The City at Three P.M.

by LaSalle, Peter;

  At the Tophet, in the building heat, a wiry mustached guy has been tagging after me, the only customer there, wanting to be my guide. I politely tell him in French I don’t need one, and I know that here I want to experience the place on my own, think about it without any intrusion, which I do. When I leave, he is sitting on a folding chair outside the gatehouse sulking, most likely because he didn’t get my business. I offer a friendly smile and explain that I didn’t need him because I already have a guide—I hold up the Rough Guides guidebook, its clichéd photo of a desert oasis on the emerald-green cover—and he shakes his head, waving it away as if it’s an annoying fly. He tells me the book is no good, and it doesn’t have the real story.

  “Les enfants,” he says gruffly.

  Sitting there, he makes a chopping motion at the back of his neck, winces in put-on agony, pantomiming what happened to the children.

  “Les enfants” he repeats it, emphasizing, “vous n’avez pas la verité, monsieur.” I don’t have the truth.

  Either he hasn’t read Orientalism and therefore isn’t suitably PC, or like Flaubert, possibly, he knows what sells. In any case, at the Tophet, Punic Carthage is beginning to emerge for me, in sort of a “know my religion, know my civilization” way.

  ** I walk past still more white villas on a suburban road along the sea, and soon find the Punic Ports, an important aspect of the ancient city of Carthage proper. Today these are but two connected brackish suburban ponds, one vaguely rectangular and one vaguely circular with a small island studding its center, yet the geometry of them was once exact. And at one time this was all a prime symbol of Carthaginian dominance, the outer port for merchant vessels and the inner one for a large fleet of naval vessels, which docked like neat spokes around that central, and formerly perfect, sphere of the island. On the island was built a nautical roundhouse to service the long, graceful ships, which were powered by both wind and rowing galley slaves in their venturing to the many outposts of the empire as far off as Cartagena in Spain (the name deriving from “Carthage”) and clear to West Africa’s Atlantic coastline. The Euclidean precision of the whole layout is definitely no longer intact, and there are just the undulating grassy banks and surrounding grounds landscaped like a park, with sun-hungry golden tamarisk and giant ornamental oleander, vivid scarlet; a number of well-heeled residents from the neighborhood are out for morning dog-walking or some casual fishing in the ponds. However, what was for me only a model or a drawing before—all the guidebook illustrations of the original city stress the classic pattern of these Punic Ports at the foot of Byrsa Hill, the once-exact geometry of them—now becomes more clear, easy to picture, and it takes being here, this close to the tepid water, to start to truly understand the layout. I can also picture the fine vessel of General Hamilcar, the princess’s father in Salammbô, gliding through the gates of the ports (they were both entirely within the city’s protecting walls then), returned at last from the Roman campaign to eventually attempt to rescue his people from the mercenary uprising, as happens in the novel. So for me here, it’s a matter of “know my ports, know my civilization,” and I’m beginning to get a solid feel for the larger plan of the city, the geography described in Salammbô. An interesting note is that it was Chateaubriand, one of Said’s named offenders, who in 1805 deduced that these unimposing ponds, neglected for centuries, were actually the famous ports of the city alluded to in ancient texts, something nobody else had quite figured out before.

  I’ve been at it for about two hours already, but with the baseball cap and the water bottle, even a roll of crackers and a banana packed for sustenance, I don’t notice the time pass.

