Visions of Isabelle (19 page)

"I have a permit signed and sealed, and you know perfectly well I'm not a spy. Now that I'm here, that I got here on my own, perfectly safely, perfectly fit, you're trying to stop me from doing what I came to do, which is harmless as you perfectly well know. Isn't that the situation right now?"

He stared at her, silent, unadulterated contempt showing in his narrow eyes.

"Since you don't answer, I take it you agree. All right. If you say I must leave Touggourt, then doubtless you have the power to make me leave. But you tell me I can't go on to Ouargla, and since I haven't the slightest intention of going backward, there's the question of just where I should proceed from here."

"Where you go, I assure you, is not of the slightest consequence to me."

"Susbielle," she said, exhaling smoke again, turning away, her voice heavy with boredom and contempt, "you are a very tiresome young man."

She sat in a leather chair at the far end of the room, crossed one leg over the other, leaned back, stared at the dull gray ceiling and thought that she would rather spend a hundred years as a Berber peasant hauling twigs all day long on her back than five minutes in De Susbielle's tanned blond arms.

"You are entitled to your opinion, of course."

"Yes," she said. "Of course."

They sat for a while in cold silence, he thinking of some way to regain his injured dignity, she wondering if she'd left him enough room for maneuver without losing face.

She needed to be allowed a few more days in Touggourt so that she could recover her health and look around. But she wanted much more than that–the freedom to travel farther into the sand, to go to at least one of the fabled places where no other writer had been.

Her eyes fell upon a large military map of the Sud-Constantine. She began to calculate the alternatives since she doubted he could retract his prohibition against her continuing south. There seemed only one solution, and as she squinted to read the name of the place that lay to the east between Touggourt and the Tunisian frontier, she noticed him doing the same.

There was a cluster of oases probably no more than four days' march away. The main town was called El Oued, the region was called the Souf. He was staring at the same spot with resignation, she with a beating heart. For at that moment, for some reason she could not divine and would never really be able to explain, she felt an ineffable call, an overwhelming desire to travel there and explore. She must conceal it; she knew her plans would be doomed by the slightest show of enthusiasm. She glanced back at De Susbielle. He was playing with his tongue inside his mouth.

"I think it would be better for us if we'd forget all this unpleasantness," she said.

"I agree. It's been most unfortunate."

"And inopportune."

"Precisely. Inopportune."

"We're busy people. We don't have time for personal rancor."

"Mademoiselle," he said with a smile, "at last we are beginning to agree."

"Then I beg you to be reasonable. I can't possibly be out of here in twenty-four hours."

"Hmmm. Yes. I see your point. Well, then, let me see–three days–I think that would be a reasonable time."

"Most generous of you. And Ouargla? You will let me go there?"

"No." He shook his head. "Ouargla is out of the question."

"Then–?"

"Yes, well, let's see. There's nothing to the west, except Ghardaia, and to get there you'd have to pass through Ouargla, too. No, I think your best bet is to the east. El Oued. I haven't been there myself, but I hear it's most interesting from the touristic point of view."

She shrugged.

"I suppose, if that's my only choice, I shall have to be resigned. Could you supply a guide?"

"No problem."

She stood up. "Thank you, Captain. I'm sorry to have troubled you so early in the morning."

"No need to apologize, Mademoiselle. It's my duty to assist."

Isabelle turned and, without a backward glance, walked out the office door.

S
he spent her days in Touggourt sleeping through the heat, writing in the afternoons and at sunset descending into the town, wandering the narrow alleys filled with sand. She searched out strange dark cafés, sat in them through the night, drinking, smoking, talking with other travelers. Then at dawn she'd wander to the main square where the caravans encamped.

Here men slept by brush fires, while others stood on guard and still others sang songs in soothing guttural whispers while exhausted Ouled dancers performed in slow undulating arabesques. At the cries of the muezzin from the minaret, men would rise from their blankets, and she would face Mecca with them and pray.

Then she'd return to her hotel to sleep as best she could, passing in and out of agonizing fevers that gave her the impression they were making her clean, were burning away all the encrustations of her upbringing that had corroded her for too long.

O
n July 30, at four in the afternoon, she departed for El Oued. Her guide, a black postman named Amrou, led her through the broken stones of ruined forts. Her fever that day was worse than ever, but she was determined to make the trip, not only to meet the deadline set by De Susbielle, but also to heed the strange haunting music she felt calling her to the east.

By sunset they reached the first dunes, magnificent brooding mounds of sand bathed in golden light. And when she turned she saw all of Touggourt spread out against the yellow sky.

By two o'clock that morning her fever was worse and she fell from her horse onto the sand. Amrou led her as far as Mthil, where she rested the entire day, grilling like a piece of meat.

On August 1, traditionally the hottest day of the Saharan year, she left with a new guide to cross a vast desert of great dunes marked by the wind into intricate ripples and parched rivulets. They arrived at dawn at Ourmès, where she lounged by a fountain in the garden of the sheik.

On the third day of August she left at five in the morning. It was possible for her to travel during daylight then, for she was in the immense complex of sunken groves that make up the inhabited region of the Souf. At four in the afternoon she stopped to drink at the wells of Kouïnine, and just at sunset, surmounting a vast high dune, laid her eyes for the first time upon El Oued.

She paused at the crest to stare down at the legendary city of a thousand domes. She was to its west, and at that moment its shimmering walls, its fantastic clustering of white domes and arches and vaults were lit up with such intensity by the setting sun that she was convinced she'd finally reached a place beyond compare. As she rode down, seeking refuge in the shadow of her horse, her fever subsided and was replaced by joy at having come so far, at having finally finished so hard and tortuous a journey across such an immensity of sinking dunes.

