When the express train comes thundering along one night in accordance with some unknown timetable, you are not prepared. The torrent suddenly roars through and drowns everything in its path.
It came to Ain Sefra on the night of October 21, 1904.
53
I admit that I cross the oued in Ain Sefra with some haste. I can see bits of skeleton in the sand on the other side. And further up, whole corpses of sheep, goats and cattle – swept down by a tidal wave? Or is it a kind of animal cemetery?
I come to a forest planted to bind the dunes. A shepherd is reading a book there.
‘Sidi Bou Djema?’ I say, in monosyllables.
He points to the faint outline of a wall on top of a dune and replies equally monosyllabically:
‘Sidi Bou Djema!’
But when I get up there, it is just a wall enclosing a small garden where a lone man and his dog grow chickpeas and onions.
The man is very friendly and he speaks beautiful French. He knows exactly where the tomb is and is pleased to take me there.
It is his garden. He laid it out himself. He dug the well himself, eleven metres deep. He fired the clay bricks for the wall himself. It would have been ready by now if it hadn’t rained the other day. His semi-fired bricks have run out into the ground – look at this! Now he has to start all over again. He is used to that. He was a guest-worker in France for eight years and has worked in Marseilles and Lyons. He has even been to Paris. Now he has come back, has a wife and six children, five of them boys, and he is looking forward to a secure old age when he no longer needs to do any work, other than potter around in his garden.
As he is telling me this, we have got as far as the burial ground of Sidi Bou Djema. It lies with dunes and mountains behind it and a view over the oued where it happened.
A few spindly stems of grass grow in the sand after the rain. But all the same, it is a very desolate place. The desolation seems to be concentrated on the absurd buckled aluminium saucepan hanging at the back of a tombstone. On the front it says in European letters:
ISABELLE EBERHARDT
54
The act of departure is the bravest and most beautiful of all. A selfish happiness perhaps, but it is happiness – for him who knows how to appreciate it. To be alone, to have no needs, to be unknown, a stranger and at home everywhere and to march, solitary and great, to the conquest of the world …
That is what Isabelle Eberhardt writes in a piece sometimes called ‘The Road’, sometimes ‘Notes in Pencil’.
Departure is a tradition in her family. Her surname comes from her German maternal grandmother, Fräulein Eberhardt, who left her country to live with a Russian Jew.
Her mother marries an old Russian general, but then leaves him to go to Geneva with the children’s young tutor – a handsome, intellectual Armenian, Tolstoy’s apprentice, Bakunin’s friend. He has been a priest, is married and now leaves his wife and children to live with his beloved in exile.
He teaches Isabelle six languages: French, Russian, German, Latin, Greek and Arabic. But he never admits to her face that he is her father.
She grows up among exiled anarchists in a chaotic milieu in which catastrophe is the natural state.
When she is eight, her brother Nicholas joins the Foreign Legion.
When she is nine, her sister Olga runs away and marries against the will of her family.
When she is seventeen, her favourite brother Augustin joins the Foreign Legion.
When she is twenty, she goes with her mother to Algeria. They both convert to Islam. The mother dies and is buried in Annaba.
When she is twenty-one, her brother Vladimir commits suicide.
When she is twenty-two, she gives her father, who is dying of cancer, an overdose of a pain-killing drug which, intentionally or not, ends his life.
She is alone in the world. At the turn of the century in 1900 she writes in her diary that the only form of bliss, however bitter, destiny will ever grant her is to be a nomad in the great deserts of life.
55
In secret, my sister Isabelle winds wet cotton bandages round her chest. She wears these bandages under her clothes and with not the slightest sign betrays what is going on. Only I know about it and I cannot stop her. She winds the wet bandages tightly, tightly round her chest. When they dry and shrink, they slowly crush her chest and suffocate her heart. No one can save her.
56
‘From where have I got this morbid craving for barren ground and desert wastes?’ Isabelle Eberhardt asks.
In her teens, she was charmed by the melancholy escapism of Loti’s first novel Aziyadé, and he became her favourite author. When his The Desert came out in 1895, she was eighteen years old. Two years later she set out into the desert on her own for the first time. Loti was the one she always took with her on her journeys, the only person she looked up to as a forerunner and example.
She thought she had found her soulmate. He had a beloved older brother who had gone to sea, she has a beloved older brother who became a legionnaire. Her life, like his, is shrouded in departure and loss. Both live in disguise. And both love the desert, where they see their emptiness and their longing for death take shape.
Eberhardt as a Bedouin.
Eberhardt as a spahi.
57
Michel Vieuchange set off into the desert disguised as a woman. Isabelle sets off into the desert disguised as a man.
To her it is not just a disguise. The French language mercilessly reveals whether the writer considers him- or herself to be a man or a woman. Even in her diary Isabelle uses the masculine to describe herself.
Pierre Loti disguised himself as an Arab, but also as a Chinese, a Turk and a Basque. In every harbour, in every book, he takes on a new disguise. He became a cut-out doll for ever in new costumes, a cultural chameleon melting into every environment and lacking authenticity wherever he went.
