Desert Divers (9 page)

The sun is scorching in Zaatcha. The evening bread has still not arrived. The houses are pale blue and honey-yellow. Some heavy long-distance trucks stop to fill up, surrounded by chattering mopeds. The children gather on the playground. The only thing that makes it a playground is the fence. No need for a sandpit. The wet salt desert smells of sea.

At the spa hotel in Biskra, I spend one night drinking with Wolfgang, a German desert fanatic crossing the Sahara on a motorcycle.
The Immoralist
is lying on the table in my room and Wolfgang says: ‘The wife has a miscarriage, doesn’t she? Otherwise she would have given birth to me.’

‘You?’

‘Yes, I grew up in exactly that kind of family. My friends thought I had the most wonderful father in the world. He thought so too. But he was interested in their opinion, not mine. True, he was full of charm and imagination. True, I admired him enormously. But he betrayed me over and over again – without even noticing. The book ought to be called
The Self-Absorbed
. In his world, the immoralist is the only person who really exists – that’s what makes him immoral.’

It was one of those night-time hotel conversations which become absolutely honest only because both people are equally sure they will never have to meet again.

‘Father was always very attentive towards my mother. But beneath the courtesies and tokens of love, the silence between them grew deeper and deeper, until finally it became explosive.

‘They didn’t dare separate. My father thought that without Mother, reality itself would cease to exist. Only she could nourish and sustain him. For her too, it was a matter of identity. There was nothing beyond their lifelong love, not even herself.’

‘What happened?’

‘One day when my mother was in the bath, he locked the bathroom door on the outside, went downstairs, poured petrol all over the living room and set fire to it. Then he went straight to the police and gave himself up. I almost think he expected praise. A respectable person does not separate from his wife, but one does have the right to burn down one’s house, doesn’t one? And it did indeed burn to the ground.’

‘And your mother?’

‘She was rescued at the last minute. I went to the Sahara. My father was a desert soldier in Rommel’s army in the Second World War. He often told me about the desert when I was small. I had got it into my head that the solution to the mystery of him might be found here.’

I am staying in Beeskra and publishing the
Honey Bee Magazine
containing news from the beekeeper front seen entirely through the eye of the bee.

Even beesexual keepers get sharp criticism for what they
regard as beeneficial. But naturally I avoid exaggerated and unbeeleevable standpoints. Since the Bee Party came into power, the honey harvests have multiplied. That way the supply of sugar-water for the bees is assured. Continued co-operation with the beekeepers is naturally for the beeneefit of the bees.

The final ‘libeeration’, as we call it, is a central beetail that unfortunately has had to bee put off into the future.

From the main character’s point of view, Gide’s
The Immoralist
is a story of liberation.

Michel has recently lost his wife. Some of his friends travel to an oasis in the Sahara to meet him. Lying on his roof, they listen as he confides in them about his marriage.

He had married Marceline largely to please his father. During their honeymoon in North Africa, he finds out he is in the advanced stages of consumption. He has already given up and prepared himself for death when the sight of a small child suddenly gives him a strong desire to live.

His whole being begins to resist the disease. ‘My health was my assignment. Everything that was wholesome was to be regarded as good, but I must reject and forget everything that did not heal.’

What arouses his will to live more than anything else is the company of children. When he sees them playing in Biskra gardens, semi-obliterated memories from his own childhood come into his mind. It amuses him to learn their games and
arrange little parties for them with juice and cakes in his hotel room.

He begins to regain his strength. He experiences exactly the kind of jubilant re-entry into life described in
Fruits of the Earth
.

Soon he does not only want to regain his health, but to be strong and full-blooded. He seems to discover within himself a new creature which teachers, relatives, yes, even he himself had previously tried to suppress. He begins to see himself as something that can be perfected. ‘Never has my will been more excited than in trying to achieve this unknown, still unclearly imagined perfection.’

