Have I done wrong? That is the question Michel asks his listeners on the roof terrace. In that case how did that wrong begin? Was it when I wanted to regain my health? Was it when I wanted to be strong? Was it when I wanted to be free? Why does this useless freedom I have gained now torment me?
75
We are not born human. We become that. We become that through solidarity with each other. We become that by taking responsibility.
That is the kind of person I wanted to be. I thought I was that kind of person.
Decisions are made in Paris. They are carried out in the Sahara. Then when the emotions that the name ‘Smara’ once inspired have vanished, the decision still remains.
I wanted to be Saint-Ex, the flyer who does not abandon a friend in distress in the desert.
I became Vieuchange, the desert wanderer who lies his way into continuing his journey, because he ‘had wanted it, in Paris’.
The immorality in The Immoralist is not that Michel has changed. One has a right to be changed. The immorality is that he does not dare admit the change. He prefers to become a murderer rather than admit the new being within him.
Is it right then, as Eberhardt writes, that departure is the bravest and most beautiful of all actions?
It is far from always beautiful. But swallow your pride! Admit your defeat! If you have already secretly departed, then admit it – the sooner the better! Your most immoral actions are carried out in order to maintain the illusion of being moral.
76
The road between Biskra and Touggourt follows an underground flow of water called Oued Rhir. The wells that took their water from the oued were fifty to sixty metres deep.
The water carried with it sand and gravel which was removed by the well-divers, ratassin. They descended more than thirty metres below the surface of the water and worked there for between 90 and 160 seconds at a time. After completing their task, they were praised as heroes.
During his honeymoon, André Gide arrived in Touggourt on April 7, 1896. There he saw a man being let down to clean out a well sixty metres deep, lined with palm trunks.
‘The effort required of these well-divers when they work under the water is incredible,’ Gide writes. ‘It is said that this man in particular was one of the bravest. He was rewarded with a medal. That evening he went insane.’
Anyone digging a fifty- to sixty-metre well must first get through the upper, unstable layer of sand. The shaft is lined with palm trunks and the space between the trunks filled with a mixture of clay and palm fibre to keep the loose sand out.
Often the well-digger must then get through several layers of polluted water before he reaches the sub-soil water. A watertight passage has to be made straight through the unclean water. Inside this passage, the well-digger works downwards through alternating firm and loose strata until he reaches the hard stone roof of the underground aquifer.
Then the foreman of the well-diggers, mhallen, descends to the bottom of the shaft and opens a hole through which the water spurts up and fills the well.
In his journal from Touggourt, Gide says nothing about his wife’s tears. But he describes the bitter taste of the water as it spurts up from the depths and fills the well.
77
Today, Touggourt receives me with high-tension cables, gasometers, construction cranes – the profile of the modern oasis. A small trickle of European desert maniacs gather at the Hotel Oasis.
Touggourt is the capital of the date world in the Sahara, the anchor in a chain of oases which produces one of the most famous quality dates in the world, ‘Fingers of Light’ – amber-coloured, almost translucent, with soft, moist and fragrant flesh.
But this is only one kind among thousands. There are date shops in which the vendors are swamped by dates of various kinds, various vintages, from various places, and as distinguished in taste as French cheeses. Having tried only one kind of date, the kind imported into Sweden, is like having eaten only processed cheese from a tube.
Date wholesalers with gigantic warehouses and international distributors have mountains of dates of every colour – brown, yellow, black and red. Most of them are not the sticky Christmas kind, but dry and shrunken everyday dates. The people of the desert eat them like bread. They are often ground into flour. They are not sweet until right inside, by the stone.
Date traders have small stands of poles and sacking alongside the wise old men who sell herbal remedies and plant juices.
I see the white juice of Launaea spinosa, supposed to relieve headaches, but also used to exterminate rats. And the small brown angular seeds of Peganum harmala, an emetic which causes dreams of paradise. And henbane which is so common in the markets of the Sahara – used to relieve cramps and to dull pain as well as for its narcotic effect, but in larger quantities a deadly poison.
Different, apparently contradictory functions are combined in these modest bland substances. A few grains is the difference between intoxication and insanity, death and healing.
78
I make tea. It is so strong it’s undrinkable. I make some more. That also blackens immediately. Where does the black come from? The answer is there. It is already in the water.
Two small girls are sitting on the floor picking lice out of each other’s hair. The reason why they have lice is their arrogance at being human.
I visit a fort nearby. As I get closer, the imposing cannons turn out to be enlargements of old engravings, stuck on cardboard.
I find a note in my pocket which says Canossa. It refers to my divorce. I am being punished for my ignorant moralism. I thought those who could no longer love each other were just lazy. But work alone is not enough. Without grace, there is no love.
79
Michel has concluded his story. His friends remain lying silently on the roof beneath the stars.
Then the silence is unexpectedly broken by Marceline who is with them on the roof, concealed by the dark night.
‘Now let me tell you what really happened,’ she says. ‘I didn’t die in Touggourt, as Michel maintains. I’d had enough. I left him.
