The City at Three PM

Seeing that the whole idea of the trip this time, going to Tunisia, is to meditate some on Flaubert and hopefully get a feel for an Arab world country to use in some of my own fiction I’m working on, I check over again what I’ve selected for books to bring.

** A Penguin Classics paperback of Flaubert’s Salammbô, to reread. It’s a novel often seen as the odd offering in his oeuvre, a lushly written near epic about ancient Carthage that has been controversial since the day it was published in 1862. I had some trouble finding a copy here in my home base of Austin, Texas, and with drives to the endless malls connected by the endless looping freeways, a configuration that defines sprawling Austin, I would go into another Barnes & Noble or Borders. At the “F” section in fiction I’d always hit a lot of Fannie Flagg but not much Gustave, outside of Madame Bovary, anyway. But I “scored”—that’s the way it felt by that point—this Penguin Classics edition at a Borders far north in the subdivisioned city at last, translated by a certain A.J. Krailsheimer. It has a buff-and-black cover bearing the insert of an oil painting of a naked, flowing-haired young woman in a chamber of variegated marble pillars, a large flat-headed serpent upright like a cane beside her. The image is identified as being taken from “La Scène du Serpent” by Gaston Bussière, and doubtless it’s Salammbô herself, the ethereally beautiful Carthaginian princess.

I tell myself it will be easy enough to pick up a cheap paperback of the book in French in Paris, where I will stop for a few days to see friends before going on to Tunis.

** This one deals me some sadness, an edition of Saint Augustine’s Confessions printed in 1962. The small, mass-market-sized paperback has a cover like a stained-glass window, with an introduction by a Jesuit. The sadness is not in the 45-cent paperback itself with flaking yellowing pages, but how when I open it I see a signature in pencil on the title page. The signature is that of Ann McCabe. It’s a name I haven’t thought of in maybe forty years and who I now remember as my second oldest sister’s roommate at the supposedly posh Order of the Sacred Heart college in a Boston suburb (the Kennedy girls were products of Sacred Heart boarding schools and colleges), an institution now long defunct. I knew the Saint Augustine was somewhere around my apartment in a box of accumulated books, and I found it and decided to take it along because he talks of being educated in Carthage when it became a Roman metropolis; Carthage, actually, was the city of Saint Augustine’s debauchery as a university student before his eventual reform. The book’s connection with my upcoming travel isn’t all that great, but, more practically, it’s probably the only thing I have on hand—besides the travel guides I’ve bought—that has much to do with Tunisia, site of ancient Carthage. And that signature, a boxy girl’s script: to see it—stare at it, really—conjures up all those sadnesses commonly associated with Time somehow represented in smug personification, inevitably and brutally passing without giving a damn about anybody else. I think about how a girl—toothy and scrub-cheeked, with a blond pageboy haircut, the way I seem to remember her from weekend visits with my sister to our home—was once forced by the ritzy nuns to plow through a book like this that she didn’t particularly want to plow through, and what a task, an ordeal, it must have been for her. And what does any of that matter today, several decades later? I wonder if Ann McCabe is even alive today, something that certainly never crossed my mind before. My sister and I see each other only infrequently, due to geography (more sadness, because she is so dear to me), and I don’t remember her mentioning Ann lately.

** I also photostat some pages from Francis Steegmuller’s two-volume Letters of Flaubert, specifically the few that Stee-gmuller includes from the quick fact-finding tour to Tunisia Flaubert launched out on in April 1858; that trip is not to be confused with his more extensive travels some years earlier with fellow writer (and photographer) Maxime Du Camp, journeying through the Middle East proper. The letters from Tunisia don’t give much info, but there is still a very raucous Flaubert, the incorrigible roué sampling prostitutes in the Medina and waking up the whole neighborhood with the racket of his sport, then going at his research out at the ruins of Punic Carthage—not far from Tunis—for fourteen hours a day; he bounces along on a flea-bitten mule in the heat, picks scorpions out of his sleeping roll at night, and loves every minute of it.

Also, besides gathering the books to bring, I figure I might tap some resources at U. of Texas where I teach—do some prep, if you will, by seeking out faculty in the field for tips, more reading suggestions, etc., which doesn’t prove much help, as it turns out. A cheery, crew-cut guy, middle-aged, in a sport shirt and Bermuda shorts in the linguistics department—he has a travel poster of a white Tunisian village on his office door, is an authority on Arabic—invites me in while he pokes a plastic fork at a takeout lunch in a styrofoam box; he explains to me that Tunisia has been his obsession since he first left the Midwest and went there as a Peace Corps volunteer years ago. He talks to me of hotels as well as the pluses and minuses of bus versus train for getting around in the country, then produces a guidebook that I already have, shows me various cities on the map (I pretend the book is new to me); the guy is more than friendly. Next I phone a newly appointed younger assistant professor in the French department. I’ve been told she’s the current authority at UT on North African literature in French; she’s from France herself, has taught in Tunis. On the phone, she sounds serious and so sincere, the way assistant professors can sound so sincere, and in a soft, French-tinged voice she just keeps going on and on with some academic jargon describing a book on harems she used for a class she taught and how it emphasizes the significance of “the gaze” (the word is “in” lately with scholarly critics, I know); I find myself looking at my watch, wondering when the talk will end. I might be somebody who, luckily, snuck into academia by the back door as a creative writer, with no credentials other than my own very small pile of published fiction to qualify me, yet I know I learned my lesson early: I seldom—but that doesn’t mean never—get much of anything genuinely important when asking a “colleague” (even though I use it myself, I dislike that word, its pomposity), or scholarly ones, anyway. That includes either of the two standard types represented here: the benevolent, happy-go-lucky Elks Club variety like the linguistics citizen or the diligent, eternal-grad-student variety like the woman in the French department caught up in “the gaze.”

Not to say that both didn’t seem essentially good, well-intentioned people, as most academics are.

Starting out for North Africa, I first put in a few days, alone, at what’s left of my family’s old summer place on the ocean in Narragansett, Rhode Island, then a few days more in Paris, where I have taught a couple of times and still have those close friends.

In Narragansett I walk around the land out on a grassy point, assess the most recent winter damage to the ramshackle (approaching tumbledown) wood-shingled white house with a lot of bedrooms that my father built for our family not long after the war. I hack down some of the grass with a sputtering rusted rotary lawnmower then go at the shrubs with hand clippers to at least make the place look reasonably presentable for another season, losing myself in the sheer exhaustion of the physical work in the blowy sunshine of late May; most of the neighboring houses are still closed for the winter. I try working on my own fiction, but realize I need a longer uninterrupted stretch for that. I get a book on Delacroix (a contemporary of Flaubert, with many of the same interests, I figure) at the little town library in Narragansett. And at night when the fog has set in, the horn at Beavertail Light moaning from across the bay, I find myself reading it while sitting in the crack-walled living room with its faded Winslow Homer prints and clamshell ashtrays, there in the big maroon leather chair that was the favorite of my father, a lawyer and a judge whose lifelong heroes were Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt—for the last of these he proudly cast his own vote in the Electoral College while a member of the Democratic State Committee as a young man. Placing a cardboard coaster as a marker in the pages, I think of how happy all of us were when I was young and we spent summers here, an ongoing carnival that usually included packing the house with freeloading friends of my sisters and mine from school and college, all the serious croquet and all the boisterous big meals at the dining table, that sort of thing. But most everybody in my immediate family is either dead now or not interested in the place much at all anymore. I also think of Flaubert, and though I surely “ain’t he,” as they say, I can’t help but remember that he was a middle-aged bachelor still staying and writing at what amounted to his own family’s country retreat at Croisset on the Seine near Rouen, the oddball in the clan, and maybe old J.-P. Sartre was right to call him, yes, “the family idiot.”

In Paris I book into a noisy but cheap hotel. It’s not far from the slim pillar topped with the freshly gilded angel at the Place de la Bastille, a neighborhood where I once lived.

It’s also not far from an apartment Flaubert kept in Paris as a pied-à-terre for use while in the city from Normandy, after he wrote Madame Bovary and when maybe he was working on Salammbô: 42, Boulevard du Temple. I take a walk over there. The building is a recently sandblasted, buff-stone Parisian rise with ornate trim and glossy blue doors; there’s, oddly, a row of modern motorcycle showrooms nearby. Technically part of the Marais, the area is today thoroughly renovated and yuppified, but the basic look of Flaubert’s building probably hasn’t changed much since he made his seasonal visits to the city from Normandy. He came for admittedly pretty heady literary and high-society company, a routine quite different from that when he was writing without interruption in the legendary near solitary confinement of Croisset; that part of his life prompted Baudelaire to describe him as an artistically dedicated “monk” rather than any family idiot. Studying the building, I tell myself you have to hand it to the French, the way they have preserved Paris; also, I like to think again that possibly some work on Salammbô itself was, in fact, done right here, only yards away from where I’m standing.

