It was during the period of uncertainty, slackness, and open laziness that preceded our embarkation for France—where the war was continuing without having, so to speak, begun—that I saw Khadidja again, one idle evening at our base in Béni-Ounif, with her hair still loose but this time wearing the seroual, which made her appear even taller and, despite her carnivalesque character, accentuated her qualities of savagery and determination. I’m not sure who had gone with me after dinner that night to have a beer in the bousbir—maybe it was the corporal in charge of the radio team, who, because he was a ranking officer in the Legion with a specialized occupation, was allowed to eat with us, the NCOs of the reserve, at the Hôtel du Sahara. Blame me for it if you will, but the fact is that I rather enjoyed the company of the professional soldier; the way in which he described the yearly festival at Sidi-Bel-Abbès commemorating the Battle of Camerone was certainly enough to excite one’s imagination: the flag bowing before that relic, the jointed hand of the one-armed officer who commanded the Legionnaires wiped out in that battle during the war with Mexico was a ritual whose air of being a pagan ceremony celebrated by people of another age or another continent certainly wasn’t evident to the man describing it, but his enthusiasm as he spoke (in the tone of a priest explaining the mass and its deeper meaning) about this homage paid to the body of which he was a part by the colored symbol of an entire nation—as though the fetish preserved in the Legion’s hall of honor had an acknowledged priority over that unanimously respected emblem—never failed to impress. This same corporal also talked to me about something that is a rock of Sisyphus in the life of a Legionnaire: earning a little stripe with difficulty, then losing it because of some overly extreme drunken episode or some infraction of discipline; earning it back, then losing it again. At that time, the Legionnaires did not have all the terrible renown they now have because of the horrors committed during the war against the Viet-Minh; the main discredit associated with them was the rather ambiguous one entailed in everyone’s eyes by their status as mercenaries, and—even though it hardly ranked them in the category of choirboys—one too easily forgot what was implied among such men by the fact of being, in the full sense of the term, professional soldiers. In my eyes, therefore, this radio team, of which I can say, without misplaced pride, that they had a soft spot for me, was only a small group of technicians, peaceful on the whole, good companions, and more often induced, by the propensity they almost all had to get drunk regularly, to indulge in clownish pranks than in bloody rages. To be honest, I should also admit to my lack of constraint and “back country” state of mind at that time: these habitués of the border regions—whatever they might be—presented me a great contrast compared to my companions the chemists, almost all of them such homebodies!
Coming out of the Hôtel du Sahara, my friend and I decided to go and spend a little time in the bousbir before going to bed. We had hardly any choice of places in which to kill time beyond a noisy, smoky bar always full of more or less inebriated soldiers and one or another of those houses that were generally tranquil, where the girls did not importune you with overly indiscreet advances and seemed content if you emptied a few bottles of beer with them. At Béni-Ounif, the red-light district was not closely guarded as it was in Colomb-Béchar; there was more of a family atmosphere there and despite their dilapidation the rooms in which one drank did not look like sordid dives as they did at Béchar, where it wasn’t hard to believe they were sets designed to create an atmosphere of disaster required for some film; on the contrary, they allowed one, stranger though one remained, to enjoy the illusion of being entertained in someone’s home. I recaptured some sense of slipping into that distant intimacy a little more than five years ago when I was visiting the region of Blida and went on an excursion to the tomb of Sidi Fodil during the festival of the mouloud: inside the monument, hardly larger than a modest-sized bedroom, women squatted in long veils, their faces bare, warming themselves at small braziers in which they burned spices, in low voices exchanging thoughts that had to do with us, and thus gathered, without any men, around the saint’s sepulchre, reminded me of the girls assembled in the living room of a brothel for the protocol of the “choice.” I had something of the same feeling again on a visit to Algiers—that seaside city with beautiful arcades such as one sees at Genoa and typical of the large sunbathed towns that give me the impression of exoticism perhaps even more than more desolate spots (my sad drunkenness, the ambiguous feeling of fullness and isolation, being out of my element in the midst of an active life that remains foreign to me, the desire to play Haroun al-Rachid walking everywhere incognito)—when groups of the devout, all the more disturbing because these were townswomen, some of them smartly turned out, had taken up positions in the mosque of Sidi Abderrâhman near another sepulchre also surrounded by a multitude of flags.
