Sherazade

by Leïla Sebbar

  'We'll go now, straight away, if you like.'

  'When I've got my papers, the forged ones. When my name's Rosa.'

  'I prefer Sherazade.'

  'I also call myself Camille. You didn't know? Depends who I'm with.'

  At the concert of Oriental music, the audience went hysterical. All the Arabs from Paris and up to thirty miles around were there. Men and women with babies in their arms and youngsters grouped according to their generation and their housing estate. Youngsters were clapping and dancing in front of the podium. Girls dressed in 'Halles' fashion or rock, had taken off the scarves they wore round their necks and tied them round their behinds to do a belly dance in jeans, imitation leather miniskirts or baggy trousers. They danced like the women at an Arab celebration, in a room of the flat, among themselves apart from the men. They were dancing in public, unashamedly, knowing no one was looking at them, protected by the ring of youngsters, boys and girls, which separated them from those who might be their parents and close relatives.

  They danced in twos and threes, surprised at their own daring and laughing as their shoulders, belly, buttocks quivered in the dance. Sherazade danced. Julien watched her.

  Suddenly he saw Sherazade stop short, freeze, look round as if being followed. He moved over to her, wrapped her in her raincoat and led her to a spot where the light was not so bright. It had occurred to Sherazade that if all the Arabs from Paris and the surrounding suburbs were there, her parents might be present. Her mother liked Oum Kalthoum and often listened to him.

  She'd have liked to catch sight of Meriem in the crowd.

  She was just leaving when she heard someone call her name.

  Omar

  It was Omar and the gang. Sherazade told Julien to Wait for her, she'd be back. She left with them. They'd turned up at the concert but got bored and were leaving again.

  When she passed Julien's Volkswagen she left a note on a Metro ticket tucked under the windscreen-wiper. 'I feel better now. S.' She sat side-saddle behind Omar who wouldn't let her drive. She insisted she knew how . . . he took a look at her dress and Sherazade said, 'Oh yes, you're right. . . it's a bit tight. . . the next time you'll see.'

  Omar stopped near the Gare du Nord, the gang's meeting place. He lit up a Marlboro, they all smoked American cigs that the Algerians from Algeria called Sonaposes - on analogy with Sonatrac* and all the Sociétés Nationales which had given rise to all the Sonas . . . It had become old-hat, almost common, the sign of an ex-serviceman to smoke Gauloises. No one in the gang would dare light up one in front of the others, they'd rather be seen dead than smoking cheap crummy French cigs . . . Omar said, 'I've had it up to here hanging around every weekend . . . What about a bit of fresh air . . . Should we go to Deauville, and try our luck at the Casino?'

  'Where's Deauville?' Sherazade asked, pulling up the thongs of her sandals.

  'It's at the seaside and there's gambling at the Casino. Shall we go? It's not far. You can win a lot of money and you'll see the sea if you've never seen it before.'

  'How d'you know I've never seen it?'

  'I just said so for no particular reason.'

  Sherazade said she didn't want to go to the Casino or the seaside, she'd be getting a bike and would be going to Algeria.

  'Really, you too?'

  'What d'you mean, me too?'

  'You want to go there? You know there aren't any pin-tables in the boondocks and even in the towns I don't think you find any, can you imagine!'

  'I don't give a damn for pin-tables. That's not what I'm going for.'

  'Why then?'

  'I dunno. I just know I'm going. That's all.'

  Omar said he and his mates were going down south on their bikes . . . They were going to arrange holidays on the coast. Some of them would get jobs crewing on yachts. The bourgeois like Arabs and gipsies . . . We'll milk them for the readies and split when they begin to smell a rat. Some of my mates've already had some fantastic summers . . . They had a ball with their birds, 'cos they told the skipper they'd have to bring their girlfriends or not come at all. The skippers thought there'd naturally be some nice little group-sex parties . . . but then . . . They locked themselves in their cabins and wouldn't come out again when they started making suggestions early in the evening. They let the old gits get on with their partner-swapping among themselves . . . Sometimes they came and knocked on the door they didn't open they said fuck off we're tired . . . I've done cruises like that right through the Mediterranean it was t'riff, Corsica, Tunisia, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Egypt. . . Wouldn't you like to come with me? You'll be far away, it'll be peaceful . . .'

