"Hmmm. Yes. I see your point. Well, then, let me see–three days–I think that would be a reasonable time."
"Most generous of you. And Ouargla? You will let me go there?"
"No." He shook his head. "Ouargla is out of the question."
"Then–?"
"Yes, well, let's see. There's nothing to the west, except Ghardaia, and to get there you'd have to pass through Ouargla, too. No, I think your best bet is to the east. El Oued. I haven't been there myself, but I hear it's most interesting from the touristic point of view."
She shrugged.
"I suppose, if that's my only choice, I shall have to be resigned. Could you supply a guide?"
"No problem."
She stood up. "Thank you, Captain. I'm sorry to have troubled you so early in the morning."
"No need to apologize, Mademoiselle. It's my duty to assist."
Isabelle turned and, without a backward glance, walked out the office door.
She spent her days in Touggourt sleeping through the heat, writing in the afternoons and at sunset descending into the town, wandering the narrow alleys filled with sand. She searched out strange dark cafés, sat in them through the night, drinking, smoking, talking with other travelers. Then at dawn she'd wander to the main square where the caravans encamped.
Here men slept by brush fires, while others stood on guard and still others sang songs in soothing guttural whispers while exhausted Ouled dancers performed in slow undulating arabesques. At the cries of the muezzin from the minaret, men would rise from their blankets, and she would face Mecca with them and pray.
Then she'd return to her hotel to sleep as best she could, passing in and out of agonizing fevers that gave her the impression they were making her clean, were burning away all the encrustations of her upbringing that had corroded her for too long.
On July 30, at four in the afternoon, she departed for El Oued. Her guide, a black postman named Amrou, led her through the broken stones of ruined forts. Her fever that day was worse than ever, but she was determined to make the trip, not only to meet the deadline set by De Susbielle, but also to heed the strange haunting music she felt calling her to the east.
By sunset they reached the first dunes, magnificent brooding mounds of sand bathed in golden light. And when she turned she saw all of Touggourt spread out against the yellow sky.
By two o'clock that morning her fever was worse and she fell from her horse onto the sand. Amrou led her as far as Mthil, where she rested the entire day, grilling like a piece of meat.
On August 1, traditionally the hottest day of the Saharan year, she left with a new guide to cross a vast desert of great dunes marked by the wind into intricate ripples and parched rivulets. They arrived at dawn at Ourmès, where she lounged by a fountain in the garden of the sheik.
On the third day of August she left at five in the morning. It was possible for her to travel during daylight then, for she was in the immense complex of sunken groves that make up the inhabited region of the Souf. At four in the afternoon she stopped to drink at the wells of Kouïnine, and just at sunset, surmounting a vast high dune, laid her eyes for the first time upon El Oued.
She paused at the crest to stare down at the legendary city of a thousand domes. She was to its west, and at that moment its shimmering walls, its fantastic clustering of white domes and arches and vaults were lit up with such intensity by the setting sun that she was convinced she'd finally reached a place beyond compare. As she rode down, seeking refuge in the shadow of her horse, her fever subsided and was replaced by joy at having come so far, at having finally finished so hard and tortuous a journey across such an immensity of sinking dunes.
And so she rode down to El Oued, her shadow growing longer as the sun sank farther down, deciding, as she noted later in her journal, that her first vision of the place was the most complete and definitive revelation of the harsh and splendid Souf, so strangely beautiful, so agonizingly sad. And as she entered the town, her nostrils pulsed at the cool sweet smell of gardens which flourished behind walls that lined the sand-filled streets.
To her, coming out of the vast silent emptiness of the west, El Oued was an island of riches, a holy place of cool. She dismounted in the great market square, walked to a stand, bought a cup of water from a vendor and two handfuls of fruit. Then she settled down delicately on the sandy floor with other travelers, men of caravans and of the groves that ringed the town, to gorge herself on the soft rich flesh of dates.
