De Potter's Grand Tour

by Joanna Scott

  After they’d climbed back down, she rested in the shade while Gertrude wandered off to explore the garden. She listened to the squeaking of a child’s violin coming from inside the villa and watched a black cat that had planted itself on the bottom step of the tower and was picking grit from its paw.

  When Gertrude returned, she wore a halo she’d woven with daisies. She announced that if she could find a way to do it, she, too, would settle permanently in Cannes. “How lucky you are, Auntie,” she declared.

  The girl was right: Aimée was lucky to have found Armand de Potter and to have escaped the provincialism of her friends back home. Because of Armand she had the chance to collect armfuls of carnations, to ride in automobiles through the countryside of Provence, and to preside over Grand Bois. Armand had introduced her to the world across the ocean and made it possible for her to structure her days in such a way that she was continually enthralled. As Madame de Potter, life was never boring. She was reminded of this as she watched Gertrude in her daisy halo trying to catch one of the lizards scurrying up the wall of the Villa Fiorentina clock tower.

  The next morning, Armand left to lead the Classic, Oriental, and Alpine Tour. He prepared for the trip in the usual way, packing his trunk and putting his tickets and passport in order, reviewing his itinerary, reading up on the archaeological sites he planned to visit. Aimée saw him off at the station in Cannes instead of accompanying him to Marseille, since she had a meeting at noon with the architect who was designing the gardener’s cottage. She wrote in her diary that night, propped up in her bed by a pair of tasseled pillows, “A. left today for Naples.” She considered writing a line about the fine coq au vin Felicie had prepared for dinner. Instead she just added, “Cloudy & damp.”

  She kept herself busy visiting and receiving friends, running errands in town, going to the dentist and to church. The weather remained unseasonably cool and rainy, and a flare-up of rheumatism made her fingers stiff. On some days she and Gertrude declined to join friends on excursions and instead stayed home, reading or playing cards by the fire. The builders started digging the cellar for the gardener’s cottage. Several times, often in fog and drizzle, Aimée invited her niece and Miss Plympton to accompany her on a carriage ride down to la Croisette to see the waves crashing against the jetty.

  The weather began to improve toward the end of May. On the first of June Aimée hired a car and took Gertrude and Miss Plympton to Mandelieu to pick up Victor at his school. A few days later they set out on a trip together, traveling through the Vars Valley to Grenoble and Lausanne on a new itinerary Aimée had agreed to test out for De Potter Tours.

  She expected to enjoy herself, but things started to go wrong. The first hotel they stayed at was a musty place, with a nest of scorpions in the closet. Not only did Victor develop a cough and have to spend a day in bed, but poor Miss Plympton didn’t fare well either. In Puget-Théniers she was nearly prostrated by the heat and humidity, and by the time they reached Grenoble she was, as Aimée reported in her diary, “entirely used up.”

  The group arrived in Lausanne on June 10. After suffering the heat on the slow train from Grenoble, Aimée shared Miss Plympton’s exhaustion. She left Victor in Gertrude’s charge and retired to her room right after dinner. She pushed open the shutters that the maid had latched, then sat on the window seat and took out a book. She lost herself in this absorbing fantasy about time travel for several hours, reading straight to the end. Not until several months later, when she was finally returning the book to the shelf at Grand Bois, would she consider the coincidence: while she’d been following the time traveler up to the point when he enters his machine and disappears forever, Armand de Potter had gone missing.

  El Kef to Tunis

  YOU CAN BE SURE that if he were telling this story, he wouldn’t begin in Constantinople. He wouldn’t begin with his arrival in New York, or even with his introduction to the Dredging Club of the Brooklyn Institute. He would begin in the outpost of El Kef, in that godforsaken dirt alley where he lost his way in 1879 after making the mistake of smoking a rare hashish offered to him by a proprietor of a tea shop.