  'When I've got my bike . . . OK. 'Night.'

  'You're not coming?'

  'Not tonight. 'Bye!'

  * Société Nationale de Transport et de Commercialisation des Hydrocarbures, National Society for Transport and Marketing of Hydrocarbon. (Trans.)

  Ritz

  Sherazade took the Metro. She didn't like travelling by Metro in the evening on account of the presence of the transport police. When she caught sight of any she'd walk fast and then break into a run to get above ground. She preferred to walk. She walked a great deal in Paris. She stopped at a call-box. She was going to phone Julien when, as often happened, someone tapped discreetly on the glass pane. It was a man in his fifties, camel-hair overcoat, signet-ring. . .

  They both emerged simultaneously. He spoke to her politely. He was in Paris on business. He'd just arrived from the Middle East and he'd like to get to know some French people, Parisian women . . . He was very fond of this country, this city and it would be his pleasure to invite her to dinner wherever she'd like to go. He knew several good restaurants and if she accepted he'd spend a pleasant evening and most important he'd be speaking this beautiful language . . .

  Sherazade accepted the invitation.

  He was very talkative. He went on and on. She wasn't bored. It was two a.m. He suggested they go to the Ritz. He had a room there he thought he could get one for her, if she liked, he could stay longer with her. Sherazade didn't feel like going back to sleep at the squat, or at Julien's. In the foyer of the hotel the businessman passed a group of women whom he greeted. He told her they were Arab princesses from the Gulf, on holiday in Paris. They said they'd been at the Kat', he'd understood it was a smart club, but he didn't know any more about it. Sherazade had heard Zouzou and France talk about Arab princesses who got their chauffeurs to drop them at the Katmandu in their Rolls, where they picked up birds and always gave them lavish presents, as well as handing out an astronomical amount of banknotes. And these bimbos developed a taste for petrodollars, if not for the Arab princesses that France said she found very ugly but France always exaggerated.

  The businessman took a room for Sherazade adjoining his own. It would include breakfast. Sherazade found herself in a palatial room, as big as a drawing-room, with armchairs, couches . . . for how many people? She let the businessman accompany her to the door of her room; he kissed her hand and then suggested a little trip in a couple of days.

  'If you're patient, in five days' time I'm leaving to spend a week in Florida, by the sea, or on one of the islands in the Caribbean, I don't know yet, I'll take you with me. I need a holiday, and perhaps you do too? What do you say?'

  'I want to go to Algeria.'

  'To Algeria? But you don't have any fun there . . . It's dreary. No one would think of spending a holiday there. You, a Parisian, you'd be bored to death in Algeria. I'll give you a few days to think it over. And then, if you need anything in the night, just tap on the interleading door to my room, on the left of your bed. The key is on your side and I think there is a little bolt, so you needn't worry . . . Goodnight, mademoiselle . . . What is your first name? You didn't tell me.'

  'Camille,' said Sherazade who was sleepy.

  'Goodnight, Camille. Sleep well. See you tomorrow.'

  'Goodnight.'

  Sherazade woke up at seven o'clock, asked for her breakfast, polished off everything edible to
the last crumb and left the Ritz never to return.

  She phoned Julien who was still at home. They arranged to meet at the Beaubourg library; it was Monday, the boutique was shut.

  Chassériau

  Julien and Sherazade had never spent the whole day together in Paris. Sherazade wanted to go to the Louvre to look at the Women of Algiers, always the same ones.

