Her disguise allowed her to visit a brothel, which she wrote about in a 1903 text called ‘Dark Pleasures’. She describes the back room of a hovel, peopled with Sudanese dancers and musicians. It is a remarkably fresh piece of writing:
The others sing without stopping or pausing for breath – the gasping chant, the terrible cry that just now brought the damp flesh of the negresses to a climax of such savage passion.
Hashish pipes do the rounds.
Bit by bit, with the peppermint tea, the incense smoke, the scents of negroes, the music in the stuffy room, a breath of madness seems to come off the shiny foreheads of the blacks.19
It was a long way from Avenue de la Paix.20
Isabelle’s flouting of political, social and gender propriety in North Africa did not go unnoticed by the French authorities. As in Geneva, the gendarmes kept their eye on her. In October 1903 she met Colonel Lyautey, the man charged with extending French colonial ‘protection’ into the disputed territory of the Sahel. Lyautey was one of those grown-up boy scouts of the Third Republic; in later life he took to the Scouts with a passion. Graduate of Saint-Cyr, Chief of Staff at Tongking, a colonial pacifier, he was another one who liked to dress up in Arab robes and hang around with young men in steam rooms. French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau described him as ‘an admirable, courageous man, who has always had balls between his legs – even when they weren’t his own’.21
Mystery surrounds the exact terms of the mission that Lyautey proposed. He needed someone who could infiltrate the desert tribes and win them over to at least a passing French allegiance. Isabelle took on the role of an embedded journalist, sent to the Sud-Oranais by her friend Barrucand to report on the insurgency for his paper in Algiers. Her writing became more focused, urgent. The correspondent of the Paris newspaper Le Matin described Isabelle at twenty-six as a ‘robust lad, imberbe’:
She was ugly, with an ugliness unredeemed by any pleasing feature of her face, with her very prominent forehead, her high cheekbones, very tiny eyes and an appallingly nasal voice. In contrast her walk, the way she held her shoulders, very squarely, belonged to a more hardened cavalryman, a real spahi; unless you had known, you would never have taken her for a woman.22
A German Legionnaire stationed at Ain Sefra confirms this view: ‘Besides, she had nothing provocative about her and was far from being pretty.’23 Lyautey, on the other hand, gives an admirable picture of her, not at all fazed by her gender bending as evidenced by his mixed pronouns:
We understood each other very well, poor Mahmoud and I, and I shall always cherish exquisite memories of our evening talks. She was what attracts me most in the world: a rebel. To find someone who is really himself, who exists outside all prejudice, all enslavement, all cliché, and who passes through life as liberated as a bird in space, what a treat!24
Roped into the machinations of the French protectorate, Isabelle’s role became more ambiguous. Whose side was she on? Her elective affinities were for the desert tribes, but her company was increasingly that of the garrison towns. Like her husband of three years, the spahi Slimene Ehnni, she had thrown in her lot with the occupying power. During the last year of her life her marriage had begun to unravel; she can’t have been a domestic goddess. In a piece written in Kenadsa, she declared: ‘All love of an individual, carnal or fraternal, is slavery, a more or less complete effacement of the personality. One renounces oneself to become a couple.’ Such clarity in a twenty-six-year-old is unnerving.
She was headed for powder country: bled-el-baroud, a colloquial term for the desert. Kenadsa was a monastery affiliated to a Sufi confraternity that Isabelle had joined some years before. Territorially it was under the rule of the Sultan of Fez, which Lyautey sought to bring under the protectorate of France in a larger game with Morocco. ‘Where, really, is the border? Where does Algeria end and Morocco begin? Nobody bothers to find out. But what good is a border which is knowingly unspecified?’25 Isabelle’s brief was to inform Lyautey of the affiliations of the sheikh, Sidi Brahim. This dovetailed with her interest in secret brotherhoods, remote desert outposts and a search for peace of mind.