  But it could hardly be called smoking when all he’d done was take one quick puff, the bamboo stem still moist from the lips of the old Berber who had offered him the pipe. He hadn’t felt any change in the quality of his consciousness after that single puff, but he eventually felt something … was it three days, or three hours, later? The hashish had followed him and spun its web, snaring his thoughts, so he couldn’t remember how he’d come to this place, or where he was supposed to be.

  Back then he was still a naive traveler and hadn’t learned the importance of always mapping out his route. He knew, at least, that he was in an outpost called El Kef, in the northwest corner of Tunisia. But in his muddled state that day he could not posit a self capable of remembering why he had come here in the first place. He remembered that once as a sublieutenant for the French military he had visited El Kef. He wasn’t a sublieutenant anymore, so why was he back? He had the vague impression that he’d returned to the village to search for something he’d misplaced, but he couldn’t remember what it was.

  He stumbled along a path bordered by polished black stones. For no good reason, he tried to catch up with a goat that was trotting urgently, as though fleeing the slaughterhouse. At the juncture of the path and the hard-packed road leading out of the palm grove, he lost sight of the goat and wasn’t sure which way to turn. He turned left, crossed between beds of dense, spiky aloe, and passed through a low archway, entering a corridor that curved endlessly into the darkness and promised to lead nowhere.

  As he moved forward, he was reminded of walking down a beach into the water. The ground was soft-packed sand like a beach, and the walls were a lemony, dimpled limestone. Moving farther along the corridor, he expected the darkness to be impenetrable. But as he rounded a bend, he saw a glow trickling in from a distant opening.

  For a man who didn’t know where he was going or how he had ended up in his current location, light was a more appealing destination than darkness, and he quickened his pace. Now at least he was a man with a sense of direction. With each step his purpose intensified. He was not just a man walking forward toward the source of light. He was a man who for a reason he couldn’t yet articulate was hopeful that soon his whereabouts would be clarified. Hope, then, was a welcome attribute, and as a hopeful man whose boots crunched the top layer of sand he proceeded along the corridor.

  He was increasingly hopeful as his senses had more to identify. There was the faint, greasy smell of his own sweat, the bitter taste of lime dust in his mouth, the occasional crumbling when his hand rubbed along the wall. Eventually he heard what he thought was the rustling of palm leaves in the breeze. But the source of the sound wasn’t the wind moving through the palms, he realized as he drew closer. It was human breath moving from the lungs and emitted through pursed lips as murmurs.

  Murmurs signaled that he had reason to be wary. He was hopeful and wary as he approached the source of the light and the murmuring. New questions came to mind. Should he be silent and observe the scene ahead of him without revealing his presence, or should he arrive with a bellow of a greeting?

  He didn’t have a chance to decide, for he was suddenly there, where the corridor opened up to a doorless entrance and the white light of the sun created a cube amid the shadows occupied by three white-robed, turbaned men. Two were squatting on the sand, knotting fine threads, and the third was standing, looking down at their work. All three offered the intruder no more than an indifferent glance before they resumed their conversation, trading hushed sounds with an intensity suggesting that whatever rug they intended to weave would be the product of reluctant compromise.

  He stood for a long while observing them, envying even more than their concentrated absorption in the work of weaving their facility with a language he did not yet understand. He wished he were a man who spoke the language of these weavers. He could be that man if he set his m
ind to it. He must have been drawn to this place for a reason.

  He was jealous of the Arabs’ secrets and yet oddly comfortable with his exclusion, for now he knew where he was. He was in a place where time couldn’t penetrate and nothing would ever change, in the presence of men who had been singled out and blessed with immortality. But it wasn’t God they had to thank. It was the ingenious machine mounted on a tripod in the corner of the workroom: a Phoebus mahogany box camera, its lens like a pig’s snout inhaling the light.

