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Published: February 3rd 2007
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In my final days, as if in some spasm of recrimination, Tunisia’s decided to send a chorus line of hustlers and vagrants my way. Something about this face, I suspect, suggests a guarded tolerance toward mischief. “You’re not likely to wheedle a single dinar out of me,” my eyes hint, “but please, don’t let that stop you from making a colorful pitch.” And they do, around Ave. Habib Bourguiba and Mohammed V, in broad daylight and in the dark midnight hours, when every last person on the street seems up to no good. A man in a long, belted overcoat - a suspicious garment offset by his beatific smile - greets me with a crisp London accent. “My friend, I do not get to practice English often,” he says. “Do you have one dinar?” Another, a young travel agent whose shirt is neatly buttoned to the collar, invites me for coffee. When I politely decline, his gaze is frank and unpleasant. He insists, more than once, as if beating me into submission is the best way to soften me up for a friendly drink. The next day, when he sees me at a café, he questions me in a voice
so sharp and accusatory, you’d think I left him standing at the altar.
On my way to lunch I get approached by a man in a cheap sports jacket, a bundle of papers tucked under his arm. He’s on his way to a meeting, he explains, but he’d be happy to walk with me: his office is just down the road. He asks about my time in Tunisia, and how long I’ll be staying, and when I explain I’m on my way to Cairo he all but slaps his forehead and says, “What are the odds!” As luck would have it, he’s a pilot for Tunisair; he flies the Tunis to Cairo route twice a week. It’s an improbable coincidence, made somewhat fishy by the fact that he gets the time of the flight wrong, isn’t entirely sure how long the route takes, and betrays about as much knowledge of Cairo as I have of particle physics. He shakes my hand and starts down a side-street, then rushes back, calling after me. He’s holding out a handful of coins and shaking his head absent-mindedly. “My friend,” he says, chuckling, like we’re in cahoots, “do you have two dinar?”
Later, in my hotel, a smiling young guy stops me in the hall. From the French I’m struggling to piece together, I seem to remind him of an Algerian friend. The way he says it suggests this is fine flattery indeed. After a few awkward exchanges he invites me into his room, nudging the door open and lifting his eyebrows hopefully. Based on our language impasse, I hardly expect an evening in his room to be steeped in political debate and a discussion of Kant’s moral imperative. I’ll leave it up to savvy readers - you know who you are - to decide for themselves just what would’ve been steeped, and where he would’ve been steeping it.
At the front desk Adel is hunched over an Arabic paper, his finger scanning the page from right to left. When we met my last time in Tunis, he didn’t waste time on pleasantries; a cynical crease across his forehead, he asked me pointed questions about my success with Tunisian girls. “The nice girls, you meet for coffee in the afternoon,” he advised. “After 8pm, the nice girls all go home.” Between reminiscences about the seven years he spent
in London - he rattled off the names of nightclubs like they were old friends - he asked about my family with a strange intensity. “Your father: what does he do?” he’d ask. “Brothers: how many?” He made a curious pitch about involving my father in a scheme to import marble. “Tunisian marble: the best!” he said emphatically, punching a finger into the palm of his hand. “I give him a very good price. You have him call me.”
On my last afternoon in Tunis, he meets me for lunch in the medina. He’s waiting under the cover of Bab Bhar; a light rain is falling. He’s wearing a green hunting jacket and a red Puma baseball cap, his left leg slightly dragging behind him as we walk. He takes me to a small, crowded restaurant down a filthy side-street. They serve us two plump fried fish crusted with sea salt; Adel plops one onto my paper placemat, translucent from the grease that’s spreading across it. He eats a bowl of spaghetti and picks at the fish with his fingers, exchanging a few jokes with the waiters in Arabic as I dig through my pocket to pay the bill.
Over coffee he comes at me with a fresh angle. “I think, if we make a magazine, it will make a lot of money,” he says, using his eyebrows to remarkable effect. “A lot,” he says again, and leans across the table. He’d taken interest in my job when we met, and now, as he makes his case in a cloud of
sheesha smoke, I can picture how the wheels and gears in his mind spent the past two weeks grinding toward this conclusion. “You make a magazine, you tell them in America about Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, Cameroon. You give it out for free in cafés. Maybe they pay a dollar - just a dollar.” It’s hardly a presentation for the boardroom, but I can tell he’s put plenty of thought into it. He rubs his temples and pokes at the table, scribbling hypothetical figures onto what appears to be fine Tunisian marble. “The companies, the tourism agencies in Tunisia, they will pay a lot of money,” he says. He leans back in his chair and pronounces the words slowly. “Millions.”
Without combing too much through his business model, I promise to think it over. I explain that the job I have keeps my plate pretty full, but he interjects, “Not for now, but for later. Three years, five years.” He waggles his hand from side to side, a man of great creative energy and boundless patience. That night he’s at his desk in the hotel, the keys lined in neat rows above his head, his finger scanning the page as if he’s got plenty of time to kill.
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