He shaves off his beard and lets his hair grow. He sunbathes and exercises his body. But he doesn’t dare, or doesn’t want to share these experiences with Marceline. He wants to keep them to himself. He soon finds it both easy and amusing to lie to her and he also thinks these lies simply increase his love.

One day he rescues his wife from a drunken driver, and with his newly won strength thrashes the man. Then he makes love to her for the first time. She becomes pregnant, they return to France and settle on a country estate which had belonged to his mother.

Among intellectuals, Michel now feels himself a stranger. He thinks life, for him infinitely valuable, is nothing to them but an annoying hindrance to their writing. Instead he finds his way to a gang of semi-criminals and with them devotes himself to nightly thieving of his own possessions.

But Marceline falls ill and has a miscarriage. They leave the estate and travel south to find a place where she can regain her health.

‘So once again I made an attempt to retain my love,’ says Michel. But he no longer has any need of it. Happiness with Marceline is to him as superfluous as rest is to someone who is not tired.

He thinks he possesses within him untouched possibilities which are being suffocated beneath layers of culture and morality. Sins and crimes are acts of liberation. Evil is natural: ‘In every living being the instinct for evil seems to me to be what is most immediate.’ And everything which is natural should be affirmed: ‘I feel nothing within me that is not noble.’ So even what is evil is noble.

They leave the Swiss resort where Marceline has begun to regain her health. In the middle of winter, they travel south to seek sun and warmth. But Marceline simply gets worse. They finally arrive in Biskra. There he was saved. There she will also regain life!

The children in Biskra, who once gave him back the will to live and made him take the first step towards self-discovery, have become almost unrecognizable. ‘Work, vice and indolence have left their mark on faces which two years ago radiated youth.’ The boys have become dishwashers, road workers and butchers. ‘How honest occupations brutalize!’

The only one to retain his beauty is a petty criminal, Moktir. Michel invites him to accompany him to Touggourt the next day. But Marceline is more ill than ever and, trembling, she presses up against Michel. He thinks:

‘Shall I not stop? – I have sought and found my real worth: a kind of stubborn obduracy in wickedness (
le pir
). But how
can I bring myself to tell Marceline that tomorrow we are going to Touggourt? …’

They take the mail carriage at dawn. Moktir is with them, happy as a king. The dismal road seems endless. Oases he thought would be smiling are wretched and he prefers the desert – ‘the land of lifeless magnificence, of unbearable lustre.’

‘You love what is inhuman,’ says Marceline.

The scorching sand irritates her throat. The inhospitable landscape torments her. As soon as they arrive, she goes to bed. The rooms are terrible. She eats nothing. He makes tea for her, but the water is salty and tastes disgusting.

He leaves Marceline and disappears out into the night to Moktir’s ‘beloved’ and makes love to her while her fiancé sits beside them playing with a rabbit. When he returns to the hotel, Marceline has her second lung haemorrhage. She dies that night.

He buries her in El Kantera, where he now lives a solitary and frugal life, making love sometimes with the beautiful dancer Meriem, sometimes with her little brother.

Have I done wrong? That is the question Michel asks his listeners on the roof terrace. In that case how did that wrong begin? Was it when I wanted to regain my health? Was it when I wanted to be strong? Was it when I wanted to be free? Why does this useless freedom I have gained now torment me?

We are not born human. We become that. We become that through solidarity with each other. We become that by taking responsibility.

That is the kind of person I wanted to be. I thought I was that kind of person.

Decisions are made in Paris. They are carried out in the Sahara. Then when the emotions that the name ‘Smara’ once inspired have vanished, the decision still remains.

I wanted to be Saint-Ex, the flyer who does not abandon a friend in distress in the desert.

I became Vieuchange, the desert wanderer who lies his way into continuing his journey, because he ‘had wanted it, in Paris’.

The immorality in
The Immoralist
is not that Michel has changed. One has a right to be changed. The immorality is that he does not dare admit the change. He prefers to become a murderer rather than admit the new being within him.

