Chacho, black and lustrous and every inch the bull, notices us as we approach the Cuadra San Francisco ranch and rises from his resting place under a tree next to the corral to meander over in very un-bull-like fashion to be petted.
“What is he here for?” I ask one of the ranch hands as I run my hand up and down along the sleek path between Chacho’s eyes and mouth.
“He’s our dog,” the ranch hand tells me with a little smile, and indeed, despite the two very visible, very sharp horns between Chacho’s ears, his big, long-lashed, bovine eyes communicate nothing but gentleness and a doglike craving for affection.
“We also use him to train horses for bullfighting.”
My mind immediately shuts down on that idea before the full implications of it can take hold; it is, however, pretty clear that Chacho won’t meet the same fate as many of his bull brethren. In a bullring, he’d pose about as much of a threat as Ferdinand, the flower-picking bull of the children’s book.
Twelve hours earlier, I was leaving my house in the cold blackness of a February morning in New Jersey. I’m a little disoriented as a result of now finding my very travel-weary self on the opposite corner of the continent, between the Sea of Cortez and the desert and mountains of Los Cabos, surrounded by free-roaming, shiny roosters, all manner of horses, and a pacifistic bull named Chacho.
A few minutes later, I’m being carried across the desert among cacti and canyons of granite by a 9-year-old white Arabian mare named Paloma, who, having assessed my riding skill or lack thereof right off the bat, picks her way over the sand and stones of the Baja peninsula desert with as much delicacy as if she were treading on broken glass. She’s the equine equivalent of a Segway, responding to my intention to ask something of her before I actually have to ask.
Valente Barrena, in what appear to be brand-new jeans, an immaculate blue-checked shirt, and a straw cowboy hat, rides alongside of our little group of city slickers on his muscular quarter horse, swinging a lasso which, I presume, would be used in the unlikely event that one of our horses spooks and makes a run for it. Enrique, a ranch hand who speaks no English, leads our little procession, turning every so often to lean his hand on his horse’s rump and make sure that all is well with us.
Valente is the son of the ranch’s owner, Francisco Barrena. Francisco spent much of his life in San Diego, training horses and riders for dressage, polo, jumping, and the like. When he was ready to retire, he returned to San Jose del Cabo to relax with eight horses, the desert, and the sea. It didn’t quite work out that way. There are now about 50 horses on the ranch, where the animals are trained and bred, and where human animals who want a break from the party culture of Cabo San Lucas and poolside margaritas at the resort can come to ride along the beach or a canyon trail, or take riding lessons.
“The difference is we love horses,” Valente tells us, comparing Cuadra San Francisco to other equestrian outfits. It shows—all of the horses on the ranch are sleek, spirited, and well fed.
I’ve been told that there are coyotes, rattlesnakes, bobcats, and roadrunners in this desert, but, to both my relief and disappointment (it hasn’t taken me long to come to trust Paloma’s discretion in unexpected circumstances), we don’t see them. There are only doves saying goodnight to one another up in the hills.
By the time we reach the end of the trail and are ready to turn back toward the ranch, my fatigue and disorientation have been transformed into a serene bliss that mere landscapes don’t often inspire in me. The light has gone soft and pink, the sea is on the horizon, and the only sounds are the calls of the doves and our horses’ hoofsteps in the sand.
Paloma, hungry and tired from being ridden badly for the past two hours, wants to go home. Her slow, patient gait occasionally breaks into a trot. My legs are aching from being in one position for so long.
“Yo no se si yo puedo caminar despues de este,” I tell Valente and Enrique in terrible Spanish as we approach the ranch. And I’m right—for the first few minutes after I dismount and turn Paloma over to the care of Enrique, my knees are locked into semi-bowlegged position. It seems a small price to pay. I stroke Paloma’s neck and thank her for her patience and forbearing; she responds with a shudder that is the equine equivalent of, “Whatever.” The ranch is settling down for the night. Even Chacho doesn’t rise again to say goodbye as we leave.
Valente has told us that they are thinking about doing full-moon night rides through the desert in the future. In the moonlight, these canyons, hills, and dry riverbeds must look like some starkly beautiful ghost-ridden planet. Put me back up on Paloma, and I’ll be up for anything.
(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008
Friday, March 28, 2008
Sunday, March 9, 2008
How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Tunisia
(I wrote this several years ago--NB.)
Grape vines, fields of lavender. Perfect rows of olive, almond, pomegranate, and pistachio trees laid out along the hills. Square fences constructed out of live, flowering cactus plants. To the west as our bus heads south from Tunis to the island of Djerba, the Atlas Mountains run back in low-lying layers and peaks back toward Algeria, pale and hazy in the morning, richly shadowed at twilight. Women and their children tend herds of sheep and goats by the side of the road, or fill jars from wells, or languidly ride atop donkey carts loaded with hay or branches of palm. Closer to Djerba, camels and their tenders drink water and rest in the last, dusty light of the day.
In the villages, schoolchildren and old men sharing sheesha pipes and tea watch our bus pass with mild curiosity. The younger children wear pink school uniforms, and the older girls wear jeans, sneakers, navy-blue tunics, and headscarves. They hang out together under the shade of trees or bus stops, eating ice cream, jostling each other the way schoolkids do everywhere.
Mesmerized by the passing landscape for eight hours, I’m thinking, What the hell was I afraid of?
Packing for my trip a few days earlier, I had a very clear idea of what I might have to fear in Tunisia. For weeks, every day’s news seemed part of a conspiracy to make my visit an increasingly bad idea. Did I really want to be an American in a predominantly Moslem country during the Iraq war, when sickening pictures of abused and tortured Iraqi prisoners were leaking out every day, and when the Middle East road to peace had run off into another ditch? Not to mention the fact that I was visiting the country in part to cover the annual Jewish pilgrimage to the La Ghriba synagogue on Djerba, where only two years ago terrorists had blown up a truck and killed more than 20 visitors.