  * * *

  When he was nineteen, Armand spent five months in Algiers as a sublieutenant for the French army, under the leadership of Crémieux, a government minister appointed to assimilate Algeria into France. Armand’s duties at the time involved supervising the transportation and settlement of Alsatian refugees fleeing the Franco-Prussian War. He took one long expedition with his regiment, traveling by train to Biskra, then on horseback across the Algerian desert from Biskra to Constantine. From Constantine they traveled by diligence to the outpost of El Kef in Tunisia. A week later they returned to Algiers.

  Constantine was in the midst of a devastating drought, and with French speculators buying up all the grain and emptying the silos, famine was spreading. By 1871, 20 percent of the region’s Muslim population had died of starvation. As a nineteen-year-old sublieutenant surrounded by fellow soldiers, Armand did not witness the full scope of the suffering, and he heard only faint rumors of the simmering unrest among the local tribes. Then, on the road between Constantine and El Kef, the regiment passed the desiccated corpse of what Armand thought was a dog but turned out to be a child—a boy of about six or seven. The officer in command ordered his regiment to dig a grave, and Armand was one of the men who helped bury the child.

  After that, he wanted to leave the desert and never return. Not until he moved to America were his memories stirred in a different way. It was as if he’d carried sand in his pocket, and he found the sand again, took out a handful, and felt it sift through his fingers. He thought about the corpse of a child, left out for the vultures. He thought about the sleepless night he spent with his regiment on the edge of a bedouin camp, when he’d stayed up listening to the bedouins make a strange music by rubbing stones together. He thought about the way the brilliant constellations seemed to flash and spin.

  Six months before he married Amy Beckwith, he used a portion of the money he’d saved to sail back across the Atlantic. He went first to visit his brother in Belgium, though he spent only a day with him before leaving for North Africa. He was longing to hear the music of the bedouins and see the stars dancing in the sky again. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d missed something on his last visit.

  On the outskirts of El Kef, he met a young photographer named Alexandre Bougault. He learned that Bougault had come from Algeria, where he’d been serving in the French military, and had recently bought himself the Phoebus box camera with the rack-and-pinion focuser. Bougault had the notion that he could have a profitable career selling albumen prints of desert scenes to tourists. So far in his brief search for marketable images of North Africa, the reality of dust and poverty had disappointed him; he preferred arranging scenes with a theatrical flourish, posing his subjects and manipulating the light in ways that enhanced the impression of hazily exotic beauty. His ambition was to sell as many prints as possible rather than to represent the truth. What did European tourists care about the truth?

  Bougault was delighted to hear his visitor greet him in French. Armand himself felt an uncharacteristic relief at meeting a Frenchman so far from home. While the photographer continued with his work, the two men traded stories about their military service and discovered that they had mutual friends. In the time it took for Bougault to use up his supply of negative plates, Armand regained sufficient clarity of mind to accept when the photographer invited him to have a drink.

  Instead of staying in the one hotel thought to be suitable for foreigners in El Kef, the industrious Bougault had arranged a deal with a rug merchant. In return for buying rugs to resell in Paris, he was given a room in the merchant’s house and two meals a day. He and Armand sat in the garden behind the house until it was dark, drinking a syrupy tea that made the ends of their mustaches sticky. Bougault showed Armand a photograph of a girl he’d left behind in Paris. Armand showed Bougault a photograph of the girl waiting for him in Tivoli. They boasted of their wealth and their family connections and were at a point when the tenor of their conversation could have gone toward either suspicion or agreeable curiosity when Bougault exclaimed and pointed to the ground. A huge beetle, as brown and round as an overripe plum, was scuttling in the shadows close to the house. The beetle disappeared into a crevice before either man could grab a rock to crush it. They fell into a long silence, and when their eyes met, they burst into merry laughter, like boys who had broken a tiresome rule without getting caught.

  From this initial meeting, they struck up such an easy friendship that the rug merchant assumed they were brothers. Armand kept Bougault company while he designed the scenes for his photographs; Bougault helped Armand sharpen his sense of purpose in his life. He came to think of the arid landscape as a place exempt from modern corruption—the version of the desert as illustrated in Bougault’s photographs was the true version, and the reality visible without the camera’s aid was just a lie.

