NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (72 page)

Walking through the small pleasant city of Tunis to shake off the effects of my sedentary trip here I was reminded by the street names of its events. There was Rue 18 Janvier 1952 and Boulevard du 9 Avril 1938, and Rue du 2 Mars 1934, and Place 3 Aout 1903, and many others. I noticed that the sky was full of birds. They were like dark, madly twittering sparrows or swifts, and they swooped and roosted in enormous noisy flocks, blackening the sky and wheeling back and forth. As they rose in the air, they shat in tremendous squirts that splashed on virtually everyone strolling on the Avenue Habib Bourguiba. These pestiferous birds are called
asfour zitoun
by the Tunisians—“olive birds,” for their habit of snatching the olives from the great coastal crop.

I felt pleased with myself: I had arrived slowly by sea; I had discovered there was a railway network throughout the country; I was now resident in a thirty-five-dollar hotel. I liked the food, Tunis was the right size—not much more than a big town—and the people were approachable. Already I had met the Taoufiks—Mr. was Tunisian, Mrs. was from Birmingham—and their sixteen-year-old son. After seventeen years in the country none of them had been to either Algeria or Libya. “And nothing has changed here in seventeen years!”

Another man, Ahmed, had lived and worked in New York City for three years, at Forty-second between Seventh and Eighth. “I was working in a shop selling smoking things, like water pipes and souvenirs.” He had a Green Card. So why was he back in Tunisia? He hated New York City: “Too many people and too dangerous, because,” he said pointedly, “of black people and white people.” I met Mr. Salah, who had gone to college in Baltimore. “I was there, like, four and a half years, studying business management. It was a neat place.” Most of all, he missed basketball—the heroes, Jordan, Ewing, Rodman, O’Neal.

Tunisians seemed to me hospitable and pleasant, especially Ali, whom I bumped into at the railway station. He asked in Italian, “You’re Italian?”

This was another country, like Malta and Albania and Croatia, within range of Italian TV broadcasts, so that many of the people who owned televisions also spoke Italian. But Ali had also worked in Rome for a while. Then he came back, got married and now had three lovely children—he showed me their pictures.

We were walking along, chatting in Italian. He spoke it well. This was not some tout who wanted an English lesson, or a loan, or to offer me a deal on some local merchandise. He spoke about his children—three girls. He had an enlightened view of women and was eager, he said, for his girls to have the same chance as a boy in Tunisia.

He looked up and pointed ahead, beyond the people crowding the sidewalk. “The Medina is at the end of this street,” he said. “Incredible place—you’ve seen it?”

“I just arrived yesterday.”

“You’re in luck. There’s a big event this morning—the Berber carpet sellers’ market. You’ve heard of the Berbers? I’m a Berber myself, from a village near Gafsa.”

He unfolded my map of Tunisia and showed me the exact location of his village. I really ought to visit him there sometime, he said. He would introduce me to the elders and take me around. Berber culture was real Tunisian culture, and carpets were their masterpieces.

“But we haven’t got much time at the moment. This Berber market closes at noon and look—it’s eleven-fifteen. Berber carpets are lovely—but then I am biased, being a Berber myself. Right through here.”

It was a classic entrance to a bazaar, narrow, with fabrics hung up and fluttering like flags, and all sort of brassware and carvings stacked near it, and a beckoning fragrance of perfume and spices. Entering it reminded me of the souk at Aleppo—once I stepped out of the city heat and dust I was in the humid shadows of this labyrinth, in the passageways, where men in gowns sipped coffee at the entrance to their tiny shops.

Ali moved so fast through the crowd I had to hurry to keep up with him, dodging some people and squeezing past others. Fortunately, he was a tall fellow, and so much bigger than the other Tunisians that I could see him above the crowd of shoppers.

“I don’t want you to be late,” he called out, glancing back and moving a bit faster. “The Berbers will all be going home with their carpets pretty soon.”

We passed a shop selling books and papers.

“I need to buy a notebook.”

“Later,” he said, stepping up his pace. “When you have time to look calmly you will be able to buy many good things.”

He used a nice Italian phrase,
tante belle cose
, and I was reassured once again. He seemed the most sensible and helpful person I had met on my whole trip—not just in Tunisia but in the Mediterranean; he had the right priorities, he was the perfect host.

