The biblical associations with the Apostles who left everything to follow the Master gave me the courage to abandon myself to such dreams: one day Someone would walk past in the November darkness out there on Långbrodal Road, Someone would see me though the window where I was bored to death doing my homework beside my father, and this Someone would call out to me and take me out into the great wide world outside Älvsjö.
We would wander in that fatal moonlight over the desert. We would walk barefoot on smooth blue rocks, our eyelids cooled by the night.
We would see the walls of desert cities turning red towards evening and glowing faintly on in the night – deep walls in which the midday light is stored. At night, they slowly repeat what the day has taught them.
We would see Bou Saada. We would see Biskra. ‘Over the moonlit terraces in Biskra, Meriem comes to me through the tremendous silence of the night. She is entirely enveloped in a torn white haik which she laughingly lets fall as she stands there in the doorway …’
After every sentence of that kind, I read with racing heart a secret Practise it! Live it!
66
Bou Saada, ‘the fortunate town’, lies in a hollow between three mountains. Its fortune is that its wells are connected to an underground lake constantly supplied with fresh water from the three mountains. The old wells can be thirty metres deep and irrigate twenty-four thousand date palms.
Today the basis of the economy is not dates but oil. The powerful desert vehicles of the prospectors, covered in mud and sand, stand outside the Hotel Caida. The oil men swill beer in a bar like a swimming baths, their voices echoing between tiled walls. They gather noisily around the long tables in the dining room with their big laughs and big wallets. A small plate of soup and a mess of vegetables costs as much as a dinner at the luxurious Opera Cellar in Stockholm.
Exchange rates create the image of the Foreigner. If the Foreigner is to appear powerful, rich and generous, then there has to be an exchange rate which makes everything cost about half what the Foreigner pays back home. If the Foreigner is to appear powerless, poor, stingy and complaining, then there has to be an exchange rate such as there is in Algeria.
I am staying at the Hotel Transatlantic. When it opened in 1909, the Foreigner was rich and powerful. Then the water closets flushed, hot water rushed out of the taps from Jacob Delafont & Co in Paris, the piano was properly tuned, the lights in the chandeliers sparkled, the Ouled Nail girls danced and made love. Those were the days.
Fruits of the Earth speaks with rapture about these girls. Loti wrote a whole book about them. Maupassant praises them. He came across them at the Café Joie in the main square and spread the rumour all over Europe that their wantonness was all part of the Ouled Nail tribal culture. According to ancient custom, the girls lived those happy days as prostitutes to save enough for their dowries.
Today, the Transatlantic in Bou Saada is the only surviving hotel of a chain that once stretched across the whole of North Africa. An infinitely old man shows me up the high stairs, as narrow and steep as a ladder. A yellow plastic bucket in the bath has to serve as both shower and WC. The beds are as cold and deep as graves.
67
I am lying on the ground in a strange town. A crowd of children dressed in white see me and come running over. They stand around me, chattering in French to each other, bending down and touching me, plucking at my clothes, touching my skin, lifting my hand. I am tremendously frightened. I expect them to say:
‘He’s dead.’
I don’t know myself whether or not I’m alive.
68
In the morning, the infinitely old man has put on a once-white jacket and from the narrow spout of an enamel pot pours a bubbling, pale brown drink which could well be tea, may be coffee. His hands with their raised veins shake as he pours.
For five years after the death of my mother, I had my father’s full confidence. Then he went behind my back and started seeing another woman.
The first time she visited us at home, as I was seventeen and was reading Fruits of the Earth, I suddenly felt terribly sorry for her.
Beside my old father, she seemed so young and lively, so unused. Did she really understand what she was letting herself in for? She didn’t know what he was really like, as I did, from long experience.
After dinner, Father went out into the kitchen to fetch the coffee. Then I said: ‘Surely you’re not considering marrying someone who is already dead?’
She looked at me in horror.
‘Ssh, he can hear what you’re saying.’
I thought I had nothing to hide, and actually raised my voice as I went on. ‘He hasn’t read a book for fifteen years, or thought a new thought. Everything about him has solidified into clichés and routines. He’s dead.’
As I was saying this, I saw from her expression that it was hopeless. I fell silent. Then my father, as old as I am now, came back into the room. He poured the coffee through the narrow spout of an enamel coffee pot. He didn’t say anything. But I can still see before me his hands, with their raised veins, shaking as he pours.
69
Eventually, Someone really did walk past and see me. He was a British composer called John. I was pleased a grown man was interested in me and taking me seriously. In the summer of 1948, I went to London to stay for a few weeks with John in his flat.
It soon turned out that our expectations of this meeting were quite different.
‘You’re reading Fruits of the Earth,’ John said. ‘Do you see what your favourite book is about?’
He showed me one place after another, for example the bit in the sixth book about the dazzling light in the towns of the Orient. I had often read that. But clearly not thoroughly enough. I hadn’t seen that among the white-clad Arabs were also children who appeared far too young, don’t you think, to know anything about love? ‘Some of them had lips hotter than newly hatched baby birds.’
‘Practise it! Live it!’ said John, and kissed me.
