Visions of Isabelle (40 page)

She keeps a mirror by the side of her bed, and every so often between the fits, she snatches it up. She peers at herself, looking for the clarity Sidi Brahim showed her on the old man struggling with the grain.
Is that look of willfulness, that stare that shows expectation of being hurt, is all that now beginning to fade?

At times, in her deliriums, she believes the veil of mystery that hides God from her eyes is turning diaphanous , that she can glimpse something beautiful, although still vague, on the other side. A delicious and perhaps dangerous numbness comes. These many weeks at Kenadsa, in which nothing has happened, seem now the most important of her life. She can feel desire and regret begin to vanish from her soul.

She knows that simplicity in being and resignation to fate are the most important things she must learn. Though they come naturally to nomads on the sand, they are most difficult goals for her. She takes to murmuring prayers, repeating them over for hours, hoping to lose all feelings of desire. She wants to be able to face the shining incandescent horizon of the desert without a flinch.

O
ne night, emerging from a fit, covered with sweat, she rises from her bed, grasps a piece of charcoal and scribbles upon the wall. The next morning, clearheaded but weak, she gazes with amazement at her trembling serpentine script:

"My life is creeping toward its tomb as inevitably as night curls toward dawn."

Suddenly she is frightened, realizes that she's dangerously sick. Alone, perhaps forgotten in this lost corner of Morocco, she is too far from help among these mystic people who impassively look on at the ruin of all that surrounds them, cross their arms before sickness and death and say: "It is written–
Mektoub
."

She knows she must leave, must wake herself, return to the world, struggle to survive. And she knows, too, that her monastic interlude has been a turning point, that Sidi Brahim has shown her the way to end the tumult in her life.

She enters the hospital at Aïn Sefra on October 1, 1904. Among the waiting letters are several from Slimen. She cannot resist his pleas for a meeting and sends him a cable inviting him to come. A few days later she receives a reply. He has arranged a leave and will arrive on the twenty-first.

A few days later a photographer visits her room. Barrucand needs a new picture–her fame as Lyautey's confidante has begun to spread, and there is demand in Algiers for a recent photo of her face. She poses against her cylindrical pillow with a tarboosh jauntily tilted on her head. Later, when the photographer examines the print, he is struck by her expression. It seems to say: "By what devious route has my life brought me here?"

By Lyautey's order the military doctors give her special care. They cannot believe that this feverish, emaciated woman is only twenty-seven years old.

Looking forward to Slimen's visit she arranges to rent a house in the African quarter of the town. It's a simple mud building set among the shacks of the camp followers on the farther bank of the dry river El Breidj. From her window in the hospital, she can see it among a nest of laundries and canteens.

Early on the morning of October 21, she leaves the hospital, goes to the village, buys a shopping basket, then marches to the souks to purchase vegetables, meat and a
couscouserie
. At noon, when the train arrives from Perrégaux, she is at the station to greet Slimen.

Tired from her walk she sits on a bench, watching the soldiers disembark. When Slimen steps off he peers around, his eyes sweeping her face.
He does not recognize me
, she thinks, amused, as she watches him on the platform, turning this way and that, searching for his missing wife.

She calls to him, he turns abruptly, sees her and rushes to her arms. They hug among the new recruits formed up by their sergeants for the march up to the forts.

He takes the shopping basket, she leans against his shoulder and they go off to find a mule. She mounts and he walks by her side as they make their way to the little house.

He sits beside her as she cuts up the meat and vegetables and prepares the couscous grains. He wants to make love to her, but is put off by the evident weakness of her body and the tone of their conversation which is awkward and strained.

"It's just three years since we were married," he says. "Do you remember the day?"

"Of course. We had great plans."

"I've disappointed you."

"No," she says. "I've disappointed myself."

Shyly he runs his finger across her cheek.

"Are you sure you're all right?"

"I'm fine. The fevers are past, and now all I have to do is gain weight and ride in the sun."

Silence as he peers about.

"I brought some good kif."

"Thank you, Slimen, but I don't smoke it anymore."

"What?" He laughs. "I don't believe you. I can't imagine you living without kif."

"I'm going to try," she says.

He goes off to unpack, explore the house. Stirring the couscous with her hands, she wonders what has become of their great tempestuous love, asks herself why now she feels only fraternal affection for this wiry dark man with liquid eyes and such a sad resigned face. Was it all an illusion–her mad passion for the Spahi horseman in the red cloak who took her on the dunes?
I must be careful not to hurt him
, she reminds herself, setting the steamer on the coals.

They eat late in the afternoon, then go to the roof of the house to lie down beneath the dying sun. He touches her again, and this time she responds, partly out of friendship, partly because she feels cold. Afterward they bundle themselves in burnooses and Slimen begins to smoke.

As she settles back to watch the stars, beginning now to come out in the darkening sky, she thinks back upon the tempests of her adolescence and the fury of living that has consumed the past five years.

Yes
, she thinks,
I have lived furiously, and I regret nothing of what I've done
. But now, on this roof, comforted by the company of her brother, Slimen, she looks forward to a calm future as a simple woman, away from tormented striving and disguise.

Slimen smokes on, through the sound of distant bugle calls, the echo of commands shouted in the fort.

"Tell me a story, Si Mahmoud."

She thinks a moment, nods, and begins.

"A lone cavalier met a woman on the dunes between Béchar and Beni-Ounif. The woman was picking out little stones from the sand. 'What are you doing?' the cavalier asked. 'I'm cleaning the desert,' she said. 'But that's absurd,' he told her. 'It will take you and all the people in the world a million years to clean the desert, and then, when you're finished, the desert will be dirty again.' `Yes,' the woman replied, 'I understand that, but anyway, I try.' The cavalier watched her for a long time, and the longer he watched the more certain he was that he had fallen in love. But he did not know how he could take such a woman away–a woman who loved the desert so much she wanted to clean it with her hands..."

