Upon arrival in Tunis, Isabelle presents herself at the tiny office of the Russian consul, where a balding young man with a walrus moustache suggests she leave at once.
"Unless you have business here," he says, "it is utterly pointless to stay. These people are fanatics, and have no morals at all."
Walking the huge medina Isabelle sees strange things: pickpockets led away by crowds of angry citizens to horrible punishments meted out in dark corners of the maze; packs of howling dogs rushing down the narrow streets at night before disappearing into fields of ruined stone to corner some poor rodent and tear apart its flesh. She hears strange stories of banditry, kidnapping, and the selling of whites as slaves. Terrible things take place in the dark labyrinth–unspeakable acts are perpetrated against the innocent bodies and virginal orifices of foreigners who wander where they do not belong. But Isabelle is undaunted. She has come to be a writer, and so sets out to find herself a place to live.
One day, soon after her arrival, wandering an old Arab cemetery on a hill near the Menara gate, she's attracted by the subtle colors of wild flowers and herbs beyond. Walking among them she comes upon a region of ruins: smashed lintels, free-standing chimneys, courtyards choked with decaying vegetation, archways split by unattended trees. She is struck by a sense of desolation and is about to turn away when she notices, across a garden of roses, an old domed Turkish house–grand, sullen, looming in the sun.
She approaches, knocks and after an interminable wait, sees a dark, wizened old face appear at a tiny window in the door.
"Yes! Yes!"
"I'm looking for a house."
"Yes!"
"I thought this one might be for rent."
"Yes!"
"Can I come in?"
After a few moments the door swings open, and she's confronted by an old black lady and a large black dog. The dog squints at her, pants then turns back inside.
"What's your name?" she asks.
"Khadidja."
"Well, Khadidja–is this house for rent?"
The old maid nods her head.
"In that case I should like to look about."
Khadidja shows her through a maze that puts the intricacies of the medina to shame. She is led through a labyrinth of passageways, then a series of interlocking rooms, all decorated with old Andalusian tiles, and plaster cut with intricate Arabic texts. At one point, when they enter a hall without windows, Khadidja takes her hand, leads her to a high-ceilinged octagonal room whose walls are embedded with rusting mirrors. From here they make their way up a spiral stairs, climbing finally to a great domed room in the turret where she finds stained cushions placed along the walls, a table and a row of arched windows overlooking the town. She goes to them, stares down at the sunlit ruins.
"What a fantastic place! I must see the owner at once."
Khadidja directs her to a bank which has seized the house in lieu of an unpaid debt. Its manager, a stylish young Frenchman named Pierre, at first tries to discourage her from taking the place.
"The rent is extravagant," he warns, "and the house is absolutely huge. It's really ridiculous if you're going to live alone."
"Irrelevant," she says. "I've come here to be a writer. If I can work in that tower room, then I may make myself a fortune, in which case the size and the cost won't matter to me at all."
Pierre is delighted with her, orders the lease drawn and quickly establishes himself as her friend.
"You'll love Tunis. It's perfect for a writer–one of the great places in the world. Here you can bring your fantasies to life. Nothing's forbidden; anything can be arranged."
"But I hear all these awful stories..."
"Don't listen! Tunis is a city of love. Only the prudes find it scandalous. The great gift of Tunis, you see, is the way that it shows their true natures to men. You can be sure that those who detest it are the ones who fear what they find here within themselves."
"Has it helped you, then?"
He looks at her, lowers his voice, confides.
"Yes, I found myself, and my own form of love. They call it 'the love that dares not speak its name' in Europe, but here it is quite acceptable, sometimes even admired."
His own special tastes are so deviant and bizarre they startle her. He lives, he tells her, in a delightful villa where he keeps a gracious garden and two large Dalmatian dogs. The dogs and flowers are his passion. At night he likes to dress himself in polka-dot clothing, paint black and white spots on his face and, with his canine friends, sneak about his neighborhood stealing exotic plants. Then, laden with booty, but still steamy from the risk of the chase, he returns home for an erotic romp with his dogs who glaze him sensuously with their tongues.
