Desert Divers (8 page)

Even as Madame Ehni, she wears men’s clothes and continues her androgynous life beside camp fires and in soldiers’ brothels. Only the male rôle provides her with the freedom to ride around reporting for the newspaper
l’Akbar
in the Sahara, which the French are just conquering. Only the male rôle gives her the freedom to make love with anyone, to drink anisette with the legionnaires and smoke kif in the cafés, where she shocks listeners with her expositions on the pleasures of brutality and the voluptuousness of subjection.

I push my way through a thick dark desert of trees which is called ‘forest’. I am in a hurry and must not come too late. In the end the forest opens up into a clearing. I see a figure hanging by the feet from a branch and I rush over. It is Isabelle! Her
normally moon-pale face is blue-black and contorted. I cut her down and carefully arrange the dead body on the ground.

The Globe, a sports arena in Stockholm, is transformed from a descending hot-air balloon into a diving bell. Isabelle and I are sluiced out into the water, spouting cascades of pearly bubbles from our oxygen masks. But very soon we are forced to go back as if into a womb. We have been born into an element that is not ours, in which we do not belong, in which we cannot live – except for short moments with the piece of bitumen between our teeth.

‘The thought of death has long since been familiar to me,’ wrote Isabelle towards the end of her life.

Pierre Loti lived with his death-wish until he was seventy-three. Isabelle Eberhardt only lived to twenty-seven. By then she had no teeth, no breasts, no menstruation, was as thin as a well-diver, and almost always depressed. ‘If this foray of mine into the darkness does not stop, what will be its terrifying outcome?’

Eberhardt seated, cigarette in hand, about six months before her death, 1904.

Her life was an extended suicide. With increasing regu larity she took refuge in drugs, alcohol and a brutal, self-destructive, indiscriminate sexuality. She suffered from innumerable illnesses, among them malaria, and probably syphilis.

At her own urgent request, she was discharged from the hospital in Ain Sefra on October 21 and returned to her house by the
oued
.

The torrent that drowned her came that night.

When Isabelle died, her first novel,
Vagabond
, was just being serialized in
l’Akbar
. Her sketches and short stories had often been included in Algerian newspapers. A large number of manuscripts was saved from the flood.

The editor-in-chief of
l’Akbar
, Victor Barrucand, published a selection in 1906. Quite well-meaningly, he had first prettied up her texts.

She wrote: ‘Everyone laughed.’ He added: ‘People laughed at his rusticity; his gesture was that of a shepherd.’

She wrote: ‘Freedom was the only happiness accessible to my nature.’ That sounded too simple. He improved on it: ‘Freedom was the only happiness that was necessary for my eager, impatient and yet proud nature.’

Despite the revisions, the book was a success and Barrucand continued to publish Isabelle’s manuscripts in 1908, 1920 and
1922, by then with greater respect for the integrity of her writing. The diaries and other writings she left were published in 1923, 1925 and 1944 by R-L Doyon. Grasset began to publish her collected writings in 1988. Most of these editions also contain short biographies. More extensive biographies have been published in France, Algeria, England and in the USA in 1930, 1934, 1939, 1951, 1952, 1954, 1961, 1968, 1977, 1983, 1985 and 1988.

What is it about Isabelle Eberhardt that goes on fascinating generation after generation?

I have plenty of time to think about that as I drive on through the desert.

She did not write nearly so much as her master, Pierre Loti. As a rule, nor did she write so well. And yet she is the one to survive. Why?

‘One must never look for happiness,’ she writes. ‘One meets it by the way – always going in the opposite direction.’

There is a great deal of sparkling use of words in her work. It is not the average that counts. It is the highlights.

It is not the quantity that counts, it is the totality. And that applies not only to her language, but also body language. The gesture of life.

Isabelle dressed in male clothes and dived into the wells of the Saharan Arab world. At the same time, Jack London was putting on working clothes and letting himself sink into
People of the Abyss
(1903).

Eberhardt on horseback. (
Painting in oils by G. Rossegrosse
)

He was conducting a social experiment. He wanted to experience with his own body what wretchedness means for the truly poor.

