Visions of Isabelle

by William Bayer

  She poured him another drink, drank off a glass herself, scoffed when he protested he was too tired. Roughly, she handed him a list of words.

  "Above all else the French respect a man who can talk. You must learn to dazzle them with your language, smother them with your lucidity. First you must learn pronunciation. No more native accents. Start at the top. Say 'Gouverneur Général.' "

  He tried. She laughed. He tried again. She gently slapped his face.

  "No, no. Listen to my 'r's, and 'l's. Work up a pompous expression. Let the syllables roll and give a little quiver at the end. Yes–better. But you must work!"

  They worked on through the night, reviving themselves with the bitter searing absinthe until they collapsed in the morning, exhausted, drunk. But she had him up at noon, drilled him more, encouraged, cajoled, showed irritation, anger and disgust. She used all the techniques that Vava had used with her, making him work to please her because only then would she let him rest.

  The work went on, every afternoon and night, day after day, until Slimen began to control the words. She did not allow him a free moment, forced him to read aloud to her from Balzac and Montaigne, Descartes and Charles Baudelaire. Though she fell asleep at times when he was reading, she was careful always to face away, and to wake herself every so often to catch him in a fault or compliment him on a well-read line.

  They worked hard, hour after hour, until she forgot her misery, thought only of the man she was making of this friendly mediocre boy she'd met in an oasis and told herself she loved. Though she wondered at times if he ever would pass the exam, she kept at him, pleading, correcting, giving complaints and praise, never allowing herself to show her doubts.

  They were interrupted only once. In the middle of December, Augustin came bursting in, waving a letter, ranting insanely of betrayal and revenge. Villa Neuve had been sold for thirty thousand francs. This money, all that was left of the Trophimovsky estate, had been distributed in accordance with a formula devised by a Swiss court. After the deduction of all legal fees and other attendant costs, including Vava's debts, their own notes and the interest that had accrued, they were informed by notaire Samuel that each of them owed him sixty francs.

  His letter urged them to pay this debt at once. Otherwise, he warned, he would be forced to seek remedy in the courts.

  MADAME SLIMEN EHNNI

  The town of Ténès is situated on the Mediterranean coast halfway between Algiers and Oran. When the Slimen Ehnnis arrive by stagecoach on the afternoon of July 7, they are struck at once by the serenity of the place. Cultivated terraces mount the hills. Wild pine forests sweep down to the sea. There are fishing villages along the coast, an old town with ancient ramparts, an occasional Roman ruin, a bucolic sense of peace. They explore until sunset and are well satisfied, but within forty-eight hours Isabelle turns to Slimen and says:

  "We are trapped, my brother. This place is a ball of snakes."

  And to that he most sadly agrees.

  They have come so that Slimen can take up his position as a functionary in the city hall. But Isabelle quickly feels oppressed by a web of small-town gossip, and the sneers and frowns of colonialists' wives. At the market strangers turn to one another and hiss out epithets:

  "Wife of an Arab!"

  "Russian transvestite!"

  "Adventuress!"

  The stigma of Behima, the stain upon her name, are still evident, though it has been a year since the trial in Constantine. She shudders at the insults and turns away, fearing less for herself–she can endure the jeers of fools–than for poor Slimen, so unsophisticated in the cruelties of European gossip, so innocent in this nest of petty intrigue.

  Oblivious to the stares she struts the streets dressed like a cavalier in snow-white burnoose and her treasured red boots. Preceded by two newly acquired Alsatian dogs, she walks to the beaches, the forests and back into the hills slashed by gorges and cascading streams. The region is beautiful, but reminds her of the Haute-Savoie–it is too rich, belongs to the romantic period of her adolescence when Alpine woods and valleys could move her soul. She recognizes that she is harder now, and craves the Africa of great deserts and dazzling light. She misses the mystery of bewitching Saharan towns which can move her by their savagery and the splendor of their pain.

  Slimen has been appointed Khodja–the official link between his people and the French. But he is used only as an interpreter, and soon finds he has no function at all.