One academic acquaintance who has told me many very important things over the years is Claude Lévy, the leading Saul Bellow scholar in France. He’s a handsome, rather dashing character, a man older than me and recently retired, whose wife is a professional opera singer. He was my chairman when I taught at Université Paris X-Nanterre, on exchange, and one evening on this trip, in the honey twilight that lingers until almost ten in Paris in June, I go with him to listen to his wife sing, her getting top billing in a concert on Île Saint-Louis; the three of us have lunch the next day at their apartment. He actually grew up in the small Jewish community in Tunis, leaving to study at the Sorbonne when eighteen. At lunch, there comes a moment over the good, bloodily rare roast beef and the good, grapi-ly tart red wine and the good—very good—conversation and laughing, when he turns more serious, admitting that he hasn’t been back to Tunisia for years. Today it’s no place for a Jew, Claude says, but he asks me to do something for him. He says that when he was kid in Tunis, his aunt had a little summer house on the shore just north of the city at La Goulette-Vieille, and he talks of how happy he was spending school vacations there. He seems a bit lost to remember it, treading water in his own reminiscing sadness, as lost as I was back in my family’s summer place in Rhode Island. (Why do summer places do this to people, even a guy like me who can barely afford my share of the sky-high taxes on mine and am constantly railing about how it chews up a big chunk of my modest teacher’s paycheck? Why do summer places bring this out in people?) He explains that the little commuter train that leaves downtown Tunis and crosses Lake Tunis, a large inland saltwater lagoon, then goes up the coast to suburban Carthage, has a stop at La Goulette-Vieille. As he speaks, his lovely opera-singer wife Lisa, younger, just silently looks at him, and it is a look that says she has seen this sadness in him before—this expression of utter loss.

“You will see it,” he tells me vacantly, perhaps trying to picture it himself. “Just look out the window, down the street of the village that leads to the sea. The house isn’t there, but you will see where it was. Right at the end of the street. You know, why don’t you stop there, visit it for me.”

From across the table he looks right at me. I can tell that this is something very important to him.

Finally, the next afternoon, I get out of the Air France jet in the bone-dry, ninety-degree June glare of Tunis. After booking into what seems a businessman’s hotel called the Omrane, I later walk around some in the fine, white city, its wide main Avenue Bourguiba lined with box-cut trees and alive with sidewalk cafés, the melody-meandering Arab pop music playing everywhere. I feel the relief—even the sweet rush—of arrival that comes after you have spent altogether too much time jumping ahead of yourself and thinking about an upcoming trip, planning it, instead of just letting it happen—letting the first sights simply rise like some stum-bled-upon dreamscape you always suspected was there but never were convinced would actually materialize, to dazzle you with the dreamlike texture that all travel, especially travel alone, certainly is. In a cubbyhole restaurant on Rue du Caire that evening, I eat what might be described as, well, “the best fucking couscous of my life” (the tomato sauce of it tangy, and the big bowl of semolina containing not only the usual carrots and potatoes and chickpeas of a Paris couscous, but good green peppers and yellow squash piled high, too, the chunk of gamy lamb topping it tender). There, the few guys in slacks and open-collared casual shirts eating are seated at the rows of tables so they are all facing the small TV hung high up, watching the news. The news includes some clips of U.S. soldiers in dun camouflage fatigues and with automatic weapons ducking around the side streets of occupied Baghdad, looking confused, even outright scared; the sniper attacks and bombings of this the summer of 2003 have already begun. Tired from having gotten up not long past dawn to make sure I was out at CDG in time for my flight despite a near-total public-transit strike in Paris, I go back to the hotel, stretch out still dressed on the made bed, and read through the introduction to my Penguin Classics edition of Salammbô; it is a commentary I haven’t looked at yet, written by the translator, the aforementioned A.J. Krailsheimer.

Tunis has a trolley system. Even this late at night, the empty kelly-green trams with their buttery lit windows pass slowly by in the empty street right below my window, rumbling, and the overhead electric connections flash blue light in the darkness, which is nice. The stark modern room has white walls, and it smells of sandalwood furniture polish for the heavy dark-wood fare, an aroma that’s somehow really nice, too, spicy. I suppose I already wish I was going to have more than two weeks in Tunisia—the place feels that right.

Also, I suppose I have no idea then that there’s eventually going to be a real bonus on this trip, and in a way it will grow out of my preliminary brushes with sadness before coming to Tunis; it will be one of those Big Realizations (keep both caps) that don’t come along very often, for boneheaded me, anyway.

Krailsheimer begins his introduction by flatly stating that “nobody but Flaubert” could have written Salammbô, which is true, of course, then he devotes the several following pages to basically defending, at the expense of celebrating, the book. To be frank, that’s often the tenor of even much of the appreciative criticism I’ve seen on it, the curse it has been saddled with in what passes for literary history.

In 1857, right after his popular success with Madame Bovary— success helped no small amount by the novel being cause for a famous court trial charging obscenity and suggesting anti-clericalism—Flaubert started making plans for a novel about ancient Carthage. By his own count, he had already read a hundred books on its almost mythical civilization.

He had long been fascinated with what for many Europeans at the time were the intriguing lands of the East, though work on the novel wasn’t coming to life for him. Flaubert hit a hard wall when he realized that he had no chance of writing about a place he hadn’t seen firsthand, even if he had considerable experience elsewhere in that part of the world from travel when younger. To borrow Steegmuller’s translation of a letter from Flaubert to a friend:

I absolutely must make a trip to Africa.... Once again I’ll live on horseback and sleep in a tent.... But this trip will be a short one. I need to go only to El Kef (thirty leagues from Tunis), and explore the environs of Carthage within a radius of twenty leagues, in order to acquaint myself thoroughly with the landscapes I’ll be describing…I’m a third of the way through the second chapter. The book will have fifteen. As you see, I’ve barely begun. Under the best circumstances, I’ll not be finished for two years.

He was right on one count: the eventual product did contain fifteen chapters, but deciding after he went to Carthage that he previously had too much all wrong (“everything I have done on my novel has to be done over”) and with the Flaubertian obsession of elevating prose itself to something close to sacred, the creation of it a visionary, semi-religious experience (or, to put it another way, just saying “le mot juste” doesn’t do justice to the full transcendent rhapsody of the process), Salammbô was five years—long and wearying—in the making. It was published in 1862, when he was forty-one.

The novel is based on a revolt of unpaid mercenaries in the Carthaginian army during the Punic Wars, when Carthage—originally founded by the Phoenicians who set out from the area of Syria/Lebanon—fought Rome for dominance of the Mediterranean. Often labeled the Mercenaries War (241-238 BC), the conflict, historians say, called into question the very premise of Carthage’s military power, which had always combined a crack navy with well-paid mercenary soldiers, all skillful professionals, recruited from throughout the ancient world. It was this formula that did later allow Hannibal (247-183 BC) to set out by sea and then parade his fabled elephants—the equivalent of today’s state-of-the-art combat tanks—across the snowy Alps and nearly bring Rome to heel, before Rome finally triumphed, invading and brutally conquering Carthage. The Romans burned the city to the ground in 146 BC; they built their own city on top of the charred ruins, sticking to the original name of Carthage (in Phoenician, “New City”), for what was to become the second most important metropolis in their own vast empire, before the Vandals invaded after that and then the Arabs from the East coming in after them. Against the backdrop of the revolt, Flaubert’s novel centers on a star-crossed love between one of the triumvirate of leaders of the mercenary troops, a rugged yet sensitive young Numidian named Mâtho, who himself probably should have been a lyric poet and not any military commander, and Salammbô. She is the daughter of the top Carthaginian general, a ravishingly beautiful but hauntingly strange young woman; sometimes very cold in her ways, she was raised by priests of the Punic goddess Tanit. The novel’s battle scenes are graphic, and there is also detailed depiction of the Punic practice of sacrifice of children to the gods. The novel’s characterization is mostly a matter of voices speaking directly, often gushingly, from the heart in set speeches rather than in any realistic way, maybe as in an opera (Maupassant described Salammbô as exactly that in a published appreciation of the book, with Flaubert being his beloved mentor and a fellow Norman). What Krailsheimer poses—that nobody but Flaubert could have written it—is largely due to the characteristic richly handsome prose, pure Flaubertian. However, on just about every other count the book has been considered a questionable offering, even seen as “un-Flaubertian” (odder than his apprentice-work novel La Tentation de Saint Antoine, with one article I read bluntly labeling Salammbô as “Flaubert’s mistake”), and the situation has been that way ever since F. first read chapters of it in manuscript to literary friends, including the Goncourt brothers; apparently, they tried to gently convince Flaubert (this is just what a writer needs from buddies when you show them something you wrote that you’re personally crazy about) that he would be wise to put it in the drawer and not pursue its publication.

But it was published. And it did sell well—as said, Madame Bovary had already established Flaubert’s name in the marketplace—though most critics at first bombed it for alleged historical inaccuracies. The tastemaker of the day Sainte-Beuve attacked it in no less than a lengthy, three-installment essay; an admirer of Sainte-Beuve, Flaubert labored to answer the criticism in a series of long and defensive letters of his own. Sainte-Beuve even questioned the essential subject, wanted to know “Why Carthage?”—a civilization that had left few traces and whose everyday customs and lifestyle were virtually unknown, a comparatively blank ledger to the modern world; if ancient history were to be examined, Sainte-Beuve argued, wouldn’t glorious Greece or glorious Rome have been a better choice? Further, Sainte-Beuve asked why write of what he saw as a footnote even in Carthage’s history, the incident of a mercenary revolt, therefore making the novel’s subject still more marginal?

