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  “LOOK! ALREADY THE ANGEL”

  “Gentlemen, and cric!” (“And cric!” answers the chorus.) “And crac!” (The chorus repeats “And crac!”)

  The man uttering these words in musical tones was a Hindu employed as manager by the large white distiller of the area. This was taking place in Gros-Morne, where I had gone with a friend from Martinique to attend the wake of his old nurse.

  “And cric! And crac!”—the traditional formula heralding the story the Hindu was about to tell to entertain the people who had gathered in the courtyard of the house to keep the vigil: the story of the thin young girl, thin “as the E string on a mandolin,” said the Hindu, an expert (it seemed) in Creole oral literature.

  As for me, I want to tell the story of Khadidja, or rather my story with Khadidja, a prostitute I met when I was a soldier in Revoil Béni-Ounif and who, though tall and slender, was not as thin as the thinnest string on a mandolin.

  Khadidja bent Maamar Chacour, born in Algiers and twenty-three years old, according to the official records. Khadidja, whose first name was that of the Prophet s wife and who, after working in the red-light district of Colomb-Béchar, had transferred what little she possessed in the way of clothing and jewelry to a brothel in Béni-Ounif after a quarrel she had had with someone named Nadia. Khadidja, so imposing that the large Roman statue of Demeter from the excavations at Cherchel in the Galland park museum in Algiers reminded me of her when I contemplated it later.

  Khadidja, whose form—with narrow shoulders, long slim legs, and wide hips—I inscribed in the diamond of the constellation Orion, which I had at one time taken for the Southern Cross (when I was discovering the tropics) and later (traveling in Greece just before the recent war) already identified with an absent form that preoccupied me.

  “... Gentlemen, and cric!. . . And crac!”

  I hardly know the Creole language at all (delicate and nuanced behind its pidgin appearance), but my friend translated for me as the Hindu spoke, and the rhythm of his delivery and very subtle modulations would have been enough to charm me anyway, even if I hadn’t grasped anything of the content of the tale. What formula might I myself use, being neither a Hindu from the Antilles nor a specialist in Creole literature, to introduce my tale, that of a very commonplace adventure imbued with a fair amount of cinematic exoticism but elevated, in my eyes—because of the contributions of several outward appearances—to the dignity of a lived myth?

  “Rebecca” was one of the biblical names that struck me the most when I was a child because of the meeting at the water hole and the word itself, which evokes something soft and aromatic, like a raisin or a muscadine grape, also something hard and obstinate, because of the initial R and especially the . . . cca, whose abrupt stringlike vibration I hear again, now, in words like Mecca or impeccable. “Rebecca”: a woman with coppery arms and face, wearing a long tunic and a great veil on her head, with a jug on her shoulder and her elbow leaning on the lip of a well. “Rebecca”: a name that opens like “rebel” and would perhaps end on the same muffled note as “impeccable” (already mentioned) if, as though in an increase in stiffness, it were not broken before the syllable with the mute e whereas the name associated with it—Eliezer—prolongs its murmuring, like that of a bubbling spring.

  “Ergastulum,” “cistern,” “lucernarium”: Aïda the beautiful and tender, the dark and proud captive, rejoins her lover, who is condemned to die of suffocation in the depths of a cave; Rebecca rests for a moment at the well where the dromedaries are watered and where the caravansary is situated; Gideon and his companions slip under cover of darkness into the camp of the Midianites, carrying illuminated lamps that they hide in jars.

  “... Gentlemen, and cric! [repeat] And crac! [repeat].” The ergastulum for slaves; the bousbir for the present-day prostitutes of the military towns of North Africa. At the Opéra, flesh-colored bodysuits clinging to busts with two protrusions but without apparent points worn by the priestesses of Isis or attendants of the pharoah’s daughter imitate the naked torsos one could see and touch in a place like the Sphinx or any one of those houses, now outlawed, which in elevated language are known as “lupanars” whereas vulgarly they are called boxons, bouics, or claques. In rue d’Aboukir, two heads with Egyptian-style headdresses—caryatids without bodies, represented by their heads alone—ornament the carriage gateway of a building that one would no doubt be mistaken in believing to be a confrere of the homonym of the monster with human head and lion’s body which was real enough to the ancient world but no longer is to us, except for the ruin surviving a short distance from the pyramids of Giza. When I said good-bye to her at the entrance to her den, Khadidja was wearing an ample white dress belted at the waist and a green muslin veil wrapped like a sort of turban around her forehead and hair; surrounded by the madame and a few of the other girls, she was sitting out in broad daylight, her back to the threshold of the courtyard on which opened all the bedrooms and other rooms of the single-story house; for the first time, that day, the day of my departure and therefore the last day of our friendship, I saw her dressed in Eastern fashion with her head covered.

