by Gates, Moses
Now, I don’t think I’m actually going to do it. I’m mostly just poking around, researching, finding a couple of accounts of recent successes on the Internet. One guy is nice enough to send over a sort of how-to guide when I ask him for pointers. I still don’t think this is going to be relevant to me, but I decide that this is valuable information, so I send it around to the people I know who might be up for this sort of thing. Then I get the following from QX:
Hey mate.
I was just wanting to follow up on El Pirámide—I’d love to do it with you.
Oh, no. I’ve been called out. And I realize I’ve subconsciously done what I’ve always done: put myself in a position where I can’t, in good conscious, say no. I get a feeling. The same feeling I had right before climbing the Manhattan Bridge years ago. The feeling that says this isn’t me casually bullshitting myself, that this is actually something that’s going to happen. I’m excited. I’m also filled with dread. After some hemming and hawing, I accept my fate. I write QX.
“Fuck it. Let’s do it.”
I get back the following:
Ding ding ding. Let me know the dates, I’m a-comin’ down. I have a French girl that’s willing to come up and get caught with us, if that works for you as well. She might work as a diversion for the guards. Thoughts?
“Who’s the French chick? Will she be OK?” I reply.
The French chick, I think she’ll be fine. She just came and did a climb with me, and then slept in a squat afterwards. So I guess it’d be fine.
“I guess it’d be fine” is not what I really want to hear for our plans to illegally infiltrate and summit the most famous landmark on a continent. But I let it go.
Rome, November 2010
I get my brother, Micah, to come along for the Italian and Tunisian legs of this trip. We plan to start by flying into Rome. From there we’ll make our way down through Italy and then across to Tunisia. Then Micah will head home and I’ll fly to Cairo.
We spend our one night in Rome at the Roma Sotterranea society with two of its members, Luca and Adriano. They had e-mailed Steve after finding his online photos of the strange offshoot in the sewer system that we had found during our trip in search of the Cloaca Maxima. They wanted to talk with us further.
“So we didn’t know about this area at all,” Adriano tells me. “We haven’t been there, the archaeologists haven’t been there. Just the sewer workers.”
He continues: “What happened was, in the nineteenth century, the tunnel where you were, called the Basso Sinistro, was constructed parallel to the Tiber River as an interceptor drain. It ended up cutting through a lot of the old sewers and other tunnels underneath the city. It also cut off the Cloaca Maxima. You actually passed right above it, the Cloaca intersects at the bottom of the Basso, below the water level. What you found was another one of the spaces cut off by the Basso.”
“Well, what do you think it is?” I ask. “And when do you think it was built?”
“Oh, what you found is definitely from ancient Rome,” Adriano replies.
I’m a little stunned. But I really shouldn’t be. In antiquity, Rome was a city of almost a million people. But after its decline, it didn’t come close to approaching this population again until the early twentieth century. As a result, almost nothing new was built in the city in the intervening period, so any ruins are almost certainly going to be at least 1,500 years old. In fact, much of what was constructed during the Renaissance, when the city started to grow again, was recycled from the materials of the old imperial capital. Rome, at its low point during the Middle Ages, had about 5 percent of its peak population from the imperial era. Rome was the Detroit of the Middle Ages—but even that’s inaccurate. It was Detroit cubed. In order to be as abandoned as Rome was at its nadir, Detroit would have to experience, proportionally, another population decline equal to the one it’s already experienced—and then another one after that. Still, this doesn’t stop me from feeling a bit like Indiana Jones. We’ve legitimately discovered part of ancient Rome. How many people can say that?
Luca has been silent most of the time. He doesn’t speak much English, occasionally commenting in Italian, which Adriano translates. As we’re leaving, though, he addresses me directly.
“You know, is not safe to do sewer,” he says with a heavy accent. “We go with suits and . . .” He struggles to find the words. “You know just go, just go like this”—he motions to me, indicating my street clothes and lack of any protective gear—“just go like this in sewer is not safe, is . . .” He struggles again, mutters something in Italian, and gives up. “Next time, next time you go with us.”
I think about this as we say our good-byes. The last time we were in town we were looking at a 500 euro charge to tag along—a charge I suspect was plucked out of the air to provide an easy way to say no without having to say no. But now that we had demonstrated our worth, things were different. It justified everywhere illegal I’d ever gone, every time I’d ignored the fence, or the sign, or the storm drain retaining wall. The best way to be taken seriously at something is to just do it. To ignore the hoops—legal, social, financial, or otherwise—that you’re told you’re supposed to jump through to someday maybe get a foot in the door. The key is never negotiating these endless hoops, trying to work your way up a ladder to nowhere. It’s finding the person who can say yes—the person who can tell everyone who’s been leading you in circles about liability insurance and permission from municipal agencies to just make it happen—and approaching this person as a peer. And it’s a lot easier to be accepted as a peer if you’ve done something to break the chicken-or-egg “How do you get a job without experience? How do you get experience without a job?” cycle—something like, in this particular case, jacking open a floodgate, making your way down a sewer channel, and seeing what’s there. There wouldn’t be a “next time with us” if there hadn’t been a first time without them. I remember the old adage: “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission.” As it turns out, a lot of times you don’t have to ask for either one.
