Tébessa was seductive in its desolate bleakness, its unrelenting layers of sand that gnawed into me, that shifted and turned. It was limbo, a backwater with a Roman town nestling at its heart, a town that civilisation had turned its back on. At my hotel, Ali had left a message to say that he would collect me at eight to dine with his family. In Tébessa, women were forbidden out after dark and dusk was falling fast as I scooted through the unmade, windswept alleys towards a cybercafé. Mistrustful eyes followed my every move but I was on such a high that I barely paid them attention until I noticed I was being followed by a half-wit, stooped, with splayed fingers, moaning to himself. For just a moment I felt a shiver of fear.
The Internet point was, of course, not a café at all, but it was the first I had ever visited where I was directed into a separate room. Women in Tébessa were segregated, forbidden to use the same computers as the men. One other female was present, cowled in her robes and scarves, booting up her screen. I set to work. Suddenly, the music of Jacques Brel playing from the speakers of her computer. I turned and the woman did too, smiling.
‘Does it bother you?’
‘Not at all.’
She was a student of sociology who lived locally and passed here every evening to study, but most of all to listen to music. When I quizzed her about being out alone, I learned that she had a special dispensation. Her college could not provide the necessary research material, so she found it online.
‘I love Jacques Brel,’ she confessed.
The lyrics of ‘Ne Me Quitte Pas’ were still circling in my head when I strode back into the lobby and found Ali spruced up, ready to go, and cross. In his van, I was politely chided for wandering the streets.
‘We don’t allow our women out. We like them shut up indoors,’ he stated.
Beyond the van’s window, the sidewalks were paved with men, crouching, walking, leaning, smoking but not a single female in view.
‘Why, if I should be indoors, have I been invited to dinner?’
‘Because you are a stranger. A stranger is always made welcome, even a woman. It is our tradition.’
Ali left me seething.
The faceless high-rise set in a bomb site of a plot at the town’s edge promised a desultory soirée, but, as was so frequently the case, the interior of the apartment was sprucely clean with floor-length white curtains, hand-embroidered with giant scarlet flowers. I was ushered into the sitting room where two daughters and a very shrivelled old lady awaited me.
‘Enjoy your dinner,’ said Ali.
‘Where’re you going?’ I snapped.
He was bound for the neighbouring room to dine with father and brothers. I was to eat with the women. On a coffee table sat two cooked chickens, numerous heaped bowls of salads, fruits, home-made breads, a veritable feast. And no couscous. I was delighted. I was couscoused out. The women directed me to the sofa. The laden table was lifted and placed at my knees. I was the only one eating. We lacked knives, forks and plates. Their burnished faces watched me like hawks, smiles broke open, golden as egg yolks, while I struggled with fingers to do justice to the delicious offerings. Linda, one of nine daughters, seated beside me, suddenly suggested to her mother that a plate was required. A sideboard was opened and one of only two plates was handed to me. Linda’s mother who, shockingly, was only sixty-two, the result of having borne eighteen children, bemoaned the woman’s lot, listing woes and chores while beautiful Linda, soon to marry, had forewarned her fiancé that she would give him but two offspring. Gossip and chatter. We had a very jolly evening.
Linda spoke ‘cassé’ French and with that broken language and her translations, we managed admirably.
‘Who was my age?’ they asked repeatedly.
A cabal we were of female secrets and exchanges. So much so that when Ali returned and saw our merriment, he grew suspicious.
‘What are you laughing at?’ he barked.
My sole distress was when I learned from Linda that she covered up and wore a veil not because her mother had ever insisted – here, the mother shook her head – but because she had read in an Islamic medical book at the school where she taught kindergarten that the cells in a woman’s brain were feeble and less resistant than a man’s; therefore head and face coverings were essential to protect health, preserve life. I had come across this argument in Syria and had dismissed it as nonsense, but hearing it a second time troubled me profoundly. Such misinformation fed to women, to herd them, to keep them powerless and ignorant.
‘Look again at that book,’ I said to her sotto voce, as I was leaving, Ali rattling keys at the door, itching to get me on my way. ‘I think you’ll discover that it was written by a man.’
