Visions of Isabelle

by William Bayer

  "But why?" he asks.

  "They say I'm a troublemaker, but the real reason, Slimen, is that they hate me because I'm different. That's the worst crime of all–to be a vagabond, without a permanent address."

  In the morning they sell Souf to pay for her passage to Marseilles. Then she sends a telegram to Augustin, asking him to meet her boat. At the ticket office she discovers that only men can travel at the steerage rate. In line she improvises a new name. "Pierre Mouchet, day laborer," she calls herself, savoring the coarseness of this identity which suits her wish to withdraw for a time, to hide.

  The crossing is rough, the worst she's known. The winds are ferocious, and the enormous waves make the little ship Le Berry tremble on the sea. She finds a curious sort of splendor in the stink of the communal hold, and eloquence in the awful groans of the men. She has the feeling of sinking, losing herself in filth, wallowing in the mud.

  In the night she makes her way to the pitching deck, and, standing there with feet spread apart, she screams out her rage at the injustice of her fate.

  PART THREE

  "For the mob I put on the borrowed mask of the cynic, the debauchee...No one has yet pierced this mask and seen my soul, so much purer than the degradations that please me, allow me to spit upon convention and indulge a strange need to suffer, debase my body...."

  Isabelle Eberhardt

  Mes Journaliers,

  January 1, 1900

  "PIERRE MOUCHET"

  When Eugène Letord arrived in Marseilles in the middle of August 1901, he was struck at once by the humidity and the smell of rotting garbage that littered the streets. He quickly made his way to a tenement at 67 Rue Grignan, where he found a soiled business card attached to an apartment door. "Augustin De Moerder," it read, "Private Lessons in Russian and German."

  Admitted to an ugly little drawing room where all the furniture was draped with frayed lace doilies, and a mal-functioning cuckoo clock hung on the wall, he looked for the first time upon Isabelle's brother, a young man of whom he'd heard a great deal and with whom he'd had a brief correspondence some years before.

  Eugène was surprised, for Augustin De Moerder bore no resemblance to the handsome, tortured Russian youth he'd pictured in his mind. He found himself facing a balding man with a paunch, uncomfortable in a seedy business suit, patronizing in manner, who seemed, unaccountably, on the verge of rage. Beside him sat his wife, the former Madeleine Joliet, a plain little woman with distant worried eyes and black curls that were waxen and tight.

  "Oh, yes," said Augustin, "she stayed here with us awhile, until she found a garret of her own. Really she was impossible–rude, insulting, especially to poor Madeleine. She flicked her cigarettes all over the floor, never helped with the housework and sat around drunk in a horrid tattered sailor suit, calling herself 'Pierre Mouchet.' It was unbelievable. I didn't recognize her; we had nothing in common at all."

  "But surely," said Eugène, "she had reason to be depressed. You must know that she was nearly hacked to death by a madman, then expelled, separated from her fiancé."

  "Oh, yes, we know all about that. She could hardly speak of anything else. But the more we learned the more clear it became that the whole ugly business was entirely her fault. And I must say we received a rather disagreeable impression of her precious Slimen–the 'fiancé,' as you call him. His letters were practically illiterate, though the way she moaned about him one might have thought he was the Prince of Wales."

  "You can't imagine," said Madeleine, "the way she carried on, hanging around Arab cafés, scavenging cigarette butts for kif, then borrowing money from Augustin in the middle of a lesson so she could go out to some bar and drink herself sick. She was absolutely disgusting, and I wasn't the least surprised–all of them in that family were mad, except for Augustin."

  They both stared at Eugène to show their outrage, and he stared back, distressed by their lack of sympathy, deeply worried about Isabelle's state of mind. But when he got up to leave, Augustin grabbed at his arm.

  "There's something I want you to see," he said, motioning toward a corner and a battered steamer trunk. Augustin threw it open, exposing a mass of papers which he began to grasp up in wild flourishes and fling down upon the floor.

