The truth is that the Ribat is now so squeaky clean that it’s lost a bit of character. Lew Grade’s Jesus of Nazareth set, which once loomed up beside it, has long gone, replaced by ornamental gardens, and where we lounged around between takes, being rude about each other’s beards, is now paved and swept clean as a whistle.
Our art department and the current restorers were both in the same game, trying to bring an ancient, partly ruined fortress to life, and to be honest I think we did a better job. The Ribat is still a good place to visit, with high walls and battlements completely, indeed recklessly accessible, but I preferred it with the market stalls, exlepers and writing on the wall.
We spend the night in nearby Sousse at another big, comfortable holiday factory by the sea. Though business is down by 50 per cent since September 11th, it’s still as busy as a railway station, and what it must be like at full capacity is terrible to contemplate.
I meet up in a local cafe with a group of Tunisians all involved in the tourist industry. Around us are tables full of men playing cards. Some football game flickers away, largely ignored, on a wall-mounted television. El Mejid, a pale-skinned, squarely built Tunisian, who looks more Irish than Arab, runs Berber evenings six days a week out at an old olive oil factory. Belly-dancing, bareback riders, waiters with bottles on their heads, a meal and all the wine you can drink for 13 dinars a head, roughly PS6.75. One of his friends puffs on a chicha, a hubble-bubble pipe; another, wearing a tracksuit, arrives late after a work-out. He looks tired and his back is giving him trouble. He’s the only one who breaks ranks and expresses any doubts about the benefits of tourism. He worries about the growth of the cities, with a corresponding break-up of family life and threat to traditions.
‘The wedding,’ he says, ‘the traditional wedding used to be about one week. Now it’s only one day or two days.’
His colleagues shake their heads. They seem willing to pay almost any price to bring in the visitors. I ask if they see any point in limiting the new developments.
‘No limit, I think. We used to receive three millions and now about five millions. Maybe in ten years ten millions.’
Ten millions. On current figures that’s more than the entire population.
Day Ninety-One
SIDI BOU SAID
Sidi Bou Said is next door to Carthage and both are salubrious suburbs of the capital, Tunis. The town is up on a hill, and our hotel looks out over the green and swaying trees of the coastal plain, towards the Gulf of Tunis and the 2000-foot mountains of the Cap Bon peninsula. It’s a grand and comfortable view, full of colour and pleasant rambling houses dotted about. The only similarity with the bald slopes of the south are the small white-domed marabouts, tombs of holy men, which are scattered through the country. Sidi Bou Said was himself a holy man (‘sidi‘ in Arabic is equivalent to ‘saint’ or ‘master’), who, after a trip to Mecca at the end of the twelfth century, settled on this hill and lived a much respected ascetic life.
Several centuries later, Sidi Bou Said’s fine location seduced a quite un-ascetic set of Europeans, led by a rich Frenchman, Baron Rodolphe d’Erlanger, who built an Anglo-Oriental mansion which is still here today. He created an international appetite for these picturesque cobbled streets on the hill and, rather like Tangier, Sidi Bou Said was near enough to Europe for writers and artists to pick up the scent, Paul Klee, August Macke and Andre Gide amongst them.
It’s still a highly fashionable, moderately bohemian enclave and its centre is the celebrated Cafe des Nattes.
It stands in a dominant position at the top of Sidi Bou Said High Street, and even when you’ve climbed up the hill there’s still a score of steep steps between you and the door, so you’re guaranteed to enter breathless. The wide, but intimate, rectangular room was once part of a mosque and dates back to the fourteenth century. There is a well-used feel to it, a definite sense of layers of history, behind the black and white horseshoe arch of the doorway. It’s a bit self-consciously traditional - very woody, with striped pillars and roof beams painted red, white and green, song birds in filigree cages, old wireless sets, black and white archive photos of Sidi Bou Said on the wall and a man behind the counter with a sprig of jasmine behind his ear. Wise old waiters in green and black striped jackets serve a largely young, international clientele sitting cross-legged on woven straw mats, the nattes that gave the place its name.
I order a thick, rich Turkish coffee and a glass of the aux pignons, tea with pine nuts, for my companion Moez, a Tunisian film producer and director. Several people are puffing contentedly at bubbling chichas, so we order one to share. Moez says there’s an extra intensity to the smoking, since Ramadan began two days ago, forbidding the taking of anything by mouth during the hours of daylight. Not that this produces a drastically slimmed-down nation. Apparently, the month of fasting results in such indulgence during the hours of darkness that people come out of it having put on weight.
The chicha is brought over by the waiter and set with courteous formality on a green baize table beside me. It’s the size of a small vacuum cleaner, and comes with various accessories, like a silver tray of fresh charcoal and a pair of tongs. My breath draws the smoke from the coal down through the tobacco and it cools as it passes the water chamber. It gurgles pleasantly and is completely legal. According to Moez, the sound is an important part of the relaxing process. The other is breath control. An accomplished smoker can keep the pipe going for an hour or more.
‘It’s not easy,’ Moez cautions, as I start puffing away like a steam engine. ‘Both of us would burn the tobacco in ten minutes.’
We talk about his work. He’s making a film about the Tunisians who died in the Second World War. From the war movies I remember, you’d be forgiven for thinking any Tunisians were involved at all.
Plenty of big foreign epics have been made in the country, including Star Wars, The English Patient and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but Moez prefers to work on local subjects.
‘We need to see our images, you know. The audiences here like to see Tunisian faces, Tunisian stories, Tunisian jokes.’
Day Ninety-Two
SIDI BOU SAID
Out early. Sidi Bou Said is very walkable. It’s spotlessly clean with almost every wall and house and building painted white and cerulean blue. Bougainvillea and morning-glory burst out of tight, green gardens and spill over into the streets. The national flag is everywhere, red and white crescent and stars wrapped round lampposts and on bunting hung across the street. Tomorrow is the fourteenth anniversary of what the Tunisians celebrate as ‘Le Changement’, the day in 1987 when the great founding president, Habib Bourguiba, was declared senile and unfit to rule and power was painlessly transferred to his deputy, Ben Ali.