I was scared. I had no desire to be involved like that. As soon as I could, I escaped from the flat and ran through the streets of London to the Swedish Embassy, where, still gasping with the fear and effort, I rang the doorbell.
It was Sunday morning. A gigantic British butler gazed down at me blankly from the top stratum of society.
Haughtily, he saw me off.
It was pouring with rain. I had nowhere to go. I went back to John. When he found out where I had been, he was instantly transformed from attacker into victim.
‘Are you crazy?’ he said. ‘Do you want me sent to prison?’
He told me about Oscar Wilde. Wilde was the prototype for Menalces in Fruits of the Earth.
I could hardly believe it.
‘What had a poseur like Wilde to teach the master of honesty, André Gide?’ I said.
‘Wilde was world famous,’ said John. ‘The young André Gide had still not had anything published when they met in Paris in 1891. They were together every day for three weeks. Gide tore those three weeks out of his diary.
‘The same year the master of honesty published Fruits of the Earth,’ John went on, ‘the master of poseurs left prison a broken man. That could happen to me, too, if you report me to the Embassy.’
Naturally, I didn’t. John and I made a pact – he left me alone and I didn’t go to the Embassy. But the message in Fruits of the Earth had suddenly shrivelled. I no longer called myself Natanael.
70
On the road between Bou Saada and Biskra is a small place called Zaatcha.
The name has never become as famous as Song My or Oradour-sur-Glane, but what it denotes is the same: massacre. The French razed the town to the ground after the rebellion of 1849 and the whole population was slaughtered, men, women and children.
Today the name denotes some dusty palm trees, a petrol station and a café rattling with dominoes. The morning bread has all gone and the evening bread has not yet arrived. There are three red plastic chairs and an iron one outside. I sit dow
n to wait.
Out of old Swedish habit, I turn my face to the sun and roll up my sleeves to get a bit of tan on my arms.
People around me are surprised and upset. They look at me as if I were a flasher. In the Sahara, the sun is the Enemy just as much as it is the Friend with us. Sunbathing in the Sahara – it’s something you simply do not do.
Not so long ago, the sun was suspect in Europe too. The first really immoral thing that happens in The Immoralist is that the main character takes all his clothes off in the sun. He sees some sunburnt workers and is himself tempted to undress. At first it feels cold and unpleasant. But the sun burns and after a while he is pleasantly roasted right through. ‘My whole self lived in my skin,’ he says.
Was he the very first modern sunbather? The sun, the liberator, teaches him not to be ashamed of his body, but to look upon it with delight. ‘I felt harmonious and full of sensuality. I almost thought I was beautiful.’
Gide writes that when it was still regarded as more natural to burn down a village than to undress in public. Nakedness was characteristic of the inferior races, along with dark body colour. What was morally superior was white.
Sunbathing became a bold symbolic action, full of rebellion and hedonistic mystery:
It seemed to me, Gide writes in If It Die …, as if when lit through by the rays of the sun my body had undergone a chemical renewal. When I took off my clothes, it was as if all torments, restraints and worries ceased to exist. While my will melted utterly away, I let my body, now as porous as a honeycomb, secretively purify and prepare the honey flowing into the Fruits of the Earth.
Respectable people do not do such things. A respectable person burns down villages, but is careful not to let his will melt away.
The sun is scorching in Zaatcha. The evening bread has still not arrived. The houses are pale blue and honey-yellow. Some heavy long-distance trucks stop to fill up, surrounded by chattering mopeds. The children gather on the playground. The only thing that makes it a playground is the fence. No need for a sandpit. The wet salt desert smells of sea.
71
At the spa hotel in Biskra, I spend one night drinking with Wolfgang, a German desert fanatic crossing the Sahara on a motorcycle. The Immoralist is lying on the table in my room and Wolfgang says: ‘The wife has a miscarriage, doesn’t she? Otherwise she would have given birth to me.’
‘You?’
‘Yes, I grew up in exactly that kind of family. My friends thought I had the most wonderful father in the world. He thought so too. But he was interested in their opinion, not mine. True, he was full of charm and imagination. True, I admired him enormously. But he betrayed me over and over again – without even noticing. The book ought to be called The Self-Absorbed. In his world, the immoralist is the only person who really exists – that’s what makes him immoral.’
It was one of those night-time hotel conversations which become absolutely honest only because both people are equally sure they will never have to meet again.
‘Father was always very attentive towards my mother. But beneath the courtesies and tokens of love, the silence between them grew deeper and deeper, until finally it became explosive.
‘They didn’t dare separate. My father thought that without Mother, reality itself would cease to exist. Only she could nourish and sustain him. For her too, it was a matter of identity. There was nothing beyond their lifelong love, not even herself.’
‘What happened?’
‘One day when my mother was in the bath, he locked the bathroom door on the outside, went downstairs, poured petrol all over the living room and set fire to it. Then he went straight to the police and gave himself up. I almost think he expected praise. A respectable person does not separate from his wife, but one does have the right to burn down one’s house, doesn’t one? And it did indeed burn to the ground.’