She thought for a while of her adventure, the long trek that had begun at the railroad station in Tunis less than a month before, the exhausting journey and the encounters with De Susbielle which seemed to sum up for her all the insufficiencies of the civilized world. She'd finally reached the place she'd always sought, a different world, strange, mysterious, full of possibilities, where there lay perhaps a destiny that would change her life.
But how odd to feel this, sitting on alien sand, cloaked like a man, among people of ancient races, before strange domed temples built for the worship of a God who had written the adventure she'd just endured.
Mektoub–it has been written that I come here. And thinking that, she smiled, wrapped herself in her robe and fell into a deep calm sleep.
Though feverish, she could not keep still. She spent the next days exploring the sandy streets of El Oued, then the sunken groves and endless dunes around. She was ravished by the way the light glittered on the sand, and by the faces of the Berbers peering from their encampments outside the town–black cloth tents, elegant pavilions.
El Oued, she became convinced, was the home she'd been seeking since she'd been a child. She had fled the garden of Villa Neuve in search of passes between the mountains that walled her in. Now at last, in the center of this vast Saharan emptiness, she'd found a place where she could feel free.
But there was confusion in her mind. What was she doing, twenty-two years old, alone in the world, pretending to be a man? Was this merely disguise or real transformation? Was she Isabelle or "Si Mahmoud"?
The question taunted her as much as the splendor of the dunes gave her peace. She knew why she wore men's clothes and called herself by a male name. It was the only way she could travel in this world she'd chosen to explore. But there was more–she was grasping for something deeper, a way to turn her disguise inward, remake herself from inside.
It was not, she decided, that she wanted to become a man, but that she wanted to live like one.
That, she thought, was the key. She was a woman, liked being a woman, would never try and renounce that fact. But she would embellish what it meant to be a woman by recreating herself as something completely new.
No longer would she allow others to view her as a precious thing whose favors were coquettishly withheld until a seducer could charm them out. That, she knew, had been her problem with De Susbielle–after she'd rejected his hypocritical gallantry, nothing was possible, friendship least of all. No more infatuations, she decided, no more Archivirs. I shall be Si Mahmoud, without explanation, and men will simply have to deal with that.
There was forged within her, then, a wish to do battle with men, to win and stifle them with her being, give them experiences they could neither imagine nor forget. Or else, if they were strong enough, could accept her as "Si Mahmoud," a woman who could do anything they could do, who could savor physical adventures and the dangers of the road, then she would become their lovers and their brothers, both at the same time.
"Si Mahmoud," she decided, would be a creature of the desert–as strange, as undulating as its mirages and its dunes, as free as its gazelles, as open as its cloudless skies. And as for love she would accept any embrace, fraternal, powerful, painful, as long as its sensation was intense.
Having settled at last the question of how she was going to live, she decided with regret that she must leave the Souf. Her fevers were too much to bear, and people she met told of others driven mad by the heat–incredible in the summer of 1899, even by Saharan standards.
She knew she would have to leave, but, much more important, she knew she must come back.
There was a letter waiting in Tunis, unhappy news. She learned from Augustin that the litigation surrounding Villa Neuve had grown unbelievably complex, and that Samuel, the notary into whose hands they had placed their affairs, was trying to cheat them out of their share of Vava's estate.
Impossible for her to remain in Tunis–she had no money, and after the splendor of the dunes, her house near Bab Menara seemed artificial, pretentious, raffiné. She sold off her belongings, the few precious rugs she'd bought with money she'd obtained for Old Nathalie's jewels, liquidated everything but her notebooks, a trunk of robes and capes and her worn red boots, and left for Paris, a place as different from El Oued as there existed on the earth.
She went there with one objective: to seek backing as an explorer, an assignment to write about the Souf, anything at all that would finance a return to the desert, and her new life as "Si Mahmoud."