And the criticism segued right into the twentieth century, with Marxist critic Georg Luckács seeing it as mere bourgeois indulgence in pretty words and romantic clichés fit for the tastes of “shop girls.” And then the late Edward Said entering the discussion in his book-length 1979 study Orientalism. He holds up Salammbô as contributing to the tendency—which he argues got full venting in the nineteenth century—of Europeans viewing the Orient as a territory of The Other (the “Orient” at the time was often considered the Middle East and Islamic environs), a place savagely irrational, sorely in need of colonizing Europeans’ organization and moral refinement. Such a perception of the region, Said emphasizes, remains strong today and has become a tool for Western political power and hegemony (the latter, like “gaze,” recently another one of those “in” words for scholars, I guess); he says it fuels more of the condescending ethnocentric stereotyping by the West of people living in that part of the globe, specifically the Muslim inhabitants, as very inferior, an outlook tracing clear back to the Crusades.

Which does make sense. And did you notice how in the build-up to the Iraq War, Saddam Hussein was continually shown in evening TV news reports with stock footage of him wearing an oversize gangster’s fedora and brandishing an automatic rifle on the dais, or unsheathing and wildly waving around a huge ceremonial saber? And, you know, I always greatly admired Edward Said, and I would say that my own politics remain close to his; plus, reading him, I certainly always appreciate his graceful and balanced critical prose itself. But his fundamental thesis in Orientalism veers toward the simplistic, and when I came upon what he says about Salammbô before making this trip, I got the feeling that as fair as he tries to be in treating Flaubert (who doesn’t get raked over the glowing accusatory coals to the same degree as a noisy Christian traveler like Chateaubriand, also some lesser-known early journalists he criticizes; Flaubert and the very dreamy—and oh-so-eerie—Gérard de Nerval are given gentler critical treatment by Said when he addresses their writing about the so-called Orient), yes, as fair as he attempts to be with Flaubert, Said—not to put too fine a point on it—is wrong in even implying that one might take this sort of critical approach concerning Salammbô.

Or possibly, as with so much political literary criticism lately that repeatedly assaults “canonized” literature, Said just “doesn’t get it.” And while considering myself pretty much as respectfully PC in everyday life as the next person, I also know when to abandon the simple, though often admirably idealistic, logic of that tack. I know that when it comes to Art, the ground rules change, have nothing whatsoever to do with political agenda, really. And most anybody who has written creative fare himself or herself and therefore experienced the singular feeling of hitting on something uncannily transcendent when you are sitting before the glowing computer screen, let’s say, pecking away at the black keyboard of your overpriced Mac PowerBook G4, let’s also say, he or she definitely knows that to be the case. Indeed, it means to actually produce on the page, while writing, a fine turn of phrase in a line of poetry or a smooth meshing of events for a twist of drama in a novel that goes beyond reason, as you sense the icy, satisfyingly clear transport of the metaphysical and the whispering of the larger wonder of the world, which you hope you can let a reader—rich or poor, established or disenfranchised—savor for a minute or two, if only to know the full capacity of one’s imagination and the extraordinary human beings we all are (kind of a William James moment, a variety of religious experience, no doubt, for both the writer and eventually the reader). Up against the strong effect of such artistic magic, argument via practical deductive reasoning and whatever else helps to render so many matters for literary scholars lately PC or not PC sours like coffee cream left in the faculty-lounge refrigerator too long, with, worse, most of the opaque high-tech linguistic “theory” that has earned many a party promotion and tenure in literature (perpetrated by talents surely less gifted than socially concerned, elegantly expressive Said) itself taking on the look of but the diversion of a bunch of giggly adolescents goofing around in the local video arcade.

Which again means that it often seems there’s little important—to employ that earlier adjective—coming from those academics, but there is—to try to salvage a point made in the midst of the gusting wind of the last paragraph—much important coming from a book like Salammbô.

Which could be the real and more significant controversy about the novel—argument on just how it does, in fact, manage to wield such inexplicable power.

I won’t go as far as Saul Bellow once did in proposing the abolishment of all departments at colleges and universities devoted to study of modern literature. Bellow said that a better tack might be to just let people read the books on their own, remove the meddling middleman who has been undermining the original reader-author love affair altogether too much lately. But here’s what I do say: What if every literature professor were forced to try his or her hand at attempting to write a few short stories or a sheaf of poems?

I mean, there was a time when a lot of scholars had tried this somewhere along the way—future lit profs once wide-eyed undergrads often daydreaming of becoming writers themselves, yet eventually putting that aside and dedicatedly going on to lecture and write about literature—a time when professors unabashedly loved the books they taught and when they understood the specialness of them better, possibly because they had tried some writing themselves. I suppose that today most undergrads with any creative inclination usually go into the many graduate M.F.A. programs currently available, and, I hate to say it, those who aspire to be academics simply proceed directly to a Ph.D. program, without much artistic sidetracking, for what is a practical, very divergent route and with a completely different relationship to the literature they should be in awe of. (I remember once seeing a young literature professor at my own university coming out of the chairman’s office; the chairman had just given her the good news that her promotion with tenure was approved by the university, and she was announcing gleefully and flauntingly—also add some nerdy nasal intonation—to anybody she ran into plodding along the green linoleum of the department’s building: “I’ll never have to read a primary text again!”) You know, attempting to produce some fiction or poetry, the scholar might experience a measure of what I have been talking about, learn firsthand the essence of the unique creative rush if only in a stolen glimpse of it, and, with that happening, suddenly Art and aesthetics might be in vogue again in English departments. Years ago Harold Bloom, an indisputably major modern-day scholar and critic, wrote an awful novel that came my way for review, a virtually unreadable performance, but I’ve often thought that the fact he attempted to produce literature himself gave the man something extra, an insight, that maybe has afforded him the decidedly rare edge he has—as lovably cranky as he can be—over so many more predictable contemporary literary observers.

I know, I’m really wandering, but it all will eventually figure in. Because I am thinking about this kind of stuff during my time in Tunisia, as I think more and more about the story of Flaubert and Salammbô. Despite the amount of controversy, the novel did emerge somewhat triumphant, principally in France. It became for many a revered Secret Text, you might say; the lush diction and visionary power of it, even the psychological complexity of its doomed central love affair, definitely and revealingly Sadeian in a way, had a great influence on the French Parnassians and Symbolists. In their own defining contrariness, they went against the grain, adopted it as a manifesto. Painters also took it to heart, the nineteenth-century Symbolist master Gustave Moreau most prominent among them. Actually, on this current Salammbô mission, I’d made it a point while in Paris to seek out Moreau’s spacious studio, which has long been maintained as a museum for his work. It’s up in the staidly gray Seventeenth Arrondissement and chock full of his billboard-sized visions of classical and Biblical scenes in wild, ultra-radiant color that go beyond the simple hallucinatory, almost qualifying as bona fide psychedelic. Gustave Moreau—now there was one guy who obviously did “get it.”

This is right before the ancient gateway arch built by the first Arabs here, which announces the entry to the old city and the Medina (near this very arch, supposedly, Cervantes once fought the “infidel”). I notice on the sidewalk a tiny key-making kiosk with an old, rather Jules Verne-ish red-metal contraption outside, coin-operated, in which you can laminate identity cards or the like. A sign says in French that your documents are important, their good condition, and you should protect them, plasticize them. I know that in a country like this such carried documents are very important, the police regularly asking to see one’s papers, yet it also strikes me right then and there as almost a metaphor for what Flaubert was trying to do with his constant mad note-taking while in Tunisia that he writes of in his letters—Flaubert attempting to preserve everything, beat time, so he could preserve it even better than that, really plasticize it, when he eventually did sit down for the five long years of surely mot juste-ing in rainy Normandy. I ask myself if all art isn’t just that, what the sign advertises:

That evening, as every evening, I again stroll up and down Avenue Bourguiba, the outdoor cafés packed, the broad sidewalks crowded with other strolling folk, a repeated, nightly celebration as thousands of starlings chirpingly swoop in dramatic dark clouds against the genuinely lavender twilight sky.

I keep thinking an awful lot about Flaubert and Salammbô. True to Flaubert’s model, I’m also up to my own habit of taking notes madly, stopping in the middle of a downtown sidewalk or in the Medina to do so, CIA style, maybe. This thinking about Salammbô and Flaubert himself in Tunisia has given me an organizing focus for the trip, but I’m also jotting down ideas for short stories of my own to be set in Tunisia, writing the invisible narratives in my head—plot outlines, transition sentences—as I meander around on my new and bouncy twenty-five-buck Reebok track shoes, black and white, and take in everything (wow, look at that side-street café with the long row of men sitting out front in red chechia caps puffing their ornate hookahs, a perfect picture! wow, look at that massive old Art Deco Jewish synagogue on Avenue de la Liberté, like an armed enclave with the dozen or so soldiers toting AK-47s at the front gate, a painful sign of the times), and meander around some more.

I go back to the couscous place just about every evening, sticking with a winner.

