There have been two deserts in my life. Neither one was mine.
The first was my mother’s.
As I grew up during the Depression and my father was an alcoholic and often unemployed, we moved frequently. Yet no matter where we lived, there was one constant in our surroundings: two photographs on the wall. In the first photo, five women in nurses’ uniform, each seated on a camel, face the camera. My mother is one of the five. Beside them, on a camel, is an older man in military uniform. Just behind them and to the left is the Sphinx and beyond, at some distance in the sand, are two pyramids, one small, one large. In front of the camels, two Arabs in white robes stare straight ahead.
In the second photo, my mother in her white nurses’ uniform is seated on a camel. Beside her, on a camel, is the older man in military uniform. They are facing to the left, not directly forward. A single Arab in white stands in front of them. In the left-near background, the Sphinx looms larger than in the first photo. Two pyramids, one small, one larger, appear at some unclear distance in the sand.
I never asked my mother about the photos, as I learned early on not to ask her about her past. Yet what seems very odd to me now is that I never even wondered about the photos, did not even wonder why my mother was in the Sahara. Only when I was an adult did I discover that she was a member of the American Zionist Medical Unit of Hadassah, sent to Palestine in 1918, before the end of World War I, to aid victims of war or illness, whether Jews or Muslims or Christians.
Much later, the year before she died, I was visiting her in the motel in Los Angeles where she lived year round, and she brought the two photos over to me and asked, “Do you want these?” I said I would be very glad to have them. As I gazed at them, I added that I could not tell how far the figures on the camels were from the Sphinx and the two pyramids. She said, “They are far in the distance.”
Those photos now hang on my wall. Whenever I look at them, I still cannot make sense of the distances in the desert. I can, however, make out the expression on my mother’s face: alert and expectant with hope.
The second desert was that of the writer Paul Bowles.
I first met Paul in 1977 when I went to Tangier to interview him for a biography of his late wife, the writer Jane Bowles. During that extended visit, he was very forthcoming about her. He spoke easily about Jane’s life and her work and, not quite so easily, about their marriage. She was a lesbian, something she admitted freely; he was a homosexual, although he did not want that said directly, only implied.
In 1993, some years after the publication of the biography of Jane, I returned to Tangier to interview Paul for a book I was writing about him. It was not to be a usual biography, but rather a portrait of him and of my interaction with him. As our conversations progressed, the more I inquired about him, the more evasive he became. I was finally forced to realize that, though he wanted me to write a book about him, he did not want me to know him. And indeed that book, You Are Not I, is a record of his admissions and of his evasions.
Now that I am thinking about deserts, I have read once again his 1953 essay “The Baptism of Solitude.” It is about the experience of traveling alone in the Sahara. The first thing you notice, he writes, is the absolute stillness, as if it were a conscious force. After detailing the many hardships he faced traveling in the desert, he ends by asking, Why go there? His answer is “When a man has been there and undergone the baptism of solitude he can’t help himself. Once he has been under the spell of the vast, luminous silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surroundings can provide the extremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute.”
Yet in his works of imagination, in his fiction, the desert, the Sahara, is the setting for horrifying events that destroy his characters. In his most famous book, The Sheltering Sky, a husband and wife closely based upon Paul and Jane go into the Sahara, and there they betray each other. He dies of typhoid. She leaves him and goes off alone into the desert, where she is picked up by a group of traveling Arabs. Each night one of the men rapes her. She comes to love being raped. At the end she runs off into the desert, having become mad.
In Paul’s story “A Distant Episode,” a professor of languages travels in the desert to study different tongues. He ends up being tortured by the natives, having his tongue cut out, and running out into the desert and becoming mad. In his story “The Delicate Prey,” again set in the desert, an Arab robs and rapes and kills a young Arab of another tribe. In retaliation the members of the other tribe bury him in the sand, with only his head open to the elements and the desert sun.
How, if at all, did Paul reconcile his two Saharas?
I never asked him.
Millicent Dillon is a novelist, short story writer, and biographer. Her novels include Harry Gold; her biographies include A Little Original Sin.
