De Potter's Grand Tour (7 page)

He was jealous of the Arabs' secrets and yet oddly comfortable with his exclusion, for now he knew where he was. He was in a place where time couldn't penetrate and nothing would ever change, in the presence of men who had been singled out and blessed with immortality. But it wasn't God they had to thank. It was the ingenious machine mounted on a tripod in the corner of the workroom: a Phoebus mahogany box camera, its lens like a pig's snout inhaling the light.

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When he was nineteen, Armand spent five months in Algiers as a sublieutenant for the French army, under the leadership of Crémieux, a government minister appointed to assimilate Algeria into France. Armand's duties at the time involved supervising the transportation and settlement of Alsatian refugees fleeing the Franco-Prussian War. He took one long expedition with his regiment, traveling by train to Biskra, then on horseback across the Algerian desert from Biskra to Constantine. From Constantine they traveled by diligence to the outpost of El Kef in Tunisia. A week later they returned to Algiers.

Constantine was in the midst of a devastating drought, and with French speculators buying up all the grain and emptying the silos, famine was spreading. By 1871, 20 percent of the region's Muslim population had died of starvation. As a nineteen-year-old sublieutenant surrounded by fellow soldiers, Armand did not witness the full scope of the suffering, and he heard only faint rumors of the simmering unrest among the local tribes. Then, on the road between Constantine and El Kef, the regiment passed the desiccated corpse of what Armand thought was a dog but turned out to be a child—a boy of about six or seven. The officer in command ordered his regiment to dig a grave, and Armand was one of the men who helped bury the child.

After that, he wanted to leave the desert and never return. Not until he moved to America were his memories stirred in a different way. It was as if he'd carried sand in his pocket, and he found the sand again, took out a handful, and felt it sift through his fingers. He thought about the corpse of a child, left out for the vultures. He thought about the sleepless night he spent with his regiment on the edge of a bedouin camp, when he'd stayed up listening to the bedouins make a strange music by rubbing stones together. He thought about the way the brilliant constellations seemed to flash and spin.

Six months before he married Amy Beckwith, he used a portion of the money he'd saved to sail back across the Atlantic. He went first to visit his brother in Belgium, though he spent only a day with him before leaving for North Africa. He was longing to hear the music of the bedouins and see the stars dancing in the sky again. He couldn't shake the feeling that he'd missed something on his last visit.

On the outskirts of El Kef, he met a young photographer named Alexandre Bougault. He learned that Bougault had come from Algeria, where he'd been serving in the French military, and had recently bought himself the Phoebus box camera with the rack-and-pinion focuser. Bougault had the notion that he could have a profitable career selling albumen prints of desert scenes to tourists. So far in his brief search for marketable images of North Africa, the reality of dust and poverty had disappointed him; he preferred arranging scenes with a theatrical flourish, posing his subjects and manipulating the light in ways that enhanced the impression of hazily exotic beauty. His ambition was to sell as many prints as possible rather than to represent the truth. What did European tourists care about the truth?

Bougault was delighted to hear his visitor greet him in French. Armand himself felt an uncharacteristic relief at meeting a Frenchman so far from home. While the photographer continued with his work, the two men traded stories about their military service and discovered that they had mutual friends. In the time it took for Bougault to use up his supply of negative plates, Armand regained sufficient clarity of mind to accept when the photographer invited him to have a drink.

Instead of staying in the one hotel thought to be suitable for foreigners in El Kef, the industrious Bougault had arranged a deal with a rug merchant. In return for buying rugs to resell in Paris, he was given a room in the merchant's house and two meals a day. He and Armand sat in the garden behind the house until it was dark, drinking a syrupy tea that made the ends of their mustaches sticky. Bougault showed Armand a photograph of a girl he'd left behind in Paris. Armand showed Bougault a photograph of the girl waiting for him in Tivoli. They boasted of their wealth and their family connections and were at a point when the tenor of their conversation could have gone toward either suspicion or agreeable curiosity when Bougault exclaimed and pointed to the ground. A huge beetle, as brown and round as an overripe plum, was scuttling in the shadows close to the house. The beetle disappeared into a crevice before either man could grab a rock to crush it. They fell into a long silence, and when their eyes met, they burst into merry laughter, like boys who had broken a tiresome rule without getting caught.

From this initial meeting, they struck up such an easy friendship that the rug merchant assumed they were brothers. Armand kept Bougault company while he designed the scenes for his photographs; Bougault helped Armand sharpen his sense of purpose in his life. He came to think of the arid landscape as a place exempt from modern corruption—the version of the desert as illustrated in Bougault's photographs was the true version, and the reality visible without the camera's aid was just a lie.

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He saw two weavers in brilliant white robes sitting near the sun-washed entrance of an ancient catacomb, delicate threads stretched between them, while a third weaver leaned against the archway and observed their effort with impatience.

He saw a donkey carrying two huge bundles of broom, being led by an Arab along a narrow dirt street. He saw a boy watching from the shadow cast by the front wall of a house. He saw the Arab bend his head, at Bougault's direction, so that his face was hidden by the white hood of his immaculate robes.

He saw two beautiful girls dressed in silk gowns and gauzy headscarves lent to them by Bougault, sitting in their dirt yard grinding spices. He saw the girls combing the dirt with their bare toes. He saw one of the girls extend her hand languorously for a turbaned visitor to kiss. He saw that the turbaned man who had been hired by Bougault to play the part of the courtier was actually the Maltese gardener at the hotel where Armand was staying.

He saw the same gardener wearing traditional bedouin robes sitting on a camel on a rocky hilltop behind the ruins of the Roman baths beyond the gates of El Kef. Armand thought it was a fine, suggestive scene, but Bougault disagreed. He wanted an infinity of sand in the background, not ugly rocks and ruins.

