Maiden Voyages (49 page)

By 4
A
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M
. our hard-headed progeny, young Mr. I Know Best, was vomiting and feverish. The steep morning’s climb to the Assekrem, on a side away from the automobile track, too much for us two and the camels, was made without that charter member of the Stalwarts and Indefatigables too. He couldn’t even get to his feet when Entayent led us two Wise Ones, on foot, up the long rocky canyon, rising more and more steeply only to arrive at a corkscrew mechbeg—a path of sorts or
tracery thereof worn by passage of feet and hooves—about half a mile’s worth, which would bring us if we made it to a saddle between peaks not much less imposing than the Assekrem itself. We made it, at a pace that must have tried Entayent’s powers of metaphor—could a snail, a slug, could any living thing be less adept in that situation?—one of us creeping because bumble-footed, the other imploring the sky, as good as clawing at it for breath, for any tiniest part of a breath, anything at all to keep the machine going. I sat, I rested, I resumed, over and over. Entayent was silent and very patient. At last he pointed up ahead to where we must wait. They would bring our poor ailing son; would be back in an hour or so. So he left us, to walk the long way back down and do it all again.

Jeepers had to walk it too, it was too steep for any riding, and he looked about ready for the vultures to feed on when he and the caravan reached us. At least down the other side and for the rest of the day he could be carried by his camel; not that such descents make for the ideal sickbed, in fact they could be taken for the ultimate one in full feverish fantasy and he may well have wondered at moments that day if it wasn’t such a figment, rocks, camels, mountains, parents, wife and all. He could scarcely have failed to read or hear that people have been known to go out of their minds, as often as to die, from sunstroke in those parts. But he didn’t fall off or say anything peculiar, that last no doubt because he was past speaking at all; just had a second bad night of it.

We meet up with the hikers, don’t hear anything very edifying about where they have been, have lunch, proceed again a while on foot, this time for a mile or two on the upper reaches of the car track. A Landrover full of goggle-eyed French tourists, aiming to spend the night at the hostelry near Père de Foucauld’s little chapel, stops; apparently the occupants are feeling the need to hear another human voice, outside their own vehicle. Actually they seem to be taking us for an hallucination, something impossible to account for, until our camels plod into sight around the bend below. On monte beaucoup, on descend beaucoup; never was truer word, and now I am groveling once more, begging for my great white wooly beautiful Betsey to be stopped and ordered to her knees again for me because I am simply not going to make it over that next crest even though the footing is good and it’s no more than
a hundred yards off. At home we have left two very close and dear friends dying of emphysema, one in New York, one in San Diego; there will be a last visit with one, a last phone call with the other, on our return.

It’s too cold, our livingroom arrangement is not warming nor particularly welcoming that evening although we have put on every warm garment we have. I sit on the pad beside Emma who offers to share her large woolen cape with me, and that’s when I pull out the cigarette and say, without paying them much mind, the words I would briefly recall at the bar in Tam an aeon or so later,
The first of the day and the last of my life
. Emma did make the climb to the Assekrem, once again mirabile dictu. We three who missed it will be more aware later of how fantastic, from say a travel columnist’s point of view, it is to have gone that far and been that close and not seen the one place within hundreds of miles that anybody who ever gave a thought to the region has heard about; plenty go for nothing else, or at least nothing they can or care to name. And I’ll admit I’d just as soon be able to prattle about having seen that marvelous view, I mean panorama, or in some circles, vista. I’ve seen pictures, some very good ones, and could lie about it but I guess I won’t, there were too many witnesses. There may be other peaks in the world that can rival it but at that level of hyperbole you don’t go picking at degrees, or talking about how nice it might be on some other planet either. This one is good enough for anybody and a little of it goes a long way; we don’t need a 360 degree outlook as far as eye can see every day, or any day, but once in a blue moon, why not, if you can swing it. For the rest of the attraction up there, our friends who did make the climb so did their duty by the sight that day don’t seem to have gotten any great spiritual kick from the priest’s role in it; which is not to cast any slur on him at all. It is just a speck, worth noticing, in the general phenomenon of who goes where why in our avid and memoryless, so always unsated, time; who is compiling the attractions; who is falling for them.

That Father de Foucauld, among whose ex personae were the high-living young army officer and for seven years the Trappist monk, didn’t go often or ever stay very long up in that eyrie, while true, in some quarters is made to sound a bit derogatory. A monk of the order called
the White Fathers, who was showing visitors around the site in 1975, is quoted by Frison-Roche as saying that the holy hero, hermit and notorious ascetic, used to go there only to escape the ghastly summer heat in Tam. The remark was perhaps not as jaundiced as it sounds, or could reflect an inkling of some inter-fraternal spat or spite not worthy of the holy life but not unknown to it just the same. The White Fathers, established well before his time, with an Algerian base far north of there, seem to have been always hospitable to the far more fanatical Foucauld, and admiring of him, but the order he failed to get started in his lifetime and which grew up subsequently according to his precepts or example, is the Little Brothers of Jesus; a corresponding female order followed the same chronology.