  ** Farther on, right beside the sea, is a plot called the Magon Quarter, or the German Excavations, unearthed by, naturally, German archeologists. This site offers low foundations of what might have been a Punic city block, weedy; nevertheless, in true German tradition (they were zealous archeologists) it’s much more organized than most of the other ruins, outfitted with illustrated placards explaining everything in French, Arabic, and German (which looks weird, because for me Tunisia itself feels anything but German). After that are the Roman Baths, a large site with substantial remnants of the buildings—stone pillars and interior arches—beside the sea, which reminds you that most of the Carthaginian ruins are Roman and not Punic, ditto regarding the site of the Roman Houses, up toward Byrsa Hill, also the nearby Roman Amphitheatre there, which has been completely reconstructed as a venue for music concerts and the like; the profusion of Roman ruins perhaps also emphasizes exactly how gone and vanished any idea of the Punic itself really is. Hot, sweating, I look at my watch to see it’s early afternoon now, two or so. And as I plod back up that same sloping asphalt pavement strewn with orange-colored petals to Byrsa Hill that I walked before, now in the fully hundred-degree afternoon heat under a sky flawlessly deep blue, I am tired, and the swelling on my leg left from the spider bite is increasingly aggravated by the heat and my khakis rubbing against it. But I do have some sense at long last of not only the layout of the original city but also how Flaubert must have felt out here, putting the puzzle together for himself. Flaubert visited Carthage before many of the major Punic archeological discoveries, as said; he was chastised at first by the supposed experts in France for allegedly having gotten wrong in his novel many of the details about the physical trappings of the Punic city, though later he was proven to be remarkably accurate on that score—uncannily so, according to some sources.

  ** And atop Byrsa Hill again, deserted of tourists who are probably all at the cooling beaches now, I look out from that same high esplanade in front of the yellow façade of the Saint Louis Basilica and the white monastery beside it that is now the artifact museum, and everything here suddenly comes alive and makes sense, too.

  The prime vista is now for me exactly the way Flaubert described it in the novel, up here where the temple was, running down the hill past the ruins of the excavated Punic Quarter, where you can discern the outline of streets and houses, then stretching—after more posh villas and clusters of fruit trees and wiggly cypresses, far below—to the Punic Ports, which were previously only nondescript ponds indeed the last time I was here, but now exist in their full significance; beyond lies the sparkling Gulf of Tunis, framed on either side by the aforementioned purple mountains and opening out to the wide, wide Mediterranean Sea, once near entirely ruled by the mighty Carthaginians who on this very spot could boast of offering the greatest civilization of their era.

  But now all of that is absolutely gone, like everything else will be gone, including me, my summer house that deals me considerable sadness lately, even the kid selling flowers (the poor little guy) there on Avenue Bourguiba beneath the aching stars a few nights before; the power of the ruins of Punic Carthage is not so much in what remains, scant compared to that of other excavated sites of former civilizations worldwide, but in how much has vanished, left only to the imagination—but the imagination is supremely powerful. And I like to think of Flaubert out here thinking exactly the same thing, and, not to be presumptuous, I sense more than ever what it must have been like for him perhaps thinking the same thing, imagining it all, planning his book.

  I wander through the empty rooms of the museum again, no guides hustling tourists in this heat. I write some notes concerning the holdings in the showcases of fine Punic jewelry (pink coral; blue scarab; exquisite cast gold), which could have been similar to Salammbô’s celebrated rich adornment, and then I linger in front of the museum’s maps and reconstructed models of the city, studying them. Several hours on my feet, I’m very tired now, but comfortably so. I feel I have found what I wanted and have experienced a breakthrough (but it will not turn out to be quite that way—yet) as I head back down the steep road, going toward the station at Hannibal.

  Which is when I see a slim young woman, pretty, walking directly towards me, approaching me.

  12. The Young German Woman Walks Away with the Ghost of Me

  “Bonjour,” she sa
ys.

  “Bonjour,” I say.