I’m saving my own assault on the ruins of Carthage till later, preparing for it. At the hotel I reread the letters I photostatted that Flaubert posted from his own trip (to repeat, there aren’t many, unlike the piles of them from the longer journey to Middle Eastern countries when younger, and he was only at the ruins of Carthage for several days), and I’m going through the complete text of Salammbô again, remembering that I forgot to pick up a copy in French in Paris and hoping I can find one here. I want to have everything fresh in my mind, my cerebral guidebook, in order to see it all through maybe F.’s own—how should I put this—“gaze”? As for the Saint Augustine I packed, I find myself skimming it, the sections on his time in Carthage turning out to be comparatively brief. And while I do again look once or twice to see the signature of my sister’s college roommate on the title page, it’s tough to get into the prose’s often bombastic preaching, what I vaguely remember from when I myself had to read it (or at least pretend I did) at a Catholic boys’ school as a kid. But I can say that when I think now of Saint Augustine’s frequently quoted line once more about how the world is a book and a person who has not traveled has read only a page of that book, such a thought understandably resonates for me at the moment.

I’ve already relocated to another hotel called the Majestic, a white Art Nouveau wedding-cake rise from the time of the French Protectorate (the admittedly hegemonistically named “Protectorate” did certainly happen, 1881-1956); the Majestic might be a little shabby, but I like how my airy, spacious room has a balcony overlooking the busy Avenue de Paris. The place is much better than the Hôtel Omrane, where I suffered a bad spider bite that has left a sizable strawberry rash on my leg. I’m finding Tunis more and more attractive almost by the hour. I take especially long walks through the maze of the old city, the Medina, which has been kept intact with designation as a UNESCO World Heritage landmark, visiting the mosques and the palaces and the ornate mausoleums of the old Arab and Ottoman rulers there, and everybody is thoroughly friendly. A smiling young cop stops me to ask in French how I am enjoying the city, proudly telling me how many languages he speaks. The athletically handsome manager in a good suit at the Hôtel Majestic turns out to be a former soccer star for the locally revered Club Africain team, and, a soccer fan myself, I talk to him at length about the sport, fancying, maybe, it’s the manly way Hemingway used to talk to hotel managers about sport—or about bullfighting, anyway, in the persona of the Jake character in The Sun Also Rises. Any problem stemming from my being in a Muslim country in the time of the major U.S. mess-up in Iraq is softened by saying to people right off the bat in my French, “Je suis américain, malheureusement,” which usually elicits a smile, then maybe some honest dialogue about the current situation. If that doesn’t work, I bring up Jack Kennedy, who remains honored in the country because he and Jackie were good friends of the founder of modern-day independent Tunisia, the progressive Habib Bourguiba—the Kennedy reference seems capable of breaking the ice if anybody seems more critical of my nationality. A last, trumping resort if I want to indisputably assert my personal credibility as an American is simply to declare, emphatically: “Bush, il est fou, c’est un idiot!”

One afternoon I’m strolling beside some impressive futuristic government buildings at the edge of the downtown, and when I stop to write down a few notes, a guy about thirty comes up to me. He introduces himself, saying he suspected I was American. He’s an overweight, wide-grinning sort wearing what looks like frat-boy attire, complete with a neat yellow polo shirt and good dress slacks; I figure he works in one of the government offices. He has no interest in getting into any Bush-bashing, and he tells me cheerily in French that his dream has always been to go not simply to America but specifically to Miami.

He talks more about Miami. After ten minutes of conversation, I conclude that for him it’s ultra-exotic, with the beach and the girls in Miami (actually, both of which he could find nearby on the Tunisian coast, where the tourist industry is garishly developed); probably the romantic aura of the big-time crime in Miami as celebrated in TV shows and movies contributes to an adventurous image, too, the fast life—in other words, for him its draw is the Otherness of the savage and morally deficient West, and even if the paradigm doesn’t entail much hegemony, it’s rather a reverse Orientalism, no?

As for the ruins of ancient Carthage being a tourist attraction, those ruins do suffer from their own longtime bad rap, I realize. The truth of the matter is that there isn’t much left, and whatever was Punic that has been excavated is overshadowed by the excavations more extensive and dramatic for the Roman city later there. Most sources warn it takes some time to appreciate the scant vestiges of the Punic era that exist today, even get a bead on what remains.

Carthage is now a suburb north of Tunis, where the city’s modern airport is located, in fact. While both the Punic and Roman leaders believed in its prime strategic location overlooking the Gulf of Tunis—a wide inlet of the luminescent-ly azure Mediterranean tucked in on either side by jagged purple mountains rising to make for long peninsulas across the way—the Arabs when they came established their city at a lesser settlement that eventually became Tunis, farther inland and set off from full proximity to the sea by Lake Tunis. On a hot weekday midmorning, I take the relatively empty little commuter train that goes to the northern suburbs, posh white villas abundant once you get beyond the industrial hodgepodge of Tunis’s port area. Many of the stations along the seaside route have names with Punic ties that could almost be an index for Flaubert’s novel: one is “Salammbô”; another “Hannibal,” Salammbô’s baby brother, who makes a relatively brief guest appearance in the book; another “Hamilcar,” her father and the fearsome Carthaginian top general. I step off the train at the empty Hannibal station—very neatly suburban and built by the colonizers with, indeed, considerable Oriental whimsy, a blue-and-white cottage-style affair of onion arches and embellishing arabesques, cascading bougainvillea everywhere. I start walking in the opposite direction of the sea, up a long, steep road blanketed with fallen tree petals—strikingly bright orange—passing a swank tennis club and more villas, heading toward the epicenter of the several scattered “Archeological Sites,” Byrsa Hill. It’s hot, will be closing in on a hundred before the day is done, and this first assault on what is the main site in the ruins of Carthage is pretty unfocused for me, even disorienting.

The summit, where the Punic temple stood and a location prominent in Salammbô, was later built over with a Roman temple. Then the French constructed a massive and gaudily yellow basilica, still standing, in honor of Saint Louis, a.k.a. Louis IX; having set out on a Crusade launched from the south of France, he succumbed to a typhoid epidemic and died here in 1270. The 360 degrees of vistas is nearly too much—the sea, the mountains, even distantly white Tunis with its few industrial smokestacks in the panorama—and to make everything more disorienting, there is the heat. Though I gunked up with coconut-fragrant sun block and am wearing khakis and a long-sleeve shirt to ward off the rays, I forgot my Red Sox baseball cap, plus this day I didn’t even pack a plastic bag with the mandatory liter bottle of water that half the Tunisian citizenry seem to tote around at all times. A long esplanade in front of a white museum, which was formerly the monastery for the giant basilica that itself is now a gallery and performance arts center, makes you feel like you’ve just stepped into a de Chirico canvas, the way they’ve set upright some truncated Roman columns and broken statuary; the heaps of brown stone ruins directly below the overlook constitute the excavated Punic Quarter, claimed to be the remnants of a neighborhood from the old civilization, but for me right now they look like not much more than, yes, heaps of brown stones, a lot of weeds and even plenty of trash interspersed. I have equally little luck in responding when I wander into the museum that offers both Roman and Punic artifacts, and not helping the situation within, there is the presence of several of the kind of for-hire guides who prey on naïve tourists, one guy now spieling away in bad, obnoxiously loud English that can be heard throughout the rooms to two British women, fragile and quite old. I tell myself they are such easy marks that no self-respecting, hustling tour guide should even attempt to hit on them, and this guy should be absolutely ashamed of himself (the standard M.O. appears to be to approach foreigners as a helpful friend and tag along with gladly given information—and then, when the spieling is done, demand some exorbitant fee for the unrequested services). To be frank, none of it is coming together today, either the lay of what was once the Carthaginian city or any sense of Flaubert bouncing around on a mule (not a horse, as he predicted in his letter) and doing his research out here. To be really frank, I am lost in a moment of wondering what the hell I am even doing on this trip, dodging some personal obligations back home and abandoning my writing for a few weeks; I know I’ve always used travel as a way to escape responsibility. Having skipped lunch, I’m a bit dizzy, and add to that, I’m sunburned already, despite the lotion.

I make the half-hour trek in the pulsating heat back to the station, take the train a little farther north to the resort village of Sidi Bou Said on a high, cliffed point of land. It’s a ridiculously beautiful place of a seemingly enforced color code on the villas, with white for the stucco walls and blue for the decorative tiles and shutters; there’s a nest of winding cobbled streets at the top of the Gibraltar-like rise of it, a yacht harbor below. It’s sometimes called the Saint-Tropez of North Africa, exclusive, immaculate, with many signs saying where you can’t park, where you can’t walk. The guidebooks note how it has been a favorite haunt of every French cultural celebrity spending time in Tunisia from Paul Klee to Michel Foucault to Simone de Beauvoir, as well as Frédéric Mitterrand, the controversial French actor and producer (nephew of the former Monsieur le Président himself), who seems to have been a longtime resident, and I do remember that I saw an expensive coffee-table photo book in a bookstore in Tunis for which he provides the chatty introduction: Les Maisons de Sidi Bou Said. Beautiful as it is, Sidi Bou Said doesn’t look very attractive to me in my present mood, the profusion here of stupid and indulgent wealth, haughtily oblivious of, even walling itself off from, any discomfort—or any reality—in the world elsewhere.