I’m not Arab-phobic‹quite the contrary, in fact; my rants about my belief that racism against Arabs, Indians, and Pakistanis is still condoned in the U.S. have often made me something less than the most popular girl at the American party. I am, however, Al Quaeda-phobic, and, it was a real struggle against what I felt to be a shameful paranoia to make the decision to go.
But how often would I have the opportunity to go to Tunisia, a place with one of those names that never fails to ring in my mind like a particularly evocative line of poetry? And just when could I honestly expect the world to become a much safer place?
I had to go. I would simply stay away from large crowds and maintain the same indefinable "safety practices" that I practice when riding the subways in Manhattan.
******
On my first evening in Tunis, our group (I was traveling with other writers and some representatives of the Tunisian Tourism Board, who I’d already managed to annoy with my pre-trip questions about security) toured the artists’ village of Sidi Bou Said. Built in the 15th-century by Arabs who had just fled Andalusia, it’s an insanely beautiful labyrinth of cobbled streets, white houses with Mediterranean-blue trim, and the same interior courtyards and fountains that one finds in Seville. Tunisia, I was thinking, just might be one of those rare destinations that live up to live up to my hard-to-live-up-to dreams of them.
There were, of course, vendors everywhere‹friendly, about an "8" on the 1-to-10 vendor-pushiness scale, and eager to talk. That evening I had the first few of the encounters that repeated themselves everywhere I went in Tunisia:
"Hello! English?"
"No."
"French?"
"No."
"German?"
"No."
"Czech?"
"No." (Here I would smile.) "American."
Skipping only about a half of a beat, my questioner would raise his eyebrows and exclaim, "Ah! American! But how do you like Tunisia?"
Here I would take the opportunity to mix things up a little more by speaking Arabic. "Quais. Helwa (nice)."
"Ah! You speak some Arabic?"
"Shwaya-shwaya (just a little)."
No one, it seemed, expected to find an American‹much less one who could speak a little Arabic in their beautiful country (it was often pointed out to me, however, that I spoke "Egyptian Arabic", but that I was forgiven). As it turned out, every day gave me more reason to be glad that I was one of those rare creatures.
******
Only on a few occasions did the subject of politics, or terrorism, or the war in Iraq, come up in my encounters with Tunisians, and I was usually the one who started the conversation. No one I spoke to was anything less than measured and polite in their responses. The general feeling seemed to be that the war was very bad and that the Bush administration was, shall we say, somewhat less than honest and sympathetic in its dealings with the Arab world, but the people I talked to seemed to believe that most Americans did not share the administration’s outlook. (One of our hosts, who spoke no English, did a very funny impression of George W. Bush. Screwing up his face until all of his features seemed to sink into one another, he muttered, "Saddam!" and started shooting erratically into the sky with imaginary pistols pulled from imaginary holsters all over his body.) In Tunisia, at least, where income from American tourism has decreased dramatically since 9/11, people simply seemed happy to have an American visitor find the country "Quais."
And only once did anyone mention 9/11, in an odd, benign exchange on my first evening in among the stalls in Sidi Bou Said. After the usual "Where are you from?" conversation, a vendor of jewelry and assorted Tunisian-style trinkets, a very handsome young man with honey-and-gold-colored eyes asked me in insufficient (for the subject) English if the "very big place" in New York was still there. I didn’t understand what he meant; he clarified by saying, "the big things that we blew up." His use of the word "we", at least as I interpreted it, sounded less like a form of alliance with Al Quaeda than a simple attempt to make a distinction between Americans and Arabs that an American might understand.
"Don’t you know?" I asked him in Arabic.
He seemed genuinely confused. A French girl, it turned out, had either told him that the World Trade Center was still there, or that something else had already been built in its place. The girl, who had apparently spent a few days at his house and had not kept her promise to stay in touch after she left, was clearly the bigger issue in our conversation.
"Americans are very gentle, very nice," he told me. "French people are not so nice." Being jilted by a European girl, it seemed, was much more troubling to him than the state of world affairs, or perhaps amounted to the same thing.
******
During our first dinner in Tunisia, over grilled loup de mer, many glasses of (surprisingly good) Tunisian wine, and boukha (a fig-based liquor which tastes like the Tunisian version of moonshine), I learned that my fellow travelers shared my concerns about security at the Djerba festival. I was relieved, at least, to find out that if I was, in fact, being a bit of a drama queen about the whole thing, I wasn’t the only one.
That night, standing on my balcony overlooking the city of Tunis, I gazed at the yellow lights spread out along the dark horizon like strings of blazing yellow diamonds, and listened to the sounds of traffic, laughter, music, and barking dogs that echoed up the hill from all over the city. In the morning a rainbow straddled the hazy hills and whitewashed houses of the city, and the deep blue harbor.
I couldn’t believe that I was in North Africa.
******
There were policemen all over Tunisia. From a distance, their dark, white-trimmed uniforms looked sharp and imposing; close-up, however, I could see that they were worn at the edges, and that the white gloves had holes in them. The officers were stern, but polite and respectful.
As we approached Djerba after our long drive south, there was even more of a police presence, and there were quite a few roadblocks. The Tunisian government seemed to be taking security very seriously, especially where the trouble had happened several years earlier.
We were exhausted by the time our bus reached the Djerba ferry terminal, and it was dark. I stood on an upper deck on the boat, shivering in a cool breeze that would, a few days later, develop into a furious, cold dervish of a wind spiraling up from the Sahara. Below me, the police were checking parcels, peering into cars, questioning passengers. Jews and Arabs got out of their cars to breathe in the sea air and watch the approaching lights of Djerba. If they took notice of anyone, it was the American journalists watching from above for signs of trouble.
There was no trouble.