Isabelle was doing the same. But with no secret gold coin sewn into her waistband. She dived without any safety rope. She went undercover with no return.

The boundaries she crossed were not only social, but racial. A white woman in the American South openly preferring black men as lovers and marrying one of them without altering her unbridled life – considered in those terms, it is easier to understand what forces Isabelle was challenging.

The French Empire in North Africa rested ultimately on the myth of the superiority of the white race. Her whole way of life questioned that myth.

It also questioned the myth of male superiority. If a female transvestite could penetrate the world of men and acquire its freedoms, vices and privileges, then the gender rôles were made to waver. Unclear sexual identity aroused anxiety and aggression. Isabelle put herself outside all categories.

Even that might possibly have been forgiven, as her fate verified all prejudices, apparently confirming that anyone who defies the conventions sinks into the dregs. So far, so good. But throughout her deterioration, Isabelle had the insolence to maintain a sense of moral superiority. That was unforgivable.

In that respect she belongs to a totally different family from Loti. She belongs to a long line of French literature running from Villon via Baudelaire and Rimbaud to Céline and Genet. She may be the only woman in that company.

André Gide’s
Fruits of the Earth
was published in Swedish in 1947, when I was fifteen.

As soon as I opened the book I felt someone was speaking to me, not over my head to other adults, but directly to me. And so confidentially, almost whispering, as if it were late at night when everyone else was asleep.

The book gave me another name, Natanael, which drew me into the text so that we could be together there. I liked it very much.

Some writers hide themselves in Action, others conceal themselves in Facts. But the master in
Fruits of the Earth
despised such hiding places. He talked about himself. He had a message. It filled the whole book. It was already there in his voice, in his way of speaking to me.

I was looking for a Master. I heard his voice for the first time in
Fruits of the Earth
, and fortunately he was also looking for what I wanted to be: an apprentice.

That was dangerous and forbidden. I realized that at once. The Master defied all authority. He preached departure, departure from everything, even from himself. He said: ‘When you’ve read my book, throw it away and go out! I would like it to have given you the desire to leave something, anything, your town, your family, your way of thinking. Don’t take my book with you … Forget me.’

That voice made me happy. But it also frightened me, made me afraid of the demands it made, afraid of the great unknown awaiting me.

‘Our actions consume us, but they give us our radiance.’

That could be an epitaph for Isabelle Eberhardt.

She went to North Africa in 1897, when
Fruits of the Earth
was on sale for the first time. She died in 1904 when
The Immoralist
had just been published. Her whole writing life was lived between these two of Gide’s books.

She was obsessed by the same mystique of departure as Gide. She preached the same nomadism. As he did, she wanted to try every experience, even those that were bad, brutal or depraved. It is conceivable that the reason why she dressed as a boy was in order to become his favourite apprentice, Natanael.

But there is nothing to indicate that she read Gide, at that
time still a little-known young writer. André and Isabelle were simply children of the same day.

And through
Fruits of the Earth
, that day also became mine.

I came to
Fruits of the Earth
from
Manual for Infantrymen
, which had long been my favourite book. I also came from the training guide
Physical Fitness and Strength
. I read Gide in the same way. I came from
Scouting for Boys
. In this last, the narrative and descriptive parts were interspersed with small comments in brackets: ‘(practise it!)’. I read parentheses of that kind into
Fruits of the Earth
as well.

When it said:

‘Every creature is capable of authenticity, every feeling of fullness.’

Or:

‘I lived in a state of almost uninterrupted, passionate surprise.’

Then I also read the invisible words ‘Practise it!’

Passionate surprise …?

I loved my father, but had he ever been passionate? Did he even know what the word meant?

Within me was a boundless need to be seized and elevated. Everything around me denied that need. Only in
Fruits of the Earth
was it understood: ‘Never stop, Natanael. As soon as an environment has become like you, or you like your environment, it is no longer any use to you. Then you must leave it. Nothing is more dangerous to you than
your
family,
your
room,
your
past.’

Was I getting like my father? Would I become the Secretary of the Älvsjö branch of the Swedish Red Cross, as he was? Would I dilute my milk with water to spare my stomach? Would I live without travelling, without festivities, without thinking, without adventures?