The disguise goes deeper in Isabelle. When she returns to Africa, she wants to free herself from her past and take on a new and Arab identity. She becomes the Tunisian author Si Mahmoud Essadi.
Dressed in the clothes of an Arab man, she sets off into the desert. She has been waiting for this moment all her life. She rides between the oases with a few native cavalrymen, with a group of legionnaires, with a chaamba caravan, with an African on his way home to his village to get a divorce. She writes:
Now I am a nomad – with no other homeland than Islam, with no family, no one in whom to confide, alone, alone for ever in the proud and darkly sweet solitude of my own heart …
She soon finds a separate confidant in one of her Arab lovers. Slimene Ehni is a sergeant in the native cavalry. She meets him in El Oued and through him becomes a member of a Sufi community, which is secretly opposed to French rule.
Another Arab fraternity closer to the French tries to murder her. A stretched washing line softens the blow and saves her life.
The French army banish her from North Africa and she ends up in Marseilles, where she supports herself for a while by writing letters in Arabic for the guest-workers.
Slimene also goes there, and on October 17, l901, they marry. By marrying an Arab in the service of France, she becomes a French citizen and can return to the desert.
With Slimene she rents a small house in Ain Sefra, which is the headquarters of the French troops during the ‘pacification’ of the border with Morocco.
Even as Madame Ehni, she wears men’s clothes and continues her androgynous life beside camp fires and in soldiers’ brothels. Only the male rôle provides her with the freedom to ride around reporting for the newspaper l’Akbar in the Sahara, which the French are just conquering. Only the male rôle gives her the freedom to make love with anyone, to drink anisette with the legionnaires and smoke kif in the cafés, where she shocks listeners with her expositions on the pleasures of brutality and the voluptuousness of subjection.
58
I push my way through a thick dark desert of trees which is called ‘forest’. I
am in a hurry and must not come too late. In the end the forest opens up into a clearing. I see a figure hanging by the feet from a branch and I rush over. It is Isabelle! Her normally moon-pale face is blue-black and contorted. I cut her down and carefully arrange the dead body on the ground.
59
The Globe, a sports arena in Stockholm, is transformed from a descending hot-air balloon into a diving bell. Isabelle and I are sluiced out into the water, spouting cascades of pearly bubbles from our oxygen masks. But very soon we are forced to go back as if into a womb. We have been born into an element that is not ours, in which we do not belong, in which we cannot live – except for short moments with the piece of bitumen between our teeth.
60
‘The thought of death has long since been familiar to me,’ wrote Isabelle towards the end of her life.
Who knows? Perhaps I shall soon let myself slip into it, voluptuously and without the slightest worry. With time I have learnt not to look for anything in life but the ecstasy offered by oblivion.
Pierre Loti lived with his death-wish until he was seventy-three. Isabelle Eberhardt only lived to twenty-seven. By then she had no teeth, no breasts, no menstruation, was as thin as a well-diver, and almost always depressed. ‘If this foray of mine into the darkness does not stop, what will be its terrifying outcome?’
Eberhardt seated, cigarette in hand, about six months before her death, 1904.
Her life was an extended suicide. With increasing regu larity she took refuge in drugs, alcohol and a brutal, self-destructive, indiscriminate sexuality. She suffered from innumerable illnesses, among them malaria, and probably syphilis.
At her own urgent request, she was discharged from the hospital in Ain Sefra on October 21 and returned to her house by the oued.
The torrent that drowned her came that night.
61
When Isabelle died, her first novel, Vagabond, was just being serialized in l’Akbar. Her sketches and short stories had often been included in Algerian newspapers. A large number of manuscripts was saved from the flood.
The editor-in-chief of l’Akbar, Victor Barrucand, published a selection in 1906. Quite well-meaningly, he had first prettied up her texts.
She wrote: ‘Everyone laughed.’ He added: ‘People laughed at his rusticity; his gesture was that of a shepherd.’
She wrote: ‘Freedom was the only happiness accessible to my nature.’ That sounded too simple. He improved on it: ‘Freedom was the only happiness that was necessary for my eager, impatient and yet proud nature.’
Despite the revisions, the book was a success and Barrucand continued to publish Isabelle’s manuscripts in 1908, 1920 and 1922, by then with greater respect for the integrity of her writing. The diaries and other writings she left were published in 1923, 1925 and 1944 by R-L Doyon. Grasset began to publish her collected writings in 1988. Most of these editions also contain short biographies. More extensive biographies have been published in France, Algeria, England and in the USA in 1930, 1934, 1939, 1951, 1952, 1954, 1961, 1968, 1977, 1983, 1985 and 1988.
62
What is it about Isabelle Eberhardt that goes on fascinating generation after generation?
I have plenty of time to think about that as I drive on through the desert.
She did not write nearly so much as her master, Pierre Loti. As a rule, nor did she write so well. And yet she is the one to survive. Why?