  Before she appeared to me, angel without rank and not yet fully tamed, in the form in which I knew her best—that is, in a seroual, those long, baggy trousers donned by most European soldiers and civilians in those regions, who liked to ape the indigenous fashion, and worn by her in imitation of their mates, who wear this as they would wear a suit of pajamas for the boudoir or the seashore—I had seen Khadidja in a blouse, loose top, or bright red pullover and a very simple gray skirt; dressed thus in Western style, she might have been taken—if it hadn’t been for the blue decoration of symbols tattooed on her face—for a half-Spanish, half-Indian mestiza such as the stories of trappers or gold prospectors portray in bars built of wood planks. I recall being struck by her height, her long black hair, her fierce expression, and her poised bearing; but I don’t see what subterfuge would allow me to recover her image exactly, unless it were by referring to another image as I did when, an adolescent in love with a young girl—whom her brothers and sisters called my “fiancée”—I would use one of the illustrations from my Manuel d’Histoire by Malet to insure myself, by summoning up familiar, catalogued features which seemed to me close to hers, against forgetting a face I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to restore to life once it had fled from my mind: a profile of the young Bonaparte by Gros or some other painter of the time, a drawing that I sometimes traced, distorting it to accentuate its resemblance to the one I was endeavoring (and in vain) to dream of every night in order to prove to myself the authenticity of my feelings.

  It is certainly possible for me to remember the worried and nervous look of Khadidja’s bronzed face behind her tattoos, many of which were crosses and which were nevertheless distinguishable right away from their homologues used in the underworld. Were they family marks? Tribal marks? Ornamentation motivated by vanity alone? Whatever the case, they situated her in the very heart of her native milieu and contrasted, when one saw her rigged out as a suburban streetwalker, with that graceless mode of dress. Emanating from a twofold shadow—the poorly lit room where the dubious whiteness of her bed was displayed, my brain in which burns (like the little kerosene night-light in my bedroom when I was a child) a lamp which, every day, imperceptibly grows feebler—I recall not only the unforeseeable riches of her body with its long, straight, sturdy legs, but also her slightly spicy fragrance, the soul of her skin, which was that of a goat girl rather than of a night person rubbed with ointments from the bazaar. These, however, are only isolated pieces of information and if the expression of these imprecise features gives an idea of what Khadidja could be, it in no way reconstructs the singularity of her body and does not introduce her specter, such as it would perhaps appear to me in the masquerade of a dream if it weren’t the case that I (who used to dream so often) almost never dream, a sure sign of growing old.

  In Colomb-Béchar—where before our months of complete isolation I sometimes
went on twenty-four-hour leave with some friends because we had no other semblance of town within reach—I noticed Khadidja one beautiful evening in one of those nightclubs even more lugubrious than one might imagine from films about the lives of legionnaires or other colonists, but, since I was there only out of an idle interest in my surroundings, it didn’t occur to me to talk to her. In my strolls around town I had already happened to sit down in one or another of these rooms with walls sometimes bare and sometimes painted with vague floral ornaments and filled with noisy soldiers (spahis or camel corpsmen) unless they were absolutely deserted except for the idle barmaid, and where, sitting at a table in front of some sort of liquid with my companions, I had all the time in the world to identify myself with the “living statue of funk” of which I had written in a letter one day when I was depressed and brooding about myself.

  The only road that led to Base 2—which we soon took over as a battlefront in order to make the inglorious tests to which we had been assigned—was a route that joined the road to Aîn-Sefra several dozen kilometers from Béni-Ounif at a point where one could read, inscribed in thick characters on massive milestones, to the right “Aîn-Sefra,” to the left “Dead End Road.” When our trucks entered the fork thus destined (as the sign said) to disappear into the nothingness of the rocky plateau, it seemed to me that a very attentive fate had wanted to see expressed in black and white something I already suspected to some extent: the dead end insanity of my venture into military life. Later, settled in Base 2, I appreciated as another trick on the part of this facetious fate the arrangement of latrines labeled NCO TOILET, the point of which seemed to be to let the immense mineral landscape they looked out on know for what use and what users they were intended, while several yards away a similar structure bore the sign MEN’S TOILET as though it were important to prove to the desert itself that, though it might obliterate many things, it would never do away with hierarchy. Throughout the entire duration of a sojourn that almost all my companions regarded as a bitter joke, I truly believe I was impervious to the blues and the only painful memory I have of those months is the sort of moral disaster into which I sank, having had the imprudence of asking—out of a desire to be like the others—for a twenty-four-hour leave to go to Béni-Ounif, where I slept in a shabby room in the “Hôtel du Sahara” and, for the whole of that day, literally didn’t know what to do with myself.