"I don't believe you," Isabelle screams, howling with giggles. "Impossible! You've made it up!"
Pierre raises his finger. "Ah," he says. "The vices of Tunis–they are magnificent, and without end."
They are all exhibited nightly, she learns, in a quarter near the old Roman slaves' prison and the cemetery by the gate called Bab El Gorjani. Pierre takes her there the next evening to watch the parade of the prostitutes. She marvels at the carnal pacing and the seductive gestures that sweep up sailors from a dozen lands into brothels for the night.
Pierre shows her little side streets choked with boys for sale. Some are mere children, ten and eleven years old.
"Luscious flesh," says the Frenchman, dabbing with his tongue at the corner of his mouth, "but too dangerous for me–they're nearly all diseased. Tunis," he continues, "is cornucopia sexualis. The Englishman who likes to be whipped, and the Russian who likes to whip. Japanese girl, Persian boy, Siamese cat. All three orifices satisfied at once.
"I've prowled here often and seen many strange things. Amateurs, noblemen, sometimes, or millionaires offer themselves to the meanest trash on the street. They take a sailor's coins, and then, at dawn, throw them to the beggars. But a man who likes women must watch out for transvestites–those fiendish boys will seduce him with phony female guile, then, later, in a pitch-dark room–it'll be too late–they'll have his ass!
"Fortunately that's not my problem, though I was once tricked by a maiden I'd mistaken for a rough street boy. Her ass was sweet, but when I grabbed 'round front–nothing! We fought furiously over the money, then settled for half, which, as far as I was concerned, was all I'd got. Later I learned she was a Scottish marchioness. She'd come here to study the art of strumpetry which she hoped to practice back in London, in the style of Catherine Walters–whom, I believe, she referred to as `Skittles'."
Pierre looks around.
"The pandemonium here is about to crest, but, unfortunately, I must leave. Take care little sparrow–you look so innocent. There is love for you in Bab El Gorjani–I'm sure of it. But beware of evil."
Installed in the old Turkish house she quickly makes friends with the dog. Since he has no name she calls him "Dédale," appropriately, she thinks, for the creature seems quite happy in her palatial maze.
She also befriends Khadidja whom she presents with a new djellaba, a bottle of perfume and other lavish gifts. Then she gives her instructions.
"If anyone should call at the door and ask you who I am, you are to repeat exactly the following words: `Mademoiselle Eberhardt is a Russian Moslem, and she devotes herself to literature'."
Khadidja practices the phrase several times, then wanders off. But whenever Isabelle meets her in a corridor, or on the stairs, she repeats it with a solemn face.
Determined to be a writer, she tries hard to capture the experience of kif. But it is beyond her reach–she realizes she does not yet have the skills. Looking for inspiration she buries herself in her books: Loti, Nadsón, the Russian classics of her youth. And when these provide her with nothing she turns to the journals of the brothers Goncourt, if only to savor the essence of the literary life.
If I'm successful, she thinks, my future is assured. I'll earn a fortune with my pen, and join the Brontës and George Sand in the elite sisterhood of literature.
Knowing she must work, but discovering not a single idea for a story in her head, she forces upon herself a vast literary project, a series of tales about the destroyed people of Tunis–the beggars, cripples, lepers, syphilitics, dwarfs and other deformed specimens she knows so well from her marches through the town. Though before she has gone to great lengths to avoid them, crossing streets, darting down alleys, doing anything possible to escape their wails, she resolves now to make a point of hovering near, hoping that by wallowing in their foulness she may somehow learn to relinquish her disgust.
She tries a story, modeling her style on Loti, then shows the draft to Pierre. He reads it, and abruptly throws it down.
"No, Isabelle–no! You must forget about other writers. Walk, ride, explore until you have something to say."
He gives her a little book by an obscure author named André Gide. It is called Les Nourritures Terrestres, and she dips into it many times, feeling that it has been written especially for her.
