May 1, 2012
Coda to La Marseillaise

I invite Gael, the receptionist who has been the most helpful to me during my stay in Marseille, to dinner. She will get off at 8:00 p.m., run home and meet me at the Tunisian restaurant where I have been two times before, originally on her suggestion.

I am able to get a table outside for the first time. As everywhere there are cafes in Marseille, most of them are dominated by Maghrebien men. Here there are only four, as the restaurant is small, and just at the end of rue Pavillon a block from the Canebiere.

I ask the same young, rather chubby man whether I can sit outside. Am I eating, he asks. When I say that I am, he motions to me to sit. The older man who owns the restaurant greets me graciously and I ask if I could have a mint tea while I wait for my friend. The young man brings it out, and I take the opportunity to ask how it is made. (It is a black tea flavored with mint and sugar, not an herb tea, it turns out.)

He asks me where I am from. I say I am from Manhattan. He brings up the destruction of the World Trade Center towers and asks if that is where the incident took place. I have a feeling from the slight smile on his face where this is going to lead, but I say "Yes". He says, stroking an imaginary beard,

"Do you believe Osama bin Laden did that?"

I say I only know that I was there that day and that I saw the destruction.

"Do you think the Arabs did that?"

I say that I do not make any generalization, I only can say what I personally saw, which was terrible.

He repeats,

The Americans did that. That was just cinema.

Again, I say I only know what I saw. He says the same thing again.

Finally, I tell him I just came to the restaurant to have cous-cous and he goes inside, returning a few minutes later with the cous-cous, which is very good.

Gael finds the server's behavior highly impolite, and inappropriate. My own reaction is a mix of disbelief and incomprehension at server's lack of self-censorship. Thinking about it later, I realize that the server was not denying that the World Trade Center towers were destroyed on September 11, 2001, but that Osama bin Laden destroyed them. In almost a week in Marseille, this is the only encounter that gives me pause.


At the end of the meal it is the custom to go inside to pay the cashier: the server never handles money. The owner of the restaurant, with whom I chatted a bit before Gael's arrival, tells me that the mint tea is a gift, and that I need only pay for the orders of two cous-cous, a total of fourteen Euros. I wonder whether he, too, thinks that the United States killed three thousand people so that it could find a pretext to invade Iraq.