"L'oeil du jour" (Hélé Béji)

The alleys shrouded in laurel groves, the coastal sadness, the tennis courts, some gentle slope down to the sea, a train station, a miniature level crossing, the ugliness of the Saint-Louis cathedral which has become an archaeological museum, the lagoons stagnant Punic ports, the peeling signs where one can read Salammbô, Hamilcar, Carthage, Byrsa, Punic Ports, stopped the vision like the decrystallization of a love which suddenly died out, the banal face of the suburbs appeared in its eternal holiday boredom, the flatness of these sunny streets, the weariness of its beaches where from time to time arises the comedy of a restaurant in the mythological name, Neptune – but alas! how far we are here from any mythology, despite the abundance of greenery where one could have dreamed of a legendary space covered in foliage.

To return to the capital, you have to drive between barely built walls, where trellises of rubbish grow almost instantly. On the new concrete breakthroughs where huge yellow buses roll leaning against the dusty junctions, hundreds of square and gaping skulls emerge from the earth against enormous lumps of sand, and from a distance they look like whitish models of battles forgotten on these hills dried by cyclops who would have played there in a prehistoric age. A horizon of holey shapes, hotels raised on tripods, neighborhoods on stilts, white balls, sanitary depots, hangars, spare parts, civil aviation panels undulated by the sun, immense slabs where a palm stump emerges, and if this panorama is true, nothing suggests it under the warm ash which covers it, like vermin on the back of an antediluvian monster whose rigid scales never stop moulting.

In fact, they are nothing other than ruins, but ruins which are at most three, five, or ten years old and which, unlike authentic thousand-year-old ruins where the invisible majesty of their past beauty still hovers , the depth of the volumes radiating imperceptibly in the very time of their wear, these new ruins are buildings which, as soon as they are erected, are struck in a few months by an incomprehensible decrepitude. Their being, their deep life beyond their appearance, are ravaged before having gone through the stages of their freshness, their development, and their death, a silent degeneration accomplished during the time of construction, on the terraces, the balconies, the doors, the walls which no longer hold space or time, the force of the creative improvisation of time, do not fix the dream of the moment, the human work, the spirit of the thing, wandering like will-o’-the-wisps in a cemetery, and each person’s existence decomposes there without ever being able to say to himself: this is my home on earth.

In fact, they are nothing other than ruins, but ruins which are at most three, five, or ten years old and which, unlike authentic thousand-year-old ruins where the invisible majesty of their past beauty still hovers , the depth of the volumes radiating imperceptibly in the very time of their wear, these new ruins are buildings which, as soon as they are erected, are struck in a few months by an incomprehensible decrepitude. Their being, their deep life beyond their appearance, are ravaged before having gone through the stages of their freshness, their development, and their death, a silent degeneration accomplished during the time of construction, on the terraces, the balconies, the doors, the walls which no longer hold space or time, the force of the creative improvisation of time, do not fix the dream of the moment, the human work, the spirit of the thing, wandering like will-o’-the-wisps in a cemetery, and each person’s existence decomposes there without ever being able to say to himself: this is my home on earth.

In the long run, the abnormal light that emerges slowly irradiates the optic nerve, which it deforms and adapts to a crude prism where the miraculous cascade of nuances, reflections, their infinite combination, is appropriated, like a cataclysm from before the birth of man that only chance triggers, a war without bombing, without explosion, which remains silent in the depths of the pupils like a drop of black water in the depths of an occult suffering. The construction sites have deposited their gray jaws in the collapsed ditches. The unfinished holes of their eyes burn their narrow pediments and bumps like hominid heads, the blades of their cheekbones, their protuberant arches. They growl in the dust of their planks with the ferocity and despair of collapsed wanderers. The throbbing heads of the cranes, the misshapen construction sites have pulmonary sputum, and from the ape-like life of these large bodies of concrete and cement emerge soft gesticulations, a lethargic delirium, a moribund terror. The lintels, the planks, the frames are bodies lying or sitting on the sidewalks in piss and mud, enveloped in the peeling immobility of the world, and the construction sites are decomposing like a chapped face, with hair in the white dust, eyelids swollen with anticipation. Bags of cement lean against a red brick wall, silhouettes gathered in crude cloaks, immobile and hardened in a heatwave sleep by the muddy grayness of the split foundations like the outline of vast tombs. The scaffolding floats on the frames like oversized thrift store suits. Rusty shovels are planted in mounds where other pickaxes with sharp faces are struggling, and scrape the sand with a dry breath, and the beams, the blocks, the stones, the walls are paralyzed limbs or struck with a tired drunkenness, tense in the accomplishment of a task that is beyond them. Crippled bodies, hazardous gestures, vision of food and truce, cracked mud of the face, elongated faces bitten with plaster, dry and statuary fauna of the construction sites, numb, cataleptic, silhouettes cast in their scaffolding, sculpted in their mortar, in the eyes of gravel!

The sky can embrace us, we can hear it playing a few chords on our terraces, nothing leaps into the immensity. Beyond the abolished line of the old ramparts, a new landscape of hangars and yellowish buildings breaks up the muddy hills, unusual colors kill the facades under an orange or brown plaster, a few bare eucalyptus trees, palm trees with discolored wicks, a dirty white mule on a vacant lot, the arch of an old church that had become a Party cell, thorn bushes along a track, rushes of rosemary and mimosas at the edge of the lagoons which once preserved the pugnacity of Tunis, and in the background the olive trees painted against the beginning of the plains, leaning, forked, brushed by the melancholy of the north wind, the olive trees cut off from the world, black , torn away by the wind.

Miserable city! Construction sites rise up on abandoned hills like ships whose bows have broken, around which the lakes are dead mirrors. The whole city floats between them, like its laundry floats in the windows, soft, worn, yellowed, its destroyed neighborhoods, its dirt under the blue mist of its terraces, its absence of grandeur and passion, its facades colored like extravagant flowers in the stench of its streets, visual rawness for a sordid drunkenness, the city is at the foot of the famous shadow line of the mountain of the Two Horns like a poor flock of sheep massed on a plain against the back of a legendary and distant animal, with its mules, its sheep, its carts, scattered across wastelands like dead birds.