THE SPY

I have just finished reading "The Spy," a novel by Paulo Coelho. He calls it a novel even though it is based as accurately as possible on the true story of Mata Hari...

... the exotic dancer who was executed by firing squad toward the end of the First World War on trumped-up charges, and for reasons that had as much to do with the PR needs of French officialdom as with her innocence or guilt. As Coelho has her lawyer write, in a final letter addressed to her, she was "victim for the sin of being a woman, for the greater sin of being free, for the immense sin of stripping in public, for the dangerous sin of getting involved with men whose reputations needed to be maintained at any cost."

Coelho's novel opens with a heart-rending description of Mata Hari's execution...

... which she faced apparently with calm, if not a kind of bored indifference. From there he takes us back to her final jail cell, where she writes the letter to her lawyer that takes up the better part of this short novel. Her lawyer's lengthy, self-exculpatory and in part apologetic response to her, along with a historical note, completes the story.

Mata Hari tells her story with the indignation and wrath of a woman victimized first as a young girl by cruel and callous sexual abuse and later, in the colonial far east, by an aloof, abusive and unloving husband. Forced to abandon her children, she returned to Europe determined to earn a reputation for herself--which she amply does, in the Paris of the gay nineties and the period of art nouveau, by scandal. She becomes notorious both for her exotic dancing, in which she exuberantly sheds all seven of those proverbial veils, and for her uninhibited promiscuity with men of wealth, position and power.

Her career as a performer and courtesan does not survive the start of the "war to end all wars". Her name sullied, her body losing its appeal, she becomes increasingly desperate for the security that cynical male attention seemed to bring her; signs up to spy for the Germans and ends up back in Paris, where she volunteers immediately to French authorities as a counter spy.

By this time, though, she's in deep trouble. Those men of wealth, position and power don't want to to know, and don't want it known they ever knew her. She becomes a pawn in the political and military power game and a useful distraction from catastrophic events on the front lines. Accused of spying, she has no means to defend herself and no allies to help her.

In Coelho's telling, Mata Hari's story is the saga of an exploited woman who dares to assert her own independence in the only way she knows how--the only way, really, that is open to her: with her body. Her downfall is the work of the devious and cowardly men who use her shamelessly and discard her pitilessly when she becomes a burden or embarrassment. His story suggests she should be as much of a hero in the long, slow tale of women's liberation as her contemporaries who chained themselves to the fences of official male power and threw themselves in front of buses. Aggressive, demanding, determined to be seen and heard, unashamed of her sexuality and refusing to be tamed in the expression of her emotions, she was a threat to very fundaments of the patriarchal social order of her day.

And for all this, a thorn in the flesh of society, she was quietly eliminated.