Fifteen minutes later, we were in the middle of the souk and I was utterly lost. Following Ali, I had not paid any attention to landmarks, and so I stayed as close to him as I could. We passed carpenters and barbershops and shops selling bolts of silk and finished clothes, bakeries, jewelers, tourist curio shops selling dead scorpions (“for good luck”), amber beads, crimson coral made into beads and necklaces, old muskets, brassware, inlaid boxes, carved boars’ tusks and more.

Seeing these robes, the Benedictine monk garb of the Berber, covering body and head, like a monk’s cowl, I contemplated going into Algeria as Sir Richard Burton would have done—as he did do in Mecca, totally in disguise, in the forbidden place that was dangerous to any unbeliever. But Burton spoke fluent Arabic, and he would have learned Maghrebi Arabic for such a venture, and his
cojónes
were of a legendary size.

“We’re almost there,” Ali said, turning a corner.

Just around the corner was a colorful shop, larger than any other, and stacked with carpets. Ali greeted the smiling man in the doorway.

“You’re just in time,” the man said in Italian—he spoke it even better than Ali. “Everything closes in twenty minutes.”

We hurried upstairs and I was offered a soft drink. I said no thanks, since I knew that accepting any sort of gift in a carpet shop would obligate me—a cup of coffee, a drink, food; anything.

“Where are the Berbers?” I asked. Somehow I had been expecting a compound where scores of men in robes were muttering encouragement for me to examine their carpets.

“There—there.”

He motioned me past a bed. Very large, with inset mirrors and ivory carvings, it stood against one wall, like a museum piece.

“The king’s bed. Why is it so large?” the manager said. “He slept there with his four wives. But when Tunisia became modern and got rid of kings they also got rid of polygamy, and we bought the bed. As you can see, it is very beautiful and very expensive. Fine work.”

“Please sit down,” Ali said. “Time is short.”

But it was only noon and we were in a carpet shop. I said, “I don’t understand why time is short.”

“The promotion—the carpet sale,” the manager said.

“What promotion? I thought the Berbers were going home with their carpets. Where are the Berbers?”

“Please look,” the manager said, growing irritable.

Small nimble men began unrolling carpets—lots of them, and the carpets were tumbling at my feet, being flapped apart and stacked. They were all colors, all patterns and sizes, rugs, prayer mats, kilims, runners. The manager was narrating this business, saying that this carpet was red because it was a marriage carpet, and this one was blue because blue was a favorite Berber color, and this was a kilim that was the same on both sides—see? And this carpet had a design to ward off the evil eye.

“Is there an evil eye in Tunisia?” I asked.

“There is evil eye in the whole world,” the manager said. “Which one do you like?”

“The red one, the blue one, this one—they’re all nice.”

“This is five hundred dollars. This is nine hundred dollars. This is—”

“Never mind.”

“You want to buy this one?”

“No.”

“Four hundred—what do you say? Go on, make me an offer.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“You can’t think. You have to buy it by noon. When the promotion ends.”

Now, much too late, I realized that I had been hustled; so I resisted.

“I’ll come back.”

“You can’t come back. What do you offer me?”

“Nothing right now. Maybe tomorrow.”

“No! No!” he said. “There is no time. Just say a number!”

Just say a number?
Hearing that, I laughed. The manager got angry and muttered harshly to Ali, who whispered back at him, and they began bickering in whispers, and every so often the manager howled, “Not much time!”

I thought: I am a fool. I am sitting here with one man howling and the other whispering and a third and fourth still unrolling carpets. I got up to leave. I said I would come back.

“You can’t come back—you can never come back!” the manager screamed at me, still in Italian—
Mai, mai!
Never, never!

Back in the twisting passageways of the bazaar, Ali—who was somewhat subdued—said, “Let’s say hello to my father,” and stopped in front of a perfume shop. There was no one in the shop. Ali snatched a vial of perfume.

“Jasmine! Special to the Berbers!”

“Not today.” I wondered whether he would persist.

“This is a present. No money! Take it!”

“I am afraid it will spill in my pocket,” I said, and defied him to answer this.

He shrugged and turned as the perfume seller, who was not old enough to be Ali’s father, entered the shop and exchanged greetings with him.

I walked away, but Ali was next to me. He said, “So, how much will you give me for taking you around?”