This book, which urges its readers to sever themselves from all restraints, satisfy all cravings and live at fever pitch, implies that nothing can really be learned from books, even from Les Nourritures Terrestres. Watching the sun rise through the arches of her tower bedroom, she recalls an admonition from Gide's Envoi: "Throw away my book. Tell yourself it is but one of the thousand ways of confronting life, and seek out your own."
Seized, after a night of warring thoughts, by a new confidence that comes with the dawn, she takes the book, and the rest of her library as well, packs them up, rents a horse and rides out to Carthage where, from a high cliff, she flings them all into the sea.
"Now I am done with books," she says aloud. "I shall live my life and I shall write only of my adventures and myself."
But if she is to seek inspiration in the streets, she has a problem, for though she speaks the language, is Moslem and even looks something like a boy, she is still a European woman in an Arab town. There is only one solution and she seizes upon it: disguise.
It becomes her passion, for it seems the only way she can fully penetrate the forbidden Arab world so dominated by men. Thinking of how she used to dress up for Archivir's photographer, she smiles and shakes her head. It is one thing to cut her hair short and wear men's clothes. It is quite another, she knows, to actually pass herself off as an adolescent boy.
This requires more than the affectation of male qualities. It requires their subtle display, a certain way of walking and standing still, of perching on the steps of a mosque, of holding a cigarette and hoisting a glass of tea.
The first few times she tries it, she fears the consequences if someone should see through her charade. But gradually she realizes she's in a land where she can have things both ways: from those who accept her as a boy she receives the insights she requires, and from those who realize she is not, she receives acceptance, too, on account of the polite Arab convention that one accepts a man on the terms he sets himself.
She begins, then, to do strange things, even to chance discovery by wrestling with boys on the streets. She tries to put herself in situations where bizarre adventures will occur. She rides about on a horse with a cigarette dangling from her lips, hoping to set off a confrontation or a fight. And there does come a moment one day when she wriggles with fear–in conversation at a café with another youth who suddenly suggests they relieve themselves in each other's ass.
When, finally, despite all her provocations, she still has no ideas for stories, and is about to give up looking for experiences in the streets, a strange adventure unexpectedly occurs. Recalling it later, she gives it a name: "The Incident of the Red Boots."
It begins one night when she's resting in her tower, staring at candles she's set up all around. She moves to the windows and peers out at the full moon–African, brilliant, washed at its center by a small drift of clouds. She stares out at the cemetery of Bab Menara, bathed in silvery light, then looks down at the ruins below her house where she sees a young man, wrapped in a white burnoose, sitting still as a statue, silent as a ghost.
And then, as she watches, he begins to sing a mournful Andalusian ballad that reaches her as if it comes from within a cave. When the song is finished, the figure glides softly into the ruins, then disappears behind a broken wall. She waits a long time for him to reappear at its other side, but he does not, seems simply to vanish in the night.
The next morning she asks Khadidja if she heard the young man sing. When she nods, Isabelle asks who he is. The old maid shakes her head.
"No one can know," she says, and then, in a trembling voice, "no one but God, of course."
That evening Isabelle walks to Bab El Gorjani, and after an hour or so of inspecting the love market, she turns into a café to rest.
The place is not familiar to her–there is a certain roughness about the clientele, and a terrible aroma, too, that issues from the armpits of a band of Spanish sailors, mingles with the kif smoke and the smell of burning paraffin, and threatens to make her sick. She feels menace in the café–flickering candles, strange sounds, looming bodies, erotic parade outside–and is about to leave when a boy brings her a glass of tea. She feels better the moment she sips, orders kif, stuffs her pipe, and settles back on the mats to dream.
After a while all menace is diffused. The stink of the Spaniards turns earthy, the candles tint everything with a golden glow. Isabelle begins to slip into a haze when she is seized by a sensation that she's being watched. Slowly she turns to meet the gaze of a thin high-cheeked youth whom she recognizes as the boy who sang beneath her house.
Their eyes lock. Isabelle smiles and then he subtly purses his lips. Someone in the café produces a guitar, and the Spanish sailors begin to sing. A Sicilian woman snaps her fingers. One of the sailors ties knives to the feet of a stool, while another strips off his shirt to make a cape.