Under a little tattered tent invaded by flies, someone from Kenadsa has installed a Moorish café. A few government-issue saddles and rifles … the dreaming soul of nomads, reckless and sensual, climbs in wonderful savage songs, raucous at times as cats in the night, and sometimes mild as the gentlest lullaby. Their songs are waves of passion and feeling that cast themselves up on the beach of the sky. Their melancholy breaks on my heart, as well.26
She was attended by Sudanese slaves, given a cell-like room in the monastery precinct, and left to her austere surroundings. As an initiate of a Sufi brotherhood she had perfect credentials with the sheik and his seminarians, who came from all over North Africa to seek instruction. Her observations on slavery have a refreshing matter-of-factness:
Sons of captives taken by the Souah and the Mossi tribes, the fathers of these slaves came to Kenadsa after years of suffering and complicated wanderings. Captured first by men of their own race during the constant warring between villages and black chieftains, they were sold to Moorish traffickers, then placed in the hands of the Tuareg or the Chaamba who, in their turn, passed them on to the Berbers.27
Isabelle’s late writing achieves a kind of grace, different from her adolescent rumblings. Vignettes are clear, sympathetic, the observer unobtrusive:
For the last few days a black boy named Messaoud has been serving me. He’s about 14 years old, tall for his age and too sharp for his own good. He dresses in white shirts pulled in at the waist by a belt of grey wool. His brown face is friendly and expressive, with mischievous, large dark eyes that seem to have no iris. On his shaved head a tuft of crisped hair, sign of slavery and also of pre-adolescence, is a comic fixture above his right ear. This bizarre ornament lends a humourous touch to his otherwise mocking features. In the pierced lobe of his ear Messaoud wears a piece of rolled blue paper, in lieu of an earring.28
Invited by students to a gathering of tea, music and embroidery, she notices the handsome Hamiani Abd el Djebbar ‘lying full length on the carpet like a big Saluki hound, he stretches his lean horseman’s muscles, which are clearly unused to inactivity’.29 One wonders who observes whom here. Some days later, she spies on him outside at night with a ‘young, waxen-faced village girl … convulsing in love’s superb fury, rolled together upon the shadowy earth’.30
In monasteries and boarding schools nothing remains secret for long. Isabelle’s usual disguise was a ruse on both sides. She had her own daydreams ‘about the lives of these Muslim students: the long tradition of scholastic studies within the bare, simple confines of the ancient mosques; pious exercises stirring most of these young men, already affiliated with mystical brotherhoods, to daily ecstasy. … many hidden vices. An almost cloistered life promotes this perversion of the senses.’31 As her most recent biographer Annette Kobak puts it, ‘she was often overtaken by moments of pure lust’.32
‘Hidden vices’, of course, is disingenuous coming from a cross-dressing former anarchist reporting back to Lyautey. But it was exactly the voyeurism she enjoyed. She liked to watch people watching. The ‘ardent rutting’ did not go unnoticed by her, and she may have joined in. Her observation of student teatime extended to a whole way of life, a cultural analysis borne out by her own experiences as a disguised woman in a man’s world.
For the well-born Muslim at home, particularly in towns, nothing of personal affairs, family life, pleasures, or loves, must be revealed outside. The publicizing of pleasures, as European students love to do, is unknown in the Islamic world.33
In short stories giving voice to North African female characters, Eberhardt shows the same acute awareness of power relations. In ‘Toalith’ a girl jumps to her death down a well to escape a second marriage to an old man, a business partner of her stepfather: ‘It was said by everyone that she had run away to become a prostitute in some purlieu of the Kasbah.’34 Women are either obe
dient wives or whores; there is no third way. In ‘Portrait d’Ouled Nail’, translated by Paul Bowles as ‘Achoura’, Isabelle characterises the semi-nomadic dancers of the Ouled Nail:
Like all the women of her region, Achoura considered the sale of her body the only escape from want that was available to a woman. She had no desire to be cloistered again by marriage, nor was she ashamed to be what she was. To her prostitution seemed legitimate, and did not interfere with her love for her favourite. Indeed, it never occurred to her to associate in her mind the indescribable bliss they knew together with what she called, using the cynical sabir word, coummerce.35
Observations such as these and Isabelle’s trail-blazing life have made her a darling of identity politics.