  Sweating from the hike up the hill so that ribbons of her mahogany hair are glued to her forehead, her eyes pale, smiling though obviously weary herself, the young woman asks me in French if there are, generically, “any sites” around here. She is lost, it seems, without a map and just off the train at the Hannibal stop herself. Probably in her late twenties, there’s something of the grad student about her, wearing functional beige pedal-pushers and a rumpled bland-plaid sleeveless blouse, what looks like very typical grad-student attire. In fact, she admits she is totally lost. We sit for a while on a bench at a bus stop in the deserted, stilled Sunday afternoon, laughing, my confessing how I was beyond totally lost myself on my first trip out here to Carthage. She explains she is staying with friends in Bizerte, a resort on the coast and formerly the Old World city of Hippo Diarrhytus (it predates even Carthage), and when I tell her I am American and try to make a joke about how Americans are currently not too popular in France, considering the international fiasco in Iraq, she tells me she is German and not French, saying, with a smile, that Americans are not very popular in Germany right now either. (My own French isn’t good enough to pick up accents—I’m usually satisfied simply to hear myself functioning in the other language). I ask her where she’s from and she says Frankfurt. She asks me why I’m in Tunis, and I go on with some energetic mush in French about Flaubert and Salammbô, which—surprisingly—appears to interest her; she admits to having heard of the novel but not having read it, says that she now wishes she had read it before she came, if it is actually about Carthage, as I say. Even though I tell her that Byrsa Hill is the main attraction in this vicinity, the principal “site,” she doesn’t appear to want to pursue climbing up the steep hill any farther, saying, “Peut-être un autre jour.” And when I tell her there is a winding side street, down the incline a ways and at the tennis club there, and that it leads over to the Roman Houses and the Roman Amphitheatre, she decides she will settle for those attractions today. It seems, however, that she just wants to go in the same direction as me. Well, I’m sane enough to know that, lost, she only wants company, and with regard to somebody my age, for her there’s clearly no interest other than that—no, I’m not a young guy anymore, needless to add—but I do get the feeling she would tag along with me on the avuncular count alone if I were to encourage it, her continuing to hang on just about anything I say in my French, repeatedly laughing in her subdued, grad-student way. Together we descend the hill for a while, then part at the tennis club, going our separate ways. Off to find the other sites I recommended, she stops after a few steps and turns around to offer me a big final wave, as she stands there in the swallowing shade of the winding side street.

  “Au revoir,” she says again.

  “Au revoir, et aussi bonne chance,” I say, adding, “Bonne chance, pour les sites.”

  She smiles again, a pretty young woman soon walking away on a carpet of those fallen, bright-orange petals.

  And I can’t help but think of how when I was young and traveling on my own a good deal, I might sometimes meet a girl in a youth hostel or just sightseeing and soon be spending time with her. (Why, I once fell head over heels, all but thought I wanted to marry on the spot, a pudgy, gigglingly bucktoothed, whitely blond Swiss girl, a lot of fun, who was twenty-two years old and a secretary at a police station in Geneva, which qualified her as an auxiliary cop herself; I was a kid myself back then, and I met her on the Chihuahua al Pacífico train that crosses the dramatic scenery of the high mountains of northern Mexico when she was backpacking in a yearlong grand trip around Latin America that she’d saved up for, the pair of us happily traveling together for a few days, ending up in a seedy, and perfect, little seaside fishing town called Topolobampo across from the Baja Peninsula.) I think of how things have certainly changed since then, but there’s no regret to any of it. Nevertheless, possibly contemplating the ruins on Byrsa Hill has skewed time some for me. To the point that I somehow seem to now see myself young and dark-haired, somehow straighter and taller, too, a ghost of me walking away with that young German woman, the two of us laughing and together waving goodbye to the older guy that is me in the Red Sox cap, standing there by himself and holding a plastic bag with a water bottle and Rough Guides guidebook—because I am older, which is how it should be, of course, granting that the whole elusive concept of time itself can often turn very spookily tricky.

  When the train back to the city stops briefly at La Gou-lette-Vieille, the car only half full with people now quietly returning from their day at the beach, I do catch a peek, the slightest view, down the main street and to the sea. It is where the aunt of my friend the Parisian professor, Claude Lévy, once had the summer house he enjoyed so much as a child, an area now funky and half industrialized, abutting Tunis’s ever-expanding shipping port. I know that I am too beat to keep my promise to revisit the place for him. But what if I simply lie to him back in Paris, fabricate like Mar-low does at the end in Heart of Darkness? What if I say that I went there, that even with the house gone, the place was beautiful (the white sand as soft as flour, the shaggy-headed palms rattling like castanets in the soft breeze, the Gulf of Tunis bluer than blue at this late hour of a summer Sunday winding down), to reinforce the image of it preserved in his own memory—because his own memory is free of the shackles of Time, and that’s the way the cherished spot remains in his own personal reality? I like that idea.

