The City at Three P.M.

by LaSalle, Peter;

  PLASTIFICATION POUR VOS DOCUMENTS

  That evening, as every evening, I again stroll up and down Avenue Bourguiba, the outdoor cafés packed, the broad sidewalks crowded with other strolling folk, a repeated, nightly celebration as thousands of starlings chirpingly swoop in dramatic dark clouds against the genuinely lavender twilight sky.

  8. Good Twenty-Five-Buck Reeboks

  I keep thinking an awful lot about Flaubert and Salammbô. True to Flaubert’s model, I’m also up to my own habit of taking notes madly, stopping in the middle of a downtown sidewalk or in the Medina to do so, CIA style, maybe. This thinking about Salammbô and Flaubert himself in Tunisia has given me an organizing focus for the trip, but I’m also jotting down ideas for short stories of my own to be set in Tunisia, writing the invisible narratives in my head—plot outlines, transition sentences—as I meander around on my new and bouncy twenty-five-buck Reebok track shoes, black and white, and take in everything (wow, look at that side-street café with the long row of men sitting out front in red chechia caps puffing their ornate hookahs, a perfect picture! wow, look at that massive old Art Deco Jewish synagogue on Avenue de la Liberté, like an armed enclave with the dozen or so soldiers toting AK-47s at the front gate, a painful sign of the times), and meander around some more.

  I go back to the couscous place just about every evening, sticking with a winner.

  I’m saving my own assault on the ruins of Carthage till later, preparing for it. At the hotel I reread the letters I photostatted that Flaubert posted from his own trip (to repeat, there aren’t many, unlike the piles of them from the longer journey to Middle Eastern countries when younger, and he was only at the ruins of Carthage for several days), and I’m going through the complete text of Salammbô again, remembering that I forgot to pick up a copy in French in Paris and hoping I can find one here. I want to have everything fresh in my mind, my cerebral guidebook, in order to see it all through maybe F.’s own—how should I put this—“gaze”? As for the Saint Augustine I packed, I find myself skimming it, the sections on his time in Carthage turning out to be comparatively brief. And while I do again look once or twice to see the signature of my sister’s college roommate on the title page, it’s tough to get into the prose’s often bombastic preaching, what I vaguely remember from when I myself had to read it (or at least pretend I did) at a Catholic boys’ school as a kid. But I can say that when I think now of Saint Augustine’s frequently quoted line once more about how the world is a book and a person who has not traveled has read only a page of that book, such a thought understandably resonates for me at the moment.

  I’ve already relocated to another hotel called the Majestic, a white Art Nouveau wedding-cake rise from the time of the French Protectorate (the admittedly hegemonistically named “Protectorate” did certainly happen, 1881-1956); the Majestic might be a little shabby, but I like how my airy, spacious room has a balcony overlooking the busy Avenue de Paris. The place is much better than the Hôtel Omrane, where I suffered a bad spider bite that has left a sizable strawberry rash on my leg. I’m finding Tunis more and more attractive almost by the hour. I take especially long walks through the maze of the old city, the Medina, which has been kept intact with designation as a UNESCO World Heritage landmark, visiting the mosques and the palaces and the ornate mausoleums of the old Arab and Ottoman rulers there, and everybody is thoroughly friendly. A smiling young cop stops me to ask in French how I am enjoying the city, proudly telling me how many languages he speaks. The athletically handsome manager in a good suit at the Hôtel Majestic turns out to be a former soccer star for the locally revered Club Africain team, and, a soccer fan myself, I talk to him at length about the sport, fancying, maybe, it’s the manly way Hemingway used to talk to hotel managers about sport—or about bullfighting, anyway, in the persona of the Jake character in The Sun Also Rises. Any problem stemming from my being in a Muslim country in the time of the major U.S. mess-up in Iraq is softened by saying to people right off the bat in my French, “Je suis américain, malheureusement,” which usually elicits a smile, then maybe some honest dialogue about the current situation. If that doesn’t work, I bring up Jack Kennedy, who remains honored in the country because he and Jackie were good friends of the founder of modern-day independent Tunisia, the progressive Habib Bourguiba—the Kennedy reference seems capable of breaking the ice if anybody seems more critical of my nationality. A last, trumping resort if I want to indisputably assert my personal credibility as an American is simply to declare, emphatically: “Bush, il est fou, c’est un idiot!”