  "You must push for power," she tells him. "Find an injustice, make an issue out of it and create yourself as a political force."

  "I must bide my time," he says. "No point in risking a thousand francs a year!"

  She looks at him then in wonder, asks herself if all her training for his exams has reduced him to the state of a fearful bureaucrat.

  "I detest the way you kowtow to these Philistines," she tells him one day. "Do you think these French officials are important because they wear tight trousers and ridiculous hats?"

  "I do my job."

  "And you do it much too well."

  "It was you who wanted me to be the link."

  "The link–yes. Their servant–never!"

  In October, when harsh winds blow in from the west, and the people of Ténès turn even more sullen and mean, she finds herself seized by fits of melancholia, and spends long hours brooding on the beach. She feels stifled by the pernicious atmosphere of the town, has trouble sleeping and begins to quarrel with Slimen. He looks back at her without comprehension, proud that he has a job, hurt by her irritation, her dark moods.

  "Can't you see," she asks him, "that these French treat you like a fool? They want you to imitate them–which you do–and then they laugh at you behind your back. The more you slobber over them, the harder they laugh. Don't you see?"

  "It was you who taught me to imitate."

  "Just the pronunciations, my brother–not their high and mighty airs."

  "France has the greatest culture in the world."

  "Ridiculous!"

  "It's true!"

  She looks at him hard, can't believe her ears.

  "There's nothing sillier," she says, "than an Algerian who apes his masters' manners and leaves behind his Arab soul."

  "You brought me this far, Si Mahmoud, and now you're angry that I want to go further on my own. I may have been a savage when you met me, but now I want to become a civilized man."

  "Oh," she cries out, "poor beloved savage–you're not becoming civilized. You're becoming a docile little clerk!"

  She decides, then, to leave him for a few days, to make a trip to Algiers, where she can be alone and think out the meaning of what she's done.

  When her name is announced to Victor Barrucand, editor of Les Nouvelles, the only paper in the colony to protest her expulsion the year before–he prepares himself to meet an arrogant Amazon–beautiful, Russian, rich. Instead a pale, slim young woman in a turban and an Arab robe strides into his office and begins to mesmerize him with her nasal, rasping voice. Throughout their interview she leans forward, supporting her head between her fists while her elbows rest upon her knees. She chain-smokes cigarettes and stares at him with piercing hazel eyes which do not waver for a moment, remaining fixed with burning intensity upon his own.

  "I'm desperate," she tells him. "I'm looking for a job."

  "I'd hire you at once," he says, "but I'm resigning next week to start a journal of my own. Would you be interested in writing for me there?"

  "What do you pay?"

  "Not a cent–for a year at least, until I can get the thing on its feet."

  She studies him, carefully inspects his handsome face. Then she laughs.

  "I shall always be poor–it is written. Tell me about your new review."

  Barrucand describes Ahkbar in which libertarian articles will be printed on facing pages in Arabic and French. The paper will publicize injustices and become the voice of the voiceless illiterate mass. Its purpose will be to transform Algeria from a society of oppressors
and oppressed into a land of interracial brotherhood.

  "I like it," she says, and then slapping her knee: "I believe what you say. What do you want me to do?"

  "Seek out injustice and name names. Investigate the scandals and pillory the ones who exploit the country for themselves."

  "And how do you know I can write?"

  "It doesn't matter. I'm a good editor. What I like is the look of your name upon the page. Isabelle Eberhardt! That's a scandal in itself. And with Victor Barrucand, the most hated man in Algiers, we have a combination that will make them sweat."

  "They'll have diarrhea every morning at the Palais du Gouvernement."

  "The very effect I wish to inspire."

  She thinks a moment, then shakes his hand.

  He invites her that night to dinner at Villa Bellevue. She likes his house, finds its shining white terrazzo floors, its glassed-in arches framing the sea, a pleasant change from Slimen's lowly apartment in Ténès. And she likes Barrucand, too–he's warm and decent, the first Frenchman she's met in the colony who doesn't hold Arabs in contempt.