Both of them are smiling now. Then the youth toasts her with his glass of tea. She raises her own glass, and, with her other hand, makes an elaborate gesture, a delicate rendition of flowing water, a desert greeting as she imagines it would be made by characters in the Arabian Nights.
The Spaniards now are lunging with the knife-legged stool, playing toro and torero to everyone's delight. Isabelle watches, and when she turns again the young man is no longer there. She dashes to the door, looks up and down the street. A matelot with filthy pompon lumbers by, stops, backtracks, then huddles with a prostitute beneath an arch. Someone in a room above pulls a curtain, and for a moment a shaft of light falls upon the pair. Isabelle peers around–the boy has vanished again.
Wondering then if he really was her singer, or merely a hallucination induced by kif, she wanders back through the alleys, finding her way by familiar sounds, the squeak of a public pump, the tune of a wheel turning before a sewer cascade.
At last she comes to the cemetery at Bab Menara and stumbles out among the moonlit stones. Approaching her house, she hears quiet footsteps, and then the rustling of cloth. She stops, looks around, sees the boy, dressed now in his white burnoose, sweeping like a ghost between two columns, then disappearing again behind another wall.
She is amazed, crouches behind the murette of a broken terrace, and moving cautiously, bent low and sometimes actually crawling on hands and knees, she creeps toward an archway that marks the side of a ruined court.
Here she stops, her breath clouded by heavy scented air. It is the perfume of roses, thick and rich, that presses like a soft cushion against her face.
The young man, seated now on a fallen pillar, raises a flute to his lips and begins to play. Clear, pure, the sounds vibrate in the aromatic air with a sadness that gives her the impression she's a secret sharer, a witness to a private movement. But then, as the song nears its end, she changes her mind. Something tells her the boy knows perfectly well that she's near, and is trying, like a Hindu playing for a cobra, to lure her out.
There is no time for this notion to catch hold. She watches, astonished, as her musician gathers up his burnoose and glides away. And, when he is gone, she walks out of the garden and up to her room, thinking strange thoughts of inscrutable cabals.
"But this is absolutely extraordinary."
Pierre is holding a delicately sugared crescent of pastry between his fingers, twirling it, examining it in the light.
"How amusing! How bizarre! Little sparrow–who would have thought you'd have such an adventure. A naif like you. Such good luck! And there's something about your story that tantalizes me, though I'm not sure I can put my finger on exactly what it is."
They are sitting in a proper café in the French quarter of the city. Boys vending fruit and pastries are circulating about.
"Please try," says Isabelle. "I'm so confused myself."
Pierre bites into his pastry, releasing an aroma of orange-scented almond paste.
"Well, it's the convenience of the coincidence, if you see what I mean."
"I'm not sure I do..."
"The chain of events. It's rather too neat, and that final vanishing act! Ha!"
"How do you explain it?"
"Well, you've made quite a spectacle of yourself in Tunis, my dear–surely you know that your wanderings at night and your formidable disguises have not gone unobserved. There is even some talk, I understand, that you're a Russian spy! Ridiculous, of course, but there you are. What I'm getting at is that you might well be the victim of a complicated hoax, spun perhaps by someone wanting to use you for a fool. And I don't trust that maid. I think she knows more than she's letting on."
"Impossible!" Isabelle shakes her head. "She's devoted to me."
Pierre takes a swipe at a cookie seller who's been pulling at his sleeve. The boy jumps out of the way, sticks out his tongue
"Ugh! These children are verminous! This isn't a good place to talk. We'll meet tonight at the same café. I know the place–one of the most sordid around. Perhaps the boy will reappear, and I can help you analyze his tricks."
She is tense that night as she makes her way into the medina, plunges through the narrow streets, pushing beggars aside. New ships have landed at the Port of Tunis, and the alleys of the love market are packed with sailors on liberty, sweaty, husky men who surge through Bab El Gorjani, eager to release the tension of the seas.
