TUNISIAN NEWSLETTER: PART TWO

DINING AND DEATH IN SIDI BOU SAID AND LA MARSA

La Marsa: the photo above is a detail taken from the one below.

“Yet whether the pilgrim air which the stranger wore kindled his fantasy or whether some other physical or psychological influence came into play he could not tell, but he felt the most surprising consciousness of a widening of inward barriers, a kind of vaulting unrest, a youthfully ardent thirst for distant scenes - a feeling so lively and so new, or at least so long ago outgrown and forgotten, that he stood there rooted to the spot, his eyes on the ground and his hands clasped behind him, exploring these sentiments of his, their bearing and their scope.”

I tried to get to both places on the train. But each day I attempted to do so I was told by a ticket seller peering at me from inside his booth and a train conductor who peered in the same way from inside his boredom as he herded travelers haphazardly into a couple of cars on a platform at the Tunis Marine terminal that I needed instead to take a bus because the train did not go to Sidi Bou Said and La Marsa, the two Tunisian beach towns I had been longing to visit before my departure for Tangiers on Sunday. They each, the ticket seller and the conductor, had looked at me with that curious mixture I continue to encounter here in Tunis which makes up for its own curt lack of curiosity with a quick and careful display of kindness that could be interpreted as concern if it only lasted longer. When I finally took a Bolt - the ride-hailing app based in Estonia which works splendidly in Tunisia - I witnessed trains arriving in both places once I too had arrived by this other mode. I was curious about that but kept it curt.

“They are not safe, the trains, nor really are the buses,” said Cryine Gannoun, the Artistic Director of Tunis’s El Hamra, Théâtre de tous les Arts. We were having a delicious lunch in Sidi Bou Said at La Villa Bleue on a terrace which afforded us remarkable views of the Mediterranean below. “Stick to taxis and Bolt,” she said, offering me a bit of advice - which maybe I was being offered in a more obtuse way by the ticket seller and conductor in their insistence that the trains were not for me - before Cyrine and I turned again to our conversation about theatre and art and politics and how culture has always played a part, so often thrillingly but at times with an anxious throb to its thrill, in the life of her beloved and ancient North African country. We had originally planned to meet in Tunis in the Medina at Fondouk el Attarine but she found herself closer to Sidi Bou Said as the day approached for our lunch date and we decided to meet at Villa Bleue after also considering Dar Zarrruk which offers its own astonishing views of the Mediterranean. When eating by myself I tend toward cheaper cafes and found one each in La Marsa and Sidi Bou Said which I liked. I spent a lot of time at bleue! in Sidi when I was there for a day and night having found an inexpensive but lovely Airbnb room for the evening. The staff at bleue! was so friendly and cool and welcoming. And I liked North Shore in La Marsa when I was so in need of a refuge during my afternoon there. If you want a more expansive cafe with the views to match, then check out the rooftop tea salon at La Marsa’s Zephyr shopping mall. But I’d steer clear of Cafe des Delices in Sidi Bou Said. It’s a tourist trap - albeit one with its own sweeping views. I had a tiny espresso and a small bottle of water and was charged 27 dinars which seemed steep to me so I checked the menu posted on the way out and it should have been only 11. Nothing obtuse about that. I didn’t go back to argue in a language that wouldn’t be understood and marked it up to paying a hefty surcharge for the view itself. Yet I did make a note to warn you here to check the menu in such places before you order so you know what the bill should be. It only came to $9 when it should have been $3 but I do hate being rightly spotted for such an easy mark. I told Cyrine about it. She smiled slightly and knowingly nodded, a dalliance of disapproval with a desire not to talk about it really. We moved on to more important subjects - fathers, families, the mining of theatrical narratives buried within the throb and thrill of our own bodies which is the basis of El Hamra’s artistic practice.

“His love of the sea had profound roots: the hardworking artist's desire to rest, his longing to get away from the demanding diversity of phenomena and take shelter in the bosom of simplicity and immensity; a forbidden penchant that was entirely antithetical to his mission and, for that very reason, seductive - a proclivity for the unorganized, the immeasurable, the eternal: for nothingness.”

I walked along the beach for a few moments in Sidi Bou Said but I hadn’t gone there really to experience the nothingness of a beach day. I had wanted instead to soak in the mostly pristine sunlit beauty of its blue-and-white aesthetic (as had British occultist Aliester Crowley and Swiss/German artist Paul Klee) and, honestly, get away from the trash-strewn streets of Tunis which had become for me visually oppressive. A couple of days later, however, when I arrived in La Marsa I headed straight for the beach in my rolled up jeans, long sleeve white shirt with those sleeves rolled up just above my elbows, and black sneakers. I did not wear a bathing suit - didn’t bring one along - because I had no intention of showing off my body and getting into the water. I once prided myself in the way my body looked. But as a 68-year-old man who suffered a broken shoulder 16 months ago and thus, even though mostly rehabilitated, have found it difficult to work out with weights, I find it even more difficult not to feel shame about how my body now looks without my clothes covering it up. I did unbutton my shirt as I sat down on the sand and stared out at the Mediterranean but I couldn’t take it all the way off. I just couldn’t. I stared too at the older Muslim women, mostly covered themselves, who did, unlike me, have enough gumption to get into the water. I sat watching them as they allowed the ebbing to and fro of the sea to wash over them as they sat just in its shallowness or lay in its lungeing all about them. I compared my shame with their sureness about their religious reasons to stay covered up. Shame or sureness, the result was the same: our older bodies remained unseen.

