The Pillars of Hercules

The passengers were all sorts, old, young, light, dark, orthodox, liberated, some in shawls, some in fezzes, others in baseball hats. One of the youths had a saxophone, and with a drummer he improvised Arabic melodies on the open deck. It was a good-humored and friendly crowd. They treated each other with courtesy, didn’t push, and were easygoing, high-spirited and respectful. One man had a sprig of jasmine stuck over his ear, like a Tahitian wearing a blossom.

There were cormorants diving into flat sea and there were distant fishing boats, but there was nothing else for almost an hour. It was not the distance of the island that made them hard to see; it was that they were low-lying, the highest one just a few feet above sea level. They came into view as smudges on the sea, and then looking like atolls, Gharbi first and then the edges of its sister island, Chergui.

Some old buses and taxis were parked in the dust at the ferry landing, waiting for passengers. The drivers sat on stacks of palm fronds that had been trimmed of their stalks. These palms were the only vegetation on the islands.

“Where do you want to go?” a driver asked me in French.

“To the town.”

“No town. Only villages.”

“Is there a hotel?”

“Get in.”

Where are we going, Paulie?

There were five of us in the taxi. Kerkennah was too small to show as anything but a dot on my map and so I really had no idea where we might be going, or what places existed on the islands. The only landscape I could see was perfectly flat and arid, stony yellow ground and dying palms with ratty fronds.

“Where are you going?” I asked the other passengers. “Remla.”

“Is that a nice place?”

“Very nice,” they said.

“I want to go to Remla,” I said to the driver.

“No,” he said.

“Oh, all right,” I said.

We passed two or three settlements of small square houses, some with flat roofs and some with domes, and scattered shops and chickens in the road. It was the simplest place I had seen so far on the Mediterranean coastline. The land was flat, the trees were few, the houses were small. It was not run-down, just silent, empty, lonely, one-dimensional. There were no power lines, apparently no lights.

What I took to be a village was a cemetery, with hutlike tombs, each one with the face of the deceased painted on the side, the size of a political poster, the same empty gaze.

We came to a crossroads, took a left, a right, a left. There were no signs. We were on gravel roads now. Then there were no villages at all, just those battered, withered palm trees. There were no people. We drove on for half an hour and then came to a sign, Grand Hotel, with an arrow. A high wall, a gate, a plaster building, a man.

“Welcome.” It was a Tunisian in his pajamas, speaking English.

There was no one else around. After the taxi left there was silence, like dust sifting down, a bird’s chirp that was so slight I realized that only this tremendous silence made it possible for me to hear it.

“Very quiet today.”

“No people.”

“Are they coming?”

“Later.”

“Today?”

He frowned. “No. Two months, three months from now.”

“But I am here.”

“You are welcome, sir.”

This was not the first time on my trip that I had achieved the distinction of being the only guest in a hotel, but it was the first time I had managed it in a hotel this large.

“This way, sir.”

I was taken through the hotel to the dining room and shown to table 23. I counted the other tables: there were seventy-two.

“I am Wahid Number One,” the waiter said, bowing.

“From Kerkennah?”

“From Kerkennah, sir. Is nice.”

In this utterly empty place I felt optimistic. I thought: I’ll stay here until I get well.

Wahid Number One served me brik, which was thin fried pastry, with canned tuna fish and a fried egg. That night’s dinner was turkey. It was a pressed slab of old turkey parts, with gravy. The next day it was brik again, and spaghetti, and French fries made of bad fat. They were disgusting, ocherous meals, with cold wobbly desserts.

“Is there another hotel nearby?” I asked Wahid Number One.

“Farhat Hotel.”

“Nice place?”

He shrugged. “Farhat Hotel they come French.”

“And Grand Hotel?”

“They come English.”

“In a few months,” I said.

“Two or three months,” he said.

Instead of retreating I decided to find out as much as I could about Kerkennah—give it a few days and then move on. In the meantime, two days here in this empty place was an experience unlike any I’d had on my trip. The ocean was gray in this threatening weather, the sandy narrow foreshore of the island was stacked with weed. I walked for several miles. Much of the shore was used as a dump—rusty cans, old cars, plastic bottles, trash. There were some houses, there was an old ruin. There were some date palms on the flat desertlike land. They had short orange fronds with clusters of dates. The dates had fallen and rotted, and so there were masses of buzzing flies.