One more day at Tébessa. With Ali, I visited another out-of-town, long-disused mill site from where a secret, three-kilometre underground passage led back to Tébessa’s Roman and Byzantine ruins within the town’s centre. Two local Berbers thought, though no one knew for sure because theirs is an oral tradition not a written one, that the passage had been used to hide persecuted Christians.
‘But the stories are being left to sleep, to fall into distant memories in the sand,’ one herdsman remarked to us.
The whole region was a veritable picture book, an anthology of a thousand legends, tales, buried epic dramas.
Back at Tébessa, within the Byzantine walls of the old town, we wandered round a stupendous herb market. I tried ‘pulverised tobacco powder’ for the first time, sniffing and coughing, a form of snuff. Ali bought a twig – he could not identify the tree – from a vendor for twenty dinars. He borrowed a well-used knife from a passer-by and split the twig.
‘This is for women to clean their teeth,’ he said.
‘Why women?’
He brushed away at his own set until his lips and tongue turned scarlet, like a whore’s make-up. I was offered the second split but I found the taste too bitter. He made me offerings of postcards, books in Arabic I could not read. Within the classical city, at the Byzantine cathedral, we met a man of ninety-six, dressed in white with big black cracked sunglasses. His nickname, ‘The Shark’. He had spent time in ‘the coal mines of northern Belgium labouring for the French’. He proudly presented the identity tattoos on his wrist and the underside of his arms. He had never joined the Algerian resistance, the maquis, because the French had treated him well enough. When he returned to Tébessa after his years in France he had been foreman of an estate here, farming olives. In those days the drupes were taken all the way to Guelma to be pressed. During French rule, olive farming was an important crop in the environs of Tébessa but no one, as far as he knew, had ever considered reinstating the old Roman presses or utilising those sites. The old man whiled away his days at these ruins, sitting within the skeleton of the basilica, talking to strangers, pondering life. His best friend, long deceased, had been the gardener here, back when the archaeological site had been in better repair.
‘Temples converted into churches and then mosques,’ he growled.
He was a Muslim but he liked sitting in the frame of the great church that had never made it to mosque. His sepulchre it was, he said, from where he could contemplate the centuries of bones and civilisations disintegrating in the sands.
El-Oued, the City of a Thousand Domes, lay at the centre of an area of oases in the northern Sahara. A back-breaking drive south of Tébessa, it was to have been my final port of call before returning to Algiers to make my way to Sicily. Up at first light the following morning, the weather had grown exceptionally cold. A sharp wind cut through us as a greyish blanket of sand rose up out of the desert, closing out the horizon. It reminded me of flocks of herons in flight. Mohammed was unhappy, fearful of the journey that lay ahead. The surrounding mountains began to disappear as though a metal grille was closing in around us. We inched on southwards for over an hour in sombre silence along what must once have been a road and was now little more than a narrow track. The challenges of harsh desertlands in such a vehicle made the going sufficiently arduous w
ithout the added pitfalls of a full-blown sandstorm. Eventually, we reached a roadblock. Two wind-fatigued police officers, looking like a pair of exhausted rammaals, sand porters, flagged us down.
‘The road south is closed off due to storms and flash flooding,’ they informed us. Inundations had washed away entire tracks. Herds of goats, ‘numbers reaching two thousand’, had been killed, drowned in landslides. ‘Two drivers drowned.’
‘Is there any way round it?’ I begged.
They shook their heads. ‘You must turn back.’
‘How long before it blows over?’
‘Days, could be weeks.’