And so she rode down to El Oued, her shadow growing longer as the sun sank farther down, deciding, as she noted later in her journal, that her first vision of the place was the most complete and definitive revelation of the harsh and splendid Souf, so strangely beautiful, so agonizingly sad. And as she entered the town, her nostrils pulsed at the cool sweet smell of gardens which flourished behind walls that lined the sand-filled streets.

To her, coming out of the vast silent emptiness of the west, El Oued was an island of riches, a holy place of cool. She dismounted in the great market square, walked to a stand, bought a cup of water from a vendor and two handfuls of fruit. Then she settled down delicately on the sandy floor with other travelers, men of caravans and of the groves that ringed the town, to gorge herself on the soft rich flesh of dates.

She thought for a while of her adventure, the long trek that had begun at the railroad station in Tunis less than a month before, the exhausting journey and the encounters with De Susbielle which seemed to sum up for her all the insufficiencies of the civilized world. She'd finally reached the place she'd always sought, a different world, strange, mysterious, full of possibilities, where there lay perhaps a destiny that would change her life.

But how odd to feel this, sitting on alien sand, cloaked like a man, among people of ancient races, before strange domed temples built for the worship of a God who had written the adventure she'd just endured.

Mektoub–it has been written that I come here
. And thinking that, she smiled, wrapped herself in her robe and fell into a deep calm sleep.

T
hough feverish, she could not keep still. She spent the next days exploring the sandy streets of El Oued, then the sunken groves and endless dunes around. She was ravished by the way the light glittered on the sand, and by the faces of the Berbers peering from their encampments outside the town–black cloth tents, elegant pavilions.

El Oued, she became convinced, was the home she'd been seeking since she'd been a child. She had fled the garden of Villa Neuve in search of passes between the mountains that walled her in. Now at last, in the center of this vast Saharan emptiness, she'd found a place where she could feel free.

But there was confusion in her mind. What was she doing, twenty-two years old, alone in the world, pretending to be a man? Was this merely disguise or real transformation? Was she Isabelle or "Si Mahmoud"?

The question taunted her as much as the splendor of the dunes gave her peace. She knew why she wore men's clothes and called herself by a male name. It was the only way she could travel in this world she'd chosen to explore. But there was more–she was grasping for something deeper, a way to turn her disguise inward, remake herself from inside.

It was not, she decided, that she wanted to become a man, but that she wanted to
live
like one.

That, she thought, was the key. She was a woman, liked being a woman, would never try and renounce that fact. But she would embellish what it meant to be a woman by recreating herself as something completely new.

No longer would she allow others to view her as a precious thing whose favors were coquettishly withheld until a seducer could charm them out. That, she knew, had been her problem with De Susbielle–after she'd rejected his hypocritical gallantry, nothing was possible, friendship least of all. No more infatuations, she decided, no more Archivirs.
I shall be Si Mahmoud, without explanation, and men will simply have to deal with that.

There was forged within her, then, a wish to do battle with men, to win and stifle them with her being, give them experiences they could neither imagine nor forget. Or else, if they were strong enough, could accept her as "Si Mahmoud," a woman who could do anything they could do, who could savor physical adventures and the dangers of the road, then she would become their lovers and their brothers, both at the same time.

"Si Mahmoud," she decided, would be a creature of the desert–as strange, as undulating as its mirages and its dunes, as free as its gazelles, as open as its cloudless skies. And as for love she would accept any embrace, fraternal, powerful, painful, as long as its sensation was intense.

Having settled at last the question of how she was going to live, she decided with regret that she must leave the Souf. Her fevers were too much to bear, and people she met told of others driven mad by the heat–incredible in the summer of 1899, even by Saharan standards. She knew she would have to leave, but, much more important, she knew she must come back.

T
here was a letter waiting in Tunis, unhappy news. She learned from Augustin that the litigation surrounding Villa Neuve had grown unbelievably complex, and that Samuel, the notary into whose hands they had placed their affairs, was trying to cheat them out of their share of Vava's estate.

Impossible for her to remain in Tunis–she had no money, and after the splendor of the dunes, her house near Bab Menara seemed artificial, pretentious,
raffiné
. She sold off her belongings, the few precious rugs she'd bought with money she'd obtained for Old Nathalie's jewels, liquidated everything but her notebooks, a trunk of robes and capes and her worn red boots, and left for Paris, a place as different from El Oued as there existed on the earth.

She went there with one objective: to seek backing as an explorer, an assignment to write about the Souf, anything at all that would finance a return to the desert, and her new life as "Si Mahmoud."

A
pril 1900. Isabelle arrived in Paris, found lodgings at a cheap rooming house near the cemetery of Montparnasse, then made her way as quickly as she could to the grounds of the Great Exposition. On the Champs de Mars she wandered among Kymer pagodas and Tahitian totem poles, strolled through a Japanese garden and a perfect reproduction of the Seraglio of Constantinople, saw Persian sword dances, a puppet show from Java, a Hindu charming a cobra, and a Kabuki play. She passed through tents filled with wax effigies, dioramas, acrobats and elephants, and visited an exhibition of machinery made in the United States.

Lost after many hours she came upon a Tunisian souk constructed of papier-mâché. Here workmen pounded out brass trays in stalls, veiled women prepared pastry leaves, and languorous camels sniffed at the air. Near sunset the crowds were pushed back so that a dozen Arab tribesmen could gallop on white horses across the grass, discharge their rifles, then rein back before trampling the gaping mob.