******
Jews and Arabs have coexisted on the island of Djerba for almost 1,500 years. It was very important to our Tunisian hosts that we see how peaceful that coexistence has remained, even through the worst of times in the Middle East.
The worst of times for Djerba came in 2002, when a truck loaded with explosives detonated outside of the La Ghriba synagogue at the height of the festival. The majority of those killed were German tourists (Jews from around the world make the pilgrimage every spring). The Tunisian government first called the explosion an accident, but it soon became clear that Al Quaeda was responsible for the attack.
One of my fellow journalists tried to reassure me about our visit to the festival by saying that terrorists tend to strike a target only once. Someone reminded her about the World Trade Center.
******
On the eve of the festival, we gathered after dinner on the vividly colored cushions of our hotel’s sheesha room to have a smoke and some boukha. Ali, our funny, charming waiter (who retained his dignity even while wearing a rather silly costume and pointy, upward-curling shoes‹he looked much better after work in his elegant suit) brought us different varieties of tobacco to try. My favorite was delicately flavored with apples.
A group of men and women came in, in chic European dress. Accompanied by the hotel’s oud player, the women began to sing in Arabic, beautifully. Ali (who had also noticed my "Egyptian Arabic") told me that the songs were those of Um Khaltoum, the much-beloved Egyptian singer (her American counterpart might be Rosemary Clooney, or Billy Holiday). When I stood closer to listen, the best of the singers, who resembled Jeanne Moreau, invited me to sit with them. I was fascinated by the pleasure they took in singing; everyone knew the words.
Although they spoke no English, they were able to tell me that they were a group of Moslem, Jewish, and Christian Tunisians, now living in Paris. They were in Djerba to help promote understanding and tolerance among the religions. It seemed to me that their songs should do the trick, but then I was just an American writer obsessing about her own safety.
******
At the entrance to the La Ghriba festival stood a guard with what I assume was an AK-47 (I’m not much of a gun aficionado; in any case, it was huge). In the parking lot, however, police officers and tour bus drivers gathered around radios in the buses, listening to a particularly important soccer match.
The synagogue, from the outside, appeared much smaller than I’d expected. There was no sign of the damage the explosion had caused; everything was white and pristine. The crowd was not nearly as big as I’d expected‹or, I imagine, as the promoters had hoped.
Past the main gate, there were two buildings, one on either side. In a courtyard in the building on the right, there was singing, celebration, souvenir and food vendors, and an auction involving scarves and the menorah that would shortly be carried about the village streets in a procession.
On the left was the synagogue itself, predominantly blue, softly lit by shafts of light from above, and filled with worshippers. The floor was covered with shoes, and sticky with what I took to be boukha (which is a popular refreshment at the festival) and orange soda. Men and boys prayed in the first, larger room, and in the second room children handed out candles to be lit and added to a long row of burning ones. The atmosphere was serene and vibrant at the same time.
Later, from a distance (in keeping with my solitary safety rule), I followed the raucous procession as the menorah was paraded through the streets. If I’d had any doubts about the seriousness with which the Tunisian government took security, they vanished then. Streets were barricaded with buses. Guards were stationed on rooftops and all along the procession route.
This was where the "peaceful coexistence" would be put to the test. Moslems stood in the doorways of their homes and shops, watching, occasionally selling ice cream to Jewish children participating in the procession. From one store I thought I heard a song in Arabic about Mohammed; I wasn’t sure what to make of its intent.
I decided to leave the procession route and explore the back streets of the village. Here, Moslems watched the festivities from behind barricades, or sat talking in their doorways. Children played ball, and sometimes a deep blue door would open to reveal a Moslem woman shyly watching me, and then close again. No one addressed me, but they answered politely when I asked them a question. My Arabic wasn’t good enough to ask if they were watching the procession from so far away because they wanted to, or because they had been told to do so.
I passed some Moslem women and children returning home from shopping. They were stopped by security people, and made to take a different route home. That, I supposed, was the answer to my question. It seemed an extreme measure, but it was remarkable to me that, in a predominantly Moslem country, such precautions were being taken to ensure the safety of a handful of Jews.
Walking back toward the synagogue, I passed a very severe-looking police officer. Maneuvering around the barricade he was guarding, I remarked, "C’est comme New York!" He cracked up.
******
Several days later, on my flight home from Tunisia, I met two women and a man from central Pennsylvania. They seemed the most unlikely people to find in North Africa, but they were already planning their next trip to Tunisia. We talked about the unspoiled beauty of the country, the elegance of the resorts, the kindness of the people. I told them that I’ll be returning in December to see the Sahara festival. We were like a secret society--Americans who have been to Tunisia and fallen in love with the place.
******
The news of my first day back is that Al Quaeda has beheaded a civilian from Pennsylvania in Iraq. Long, jagged, out-of-season strands of lightning hit the ground all afternoon, as they also did in Frankfurt during my trip home. The green hills, blue-trimmed white houses, and tranquil, dusty streets of Tunisia seem more like a dream now than they did before I left home.
Grape vines, fields of lavender. Perfect rows of olive, almond, pomegranate, and pistachio trees laid out along the hills. Square fences constructed out of live, flowering cactus plants. To the west as our bus heads south from Tunis to the island of Djerba, the Atlas Mountains run back in low-lying layers and peaks back toward Algeria, pale and hazy in the morning, richly shadowed at twilight. Women and their children tend herds of sheep and goats by the side of the road, or fill jars from wells, or languidly ride atop donkey carts loaded with hay or branches of palm. Closer to Djerba, camels and their tenders drink water and rest in the last, dusty light of the day.
In the villages, schoolchildren and old men sharing sheesha pipes and tea watch our bus pass with mild curiosity. The younger children wear pink school uniforms, and the older girls wear jeans, sneakers, navy-blue tunics, and headscarves. They hang out together under the shade of trees or bus stops, eating ice cream, jostling each other the way schoolkids do everywhere.