And trudging around Sidi Bou Said I remember—to make matters even worse—a scene of a badly lame little kid of ten or so. Barefoot, he was dressed in ragged white and trying to sell sprigs of jasmine to those sitting at the outdoor cafés on Avenue Bourguiba the evening before; in Tunisia, men will buy fragrant jasmine—the national flower—to put behind the ear, a ubiquitous local tradition. The kid was having no luck selling, and he seemed to give up at one point, or to just forget about it, and looking at his flower holder (the boys who sell them stick the stems of the white-petaled jasmine into a wooden ball, which becomes almost a big star in the hand), he held it up as if he were indeed but a carefree kid with a fireworks sparkler, ran limpingly in meaningless circles, smiling and gazing up at that star he waved, maybe at all the brighter stars of the indigo Tunisian night sky above, too, the kid contentedly playing, even singing to himself. Yes, for a minute, anyway, he was merely a happy kid and not somebody shackled to a life in the street and a physical disability that will make that life so hard for him, as in his innocence he didn’t know such consequences and all of that yet. To witness it broke my heart, and I think of it now in Sidi Bou Said—how absurd a world it is that juxtaposes that kind of ill fortune beside the smug opulence of a place such as Sidi Bou Said, with its gleaming BMWs and its handsome walled-in villas and its chic, beautiful-people inhabitants easing around behind oversize protecting sunglasses. I think of my own sadness I indulged in (the sense of loss I get whenever I go back to my summer place, often there alone and with only the remembering of happier times to surround me), and I feel more than stupid for such self-centered indulgence, suspect that possibly social concern has to figure into everything, and art and literature can be but indulgence as well. I take the train back to Tunis, worn out from a day that didn’t add up to much whatsoever, other than doubt.

And I concede what you have to sometimes concede: Not every day of travel, just as not every night of dreaming, takes you to where you really want to go. At the Hôtel Majestic I spend a couple of subdued days rereading yet another time the passages of Salammbô that describe the vanished ancient city of Carthage, still trying to get some valid orientation. I also go through, once more, the photostatted Flaubert letters for clues that might help me conjure up a better sense of his own visit there.

My second assault on ancient Carthage will prove the beginning of my breakthrough, the already alluded to Big Realization. (Salammbô uses potboiling, cliff-hanging tricks throughout, especially at the end of chapters, so if I do appear to be trying quite hard with the narrative teasing, at least I’m in respected company). Listen a little more.

Those good Reeboks cushiony below me, the dark blue baseball cap with a big red B on it firmly on my head, a liter bottle of mineral water along with my guidebooks and maps packed in a flimsy plastic supermarket sack, I return to the downtown station and board the teapot-whistling little commuter train to head up the coast again. I soon realize it’s a mistake to travel on Sunday, the cars crowded with a large chunk of Tunis’s population escaping the city for the many good beaches far less exclusive than the one at Sidi Bou Said, and standing up I’m soaked in sweat; but when two teenage guys jimmy the locked latch mechanism and open the doors once we get rolling, the breeze on the causeway that crosses over the huge steamy puddle of Lake Tunis is wonderful. I remember Flaubert, both in a letter and in the novel, talking of flocks of pink flamingoes alighting from the lake, and while I haven’t witnessed the phenomenon personally, I can easily envision it as the train rattles along—which is exactly what I do. And already I somehow sense it’s going to be a better day, a banner one, in fact.

Stepping off at the Salammbô station this time, I plan to make the entire loop of the so-called Archeological Sites, a half-dozen spots separated by a half mile or so of walking in between them. It’s still as hot as it was a couple of days before, but I’m much better prepared now. I will scribble notes for the next four or five hours, walking, scribbling, and walking some more.

** The Tophet, or ancient burial plot, is a fenced-in, unkempt patch amid more white villas close to the sea. It offers several unearthed crypts and hundreds of strewn-about stèles, more or less small obelisk headstones bearing the mark of the goddess Tanit, Salammbô’s personal deity, which consists of a pyramid topped with a cross bar and a ring, the symbols of the sun and moon above that.

Flaubert figures in largely on this. And even if the site wasn’t excavated when he was here in 1858, he did get to know the Belgian archeologists studying Carthage at the time. The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa in his book on Madame Bovary, a masterful meditation titled The Perpetual Orgy, talks of visiting the small Flaubert museum in Croisset and seeing such a stèle, which apparently F. had lugged back with him to France. Right from the start, a charge against Salammbô was that it indulged in gratuitous violence, not only the battles but particularly the episode when the war with the rebelling mercenaries isn’t going too well for the Carthaginians and they sacrifice some of their children to the god Moloch in hopes of reversing their luck; such rumored child sacrifice wasn’t documented when Flaubert wrote of it, though remains found at this very site later confirmed it. To be honest, the violence and graphic descriptions of the killing in the novel are fully nightmarish, à la Cormac McCarthy in Blood Meridian, and somebody adhering to the critical approach of Edward Said, in the spirit of Orientalism, might say that Flaubert indulged in literary sensationalism at the expense of a true depiction of the Carthaginians, Flaubert allegedly perpetuating the image of Oriental savagery. But the scenes are also handsomely written, effective. Further, Flaubert might have been noticeably condescending in some of his letters about what he observed during his extensive Eastern travels (such as in describing his trip to Constantinople), yet in carefully reading Salammbô, one soon learns that the Carthaginians, master merchants, are by and large shown as highly refined in their government and commerce, while the few times Gauls—Europeans—are mentioned (there are some among the recruited mercenaries) they seem to be portrayed as markedly uncivilized, seen as drunken louts.

At the Tophet, in the building heat, a wiry mustached guy has been tagging after me, the only customer there, wanting to be my guide. I politely tell him in French I don’t need one, and I know that here I want to experience the place on my own, think about it without any intrusion, which I do. When I leave, he is sitting on a folding chair outside the gatehouse sulking, most likely because he didn’t get my business. I offer a friendly smile and explain that I didn’t need him because I already have a guide—I hold up the Rough Guides guidebook, its clichéd photo of a desert oasis on the emerald-green cover—and he shakes his head, waving it away as if it’s an annoying fly. He tells me the book is no good, and it doesn’t have the real story.

Sitting there, he makes a chopping motion at the back of his neck, winces in put-on agony, pantomiming what happened to the children.

“Les enfants” he repeats it, emphasizing, “vous n’avez pas la verité, monsieur.” I don’t have the truth.

Either he hasn’t read Orientalism and therefore isn’t suitably PC, or like Flaubert, possibly, he knows what sells. In any case, at the Tophet, Punic Carthage is beginning to emerge for me, in sort of a “know my religion, know my civilization” way.

** I walk past still more white villas on a suburban road along the sea, and soon find the Punic Ports, an important aspect of the ancient city of Carthage proper. Today these are but two connected brackish suburban ponds, one vaguely rectangular and one vaguely circular with a small island studding its center, yet the geometry of them was once exact. And at one time this was all a prime symbol of Carthaginian dominance, the outer port for merchant vessels and the inner one for a large fleet of naval vessels, which docked like neat spokes around that central, and formerly perfect, sphere of the island. On the island was built a nautical roundhouse to service the long, graceful ships, which were powered by both wind and rowing galley slaves in their venturing to the many outposts of the empire as far off as Cartagena in Spain (the name deriving from “Carthage”) and clear to West Africa’s Atlantic coastline. The Euclidean precision of the whole layout is definitely no longer intact, and there are just the undulating grassy banks and surrounding grounds landscaped like a park, with sun-hungry golden tamarisk and giant ornamental oleander, vivid scarlet; a number of well-heeled residents from the neighborhood are out for morning dog-walking or some casual fishing in the ponds. However, what was for me only a model or a drawing before—all the guidebook illustrations of the original city stress the classic pattern of these Punic Ports at the foot of Byrsa Hill, the once-exact geometry of them—now becomes more clear, easy to picture, and it takes being here, this close to the tepid water, to start to truly understand the layout. I can also picture the fine vessel of General Hamilcar, the princess’s father in Salammbô, gliding through the gates of the ports (they were both entirely within the city’s protecting walls then), returned at last from the Roman campaign to eventually attempt to rescue his people from the mercenary uprising, as happens in the novel. So for me here, it’s a matter of “know my ports, know my civilization,” and I’m beginning to get a solid feel for the larger plan of the city, the geography described in Salammbô. An interesting note is that it was Chateaubriand, one of Said’s named offenders, who in 1805 deduced that these unimposing ponds, neglected for centuries, were actually the famous ports of the city alluded to in ancient texts, something nobody else had quite figured out before.

I’ve been at it for about two hours already, but with the baseball cap and the water bottle, even a roll of crackers and a banana packed for sustenance, I don’t notice the time pass.