‘Families, I hate you!’ says Menalces. Through a window, he sees a boy sitting reading beside his father. The next day Menalces meets the boy on his way back from school. The next day they talk to each other, and four days later ‘he left everything to come with me’.

The biblical associations with the Apostles who left everything to follow the Master gave me the courage to abandon myself to such dreams: one day Someone would walk past in the November darkness out there on Långbrodal Road, Someone would see me though the window where I was bored to death doing my homework beside my father, and this Someone would call out to me and take me out into the great wide world outside Älvsjö.

We would wander in that fatal moonlight over the desert. We would walk barefoot on smooth blue rocks, our eyelids cooled by the night.

We would see the walls of desert cities turning red towards evening and glowing faintly on in the night – deep walls in which the midday light is stored. At night, they slowly repeat what the day has taught them.

We would see Bou Saada. We would see Biskra. ‘Over the moonlit terraces in Biskra, Meriem comes to me through the tremendous silence of the night. She is entirely enveloped in a torn white haik which she laughingly lets fall as she stands there in the doorway …’

After every sentence of that kind, I read with racing heart a secret
Practise it! Live it!

Bou Saada, ‘the fortunate town’, lies in a hollow between three mountains. Its fortune is that its wells are connected to an underground lake constantly supplied with fresh water from the three mountains. The old wells can be thirty metres deep and irrigate twenty-four thousand date palms.

Today the basis of the economy is not dates but oil. The powerful desert vehicles of the prospectors, covered in mud and sand, stand outside the Hotel Caida. The oil men swill beer in a bar like a swimming baths, their voices echoing between tiled walls. They gather noisily around the long tables in the dining room with their big laughs and big wallets. A small plate of soup and a mess of vegetables costs as much as a dinner at the luxurious Opera Cellar in Stockholm.

Exchange rates create the image of the Foreigner. If the Foreigner is to appear powerful, rich and generous, then there has to be an exchange rate which makes everything cost about half what the Foreigner pays back home. If the Foreigner is to appear powerless, poor, stingy and complaining, then there has to be an exchange rate such as there is in Algeria.

I am staying at the Hotel Transatlantic. When it opened in 1909, the Foreigner was rich and powerful. Then the water closets flushed, hot water rushed out of the taps from Jacob Delafont & Co in Paris, the piano was properly tuned, the lights in the chandeliers sparkled, the Ouled Nail girls danced and made love. Those were the days.

Fruits of the Earth
speaks with rapture about these girls. Loti wrote a whole book about them. Maupassant praises them. He came across them at the Café Joie in the main
square and spread the rumour all over Europe that their wantonness was all part of the Ouled Nail tribal culture. According to ancient custom, the girls lived those happy days as prostitutes to save enough for their dowries.

Today, the Transatlantic in Bou Saada is the only surviving hotel of a chain that once stretched across the whole of North Africa. An infinitely old man shows me up the high stairs, as narrow and steep as a ladder. A yellow plastic bucket in the bath has to serve as both shower and WC. The beds are as cold and deep as graves.

I am lying on the ground in a strange town. A crowd of children dressed in white see me and come running over. They stand around me, chattering in French to each other, bending down and touching me, plucking at my clothes, touching my skin, lifting my hand. I am tremendously frightened. I expect them to say:

‘He’s dead.’

I don’t know myself whether or not I’m alive.

In the morning, the infinitely old man has put on a once-white jacket and from the narrow spout of an enamel pot pours
a bubbling, pale brown drink which could well be tea, may be coffee. His hands with their raised veins shake as he pours.

For five years after the death of my mother, I had my father’s full confidence. Then he went behind my back and started seeing another woman.

The first time she visited us at home, as I was seventeen and was reading
Fruits of the Earth
, I suddenly felt terribly sorry for her.

Beside my old father, she seemed so young and lively, so unused. Did she really understand what she was letting herself in for? She didn’t know what he was really like, as I did, from long experience.

After dinner, Father went out into the kitchen to fetch the coffee. Then I said: ‘Surely you’re not considering marrying someone who is already dead?’

She looked at me in horror.

‘Ssh, he can hear what you’re saying.’