‘And your mother?’
‘She was rescued at the last minute. I went to the Sahara. My father was a desert soldier in Rommel’s army in the Second World War. He often told me about the desert when I was small. I had got it into my head that the solution to the mystery of him might be found here.’
72
I am staying in Beeskra and publishing the Honey Bee Magazine containing news from the beekeeper front seen entirely through the eye of the bee.
Even beesexual keepers get sharp criticism for what they regard as beeneficial. But naturally I avoid exaggerated and unbeeleevable standpoints. Since the Bee Party came into power, the honey harvests have multiplied. That way the supply of sugar-water for the bees is assured. Continued co-operation with the beekeepers is naturally for the beeneefit of the bees.
The final ‘libeeration’, as we call it, is a central beetail that unfortunately has had to bee put off into the future.
73
From the main character’s point of view, Gide’s The Immoralist is a story of liberation.
Michel has recently lost his wife. Some of his friends travel to an oasis in the Sahara to meet him. Lying on his roof, they listen as he confides in them about his marriage.
He had married Marceline largely to please his father. During their honeymoon in North Africa, he finds out he is in the advanced stages of consumption. He has already given up and prepared himself for death when the sight of a small child suddenly gives him a strong desire to live.
His whole being begins to resist the disease. ‘My health was my assignment. Everything that was wholesome was to be regarded as good, but I must reject and forget everything that did not heal.’
What arouses his will to live more than anything else is the company of children. When he sees them playing in Biskra gardens, semi-obliterated memories from his own childhood come into his mind. It amuses him to learn their games and arrange little parties for them with juice and cakes in his hotel room.
He begins to regain his strength. He experiences exactly the kind of jubilant re-entry into life described in Fruits of the Earth.
Soon he does not only want to regain his health, but to be strong and full-blooded. He seems to discover within himself a new creature which teachers, relatives, yes, even he himself had previously tried to suppress. He begins to see himself as something that can be perfected. ‘Never has my will been more excited than in trying to achieve this unknown, still unclearly imagined perfection.’
He shaves off his beard and lets his hair grow. He sunbathes and exercises his body. But he doesn’t dare, or doesn’t want to share these experiences with Marceline. He wants to keep them to himself. He soon finds it both easy and amusing to lie to her and he also thinks these lies simply increase his love.
One day he rescues his wife from a drunken driver, and with his newly won strength thrashes the man. Then he makes love to her for the first time. She becomes pregnant, they return to France and settle on a country estate which had belonged to his mother.
Among intellectuals, Michel now feels himself a stranger. He thinks life, for him infinitely valuable, is nothing to them but an annoying hindrance to their writing. Instead he finds his way to a gang of semi-criminals and with them devotes himself to nightly thieving of his own possessions.
But Marceline falls ill and has a miscarriage. They leave the estate and travel south to find a place where she can regain her health.
74
‘So once again I made an attempt to retain my love,’ says Michel. But he no longer has any need of it. Happiness with Marceline is to him as superfluous as rest is to someone who is not tired.
He thinks he possesses within him untouched possibilities which are being suffocated beneath layers of culture and morality. Sins and crimes are acts of liberation. Evil is natural: ‘In every living being the instinct for evil seems to me to be what is most immediate.’ And everything which is natural should be affirmed: ‘I feel nothing within me that is not noble.’ So even what is evil is noble.
They leave the Swiss resort where Marceline has begun to regain her health. In the middle of winter, they travel south to se
ek sun and warmth. But Marceline simply gets worse. They finally arrive in Biskra. There he was saved. There she will also regain life!
The children in Biskra, who once gave him back the will to live and made him take the first step towards self-discovery, have become almost unrecognizable. ‘Work, vice and indolence have left their mark on faces which two years ago radiated youth.’ The boys have become dishwashers, road workers and butchers. ‘How honest occupations brutalize!’
The only one to retain his beauty is a petty criminal, Moktir. Michel invites him to accompany him to Touggourt the next day. But Marceline is more ill than ever and, trembling, she presses up against Michel. He thinks:
‘Shall I not stop? – I have sought and found my real worth: a kind of stubborn obduracy in wickedness (le pir). But how can I bring myself to tell Marceline that tomorrow we are going to Touggourt? …’
They take the mail carriage at dawn. Moktir is with them, happy as a king. The dismal road seems endless. Oases he thought would be smiling are wretched and he prefers the desert – ‘the land of lifeless magnificence, of unbearable lustre.’
‘You love what is inhuman,’ says Marceline.
The scorching sand irritates her throat. The inhospitable landscape torments her. As soon as they arrive, she goes to bed. The rooms are terrible. She eats nothing. He makes tea for her, but the water is salty and tastes disgusting.
He leaves Marceline and disappears out into the night to Moktir’s ‘beloved’ and makes love to her while her fiancé sits beside them playing with a rabbit. When he returns to the hotel, Marceline has her second lung haemorrhage. She dies that night.
He buries her in El Kantera, where he now lives a solitary and frugal life, making love sometimes with the beautiful dancer Meriem, sometimes with her little brother.
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