NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (74 page)

Oleanders, and date palms, and a green stagnant swimming pool. Except for the flies and the chirp of birds, not a single sound. Except for the manager and Wahid Number One, not another person. The houses a mile up the beach were empty. Amazingly, I was on the Mediterranean—the emptiest part I had so far seen, emptier than the emptiest part of Albania. There had been people here; they had come and gone. It was like a colony that had gone bust, an experiment that had failed.

All that I worked out on my first day. On my second day I went bird-watching. For all the reasons it had seemed dead and abandoned it was attractive to birds, and amounted to a bird sanctuary the like of which I had not seen anywhere on the Mediterranean shores, many different birds in great profusion. A number of them must have been migrants, since this had to be one of the stopping-off places for birds in their seasonal transit between Africa and northern Europe; others I took to be resident shore birds. The largest was a gray heron, about four feet tall and looking patient and important in its slow-motion strutting at the shoreline. I saw a little egret, and a quail that called out “Wet my lips!” Farther on I spotted a wader that turned out to be a curlew, some plovers, a crested lark, a linnet, a red-rumped swallow. A whitish bird with a black mask and a gray cap and black wing-marks was definitely a great gray shrike. I had no bird book. I sketched them and wrote descriptions of their peculiar marks and later identified them. In this way, by spotting birds, I have given the flattest days of travel some meaning and a sense of discovery.

Later that second day I went to Remla, in the old bus that passed by the Grand. Remla was like a town at the end of the world. Apart from the subsistence fishing there was nothing else. The soil was too poor to support vegetable gardens. There were no lights. The town itself was a huddle of square huts set in a maze of damp passageways.

“What about water?”

“We have fountains.”

The brackish undrinkable water came from wells. On the road, there was a bar, Al Jezira, where the local people congregated. When a motorbike crepitated past the bar, the boys and old men looked up. These were the men who owned the fishing boats. The boats had lateen sails, but the fishing was no good, the men told me. The desolation here surpassed anything I had so far seen. Taking it in my stride I regarded it as a personal achievement. And on the third day, wishing greatly to leave Kerkennah, I told myself I felt much better. I said good-bye to Wahid Number One and left the empty hotel on the deserted beach and took the bus to the ferry landing. There I met Mourad, who was heading to Sfax to visit his wife, who was ill in the hospital there.

My first impression of Kerkennah had been of a great emptiness—hot gravelly earth and dying trees and poor huts. But that appearance of nothingness was misleading. Everything here had a name. Remla was an important town, and without realizing—without knowing it—I had also been to El Attala and Oulad Kacem and Melita. This ferry landing was not just a ferry landing. The three decrepit houses here and the rutted road constituted the settlement of Sidi Yousef.

“What do you think of these islands?”

“This is my home,” Mourad said.

Like most other Tunisians he had an air of uncorrupted courtesy.

And so we sailed back to Sfax on
El Loud III
, and the morning light floated a russet color across the surface of the sea, while lambs bleated on the trucks belowdecks.

In Sfax I tried to solve the problem of traveling from Tunisia to Morocco, without stopping in Algeria. I was given the name of a company in Tunis
which acted as the agent for a Libyan ship, the
Garyounis.
This ship took both passengers and cargo and sailed from Tripoli to Tunis to Casablanca. I did not really want to leave Tunisia. I liked it here, and now I was ready to follow all the advice I had been given, about seeing the desert and the cave dwellers at Matmata, and Tozeur, and the Jews in Djerba, and the nomads, and the camel sellers, and the weavers, and the mystics who fondled scorpions. I called the agent. He said the
Garyounis
would be leaving in a few days for Casablanca.

I picked up my sixty-dollar kilim from Ahmed Khlif in the medina of Sfax, in his narrow shop at the Souk des Etoffes. I took the train back to Tunis.