THIRTY-TWO
Tunis, November 2010
From Rome, Micah and I head down through Naples to Sicily, and from there prepare to take the ferry to Tunisia. With a couple hours left until our departure, I check into an Internet café and find the following from QX:
Hey mate.
Am in Nepal—will write more when I get back. Will probably be coming alone, or not at all if my soon-to-be-ex doesn’t take the news well . . .
This makes me nervous. My entire process is predicated on putting myself in the right place at the right time with the right people—people who I know will get me over the final barrier in a timely manner. When the moment comes, I know I don’t have to go through the torturous process of gathering my nerve and pushing myself beyond my mental limits, like I did that first time I grabbed my right leg and shoved it past the red metal sign at the end of the subway platform. Instead, I can just relax and go with the flow I’ve created.
I can control two of the three variables, right time and right place, with a degree of certainty, more or less. But the third one, right people, is tougher. If QX bails on me, it’ll mess everything up. I write back. “Actually, I might change my plans around a bit (and will definitely bottle out of the climb) if you’re not coming, so try to let me know the plan in a few days if you can.” I send this with equal doses of regret and relief. Right away, I get the following back:
Hey mate.
I am definitely coming—no worries about that. The part about me not was more a joke if the French chick kills me. I’ll be there with bells on.
I immediately get up and take the opportunity to discharge my bowels before getting on the boat.
• • •
The first thing I notice upon arriving in Tunisia is the huge visage of the President for Life, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, staring at me. It stares at me pretty much everywhere I go. It
stares at me when I arrive at the airport, it stares at me as the cab drives us into town, it stares at me in the Internet café next to the “IL EST STRICTEMENT INTERDIT DE CONSULTER LES SITES PROHIBES” sign. (Flickr and YouTube are banned. Google and Facebook make the cut.)
I’m a tourist, don’t speak the language (Arabic), don’t even speak the second language (French), so I get only glimpses of what this Orwellian world actually means to regular people. Toward the end of the trip, after a couple weeks on the standard tourist circuit, we return to Tunis. I head to the medina, the oldest part of the city, where most of the souks are, to shop for a soccer jersey. There are two main soccer teams in Tunis, Espérance Sportive de Tunis and Club Africain.
PRESIDENT BEN ALI.
Sports loyalties in many places abroad differ from sports loyalties in the United States, where team preferences are almost always formed on the simple basis of geography: you live in Detroit, you’re a Tigers fan; you live in St. Louis, you’re a Cardinals fan; you live in Brooklyn, you pine away for the Dodgers and make do with the Mets. In Europe and South America you have middle-class and working-class loyalties, teams with nationalist or even fascist bents and ones with communist sympathies. I imagine the same might be true of Tunisia, so I want to make sure I’m not mistakenly getting the jersey of a team supported by the local phalange.
“So which kind of people like which team?” I ask the vendor, who speaks OK English.
“In Tunis, here, we like both teams,” he answers.
I try to get clarification. “No, I mean, do people in one part of the city like one team, and people in another part of the city like the other team? Or do rich people like one team, and poor people the other? Or is there a team with left-wing politics and a team with right-wing politics? Like that?”
The vendor’s expression changes immediately, the routine false smile growing wider and even more forced. “Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. You do not understand. There is not left-wing politics or right-wing politics in Tunisia. There is only just Tunisia,” he says, clearly sketched out that I would even ask such a thing.
I pick the Espérance Sportive de Tunis jersey and start the bargaining. We negotiate back and forth for a few minutes before we get to the endgame. I offer twelve dinar.
“Take my hand,” the vendor says.
I take.
“We are shaking.”
We are.
“Sold for fifteen dinar.”
I start to open my mouth but let it go. Fine. I will take my bipartisan democracy over three Tunisian dinar.
Micah says: We also went to see an Espérance Sportive de Tunis game. Going into the soccer stadium was a lesson in the oppressive yet dysfunctional security apparatus in Tunisia. In the course of a ten-minute walk from the gate to the stadium, we passed through no fewer than eight security checkpoints. Each time, we lined up, in gendered lines, to be patted down. Each time, roughly half of the people were waved through, and the other half got a pat-down that at the best of times would have caught only someone who was trying to smuggle in a gun the size of a small child.
Shortly after this exchange I meet Farthi, a middle-aged perfume dealer, in the middle of the Tunis medina while I’m sightseeing with a Canadian I met at our hostel. I’m initially suspicious when he starts chatting with us in English, thinking it’s some kind of sale attempt or scam, but something about his demeanor leads me to relax my guard after a few minutes and follow him into a nearby building he suggests we go see. I still think this is some sort of sale attempt, but it seems like it’ll be a pleasant and worthwhile one. He leads us up two flights of stairs and out onto the roof of the city.