A beautiful boy about 16 or 17 then emerged from the water and engaged with the older women. It suddenly felt as if there in the exotic environs of North Africa as the Mediterranean motioned toward me but did not quite yet beckon that I was another writer, Gustav Aschenbach, 15 years alas my junior, in an Arab version of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and that boy who took no notice of me whatsoever was Tadzio. The more I watched him head back into the water and then emerge, head back in, emerge, I began to long not for him exactly but the water that took him then gave him back. There was a rhythmic sway to the way they - water and boy - came together then separated which both lulled and aroused me. It did not seem correct to want the boy so I wanted it instead, the water, the sea, the massiveness of the Mediterranean which bonded with me in my correctness and beckoned me knowing too it must replace the boy. But would it be safe to strip down to my boxer briefs and head into it? Would that be against some code or law in this Tunisian city although the young woman next to me under her umbrella was wearing a bikini? Would my wallet be safe in my jeans if I took my jeans off and folded them up? Would my phone not be stolen? Would I be arrested for wearing my underwear?

I was just about to ask the woman in the bikini if she would watch my stuff if I went into the water when at the side of my vision, which had until that moment been taken up by the boy’s beauty amidst the bounty of the sea, I began to notice peripherally in the distance a disturbance of some sort. At first I thought I was beginning to get one of my silent migraines that announces itself with an aura at that exact same peripheral spot, a long line of color that can blur and vibrate and move about just as what I was seeing in the distance was moving about in a blur of activity as it was trying to emerge from the water.

I turned and shaded my eyes and tried to focus on what was happening.

Two white men it appeared were pulling another white person from the water.

They stumbled.

They stood again.

They pulled the body of the man closer to the shore.

I thought the person being saved was stumbling too but then I saw that he was dead weight.

Or was he dead?

The two struggling men finally pulled him to shore down where there were lots of umbrellas ordered in rows where most of the other beachgoers had arranged themselves.

They all were standing now and watching what was happening.

A young lifeguard carrying a rudimentary resuscitation device went running by me and down the beach toward them.

A small circle was now around the body lying on the sand and the young life guard and two others were taking turns administering CPR and doing chest compressions on the body.

I could only see the body’s two white legs emerging from the small circle now surrounding it.

The older women in front of me were now standing in the shallow water looking down the beach.

The women in the bikini stood to watch.

I too stood now to do so.

The beautiful boy bounded back in the water that would not be denied his beauty just as down the beach it would not, it seemed, be denied this life.

I walked down there to get a closer look hoping it wasn’t a child.

It wasn’t.

It was an older man who appeared to be 15 years my junior.

I had just begun to think of the strawberries and cholera that finally killed Gustav Aschenbach in Death in Venice when trying to recall its plot to stop any further evidence of my being wrongly aroused by the beauty of the underaged boy and now here was this death in Marsa - not Gustav’s, not mine - caused by the Mediterranean.

The chest compressions continued.

I dared to come just a bit closer.

I turned from Mann to meditation, to prayer and kept repeating one word in a whisper, “Breathe breathe breathe breathe breathe …”

The resuscitation was not reviving the body.

“Breathe breathe breathe …”

It took the ambulance about 30 minutes to arrive.

The body still showed no signs of life when they put him on the stretcher.

One of the men who had dragged him from the sea - a son or a nephew or a brother or a friend - started yelling at the circle of Tunisians and Arab tourists who had been watching it all . “Go! Go! Go!” she shouted in anger, “Go away! Please! Go!” He shooed them as if they were a herd of stubborn goats. A woman in a hijab and abaya soaked with the Mediterranean raised her arms and hands to the blue startled sky and wailed in a voice that floated up and over the water. I assumed she was mentioning the God to whom she motioned but no longer beckoned. She and the man bellowed back and forth, each an errant echo of the other. The sea’s silence itself echoed the body it just gave back.

I walked the length of the beach.

The woman in the bikini when I arrived back where I had started asked me in a language I did not understand a question I did.

“He’s dead, I think,” I said. “It was not a child.”

The woman did not understand me but she did comprehend the tragedy we had just witnessed.

The older Muslim women sat back down in the water.

The beautiful boy’s beauty bobbed in the distance where the sea allowed it to live.

I walked on and into the North Shore cafe. I ordered a chocolate cookie and a coffee. I did not tell the kid behind the counter that someone had just drowned. I sat at an outside table in my utter solitude and looked up quotes from Death in Venice trying to find solace in the contextualizing of the strangeness of beauty abutting tragedy in a fictive narrative so it wouldn’t feel so awful and foreign and … felt. Inside of me was a kind of vaulting unrest. I was so far away from everything I really knew and yet I needed distance.

“The observations and encounters of a solitary, taciturn man are vaguer and at the same times more intense than those of a sociable man; his thoughts are deeper, odder and never without a touch of sadness. Images and perceptions that could be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions, occupy him unduly, become more intense in the silence, become significant, become an experience, an adventure, an emotion. Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden.”

“Breathe.”

“Breathe.”

“Breathe.”

“It seemed to him the pale and lovely Summoner out there smiled at him and beckoned; as though, with the hand he lifted from his hip, he pointed outward as he hovered on before into an immensity of richest expectation. And, as so often before, he rose to follow.”

Breathe.

Breathe.

Breathe.