Mesmerized by the passing landscape for eight hours, I’m thinking, What the hell was I afraid of?
Packing for my trip a few days earlier, I had a very clear idea of what I might have to fear in Tunisia. For weeks, every day’s news seemed part of a conspiracy to make my visit an increasingly bad idea. Did I really want to be an American in a predominantly Moslem country during the Iraq war, when sickening pictures of abused and tortured Iraqi prisoners were leaking out every day, and when the Middle East road to peace had run off into another ditch? Not to mention the fact that I was visiting the country in part to cover the annual Jewish pilgrimage to the La Ghriba synagogue on Djerba, where only two years ago terrorists had blown up a truck and killed more than 20 visitors.
I’m not Arab-phobic‹quite the contrary, in fact; my rants about my belief that racism against Arabs, Indians, and Pakistanis is still condoned in the U.S. have often made me something less than the most popular girl at the American party. I am, however, Al Quaeda-phobic, and, it was a real struggle against what I felt to be a shameful paranoia to make the decision to go.
But how often would I have the opportunity to go to Tunisia, a place with one of those names that never fails to ring in my mind like a particularly evocative line of poetry? And just when could I honestly expect the world to become a much safer place?
I had to go. I would simply stay away from large crowds and maintain the same indefinable "safety practices" that I practice when riding the subways in Manhattan.
******
On my first evening in Tunis, our group (I was traveling with other writers and some representatives of the Tunisian Tourism Board, who I’d already managed to annoy with my pre-trip questions about security) toured the artists’ village of Sidi Bou Said. Built in the 15th-century by Arabs who had just fled Andalusia, it’s an insanely beautiful labyrinth of cobbled streets, white houses with Mediterranean-blue trim, and the same interior courtyards and fountains that one finds in Seville. Tunisia, I was thinking, just might be one of those rare destinations that live up to live up to my hard-to-live-up-to dreams of them.
There were, of course, vendors everywhere‹friendly, about an "8" on the 1-to-10 vendor-pushiness scale, and eager to talk. That evening I had the first few of the encounters that repeated themselves everywhere I went in Tunisia:
"Hello! English?"
"No."
"French?"
"No."
"German?"
"No."
"Czech?"
"No." (Here I would smile.) "American."
Skipping only about a half of a beat, my questioner would raise his eyebrows and exclaim, "Ah! American! But how do you like Tunisia?"
Here I would take the opportunity to mix things up a little more by speaking Arabic. "Quais. Helwa (nice)."
"Ah! You speak some Arabic?"
"Shwaya-shwaya (just a little)."
No one, it seemed, expected to find an American‹much less one who could speak a little Arabic in their beautiful country (it was often pointed out to me, however, that I spoke "Egyptian Arabic", but that I was forgiven). As it turned out, every day gave me more reason to be glad that I was one of those rare creatures.
******
Only on a few occasions did the subject of politics, or terrorism, or the war in Iraq, come up in my encounters with Tunisians, and I was usually the one who started the conversation. No one I spoke to was anything less than measured and polite in their responses. The general feeling seemed to be that the war was very bad and that the Bush administration was, shall we say, somewhat less than honest and sympathetic in its dealings with the Arab world, but the people I talked to seemed to believe that most Americans did not share the administration’s outlook. (One of our hosts, who spoke no English, did a very funny impression of George W. Bush. Screwing up his face until all of his features seemed to sink into one another, he muttered, "Saddam!" and started shooting erratically into the sky with imaginary pistols pulled from imaginary holsters all over his body.) In Tunisia, at least, where income from American tourism has decreased dramatically since 9/11, people simply seemed happy to have an American visitor find the country "Quais."
And only once did anyone mention 9/11, in an odd, benign exchange on my first evening in among the stalls in Sidi Bou Said. After the usual "Where are you from?" conversation, a vendor of jewelry and assorted Tunisian-style trinkets, a very handsome young man with honey-and-gold-colored eyes asked me in insufficient (for the subject) English if the "very big place" in New York was still there. I didn’t understand what he meant; he clarified by saying, "the big things that we blew up." His use of the word "we", at least as I interpreted it, sounded less like a form of alliance with Al Quaeda than a simple attempt to make a distinction between Americans and Arabs that an American might understand.
"Don’t you know?" I asked him in Arabic.
He seemed genuinely confused. A French girl, it turned out, had either told him that the World Trade Center was still there, or that something else had already been built in its place. The girl, who had apparently spent a few days at his house and had not kept her promise to stay in touch after she left, was clearly the bigger issue in our conversation.
"Americans are very gentle, very nice," he told me. "French people are not so nice." Being jilted by a European girl, it seemed, was much more troubling to him than the state of world affairs, or perhaps amounted to the same thing.
******
During our first dinner in Tunisia, over grilled loup de mer, many glasses of (surprisingly good) Tunisian wine, and boukha (a fig-based liquor which tastes like the Tunisian version of moonshine), I learned that my fellow travelers shared my concerns about security at the Djerba festival. I was relieved, at least, to find out that if I was, in fact, being a bit of a drama queen about the whole thing, I wasn’t the only one.
That night, standing on my balcony overlooking the city of Tunis, I gazed at the yellow lights spread out along the dark horizon like strings of blazing yellow diamonds, and listened to the sounds of traffic, laughter, music, and barking dogs that echoed up the hill from all over the city. In the morning a rainbow straddled the hazy hills and whitewashed houses of the city, and the deep blue harbor.
I couldn’t believe that I was in North Africa.
******
There were policemen all over Tunisia. From a distance, their dark, white-trimmed uniforms looked sharp and imposing; close-up, however, I could see that they were worn at the edges, and that the white gloves had holes in them. The officers were stern, but polite and respectful.