MEDINA ALLEYWAY AT NIGHT.
The Tunis medina is an amazing place. Without context, if you were dropped there at night you would think it was one of the scariest, most dangerous places on earth. The streets, which can barely be called “streets,” being better described as paths or alleyways, twist and turn, with anything possible around the next bend. These dark passageways are made even darker by the fact that many of them are partially or even completely covered over. There is no hard-and-fast line between indoor and outdoor or even between public and private space. The streets and arcades flow together with courtyards, souks, and alleyways. A door or passageway might lead to a factory, garden, yard, alley, street, staircase, or right into someone’s home. I have never been anywhere else like this, somewhere so different from the modern planned city of streets, sidewalks, and storefronts. And on top of this, within the square mile of the medina are almost seven hundred historic monuments, reflecting Tunis’s history as one of the wealthiest cities of the ancient Arab world.
And this is just one level. After we ascend to the roof, Farthi shows us the other level of the medina. Because of the narrowness and crowdedness of the streets, and the fact that many of them are partially or fully covered over, I haven’t experienced anything you could call a “view” in the medina. Sight lines are limited to what’s right in front of you, the entire experience taking place in a sort of tunnel vision. This is the first time I’ve seen a vista, gotten a lay of the land. Because of this tunnel vision, despite the numerous mosques in the medina, until now I’ve never been able to look up and actually see a minaret. Our view now unimpaired, Farthi points out several, explaining the difference between the square minarets of the Arabs and the octagonal ones of the Ottoman Turks. The Al-Zaytuna Mosque, for a millennium one of the preeminent centers of Islamic learning in North Africa, and one of the oldest mosques in the world, is only a few roofs over. I wonder if I can get there without going back down to the street. I consider trying this for a split second before remembering that if it’s insulting to walk in a mosque with shoes, it’s probably even worse to walk on one.
ON THE ROOFTOPS WITH FARTHI.
Still, this gets me thinking. One of my favorite experiences is traversing a city on a different level from the one that 99.99 percent of the population traverses: the street level. But I have only ever done it on the level below—journeying through the catacombs of Paris or the subways of New York. The level above has always been a point, not a path—something to be climbed up to, enjoyed, and then climbed down from. There are many places in New York where you can walk across a city block on the rooftops, and even a few where you can cross a street via the level above and make it across two blocks. I know of one place where you can manage a three-block walk without hitting the ground. But here in the medina it looks like you can walk across the roofs forever. It seems like taking a canopy tour of the rain forest, except on an urban level. I ask Farthi if it’s possible to walk across the entire medina on this upper level.
“Oh, yes,” he replies.
I ask if he’s ever done it.
“Well, we tried,” he says. “When I was a child we used to race. But we never finished. Somebody would always fall and get hurt.”
He goes on to explain that within the medina are some of the oldest and most valuable jewelry stores in the Middle East. Even if you could avoid falling and walk on top of the numerous mosques, guard dogs prowl the roofs of many of the shops. Not said is the fact that in addition to the numerous shops in the medina, there are several government buildings such as the Palais de Justice—the main courthouse. The pyramids, even if we get caught, seem like they’d be a laugh. We’d be far from the first Westerners to try it, and surely won’t be the last. It may not be smiled upon, but it’s easily explained. Getting caught on top of the Al-Zaytuna Mosque or the Palais de Justice is not easily explained. And from the moment I arrived in Tunisia, I have been sold on the idea that this is not the kind of country where you want to have to deal with questions from the authorities that are not easily explained. Geographically, France is only a two-hour flight, closer to Tunis than New York is to my hometown in Michigan, but mentally Paris has never seemed farther away.
Later, after the Canadian leaves, Farthi leads me into a
few more nooks and crannies around the medina, taking me inside the ancient library and a working fabric shop still using pedal-operated looms. I can tell it’s not the first time he’s guided a random American around, and when I ask him how often he does this, and why, he answers that he enjoys showing people his city and does it whenever he’s feeling like practicing his English. I know that’s not the entire answer, that there’s a sale to be made, but still, it’s not an insignificant part of the answer. The boundary between friendliness and business, salesmanship and socializing, is not hard-and-fast, not even a boundary, really. It all flows together, same as the streets and shops, alleys and courtyards, of the medina. After this impromptu tour, I go to his perfume shop and buy what I think I’m supposed to buy. I don’t know what the polite thing to do is, the social norms of this particular interaction. Luckily, Farthi, who has told me he’s visited the States and has relatives there, doesn’t seem like he expects me to have the least bit of familiarity with them, so the process of ending up with a small vial of massage oil and another one of jasmine-scented perfume isn’t too awkward. I want to ask Farthi about life, politics, the universal visage that gazes at me, but I remember the vendor’s reaction and don’t bring it up. Three weeks after we leave, a young man named Mohamed Bouazizi lights himself on fire, the city erupts, and I think of Farthi.