Tunis was busy with two important events—the Carthage Film Festival and a decisive soccer match, Tunisia against Togo, to determine which country would qualify to play in the Africa Cup. I watched the match on television at the cafe in a backstreet, with about two hundred people, men and boys. They were attentive, there were no outbursts, only murmurs. Tunisia was ahead, one to nothing for most of the match, and towards the end, when Togo kicked the equalizer, not a word was spoken. The only interruption came when the strangled cry of a muezzin gave his call to prayers. A number of people got down, faced east, and prayed—five minutes of this—then back to the match, which ended in a draw.

The Carthage Film Festival was promoted under the slogan “A Hundred Years of Tunisian Cinema!” This seemed to me as unlikely a claim as the centenary of Israeli railways that was being celebrated when I was in Haifa. Never mind. I pretended to be a movie critic and went to two of the movies. In spite of the name of the festival, the movies were shown in Tunis. Most had been made in the Mediterranean; France, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Egypt and Palestine were represented. There were ten films from Turkey. The rest were from places as distant as Brazil and China.

My interest was the Mediterranean. I chose two films about places I had been. But I had not been able to penetrate the countries to this extent.
Couvre Feu
(Curfew), directed by a Palestinian, Raschid Masharaoui, was an insider’s account of simple bravery and defiance against great odds, the stone throwers of the Intifada facing machine guns of the Israeli soldiers.

Throughout the Mediterranean, the most-quoted atrocity of Bosnia
was not a list of the number dead but rather the deliberate shelling by the Serbs of the ancient bridge over the river at Mostar. The destruction of the bridge symbolized everything that was wicked about the war—the stupidity and meanness in the conflict, and all the atavistic cruelty that was still present in the Mediterranean. In
Bosna
(Bosnia) directed by Bernard Henry I saw the bridge destroyed—and much else. This documentary showed the carnage of the war, the pitiful merciless slaughter, the inert corpses by the roadside, the blood and broken glass and decapitations; the mass graves, weeping children, terrified adults and brutalized soldiers—snow, rain and ruin. But no atrocity in the film stirred the audience more than the shells—about a dozen of them altogether—falling on the bridge itself, which had stood for five hundred years, finally falling to pieces into the river. The people in the theater gasped, there were pitiful groans, and when the lights came up there were tears in their eyes.

I went back to my hotel after the film about Bosnia and listened to the news on my shortwave radio. “Serbian forces are advancing on Bihac to reclaim territory they lost to the Bosnians in the past two weeks,” I heard. The casualty figures for the dead and wounded and missing were given, and the news that Sarajevo (which I had seen shelled in the year-old documentary
Bosna
just an hour ago) was being shelled again.

The weather was rainy and cold. I was eager to move on. I returned to Mr. Habib, the agent for the shipping lines.

“We are waiting for notification,” the agent said. He was friendly. He spoke English well. He said that it would be an interesting voyage.

I said, “As it’s a Libyan ship I think I should tell you that I am an American.”

“No problem. I’ll talk to the captain, just in case anyone thinks of doing something stupid to you.”

I kept trying. But three days later Mr. Habib was still waiting for notification, and there was no word about the
Garyounis.

            
T
his lakelike sea with such a tame coast had so habituated me to sunshine and mediocre weather that it did not occur to me to stick my face into the wind today and fathom its force. Surely the whole point about picturesque landscapes was that they were not dangerous? But if I had simply wetted my finger and held it up I would have known a great deal. As the rain and wind increased, I waited for the
Garyounis
to take me to Morocco. I saw only that the wind was lifting the flags higher and straighter than normal. A seasoned Mediterranean sailor would have seen more muscle in that wind than I had, sensed something darker and chillier, a turbulence from the Levant, a dolphin-torn and gong-tormented sea. It was the weather we had been having for a week. Mediterranean weather usually came and went. But this did not go.

One day, Mr. Habib said, “The
Garyounis
was put into dry dock. The Libyans are sending a different ship. It does not take passengers. Therefore, you will have to go some other time.”

I muttered an insincere curse. This was not good weather for the three-day voyage to the far side of Morocco. It was not good for the short voyage to Sicily. There were no other ships to Morocco, and I had vowed not to take any planes. The Marseilles ferry was leaving next week. I decided to make my way by train through Italy to France, where
I might find a ferry to Morocco. It was a very long detour, but what was the hurry?