‘Michel had married me to please his father. His mother died when he was fifteen and since then he and his father had lived in a very close and confident relationship. To the extent that the son acquired an old-fashioned air about him.
‘He once said he had within him forces “which have retained all their secretive youthfulness”. That was laughable coming from a twenty-five-year-old – but as I was married to him, I was able to refrain from laughing.
‘After the wedding we went straight to his apartment in Paris, where two separate bedrooms were ready for our wedding night. His father’s funeral and the wedding had exhausted Michel, and the honeymoon simply increased his exhaustion. In Tunisia he spat blood, and he arrived in Biskra unconscious. I had hoped to become a mother and found instead I was about to become a widow.
‘That was why I loved the children in Biskra. Michel was angry at first, then more and more interested. To me he said with the conventional rhetoric of love: “Marceline, my wife, my life.” But he didn’t see me, he was looking past me at the Arab boy I had with me, at his tongue which was “rosy pink like a cat’s”, he said as he leant over and touched his narrow shoulder.
‘He never touched me. But it was wonderful to see his will to live come back. He started eating again, he slept by the open window, and he was soon going out for walks with the children.
‘During his entire recovery, he was much occupied with his own body. He sunbathed, exercised, looked at himself in the mirror with pleasure. I often wondered what moved inside him, but it appeared to be something vulnerable he wanted to keep to himself. By respecting his secrets – and even his lies – I hoped I would eventually gain his confidence.
‘Sexually, I was still taboo to him. He appeared to be impotent. But once when I was out riding in a carriage, the driver had drunk rather too much and the horses bolted. Michel was beside himself with rage and thrashed the man, tied him up and
took him back to town. More violence than the situation demanded, I thought; but it had an excellent effect on Michel’s manhood. That night I became, as they say, “his”.
‘Perhaps it was that night which Michel always tried to live over again in our life together, though its reflection grew weaker and weaker for every repetition.
‘Nonetheless, I managed to get pregnant. We returned to France and settled on an estate that had belonged to Michel’s mother. Then suddenly he began to react to me like a child to his mother. He didn’t see me as a fellow human being, but as an authority he had to defy, a supervisor he had to escape from.
‘He couldn’t remember his childhood, had never had any youth, and now he was slipping out into the woods night after night to partake in a kind of boyish adventure which would have been criminal if it hadn’t been directed at himself. I pretended not to notice. I was absorbed in the expectation of the child – until my pregnancy was terminated by a miscarriage.
‘When I was nursing Michel during his illness, I already knew, of course, that I was risking infection. And yet it came as a shock to me when I realized that I also had consumption.
80
‘Now the tables were turned. Michel nursed me – with a tenderness his sick conscience made hectic and frightening. The more I needed him, the less he needed me. In the middle of his most tender care, he could exclaim: “I loathe compassion. All kinds of infections are concealed inside it. One ought not to feel sympathy for anyone but the strong!”
‘Why shouldn’t “one”? Because all compassion is as false and exaggerated as what Michel was now showing me? Because an unforced natural sympathy can only be aroused by the strong?
‘That certainly isn’t true of every “one”. My own sympathy is aroused to its most irresistible by the frail and the vulnerable.
‘It was because of that I loved Michel, who even in his newly won strength was so frail. I loved precisely what was vulnerable about him, what made him admire strength.
‘“Now I understand your faith,” I said. “Maybe it is beautiful, but it subjugates the weak.”
‘“That’s just as it should be,” he replied swiftly and involuntarily.
‘It was horrible to feel the way he observed not only with “anxiety” but also with “expectation” the way my strength was fading. Full of consideration, he was forever taking me to new places which would be better for my health. But those exhausting journeys only took me closer to death – which Michel secretly had begun to long for as part of his own liberation.
‘He wanted to go to Biskra. But his return was a terrible disappointment to him.
‘Michel was fifteen when his mother died. That seemed to be a boundary he never crossed. As long as Charles, the bailiff’s son, was fifteen, he interested Michel, but a year later he suddenly seemed foolish, ugly and indifferent.
‘The same with the children in Biskra. Three years ago they had been under fifteen and delightful. Now they were simply repugnant.
‘I begged him to stay in Biskra. He wouldn’t listen. During the journey to Touggourt, he had eyes only for that boy prostitute fawning for his attention. I was a burden he was about to throw off.
‘When he left me in that filthy, fly-blown hotel room and slipped out into the night, with an expression so secretive that it concealed nothing, I had suddenly had enough. I gathered up all my instinct for survival and left him for ever.
‘Was that wrong of me? Could I have saved our marriage?
‘If so, what should I have done? Can you see any possibility I didn’t see?’
81
No, Marceline, I see no possibility.
I think at best your marriage could have been a mutual pregnancy. Two people becoming pregnant with each other and finally giving birth to each other.
Some pregnancies last longer than others – the elephant’s and the whale’s. There are marriages which last for decades. But the aim is not to extend the pregnancy at any cost. The aim is that out of inevitable birth pains, two people will rise, each one freer and happier than they could be together.