** Farther on, right beside the sea, is a plot called the Magon Quarter, or the German Excavations, unearthed by, naturally, German archeologists. This site offers low foundations of what might have been a Punic city block, weedy; nevertheless, in true German tradition (they were zealous archeologists) it’s much more organized than most of the other ruins, outfitted with illustrated placards explaining everything in French, Arabic, and German (which looks weird, because for me Tunisia itself feels anything but German). After that are the Roman Baths, a large site with substantial remnants of the buildings—stone pillars and interior arches—beside the sea, which reminds you that most of the Carthaginian ruins are Roman and not Punic, ditto regarding the site of the Roman Houses, up toward Byrsa Hill, also the nearby Roman Amphitheatre there, which has been completely reconstructed as a venue for music concerts and the like; the profusion of Roman ruins perhaps also emphasizes exactly how gone and vanished any idea of the Punic itself really is. Hot, sweating, I look at my watch to see it’s early afternoon now, two or so. And as I plod back up that same sloping asphalt pavement strewn with orange-colored petals to Byrsa Hill that I walked before, now in the fully hundred-degree afternoon heat under a sky flawlessly deep blue, I am tired, and the swelling on my leg left from the spider bite is increasingly aggravated by the heat and my khakis rubbing against it. But I do have some sense at long last of not only the layout of the original city but also how Flaubert must have felt out here, putting the puzzle together for himself. Flaubert visited Carthage before many of the major Punic archeological discoveries, as said; he was chastised at first by the supposed experts in France for allegedly having gotten wrong in his novel many of the details about the physical trappings of the Punic city, though later he was proven to be remarkably accurate on that score—uncannily so, according to some sources.

** And atop Byrsa Hill again, deserted of tourists who are probably all at the cooling beaches now, I look out from that same high esplanade in front of the yellow façade of the Saint Louis Basilica and the white monastery beside it that is now the artifact museum, and everything here suddenly comes alive and makes sense, too.

The prime vista is now for me exactly the way Flaubert described it in the novel, up here where the temple was, running down the hill past the ruins of the excavated Punic Quarter, where you can discern the outline of streets and houses, then stretching—after more posh villas and clusters of fruit trees and wiggly cypresses, far below—to the Punic Ports, which were previously only nondescript ponds indeed the last time I was here, but now exist in their full significance; beyond lies the sparkling Gulf of Tunis, framed on either side by the aforementioned purple mountains and opening out to the wide, wide Mediterranean Sea, once near entirely ruled by the mighty Carthaginians who on this very spot could boast of offering the greatest civilization of their era.

But now all of that is absolutely gone, like everything else will be gone, including me, my summer house that deals me considerable sadness lately, even the kid selling flowers (the poor little guy) there on Avenue Bourguiba beneath the aching stars a few nights before; the power of the ruins of Punic Carthage is not so much in what remains, scant compared to that of other excavated sites of former civilizations worldwide, but in how much has vanished, left only to the imagination—but the imagination is supremely powerful. And I like to think of Flaubert out here thinking exactly the same thing, and, not to be presumptuous, I sense more than ever what it must have been like for him perhaps thinking the same thing, imagining it all, planning his book.

I wander through the empty rooms of the museum again, no guides hustling tourists in this heat. I write some notes concerning the holdings in the showcases of fine Punic jewelry (pink coral; blue scarab; exquisite cast gold), which could have been similar to Salammbô’s celebrated rich adornment, and then I linger in front of the museum’s maps and reconstructed models of the city, studying them. Several hours on my feet, I’m very tired now, but comfortably so. I feel I have found what I wanted and have experienced a breakthrough (but it will not turn out to be quite that way—yet) as I head back down the steep road, going toward the station at Hannibal.

Which is when I see a slim young woman, pretty, walking directly towards me, approaching me.

Sweating from the hike up the hill so that ribbons of her mahogany hair are glued to her forehead, her eyes pale, smiling though obviously weary herself, the young woman asks me in French if there are, generically, “any sites” around here. She is lost, it seems, without a map and just off the train at the Hannibal stop herself. Probably in her late twenties, there’s something of the grad student about her, wearing functional beige pedal-pushers and a rumpled bland-plaid sleeveless blouse, what looks like very typical grad-student attire. In fact, she admits she is totally lost. We sit for a while on a bench at a bus stop in the deserted, stilled Sunday afternoon, laughing, my confessing how I was beyond totally lost myself on my first trip out here to Carthage. She explains she is staying with friends in Bizerte, a resort on the coast and formerly the Old World city of Hippo Diarrhytus (it predates even Carthage), and when I tell her I am American and try to make a joke about how Americans are currently not too popular in France, considering the international fiasco in Iraq, she tells me she is German and not French, saying, with a smile, that Americans are not very popular in Germany right now either. (My own French isn’t good enough to pick up accents—I’m usually satisfied simply to hear myself functioning in the other language). I ask her where she’s from and she says Frankfurt. She asks me why I’m in Tunis, and I go on with some energetic mush in French about Flaubert and Salammbô, which—surprisingly—appears to interest her; she admits to having heard of the novel but not having read it, says that she now wishes she had read it before she came, if it is actually about Carthage, as I say. Even though I tell her that Byrsa Hill is the main attraction in this vicinity, the principal “site,” she doesn’t appear to want to pursue climbing up the steep hill any farther, saying, “Peut-être un autre jour.” And when I tell her there is a winding side street, down the incline a ways and at the tennis club there, and that it leads over to the Roman Houses and the Roman Amphitheatre, she decides she will settle for those attractions today. It seems, however, that she just wants to go in the same direction as me. Well, I’m sane enough to know that, lost, she only wants company, and with regard to somebody my age, for her there’s clearly no interest other than that—no, I’m not a young guy anymore, needless to add—but I do get the feeling she would tag along with me on the avuncular count alone if I were to encourage it, her continuing to hang on just about anything I say in my French, repeatedly laughing in her subdued, grad-student way. Together we descend the hill for a while, then part at the tennis club, going our separate ways. Off to find the other sites I recommended, she stops after a few steps and turns around to offer me a big final wave, as she stands there in the swallowing shade of the winding side street.

“Au revoir, et aussi bonne chance,” I say, adding, “Bonne chance, pour les sites.”

She smiles again, a pretty young woman soon walking away on a carpet of those fallen, bright-orange petals.

And I can’t help but think of how when I was young and traveling on my own a good deal, I might sometimes meet a girl in a youth hostel or just sightseeing and soon be spending time with her. (Why, I once fell head over heels, all but thought I wanted to marry on the spot, a pudgy, gigglingly bucktoothed, whitely blond Swiss girl, a lot of fun, who was twenty-two years old and a secretary at a police station in Geneva, which qualified her as an auxiliary cop herself; I was a kid myself back then, and I met her on the Chihuahua al Pacífico train that crosses the dramatic scenery of the high mountains of northern Mexico when she was backpacking in a yearlong grand trip around Latin America that she’d saved up for, the pair of us happily traveling together for a few days, ending up in a seedy, and perfect, little seaside fishing town called Topolobampo across from the Baja Peninsula.) I think of how things have certainly changed since then, but there’s no regret to any of it. Nevertheless, possibly contemplating the ruins on Byrsa Hill has skewed time some for me. To the point that I somehow seem to now see myself young and dark-haired, somehow straighter and taller, too, a ghost of me walking away with that young German woman, the two of us laughing and together waving goodbye to the older guy that is me in the Red Sox cap, standing there by himself and holding a plastic bag with a water bottle and Rough Guides guidebook—because I am older, which is how it should be, of course, granting that the whole elusive concept of time itself can often turn very spookily tricky.

When the train back to the city stops briefly at La Gou-lette-Vieille, the car only half full with people now quietly returning from their day at the beach, I do catch a peek, the slightest view, down the main street and to the sea. It is where the aunt of my friend the Parisian professor, Claude Lévy, once had the summer house he enjoyed so much as a child, an area now funky and half industrialized, abutting Tunis’s ever-expanding shipping port. I know that I am too beat to keep my promise to revisit the place for him. But what if I simply lie to him back in Paris, fabricate like Mar-low does at the end in Heart of Darkness? What if I say that I went there, that even with the house gone, the place was beautiful (the white sand as soft as flour, the shaggy-headed palms rattling like castanets in the soft breeze, the Gulf of Tunis bluer than blue at this late hour of a summer Sunday winding down), to reinforce the image of it preserved in his own memory—because his own memory is free of the shackles of Time, and that’s the way the cherished spot remains in his own personal reality? I like that idea.

Man, the day has proved a great one, and I feel good. But the Big Realization is still to come.

So, my Carthage research just about accomplished, I log some old-fashioned sightseeing.

