Visions of Isabelle

by William Bayer

  Silence as he peers about.

  "I brought some good kif."

  "Thank you, Slimen, but I don't smoke it anymore."

  "What?" He laughs. "I don't believe you. I can't imagine you living without kif."

  "I'm going to try," she says.

  He goes off to unpack, explore the house. Stirring the couscous with her hands, she wonders what has become of their great tempestuous love, asks herself why now she feels only fraternal affection for this wiry dark man with liquid eyes and such a sad resigned face. Was it all an illusion–her mad passion for the Spahi horseman in the red cloak who took her on the dunes? I must be careful not to hurt him, she reminds herself, setting the steamer on the coals.

  They eat late in the afternoon, then go to the roof of the house to lie down beneath the dying sun. He touches her again, and this time she responds, partly out of friendship, partly because she feels cold. Afterward they bundle themselves in burnooses and Slimen begins to smoke.

  As she settles back to watch the stars, beginning now to come out in the darkening sky, she thinks back upon the tempests of her adolescence and the fury of living that has consumed the past five years.

  Yes, she thinks, I have lived furiously, and I regret nothing of what I've done. But now, on this roof, comforted by the company of her brother, Slimen, she looks forward to a calm future as a simple woman, away from tormented striving and disguise.

  Slimen smokes on, through the sound of distant bugle calls, the echo of commands shouted in the fort.

  "Tell me a story, Si Mahmoud."

  She thinks a moment, nods, and begins.

  "A lone cavalier met a woman on the dunes between Béchar and Beni-Ounif. The woman was picking out little stones from the sand. 'What are you doing?' the cavalier asked. 'I'm cleaning the desert,' she said. 'But that's absurd,' he told her. 'It will take you and all the people in the world a million years to clean the desert, and then, when you're finished, the desert will be dirty again.' `Yes,' the woman replied, 'I understand that, but anyway, I try.' The cavalier watched her for a long time, and the longer he watched the more certain he was that he had fallen in love. But he did not know how he could take such a woman away–a woman who loved the desert so much she wanted to clean it with her hands..."

  She turns to Slimen, sees delight in his face. A curl of kif smoke lingers before her. The air is still.

  She shuts her eyes, trying to regain her story's thread, but then she's distracted by an unpleasant noise. It's a deep, rumbling growl, and when she turns to look, it is louder, much louder, as if a whole mountain were rolling toward her cutting off escape. Someone runs by the house. She hears a cry. Suddenly Slimen stands up.

  Lyautey is in the private dining room of his residence, taking coffee with his staff. Suddenly one of the German legionnaires bursts into the hall.

  "Come, quick! Something terrible is happening in the town!"

  Lyautey and the others jump up from the table, rush to the terrace that overlooks the ravine. By the moonlight they can make out the riverbed and a gigantic tidal wave that seems to have come out of nowhere and is rushing through smashing everything in sight. The entire village is being torn to bits. Trees, animals, people and the tops of houses are being swept in a torrent downstream.

  Lyautey, standing helpless, quickly understands. It's one of the great curiosities of the desert–a flash flood that comes out of the mountains, without even the warning of a thunderclap, to rip through gullies with devastating force.

  Isabelle and Slimen stand on their roof watching the ruin all around. Children are screaming, dogs and sheep are struggling against the ferocious tide. The sound is terrible in the still night air. And then bits of their house begin to melt.

  "We'll have to swim," yells Slimen. She shakes her head, motions that they should try to climb to the neighboring roof. The water is rising higher. Suddenly she feels the house collapse beneath her feet.

  Slimen leaps into the water, disappears. Then he rises again, far away, and she watches in wonderment as he turns, lost in the maelstrom, trying to find her as he's swept from sight.

  She peers around, then lowers herself into the rushing stream. Holding onto the terrace wall to keep herself from being swept, she suddenly feels something heavy crush her down.

  There is an enormous pain across her back as she begins to sink. She struggles against the weight, frantically trying to fight her way back to air. But she cannot make the water yield. The pain begins to spread.