“I don’t want to be taken around.”

“I just took you around. What about baksheesh for everything that I showed you.”

“For everything that you showed me?” I said, thinking: Here is another pair of mammoth
cojónes.
“Nothing.”

He left, grumbling, yet I did not dislike him really. I hated myself for falling for the line
We don’t have much time!
But it was a brilliant gimmick.
In the souk, in the street, at the station, the faces of Tunis were the faces of the Mediterranean in a much more remarkable way than anywhere else I had been on the shores of this sea. The Arab face predominated, but Arab faces ranged from pasty, freckled and pale-eyed to utterly dusty, almost Dravidian masks. The faces of Tunis could have been Italian, Spanish, Greek, Sardinian, Turkish, Albanian—and probably were. In Tunisia, Europe and all its colors met North Africa and all its colors, and one blended into the other. With its great ports, and its easy proximity to Italy—the country had always been a crossroads. When the Vandals conquered Spain and North Africa they sacked Carthage, reentered Europe by hopping over from here to Italy. It was an easy distance, for which Sicily was the stepping-stone.

Racially it was not monochromatic, and the clothes too were still reminiscent of orientalist paintings, the shrouded women, the veils, the shawls, as well as pale pouty girls in blue jeans and big bossy women in sunglasses and frilly dresses.

I went by train to Al Marsa via Goulette, Salambo, Carthage (Hannibal), Carthage (Amilcar), Sidi Bou Said and the Corniche. At Sidi Bou, a small town on a hill overlooking the sea, all whitewashed houses, I hiked around. The houses had blue shutters, blue doors, blue porches: the blue was supposed to keep the mosquitoes away. Down by the sea, the shore was littered—as bad here as it had been a thousand miles away on the Syrian beaches. In the thin woods beside the shore there were Tunisian lovers—couples smooching in the oleanders—and a profusion of stray cats.

There seemed to be nothing else at Sidi Bou. The vestiges of Carthage’s memory were remote conquests of the Phoenicians, Hannibal’s battles, the Punic Wars, St. Augustine (he had been a student there), and the Barbary pirates. The traditional date of the founding of Carthage was 814
B.C.
But there were more recent memories. Robert Fox writes how, after the mysterious deaths of three Israelis in Cyprus, in 1985, Israeli planes appeared in the skies on this part of the coast and bombed the PLO compound, intending to kill Yassir Arafat. Seventy-two people died in this Israeli bombing. Arafat was not one of them. Fox goes on, “Two years later Israeli raiding parties landed from the sea at the village of Sidi Bou Said, the Saint Tropez of Tunis, to murder a senior PLO figure, Khalil al-Wazir, whose
nom de guerre
was Abu Jihad, in his bungalow; the Israeli government
believed, erroneously, that he had organised the Intifada in the Occupied Territories.”

Black, yellow streaked clouds loomed over Carthage (Baedeker in 1911: “… the beauty of the scenery and the wealth of historical memories amply compensate for the deplorable state of the ruins”); soon the rain began. It was as strong as monsoon rain, and as sudden and as overwhelming, casting a twilight shadow over the coast and hammering straight down with a powerful sound, the water beating on the earth, smacking the street. At once the gutters were awash. Then the streets were flooded. The train halted, the traffic was snarled.
Look, it’s like a dam!
a woman cried out in French, at the sight of a field. There was a kind of hysteria, as the rain came down. People were gabbling, they were confused. The city began to drown, and then it simply failed.

It was a turning point, though I did not realize it until quite a while afterwards. From this moment onward in my trip the weather deteriorated. It went bad. It thwarted me. It frustrated my plans. Short periods of sunshine were separated by long spells of low cloud and wind, until the wind became a spectacular Levanter. The low pressure and all the damp rooms and shut windows and stale air also seemed to make me ill. Within a few days I had a severe cold—a sore throat, stomach trouble, achy muscles.

Deciding to leave Tunis, I solicited advice from Tunisians.
See the desert!
they said.
See the cave dwellers at Matmata! Go to Tozeur and Djerba. There are Jews in Djerba! See the nomads and the camel sellers and the weavers! See the mystics who fondle scorpions! Go to Sousse—tourists love Sousse! Whatever you do, don’t go to Sfax. There is nothing in Sfax.