The Pillars of Hercules

It was right for me. There was no traffic. There was a sea breeze. The hotels cost almost nothing. There were no tourists here, because the town supposedly lacked color. Yet people lived here, and they worked and prospered. They traded in salt and fish and phosphate and sulfur, as well as in the products of the poorer inland places—spices and handmade goods from Kairouan and Gafsa. On this cool damp night there was a crowd of milling men along the main boulevard of Sfax that resembled the passeggiata of Sicily and Calabria. I felt that I was outside the mainstream, on the sea. I liked the briny odor of the breeze, and the great clammy blankness at the shore that was like a black wall at night.

I did not feel well. I went through the medina the next day and had to ask permission of a carpet seller to sit in his shop for a while—I was dizzy and weak. While I sat and perspired, feeling ghastly, he unwrapped a Berber kilim. It was striped, vividly colored, handwoven of wool.

“I’ll wrap it for you, so you can carry it.”

“I am too ill to carry anything.”

But three days later I went back and bought it, for sixty dollars. It was ten feet by six feet. In a year and a half of travel on the shores of the Mediterranean, it was the only thing I bought; indeed, it was the only thing I saw that I wished to buy.

In those three days I vowed to get better. I knew I had a bad cold and some sort of low-grade infection in my lungs. I took aspirin. I tried to clear my lungs by eating spicy food, the soup they called h’lalem and couscous with hot pepper sauce and glasses of Tunisian mint tea.

Reading about the anniversary of Nietzsche’s birth, I had a context for examining my own bad state of health at the moment. I had become interested in him since reading about him in the Oliver Sacks book. “Fritz,” as his sister called him, had been born 150 years ago, in Rocken, Germany. He wrote Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spake Zarathustra. He loved music. Somewhat unfairly, he had been taken up by the Nazis, who admired his saying, “What fails to kill me makes me stronger.” He went insane in 1889 and returned home to live with his mother and sister. He spent his last seven years as a vegetable, and died in 1900 at the age of fifty-six. But some years before the end, there were signs of eccentricity.

“He was fond of playing the piano, splashing in the bathtub and occasionally carefully removing his shoes and urinating in them.”

This strange case history had the effect of making me feel that I was perhaps not so ill after all.

All my life I have hated being asked to explain what I am doing. I hate the question because I very seldom know the answer.

It was Sunday in Sfax, and everything was closed. After three days supine in the seedy grandeur of the Hotel des Oliviers I was feeling slightly better, though I was far from well. I woke thinking, What about Djerba? It was a whole day’s traveling south by train. Gabès was halfway. What about Gabès? But I hesitated when I realized there was a ferry this morning to Kerkennah. The two islands of Kerkennah were about fifteen miles offshore from Sfax. It took an hour and a half. It cost fifty cents. The ferry was leaving shortly and it was called El Loud III. All these details, especially the name, helped me make up my mind to go to Kerkennah.

I grabbed my bag and hurried to the ferry port. How would I have explained this apparently indecisive behavior to a traveling companion, who would ask the reasonable question, Where are we going? I would have to answer, I’m not sure.

Traveling in a general direction, without a specific destination, it was necessary for me to be alone. It wasn’t fair to expect anyone to put up with that much indecision or suspense. I was not sure why I had come to Sfax, until I got there. This may be another difference between a traveler and a tourist: the traveler is vague, the tourist is certain. But I was vindicated in my ignorant decision. My two-day trip to Kerkennah was pleasant.

There were about three hundred passengers on the ferry, all Tunisian, many of them returning to their island home for the day, some of them picnickers, a few going along for the ride. Being Tunisians, they were all sorts, but this was also a feature of the Mediterranean coast. There was no place that I had seen on my entire trip that was one thing—a single people, the same face, the same religion, all dressed the same. One of the pleasures of the Mediterranean was the way in which the complex cultures had intermingled, though what was true of the shoreline was not the case in the inland villages.