Tunis
A village of two colors and no other, and the sunset when a third appears and a man's hand will not finish its reach.
Sidi Bou Saïd
I had brought her to a place that had agreed, more than a century ago, to be two colors and no other, and had held to it without a break since.
The drive from Tunis-Carthage airport ran twenty kilometers along the gulf, the water on our right the soft Mediterranean blue of a May afternoon, the road climbing in the last kilometer as it left La Marsa and began the cliff. Then the village arrived. White first. Whitewashed walls turning a corner ahead of us, the lime so freshly applied that the wall held the sun like an unopened page. Then the blue, set into the white: doors, shutters, the iron grilles over the windows, every one of them the same cobalt the village had agreed in 1915 to wear, a heritage decree the Baron at Ennejma Ezzahra had championed while he restored his dar on the cliff.
Her Highness had been quiet on the descent into Carthage, watching the gulf out the window in the way she watches water from above, which is to give it the room a serious thing requires. She said nothing when we landed. She took the steward’s offered jacket on her shoulders and walked off the plane and across the tarmac with her hair loose against the linen of her travel shirt, her sunglasses already down.
Now, from the back seat of the car, she sat forward.
“It is true,” she said. “There is nothing else. Only the white and the blue.”
I told her the village had agreed to it a century ago and had never taken it back.
She did not say more. She turned her face to the window, and the window framed a doorway of cobalt set into a wall of white, the doorway studded with the black iron nails the local carpenters arrange in geometric patterns that I have read are protective and that I have never asked a man here to confirm. The patterns are diamonds and stars and a small Hand of Fatima at the center. The nails are the only color on the door that is not the blue.
La Villa Bleue sits at the upper edge of the village, where the cliff falls eighty meters to the sea, the building itself a restored dar of the late nineteenth century, the courtyard tiled in the geometric blue-and-white zellige that the older houses in this town were built around. The driver took our cases through the low cobalt door. A young man in a white shirt and dark trousers met us at the inner court, inclined his head, and led us along a corridor whose floor was a checkerboard of white marble and the blue tile, every other tile painted with the small four-pointed star that signals an older workshop. The bougainvillea in the inner court had been trained against a white wall, and the magenta of it threw itself across the wall in a long unrepentant cascade.
She slowed in the corridor. She put one hand on the white wall as we passed it. The wall was cool. The lime had been applied within the season.
The room was on the seaward side. The shutters were open. The terrace beyond the shutters was a small square of white tile with a low blue-painted wall at its outer edge, and beyond the low wall the cliff fell to a sea that, in the four o’clock sun, was the matching cobalt of a coincidence the village had been arranging with the Mediterranean for a century. The blue of the door and the blue of the sea were the same blue. The white of the wall and the white of the foam at the base of the cliff were the same white. The village had been painted to match what it was looking at.
Her Highness walked through the room and out onto the terrace without setting down her case. She stood at the low blue wall. She did not turn. From behind I could see the line of her shoulder against the sea, the soft fall of her shirt, the loose strand of hair the cliff wind was lifting and putting back.
I let her have the terrace.
I unpacked. The suit for tonight was a linen-cotton blend the color of dry sand, cut by my Hong Kong tailor in a weight that the Tunisian May had been designed for, the jacket built to drop its wrinkles overnight from a single hanger, the lapel narrow enough to read European and wide enough not to read trying. The shirt was the white I always wear under it. The trousers broke just above a pair of suede loafers in a tobacco brown. No tie. The cufflinks were small ovals of lapis lazuli set in plain silver, the blue of them the same blue as the door we had walked through, the choice deliberate.
She came back in from the terrace.
“Walk with me,” she said.
We walked.
The lanes of Sidi Bou Saïd at four o’clock in the afternoon are nearly empty. The morning tour buses have gone back to Tunis. The evening crowds have not yet arrived. The light is the high clean light the painters had come here for. Klee and Macke and Moilliet had stood in these same lanes in 1914 and decided they had found the place where light was a substance you could paint with rather than a thing you painted around. The lanes climb and descend on uneven cobble, set in patterns the local masons had worked into the stone a century ago and that no one had asked them to change.
Her Highness walked beside me with her hand on the inside of my elbow, through three lanes without speaking, and looked at the doors.
We came out at the small plaza at the top of the village, the one the maps call the Place 7-Novembre and the locals still call by its old name. The Café des Nattes sat at the far side of the plaza, its tall stair climbing to a doorway in the white wall, the inside of the café shaded by the canopy and floored with the woven mats that give it its name. Old men sat on the steps with their tea glasses in their hands. A boy was carrying a brass tray of fresh glasses up the stairs without looking at his feet. A black-and-white cat slept on the third step, untroubled by the boy passing it.
She stopped at the base of the stairs. “Not here,” she said. “Later. The cliff first.”
We walked down through the village toward the cliff. The lane narrowed. The walls leaned closer. A woman was watering a pot of pink geranium on her doorstep with a copper jug, and the geranium was the second color I had seen in the village that was not the two, and the woman lifted her face as we passed and gave us a long careful look without expression and went back to her watering.