‘One must never look for happiness,’ she writes. ‘One meets it by the way – always going in the opposite direction.’
There is a great deal of sparkling use of words in her work. It is not the average that counts. It is the highlights.
It is not the quantity that counts, it is the totality. And that applies not only to her language, but also body language. The gesture of life.
Isabelle dressed in male clothes and dived into the wells of the Saharan Arab world. At the same time, Jack London was putting on working clothes and letting himself sink into People of the Abyss (1903).
Eberhardt on horseback. (Painting in oils by G. Rossegrosse)
He was conducting a social experiment. He wanted to experience with his own body what wretchedness means for the truly poor.
Isabelle was doing the same. But with no secret gold coin sewn into her waistband. She dived without any safety rope. She went undercover with no return.
The boundaries she crossed were not only social, but racial. A white woman in the American South openly preferring black men as lovers and marrying one of them without altering her unbridled life – considered in those terms, it is easier to understand what forces Isabelle was challenging.
The French Empire in North Africa rested ultimately on the myth of the superiority of the white race. Her whole way of life questioned that myth.
It also questioned the myth of male superiority. If a female transvestite could penetrate the world of men and acquire its freedoms, vices and privileges, then the gender rôles were made to waver. Unclear sexual identity aroused anxiety and aggression. Isabelle put herself outside all categories.
Even that might possibly have been forgiven, as her fate verified all prejudices, apparently confirming that anyone who defies the conventions sinks into the dregs. So far, so good. But throughout her deterioration, Isabelle had the insolence to maintain a sense of moral superiority. That was unforgivable.
In that respect she belongs to a totally different family from Loti. She belongs to a long line of French literature running from Villon via Baudelaire and Rimbaud to Céline and Genet. She may be the only woman in that company.
The Immoralist
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André Gide’s Fruits of the Earth was published in Swedish in 1947, when I was fifteen.
As soon as I opened the book I felt someone was speaking to me, not over my head to other adults, but directly to me. And so confidentially, almost whispering, as if it were late at night when everyone else was asleep.
The book gave me another name, Natanael, which drew me into the text so that we could be together there. I liked it very much.
Some writers hide themselves in Action, others conceal themselves in Facts. But the master in Fruits of the Earth despised such hiding places. He talked about himself. He had a message. It filled the whole book. It was already there in his voice, in his way of speaking to me.
I was looking for a Master. I heard his voice for the first time in Fruits of the Earth, and fortunately he was also looking for what I wanted to be: an apprentice.
That was dangerous and forbidden. I realized that at once. The Master defied all authority. He preached departure, departure from everything, even from himself. He said: ‘When you’ve read my book, throw it away and go out! I would like it to have given you the desire to leave something, anything, your town, your family, your way of thinking. Don’t take my book with you … Forget me.’
That voice made me happy. But it also frightened me, made me afraid of the demands it made, afraid of the great unknown awaiting me.
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‘Our actions consume us, but they give us our radiance.’
That could be an epitaph for Isabelle Eberhardt.
She went to North Africa in 1897, when Fruits of the Earth was on sale for the first time. She died in 1904 when The Immoralist had just been published. Her whole writing life was lived between these two of Gide’s books.
She was obsessed by the same mystique of departure as Gide. She preached the same nomadism. As he did, she wanted to try every experience, even those that were bad, brutal or depraved. It is conceivable that the reason why she dressed as a boy was in order to become his favourite apprentice, Natanael.
But there is nothing to indicate that she read Gide, at that time still a little-known young writer. André and Isabelle were simply children of the same day.
And through Fruits of the Earth, that day also became mine.
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I came to Fruits of the Earth from Manual for Infantrymen, which had long been my favourite book. I also cam
e from the training guide Physical Fitness and Strength. I read Gide in the same way. I came from Scouting for Boys. In this last, the narrative and descriptive parts were interspersed with small comments in brackets: ‘(practise it!)’. I read parentheses of that kind into Fruits of the Earth as well.
When it said:
‘Every creature is capable of authenticity, every feeling of fullness.’
Or:
‘I lived in a state of almost uninterrupted, passionate surprise.’
Then I also read the invisible words ‘Practise it!’
Passionate surprise …?
I loved my father, but had he ever been passionate? Did he even know what the word meant?
Within me was a boundless need to be seized and elevated. Everything around me denied that need. Only in Fruits of the Earth was it understood: ‘Never stop, Natanael. As soon as an environment has become like you, or you like your environment, it is no longer any use to you. Then you must leave it. Nothing is more dangerous to you than your family, your room, your past.’
Was I getting like my father? Would I become the Secretary of the Älvsjö branch of the Swedish Red Cross, as he was? Would I dilute my milk with water to spare my stomach? Would I live without travelling, without festivities, without thinking, without adventures?
‘Families, I hate you!’ says Menalces. Through a window, he sees a boy sitting reading beside his father. The next day Menalces meets the boy on his way back from school. The next day they talk to each other, and four days later ‘he left everything to come with me’.
Desert Divers Page 6