  Julien suggested going to the Versailles Museum to look at the huge picture in the Algerian gallery, The Capture of Abd al-Qadir's Retinue by Horace Vernet, an artist who'd accompanied the armies of occupation in Algeria, around 1830. Julien spoke of the baroque confusion of the painting in reds and ochres, a tangle of French soldiers, camels, palanquins from which harem women had been thrown out and caught by their Negro servants, Arab warriors, spirited horses in embroidered caparisons, sheep, carpets, cattle . . . Sherazade repeated that she wanted to go to the Louvre to look at the Women of Algiers and the bathing women, that she'd only caught a glimpse of when they'd hurried past together to get to Delacroix without looking at anything else. The medley of plump white bodies of Ingres's Turkish Bath astonished her. You couldn't distinguish the ones in the background clearly when your eyes left the back and the highlighted nape of the neck of the naked woman in the centre foreground, a musician. Chassériau's Esther at her Toilet was not so overcrowded. On either side of the white woman with the naked torso, a serving-maid: a Moorish woman and a Negress carrying perfumes and jewels. Julien told Sherazade that Chassériau was born in the West Indies, his mother was a Creole, the daughter of settlers from Santo Domingo, now Haiti, and his father was the French consul in Porto Rico. He told her he was trying to get to see Baron Chasseriau's private collection but he didn't know how to set about it. Sherazade also looked at Fromentin's Algerian landscapes and paused, before leaving, at Ingres's Odalisque. Like the musician in The Turkish Bath, she was wearing a turban whose silver and gold thread and tassels in the nape of her neck were clearly visible. Julien drew up for her an impressive but, he emphasized, incomplete list of odalisques from Delacroix to Renoir

  – who had painted some as a tribute to Delacroix

  – up to Matisse, whose paintings of odalisques from 1912 to 1929 Julien ticked off on his fingers

  – not counting drawings and sketches – naming them as they came into his head:

  Odalisque in White Turban

  Odalisque with Red Casket

  Odalique in Lotus Position

  Odalique with Magnolia

  Odalisque with Green Foliage

  Odalisque in Red Trousers (2)

  Odalisque in Grey Trousers

  Odalisque in Armchair

  'Are they always naked women?' asked Sherazade, who heard the word odalisque for the first time.

  'It's more that they're half-draped; apart from the one by Ingres, who only wears a turban, the ones I've been able to see are often dressed in sort of baggy trousers from just below the waist and sometimes a transparent blouse that lets you make out the breasts or else is cut low enough to reveal them. They're always reclining languidly, gazing vacantly, almost asleep . . . They suggest for Western artists the indolence, voluptuousness, the depraved allure of Oriental women. They were called Odalisques in nineteenth-century art, forgetting that an odalisque in the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish Empire, was simply a servant, a slave waiting on the women of the royal harem. If you like, we can go to the Museum of Modem Art and I'll show you some. But they're nearly all in private collections, like the Algerian women: Manet's Algerian woman, Corot's, Renoir's Algerian girl with the falcon, and then Matisse's Algerian woman . . . Matisse's is in the Museum of Modem Art.

  In the afternoon Julien rummaged among his bookshelves to find the Orientalist albums that he hadn't touched for years and books he'd picked up on the second-hand stalls in Bordeaux, Aix-en-Provence, Paris. He read Sherazade a passage from Théophile Gautier's Algerian chronicles, taken out of his Picturesque Journey to Algeria, written about 1843:

  'We think to have conquered Algiers and it is Algiers which has conquered us. Our women already wear scarves interwoven with gold, a medley of a thousand gaudy colours, which were used by the slaves in the harem, our young men adopt the camel-hair burnous . . . If this continues, in a very short time France will be Mohammedan and we shall see in our cities the white domes and minarets of mosques mingling with church steeples, as in Spain at the time of the Moors . ..'

  'Apart from the Paris Mosque . . .' said Sherazade, 'there's one in Asnières, I know because my mother's friends go there to take offerings of bread and milk and to pray on Fridays, but are there any others?'

  'France hasn't become "Mohammedan" . . . but I've heard some pieds-noirs say that France will soon be colonized by Arabs from North Africa, the Mashreq* and the Gulf . . .'

  They're crazy, those pieds-noirs . . . and you believe them?'

  'I do believe that France is becoming a multiethnic society. . . First with the Russians and the Poles from the East and if it continues with the dissidents in the USSR and Poland, in the other countries of Eastern Europe as well, but the exodus from there is less serious, and then from the South with the Italians, Spanish, Portuguese immigrants and again from the South with White and Black Africa, not to mention the West Indies and other islands still under French domination . . . Those of original French stock will become the new minority in a few decades,' Julien said with a laugh, 'and all because of girls like you.'