I had been hoping to meet up with a hydrologist from El-Oued whose expertise was water management. El-Oued offered a vision of the future that was positive, constructive. At the end of the late fourteenth century, Sidi Mastour, an Arab, arrived in El-Oued from the eastern Sahara. He brought with him date-palm seedlings. He believed that even in this arid region the trees could flourish if the subterranean water source was tapped. He taught the locals to carry off the top level of sand and create sunken farms, craters known as aghwaat. Into these were planted the palms. The trees’ roots were able to reach the water and so they flourished and became the foundation of the Algerian date industry. Today, the water table lies much deeper. The challenges are to keep the sand managed and to irrigate the plants, drip by drip, and to choose crops that can survive. The olive fits the bill better than any, I had been told. I had dearly wanted to see how this operated, this vision for the future. To learn of the olive’s root systems. To see in what way, if any, I could put this knowledge to use on our farm, too. Had it been a day, even two, I would have sat it out but an indefinite length of time was not feasible. I needed to move on to Sicily. Turning back was a blow, a bitter disappointment. Still, Mohammed was happy, returning home a few days earlier and still getting paid. He swung his boneshaker about and retraced our route to Annaba.
At Algiers airport, landside, I was browsing in the bookshop when a strangled, blood-curdling ululation broke out. It stopped everyone in their tracks, causing a restrained panic. Resonances of the recent bombings still lingered in the hearts of people. I hurried with my bags to see what it was about. Standing before the sliding doors at Arrivals was a short, pear-shaped Arab in long beige dress and grey headscarf. She was holding the lower palms of her hands over her eyes, her wrists covering the lower part of her face. The sound she was emitting was a low-spirited chirruping. Others who had come to look moved on, no longer interested as the distressed woman slumped on to a bench. Another woman seated there, also in full dress code, stared straight ahead, ignoring her new neighbour, determined not to engage with the other who was now howling dry tears. I inched forward and took her hand. Limply, she accepted the warmth without registering it. I looked about for a security officer, beckoning someone who could take control, assist.
‘What do you want?’ he snapped.
‘Can you help this lady, please?’
He shook his head. Her son had been killed in France. They were bringing in the body, the coffin, off the recently landed plane. By now, a small huddle of women had gathered round the grieving mother, babbling in Arabic. I released my hand and slipped out of their way.
The officer looked at me and said: ‘She shouldn’t have come here. Her place is in the house. Not here.’
I walked off without responding through passport control, into the no-man’s-land of travellers, onwards to my next destination, Sicily. The woman’s heart-rending cries were still audible, accompanying me all the way. It was my last image of Algeria.
The five-times-a-day muezzin calling the faithful to prayer, yes, that would abide in my memory, as well as the dust, the desert sands, the aridity, the weeks of torrential rains. But this woman weeping sank deep into my bones. Weeping for Algeria, it seemed, for a country snagged up in transition. A country with dreams, plans, possibilities, full of generosity and welcomes, caught somewhere between violence, turmoil and repression, between poverty and ignorance, with little time for its past and a future not even sketched.
SICILY
What struck me when I landed in Sicily and began to penetrate the island’s countryside from the Falcone-Borsellino airport to Palermo was the vibrancy of nature’s colours, the clean and cared-for roadsides, fields, the young women in their skimpy outfits expressing an easy sexuality. And pigs. I smiled to myself. It had been a while since I had seen pens of muddied pigs gathered round troughs gorging happily. It was almost the end of April and I had left the world of Islam behind me, though not entirely. Two centuries of Arab occupation of Sicily had left many traces. The dialect abounded in archaic Arabic words and Arab blood flowed through Sicilian veins.
Ziz, Paleopolis, Panormus, Palermo. The coastal city of Palermo assumed many identities and saw many conquerors. Its geographical location, a strategically perfect transit port right at the heart of the Mediterranean, has always given it great allure. In its heyday, Palermo was judged to be one of the grandest and most luxurious cities in Europe and the Palermitans of today still regard it as such. Palermo was established around a natural harbour on the north-western coast of the island in the eighth century BC by Phoenician tradesmen from Tyre. They called it Ziz, ‘flower’. It is tucked into the centre of a wide bay enclosed to the north by the Pellegrino Mount and to the south by Capo Zafferano.
The Greeks, who had known the island as Trinacria, or ‘three tips’ because of its shape, occupied the port city some one hundred years later and rechristened it Panormus, which is ‘all harbour’. They lived in Panormus, established settlements at various points on the island and traded, skirmished and fought with the Carthaginians. During the First Punic War, Palermo was conquered by the Romans and, when the Roman Empire split, it fell under Byzantine control until the Arabs arrived in AD 831. Under Arab rule, until 1072 (when the Normans took the reins), Palermo enjoyed a period of prosperity and creativity and became a jewel in the Islamic casket.