  9. “Miami, That’s My Kind of City!”

  One afternoon I’m strolling beside some impressive futuristic government buildings at the edge of the downtown, and when I stop to write down a few notes, a guy about thirty comes up to me. He introduces himself, saying he suspected I was American. He’s an overweight, wide-grinning sort wearing what looks like frat-boy attire, complete with a neat yellow polo shirt and good dress slacks; I figure he works in one of the government offices. He has no interest in getting into any Bush-bashing, and he tells me cheerily in French that his dream has always been to go not simply to America but specifically to Miami.

  To quote him: “Miami, that’s my kind of city!”

  He talks more about Miami. After ten minutes of conversation, I conclude that for him it’s ultra-exotic, with the beach and the girls in Miami (actually, both of which he could find nearby on the Tunisian coast, where the tourist industry is garishly developed); probably the romantic aura of the big-time crime in Miami as celebrated in TV shows and movies contributes to an adventurous image, too, the fast life—in other words, for him its draw is the Otherness of the savage and morally deficient West, and even if the paradigm doesn’t entail much hegemony, it’s rather a reverse Orientalism, no?

  Innocent enough.

  10. Ancient Carthage, the First Assault

  As for the ruins of ancient Carthage being a tourist attraction, those ruins do suffer from their own longtime bad rap, I realize. The truth of the matter is that there isn’t much left, and whatever was Punic that has been excavated is overshadowed by the excavations more extensive and dramatic for the Roman city later there. Most sources warn it takes some time to appreciate the scant vestiges of the Punic era that exist today, even get a bead on what remains.

  Carthage is now a suburb north of Tunis, where the city’s modern airport is located, in fact. While both the Punic and Roman leaders believed in its prime strategic location overlooking the Gulf of Tunis—a wide inlet of the luminescent-ly azure Mediterranean tucked in on either side by jagged purple mountains rising to make for long peninsulas across the way—the Arabs when they came established their city at a lesser settlement that eventually became Tunis, farther inland and set off from full proximity to the sea by Lake Tunis. On a hot weekday midmorning, I take the relatively empty little commuter train that goes to the northern suburbs, posh white villas abundant once you get beyond the industrial hodgepodge of Tunis’s port area. Many of the stations along the seaside route have names with Punic ties that could almost be an index for Flaubert’s novel: one is “Salammbô”; another “Hannibal,” Salammbô’s baby brother, who makes a relatively brief guest appearance in the book; another “Hamilcar,” her father and the fearsome Carthaginian top general. I step off the train at the empty Hannibal station—very neatly suburban and built by the colonizers with, indeed, considerable Oriental whimsy, a blue-and-white cottage-style affair of onion arches and embellishing arabesques, cascading bougainvillea everywhere. I start walking in the opposite direction of the sea, up a long, steep road blanketed with fallen tree petals—strikingly bright orange—passing a swank tennis club and more villas, heading toward the epicenter of the several scattered “Archeological Sites,” Byrsa Hill. It’s hot, will be closing in on a hundred before the day is done, and this first assault on what is the main site in the ruins of Carthage is pretty unfocused for me, even disorienting.