WHERE LITERATURE IS SUPREME
April 1900. Isabelle arrived in Paris, found lodgings at a cheap rooming house near the cemetery of Montparnasse, then made her way as quickly as she could to the grounds of the Great Exposition. On the Champs de Mars she wandered among Kymer pagodas and Tahitian totem poles, strolled through a Japanese garden and a perfect reproduction of the Seraglio of Constantinople, saw Persian sword dances, a puppet show from Java, a Hindu charming a cobra, and a Kabuki play. She passed through tents filled with wax effigies, dioramas, acrobats and elephants, and visited an exhibition of machinery made in the United States.
Lost after many hours she came upon a Tunisian souk constructed of papier-mâché. Here workmen pounded out brass trays in stalls, veiled women prepared pastry leaves, and languorous camels sniffed at the air. Near sunset the crowds were pushed back so that a dozen Arab tribesmen could gallop on white horses across the grass, discharge their rifles, then rein back before trampling the gaping mob.
How marvelous, she thought, to find a fantasia in Paris. And then she thought: how false!
She stood in line for an hour, finally ascended to the first platform of the Eiffel Tower, and from there gazed down at the extraordinary scene below.
Paris glitters, she thought, money flows in the streets, and literature is supreme. Here I shall make a success, take whatever I can get and disappear back into the dunes.
Though the "City of Light" amazed her, it depressed her, too. Despite the wonders of its streets glowing with electricity, and the lavish displays in shops of all the things made by men from all the corners of the globe, despite the swirling mobs that pressed her on the boulevards, despite all of these things and a thousand things more, she became sad when she thought of the desert so far away. Then she longed for the solitude of empty sand, a night aglow with stars, the subtle sound of gently blowing wind, the warmth of a naked sun. Better, she thought, the fevers of that empty wilderness than the smugness of this city of a thousand dreams.
Her daytime walks back and forth across the Champs de Mars were followed by lengthy strolls at night. She would pass through the crowds that thronged the boulevards and mingle with the mobs outside the theater where Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac had been playing for three years. Here desperate men fought for tickets to performances months away. She watched and scoffed at them for pursuing vicarious sensation because they were too cowardly to fling themselves into an adventurous life.
It was the vanity of Paris that struck her at these moments, the meaninglessness of all the efforts being expended on the gaining of wealth, the pursuit of power, the conquest of stunning lovers. She knew then that for her there would always be more satisfaction in beginning a long journey down an unknown road than in bringing this light-filled city to its knees.
Nevertheless she had come for a reason, and so set out on a spring afternoon for the offices of the newspaper La Fronde, where she presented herself to its editor, the noted Dreyfusard, estimable friend of the trod-upon and oppressed, formidable heroine of European feminism, Séverine.
She was received in a small office cluttered with letters, manifestos, tracts. The walls were covered with drawings and cartoons which depicted the huge bosomed woman who bustled before her, a person with a classic Roman head surrounded by a halo of wild iron locks. Isabelle waited on a narrow sofa while this frowzy bull paced about issuing orders, scribbling her signature on scraps of paper and commanding an assistant, who appeared at her door like a jack-in-the-box, to "rip up this trash and write it again." Isabelle was amused until she caught sight of Séverine's eyes. Then she was stunned. They were slate-gray, and, when she squinted, they flashed fiercely like a pair of finely honed blades.
These eyes inspected her closely before the two settled down to talk.
"I approve of women who dress for comfort," she said, indicating Isabelle's trousers and blouse. "I'm only disappointed you didn't come to me in your desert robes."
"I've thought of wearing them," Isabelle replied, "if only to make a sensation. But with the Exposition, Paris is already too full of people in peculiar dress."
"Quite right, my pet. How very astute!"
She rifled through the papers that were piled on her desk, finally extracted a purple folder.
"I have read your desert sketches, and though I find them talented, I must tell you frankly they are of no possible use to me."
Isabelle lowered her eyes. For an instant she felt crushed. She'd worked hard her last weeks in Tunis, bringing her slender sheaf of writings to a high polish.