Until then, I had always gone to the bousbir as a sightseer or a stroller or when on duty, which happened to me once, when my turn came to be the leader of the patrol that, after evening mess, was assigned to go around town seeing that the soldiers were behaving properly while off duty. In regulation dress, as I almost always was, except for my duck trousers (replaced this time by the pants I had drawn from my company’s depot at the same time as the coarse cloth tunic that inspired Khadidja to say, a little later when we had become friends, “I thought you were a private,” this direct confession being offered as an apology—unless it was meant to show me clearly that she was something more than a soldiers’ girl—for having completely ignored me before I made advances to her), an empty holster attached to my belt and wearing on my head, not my usual forage cap, but a khaki sun helmet, I gravely made my rounds, flanked by two nonranking comrades belonging, like me, to the team of chemists, and spent a good hour or two strolling, as I chatted with my companions, down badly lit, roughly paved streets without forgetting to visit—in accordance with our instructions—the two places that could logically be regarded as the most likely to give rise to incidents: the rowdy bar where rounds of drinks were exchanged at a rapid pace; and the bousbir, ordinarily not very busy but capable of becoming the site of some agitation (as, for instance, during the time two traveling Frenchwomen were quartered there and did very well, since most of the troopers who happened to be in Béni-Ounif preferred, over the Muslims, these thickly powdered tarts, one a lean brunette, the other an opulent blond dubbed “the glutton” by one of my habitual companions). We lingered for a few minutes in the bar joking with the other soldiers, who teased us in a friendly way because of our regulation gear; at the bousbir, where everything was as peaceful as it could be, we hardly paused longer than was necessary to sample the glass of beer the old procuress had brought to each of us, anxious to maintain good relations with us, whom she already knew—or hoped to know—as customers and who that evening represented the police.
On the evening when, escorted by one of the men who ate dinner in the Hôtel du Sahara, which we used as a mess hall, I went to the bousbir mainly because that was still the place where one could be most at peace, how did I —who was not tormented by any imperious need of an embrace and have always been wary of dubious forms of intercourse—come to spend the night with a prostitute of the lowest order like Khadidja? It is hard for me to say exactly, today. It no doubt seemed to me unpleasant to haunt the brothels, as I was doing, out of mere love of the picturesque, and, with my departure approaching, that it would be stupid to go back to France without having had any sensual contact at all with a woman of this country. Perhaps, too, no longer living (as I had at Base 2) in a barracks room containing a few beds, I might have dreaded returning to my quarters to sleep in the vast room assigned to the chemists? Since coming back from the desert, there was also a reigning spirit of voluptuous idleness whose inaugural sign had been the sight of the grassland turning green. Besides that, it is clear that from our first encounter I had been attracted to Khadidja and felt pleasure in rediscovering in Béni-Ounif this girl with her proud bearing who seemed to have nothing in com
mon with the other girls except the exercise of what is considered almost everywhere to be a profession one should be ashamed to acknowledge. Will I not simply be yielding to a foolishly romantic temptation, when I say that I finally believe that if I was incited to depart from my long chastity and to do it in conditions such that I could have been left with some painful mark from it, the true motive must have been a little love for me on the part of Khadidja?
“Gentlemen, and cric! . . . And crac!” (One would have to be a fairly good musician, a rather expert linguist, and in addition be blessed with an adequate memory, to be able to insert here the song with Arab melody and Arab words that Khadidja sang when she strode across the courtyard in search of the bottle of beer that, being the good hostess she was, she had induced me to buy, though I had drunk a large number already; the modulated harshness of that cry—an encouragement to assault, a hymn to victory, or a witch’s incantation—reminded me of certain proud songs proffered in their trances by those women I had known in Ethiopia who, inhabited or ridden by spirits worshiped under the name of zar, encircled their foreheads, like hunters or chieftains in ceremonial dress, with a strip of cloth or a diadem made from a lion’s mane; but if she had found herself among those Christians of the old school, what spirit of town or countryside would Khadidja have been transformed into, if not the female spirit to which this song was dedicated:
We gaze with admiration at her neck, her breasts, her elegant form.