After several weeks of travelling in the world of Islam, I was out of step with the calendar of Christian Europe. May Day was upon us and the island was overrun with vacationers from the Italian mainland. For my first night, I booked a hotel on the north-western coast just outside the capital, near the city’s commercial port. It proved to be a sumptuous mansion, constructed at the end of the nineteenth century and designed in the Art Nouveau style – when Liberty was all the rage – for a powerful Sicilian family. The Florios were members of the rising class of rich merchants. They had amassed fortunes through several businesses, the most important of which were Marsala wine and the canning of tuna fish. In the lobby hung a painting of a graceful woman sporting a magnificent rope of pearls set against a black cocktail dress. This was Donna Florio, a renowned beauty in her day. Wife of one of the two brothers who had founded the merchant dynasty, she had been the empress of fashion and her lavish dinner parties at their city residence, Villino Florio, were legendary.
This hotel, set on a low bluff at the foot slopes of Monte Pellegrino, had been for the Florio clan a weekend seaside retreat. It was way beyond my budget, but I had found nowhere else and its history offered me a starting point for my travels. Where there was canned tuna, there was certainly olive oil.
Two perennial images of Sicily are its Mafia and its olive oil, and they were not unrelated. The fame of Italian olive oil worldwide, particularly in the United States, was born when Sicilian Mafia families based in North America began to transport it across the Atlantic. Those Mafia families needed an honest business to cover for their steeped-in-vice dealings and olive oil suited them down to the ground. The island was swimming in it and it came cheap. Why not turn it to their advantage?
I asked the concierge whether he could assist me in contacting a member of the esteemed Florio family; one who could tell me something about their heritage.
‘They’re all dead, lady,’ was the surprising reply.
I knew the house had long since been sold on but I had not exp
ected the Florios to lack survivors.
‘No one living?’
‘Tutti morti, lady. Like I tell you, all dead.’
Everyone addressed me as ‘lady’: ‘You wanna order, lady?’ ‘Hey, lady, you got bags?’
‘What happened?’
The porter shrugged. ‘Let’s just call it a decline in fortunes.’
Palermo was like a conglomeration of everywhere I had visited round the Med and yet it was very much its own personality, if not its own master. The past, a thousand pasts, lingered everywhere. Still, somehow, it was difficult to grasp. It was theatrical, had a grandeur about it yet its character slipped like oil through my fingers, but I loved wandering its streets, its stylish quarters, peering into its shockingly decaying slums, its historic centre.
Two uniformed polizia leaning against a blue and white police car; a young woman, garishly attired, pressed up against one of the men, rubbing her hand up and down his gun, caressing it as though it were his member. Slickly attired, iron-grey men, resembling retired lawyers, judges, bankers, sat perusing Giornale di Sicilia, the island’s daily paper, at outdoor cafés. Fleets of red Ferraris – more Ferraris than I had seen in my life – snarled up the streets. Handsome buildings blackened by fumes and pollution; classical buildings dripping with hanging plants; the high-pitched wail of police sirens, carabinieri on the move, possibly escorting judges, prisoners or witnesses linked to yet another episode in the scandali di mafioso. The decaying quarters alongside the loud displays of wealth were hard to stomach. The Vucciria food market stretching through the streets of the city’s historic heart with a mix of Arab and Latin faces, men with coppola caps, naked light bulbs dangling from tarpaulins, the cries of the hawkers, crates of olives and capers. In the Sicilian dialect Vucciria means noisy, vociferous cries. This outdoor market has existed for seven centuries. An expression in Sicilian says: Quannu s’asciucanu i balati dà Vucciria. Loosely translated: When the streets of Vucciria run dry … or It could never happen. But the fears among the stallholders I chatted with were that the market could disappear. The Mafia were moving in, levelling the crumbling tenements, handing out construction contracts to friends.
The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2) Page 30