  At Base 2 I tasted the presence of the desert, which is, if you like, only a void and an absence (the absence, at least, of all life) but in which the solitude one discovers—even if one is there with two or three hundred others, as I was in my camp of huts—is so intense that very little complicitous abandon is needed for it to change into fullness: not simply being alone, but being alone in being is what the desert makes one feel, for here more than anywhere else, one’s consciousness of one’s existence is confronted with the exterior in its purest state and becomes, having no rival, the very gaze of a God outside of whom there is no consciousness. The place where being and nonbeing—or fullness and emptiness—come together, the desert, at the same time that its nakedness deprives me, heightens the feeling I have of my own presence and makes me—as at certain moments when I am writing—feel alone in the world, nothing (when I am face-to-face with this nothingness) appearing to exist except as a function of me, as a dream I invent that can touch no one but me. In the place of meditation, which the natural desert is, as in the desert that surrounds me still sometimes when I sit down to write, I don’t believe myself to be either more pure or more detached than in the moments when I take my part in the tumult of everyday life, nor do I ruminate with sorrow over the idea that I am separate; rather, I tend to think I have truly turned into a microcosm, as though the world reduced to the ideas that I manipulate or to an inert exteriority that I see, belonged, in all its mad diversity, to the solitary being I am, without any live intrusion preventing me from incorporating it into me so that everything may be contained in me.

  Unquestionably, I took pleasure in gradually realizing that that expanse of rubble—which appeared to me more nuanced, richer in color than any landscape loaded with violent hues, so that in its heart I was able to come alive—was, far from being a mere dead surface, relatively populated. As I became familiar with the variety of Saharan desert known as the hamada (as opposed to the reg with its classic layers of sand) and as my eyes little by little became diligent at studying the details of the larger spectacle on which they had originally fed, I discovered infinitesimal plants that were paradoxically finding a way to survive in what I had at first taken for the very image of desolation; I also saw several insects, testifying to an animal life that, unlike the hostile kingdom represented by scorpions and horned vipers (happily less profuse than we are led to believe), one could observe without fear or disgust; by taking a long walk to a wadi where, we had been told, there were a few feet of earth cultivated by seminomads (which was certainly worth our spending many hours walking under the sun bathed in sweat) I even saw a few human beings: striding rapidly along, having started at some unknown hour, on his way to some unknown place where he would arrive at some unknown point in time, a man we encountered halfway to the minuscule camp which marked the end of our walk; near this camp, working a piece of yellowish, completely bare soil, another man behind a swing plow pulled by a camel the same color, the color of sackcloth with coarse, miserable darnings. Just as much as my view of the hamada as an area in which we would be the only living atoms except for a few venomous creatures, these tiny discoveries and our encounter with the two men overjoyed me, because of the very fact that (contesting the validity of my original idea) they revealed to me a certain number of presences in a solitude I had thought complete; however exhilarating it may be, the feeling of an absolute desert is probably so humanly uncomfortable that one can’t refrain for very long from trying, secretly, to uncover the pulsation of a little life within this void whose virtue then becomes the fact that it confers an infinite value on the frailest apparition. Quite likely, despite my scorn for those who were bored at Base 2,1 myself was less at ease there than I imagined, and I recall a strange event that was in some sense grafted onto another strange thing (my surprise at the sudden appearance of a little unexpected softness being joined by surprise at finding myself on the edge of tears at the sight of something that, anywhere else, I would have considered banal)—the emotion that seized me when, returning to Béni-Ounif in an automobile convoy after our campaign was over, I saw at some distance from the town a green patch of grassland that had grown up while we were away, almost supernatural pasture suggesting to us that this inland country (sterile not long ago, and so often vilified) was in truth a rich country off which, henceforth, we could feed ourselves heartily.

  Among the North African prostitutes I had approached up to then, none had inspired me with an imperative desire to sleep with her, not even the one in Figuig to whose home we had gone one Sunday and who served mint tea with so delicate a gesture: the glass, slightly inclined, held out to you grasped between two fingers, the little one extending under the base while the tip of the index pressed against the rim. That girl who, seeing my shaved skull and my serious expression, had asked my friends if I was a dervish (a nickname that stuck), offered me very politely a little grain of mint and I was infinitely grateful to her for her attention, since I attach an immense price to those trivial gifts which, coming at just the right juncture, are a sort of proof that at a given moment the outside world has responded to us and are then preserved with a nagging fear that they will vanish like those astonishing objects one possesses in dreams and whose disappearance, upon waking, one deplores (before realizing that in fact the dream itself is the disappointing object one is so sorry not to hold in one’s hand); but her face, with its hard, violently painted features surmounted by a sort of cylindrical cap, called to mind, not the majesty of a sibyl but rather the brutality of a cossack and seemed to have been so heavily daubed only in order to mask the signs of some kind of rot. At Colomb-B
échar I had seen other girls, some ugly, others endowed with that minimum of attractiveness that gives a prostitute a chance with someone: a little black woman, quite kind, who boasted of having lived with a sergeant for a while; a tall, robust Chleuh mountain woman; in order to enter the red-light district, however, one had to pass through a guardhouse where it was very difficult to avoid the prophylactic injection a male nurse had been ordered to administer to all those whose motives for venturing into that precinct were assumed to be something other than a tourist’s simple curiosity, and such a beginning was not very encouraging.