My travels soon became what an exasperated English person would call a bugger’s muddle. Refusing to leave the ground, I traveled from Sicily to Naples again, to Rome; and north by train to Livorno and Pisa. Crossing from Nice to Corsica I had missed this section of coast, which was dramatic, and dignified by rocky cliffs and blasted by the wind. This was one of the loveliest coastlines in the entire Mediterranean. It was another place that I would be happy to return to. I consoled myself by thinking that on the
Garyounis
I would have missed it—the houses clustered on the great plunging rock cliffs of seaside Cinqueterre, the villas and precipices south of Antignano, the enormous blocks of marble piled at the station of Massa, near Carrara, which had supplied raw material to almost every Italian sculptor.

On the coast, all the way from Chiavari—where I was proud to have relatives—to Portofino and Rapallo and Genoa, the cliffs were too rugged to be vulgarly modernized, too sharply angled to serve as the foundations for condominiums. They had that in common with the cliffs of the Costa Brava in Spain, and the seaside heights of Croatia, and sections of the Turkish coast, and North Cyprus. But wherever the Mediterranean coast was flat it was overbuilt; the low-lying shores had been deemed suitable for hotels and mass tourism, and had been destroyed.

The rarest sight in the Mediterranean was surf, but at Imperia, Porto Maurízio, approaching Ventimiglia, I saw six-foot rollers dumping foam onto the beach. Something unusual was happening in the Mediterranean this week; and still the wind was blowing from the east.

There were six older American couples in the train, bewildered by the weather, burdened by seventeen heavy suitcases. They were from Jackson, Mississippi, and they soon became embroiled with some Spanish students in a fuss about seats. The blustering turned to abuse. It was a blessing that these gentle people were not aware of what was being said to them in Spanish. They were the sort of patient Americans whom I had seen being taken advantage of and overcharged all over the Mediterranean. It did not matter that they said Antibes as though it rhymed with “rib-eyes,” and pressed
their faces to the window and chanted “Monny Carla.” After all, no one else here could have pronounced the grand Mississippi name Yoknapatawpha.

“You’re a yella-dog Democrat,” Billy Mounger said to me, concluding—correctly—that I would vote for a yellow dog before I’d vote for a Republican.

I said, “I think I’d vote for a yellow dog before I’d vote for a Democrat, too.”

He laughed at that. He said, “We’re yella-dog Republicans. We’re probably the most right-wing people you probably ever met.”

“Go on, then, shock me, Billy,” I said.

“I’m chairman of the Phil Gramm for President Committee.”

“That is pretty shocking.” Mr. Gramm claimed to be the most conservative candidate of all the Republicans.

“That ain’t the story,” Mounger said. “One of our guys back there is against Phil Gramm. Says to me, ‘I don’t want no oriental damn woman as the First Lady in the White House.’ ”

Mrs. Gramm, born and raised in Hawaii, was of Korean descent.

“You said it, Billy, he’s one of your guys.”

They all got off at Cannes, rhyming it with “pans,” and I stayed aboard, rattled down the track to Marseilles, where I was told there were no ferries to Morocco. I got into my berth and slept until Port-Bou, the frontier, changed trains at dawn, and at Barcelona got another train to Valencia. Twenty-six hours ago I had left Rome.

Gently rocking around the edge of the Mediterranean once again, in the opposite direction, this Spanish train stopped at the town of Tortosa. It was exactly opposite—that is to say, at the far end of the Mediterranean—from the Syrian town of Tartus, where I had been over a month ago. Tartus had once been given the name of Tortosa by the Crusader Knights. We passed Xilxes, which, printed boldly on its station signboard, had the appearance of an obscure Roman numeral. I stayed only long enough at the lovely station at Valencia to buy some oranges and a ticket through the fields of fruit trees, past a small chapellike building lettered
Urinario
, to Alicante. I would have continued, but I was too late for the Málaga train, so I slept there and went to Málaga the next day.