Her smile kills.
Do not venture to think she is a woman!)
Among the grains of dust from our past that move us especially because of the fact that their content appears out of proportion to its infinitesimal container (fragments of something very important which fate has left in suspense or which, in order to exist, did not even need to have happened), among those events so thin that one is almost surprised at having kept them in one’s memory but that gleam here and there in the hodgepodge of our life, I—and probably others too—would number certain caresses that are completely innocuous, sometimes reduced to an apparently negligible gesture that nevertheless gives the illusion (but is it really an illusion?) that it ties you, just as much as the act of love, to a creature whose name you don’t even necessarily know. Without any clear motive, fingers were clenched or laid softly on your forearm, a palm was applied to the back of your hand or, during an indefinite length of time, your arm wrapped around two shoulders, your knee pressed by chance—and by the happy yielding to that chance—against another knee. I, for one, place great value upon trivial effusions of this sort, perhaps because I am not so much a man of passion as a man of longing: someone who leaves things at a distance, in order to preserve his desire for them or his regret at their loss; who because he is too weak to dare to take something, only wants that thing and (without running any risk) makes sparest use of that wanting; who lacks courage to the extent that he sees love as an interior state in which to settle and not as an adventure, a drama, an act; who is always seeking euphoria, never power or domination; who, instead of trying to appropriate something for himself, even if this entailed the ruin of the desiring subject or the object desired, limits himself to constructing an object to daydream or brood about in order to revel in it; who remains a man subject to whims, one who (almost without moving) always flies off toward unexpected countries. You put a cross on each thing and you do nothing with it, a female friend said to me in a dream I had many years ago.
(I did nothing—and also did not think for a second of doing anything—with the gentle Lumane, that slender, somewhat simian girl with very dark skin and prominent breasts who used to go to the home of Lorgina, the voodooist of the Saline quarter in Port-au-Prince, and whom I saw for the first time one evening when she was taken by the female Iwa Grande Vélékété and, her features exaggeratedly twisted, went into convulsions for some time on a mat by the side of the leader of the choir, who was also foaming at the mouth and rolling his eyes up in front of all of us—initiates and noninitiates, men and women—who were there standing on our feet and were supposed to step over them—once over, once back—in order to attract good luck, and whom I then saw again on the evening of the “bedding of the yams,” when the hounfor, loud with chanting and furnished with an improvised altar at the back, felt like a Nativity crèche, even more so because of those adoring shepherds, the men who, close to the painted center post known as the “midpost,” stood motionless and quite proper in their duck pants to present some billy goats, future sacrificial offerings with necks encircled by leading ropes; many people were gathered there that evening and I was sitting very close up against Lumane, whose knee was touching mine; since I knew no Creole and she no French, we said not a word to each other; noticing that she sniffled, wiped her nose in her underskirt, occasionally grimaced, and moved around restlessly as though she were about to be possessed and were trying not to let herself go, I observed her from the corner of my eye with a sort of affectionate solicitude, waiting for that attack—which in the end never came—as though to help her if the spirit overcame her, and feeling in a strangely intense, profound, and self-evident way that I was her closest friend, even though that feeling was probably not fully reciprocated.)