Concentrating on keeping her burnoose clean, avoiding the moist walls and the windows overhead from which, at any moment, she might be drenched by a quickly unloaded basin of slop, she takes a wrong turn and becomes lost.
The more she struggles to find her way, the more confusing she finds the alleys. In panic she darts this way and that, searching for some familiar sight. Finally, exhausted, she stops to rest at the edge of a public well. Catching her breath, she finds her body sticky with sweat and her robe badly stained, caked with donkey dung.
She peers about the tiny square with desperate eyes. It is hopeless, she knows, to continue looking for the café. She must first find the cemetery near her house, then work her way back along the route she took the night before.
As she stumbles about, looking for the cemetery wall, she takes no notice of the other people around. It never occurs to her that a man is treading behind, stalking, pressing against walls, crouching in doorways, tracking her through the maze. It is only when she reaches the Menara gate and pauses to wipe her face that she has a feeling that someone is lurking near.
Suddenly she snaps her head around. A shadowy figure emerges from the cemetery, walks directly toward her with a familiar gliding gait. She feels puzzlement, and then extreme curiosity. The young man looks stunning in his brown and white striped gown, and even before she can see his face she is certain who he is.
"Good evening."
"You know me?" she asks.
"Of course. You're a Russian Moslem, and you devote yourself to literature. Is there anyone in Tunis who does not know that?"
They both laugh then, and though she does not yet understand his game, she has no doubt now that a game is what he plays.
"Strange we should meet here," she says. "Have you been following me for long?"
"Not too long. I saw you get lost, and thought I should help. Then I thought you might be insulted. But I followed you anyway, just in case. The medina is a nightmare, unless one is born in it, and even then... Do you know that often, if you ask a native the way to a certain place, he will send you in an opposite direction to make a joke?"
"What's your name?"
He stares at her, ignores the question. "Have you smoked tonight?"
"Not yet."
"Good. I don't think kif and absinthe mix. Let's go to your house and have a drink."
"My house! You do have a nerve. I don't even know who you are."
He shrugs. "It's not as if we've never met."
"No, but one must be careful here..." She remembers all she's heard of the dangers of the medina, those tales of kidnapping and being sold into slavery, forced penetrations, multiple rapes. There is a side of her that is wary and another that is hungry for life. Already she is savoring the promise of adventure, wondering how to frame the opening words of a short story that will recount this strange meeting in the night.
"How odd of you to want absinthe," she says. "You're the first Tunisian I've met who drinks."
"I didn't say I was Tunisian."
"No, but I assumed..."
"Ah–but you mustn't assume anything. It's much better not to think. One must take one's life as it comes, accept the odd meetings, choose the untraveled roads."
By one hand she leads him inside the house–in her other she carries a torch. When they reach the octagonal room, he grasps the torch away and brandishes it, causing whorls of light and swirls of shadow to dash across the mirrors. He laughs, brandishes the torch faster, spattering embers on the black marble floor. In an infinity of reflections Isabelle sees her hazel eyes enlarge, catch fire, gash the silver glass with streaks of gold.
He pauses, moves close to her, holds the torch between them so it illuminates their faces from beneath. As they stand together, peering into each other's eyes, she feels a warmth rising in her loins.
They climb the spiral stairs, higher, higher, to her round domed room in the turret at the top. Here he extinguishes the flame, throws himself on her cushions and looks about.
"Ah," he says, pointing to her folding writing table covered with her papers, her pens and bottles of ink, "so this is where your devotion takes place. And there..." looking at her tiny prayer rug arranged with four candles, each set at a corner, stuck to the floor with a bead of wax, "...there is where you pray. Yes, I like your house. This is the room of someone interesting–an interesting personage."
"That's very kind of you to say," she says, uncorking a bottle, pouring them each a drink. "But, if you don't mind, I think you should explain yourself."
"My name means nothing. It wouldn't interest you, and besides I prefer to present myself in a different way. I've been observing you closely for some days now, following you about, discovering what you do and where you live. Your disguises caught my interest, and the way you run around in the medina, peering at people with that intent expression on your face."
"I've never noticed you."