She turns to Slimen, sees delight in his face. A curl of kif smoke lingers before her. The air is still.

She shuts her eyes, trying to regain her story's thread, but then she's distracted by an unpleasant noise. It's a deep, rumbling growl, and when she turns to look, it is louder, much louder, as if a whole mountain were rolling toward her cutting off escape. Someone runs by the house. She hears a cry. Suddenly Slimen stands up.

L
yautey is in the private dining room of his residence, taking coffee with his staff. Suddenly one of the German legionnaires bursts into the hall.

"Come, quick! Something terrible is happening in the town!"

Lyautey and the others jump up from the table, rush to the terrace that overlooks the ravine. By the moonlight they can make out the riverbed and a gigantic tidal wave that seems to have come out of nowhere and is rushing through smashing everything in sight. The entire village is being torn to bits. Trees, animals, people and the tops of houses are being swept in a torrent downstream.

Lyautey, standing helpless, quickly understands. It's one of the great curiosities of the desert–a flash flood that comes out of the mountains, without even the warning of a thunderclap, to rip through gullies with devastating force.

I
sabelle and Slimen stand on their roof watching the ruin all around. Children are screaming, dogs and sheep are struggling against the ferocious tide. The sound is terrible in the still night air. And then bits of their house begin to melt.

"We'll have to swim," yells Slimen. She shakes her head, motions that they should try to climb to the neighboring roof. The water is rising higher. Suddenly she feels the house collapse beneath her feet.

Slimen leaps into the water, disappears. Then he rises again, far away, and she watches in wonderment as he turns, lost in the maelstrom, trying to find her as he's swept from sight.

She peers around, then lowers herself into the rushing stream. Holding onto the terrace wall to keep herself from being swept, she suddenly feels something heavy crush her down.

There is an enormous pain across her back as she begins to sink. She struggles against the weight, frantically trying to fight her way back to air. But she cannot make the water yield. The pain begins to spread.

After a few seconds her strength gives out. Water begins to fill her lungs. Fear gives way to resignation. But then, sinking into oblivion, there comes a feeling that something important is very near.

Now the struggle is within, to rend the veil, to see the face of God. Sinking beneath the water, drowning in the mud, she is struck by an illumination, a blinding insight in which all the confusion of her life fits with perfect symmetry into a dazzling design.

It is light she sees–clear, white and hot. She smiles as she sees she is but a grain of sand in God's limitless desert. She is in tune with all the universe, the music of the stars, and though only a speck of the immense weight, the totality of everything, she is also a part without which the whole cannot be whole.

W
hen Lyautey's men find her body the next day, crushed beneath a heavy beam loosed from her house, she is curled like an embryo, her arms raised in front to protect her face.

S
limen Ehnni survived the flood and died two years later of a respiratory disease.

In 1914 Augustin De Moerder committed suicide in Marseilles.

General Louis Hubert Gonsalve Lyautey gradually tightened the screws against Morocco until the establishment of the French Protectorate in 1912. Lyautey became the first resident general of Morocco, was later made a marshal, and in 1917 served briefly as war minister in France. He was elected to the French Academy and died at the age of eighty in 1934.

M
uch is known of Isabelle Eberhardt's life, but there are great holes which only fiction can now fill.

The best sources are her own writings, and it should be noted that many passages in this book paraphrase her descriptions of events, her own psychological states and desert terrains.

Particularly valuable are her journals, published as
Mes Journaliers
(Paris, 1923) which cover several years and are especially detailed on the period 1900-1901–the Souf, the stabbing and its aftermath.

The three books which were put together and heavily edited by Victor Barrucand are also useful:
Dans L'Ombre Chaude de L'Islam
(Paris, 1905), rich in material on her stay in Kenadsa;
Notes de Route
(Paris, 1908) which deals mostly with her impressions of the Sud-Oranais; and
Pages D'Islam
(Paris, 1908) containing many short journalistic pieces and her moving defense of vagabondage.

Au Pays des Sables
(Paris, 1944) contains some of her short fiction and also documents that illuminate various periods in her life. As for her novel,
Le Trimardeur
–it is best forgotten.

It would take pages to separate the blend of fact and fiction in this book. For example, though she did write a letter to Augustin on Christmas Eve, 1895, the letter quoted here is not the same, but a composite of several letters, with the addition of fictional material. The same is true of the dialogue at the Constantine trial, and events such as her first meeting with Eugène Letord which actually took place under other circumstances at another time.

But some of the more amazing things happened much as they are reported here: the saga of her brothers who were mixed up with anarchists and opium (according to Trophimovsky, Vladimir was tortured by Prozov); the attack at Behima; the suicide pact in Ténès; the flash flood; and even the incident with the fictional "Desforges."

There have been many biographies, mostly bad. René-Louis Doyon was the first serious writer to deal with her, and in his
Précédés de la Vie Tragique de la Bonne Nomade
(Paris, 1923) he established the first accurate chronology of her life. Another good book is Cecily Mackworth's
The Destiny of Isabelle Eberhardt
(London, 1950)–accurate, well-written, though lacking in footnotes to the many sources from which the material has been drawn. Of the recent French biographies, Françoise Eaubonne's
La Couronne de Sable
(Paris, 1968) is quite good, but unfortunately marred by an absurd speculation: that Isabelle was the illegitimate daughter of Arthur Rimbaud.