As we approached Djerba after our long drive south, there was even more of a police presence, and there were quite a few roadblocks. The Tunisian government seemed to be taking security very seriously, especially where the trouble had happened several years earlier.
We were exhausted by the time our bus reached the Djerba ferry terminal, and it was dark. I stood on an upper deck on the boat, shivering in a cool breeze that would, a few days later, develop into a furious, cold dervish of a wind spiraling up from the Sahara. Below me, the police were checking parcels, peering into cars, questioning passengers. Jews and Arabs got out of their cars to breathe in the sea air and watch the approaching lights of Djerba. If they took notice of anyone, it was the American journalists watching from above for signs of trouble.
There was no trouble.
******
Jews and Arabs have coexisted on the island of Djerba for almost 1,500 years. It was very important to our Tunisian hosts that we see how peaceful that coexistence has remained, even through the worst of times in the Middle East.
The worst of times for Djerba came in 2002, when a truck loaded with explosives detonated outside of the La Ghriba synagogue at the height of the festival. The majority of those killed were German tourists (Jews from around the world make the pilgrimage every spring). The Tunisian government first called the explosion an accident, but it soon became clear that Al Quaeda was responsible for the attack.
One of my fellow journalists tried to reassure me about our visit to the festival by saying that terrorists tend to strike a target only once. Someone reminded her about the World Trade Center.
******
On the eve of the festival, we gathered after dinner on the vividly colored cushions of our hotel’s sheesha room to have a smoke and some boukha. Ali, our funny, charming waiter (who retained his dignity even while wearing a rather silly costume and pointy, upward-curling shoes‹he looked much better after work in his elegant suit) brought us different varieties of tobacco to try. My favorite was delicately flavored with apples.
A group of men and women came in, in chic European dress. Accompanied by the hotel’s oud player, the women began to sing in Arabic, beautifully. Ali (who had also noticed my "Egyptian Arabic") told me that the songs were those of Um Khaltoum, the much-beloved Egyptian singer (her American counterpart might be Rosemary Clooney, or Billy Holiday). When I stood closer to listen, the best of the singers, who resembled Jeanne Moreau, invited me to sit with them. I was fascinated by the pleasure they took in singing; everyone knew the words.
Although they spoke no English, they were able to tell me that they were a group of Moslem, Jewish, and Christian Tunisians, now living in Paris. They were in Djerba to help promote understanding and tolerance among the religions. It seemed to me that their songs should do the trick, but then I was just an American writer obsessing about her own safety.
******
At the entrance to the La Ghriba festival stood a guard with what I assume was an AK-47 (I’m not much of a gun aficionado; in any case, it was huge). In the parking lot, however, police officers and tour bus drivers gathered around radios in the buses, listening to a particularly important soccer match.
The synagogue, from the outside, appeared much smaller than I’d expected. There was no sign of the damage the explosion had caused; everything was white and pristine. The crowd was not nearly as big as I’d expected‹or, I imagine, as the promoters had hoped.
Past the main gate, there were two buildings, one on either side. In a courtyard in the building on the right, there was singing, celebration, souvenir and food vendors, and an auction involving scarves and the menorah that would shortly be carried about the village streets in a procession.
On the left was the synagogue itself, predominantly blue, softly lit by shafts of light from above, and filled with worshippers. The floor was covered with shoes, and sticky with what I took to be boukha (which is a popular refreshment at the festival) and orange soda. Men and boys prayed in the first, larger room, and in the second room children handed out candles to be lit and added to a long row of burning ones. The atmosphere was serene and vibrant at the same time.
Later, from a distance (in keeping with my solitary safety rule), I followed the raucous procession as the menorah was paraded through the streets. If I’d had any doubts about the seriousness with which the Tunisian government took security, they vanished then. Streets were barricaded with buses. Guards were stationed on rooftops and all along the procession route.
This was where the "peaceful coexistence" would be put to the test. Moslems stood in the doorways of their homes and shops, watching, occasionally selling ice cream to Jewish children participating in the procession. From one store I thought I heard a song in Arabic about Mohammed; I wasn’t sure what to make of its intent.
I decided to leave the procession route and explore the back streets of the village. Here, Moslems watched the festivities from behind barricades, or sat talking in their doorways. Children played ball, and sometimes a deep blue door would open to reveal a Moslem woman shyly watching me, and then close again. No one addressed me, but they answered politely when I asked them a question. My Arabic wasn’t good enough to ask if they were watching the procession from so far away because they wanted to, or because they had been told to do so.
I passed some Moslem women and children returning home from shopping. They were stopped by security people, and made to take a different route home. That, I supposed, was the answer to my question. It seemed an extreme measure, but it was remarkable to me that, in a predominantly Moslem country, such precautions were being taken to ensure the safety of a handful of Jews.
Walking back toward the synagogue, I passed a very severe-looking police officer. Maneuvering around the barricade he was guarding, I remarked, "C’est comme New York!" He cracked up.
******
Several days later, on my flight home from Tunisia, I met two women and a man from central Pennsylvania. They seemed the most unlikely people to find in North Africa, but they were already planning their next trip to Tunisia. We talked about the unspoiled beauty of the country, the elegance of the resorts, the kindness of the people. I told them that I’ll be returning in December to see the Sahara festival. We were like a secret society--Americans who have been to Tunisia and fallen in love with the place.
******
The news of my first day back is that Al Quaeda has beheaded a civilian from Pennsylvania in Iraq. Long, jagged, out-of-season strands of lightning hit the ground all afternoon, as they also did in Frankfurt during my trip home. The green hills, blue-trimmed white houses, and tranquil, dusty streets of Tunisia seem more like a dream now than they did before I left home.