  "See! The rubbish of my family! The residue of my crazy stepfather's estate! Look at it! Letters from that crook Samuel, claims by the Russian attorneys, documents of contests, offers of settlement, transcripts of all the hearings at the Court of Vernier. And look! Thousands of francs of unpaid bills! If only we could get our hands on that damn house, we could move out of this hole and live in a decent style. But it's hopeless. You have to be a lawyer to understand it. The whole thing's a spider web that's entangled us all."

  "Terrible," said Eugène, retreating from the clutter of molding documents, aghast at the thought that the tropical garden of which he'd heard so much was now reduced to this. "But surely you can salvage something. As I understand it Trophimovsky left you and Isabelle everything he had."

  "Salvage something? Do you think I haven't tried? When Isabelle came I talked to her for hours. I had a scheme, you see." His eyes began to enlarge. "We'd borrow enough to go to Russia where we'd confront Vava's widow and come to terms. But she wouldn't listen. She refused. My own sister! She said she didn't care–that she loathed the house and would be just as happy if she never saw a cent: That was the last straw. I had to throw her out!"

  As Eugène climbed the stairs to Isabelle's attic garçonnière, the stink of cat urine made him flinch. She was not in, but her door was unlocked. He pushed it open and looked around.

  There were few possessions: a cooking pot and a plate, and over the ratty cot a crude drawing affixed to the wall. Miserable Eden, it said. Eugène laughed and sat down.

  Some hours later he heard her clumping up the stairs. When she appeared in the doorway, he was certain he'd made a mistake. Then he recognized her, though she was dressed in the filthy costume of a matelot, and her face and hands were black with soot.

  "Pierre Mouchet, I presume," he said.

  "Eugène!"

  Her blackened face burst into a smile. She came to him on the cot, planted a great masculine kiss against his cheek. "So long since I've seen a friend–at last, at last!"

  She began at once to peel off her clothes, which she threw into a corner as fast as she could get them off. Without any modesty at all, she stood before him dirty and naked to the waist.

  "Look," she said, "look at what they've done."

  He stared at her saber scars and shuddered at the marring of her flesh.

  "See how angry they are," she said, running her fingers along the ridges on her shoulder and her arm. "This is what comes of going to the desert with a head full of illusions. I thought I'd find freedom–I found madness instead."

  She wrapped her arms around herself to cover her nakedness, and he was moved by the pain in her face. She went downstairs to wash, and when she returned she was wearing a burnoose, had a black band wrapped around her forehead and a necklace of desert corals hanging from her neck.

  "Now tell me everything," she said. "Tell me first of all about my dearest Slimen."

  "He was getting a hard time from his officers for a while, but I spoke to them and now I think things will settle down."

  "Poor darling–he doesn't know how to cope with those vicious colonial types."

  "The trial was a scandal, as you know. People still talk about it. Your defenders are few, but we're extremely vociferous. There's even been some mention in the press that you were unfairly treated."

  "Good! Good! And the transfer?"

  "I think it'll happen soon. I've been in touch with a colonel here who's sympathetic. He'll have Slimen transferred to his regiment, and when he comes he'll give you permission to marry. Then, as the wife of a French soldier, you'll be French yourself, the expulsion order will be voided, and you can go back to Algeria again."

  "Eugène, you bring me miracles. How good to see a kind face!"


  "I went to see your brother this afternoon. He and his wife were hostile. They said some strange things."

  "I'm sure they filled your head with tales of my miserable deeds. God, they make me sick–phony-proper, self-righteous, petit bourgeois worms. They're everything Augustin and I used to laugh at and despise. He made a bad marriage, and is horribly changed. You wouldn't believe their bickering–the pettiness in their voices–ugh!"

  "So–how do you survive?"

  "I have a job. I'm in the sanitation corps. I work on a garbage scow shoveling muck all day long."

  "That's horrible! How do you manage with your injured arm?"

  "It's a kind of hell, yes, but I enjoy it all the same. They're a few other women, and we work as hard as the men. Everyone's quite kind. Between the stops they share their wine with me. They think I'm a real character because I keep insisting they call me 'Mouchet.'"