  'Why me?'

  'Because you are the ones who're going to have two-tone children, half-castes, cross-bred, adulterated offspring, bastards . . . hybrids . . . mongrels . . .'

  'Me, children? I shan't have any.'

  Sherazade was glancing at Delacroix's Journal. She paused at the account of his stay in Morocco and Algeria. Julien was having a bath, Sherazade came in with the book and sat on the bidet.

  'Listen Julien, Delacroix's talking about what we saw this morning. Shall I read it to you?'

  'Yes, do. I've forgotten.'

  'It's in 1847. I'll read the whole thing, even if it's a bore.

  "31 January. Worked on Women of Algiers.

  29 March. The next day resumed work on Women of Algiers, the Negress and the curtain she is lifting.

  26 May. Worked with enthusiasm, although for short periods only, on Women of Algiers. Composed an interior in Oran with figures . . .

  27 May. Enjoyed working on Women of Algiers: the woman in the foreground . . ."

  Shall I go on?'

  Julien explained that the Women of Algiers in the Louvre dated from 1834 and that Delacroix had taken the same subject for another smaller picture, exhibited at the 1849 Salon. It could be seen in a museum in Montpellier.

  Sherazade went on:

  ' "5 February. Baudelaire arrived just as I was beginning again on a little figure of an Oriental woman, lying on a sofa, commissioned by Thomas in the Rue du Bac. He told me of Daumier's difficulties in finishing. Then he started talking about Proudhon whom he admires and says is the people's idol.

  His views seem among the most modem and completely progressive.

  Continued the little figure after he left and went back to the Women of Algiers.

  My experience with the Women of Algiers is that it is very satisfying and even necessary to paint on top of the varnish. Only I shall have to find a way of preventing the subsequent layers of varnish from attacking the varnish underneath, or first varnishing on top of the first outline with a permanent varnish.

  Tuesday 13 March. The doctor came about five o'clock; he upset me, he talks of using small probes. I stayed by the fire.

  This morning Weil took the Odalisque and gave me 200 F.

  Thomas, Turkish Woman 100 F.

  Lèfebvre. Odalisque 150 F." '

  Sherazade stopped reading. She'd read the rest in the evening, in bed or at the shop. Julien told her that Delacroix had brought back from his travels in North Africa some magnificent Oriental costumes that he never liked to lend. He needed them for his pictures and sometimes
wore them for fancy-dress balls.

  He recalled the grotesque fancy-dress party organized and financed by a famous couturier at the Palace Hotel. His story made Sherazade laugh. The theme was The Arabian Nights and the guests were shown an idiotic film about an idyll worthy of Nous deux in the courtyards and Moorish chambers of Moroccan palaces, with clips of the desert.

  He added that at this Parisian Arabian Nights party he'd seen African princesses and Moroccan princesses, sisters of the king, two of the five officially recognized by Mohammed V, four since the accidental death of one. They were the centre of attraction and the one in the round red hat with a green feather was particularly conspicuous. The whole evening they never left their chairs nor the table on the platform reserved for VIPs. They stared at everything that moved in front of them with that royal gaze that sees no one but is there to be seen, almost like a divinity. They were accompanied by two men who talked together. They were dignified in their boredom.

  Julien had been momentarily fascinated to watch a monumental woman, an extremely beautiful African princess who wore a long white gown of real ermine; the white muslin sleeves and the low-cut bodice prevented her from fainting from the heat or simply from sweating profusely. She talked on her left in an African language to a man in a dinner-jacket and on her right in French to another man, also in a dinner-jacket. Around her neck she wore a diamond necklace and Julien wondered if this woman mightn't simply be the Empress Bokas-sa. He never found out. Next day he'd completely forgotten these princesses of one evening.

  'If you like, said Julien, 'we can go and see Delacroix's studio it's in the Place Furstenberg in Saint-Germain.'

  Sherazade began to laugh.

  'Why are you laughing?'

  'Because if I agreed to do what everyone's always suggesting I do . . . Anyway, with you it's not too far . . . Versailles, Saint-Germain . . . OK. Was it you who mentioned the Cotentin Peninsula to me?'

  'No.'

  'Then who was it?'