As to the Assekrem, we would hear a similar implication, of some spiritual credit not warranted, from the same character who wanted the prehistoric art works thereabouts to be fakes. Denigrating anything widely appreciated is of course often wise and as often sick. That the speaker in this instance was also very anti-U.S. and pro-Qaddafi is neither here nor there as far as carved bisons and a French candidate for sainthood are concerned. Those sentiments about the international scene are too prevalent, not just on that continent, to be any gauge of personal temperament, except as colonial rule is bound to leave some soreheads and screwballs on both sides long after the jig is up. A lot of love-hate everywhere, between old possessors and possessed, with due variations according to demographic origins and much else in history; in this case there seems to be about as much pride in Frenchification as resentment of the French, and at least there in the southern region, a name of the prominence of Foucauld would be touchy even without the blazing contradictions in his role.

A French Thomas Merton? Well, hardly, beyond the fact of two intellectuals choosing to be Trappists, one temporarily. Or some nowadays, on grounds as sketchy, might leap to say a French CIA agent, and that too would not be altogther false. Through all his burning religiosity this rather late-blooming priest remained a French patriot and army officer in spirit, in an era when some of the best minds in his country could refer, speaking of North Africa, not to colonial exploitation, rampant and profitable as that was, but to
la mission civilizatrice
de la France
. That he was murdered by Tuareg members of the rabid and then fast-growing Senoussi sect of Moslems is denied by an Arab biographer, who calls his assassination “an act abhorrent to all Muslims,” but that is the generally accepted version of his death, and on one precipitation factor there can be no dispute. It is not that he had tried to make converts to Christianity; this he never did, hoping instead to convert by example alone and failing totally in that. It is that he was a prime source of intelligence for the French army command in the Sahara, notably through the weakened, perilous World War I years up to the day of his death.

Or taking it all from yet another side, it could be argued with no less justice that this highborn rich kid, as spoiled as bereaved, differed mainly in degree from a not too unusual strain of Gallic eccentric, quite unlike the English common varieties as seen for example in the Lawrences, T. E. and D. H., to speak only of quasi-contemporaries of Foucauld. His French lineage, embracing a number of poets, poet-diplomats, the oddball fur trader or friars and clerics among the heathens, is along patterns dear to Stendhal, seekers of soul, explorers of deeps, in distinction from and sometimes in mortal combat with the go-getter world portrayed by Balzac.

The story grows and grows clearer with reflection. Right now the question involving Tamrart and the last cigarette is whether camping that night below any other mountain, or say any other of the Atakor range, would have served as well. A more honest, if more embarrassing, form of the question is whether there could be some kind of emanations from and around the Assekrem that could, on a willing subject, have such effects, and if so, granted the premise is way out in the shabby suburbs of the para-normal, is Père de Foucauld an active agent thereof or just a fellow beneficiary, who chose the spot for his hermitage because of just such uplifting effects? The interrogation, overly personal that’s true but no more so than some of St. Augustine’s up at the opposite edge of the same desert once upon a time, arises not from the paltry fact of giving up an ugly and self-destructive habit but from the ease, the lack of any conscious will or decision about it, and the absence of a single moment’s temptation afterwards. At least from Mark Twain on how easy it was to give up smoking, he’d done it a dozen or maybe he
said a hundred times, on through the nearly universal “hardest thing I ever did in my life,” the story isn’t often of any such automation. As type of experience the nearest to this one might be Iphigenia’s being snatched off the sacrificial altar at Aulis by the goddess Artemis and dropped far away on a shore of the Black Sea. That’s to speak, in case it should be necessary, just of the nature, in quality and speed, of a life-saving transition; we’ll leave out that other heroine’s subsequent place in the history of culture.

The Tamrart of these pages knew very little about Charles de Foucauld at that time; he and the Assekrem both were new names; we can forget miraculous cures and other salutary effects in spots famous for that sort of thing, through apparitions of the Virgin or lingering imprints of a saint. From that domain, if we care to be credulous, there could as well be influences from long before any religion now practised on earth. As to the quite recent figure associated with the spot, on further acquaintance he does begin to reveal, for all his excesses, an unusual degree of character, brains and personal charm, and of the genuineness of his Christian faith there can be no doubt. To that extent I can be said to have smoked my last cigarette, if not in the odor of sanctity, at least within sight of it.

(1931–)

from
MUDDLING THROUGH IN MADAGASCAR

Manalalondo’s shops—some quite large—were either closed or almost empty. In the market-place the few occupied stalls sold little more than rice, onions, eggs, rotten sardines and unidentifiable wizened objects—probably traditional “cures” and
ombiasas’
charms. Here, as in other areas during the weeks ahead, we got the impression that the rural Malagasay have reverted to a subsistence economy. Families depend on their own and their neighbours’ produce, often exchanged rather than bought, and the flow of imported foodstuffs and consumer goods, stocked in colonial and immediately post-colonial days, has dried up.

On the edge of the town we sought refreshment in a thatched “café” so tiny that our heads touched the ceiling and we had to leave our rucksacks outside. The young couple crouching in the smoky interior, and their four children, looked wretchedly unhealthy and seemed half-afraid of us. Husband sat slumped in one corner, his eyes dull, holding
a whimpering filthy baby. We shared his unsteady bench while wife cooked rice-buns on a grass-burning mud stove. Suddenly he was overcome by a paroxysm of coughing and the baby howled in sympathy; he handed it to a toddler and lay on the ground at our feet. In the firelight I could see sweat glistening on his forehead before he drew his
lamba
^*
over his head.