"Now you mustn't be hurt. You describe the terrain very well, and the characters certainly come alive. But these are personal reflections, better perhaps for a volume of sensitive essays than a journal like mine that's engaged. My readers want to know about the scandals, the outrages, nepotism, corruption, who's taking the bribes. I need documentation of conditions in the prisons and the whole stinking Algerian mess."
She was excited now, pacing her small office, pounding her fist into her palm.
"If you can write about those things we can make a good arrangement."
The plump woman studied Isabelle again.
"You do cut quite a figure, my pet. I think it's especially daring that you don't wear scent."
Isabelle laughed.
"My father was in the business," she said, "so, naturally, I loathe perfume."
"How fascinating! And how Russian you look! Those Tartar eyes! I'm sure you'll have a great success in Paris."
"I have many letters. People are kind. But sometimes I feel lost in the salons."
"Ah, but you will catch on quickly to that little game. It's the 'real' Paris, of course. Not what happens in the streets–oh no!–but the talk and manners of a dozen drawing rooms. Unfortunately that's what's wrong with the 'real' Paris, and why I've decided to become the conscience of this cowardly town."
They talked on for a while, and Isabelle found herself intrigued by the quick wit and cunning irony of this impressive woman. As their interview ended, and she rose to leave, Séverine took her arm.
"Would you like to come on one of my weekends? A few close friends, good talk, country food."
She placed her fingers against Isabelle's ribs.
"Yes, my sweet–you could use some fattening up."
Grateful and touched, Isabelle accepted, even agreed to come in her burnoose.
She'd been busy since her arrival making calls. The secretary at the Societé Géographique had been particularly kind, agreeing that her Saharan expedition entitled her to membership. But then he set her back when he told her the entrance fee was one hundred fifty francs.
She tried but failed to see the great explorers, Prince Roland, Count Leontieff, Prince Henri d'Orléans. And at the door of the residence of the Prince of Monaco she stood helpless before a footman who refused to accept her letter unless she could first present him with a card.
There was, however, one salon where she was politely received–the home of Maria Laetitia Bonaparte-Wyse, on
the third story of a vast mansion on Boulevard Poissonnière.
This woman was known in Paris as "La Ratazzi," for though she was a grandniece of the emperor, she had been married to a minister of King Victor Emmanuel after turning down a match with Napoleon the Third. Now an old lady, deaf as a pot, she received in a series of boudoirs draped in blue satin, the walls and tables covered with Empire memorabilia which included everything from tattered Corsican handicrafts to gold plate bearing the imperial arms. She looked slightly Oriental, like an aging mustachioed Cleopatra wrapped in lacy garments, a poor shriveled old thing who welcomed absolutely everyone and thus had gained the reputation of running a "salon of junk."
Her visitors were not all undistinguished. The American, Isadora Duncan, who was then creating a sensation with her Grecian dances, came by several times. Maurice Ravel occasionally touched the keys of her piano. And a portly sad-eyed man with a pale complexion, who wandered in one day, was, Isabelle gathered from the whispers that greeted his entrance, none other than the infamous though failing Oscar Wilde.
Among the more scrofulous of the regulars was a young curly-headed poet who struck languid poses, wore powder on his face and edited the review L'Hercule. His name was Paul Durand and his magazine was a wastebasket for whatever refuse writers such as Daudet, Lout's or Anatole France happened to have unpublished in the back drawers of their desks. It was a standing joke that he would pant at the merest mention of a baron, and would fawn before a duke. He would do anything for money, including sleeping with rich old ladies, but he never paid his contributors, and had a nasty habit of "borrowing" their writings and publishing them without consent.
Isabelle knew she was failing to make an impression until one day this creature presented her with a long-awaited chance. She overheard him describe her as a "Slavic hermaphrodite," and without thinking of the consequences marched up to him and emptied her coffee cup onto his lap.
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