  She laughed then, put her arm around him, hugged him, rumpled his hair.

  "Where, for God's sakes, did you get that name? `Si Mahmoud' was quite adequate, and I rather liked `Nadia' who used to sign all your letters, and `Isabelle' who's nearly forgotten now, beneath all these layers of disguise...."

  She laughed again, then explained.

  "Si Mahmoud was badly wounded at Behima, Eugène, and for a time it was necessary for him to rest. So Pierre Mouchet came along and took his place. Now let me tell you about Mouchet–he's a real rat, ugly and mean, and a hell of a drunk...."

  He took her out to a decent restaurant; she asked him a thousand questions about Slimen. He answered them all, but studied her at the same time–she amazed him; he couldn't make her out.

  "You know," he said finally, "your whole condition here is too extreme. I don't understand this horrible job."

  "Yes, yes, you probably think I'm mad. But really it's what I want–to roll around for a while in the mud. I want to inspire people's disgust. I want them to cross to the other side of the street when they see me. I feel loathed and unhappy, miserable and alone, and I want to proclaim that to the world."

  "But nobody cares, except a few friends like me."

  "I care," she cried. "I have to do it. And now I know what it's like to be an Arab in French Algeria–to be ridiculed and despised."

  "Ah, Pierre–Pierre Mouchet!" He whistled the words to her, as if they were beautiful music that melted his heart.

  "It's a good name, isn't it? Of course everyone knows who I am. But it gives them something to talk about. They can go home and tell all their dull friends that they know a Russian girl who was stabbed in the desert, and now wears a sailor suit and calls herself 'Pierre.' What the hell! I told you last year that I'd decided I wouldn't write–that I was going to live my life like a novel, be a passionate character swept about by fate."

  "I remember."

  "Well this, my dear Eugène, is the blackest of the chapters–the one where the heroine is dumped onto the dung."

  That night he spent hours caressing her scars, saddened by the hardness of her manner, her cynicism about life.

  "No," she told him proudly, "I'm not cynical at all. The only thing I regret is being deprived of Slimen and my precious Moslem earth. But it doesn't matter. He'll come here soon, we'll get married, and then, when his enlistment expires, we'll go back and try again. I have great plans for him, and every confidence that he'll carry them out. The only thing that bothers me is the speed at which everything rushes by. When I'm having a good time, I always pray that it'll last. But it always seems to pass quickly, and then the whirlwind spins me around again. Why is that, Eugène? Why aren't the great moments long, and the bad ones quick? Why can't it be the other way around?"

  She bent over him, planted kisses all over his face, but he lay rigid, deep in thought.

  "You're like a camel," she said suddenly, giggling against his chest.

  "What?"

  "Yes, a camel."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "Because male camels don't like sex. In the desert there are men who specialize in arousing them. Camel-stimulators. They do things like this."

  She reached down and tickled him in a private place. He was furious at the distraction, and amused at the same time.

  "Come on, Eugène. I've had enough of garbage men. They're brutes in bed, and they stink like hell. Make love to me. I crave the embraces of a French officer–the class that hates me and has cast me out."

  He complied with pleasure, and when they were finished, she stared up at the peeling ceiling and smoked a cigarette. "Admit it–I confuse you a lot."

  "Oh you do, Mouchet, you do, indeed."

  "Tell me why."

  "I don't know. You're kind and good-natured and you have a marvelous presence. You're full of passion and energy and you're brave when things go wrong. You don't pity yourself, and you do what you want. But the way you live seems so misguided. Of course I'm just a French officer, and in no position to judge, but it seems to me that you're living a romantic illusion of sensation and adventure and self-made myth. What do you really want? If you could tell me, then I think I could help."

  "Don't try, Eugène. I'm too fatalistic. That's a classic Russian fault."

  "And you're Moslem, too."

  "Yes, and so I must submit. That's the great consequence of my faith, you see. I must submit to my destiny, for everything in my life has been written, and there's nothing I can do to change the words."

  "But you can't just let life wash you about, as if you were some flotsam on the sea."