  The summit, where the Punic tem
ple stood and a location prominent in Salammbô, was later built over with a Roman temple. Then the French constructed a massive and gaudily yellow basilica, still standing, in honor of Saint Louis, a.k.a. Louis IX; having set out on a Crusade launched from the south of France, he succumbed to a typhoid epidemic and died here in 1270. The 360 degrees of vistas is nearly too much—the sea, the mountains, even distantly white Tunis with its few industrial smokestacks in the panorama—and to make everything more disorienting, there is the heat. Though I gunked up with coconut-fragrant sun block and am wearing khakis and a long-sleeve shirt to ward off the rays, I forgot my Red Sox baseball cap, plus this day I didn’t even pack a plastic bag with the mandatory liter bottle of water that half the Tunisian citizenry seem to tote around at all times. A long esplanade in front of a white museum, which was formerly the monastery for the giant basilica that itself is now a gallery and performance arts center, makes you feel like you’ve just stepped into a de Chirico canvas, the way they’ve set upright some truncated Roman columns and broken statuary; the heaps of brown stone ruins directly below the overlook constitute the excavated Punic Quarter, claimed to be the remnants of a neighborhood from the old civilization, but for me right now they look like not much more than, yes, heaps of brown stones, a lot of weeds and even plenty of trash interspersed. I have equally little luck in responding when I wander into the museum that offers both Roman and Punic artifacts, and not helping the situation within, there is the presence of several of the kind of for-hire guides who prey on naïve tourists, one guy now spieling away in bad, obnoxiously loud English that can be heard throughout the rooms to two British women, fragile and quite old. I tell myself they are such easy marks that no self-respecting, hustling tour guide should even attempt to hit on them, and this guy should be absolutely ashamed of himself (the standard M.O. appears to be to approach foreigners as a helpful friend and tag along with gladly given information—and then, when the spieling is done, demand some exorbitant fee for the unrequested services). To be frank, none of it is coming together today, either the lay of what was once the Carthaginian city or any sense of Flaubert bouncing around on a mule (not a horse, as he predicted in his letter) and doing his research out here. To be really frank, I am lost in a moment of wondering what the hell I am even doing on this trip, dodging some personal obligations back home and abandoning my writing for a few weeks; I know I’ve always used travel as a way to escape responsibility. Having skipped lunch, I’m a bit dizzy, and add to that, I’m sunburned already, despite the lotion.

  I make the half-hour trek in the pulsating heat back to the station, take the train a little farther north to the resort village of Sidi Bou Said on a high, cliffed point of land. It’s a ridiculously beautiful place of a seemingly enforced color code on the villas, with white for the stucco walls and blue for the decorative tiles and shutters; there’s a nest of winding cobbled streets at the top of the Gibraltar-like rise of it, a yacht harbor below. It’s sometimes called the Saint-Tropez of North Africa, exclusive, immaculate, with many signs saying where you can’t park, where you can’t walk. The guidebooks note how it has been a favorite haunt of every French cultural celebrity spending time in Tunisia from Paul Klee to Michel Foucault to Simone de Beauvoir, as well as Frédéric Mitterrand, the controversial French actor and producer (nephew of the former Monsieur le Président himself), who seems to have been a longtime resident, and I do remember that I saw an expensive coffee-table photo book in a bookstore in Tunis for which he provides the chatty introduction: Les Maisons de Sidi Bou Said. Beautiful as it is, Sidi Bou Said doesn’t look very attractive to me in my present mood, the profusion here of stupid and indulgent wealth, haughtily oblivious of, even walling itself off from, any discomfort—or any reality—in the world elsewhere.

  And trudging around Sidi Bou Said I remember—to make matters even worse—a scene of a badly lame little kid of ten or so. Barefoot, he was dressed in ragged white and trying to sell sprigs of jasmine to those sitting at the outdoor cafés on Avenue Bourguiba the evening before; in Tunisia, men will buy fragrant jasmine—the national flower—to put behind the ear, a ubiquitous local tradition. The kid was having no luck selling, and he seemed to give up at one point, or to just forget about it, and looking at his flower holder (the boys who sell them stick the stems of the white-petaled jasmine into a wooden ball, which becomes almost a big star in the hand), he held it up as if he were indeed but a carefree kid with a fireworks sparkler, ran limpingly in meaningless circles, smiling and gazing up at that star he waved, maybe at all the brighter stars of the indigo Tunisian night sky above, too, the kid contentedly playing, even singing to himself. Yes, for a minute, anyway, he was merely a happy kid and not somebody shackled to a life in the street and a physical disability that will make that life so hard for him, as in his innocence he didn’t know such consequences and all of that yet. To witness it broke my heart, and I think of it now in Sidi Bou Said—how absurd a world it is that juxtaposes that kind of ill fortune beside the smug opulence of a place such as Sidi Bou Said, with its gleaming BMWs and its handsome walled-in villas and its chic, beautiful-people inhabitants easing around behind oversize protecting sunglasses. I think of my own sadness I indulged in (the sense of loss I get whenever I go back to my summer place, often there alone and with only the remembering of happier times to surround me), and I feel more than stupid for such self-centered indulgence, suspect that possibly social concern has to figure into everything, and art and literature can be but indulgence as well. I take the train back to Tunis, worn out from a day that didn’t add up to much whatsoever, other than doubt.