I thought I had nothing to hide, and actually raised my voice as I went on. ‘He hasn’t read a book for fifteen years, or thought a new thought. Everything about him has solidified into clichés and routines. He’s dead.’

As I was saying this, I saw from her expression that it was hopeless. I fell silent. Then my father, as old as I am now, came back into the room. He poured the coffee through the narrow spout of an enamel coffee pot. He didn’t say anything. But I can still see before me his hands, with their raised veins, shaking as he pours.

Eventually, Someone really did walk past and see me. He was a British composer called John. I was pleased a grown man was interested in me and taking me seriously. In the summer of 1948, I went to London to stay for a few weeks with John in his flat.

It soon turned out that our expectations of this meeting were quite different.

‘You’re reading
Fruits of the Earth
,’ John said. ‘Do you see what your favourite book is about?’

He showed me one place after another, for example the bit in the sixth book about the dazzling light in the towns of the Orient. I had often read that. But clearly not thoroughly enough. I hadn’t seen that among the white-clad Arabs were also children who appeared far too young, don’t you think, to know anything about love? ‘Some of them had lips hotter than newly hatched baby birds.’

‘Practise it! Live it!’ said John, and kissed me.

I was scared. I had no desire to be involved like that. As soon as I could, I escaped from the flat and ran through the streets of London to the Swedish Embassy, where, still gasping with the fear and effort, I rang the doorbell.

It was Sunday morning. A gigantic British butler gazed down at me blankly from the top stratum of society.

Haughtily, he saw me off.

It was pouring with rain. I had nowhere to go. I went back to John. When he found out where I had been, he was instantly transformed from attacker into victim.

‘Are you crazy?’ he said. ‘Do you want me sent to prison?’

He told me about Oscar Wilde. Wilde was the prototype for Menalces in
Fruits of the Earth
.

I could hardly believe it.

‘What had a poseur like Wilde to teach the master of honesty, André Gide?’ I said.

‘Wilde was world famous,’ said John. ‘The young André Gide had still not had anything published when they met in Paris in 1891. They were together every day for three weeks. Gide tore those three weeks out of his diary.

‘The same year the master of honesty published
Fruits of the Earth
,’ John went on, ‘the master of poseurs left prison a broken man. That could happen to me, too, if you report me to the Embassy.’

Naturally, I didn’t. John and I made a pact – he left me alone and I didn’t go to the Embassy. But the message in
Fruits of the Earth
had suddenly shrivelled. I no longer called myself Natanael.

On the road between Bou Saada and Biskra is a small place called Zaatcha.

The name has never become as famous as Song My or Oradour-sur-Glane, but what it denotes is the same: massacre. The French razed the town to the ground after the rebellion of 1849 and the whole population was slaughtered, men, women and children.

Today the name denotes some dusty palm trees, a petrol station and a café rattling with dominoes. The morning bread has all gone and the evening bread has not yet arrived. There are three red plastic chairs and an iron one outside. I sit down to wait.

Out of old Swedish habit, I turn my face to the sun and roll up my sleeves to get a bit of tan on my arms.

People around me are surprised and upset. They look at me as if I were a flasher. In the Sahara, the sun is the Enemy just as much as it is the Friend with us. Sunbathing in the Sahara – it’s something you simply do not do.

Not so long ago, the sun was suspect in Europe too. The first really immoral thing that happens in
The Immoralist
is that the main character takes all his clothes off in the sun. He sees some sunburnt workers and is himself tempted to undress. At first it feels cold and unpleasant. But the sun burns and after a while he is pleasantly roasted right through. ‘My whole self lived in my skin,’ he says.

Was he the very first modern sunbather? The sun, the liberator, teaches him not to be ashamed of his body, but to look upon it with delight. ‘I felt harmonious and full of sensuality. I almost thought I was beautiful.’

Gide writes that when it was still regarded as more natural to burn down a village than to undress in public. Nakedness was characteristic of the inferior races, along with dark body colour. What was morally superior was white.

Sunbathing became a bold symbolic action, full of rebellion and hedonistic mystery:

Respectable people do not do such things. A respectable person burns down villages, but is careful not to let his will melt away.