  "Listen," she said, sitting up on the cot, crossing her legs beneath her, brushing away some loose feathers that escaped from the quilt. "All my life people have told me I'm extreme. But to me only the extreme forms of life are worth living. All the greedy colonialists in Algeria, and their stupid, spoiled society wives, would envy my miserable rags, this wretched garret, the awful food I eat–if they only knew. They'd envy me for the love I have with Slimen–a love completely untainted by any question of advantage–and the way I took possession of the desert, and the way I feel about the wind and the sun and the stars. And they'd envy me most for the way I've let myself be possessed by my life, and have reveled in it more fully than any king ever reveled in his power. Listen–when I think of people in Paris making witticisms in brilliant salons, when I think of them laughing in boxes in the theaters and talking nonsense at spectacular balls, I'm filled with pity for their useless, unfeeling lives, and I crumple the stuff of all their dreams in my fist."

  Suddenly she took her cigarette and started to grind it out against the back of her hand. Eugène wanted to stop her, but he found himself paralyzed, fascinated by the horror, and the smile that never left her lips.

  "You see–I can enjoy even that." She brushed away the ash and showed him the scar. "Because it's real, and I can feel it. I'd rather be a garbageman in the port of Marseilles than those silly fools in Constantine who mock me even now. I'd rather roll in the gutter than live at the norm. Give me pain or give me ecstasy, but don't ever let me become like my poor ruined brother Augustin. Now do you understand? Do you see it now, Eugène? Do you? Do you understand me now?"

  The next morning when he escorted her to the docks for the form-up of the harbor sanitation crews, saw her standing straight and proud in the mob of burly, heavily muscled men, he was still not sure he understood her, but he was no less determined to try.

  His last glimpse was of her poised at the square end of a retreating barge, waving at him with a shovel which she held like an ensign above her head.

  A month after Eugène Letord left, Slimen was transferred to a Spahi regiment near Marseilles. Isabelle was done then with the role of "Pierre Mouchet." She threw out the costume of the matelot, left her job and began to walk again in burnoose and boots.

  On October the first Slimen was released from the army–earlier than expected on account of ill health. On October 17, 1901, he and Isabelle were legally married in the Hotel de Ville of Marseilles, and, immediately afterward, under Islamic law, in a
decrepit carriage house that the Algerian workers on the docks had turned into a mosque.

  Isabelle wore the clothes of a European woman, and a tawdry and quickly purchased yellow wig to cover her close-cropped hair. Augustin stood beside her, wincing at the grotesquerie of his sister's garb, while the strange guttural language and the mysterious atmosphere of the mosque made Madeleine afraid.

  It was sunny and cool when the four of them walked back to the De Moerder apartment for a wedding feast of grilled bass and a toast of Beaujolais. There were no gifts, but afterward, as she and Slimen walked home, Isabelle stopped at a store and convinced its Corsican proprietor to give her a bottle of absinthe on account.

  Back at the garçonnière, Slimen was anxious to make love, but Isabelle was solemn, made him sit down, then lit the candles and poured them each a drink.

  "It's time to be serious," she said. "No nuptial rites for us."

  Slimen swallowed the liqueur, began to unbutton his blouse.

  "No, brother–no games tonight. We must talk about the future."

  "But, Si Mahmoud–tonight of all the nights..."

  "Yes! Tonight! Tonight we begin." She pulled out a batch of papers, spread them out on the cot. "I have great plans. There are books you must read. You're going to apply for a position in the Algerian administration. With my help you'll pass the exam, and then you'll have a career!"

  "But, Si Mahmoud..."

  "No 'buts.' This isn't just for you. It's for all the Arabs, all our brothers. We're going to show the French that the Arabs can perform. No more useless uprisings in the desert. Arabs must learn to beat the French at their own game. You're going to be an administrator. By following my course you'll take the first step, and no one will ever call you an Arab halfwit again." Her eyes widened. "Look at me, Slimen. You'll be just the first. Others will follow, hundreds, thousands, until you strangle the French with your numbers and your skills. This is how we shall serve Islam, and we start tonight!"