Is it right then, as Eberhardt writes, that departure is the bravest and most beautiful of all actions?

It is far from always beautiful. But swallow your pride! Admit your defeat! If you have already secretly departed, then admit it – the sooner the better! Your most immoral actions are carried out in order to maintain the illusion of being moral.

The road between Biskra and Touggourt follows an underground flow of water called Oued Rhir. The wells that took their water from the
oued
were fifty to sixty metres deep.

The water carried with it sand and gravel which was removed by the well-divers,
ratassin
. They descended more than thirty metres below the surface of the water and worked there for between 90 and 160 seconds at a time. After completing their task, they were praised as heroes.

During his honeymoon, André Gide arrived in Touggourt on April 7, 1896. There he saw a man being let down to clean out a well sixty metres deep, lined with palm trunks.

‘The effort required of these well-divers when they work under the water is incredible,’ Gide writes. ‘It is said that this man in particular was one of the bravest. He was rewarded with a medal. That evening he went insane.’

Anyone digging a fifty- to sixty-metre well must first get through the upper, unstable layer of sand. The shaft is lined with palm trunks and the space between the trunks filled with a mixture of clay and palm fibre to keep the loose sand out.

Often the well-digger must then get through several layers of polluted water before he reaches the sub-soil water. A watertight passage has to be made straight through the unclean water. Inside this passage, the well-digger works downwards through alternating firm and loose strata until he reaches the hard stone roof of the underground aquifer.

Then the foreman of the well-diggers,
mhallen
, descends to the bottom of the shaft and opens a hole through which the water spurts up and fills the well.

In his journal from Touggourt, Gide says nothing about his
wife’s tears. But he describes the bitter taste of the water as it spurts up from the depths and fills the well.

Today, Touggourt receives me with high-tension cables, gasometers, construction cranes – the profile of the modern oasis. A small trickle of European desert maniacs gather at the Hotel Oasis.

Touggourt is the capital of the date world in the Sahara, the anchor in a chain of oases which produces one of the most famous quality dates in the world, ‘Fingers of Light’ – amber-coloured, almost translucent, with soft, moist and fragrant flesh.

But this is only one kind among thousands. There are date shops in which the vendors are swamped by dates of various kinds, various vintages, from various places, and as distinguished in taste as French cheeses. Having tried only one kind of date, the kind imported into Sweden, is like having eaten only processed cheese from a tube.

Date wholesalers with gigantic warehouses and international distributors have mountains of dates of every colour – brown, yellow, black and red. Most of them are not the sticky Christmas kind, but dry and shrunken everyday dates. The people of the desert eat them like bread. They are often ground into flour. They are not sweet until right inside, by the stone.

Date traders have small stands of poles and sacking alongside the wise old men who sell herbal remedies and plant juices.

I see the white juice of
Launaea spinosa
, supposed to relieve
headaches, but also used to exterminate rats. And the small brown angular seeds of
Peganum harmala
, an emetic which causes dreams of paradise. And henbane which is so common in the markets of the Sahara – used to relieve cramps and to dull pain as well as for its narcotic effect, but in larger quantities a deadly poison.

Different, apparently contradictory functions are combined in these modest bland substances. A few grains is the difference between intoxication and insanity, death and healing.

I make tea. It is so strong it’s undrinkable. I make some more. That also blackens immediately. Where does the black come from? The answer is there. It is already in the water.

Two small girls are sitting on the floor picking lice out of each other’s hair. The reason why they have lice is their arrogance at being human.

I visit a fort nearby. As I get closer, the imposing cannons turn out to be enlargements of old engravings, stuck on cardboard.

I find a note in my pocket which says
Canossa
. It refers to my divorce. I am being punished for my ignorant moralism. I thought those who could no longer love each other were just lazy. But work alone is not enough. Without grace, there is no love.