The Pillars of Hercules

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.