"Well, that's the way life is–a person looks at everybody else, and never notices somebody looking at him. But sometimes," and he smiles, "there is an encounter, like a story, perhaps, or like a dream. The two observers meet, by chance or by design, and then something happens between them, and they remember it well although they never see one another again."
"Oh," she asks, amazed, "what do you suppose is going to happen between us?"
"It is written," he says, staring at her with devouring eyes, "it is written that we shall make love."
And at that he brings down his head and presses his lips against her mouth.
Suddenly, she does not quite remember how, they are facing each other, their bodies bare. He grasps her, moves his fingers slowly down her flanks, until she feels moisture begin to run between her thighs. Then she seems to be falling, shedding some part of herself. She senses a wildness in him, something powerful and strong. He is limber, lithe, slim, and his skin, white, pale like lime, is glazed with a delicate moistness that shimmers in the moonlight scattering around the room.
They lie now on cushions, on their sides. She has never felt so light, has closed her eyes, is dreaming of colors, sounds. Suddenly they begin to struggle, and then laugh as she tries to throw him off. But she can't, and when she lies beneath him, pinned, exhausted, panting for breath, playing with her palms and outstretched fingers, smearing the sweat about on his chest, she feels they've enacted a game of mastery and conquest, in which he's proved his strength and so can now take his prize.
Suddenly something warm and moist glazes her below, and she finds herself falling into a pit of wildness and violent passion. He licks her as he might lick a sherbet, in long even strokes toward a single point. She can barely stand it–his strokes are so delicate and fine. He probes on, deeper, deeper, until her whole body begins to thrash.
Then he is upon her again, an expert horseman controlling a new mount. One part of her wants to resist, but another side takes joy in being tamed. His face is radiant as he rides, and she loves his roughness, his limber strength. She has never fought a lover so hard, never sweated in embrace like this. She revels in the push and pull, moving harder, faster, even laughing as they blast.
At last: an explosion. She feels a contracting deep inside, spreads her thighs, arches back and thrusts. He gasps, she cries out, and then they fall. She feels him emptying–the flow goes on and on. She shudders, grasps his body. And then the odor of roses floods full in.
It makes her heady, this rich red aroma, fogs her mind. She rolls upon her back, her head down near his thighs, and gulps in air as if she's run a race. They lie like this, eyes glazed, and then she falls off to sleep.
She awakens occasionally in the night, once when she thinks she hears a flute. Long before dawn she hears the moans of the muezzin calling from the minarets of all the mosques of Tunis. Looking about a few minutes later, she sees her lover on her prayer rug, surrounded by lit candles, bent.
"God is great; There is no God but God; Allah is His name; Mohammed is His prophet."
She falls off and when she wakes again her tongue feels salty, her lips and body battered, bruised. She turns, looks about. The room is flooded with sunshine, and he is gone.
Confused, she inspects her things. The absinthe bottle is corked, the two glasses washed, dried and arranged together on the tray. The papers on her writing desk are arranged, too, the quills and inkpot set at right angles as if ready for a clerk.
She dresses, wanders down the stairs and corners Khadidja preparing coffee on her charcoal stove.
"When did he leave?"
"Hours ago."
"Did he say anything–when he'd be back?"
Khadidja shakes her head. Isabelle looks at her closely, forces her to meet her eyes.
"Tell me, Khadidja–tell me who he is."
The maid shrugs and fidgets.
"I don't know," she says. "He came here several days ago when you were out, asked me about you, and I told him the words you taught me to say. Then he left."
"But you'd seen him before?"
"No, Mademoiselle. He's not from Tunis."
Isabelle nestles herself by the old maid's side.
"In that case, Khadidja, tell me what you think."
Khadidja looks puzzled, as if no one has ever asked her opinion on anything before.
"I feel he is sad, Mademoiselle, and perhaps very rich. He could be a Moroccan. Maybe he is a prince–his words are fine, and so are his clothes. When I heard him sing, I thought he might be a ghost, perhaps the ghost of someone who lived here long ago."
"The music was real."
"Oh, yes, Mademoiselle. But a ghost is real, too."