Saturday, March 1, 2008
Being Somewhere, for a Day, in Coney Island
Lorenzo is at his computer, studying an online map of the New York City subway system as if our survival depends on his ability to decipher the message hidden among the tangle of colored lines, numbers, and letters, and to find our escape route before the sand runs out of the hourglass. It’s Memorial Day, and we’ve made an early-morning, pre-coffee decision to get out of New Jersey and spend the day at Coney Island. I have misgivings about allowing my directionally challenged husband to plan out the route for our little impromptu excursion, but I have, of late, lost the instincts necessary to navigate the New York City transportation system on the fly. So I leave it in his hands; it’s up to him to decide whether we take the A to West 4th Street and pick up the D train, or start downtown and get the F somewhere.
We’re doing something that we haven’t done since my relatively new incarnation as a travel writer began to allow me to regularly pick up and go to distant destinations and call my journeys ”work,” thereby satisfying to some extent my near-constant drive to go somewhere. With no passports, no luggage, no e-tickets, and no transportation option other than to surrender ourselves to the vagaries of the subway system, we’re simply making a traditional New York daytrip.
It’s the kind of thing that Lorenzo and I did a lot in our proverbial poor-but-happy newlywed days. Sometimes we’d even go to Coney Island in winter; we’d walk the empty boardwalk, listening to the calls of gulls circling in the gray sky, watching the Russians who make up much of the local population wander serenely in and out of the freezing surf, and speculating on the reason why all of the Russian restaurants along the boardwalk serve sushi. On other weekends we might take the M15 bus downtown for a ferry trip to Staten Island, or a series of buses for a two-hour journey up to the Bronx Zoo or the Cloisters. (We could have taken the train part of the way and cut an hour or so off of those trips, but a good part of the fun was the journey itself.) At the end of the day we’d straggle back to our one-bedroom apartment, exhausted but exhilarated by the fact that, for the price of two subway fares and a couple of snacks, we’d seen something, and been somewhere.
Route chosen (A to D), animals fed, snacks packed, we head out. I ask Nicco and Alessandro, our sons, if they remember a trip we made to Coney Island over four years ago, but Alessandro was still in a stroller then, and Nicco was half the height he is now, and much more child than man at that point. Nicco remembers something about a game in which one shoots at targets in a kind of old western town; Alessandro remembers nothing, but he’s up for anything that involves a train ride and a boardwalk.
Port Authority is crowded with couples and families in their weekend clothes, making their way, like us, to the places most likely to make them feel that their day off has been spent well--most likely to seem, if only in a small way, like an adventure. Everyone is freshly showered and dressed for summer. I remember this from years ago—the atmosphere of relaxed optimism that you can breathe in on a summer weekend morning in Manhattan. People who, whether by choice or because they lack the means, are not leaving the City for the weekend, collectively affirm that We don’t need no stinking Hamptons, or, for that matter, anywhere else that can’t be reached by public transportation.
We’ve explained to Alessandro that it will take a long time to get to Coney Island, and that the subway ride is part of the adventure, but my little vagabond-in-the-making already knows. He’s up on his knees watching out the window as the D train emerges from the tunnel into the light, thrilled with the concept of a subway that runs outdoors, and the pigeon’s-eye view of streetscapes, backyards, laundry on the line. Below us, the familiar landscape of Chinatown seems, from this perspective, wondrously unfamiliar, as does (although we used to live a block away from it) the East River. We can’t even figure out which bridge we’re crossing into Brooklyn.
Nicco is sitting next to three Russian girls, who are dressed, at 11 in the morning, in full spaghetti strap-and-sequins nightclub regalia. He’s listening intently, and very conspicuously, to their conversation. He notices that we’re watching him, and smiles.
“I’m only getting about half of what they’re saying,” he says. Lorenzo and I are a little confused, because the girls are speaking Russian, and Nicco studies French. No matter. He’s enjoying himself, and he’s smart enough that he may well be picking up on some of what they’re saying.
The trip seems shorter than I remember. A child at the other end of the subway car yells, ”We’re here! We’re here!” as the silhouette of the Wonder Wheel comes into view ahead. The train looked fairly empty while we were on it, but once we get into the terminal at Coney Island we’re caught up in a current of people. They’re carrying beach chairs and children and coolers; the party, it seems, has already started, and we’re part of it.
The terminal is a brand-new, futuristic construction of glass and metal—nothing at all like the decrepit place I remember from a few years ago. I, however, like decrepitude, at least in certain places, and I’m hoping that no one’s gone and completely erased the gaudy, Arbus-esque tawdriness of the boardwalk a la the recently sanitized Times Square.
My fears are put to rest once we get outside, cross Surf Avenue, and head up Stillwell toward the beach. Even in the full, flat light of midday, the carnival colors are magnificent. Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs has had a little work done, but it still looks pretty much the way it did when it opened 85 years ago (I’m not remembering, thank you very much—I’ve seen pictures). The Parachute Jump and Wonder Wheel have been painted. But Coney Island is still in its iconic, kaleidoscopic, decrepit glory, and as much of a beautiful assault to the senses as ever. Bells ring, buzzers buzz, children shriek, and music of every kind blares simultaneously in cacophonous layers. There are flea markets, freak shows, arcades, souvenir shops, photo booths, cotton candy stands, churro vendors. The air smells of candy apples, salt water, and fried chicken. Rides of every kind swirl, plummet, twist, and swing. On the boardwalk, a full-scale Gospel chorus and orchestra proclaim the world-view of the God (heart)NY Ministry Tour 2005 with inspirational swells that roll across the beach; cheerful people in black t-shirts are dispensing free Bibles and advice of a very specific nature. At the same time, we hear the subversive rhythms of an impromptu drumming session from the pier at the other end of the beach. In Coney Island, nothing matches, but everything fits.