On that night in Béni-Ounif when for me Khadidja ceased to be a creature without substance—a silhouette barely glimpsed against the background of a gloomy decor during an evening that was hardly more delightful—to choose her rather than another girl was a completely spontaneous impulse, as though my gesture in pointing to her had simply been the public avowal of an old association and as though no one at that moment could have dreamed of disputing it. As I speak here of a choice I supposedly made, it is even certain that I am giving a false idea: it all happened as though since the beginning of time it had been decided that that night I would share a bed with Khadidja. It is also certain that my desire to remain by her side was much stronger than any strictly erotic desire: I wanted that girl with a desire that I could call childlike; the actions we would perform were, in a sense, actions required by etiquette (since to spend time with a prostitute normally implies the execution of certain immodest actions) and, in another sense, the most natural and innocent expression of the desire I had for her. If one can—as I have wished to for a long time—experience love (in this case stripped of its halo of idolatry and purged of all odor of the confessional) as a friendship very simply pushed to the point of paroxysm, one that the effusions of sensuality would only be expressing with all the intensity demanded by an extreme feeling, then it was, no doubt, a particle of something tending toward such a love that I experienced in the basically venal adventure I had with Khadidja. Nevertheless, I can’t ignore the fact that if the joy I felt at finding myself with her was almost as candid as my joy on certain Sundays at bathing in the pools that, at Figuig, serve to water palm groves and gardens, it was in a muddy sort of water, swarming with insects and frogs, that I took those great fresh baths in the oasis, and that with Khadidja I experienced whatever amiability and freshness existed between us all the more keenly because we were frolicking about, in fact, in waters just as filthy as those that covered the slippery bottoms of those pools.
Not without a feeling of shame, I must confess that on that first night it was with a cautious reserve that I made use of a companion of whom the least one could say was that any man at all inclined to be afraid, where love is concerned, of deleterious contacts would have had some reason to be mistrustful of her. Despite my months in the desert I wasn’t moved by any mad desire, and I was therefore clearheaded enough, at least, not to undertake with my partner anything that exposed me too obviously to the risk of regretting it later. An expression endowed with the idyllic charm that so often marks slang expressions designating obscene acts—an expression that, in fact, I had learned when I was in the army during the phony war—“se faire brouter la tige” [get one’s stem nibbled] will allow me to indicate, in a euphuistic style, the service that justified in Khadidja’s eyes my presence in the room where she retired to
rest or exercise the esoteric part of her calling. Will I give an exact idea of the clear and naked honesty that governed our relations if I add that I reached the limit of my ecstasy—in all gentleness, as one comes in a dream—just as she was pronouncing the words “twenty francs” at the end of a conversation about money begun and pursued in the course of our dealings?
In Le Havre, I wrote, after a stay in the great Normandy port a full adult lifetime before this (I hadn’t yet broken my solitude by marrying, hadn’t yet rediscovered it by traveling—silly man!—in order to get away from myself by removing myself to a great distance and was experimenting with a style both too pretentious and too abbreviated to give a literary formulation to the confused things I was feeling, another way one can try to overcome one’s isolation and one that I, for my part, novice that I was, would use with an awkwardness against which even today I must wage a struggle which experience has made, perhaps, more attentive and effective but certainly also much more tedious)—in Le Havre, the ships, the dockworkers, the shady bars, and the brothels, madams in heavy makeup standing on the doorstep among the fish-and vegetablemongers.
Day and night, on the beach and the esplanade, the healthy, salty damp of the sea, which makes one desire a vigorous love indulged with a naive, rather childlike sentimentality; in the town, the clamminess of a bath-house, the suspect force of dirty passions amid doctored alcohol, discordant music, the smells of bottled perfumes. The heart in silk stockings. (The next day, not departing from my theme—the low dive full of prostitutes—I took up this wretched image again: “The women wind off the skein of their closeted days by crossing their legs to show the silken mesh of their stockings.”) The mouth wants to be humiliated, or torn apart. There is no more gentleness or even purity. We no longer want (when “I no longer want,” committing only myself, would have reflected the truth) the marine fragrance of algae (which more properly should have been expressed as “seaweed”) but the odor of flesh in rut or bodies artfully prepared and rubbed down, bleached by the absence of daylight, fat with laziness and fatigue, and animated by one sole movement: that of the belly, which in this disruption of the usual hierarchy of the organs now assumes supremacy.
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