Khadidja bows her head, and Isabelle understands. The gesture is an acknowledgment that there are things in the world that cannot be explained, things which happen, nevertheless, and to which people must submit.
She spends the morning pacing about her house. When her phantom lover does not return, she goes to the city, hires a horse and gallops out to the ruins of Carthage, followed by Dédale.
She watches the sun begin to set from the Baths of Antoninus, stumbles across the huge capital of a fallen Corinthian column, then looks out to the sea. Sweaty, dirty, smelling of her horse, she tosses aside her robe, and runs, followed by the yelping dog, into the spumy waves.
That night she sits for a long while among the rose bushes in her garden. Then she calls for Khadidja to join her outside.
"He is a man, Khadidja–that I know for sure. And a man cannot disappear. Come–we must find out how he leaves."
Grasping onto torches they explore the ruins. Finally they come to the wall where, they agree, he has disappeared three times. There are bushes behind it, and behind one of these is a niche. Inside they find the white burnoose, and wrapped in it the flute.
The next morning Khadidja comes running into the tower.
"Mademoiselle," she cries, shaking Isabelle awake. "A boy has come from the flutist and has brought you this."
She hands over a package which Isabelle frantically unties. Inside she finds a pair of Spahi riding boots, made of shiny red Moroccan leather, finely waxed.
"Was there a message? Did the boy say anything at all?"
"Just that his master is leaving Tunis, and will not be back again."
Days pass, and the young man sends no further word. His flute and burnoose remain untouched in the niche. Isabelle waits and waits, and the next time the moon is full, she watches the garden the whole night hoping he'll return. But he does not, and after that she takes him at his word.
Through the rest of 1898 she writes little, though she comes to know Tunis well. She becomes adept at assuming a male disguise, and begins to use a man's name: "Si Mahmoud."
Often she leaves the old Turkish house to ride in the countryside for days. Then she sleeps out in the open, in meadows or on the beach, listening to herself, her thoughts, trying to work out the meaning of her life.
Sometimes she does not leave her tower for a week, smoking, drinking, dreaming of herself in situations, her destiny, the real meaning of her disguise. Then she goes out to Bab El Gorjani, finds a lover, takes him to her tower, gratifies herself and dismisses him at dawn.
Sometimes, when she is prowling in the medina, she thinks she sees the donor of the red boots. But always, when she looks closely, the person turns out to be someone else.
In early 1899, she begins to receive disturbing news. Vava is ill, and Augustin (out of the legion, married to Madeleine, "in business" in Marseilles) writes her that the old man does not have long to live. She knows she must return to Geneva, but puts off the trip as long as she can.
Finally, when she receives an urgent cable, she calls at the bank to tell Pierre she will no longer be able to keep the house. She learns that he has not come in to work for several days.
She finally finds his home, a charming villa poised on a hill overlooking the sea. She walks through the garden and finds her friend running about his terrace in a rage. The two Dalmatians are barking ferociously as the Frenchman, forehead covered with sweat, scurries about throwing potted plants off his balcony into the sea.
"They're transferring me to Lyons," he shouts, as rose bushes, potted yuccas, rare bamboos and dahlias are heaved. "My life is over. I shall never survive in that hideous, heartless town. Seems some rumors of my inversion have filtered back. God damnit," he cries, as he holds a huge earthenware pot of violet hydrangeas above his head. "The brutes! The dirty swine!"
He thrusts the pot over the railing, and Isabelle watches as the petals break loose and glide, sprinkling a thousand shards of smashed pottery scattered on the rocks.
Later that night, the two of them drunk on wine, the Dalmatians snoring loudly at his feet, Pierre asks if she ever met up again with the mysterious boy who sent her the boots.
"No," she says. "The story was left unresolved."
"Still you should try and write it up."
"I've tried many times," she says, "but the words never come."
"Ah," Pierre shrugs. "Perhaps it was not such a great experience after all."
"He was the best lover I ever had."
"And the boots...?"
"What about them?"
"You must use them, little sparrow. To march. March and explore."