They left the Maltese worker and the camel in El Kef and traveled by diligence to Souk-el-Arba and from there by train to Tunis, arriving shortly before midnight. They were given rooms in the house of Monsieur Alapetite, the French resident-general, who was a friend of Bougault's. They spent the evening drinking a tarry anise liquor and arguing about the future of Tunisia, which the resident-general thought a hopeless place and Armand and Bougault believed was a gold mine for the French.

The next day the two men left for Constantine by train. From Constantine they took the diligence to Biskra, where they hired horses and a guide and rode into the desert, reaching Mraier, an oasis famous in the region for its thousands of date palms, in the late afternoon. They were given bed and board at the French military barracks.

In the morning they found an Arab with his own herd of camels. The Arab was a clever bargainer and demanded forty francs for the use of his camel and an additional ten francs to lead the two men a short way into the desert, to the top of a dune.

Armand stood at the photographer's side and watched as the Arab, dressed in bedouin robes, mounted the camel. The camel pushed itself up to standing. The Arab rocked perilously on the wood-and-rawhide saddle and then, following Bougault's order, shaded his eyes with his hands and searched the infinite emptiness of the desert for some sign of life.

On their way back to Mraier, they met a group of Sudanese slaves waiting outside the gates of the village, their faces and robes streaked with dust. Bougault spoke with them and learned that the slaves had been left in charge of the camels while their master finished his business in the village. Bougault spent nearly an hour trying out different arrangements. At the end, he created a tableau with two of the camels sitting on folded legs, the other two camels standing with two of the Sudanese men holding their reins while the third man sat in the foreground with his back to the camera, draped in the spotless white robes Bougault had given him to wear.

The group's master appeared and demanded payment for the service provided by his slaves. Bougault obliged, giving him five francs, and the group set out to continue their trade in the next village. Armand watched them trek as if in slow motion across the sand, the figures shrinking with the distance and finally disappearing over the rise of a dune.

Where the Sudanese men and their camels had been, Armand saw sand seas and salt terraces blistered by heat. He saw a beautiful, vast, windblown nothingness that hid the secrets of its ancient history. And thanks to Bougault, he saw the potential for making a fortune from this land.

On the road to Constantine, Armand asked for copies of the finished photographs. Bougault peered at him strangely without answering, his lips turned up in a half smile, his silence awkward at first, then unnerving. Armand shifted in his seat to move away from him and make the boundaries clear. Bougault's response was to set an exorbitant price for each print, which Armand refused to pay. The two men argued so violently that the diligence they were riding in shook from their fury. By the time they'd reached Constantine, they had agreed that they wanted nothing more to do with each other, and Armand was left to fend for himself.

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In his own dream of the desert, Armand was never thirstier than his bedouin guides. He drank only when they drank. He knew thirst to be a sign of weakness. Only foreigners admitted to thirst. Rather than complaining, he sucked whatever moisture was left from his tongue, his gums, the raw lining of his cheeks, before he ever let himself beg for more than his fair share of water. He swallowed the gravel in his throat, squeezed his dry lips together to seal them. He would rather collapse than speak of his thirst. He was willing to lie there, forgotten, while the rest of the caravan moved on, the jingle of the bells on the camels' collars grew fainter, night settled over the dunes, and the river of stars flooded the sky and poured down to earth.

He opened his mouth to catch the jewels released by the sky. When he was finally satiated he sat up and looked at the endless space around him, marveling at his aloneness even as he felt confident that when the sun rose the next morning, another caravan would arrive and offer him a ride.

At some place deep in the core of his being he believed that he wasn't destined to die in the desert. He hadn't been afraid on that first long expedition to El Kef when he was in the military. He hadn't been afraid on his explorations with Bougault. And he wasn't afraid now, lying on his back in the sand.

In Armand's unreal version of North Africa, a brave man could make a fortune. He didn't have to persuade the reticent natives to pose for his camera. All he had to do was lie there under the stars, open his mouth, and drink in the night's treasures.

Days later, or just hours, he woke in his bed at the hotel in El Kef. Before his thoughts clarified, he had the impression of being someone important, as though he'd been charged by some high government official with a crucial diplomatic mission. He imagined speaking fluently in front of a large group of Arabs, explaining to them that he had been authorized to usher in a new period of prosperity and friendship between the French and the people of North Africa.

But on the streets of El Kef there was no prosperity. There were low-slung mud houses and dirty children who followed him everywhere, begging for money. They followed him as he crossed the plaza where the fountain sent its huge spray into the air. They followed him to the ruins of Kasr-er-Roula, an ancient basilica that was said to have been the repository of great treasures. When he started to dig in the dust with his walking stick, the children did the same.

They dug for hours, until the sun was low in the sky, but they found nothing more than shards from broken columns. Armand returned to his hotel, but he was back at the ruins early the next morning. Word spread through El Kef that the white man was digging again, and the children gathered to help. They kept digging through the day and returned the next day to dig some more. They dug and dug and dug until, at last, their labor was rewarded.

“M'sheer, m'sheer,” one boy called, and ran toward Armand holding what looked like a dead fish he had unearthed. A fish in the desert! But it couldn't be dead because it had never been alive. It had rubies for eyes, papery brass scales, and a hinge in its center so it could be made to wiggle. As Armand examined the fish, he discovered that the head was detachable. When he pulled it off, the children who had gathered around him hooted Arabic words that sounded to Armand like mockery. He emptied the sand from the fish and replaced the head. Then he jerked the hinged fish in a savage motion toward the nearest boy and growled. The children shrieked and ran away, and Armand put the fish in the pocket of his linen jacket. It was the first of many treasures he would take from the desert.