  "I should be exploring the south," she tells him, gulping down her drink, "not suffering the taunts of little people in a horrid provincial town. There's nothing they can do to me that hasn't already been done, but where–where is my youth? I'm twenty-five years old!"

  Barrucand laughs, offers her another drink, then listens in amazement as she tells him the story of her life and goes through a bottle of his best cognac in two hours and a half. At the end of the evening, when she is finally done, she falls down fast asleep on his best Berber rug.

  The next morning they begin work on Ahkbar, outlining stories, planning the format and the point-of-view.

  "Once I wanted to write novels," she admits to him, "but I didn't have the talent, and I despised all the writers I met. But journalism's different. It would give my travels a purpose. I hate the system here and long to tear it down."

  He lends her a horse and in the afternoons she roams the countryside around Algiers. One day, on one of her rides, she comes into a town and stumbles upon a disquieting scene. A third-rate European, with an arrogant interpreter on one side and an armed gendarme on the other, has set up a table in the village square. All the peasants in the district are waiting before him in lines for compensation for their expropriated land. While the European dispenses centimes for the ancestral acres, Isabelle observes closely and takes careful notes. Then back at Bellevue she unleashes all her outrage in a stinging short piece she entitles "Criminel."

  Barrucand loves it and decides to publish it as a broadside to publicize his forthcoming Ahkbar. "Criminel" creates a sensation, and in Algiers, once again, her name is on people's lips. She is pleased and returns to Ténès, where she is surprised to find Slimen in a rage.

  "So this is what you've been doing," he shouts at her, his hand trembling as he brushes the broadside across her face. "You disappear to Algiers, take up with some new man and write rubbish that can ruin my career."

  "Your career," she tells him calmly, "is a farce. It was my gift to you–a gift I'm beginning to regret."

  "An Arab wife belongs in the home!"

  "But I'm Si Mahmoud, your brother–not some Arab wife. I'm not Fatima or Zohra–you can't order me around. It's really terrible, Slimen, the way you've gotten yourself confused. You want to be a French pig and an Arab at the same time."

  Furious he slams the door, but an hour later returns with tears in his eyes.

  "If it weren't for you, Si Mahmoud, I'd still be a sergeant in the Spahis. I'm sorry for what I said. I had no right."

  "Your trouble, Slimen, is that you've been corrupted by the French. Don't be a fool and fall into their nasty trap. They are nice to you in the hope that you'll control me and keep me off their backs. At the same time they remind you how easily you could lose your job. Well, I say screw the job! We can live without money, but without freedom I'm dead."

  Ramadan, to which she's always looked forward if only because the bodily torment of the fast gives her a feeling of spiritual cleanliness and expiated guilt, falls, this particular year, in the somber rainy month of December. Between the storms she goes to sit on a rock overlooking the sea, and there, hungry and alone, she ponders for long periods the mess she's making of her life. The marriage with Slimen is clearly not working out, and she feels terror, too, at the neurasthenic melancholy that comes upon her frequently and which she believes is a symptom of a family disease. "The curse of the De Moerders" she calls it, thinking of the morose natures of Vava and her brothers.

  She makes a pilgrimage with Slimen to the great mosque at El-Hammel where she stands in an alcove and becomes moved by the endless repetitions of God's name she finds her body, despite her will, begin to sway in time to the muted whispered prayers. As a trance begins to take possession, she feels she could happily submerge herself in monastic gloom, far from the civilized world that has caused her so much grief.

  But later, on the way back to Ténès, she realizes how far she really is from that. Though attracted to stoicism and renunciation, she is always yielding to ecstasy and desire. Sex, absinthe, the heightened vision induced by kif, the feeling of burning sun and Saharan wind, sand against her flesh, the taste of water, after a lengthy desert journey, drawn from a deep cool well–these are her greatest pleasures, and she cannot imagine giving any of them up.