Café des Délices sits at the end of a lane that opens at the cliff. The café is a series of terraced platforms stepping down the slope, the railings and the umbrellas above the tables painted the same cobalt, the tables themselves the white marble of the courtyard floors. The waiter led us to a table on the lowest platform. The view from the lowest platform is the entire Gulf of Tunis. Cape Bon to the east, the long blue arm of the peninsula reaching into the Mediterranean. The ruins of Carthage just south of us, the small port at the base of the cliff to our left, the white masts of the fishing boats moving in the small chop.
We ordered the pine-nut mint tea. The waiter set down two glasses, each full of the green tea steeped strong with bruised mint, a small handful of pale, slender pine nuts floating on the surface of each like a small constellation on a dark pond. She lifted hers in two hands. She held it for a long second before she drank.
“How does it taste,” I said.
“Like a country that does not need me to like it.”
Her Highness drank. The pine nuts caught at her lower lip. She set the glass down and put one fingertip to her lip and removed them. There was no flourish in it. She did the thing the tea required, which is to remove the pine nuts from a mouth.
The sun was three hours from setting. The Gulf of Tunis below us was the cobalt and the white of the village rephrased as water and foam. A fishing boat crossed the lower edge of our view, the boat itself painted white and blue. The boats of this coast follow the rule of the village by tradition rather than by ordinance, a country accepting the tone of voice of one of its own without being told.
She set her tea down. “You did not bring me to Tunis,” she said. “You brought me to two colors.”
“I did.”
She did not look at me as she said it. She looked at the gulf. The line of her face in the four o’clock light was the line of a woman who had spent a career being photographed in front of every imaginable arrangement of colors and had now been brought to a cliff where there were two and the option had been removed.
She did not need me to explain why.
She picked up the tea again and drank the second half slowly. The waiter, at his post by the upper terrace, was waiting for any signal she might give. She gave none. She finished the glass and set it down on the marble.
The call to prayer began.
Not loud. The minaret of the village mosque rose above the white roofs a hundred meters behind us, and the muezzin’s voice carried out over the cliff and down to the gulf, and the gulf gave it nothing back. After a moment the asr call from the mosque at La Marsa came up the coast, a thinner voice across the water, and then a third from a minaret on the inland side that I could not locate from the table. The three calls overlapped for a minute together. She did not close her eyes. She held still. She let the calls finish.
When the air was quiet again, she turned to me.
“I want to walk to the door at the end of the village,” she said. “The one with the studded star.”
Her Highness had seen it on the way in. She had been photographed in front of every door in Paris and Milan, and one she had not been photographed in front of had registered on her with the small alertness she reserves for doors not yet recorded. We walked back up through the village. The lane climbed. We passed the women with the watering jugs. We passed a man on a low stool at his shop door, his red chechia set on his head, his hands folded over a string of amber beads. He nodded to me. He did not nod to her. He looked at her with the long careful regard the old men of this country reserve for a beautiful woman, which is to say that he committed her to memory and did not let his face record the act.
The door she had seen was on the east side of the upper village. The pattern of the iron nails on it was a six-pointed star at the center, the points radiating outward to a perimeter of diamonds. The blue of the door was the cobalt. The white of the wall was the white. She stood in front of the door for half a minute. She did not touch it. She looked at the door and at the wall around it, then stepped back and turned away.
“There,” she said.
We walked back to La Villa Bleue along the cliff path. The path runs above the sea, the white wall on the inland side and the drop on the seaward side, the cobalt of the ironwork on the houses repeating itself along the cliff at intervals so consistent that the eye learns the rhythm and stops resisting it. By the time we reached the hotel the sun was low enough to have begun warming the white of the walls toward a soft cream, and the blue of the doors, which had been the high cobalt of midday, had begun to deepen toward the indigo of evening. The colors did not change. The light changed. The colors stayed loyal to themselves and let the light do what it would.
In the room she stood at the terrace door and watched the sea darken. I poured two fingers of bourbon into the lowball glass the hotel had set on the writing desk. The bottle on the shelf was Woodford Reserve, which travels and which holds the middle of a hotel’s bourbon shelf like a familiar friend in a crowded room. I drank one finger. I set the glass down. We had an hour before we needed to dress.
She turned from the terrace.
“The dress is the white one,” she said. “I packed only the white and the blue. I left every other one in another country.”
She had read the village before she had packed for it. A woman who has worked the floors of the Paris collections for a long career does not arrive in a city of two colors wearing a third.
I dressed. I looked at her dressing across the room, in the mirror, with the practiced sidelong attention a man learns so that the looked-at does not become a thing being looked at: the gathering of fabric at the hip, the small adjustment at the strap, the careful placement of one earring. She wore the white tonight. The blue would be tomorrow. The white dress fell from one shoulder in a single line of crepe to the floor, the other shoulder bare, the back open to the small of the back, the line of it the line she had refined across a career and never stopped refining. Her hair was up in a low chignon. No earrings tonight. No necklace. A single silver bracelet at her right wrist.
The white dress against the white wall of the room was a small problem the painters had warned about, the eye losing the boundary between the cloth and the wall and reading her as an interruption in a continuous surface. She had solved the problem by standing in the open frame of the terrace door, where the cobalt of the iron grille caught her at the shoulder and the indigo of the evening sea caught her behind, and the white of her dress floated between two registers of blue without being absorbed by either.
I crossed to her. I put my hand at the small of her back, on the bare skin. She did not move.
“Tonight,” I said, “we eat in the village.”
“At Dar Said?”
“At Dar Zarrouk.”
She nodded.