I leave the Hôtel Majestic for a few days and travel by bouncing long-distance bus out toward the edge of the Sahara and the city of Kairouan. Founded in 670, it was once the administrative seat for a large portion of Muslim North Africa, a place still considered the fourth holiest in Islam, seeing that a compatriot of the Prophet is entombed there. The fine golden crenellated walls of its vast Medina, the way that everything on street signs and such is in wispy Arabic and not French here, the architectural phenomenon of its imposing Great Mosque—the whole package makes it easy to understand how the place did such a number on a young Paul Klee in 1914; Klee proclaimed that to see Kairouan was to behold A Thousand and One Nights in reality, and he said the experience moved him so much, was so powerful, that it made him decide to return to Germany and at last get serious with his own painting. In making a loop by bus back to Tunis, I spend time in Sousse, a large seaside city now developed as a major Mediterranean beach resort with a ton of package-tour business. As welcoming as the sun and surf are in Sousse, it isn’t my kind of scene (too many new high-rise hotels; also, one of those white, rubber-tired imitation choo-choo trains for tourists slowly snaking along the Corniche; and, most annoying for me, two shaved-headed young British guys who look like soccer hooligans in my small hotel—loud, red like boiled crabs, the heavier of the pair always wearing with his swimsuit a black T-shirt that announces “FBI” in big white lettering on the back, and under that in smaller print: “Female Body Inspector”), until eventually I’m glad to be back in Tunis. There I’m greeted like a celebrity by the staff at the once-opulent Majestic, who address me heartily as “Monsieur LaSalle,” not only the former soccer star of a manager pleased to see me again, but also the elderly bellboy in his frayed, epauletted red jacket and the cleaning ladies as well, all remembering my generous tipping, I guess.

I finally buy a copy of Salammbô in French at a bookstore on Avenue Bourguiba. It’s a cheap edition published by the Paris company Maxi-Livres that prints up uncopyrighted classics in functional, sturdily bound paper editions, an operation like Dover Books in the U.S. I’m at that stage when you’ve done most everything you’re supposed to do on a trip. (Yes, I have “tuned in” on Flaubert’s time in Carthage and, in being here, savored the wonder of a book that admittedly is—when all is said and done—still an oddity in his oeuvre, Salammbô; my brain is cooking with plenty of new ideas for fiction set in Tunisia, plus the research I’ve accomplished will eventually render the essay you’re now reading.) Before dinner one evening I sit out on my hotel room’s balcony above the Avenue de Paris. I enjoy a bottle of Virgen lemon soda (the chief local brand) and a small bag of paprika potato chips I bought at the Monoprix on Avenue Charles de Gaulle (being in a Muslim country encourages a cut-down on alcohol, so no late-afternoon tallboy of beer for me—I wouldn’t even know of a street shop where to buy one in Tunis), and I start reading Salammbô in the French edition. It has an orange spine and the cover reproduces a scene of busy activity in a palace that seems much more Roman than Punic (you can’t expect everything to be accurate on a two-buck production like this). The thumping, meandering Arab pop plays from a kiosk selling music tapes below; the horns of the yellow taxis yap at each other during the rush hour now on Avenue de Paris, lined with its fine, purple-flowering jacarandas; the workers in their European attire pour out of the old office buildings, including the sizable one for Star Assurances across the street. Actually, from the balcony I can see over the big Star Assurances building, have a good view, well beyond that, of the low clutter of many white domes that is the Tunis skyline.

No, my life at the moment has nothing to do with that. I am in a whirlwind of words—strong nouns and rich adjectives and breathing verbs; drugging metaphors and orchestral polysyllabic rhythms, too—and I have been blown from wherever I am on a balcony above Avenue de Paris clear to a raucous Punic feast being held in ancient Carthage’s luxuriant palatial gardens, organized for the soon-to-revolt mercenaries who have been recruited from every far-flung corner of the ancient world, gathered now to be honored for their victories abroad. Until that is interrupted by a door at the adjoining palace opening on a high terrace above, and entering the gardens is a wraith of a heartbreakingly lovely young woman almost powered by the milky moonlight itself; she marches into the feast as followed by two lines of pale eunuch priests hauntingly chanting low a hymn to the deities of Carthage. The woman is Salammbô, General Hamilcar Barca’s daughter, and her priests are also from that noble Barca family, all descended from (this gets wild) the original conger eel that hatched the mystic egg in which the goddess Tanit, moonlight-charged herself, had long lay hidden.

15. OK, Even If You Don’t Understand a Goddamned Word of French, Read this Aloud Yourself Wherever You Are and Tell Me What Happens, Because Here Is the Scene in the Novel of Princess Salammbô Entering that Feast:

Sa chevelure, poudrée d’un sable violet, et réunie en forme de tour selon la mode des vierges chananéennes, la faisait paraître plus grande. Des tresses de perles attachées à ses tempes descendaient jusqu’aux coins de sa bouche, rose comme une grenade entr’ouverte. Il y avait sur sa poitrine un assemblage de pierres lumineuses, imitant par leur bigarrure les écailles d’un murène. Ses bras, garnis de diamants, sortaient nus de sa tunique sans manches, étoilée de fleurs rouges sur un fond tout noir. Elle portaint entre les chevilles une chaînette d’or pour régler sa marche, et son grand manteau de pourpre sombre, taillé dans une étoffe inconnue, trâinait derrière elle, faisant à chacun de ses pas comme une large vague qui la suivant.

Do you see what I mean? Is it possible there is an occasion when the mot juste can become so juste that it transcends even the ridiculous boundaries of different tongues, to the degree that, no matter what language you speak, an understanding is automatic? Are those words in themselves a creation that goes beyond all such, well, babbling difference, the confusion thrown up by different tongues, and glides clear into a zone of pure beauty and significance well beyond different tongues? Is a paragraph like that quite possibly a major achievement in the entire course of the human endeavor— and then some?

I read and read. And once I touch back down again to my chair (borrowed from the white vanity table in the hotel room and brought out here to the balcony), sip another long sip of the lemon Virgen soda (pretty sugary), I chide myself for being lazy in the first place and previously rereading the book in translation—three different ones in the past, including Krailsheimer’s—which do no justice whatsoever to the achievement of what is before me, the quintessential power in the original French.

I leave Tunis a couple of days later, wishing I had more time there (isn’t that a given for the best travel?—just when you get comfortable, you take out your computer-printed slab of a light-green-and-white airline ticket and reluctantly stare at the day and the hour when you have to depart), and out at the rather gaudy Tunis airport, a new terminal done up in what could be labeled as glitzy Las Vegas/Mosque kitsch, if that makes any sense, I remain unaware of what is about to happen to me back in Paris.

In sweltering Paris (temperature records are being broken in the summer of 2003) crammed with tourists, I find a cheap one-star hotel up by the Gare de l’Est. It’s a funky neighborhood now thoroughly hip, vibrant with the busy street life of Sub-Saharan Africans who have immigrated to France, their shops with names like (untranslated) “Homeboys” and “Afro King,” even a standard Parisian café renamed “Motown Lounge.” It does get me away from the noisy tourists, who are present in hoards down around where I stayed earlier, near the Place de la Bastille and in the Marais. I meet a French novelist pal of mine, Michel Sarotte, for dinner at a restaurant behind the Panthéon; besides having written fine novels, one once short-listed for the Prix Goncourt, Michel is the author a first-rate, probably seminal book published in the seventies on the recurring theme of homosexuality throughout the history of American literature. He assures me that even if Edward Said wasn’t a fan of Salammbô (soft-voiced Michel has never heard of Said, yet I try to explain to him Said’s stand, one most definitely based on understandable social concern; regretfully, Said will die a few months hence), despite all controversy, Michel says, the novel has today gradually achieved the status of an indisputable classic in France, even turning up as recently as a year or so ago as one of the texts on the sacred Agrégation exam for certification for teaching French literature in schools and universities. Claude Lévy has left town for the week with his wife who is singing opera in Metz, so I won’t have to lie to him about visiting La Goulette-Vieille—for the time being, anyway. I do have one final chore that involves the unfinished business of closing out a checking account I’ve had with Banque Nationale de Paris for years, something I haven’t been looking forward to; anybody who has dealt with the bureaucracy of French banking and its infamous runarounds and petty authoritarianism knows what I’m talking about. Luckily, the general transit strike is finally solved, and I take the RER train out to Nanterre on the other side of the La Défense skyscraper district, where my branch of the BNP is located and where I taught two times at the relatively new university there. Nanterre is bleak even in the leaf-shimmering June sunshine, the supposedly once futuristic reinforced-concrete university buildings now crumbling and often graffiti-covered, the unkempt campus virtually abandoned for summer break; the bank office is scenically located on a rusted trestle walkway over the rumbling train tracks. Surprisingly, everybody at the bank is quite helpful, and after I am first told I can come back the next week for a cashier’s check covering what’s left in my account, I argue. I am then told I can come back the next day; I argue in French some more. I finally get the three people who are working there to engage behind the counter in a serious, whispering five-minute pow-wow on the problem, and they agree that they can have the check ready that afternoon at two, meaning I have about three hours to kill. I go to the university library—hot and un-air conditioned—thumb through some American literary magazines in the reading room, then figure I might head upstairs to the stacks and see what they have in their holdings on Flaubert and Salammbô.

