by Paul Theroux
The train was almost empty. The only people in the Comfort Section were a Vietnamese woman and a chain-smoking Tunisian man who was trying to woo a young Tunisian woman traveling on her own.
We were out of Tunis, beyond the slums, the suburbs, the refuse heaps and scavengers in shacks, in a matter of minutes, and then it was all olive groves for sixty miles. Like so many other parts of the Mediterranean shore, olive trees predominated. There were more here, and they were more orderly and fruitful, than in Greece. They were organized on terraces, with cactuses and spiky century plants arranged around them as perimeter fences, and with so much space between the trees the olives could be picked mechanically.
I saw an old woman riding a donkey through a herd of goats, I saw shepherds strolling behind flocks of sheep, and stumbling lambs, and in the geometric settlements there were low square houses on grids of streets. I had known nothing about Tunisia before I had gotten off the Sicilian ferry, and so I was pleased to see how orderly and apparently self-sufficient it was. And it was another secular place—at least there was no state religion, either theological or political.
Greener and tidier as we continued south, the countryside was flat and agricultural. It seemed a very peaceful land, in spite of the stormy weather. Passing through Sousse—the railway line went right down Sousse’s main street, along the promenade, around the port—I was reminded of how it had been recommended as a nice place to visit. It was clearly a tourist town.
Thirty or forty miles south of Sousse we came to El Djem. The town was insignificant, but the Roman amphitheater in El Djem was impressive.
“It’s in better shape and there’s more of it than the one in Rome,” an American man said to me, at El Djem. He was Mike from Louisiana.
Mike’s friend Steve said, “This thing is real old.”
They could appreciate the handiwork in El Djem because they were in construction themselves. They had been living in Sfax for almost two months, living alone in hotel rooms—going slightly crazy, they said—supervising the building of an oil-drilling platform offshore.
Steve went on. “It was built in something like 1720.”
“Isn’t it Roman?” I said.
“The guy didn’t say, but I’ll tell you one thing. This sucker is well built.”
“That’s for sure,” Steve said, and leaned way back to admire the complex arrangement of arches.
“Is this A.D. or B.C.?” Mike said.
“What’s the difference?” Steve replied.
Exactly, I thought. Surely the point was that it was about a thousand years older than any other building in the town and yet was stronger, more handsome and symmetrical and would probably outlast all the rest of them.
I got a later train onward to Sfax, and was at first alarmed by the ugly suburbs and tenements, and at last reassured. It was a more somber and quieter place than Tunis, with just a few main streets, and a boulevard and a harbor. Mike and Steve told me that the medina—the bazaar—was worth seeing. There were some islands fifteen or twenty miles offshore but they had not been there. It’s kind of a quiet place, they said. And they added, We’re going nuts here.
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.
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.
Oleanders, and date palms, and a green stagnant swimming pool. Except for the flies and the chirp of birds, not a single sound. Except for the manager and Wahid Number One, not another person. The houses a mile up the beach were empty. Amazingly, I was on the Mediterranean—the emptiest part I had so far seen, emptier than the emptiest part of Albania. There had been people here; they had come and gone. It was like a colony that had gone bust, an experiment that had failed.
All that I worked out on my first day. On my second day I went bird-watching. For all the reasons it had seemed dead and abandoned it was attractive to birds, and amounted to a bird sanctuary the like of which I had not seen anywhere on the Mediterranean shores, many different birds in great profusion. A number of them must have been migrants, since this had to be one of the stopping-off places for birds in their seasonal transit between Africa and northern Europe; others I took to be resident shore birds. The largest was a gray heron, about four feet tall and looking patient and important in its slow-motion strutting at the shoreline. I saw a little egret, and a quail that called out “Wet my lips!” Farther on I spotted a wader that turned out to be a curlew, some plovers, a crested lark, a linnet, a red-rumped swallow. A whitish bird with a black mask and a gray cap and black wing-marks was definitely a great gray shrike. I had no bird book. I sketched them and wrote descriptions of their peculiar marks and later identified them. In this way, by spotting birds, I have given the flattest days of travel some meaning and a sense of discovery.
Later that second day I went to Remla, in the old bus that passed by the Grand. Remla was like a town at the end of the world. Apart from the subsistence fishing there was nothing else. The soil was too poor to support vegetable gardens. There were no lights. The town itself was a huddle of square huts set in a maze of damp passageways.
“What about water?”
“We have fountains.”
The brackish undrinkable water came from wells. On the road, there was a bar, Al Jezira, where the local people congregated. When a motorbike crepitated past the bar, the boys and old men looked up. These were the men who owned the fishing boats. The boats had lateen sails, but the fishing was no good, the men told me. The desolation here surpassed anything I had so far seen. Taking it in my stride I regarded it as a personal achievement. And on the third day, wishing greatly to leave Kerkennah, I told myself I felt much better. I said good-bye to Wahid Number One and left the empty hotel on the deserted beach and took the bus to the ferry landing. There I met Mourad, who was heading to Sfax to visit his wife, who was ill in the hospital there.
My first impression of Kerkennah had been of a great emptiness—hot gravelly earth and dying trees and poor huts. But that appearance of nothingness was misleading. Everything here had a name. Remla was an important town, and without realizing—without knowing it—I had also been to El Attala and Oulad Kacem and Melita. This ferry landing was not just a ferry landing. The three decrepit houses here and the rutted road constituted the settlement of Sidi Yousef.
“What do you think of these islands?”
“This is my home,” Mourad said.
Like most other Tunisians he had an air of uncorrupted courtesy.
And so we sailed back to Sfax on El Loud III, and the morning light floated a r
usset color across the surface of the sea, while lambs bleated on the trucks belowdecks.
In Sfax I tried to solve the problem of traveling from Tunisia to Morocco, without stopping in Algeria. I was given the name of a company in Tunis which acted as the agent for a Libyan ship, the Garyounis. This ship took both passengers and cargo and sailed from Tripoli to Tunis to Casablanca. I did not really want to leave Tunisia. I liked it here, and now I was ready to follow all the advice I had been given, about seeing the desert and the cave dwellers at Matmata, and Tozeur, and the Jews in Djerba, and the nomads, and the camel sellers, and the weavers, and the mystics who fondled scorpions. I called the agent. He said the Garyounis would be leaving in a few days for Casablanca.
I picked up my sixty-dollar kilim from Ahmed Khlif in the medina of Sfax, in his narrow shop at the Souk des Etoffes. I took the train back to Tunis.
Tunis was busy with two important events—the Carthage Film Festival and a decisive soccer match, Tunisia against Togo, to determine which country would qualify to play in the Africa Cup. I watched the match on television at the cafe in a backstreet, with about two hundred people, men and boys. They were attentive, there were no outbursts, only murmurs. Tunisia was ahead, one to nothing for most of the match, and towards the end, when Togo kicked the equalizer, not a word was spoken. The only interruption came when the strangled cry of a muezzin gave his call to prayers. A number of people got down, faced east, and prayed—five minutes of this—then back to the match, which ended in a draw.
The Carthage Film Festival was promoted under the slogan “A Hundred Years of Tunisian Cinema!” This seemed to me as unlikely a claim as the centenary of Israeli railways that was being celebrated when I was in Haifa. Never mind. I pretended to be a movie critic and went to two of the movies. In spite of the name of the festival, the movies were shown in Tunis. Most had been made in the Mediterranean; France, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Egypt and Palestine were represented. There were ten films from Turkey. The rest were from places as distant as Brazil and China.