Her ascetic interlude didn’t last long and soon she was back on the drugs. She had a way of nosing out a kif pipe. The Oblivion Seekers (2010) is the arresting title of a collection of her stories translated by that old kif smoker and Moroccan hand Paul Bowles. Bowles and Eberhardt were made for each other. In his preface, Bowles renders homage to her father for inculcating Isabelle with anarchist independence:
he allowed his daughter to have no contact with the Swiss among whom they lived. Very early he instilled in her a healthy contempt for the values of bourgeois society. Indifference to public opinion was essential if she was to be able to lead the kind of life she demanded.36
Isabelle’s sympathies lay with the underdog, the nomad, the feckless – an ‘intellectual nomadism’ identified by the writer Norman Douglas as long ago as 1911. He makes an interesting link between the Alps discovered by the Romantics and the Sahara ‘discovered’ by the same kind of people, fleeing the strictures of bourgeois society. Isabelle’s shiny black eyes, kif enflamed, anticipated the drug culture of the Beats and the fin-de-siècle clubbers:
The seekers of oblivion sing and clap their hands lazily; their dream voices ring out into the night, in the dim light of the mica-patterned lantern. Then little by little the voices fall, grow muffled, the words are slower. Finally the smokers are quiet, and merely stare at the flowers in ecstasy. They are epicureans, voluptuaries; perhaps they are sages. Even in the darkest purlieu of Morocco’s underworld such men can reach the magic horizon where they are free to build their dream-palaces of delight.37
1904 flash flood at Aïn Sefra, western Algeria, in which Isabelle Eberhardt drowned
In the autumn of 1903, sick with malaria and perhaps syphilis, she checked into the military hospital at Ain Sefra in the western Atlas. She asked her husband Slimene to join her. Both knew their destinies lay in different directions. She rented an old adobe house in the lower town in anticipation of his arrival and her discharge. They had been living separately for eight months.
In those southern Atlas towns flash floods sweep all in their path with sudden fury. Barely two hours after Isabelle had checked herself out of hospital, the water surged down the dry wadi and took the town by surprise. Husband and wife were upstairs, probably smoking kif. Slimene managed to escape. Isabelle was found trapped under the stairwell two days later, drowned with her hands behind her head as though protecting herself from falling masonry. She was buried according to Muslim rites in the cemetery nearby. Slimene didn’t turn up for the funeral.
Lyautey ordered a search for her papers and a month later the manuscript of what was to become ‘Sud-Oranais’ was found inside a large urn. Her editor Barrucand in Algiers supervised publication of her writings in the following decades. Two stage plays in the 1920s about her life, a film and the diaries began to build the legend of the tragic twenty-seven-year-old desert wanderer of Russian-Genevan heritage who liked to hang with the sailors.
Three of the Moerder children came to bad ends: Vladimir gassed himself in 1898; Isabelle drowned in 1904; in 1914 Augustin committed suicide. Slimene died of tuberculosis three years after escaping from the flood that killed his wife. The Australian writer Robert Dessaix makes an apt comment about happiness: ‘I’m not at all convinced now that happy childhoods are a good thing. I think they can lead to a kind of moral paralysis, a sort of smug Swissness of the spirit.’38 No one could accuse Isabelle Eberhardt of smug Swissness of spirit. In her diary she wrote: ‘I will vanish from this earth, where I have always been a spectator and outsider among men.’39 She hasn’t vanished yet.
Joseph Conrad was well placed to understand the anarchist threat among imperial powers. The Tsar’s police had imprisoned his Polish parents for sedition. Conrad was born in the Ukraine and ran away to join the merchant marine. As the chronologies put it, ‘a period of biographical mystery ensues’. After twenty years at sea, he eventually took British citizenship and settled down to marriage and a life of authorship in English. He set Under Western Eyes (1911) in the anarchist world of pre–First World War Geneva, among Russian revolutionaries plotting imperial ruin.
He had toured the Alps as a sixteen-year-old. Later, spending time in Geneva undergoing hydrotherapy, he imbibed the city’s atmosphere of Russian intrigue. Models for Under Western Eyes can be found in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Demons (1872), both of which contain anarchistic or politically motivated murders. Dostoyevsky himself had spent an impoverished winter in Geneva in 1867–68, gambling and writing The Idiot (1869). Both writers modelled their fictional characters on the nihilist Sergei Nechayev, who was arrested in Zürich and extradited to Russia.
