“Cairo Time”
“Street In Cairo“ (1873)
____________
many years ago, when I was in my
skittish twenties, and the world had
opened up to me as I’d started work
at an international airline, I opted
to go to Tunisia, less harried than
Morocco, I thought, and probably
less expensive
a friend had asked to come along,
who worked for the same company
Judy was my age, honey blond, lithe,
curvaceous, voluptuous, though
ever entirely unassuming, we made
a lovely pair
but soon the locals had our number,
understood that I was merely her
friend, no challenger for her
affections, somehow
from our seaside hotel in nearby
Hammamet, a coastal resort, we set
out our first day for the nearby capital,
Tunis, a dusty town, I remember, a
cowtown, or a camel town, north of
the Sahara Desert, with shoddy
buildings and not much else, I was
young
we found ourselves on the Boulevard
Habib Bourguiba, the name of the first
President of the Republic of Tunisia,
not paved then, or with what we used
to call soft shoulders, when the
pavement doesn’t reach the sidewalks,
where we looked for a restaurant or a
coffee house to get our bearings
inside a nondescript place we found
for lack of anything else, we sat down,
had a coffee, looked around
it didn’t take long for us to realize that
Judy was the only girl in the place, so
we finished our fare and took off
when all the men in the place followed
we found a cab to take us back to the
hotel and didn’t return to Tunis apart
from accompanied
but that’s another story
it’s seemed so hard for me to explain
this to people who haven’t experienced
this discomfort cause this kind of
indignity is so foreign to us, offensive
and hard to imagine
but a film I just saw about Cairo,
“Cairo Time“, gives a good impression
of the differences in our cultures
were it only for this insight, I wouldn’t
suggest this movie, but because it is
a wonderful travelogue through this
remarkable city, with views of bazaars,
pyramids in the distance, and all of it
in splendid cinemascope and colour,
the film is a marvel
Patricia Clarkson, an actress I greatly
admire, plays the role Katharine
Hepburn played in “Summertime“,
one of my all-time favourite movies,
of a woman alone in a city, needing
to trust in the kindness of strangers
Clarkson‘s kind stranger is no slouch
either
Richard
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