  After a few seconds her strength gives out. Water begins to fill her lungs. Fear gives way to resignation. But then, sinking into oblivion, there comes a feeling that something important is very near.

  Now the struggle is within, to rend the veil, to see the face of God. Sinking beneath the water, drowning in the mud, she is struck by an illumination, a blinding insight in which all the confusion of her life fits with perfect symmetry into a dazzling design.

  It is light she sees–clear, white and hot. She smiles as she sees she is but a grain of sand in God's limitless desert. She is in tune with all the universe, the music of the stars, and though only a speck of the immense weight, the totality of everything, she is also a part without which the whole cannot be whole.

  When Lyautey's men find her body the next day, crushed beneath a heavy beam loosed from her house, she is curled like an embryo, her arms raised in front to protect her face.

  AFTERWORD

  Slimen Ehnni survived the flood and died two years later of a respiratory disease.

  In 1914 Augustin De Moerder committed suicide in Marseilles.

  General Louis Hubert Gonsalve Lyautey gradually tightened the screws against Morocco until the establishment of the French Protectorate in 1912. Lyautey became the first resident general of Morocco, was later made a marshal, and in 1917 served briefly as war minister in France. He was elected to the French Academy and died at the age of eighty in 1934.

  Much is known of Isabelle Eberhardt's life, but there are great holes which only fiction can now fill.

  The best sources are her own writings, and it should be noted that many passages in this book paraphrase her descriptions of events, her own psychological states and desert terrains.

  Particularly valuable are her journals, published as Mes Journaliers (Paris, 1923) which cover several years and are especially detailed on the period 1900-1901–the Souf, the stabbing and its aftermath.

  The three books which were put together and heavily edited by Victor Barrucand are also useful: Dans L'Ombre Chaude de L'Islam (Paris, 1905), rich in material on her stay in Kenadsa; Notes de Route (Paris, 1908) which deals mostly with her impressions of the Sud-Oranais; and Pages D'Islam (Paris, 1908) containing many short journalistic pieces and her moving defense of vagabondage.

  Au Pays des Sables (Paris, 1944) contains some of her short fiction and also documents that illuminate various periods in her life. As for her novel, Le Trimardeur–it is best forgotten.

  It would take pages to separate the blend of fact and fiction in this book. For example, though she did write a letter to Augustin on Christmas Eve, 1895, the letter quoted here is not the same, but a composite of several letters, with the addition of fictional material. The same is true of the dialogue at the Constantine trial, and events such as her first meeting with Eugène Letord which actually took place under other circumstances at another time.

  But some of the more amazing things happened much as they are reported here: the saga of her brothers who were mixed up with anarchists and opium (according to Trophimovsky, Vladimir was tortured by Prozov); the attack at Behima; the suicide pact in Ténès; the flash flood; and even the incident with the fictional "Desforges."

  There have been many biographies, mostly bad. René-Louis Doyon was the first serious writer to deal with her, and in his Précédés de la Vie Tragique de la Bonne Nomade (Paris, 1923) he established the first accurate chronology of her life. Another good book is Cecily Mackworth's The Destiny of Isabelle Eberhardt (London, 1950)
–accurate, well-written, though lacking in footnotes to the many sources from which the material has been drawn. Of the recent French biographies, Françoise Eaubonne's La Couronne de Sable (Paris, 1968) is quite good, but unfortunately marred by an absurd speculation: that Isabelle was the illegitimate daughter of Arthur Rimbaud.

  Though there are several streets named after her in Algeria, very few young people in France have ever heard of Isabelle Eberhardt, and she is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. But there was a time when she was something of a legend, a sort of French T. E. Lawrence with a feminist dimension. Now I hope interest in her will be revived, both because of this novel, and also the publication of some of her stories, excellently translated by Paul Bowles.