The beach is crowded with young Latino men playing volleyball, Indian women in saris, Asian families, black families, white families. A man in a dark suit and sunglasses sits in the sand. Hasidic children, their wigged mothers keeping watch, ride the fire truck and Willy the Whale rides at Deno’s Wonder Wheel Amusement Park. Moslem children, their mothers in hijab, do the same. I could travel for a year and never see such as many nationalities as I do in these few blocks of Brooklyn.
Nicco is quiet, taking it all in, winning tickets for his brother to redeem in the arcades, taking me up on my challenge at the shooting gallery (neither of us wins). Alessandro, every inch a 6-year-old at a carnival, bounces from ride to arcade to beach and back, asking for stuff. Bystanders, perfect strangers, cheer and coach him when he tries to win a prize using a fishing pole. He has also, somehow, become a damned fine skeeball player. Lorenzo, who hasn’t had many opportunities lately to take pictures for fun, rather than for work, frequently wanders off to compose a shot.
For the most part I am, like Nicco, content to absorb it all, and to make sure that Alessandro doesn’t disappear into what is by late afternoon a tidal wave of people churning through the amusement parks and arcades. The continual stimulation of my various senses is inducing flashbacks. When I look down at the fine, dirt-brown New York sand of the beach, I’m thrown back 35 years or so to the miraculous (or so it seemed at the time) moment when I pulled a sopping wet 20-dollar bill out of the fine, dirt-brown New York sand of Jones Beach (New York’s other great democratic beach getaway). From there, memory drops me into the front seat of the baby-blue Rambler convertible that used to take my mother and me there. I remember with near-perfect clarity watching the heat rise from the pavement and the hoods of the hundreds of other cars with whom we crawl along on the Long Island Expressway toward the beach, and the promise of a day’s escape from the familiar.
On the way home, I’m thinking about which shards of images from today might embed themselves in Nicco’s and Alessandro’s memories and reveal themselves, decades from now, as unexpectedly and in such vivid detail as mine have a tendency to do. I wonder about this every time we travel.
But can our little daylong escape from the familiar be called “travel?” How far from home does one need to go to have the right to say, “I traveled?” And if a day’s excursion can’t be considered travel, does that mean that the thousands of people hauling their (now sleeping) children, their coolers, their towels, their Frisbees and their picnic lunches all through the boroughs today, seeking escape, and those who may never have the means to get to Europe, or the Caribbean, or even Disney World, have not really been anywhere?
I seem, of late, to constantly come across someone’s opinion of what separates the traveler from the tourist, and what constitutes ”authentic” travel. Here’s mine: I believe that you’ve traveled when, because your mind is open, and you’re willing to hang back and allow things to happen that might not happen anywhere else, you’ve had the chance to see something that you ordinarily would not, or to see things that you thought you knew in an entirely different way.
It’s not that I don’t believe that it’s incredibly important that people get out and see as much of our world—the mundane, the magnificent, the tawdry—as possible. But the number of miles you’ve racked up is less important than whether or not you come back home at the end of the day, or the week, or the year, feeling that there’s a little bit more to you than there was when you left—even if it’s just a few new memories to remind you that there are places, and ways of living, other than the one you know.
At home, shaking the fine, dirt-brown New York sand out of Alessandro’s jeans, I’m content to know that we’ve seen something, and we’ve been somewhere.
(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008
We’re doing something that we haven’t done since my relatively new incarnation as a travel writer began to allow me to regularly pick up and go to distant destinations and call my journeys ”work,” thereby satisfying to some extent my near-constant drive to go somewhere. With no passports, no luggage, no e-tickets, and no transportation option other than to surrender ourselves to the vagaries of the subway system, we’re simply making a traditional New York daytrip.
It’s the kind of thing that Lorenzo and I did a lot in our proverbial poor-but-happy newlywed days. Sometimes we’d even go to Coney Island in winter; we’d walk the empty boardwalk, listening to the calls of gulls circling in the gray sky, watching the Russians who make up much of the local population wander serenely in and out of the freezing surf, and speculating on the reason why all of the Russian restaurants along the boardwalk serve sushi. On other weekends we might take the M15 bus downtown for a ferry trip to Staten Island, or a series of buses for a two-hour journey up to the Bronx Zoo or the Cloisters. (We could have taken the train part of the way and cut an hour or so off of those trips, but a good part of the fun was the journey itself.) At the end of the day we’d straggle back to our one-bedroom apartment, exhausted but exhilarated by the fact that, for the price of two subway fares and a couple of snacks, we’d seen something, and been somewhere.
Route chosen (A to D), animals fed, snacks packed, we head out. I ask Nicco and Alessandro, our sons, if they remember a trip we made to Coney Island over four years ago, but Alessandro was still in a stroller then, and Nicco was half the height he is now, and much more child than man at that point. Nicco remembers something about a game in which one shoots at targets in a kind of old western town; Alessandro remembers nothing, but he’s up for anything that involves a train ride and a boardwalk.
Port Authority is crowded with couples and families in their weekend clothes, making their way, like us, to the places most likely to make them feel that their day off has been spent well--most likely to seem, if only in a small way, like an adventure. Everyone is freshly showered and dressed for summer. I remember this from years ago—the atmosphere of relaxed optimism that you can breathe in on a summer weekend morning in Manhattan. People who, whether by choice or because they lack the means, are not leaving the City for the weekend, collectively affirm that We don’t need no stinking Hamptons, or, for that matter, anywhere else that can’t be reached by public transportation.
We’ve explained to Alessandro that it will take a long time to get to Coney Island, and that the subway ride is part of the adventure, but my little vagabond-in-the-making already knows. He’s up on his knees watching out the window as the D train emerges from the tunnel into the light, thrilled with the concept of a subway that runs outdoors, and the pigeon’s-eye view of streetscapes, backyards, laundry on the line. Below us, the familiar landscape of Chinatown seems, from this perspective, wondrously unfamiliar, as does (although we used to live a block away from it) the East River. We can’t even figure out which bridge we’re crossing into Brooklyn.