  One morning, on her way out of the apartment, after Slimen has gone off to work, she finds an unsealed package pushed against the door. She opens it and finds a horrible, shriveled, stinking fish with a piece of paper clenched between its teeth.

  "Ehnni," it says, "your wife is unfaithful! She and Barrucand are trying to topple the regime!"

  Isabelle scoffs and throws the note and the fish into the street. But the next morning, when Slimen arrives at his office, he finds a drawing of horns glued to his desk. Overpowered by rage he dashes out of the Hôtel de Ville, rushes home and rips the covers from on top of Isabelle who is still asleep.

  "Pig!" he shouts. "Whore! An Arab man has the right to kill his woman for less!"

  Amazed by his outburst, and his reference to herself as his "woman," she demands to know what she's done.

  "Don't lie," he cries. "They're mocking me in the town. I'm a cuckold! You're an adulteress! Tell me who he is!"

  She stares up at him with stupefaction. "Poor brother," she moans. "'He' does not exist!"

  He shakes her. She is thrilled to see his passions so aroused, and for an instant remembers the savage whom she loved, and who has been lost to her for so long a time.

  "Tell me–so I may kill him. Otherwise I shall kill myself!"

  "And why not me–why not kill me first?"

  "I love you too much!"

  "Then choke it out of me! Squeeze my throat until I cough out his name!"

  He stands back in anguish. "You mock me, too! Never mind! I shall shoot myself!"

  He rushes from the room. She chases after him. At last, she thinks, a scene worthy of my life.

  After a frustrated search he finds his revolver. They struggle over it, but he manages to get his finger around the trigger. Then, as they flail about the room, fighting, screaming, they hear a hard dry click that stops them cold.

  "My God!" he cries. "It's empty!"

  He goes back to the bedroom, throws himself upon the bed, sobs and weeps until she gently caresses his head.

  "Poor brother," she says. "See what they've done. The jackals! "

  "You promise there was no one?" he mutters, his mouth pressed against the mattress.

  "No one," she says.

  "Not even Barrucand?"

  "Not even him."

  "Oh, Si Mahmoud, I was certain you'd betrayed me. I know what you think of me. I know I fill you with contempt. You should have married a brilliant man–not a clod like me. Without you I'm nothing–nothing at all."

  She is seized, then, suddenly, with a great ennui, a deep feeling of uselessness and self-disgust.

  "
Oh, Slimen..." Her eyes fill with tears. He reaches to embrace her, but she turns away.

  Later, when he is calm, and has prepared himself to go back to work, he finds a note beneath a vase of flowers on the table where they eat:

  "There's a full moon tonight–let's die beneath it. Bring the revolver (loaded!) and a bottle of absinthe. I'll meet you at midnight on the beach."

  She comes to the rendezvous fully prepared to die. She has no further use for life, feels she is destroying both of them by her misery and her drink, and that they will be better off with a quick romantic death. A double suicide seems the perfect solution. Then, she thinks, the animal who sent those notes will see what he has done.

  She is touched, when Slimen arrives, by his white burnoose. She imagines how nice the blood will look against the nubby wool.

  He sits beside her, his face grave.

  "It will be beautiful," he says. "I have often dreamed of a melancholy death upon the sand."

  "The beach is not the desert, but it will do as well."

  Slimen, enraptured by the thought, begins to recite an ancient desert verse. He sings of night and death, and when he finishes he quotes to her from the Koran.

  It is her turn now, and she wishes to show him that though she's a European she knows Arabic even better than he. After a deep swig from the bottle–which is a sacrilege and which she prays God will forgive–she launches upon a long improvisation in a rich, florid, Tunisian style.

  Slimen, ashamed at being outdone, tries again, and she taunts him when he makes a bad rhyme. They drink more, then continue the contest, but soon Isabelle gives up, lying back, preferring to listen to Slimen's deep Saharan growl.

  By 2:00 A.M. they are drunk, and she's begun to stomp about the beach.