  In the autumn of 1974 I traveled to Algeria to retrace her footsteps. The country has changed enormously, of course, but one gets a sense of the desert as it must have been at the turn of the century simply by turning down any one of a thousand ragged pistes. Then one must stand in awe of her bravery and her love of the road.

  I had no trouble getting to Beni-Ounif, Figuig (in Morocco), Kenadsa, El-Hammel or any of the rest of those hidden places in North Africa where she spent her time. One sees young people wearing granny glasses and Che Guevara T-shirts in El Oued today, but there is still sand in the streets, and the palms are still grown in deep basins called cuvettes.

  I met there with the local writer-historian whose grandfather had been caid in Isabelle's time. "She was strong and svelte, built like a gazelle," he said, and then showed me the ruins of her house, the hospital, the Arab Bureau (now the prefecture) and the house in Behima where she was stabbed.

  Ténès, like so many of the coastal towns in Algeria, has the shuttered decayed look of a place hastily deserted by the French. There is a small private beach around the mountain to the east where I imagined Isabelle and Slimen trying to fulfill their suicide pact.

  As for Aïn Sefra, I was there seventy years to the day after the famous flood. The river was bone dry and the Algerian army now occupies the old barracks and hospital on the heights (not so high as I had thought). Aïn Sefra is set in a stunning country of red earth and sand, and at sunset the light coats the mountains with an indescribable glow.

  After a long chain of complications I found her tomb. It is a simple raised monument set apart from the other graves. "Si Mahmoud," it says in Arabic, and then in French: "Isabelle Eberhardt, wife of Slimen Ehnni, dead at 27 in the catastrophe at Aïn Sefra, October 21, 1904." Nothing else, but the tomb faces Mecca like the rest, and is extremely eloquent in this weed-choked cemetery facing the dunes.

  After she died Lyautey wrote: "She was that which attracted me more than anything else. A rebel." She rejected Western culture–the virtues of logic, lucidity, science, proofs. She was attracted to mysticism, poetic leaps of the soul, disguise, erotic love, mad rides across the sand. She was the quintessential wanderer, a troubled, moody vagabond who tried to live in total freedom, re-creating herself according to her dreams. She was fearless in pursuit of what she was, afraid of nothing except that she might harm someone else. Once I learned of her I found it impossible to put her out of my mind, and thus this fantasy, in which I have tried, like other historical novelists, to use fiction as a mans of approaching truth. WB (Tangier, 1973-1975)

  SPECIAL AUTHOR'S EDITION SUPPLEMENT

  "VISIONS OF ISABELLE" Q & A WITH WILLIAM BAYER

  Q. You're known as a crime fiction writer, but Visions Of Isabelle is clearly an historical novel base on the life of a real person. How did you happen to write it?

  A. It's an early work written back in the 1970s before I turned to crime fiction. One day my then girlfriend (now wife), Paula Wolfert, started telling me about this amazing person, Isabelle Eberhardt–an adventuress, Saharan explorer, writer and proto-feminist who dressed as a man and took an Arab male name. Intrigued, I tried to learn more about her, but there was very little information available. Finally, I went to the New York Public Library and read her published journals in French. Then one night, several weeks later, I dreamt of her. After a succession of dreams, I decided to write about her.

  Q. Do you always dream about your characters?

  A. Rarely. This was the first time. I felt haunted by her. There was a particular photo in one of the books taken just a few days before she died. She's sitting up in bed in a hospital, and there's something very weird about the expression on her face, as if the photographer crept up on her and surprised her. Also a sense I got that she knew something momentous and fearful was soon going to occur in her life. I remember a few years later, after Paula and I moved to Tangier (our plan was to move there for a year; I would write my Isabelle novel while Paula completed her Moroccan cookbook), I showed a copy of this photo to the writer Paul Bowles. He studied it, then shook his head and turned away. "I can't bear to look at it," he said. That was when I knew that there really was something strange there.

  Q. Yet your book is not a biography?

  A. Being a fiction writer, I didn't want to go that route, but it occurred to me that she'd make a great subject for a novel, and that if I fictionalized I'd be free to fill in many things not known about her. I think of Visions Of Isabelle as a kind of fictionalized psycho-biography, in that I try to probe into her psyche and erotic life.