In your case, there were not two people pregnant, but one. You gave birth to Michel. He could not do the same for you.
82
‘In Africa and particularly in the Sahara, there are practically no signs of the presence of oil,’ said Gulf’s senior geologist in 1949. Seven years later, oil was gushing from a depth of 3,329 metres in Hassi Messaoud. Since then, the poverty-stricken Sahara has supported Algeria.
The road to Hassi Messaoud is lined with bits of black rubber, the corpses of giant tyres that once bore steel pipes, enormous caterpillar track front-loaders, and bulldozers.
Nearer the oil fields, the road crosses a marshalling yard of black oil pipes half buried in the yellow sand. The actual production area can be made out at a great distance, from the light of vast torches and the smoke rising over the horizon – they are burning off the gas, the pressure of which forces the oil up to the surface.
It is a perverse sight; hot flames against an already overheated sky, brilliant beneath a sun already providing more than enough light.
The town has a small square, with a few quick-growing trees and some concrete benches. The cool winter wind smells of sulphur.
Under a shared metal roof is a row of shop-huts, a small café where they sell a thin brown coffee-like drink and ochre-coloured lemonade, and a little post office where everyone ahead of me is surprised and embarrassed when I take my place at the end of the queue. They solve the problem by leaving. Soon I am at the head of the queue because I am the only one left.
The bookshop is advertising Rabia Ziana’s new novel, The Impossible Happiness – an appropriate read for a night at the Hotel C.A.S.H. in Hassi Messaoud.
83
I crawl through the barbed-wire fence into a house which is at the same time half finished and an abandoned ruin. The barbs catch me. It’s no use closing my eyes. It’s no use covering my eyes. The light penetrates everywhere and so do the barbs.
Then a desert dune drifts in and covers the barbed wire. My lacerated eye sockets fill with flying soft warm sand. It is very pleasant. I was already blind. Now at last I can enjoy it.
84
André Gide went to North Africa for the first time in 1893. Twelve years earlier, the French had occupied Tunisia. Gide travels in Tunisia without mentioning the occupation. The conquest of Algerian Sahara is at its height. Gide does not mention it. In the occupied oases, military commanders rule like absolute monarchs and the Arab population is kept down with an iron hand. Gide sees nothing.
Others saw. Isabelle Eberhardt saw.
She was in North Africa while Gide was writing The Immoralist. She shows in her stories how France takes land from Arab small farmers, forcing them to work for the new French owners – who can’t understand why their farm workers go around with such sly, sullen expressions.
She sees how those who object are taken away in chains to the prison in Tadmit. The guards force them to walk barefoot on the ridge of sharp stones formed between the wheeltracks on the road. ‘With no verdict from the courts, punished by French administrators or local collaborators, with no chance of appeal, they are sent away to years of lonely suffering, with no hope of mercy.’
For Isabelle, like Gide, North Africa is primarily an erotic experience. When she falls in love with a young Tunisian, she leaves everything and goes with him, although he is a tax collector for the French. But her love affair does not stop her from seeing and reacting:
Everywhere among these poor, dark and recalcitrant tribes, we are given a hostile reception, she writes. Si Larb’s good heart bleeds for them, and what we are doing – he out of duty, I out of curiosity – makes us ashamed as if we had committed an outrage.
Gide at Biskra, 1893. (Collection Roger-Viollet, Paris)
There is no feeling in Gide that the conquest is an outrage. That doesn’t come until the Congo books in the late 1920s. By then Joseph Conrad had taught him to see it.
&nbs
p; Conrad and Gide were both in Africa in the early 1890s. Conrad was writing Heart of Darkness while Gide was writing The Immoralist. They were contemporaries – but it took Gide another thirty years to acquire Conrad’s insight.
In The Immoralist, the moral conflict is enacted entirely between the husband Michel and the wife Marceline. The novel trembles with her unspoken reproaches and with his pride and shame when he discovers himself. Gide sees no other conflict.
85
‘Nietzsche’s small change’ says the Encyclopédie Universalis contemptuously of The Immoralist.
Gide read Nietzsche, mad with jealousy at finding in him ‘all his most secret thoughts’. An enormous Nietzsche moustache grew on Menalces’ face, which had previously looked like Oscar Wilde’s. It becomes a ‘pirate face’ and is given the famous Nietzschean gaze: ‘a cold flame indicating more courage and determination than goodness.’
Gide, Saint-Exupéry, Vieuchange and Eberhardt – they have all looked into that gaze. All of them dive in after Nietzsche’s small change.
The contempt, however, is unwarranted. Not until the vast wealth of high-flown rhetoric has been cashed into the ordinary small change of a household do we see what it really entails – for me, for you, for all of us.
86
So what was it actually all about?
Over the moonlit terraces, Meriem comes through the tremendous silence of the night, enveloped in a torn white haik.
‘I am the “beautiful dancer” Michel lives with,’ she says. ‘Though, of course, this is a prettified circumlocution. My little brother Ali and I are prostitutes.
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