  Man, the day has proved a great one, and I feel good. But the Big Realization is still to come.

  Listen just a little more.

  13. Almost

  So, my Carthage research just about accomplished, I log some old-fashioned sightseeing.

  I leave the Hôtel Majestic for a few days and travel by bouncing long-distance bus out toward the edge of the Sahara and the city of Kairouan. Founded in 670, it was once the administrative seat for a large portion of Muslim North Africa, a place still considered the fourth holiest in Islam, seeing that a compatriot of the Prophet is entombed there. The fine golden crenellated walls of its vast Medina, the way that everything on street signs and such is in wispy Arabic and not French here, the architectural phenomenon of its imposing Great Mosque—the whole package makes it easy to understand how the place did such a number on a young Paul Klee in 1914; Klee proclaimed that to see Kairouan was to behold A Thousand and One Nights in reality, and he said the experience moved him so much, was so powerful, that it made him decide to return to Germany and at last get serious with his own painting. In making a loop by bus back to Tunis, I spend time in Sousse, a large seaside city now developed as a major Mediterranean beach resort with a ton of package-tour business. As welcoming as the sun and surf are in Sousse, it isn’t my kind of scene (too many new high-rise hotels; also, one of those white, rubber-tired imitation choo-choo trains for tourists slowly snaking along the Corniche; and, most annoying for me, two shaved-headed young British guys who look like soccer hooligans in my small hotel—loud, red like boiled crabs, the heavier of the pair always wearing with his swimsuit a black T-shirt that announces “FBI” in big white lettering on the back, and under that in smaller print: “Female Body Inspector”), until eventually I’m glad to be back in Tunis. There I’m greeted like a celebrity by the staff at the once-opulent Majestic, who address me heartily as “Monsieur LaSalle,” not only the former soccer star of a manager pleased to see me again, but also the elderly bellboy in his frayed, epauletted red jacket and the cleaning ladies as well, all remembering my generous tipping, I guess.

  I finally buy a copy of Salammbô in French at a bookstore on Avenue Bourguiba. It’s a cheap edition published by the Paris company Maxi-Livres that prints up uncopyrighted classics in functional, sturdily bound paper editions, an operation like Dover Books in the U.S. I’m at that stage when you’ve done most everything you’re supposed to do on a trip. (Yes, I have “tuned in” on Flaubert’s time in Carthage and, in being here, savored the wonder of a book that admittedly is—when all is
said and done—still an oddity in his oeuvre, Salammbô; my brain is cooking with plenty of new ideas for fiction set in Tunisia, plus the research I’ve accomplished will eventually render the essay you’re now reading.) Before dinner one evening I sit out on my hotel room’s balcony above the Avenue de Paris. I enjoy a bottle of Virgen lemon soda (the chief local brand) and a small bag of paprika potato chips I bought at the Monoprix on Avenue Charles de Gaulle (being in a Muslim country encourages a cut-down on alcohol, so no late-afternoon tallboy of beer for me—I wouldn’t even know of a street shop where to buy one in Tunis), and I start reading Salammbô in the French edition. It has an orange spine and the cover reproduces a scene of busy activity in a palace that seems much more Roman than Punic (you can’t expect everything to be accurate on a two-buck production like this). The thumping, meandering Arab pop plays from a kiosk selling music tapes below; the horns of the yellow taxis yap at each other during the rush hour now on Avenue de Paris, lined with its fine, purple-flowering jacarandas; the workers in their European attire pour out of the old office buildings, including the sizable one for Star Assurances across the street. Actually, from the balcony I can see over the big Star Assurances building, have a good view, well beyond that, of the low clutter of many white domes that is the Tunis skyline.

  But none of that has anything to do with my life at the moment.