  * * *

  He saw two weavers in brilliant white robes sitting near the sun-washed entrance of an ancient catacomb, delicate threads stretched between them, while a third weaver leaned against the archway and observed their effort with impatience.

  He saw a donkey carrying two huge bundles of broom, being led by an Arab along a narrow dirt street. He saw a boy watching from the shadow cast by the front wall of a house. He saw the Arab bend his head, at Bougault’s direction, so that his face was hidden by the white hood of his immaculate robes.

  He saw two beautiful girls dressed in silk gowns and gauzy headscarves lent to them by Bougault, sitting in their dirt yard grinding spices. He saw the girls combing the dirt with their bare toes. He saw one of the girls extend her hand languorously for a turbaned visitor to kiss. He saw that the turbaned man who had been hired by Bougault to play the part of the courtier was actually the Maltese gardener at the hotel where Armand was staying.

  He saw the same gardener wearing traditional bedouin robes sitting on a camel on a rocky hilltop behind the ruins of the Roman baths beyond the gates of El Kef. Armand thought it was a fine, suggestive scene, but Bougault disagreed. He wanted an infinity of sand in the background, not ugly rocks and ruins.

  They left the Maltese worker and the camel in El Kef and traveled by diligence to Souk-el-Arba and from there by train to Tunis, arriving shortly before midnight. They were given rooms in the house of Monsieur Alapetite, the French resident-general, who was a friend of Bougault’s. They spent the evening drinking a tarry anise liquor and arguing about the future of Tunisia, which the resident-general thought a hopeless place and Armand and Bougault believed was a gold mine for the French.

  The next day the two men left for Constantine by train. From Constantine they took the diligence to Biskra, where they hired horses and a guide and rode into the desert, reaching Mraier, an oasis famous in the region for its thousands of date palms, in the late afternoon. They were given bed and board at the French military barracks.

  In the morning they found an Arab with his own herd of camels. The Arab was a clever bargainer and demanded forty francs for the use of his camel and an additional ten francs to lead the two men a short way into the desert, to the top of a dune.

  Armand stood at the photographer’s side and watched as the Arab, dressed in bedouin robes, mounted the camel. The camel pushed itself up to standing. The Arab rocked perilously on the wood-and-rawhide saddle and then, following Bougault’s order, shaded his eyes with his hands and searched the infinite emptiness of the desert for some sign of life.

  On their way back to Mraier, they met a group of Sudanese slaves w
aiting outside the gates of the village, their faces and robes streaked with dust. Bougault spoke with them and learned that the slaves had been left in charge of the camels while their master finished his business in the village. Bougault spent nearly an hour trying out different arrangements. At the end, he created a tableau with two of the camels sitting on folded legs, the other two camels standing with two of the Sudanese men holding their reins while the third man sat in the foreground with his back to the camera, draped in the spotless white robes Bougault had given him to wear.

  The group’s master appeared and demanded payment for the service provided by his slaves. Bougault obliged, giving him five francs, and the group set out to continue their trade in the next village. Armand watched them trek as if in slow motion across the sand, the figures shrinking with the distance and finally disappearing over the rise of a dune.

  Where the Sudanese men and their camels had been, Armand saw sand seas and salt terraces blistered by heat. He saw a beautiful, vast, windblown nothingness that hid the secrets of its ancient history. And thanks to Bougault, he saw the potential for making a fortune from this land.

  On the road to Constantine, Armand asked for copies of the finished photographs. Bougault peered at him strangely without answering, his lips turned up in a half smile, his silence awkward at first, then unnerving. Armand shifted in his seat to move away from him and make the boundaries clear. Bougault’s response was to set an exorbitant price for each print, which Armand refused to pay. The two men argued so violently that the diligence they were riding in shook from their fury. By the time they’d reached Constantine, they had agreed that they wanted nothing more to do with each other, and Armand was left to fend for himself.