Under Western Eyes opens with a prominent political assassination in St Petersburg. The student Razumov turns the assassin over to the police while managing to keep his cover as an accomplice. Later, he turns up in Geneva and meets the assassin’s family and a covert network of exiled anarchists. Lionised by this clique of left-wingers, Razumov gradually works his way into their confidence. He is a plant, a double agent, a sleeper, one of the first in a long line of undercover spies in twentieth-century fiction.
Conrad pictures Geneva as a cold escape from tyranny, ‘a respectable town of refuge to which all these sorrows and hopes were nothing’. This ‘sleeping town of prosaic virtues and universal hospitality’ is merely a backdrop to a tale of betrayal and allegiance. His émigré anarchists shuttle between the Boulevard des Philosophes and assignations on the Promenade des Bastions. His characters watch each other. And Swiss police watch them. The tale’s English narrator, a ‘teacher of languages’, is himself a kind of spy, the western eyes of the title. Geneva is a city of intrigue, biting wind and even colder people. Its inhabitants are characterised as smug keepers of democracy’s flame:
In the very middle of it I observed a solitary Swiss couple, whose fate was made secure from the cradle to the grave by the perfected mechanism of democratic institutions in a republic that could almost be held in the palm of one’s hand.40
These Russian anarchists congregate at the Château Borel, based on the Villa La Grange, still standing on Geneva’s south shore. After meeting them, Razumov looks across the lake towards the Jura and the vineyards below, at ‘the very perfection of mediocrity attained at last after centuries of toil and culture’. Unlike Rousseau and the Romantic poets, Razumov is immune to the beauty of the lake. A prig and a moralist, he has fallen into his double-agent role almost by accident:
there was but little warmth; and the sky, the sky of a land without horizons, swept and washed clean by the April showers, extended a cold cruel blue, without elevation, narrowed suddenly by the ugly, dark wall of the Jura where, here and there, lingered yet a few miserable trails and patches of snow.41
Dostoyevsky, very much a xenophobe and a Russian patriot, had also found scant comfort among the Swiss, lamenting in his diary their tendency to smugness: ‘Everything here is vile, rotten, everything is expensive.’42 Conrad’s Russians scorn the very democracy they are murdering to attain. He manages nonetheless to capture the city’s émigré microclimate. Give or take a profession, it is not too different today:
revolutionist members of committees, secret emissaries, vulgar and unmannerly fugitive professors, rough students, ex-cobblers
with apostolic faces, consumptive and ragged enthusiasts, Hebrew youths, common fellows of all sorts that used to come and go around Peter Ivanovitch – fanatics, pedants, proletarians all.43
Razumov’s role as double agent sits uneasy with him under the scrutiny of the assassin’s family and these watchful revolutionaries. His silence is interpreted as aloofness and modesty, but is in fact dissent from their firebrand views. At any moment he could be unmasked as an agent. Conrad is careful to associate Razumov with Rousseau. ‘To write was the very thing he had made up his mind to do that day,’ thinks Razumov, wandering along the quay:
To his right, beyond the toy-like jetties, he saw the green slopes framing the Petit Lac in all the marvellous banality of the picturesque made of painted cardboard, with the more distant stretch of water inanimate and shining like a piece of tin.44
Almost unconsciously, Razumov makes for an island in the stream, ‘a tiny crumb of earth named after Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, and drinks a glass of milk on a bench. It is here that he has his epiphany and begins to write his true story. Conrad’s own divided nationality, his bilingualism, his inherited dislike of Russia are behind Razumov’s torn soul. Rousseau too blew hot and cold about his Swissness. His island is perhaps the most visible place to sit down and write in all of Geneva, off the dogleg bridge, smack in the middle of the Rhône as it sweeps out of the lake in a hurry to get to France:
he pulled out of his pocket a fountain pen, opened a small notebook on his knee, and began to write quickly, raising his eyes now and then at the connecting arm of the bridge. These glances were needless; the people crossing over in the distance seemed unwilling even to look at the islet where the exiled effigy of the author of the Social Contract sat enthroned above the bowed head of Razumov in the sombre immobility of bronze. … His fine ear could detect the faintly accentuated murmurs of the current breaking against the point of the island.45
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