Nicco is sitting next to three Russian girls, who are dressed, at 11 in the morning, in full spaghetti strap-and-sequins nightclub regalia. He’s listening intently, and very conspicuously, to their conversation. He notices that we’re watching him, and smiles.
“I’m only getting about half of what they’re saying,” he says. Lorenzo and I are a little confused, because the girls are speaking Russian, and Nicco studies French. No matter. He’s enjoying himself, and he’s smart enough that he may well be picking up on some of what they’re saying.
The trip seems shorter than I remember. A child at the other end of the subway car yells, ”We’re here! We’re here!” as the silhouette of the Wonder Wheel comes into view ahead. The train looked fairly empty while we were on it, but once we get into the terminal at Coney Island we’re caught up in a current of people. They’re carrying beach chairs and children and coolers; the party, it seems, has already started, and we’re part of it.
The terminal is a brand-new, futuristic construction of glass and metal—nothing at all like the decrepit place I remember from a few years ago. I, however, like decrepitude, at least in certain places, and I’m hoping that no one’s gone and completely erased the gaudy, Arbus-esque tawdriness of the boardwalk a la the recently sanitized Times Square.
My fears are put to rest once we get outside, cross Surf Avenue, and head up Stillwell toward the beach. Even in the full, flat light of midday, the carnival colors are magnificent. Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs has had a little work done, but it still looks pretty much the way it did when it opened 85 years ago (I’m not remembering, thank you very much—I’ve seen pictures). The Parachute Jump and Wonder Wheel have been painted. But Coney Island is still in its iconic, kaleidoscopic, decrepit glory, and as much of a beautiful assault to the senses as ever. Bells ring, buzzers buzz, children shriek, and music of every kind blares simultaneously in cacophonous layers. There are flea markets, freak shows, arcades, souvenir shops, photo booths, cotton candy stands, churro vendors. The air smells of candy apples, salt water, and fried chicken. Rides of every kind swirl, plummet, twist, and swing. On the boardwalk, a full-scale Gospel chorus and orchestra proclaim the world-view of the God (heart)NY Ministry Tour 2005 with inspirational swells that roll across the beach; cheerful people in black t-shirts are dispensing free Bibles and advice of a very specific nature. At the same time, we hear the subversive rhythms of an impromptu drumming session from the pier at the other end of the beach. In Coney Island, nothing matches, but everything fits.
The beach is crowded with young Latino men playing volleyball, Indian women in saris, Asian families, black families, white families. A man in a dark suit and sunglasses sits in the sand. Hasidic children, their wigged mothers keeping watch, ride the fire truck and Willy the Whale rides at Deno’s Wonder Wheel Amusement Park. Moslem children, their mothers in hijab, do the same. I could travel for a year and never see such as many nationalities as I do in these few blocks of Brooklyn.
Nicco is quiet, taking it all in, winning tickets for his brother to redeem in the arcades, taking me up on my challenge at the shooting gallery (neither of us wins). Alessandro, every inch a 6-year-old at a carnival, bounces from ride to arcade to beach and back, asking for stuff. Bystanders, perfect strangers, cheer and coach him when he tries to win a prize using a fishing pole. He has also, somehow, become a damned fine skeeball player. Lorenzo, who hasn’t had many opportunities lately to take pictures for fun, rather than for work, frequently wanders off to compose a shot.
For the most part I am, like Nicco, content to absorb it all, and to make sure that Alessandro doesn’t disappear into what is by late afternoon a tidal wave of people churning through the amusement parks and arcades. The continual stimulation of my various senses is inducing flashbacks. When I look down at the fine, dirt-brown New York sand of the beach, I’m thrown back 35 years or so to the miraculous (or so it seemed at the time) moment when I pulled a sopping wet 20-dollar bill out of the fine, dirt-brown New York sand of Jones Beach (New York’s other great democratic beach getaway). From there, memory drops me into the front seat of the baby-blue Rambler convertible that used to take my mother and me there. I remember with near-perfect clarity watching the heat rise from the pavement and the hoods of the hundreds of other cars with whom we crawl along on the Long Island Expressway toward the beach, and the promise of a day’s escape from the familiar.
On the way home, I’m thinking about which shards of images from today might embed themselves in Nicco’s and Alessandro’s memories and reveal themselves, decades from now, as unexpectedly and in such vivid detail as mine have a tendency to do. I wonder about this every time we travel.
But can our little daylong escape from the familiar be called “travel?” How far from home does one need to go to have the right to say, “I traveled?” And if a day’s excursion can’t be considered travel, does that mean that the thousands of people hauling their (now sleeping) children, their coolers, their towels, their Frisbees and their picnic lunches all through the boroughs today, seeking escape, and those who may never have the means to get to Europe, or the Caribbean, or even Disney World, have not really been anywhere?
I seem, of late, to constantly come across someone’s opinion of what separates the traveler from the tourist, and what constitutes ”authentic” travel. Here’s mine: I believe that you’ve traveled when, because your mind is open, and you’re willing to hang back and allow things to happen that might not happen anywhere else, you’ve had the chance to see something that you ordinarily would not, or to see things that you thought you knew in an entirely different way.
It’s not that I don’t believe that it’s incredibly important that people get out and see as much of our world—the mundane, the magnificent, the tawdry—as possible. But the number of miles you’ve racked up is less important than whether or not you come back home at the end of the day, or the week, or the year, feeling that there’s a little bit more to you than there was when you left—even if it’s just a few new memories to remind you that there are places, and ways of living, other than the one you know.
At home, shaking the fine, dirt-brown New York sand out of Alessandro’s jeans, I’m content to know that we’ve seen something, and we’ve been somewhere.
(c) Nancy Bevilaqua 2008
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