The tables are empty, and these second-floor rooms are even hotter. But I hit a genuine platinum mine of texts, several long shelves of works by and about Flaubert, first losing myself in a complete two-volume set of his travel notebooks, containing new info for me on his Tunisia trip. That includes evidence of how he was, in truth, very politically curious, interested in the daily stuff of administration and colonial life in North Africa at the time, F. making voluminous notes with detailed observations on the subject, even if none of that found its way into what he eventually would publish as prose fiction. Then my eye snags on a paperback on the shelf, what should be only a hokey illustrated production, an edition of Salammbô in a series called “Lire et Voir les Classiques”: Read and See the Classics, as stated, and the texte intégral (unabridged version) accompanied by several inserted glossy-page sections with paintings influenced by Salammbô and scenes from a number of operas based on it, even stills from a Cecil B. DeMille-style Italian film adaptation—in lurid movie technicolor, the guys gleamingly muscular, the girls with bulbous sixties hairdos. Thumbing through the book, I decide to read the lengthy critical introduction, and before long I sense that I’m really into something major from its author, Pascaline Mourier-Casile. I jot down her name, because the critical writing here and the argument within are so very good—so forget the crabby opinionating I spouted earlier, cheekily bombing academics for seldom offering anything important (or forget it for now, anyway). Right off, she makes a most basic point, which disposes of the nitpicking about Salammbô’s historical accuracy in a single deft stroke; she stresses that while it is a historical novel, it is first and foremost an entity beyond that, essentially a novel and a creative work, meaning that questioning it as to historical details, or even reading it as social commentary, really isn’t the issue. In fact, as Mourier-Casile would have it, Sainte-Beuve’s demand of “Why Carthage?”—the civilization about which the modern world knows very little, almost nothing—is precisely the answer to it all. Because, wasn’t the central quest of Flaubert laid out in the famous letter to his mistress Louise Colet while laboring over—and temporarily dissatisfied with his progress on—Madame Bovary at Croisset?:

What seems beautiful to me, what I would like to write, is a book about nothing, a book with no attachments to the outside world, which would be self-sustaining, thanks to the internal force of its style, as the earth holds itself in the void without being supported, a book that would have almost no subject, or one at any rate in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible?

No, I don’t have that Flaubert quote in front of me in the library and Mourier-Casile doesn’t reproduce it, but I have close to memorized it over the years. And what Mou-rier-Casile suggests becomes the catalyst, because something suddenly hits me, and I tell myself:

Punic Carthage was for Flaubert, and most everybody else, no doubt, a lost civilization, a ruined land all gone, Carthage in a way was an object of contemplation free of any ties to the corporeal, the limitations of the material—in other words, Carthage for Flaubert was rien, nothing, it was nearly an abstract concept, as that haunting premise of his letter would have it, an item of airy contemplation to allow the master to create without restraint a book where literary style itself was the issue of paramount importance, for him to compose his breathtaking sentences that beat Time in a way that no simple plastification of documents, if you will, ever could, that rendered inconsequential, too, all the accompanying sadness brought about by Time passing—because a Work of Art can go beyond that, become as concrete and overwhelmingly important as whatever saving force that does actually sustain the earth, keep it suspended in the void, and with the abundance of sadness in the world is there ever a void, all right.

The idea deals me a rush of vertigo—it’s my Big Realization, what I know full well right then and what has made the entire trip supremely meaningful at last.

Strangely, as I sit alone hunched over the strewn books at the table, somebody else is, in fact, sitting only a few feet away from me, having shown up very quietly.

Or, I heard some shuffling of books nearby, but I avoided making any show of observation after looking over quickly, noticing it was a young woman and not wanting to be caught ogling (“gazing?”), which can be embarrassing, a problem for a guy my age. (You know, I hope my current romantic interest of suitable age for me doesn’t read this and see so much talk about young women sometimes half my age. On the other hand, it’s all laudably in the name of literary honesty, right?—that being my sole ready defense.) But I do sneak a better glimpse now, and, man oh man, what a lovely young woman at that, seated on a low metal-legged round stool she has pulled up. Apparently, she is going through a few of the lower shelves in the “B” section next to where I had been picking at the shelves in the “F” section. Delicate features and long, lustrous auburn hair falling like flames to the shoulders of a black-velvet riding jacket, tapered at the waist; a lot of purple lipstick, Gothish, and strikingly amber eyes to match the auburn hair. Her jeans are tastefully faded and, the very best touch, her slipper-like shoes, again black velvet, have the tops of them decorated with tiny mirror inserts, what you might see on some twirling Hindustani dancer. She either consciously ignores, or is completely oblivious to, an older party like me, and this isn’t any case of my sentimentally telling myself in middle age how in long-gone former days I might have struck up a conversation with her. This girl is a rare beauty, and any honest male learns his limitations in that arena by sixteen or so: while I might have stood a chance in striking up something when younger with a young woman like the weary German grad student, and while I did successfully meet and have fun traveling with a pudgy, buck-toothed Swiss girl in Mexico, the giggling secretary from a Geneva cop station years ago, this is a beauty who would have been way out of my league even when at the top of whatever my bungling sexual game reportedly ever was in my better years. (Ah, again such honesty!)

When she leaves with a pile of books—is she ever lithe, too, runway-model tall and strutting gracefully toward the overhead Sortie sign—I push my chair back, get up to investigate what she has been browsing. And, wouldn’t you know it, it is the section containing the work of, and commentary on, that dark-eyed, rhapsodically tortured, consummate poetic master, Baudelaire, a contemporary of Flaubert; as explained earlier, while Baudelaire didn’t know F. very well personally, he was a great admirer of the man’s work. (Did you ever stop and think of how flat-out amazing it is that both Les Fleurs du Mal, which changed the look of world poetry forever, and Madame Bovary, which did the same for the look of world fiction, came out in the same city and in the same year, 1857, and both—to make the marvel of it more amazing—were hauled through near-identical court trials for offending public mores, as if to emphatically illustrate the never-ending battle between the play-it-safe, uptight bourgeois world and that of the True Artist?) The girl gone, I return to reading the rest of Mourier-Casile’s commentary, which isn’t quite as good for the remaining few thin paperback pages. But I know I have already experienced the kind of message I hoped for on this trip, Mourier-Casile’s observation on that rien business galvanizing so many things I’ve been thinking about lately. And in an odd way it almost has been an understanding delivered, I now like to think, by the Baudelaire Girl, a news-bearing angel who herself already doesn’t seem all that real in retrospect (did I see her? but I did see her), as what lingers about the encounter is how ethereally beautiful she was and also how damn good it is to see an obviously curious and intelligent young person like her—overdone purple Goth lipstick notwithstanding—immersed in Baudelaire.

I don’t want to get carried away with it, but she could even have been Salammbô—not just her beauty, but also something about the undeniably exotic slipper-like shoes with the sparkling mirrors dotting them.

After his trip to Tunisia, a journey of several weeks all told and a stop in Constantine in Algeria included, Flaubert wrote to a friend in Paris that he was so exhausted on his return to Croisset that he slept for three complete days.

He soon buckled down to work on Salammbô, and, several years following its publication, he published what could be a masterpiece even more significant than Madame Bovary, the novel L’Education Sentimentale, which appeared in 1869. But after that there followed gradual decline: his beloved niece’s husband, on the verge of bankruptcy with failing business ventures, wrangled from Flaubert his own family inheritance (Flaubert’s father, a renowned Rouen surgeon, had left considerable money), and Flaubert’s ongoing ill health (including the complications of syphilis) turned worse, as his reputation as a writer seemed to be evanescing. Having been only a writer his entire life, toward the end he was disillusioned, broke, and reduced to enlisting the help of friends to try, unsuccessfully, to land the sinecure of a second-rate librarian’s job at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenale in Paris; however, even then he always kept writing, with some critical approval of his trio of long stories Trois Contes in 1877 and then his prophetically postmodern final work, Bouvard et Pécuchet, being published posthumously. He was just fifty-nine when he died in 1880.

Back at my family’s summer house in Narragansett, alone there again, I sit down at the wobbly oaken desk in the small bedroom I’ve had since a kid, amid junk like old swim fins and tangled fishing gear; on the green walls are photos of me on sports teams when young and dented license plates from cars I’ve owned in various states over the years. I start going through my own notebooks from the trip. And if I don’t continually sleep for three days, I pay tribute to my jet lag with some big-league napping off and on throughout the day for about a week, dreaming maybe of Tunis and Carthage, probably the barefoot kid under the stars limpingly running in happy, aimless circles with that holder sprouting the sprigs of jasmine making for his own lucky star, waving it around, or my maybe dreaming of the couscous restaurant on Rue du Caire and the Tunisian guys watching—silently, very seriously—the troubling TV news reports from Iraq there. I suppose I also dream of the Baudelaire Girl, though the sleep logged on the living room sofa or on the made bed of any of the different bedrooms I successively try for a nap, sort of Goldilocks fashion, true, the sleep is so deep—gulls squealing in the salty sunshine outside, power mowers rumbling now and then from neighboring houses and offering a snoring of their own, the summer season in full swing—that I honestly don’t remember what I dream about.

Maybe even the kind of sleep where you dream of nothing, let’s say, not anything, ne...rien, as the construction would have it.

I tell myself there will be plenty of time for writing all of this up when I return to Austin, where, surely being able to use the extra cash this particular year, I’ve signed on to teach the second term of the summer session.

And repeatedly, when I wake up from such daytime napping, I feel refreshed and relaxed, and with great resolve, I start calling around to local workmen to line up some repairs. The place needs a new back gutter, plus the oven unit of the bulbous old white stove hasn’t worked right for years, and it’s time I did something about the paint outside that’s peeling from the shingles in veritable sheets—high time I did something about all such inevitable decay.

I also finally get back to writing my own fiction, which, as always, feels really good.