  And I concede what you have to sometimes concede: Not every day of travel, just as not every night of dreaming, takes you to where you really want to go. At the Hôtel Majestic I spend a couple of subdued days rereading yet another time the passages of Salammbô that describe the vanished ancient city of Carthage, still trying to get some valid orientation. I also go through, once more, the photostatted Flaubert letters for clues that might help me conjure up a better sense of his own visit there.

  My second assault on ancient Carthage will prove the beginning of my breakthrough, the already alluded to Big Realization. (Salammbô uses potboiling, cliff-hanging tricks throughout, especially at the end of chapters, so if I do appear to be trying quite hard with the narrative teasing, at least I’m in respected company). Listen a little more.

  11. Ancient Carthage, the Second Assault

  Those good Reeboks cushiony below me, the dark blue baseball cap with a big red B on it firmly on my head, a liter bottle of mineral water along with my guidebooks and maps packed in a flimsy plastic supermarket sack, I return to the downtown station and board the teapot-whistling little commuter train to head up the coast again. I soon realize it’s a mistake to travel on Sunday, the cars crowded with a large chunk of Tunis’s population escaping the city for the many good beaches far less exclusive than the one at Sidi Bou Said, and standing up I’m soaked in sweat; but when two teenage guys jimmy the locked latch mechanism and open the doors once we get rolling, the breeze on the causeway that crosses over the huge steamy puddle of Lake Tunis is wonderful. I remember Flaubert, both in a letter and in the novel, talking of flocks of pink flamingoes alighting from the lake, and while I haven’t witnessed the phenomenon personally, I can easily envision it as the train rattles along—which is exactly what I do. And already I somehow sense it’s going to be a better day, a banner one, in fact.

  Stepping off at the Salammbô station this time, I plan to make the entire loop of the so-called Archeological Sites, a half-dozen spots separated by a half mile or so of walking in between them. It’s still as hot as it was a couple of days before, but I’m much better prepared now. I will scribble notes for the next four or five hours, walking, scribbling, and walking some more.

  ** The Tophet, or ancient burial plot, is a fenced-in, unkempt patch amid more white villas close to the sea. It offers several unearthed crypts and hundreds of strewn-about stèles, m
ore or less small obelisk headstones bearing the mark of the goddess Tanit, Salammbô’s personal deity, which consists of a pyramid topped with a cross bar and a ring, the symbols of the sun and moon above that.

  Flaubert figures in largely on this. And even if the site wasn’t excavated when he was here in 1858, he did get to know the Belgian archeologists studying Carthage at the time. The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa in his book on Madame Bovary, a masterful meditation titled The Perpetual Orgy, talks of visiting the small Flaubert museum in Croisset and seeing such a stèle, which apparently F. had lugged back with him to France. Right from the start, a charge against Salammbô was that it indulged in gratuitous violence, not only the battles but particularly the episode when the war with the rebelling mercenaries isn’t going too well for the Carthaginians and they sacrifice some of their children to the god Moloch in hopes of reversing their luck; such rumored child sacrifice wasn’t documented when Flaubert wrote of it, though remains found at this very site later confirmed it. To be honest, the violence and graphic descriptions of the killing in the novel are fully nightmarish, à la Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian, and somebody adhering to the critical approach of Edward Said, in the spirit of Orientalism, might say that Flaubert indulged in literary sensationalism at the expense of a true depiction of the Carthaginians, Flaubert allegedly perpetuating the image of Oriental savagery. But the scenes are also handsomely written, effective. Further, Flaubert might have been noticeably condescending in some of his letters about what he observed during his extensive Eastern travels (such as in describing his trip to Constantinople), yet in carefully reading Salammbô, one soon learns that the Carthaginians, master merchants, are by and large shown as highly refined in their government and commerce, while the few times Gauls—Europeans—are mentioned (there are some among the recruited mercenaries) they seem to be portrayed as markedly uncivilized, seen as drunken louts.