  Q. Did you do a lot of research?

  A. I read everything she wrote and everything I could find that was written about her. It was only after I finished my research that Paula and I decided to go live in North Africa for a year. We rented a house in Tangier, enrolled Paula's kids in the American School there, and set to work on our respective projects.

  Q. Didn't Isabelle Eberhardt spent most of her Saharan career in Algeria?

  A. True. But it was easy for me to travel there from Tangier. I'd get in my car and drive to Algiers, then down to the various oases where she'd spent her time, and, finally, to the Saharan village, Aïn Sefra, where she died in a flood at age 27.

  Q. A flood in the Sahara?!

  A. Amazing, isn't it? Reminds me in a reverse way of that famous exchange in the movie Casablanca between Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) and Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains):

  Renault: "What in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?"

  Rick: "My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters."

  Renault: "The waters? What waters? We're in the desert."

  Rick: "I was misinformed."

  In fact, flash floods, though very rare, do occasionally occur in the Sahara. In this case there was a huge rain storm in the mountains, the water was funneled down through the gullies carved into the surrounding hills, and then suddenly and unexpectedly cascaded through the town like a tsunami. The Aïn Sefra flood was a genuine catastrophe in that the entire town was wiped out. People who live there still speak of it even though none of them were alive when it happened. As mentioned in the Afterward above, a few days later Isabelle's body was recovered, and she was buried nearby. Here's a picture of me beside her grave when I located it in 1974:

  Q. Was Isabelle transgendered?

  A. She'd always been boyish, and very much disliked having to play a passive feminine role. But the male Arab name and disguise was a way to travel alone in tribal areas. Most of the people she encountered along the way knew she was female, but so long as she called herself 'Si Mahmoud,' they accepted her as she presented herself.

  Q. How much of your novel is pure fiction?

  A. Impossible to say since I wove what I could verify with what I made up and now can't separate the strands. For those seeking historical truth, there are several excellent biographies mentioned in the Afterward. In English I recommend the one by Annette Kobak (not available when I wrote the novel), and in French, the exhaustive two volume study by the great writer and resistance heroine, Edmonde Charles-Roux. Also, Isabelle's Journals and most of her other writings are now available in English.

  Q. Do you see her as an important historical figure?

  A. Yes, though not on t
he scale of someone like T. E. Lawrence. She didn't change the world in a major way. But I think she's very important for reasons that go beyond her considerable accomplishments. She was one of a very select group of human beings–a person who tried to live in total freedom at a time when that was barely possible for a woman.

  Q. Sounds like she'd make a great subject for a movie.

  A. She would…and has. There's an okay film bearing her name released in 1991, a French-Australian co-production. Mathilda May plays Isabelle, and Peter O'Toole plays Lyautey. One odd fact: after directing this film, the Australian, Ian Pringle, served a sentence for stealing a Picasso and other stuff in New York. Far as I know, Mr. Pringle has not directed any movies since. Another odd fact: there's an anarchist-oriented publishing house in Portland, Eberhardt Press, named for Isabelle. Among their publications: a nice pamphlet about her life.

  Q. Your title…?

  A. I played with several titles, but I kept coming back to "Visions" because it seemed to suit the kaleidoscopic effect I was after. I also remember being influenced by the title of that great Bob Dylan song, "Visions Of Johanna." Paula, I and the kids loved his White On White album, and played it a lot when we lived in Tangier.

  Q. Looking back, is there anything you'd change in the book written more than thirty-five years ago?

  A. I don't think so. It was a joy to reread it while preparing it for e-book publication. It's the only book I've written that can be categorized as historical fiction. I feel I found a great subject and did well by her. And I'm sure that if I hadn't taken on this project, I would never have had the experience of living in North Africa…which led to my writing Tangier, my first detective novel, which I started as soon as I finished Visions Of Isabelle.