-Viollet, Paris
)

There is no feeling in Gide that the conquest is an outrage. That doesn’t come until the Congo books in the late 1920s. By then Joseph Conrad had taught him to see it.

Conrad and Gide were both in Africa in the early 1890s. Conrad was writing
Heart of Darkness
while Gide was writing
The Immoralist
. They were contemporaries – but it took Gide another thirty years to acquire Conrad’s insight.

In
The Immoralist
, the moral conflict is enacted entirely between the husband Michel and the wife Marceline. The novel trembles with her unspoken reproaches and with his pride and shame when he discovers himself. Gide sees no other conflict.

‘Nietzsche’s small change’ says the
Encyclopédie Universalis
contemptuously of
The Immoralist
.

Gide read Nietzsche, mad with jealousy at finding in him ‘all his most secret thoughts’. An enormous Nietzsche moustache grew on Menalces’ face, which had previously looked like Oscar Wilde’s. It becomes a ‘pirate face’ and is given the famous Nietzschean gaze: ‘a cold flame indicating more courage and determination than goodness.’

Gide, Saint-Exupéry, Vieuchange and Eberhardt – they have all looked into that gaze. All of them dive in after Nietzsche’s small change.

The contempt, however, is unwarranted. Not until the vast wealth of high-flown rhetoric has been cashed into the ordinary small change of a household do we see what it really entails – for me, for you, for all of us.

So what was it actually all about?

Over the moonlit terraces, Meriem comes through the tremendous silence of the night, enveloped in a torn white haik.

‘I am the “beautiful dancer” Michel lives with,’ she says. ‘Though, of course, this is a prettified circumlocution. My little brother Ali and I are prostitutes.

‘Michel asks you: “Have I done wrong? How in that case did the wrong begin?”

‘I reply: the wrong Michel does is naturally not that he wants to be healthy or strong or free. Nor is it that he is homosexual – we North Africans have always taken a more humane view of love between people of the same sex than you in Europe.

‘What is shameful isn’t there – but in the occupation, which makes love into prostitution and shrouds its crimes in myth.

‘Maupassant saw my mother dancing in the Café Joie in Bou Saada. He was one of the first in Europe to spread the rumour about the wonderful wantonness of the Ouled Nail girls: they saved up their dowries by living life’s happy days in the brothels.

‘Similar legends are spread about the prostitutes in
Bangkok, for the same reason. Customers are given a moral alibi. The legends give an illusion of mutual desire to the exploitation of someone else’s poverty.

‘Isabelle Eberhardt was not deceived. In fortunate Bou Saada she wrote: “Never before have I been so well aware as here of the weight that hangs over all the occupied areas.”