Drawing the Mediterranean Before the Bell

I arrive forty minutes early on the days I teach the Mediterranean. The classroom still smells of the night's dust and the windows are clouded with salt. I take the chalk — the soft white kind, not the coloured sticks the art teacher keeps upstairs — and start at the left edge of the board, where there is nothing yet, only slate.

There is a printed map in the textbook, of course. It is correct and small and nobody looks at it twice. A map that appears line by line, with a man's back to you and chalk dust falling on his sleeve, is a different object. The students watch the sea being made. They see Sicily arrive after Sicily's absence.

Starting from Oran

I always begin with the city they can smell. Oran, then the coast running east, then the long back of Algeria, then Tunis, then the strait. By the time I reach Gibraltar my arm has warmed up, and someone has usually asked why the sea is drawn white when the chalk is white.

That question is my favourite kind. I answer it badly on purpose first, to let them laugh, then properly: the sea was named in the port registers long before anyone drew it, and the colour is a habit left by the people who wrote the names. A boy in the third row writes that down. He writes down almost nothing else all year.

The bell for the next class always comes while I am mid-sentence. My colleagues have learned to expect it. I hold up one finger — five minutes, five minutes — and the students close their books and let me finish, because by then they want to know how the strait ends.

Five minutes is not a long time to give a room, if what you give it is a story.

What I actually give them is not the extra five minutes of the syllabus. It is the cartographer who never crossed the water, or the port where two languages argued over the same harbour. Dates they forget by June. A harbour with two names, and an argument standing in it, they keep.

After the Eraser

Afterwards I stay behind and wipe the board myself, slowly, following the coastline back the way I drew it. A girl from the back row waits with her bag on her shoulder and asks whether Gibraltar is a place, or only a word for a place people wanted. I tell her it is both. She seems satisfied, and leaves.

The board is grey again. Outside, the corridor smells of orange peel and cheap floor cleaner, and someone is running because the monitor has not seen them. Sixteen years of this, and I still arrive early on map days with the same dull nervousness, like a man crossing a square he has crossed a thousand times.