A Life (14 page)

The granite peaks, variously pink or blue, lent a fairy-tale appearance to the landscape, while on the lower slopes green forests of towering chestnut seemed like mere shrubbery, so vast are the undulations of the land in this region.

Occasionally the guide would stretch out a hand in the direction of the tall escarpments and say a name. Jeanne and Julien would look, see nothing, and then finally make out something grey that looked like a pile of stones that had fallen from the summit. It was a village, a little granite hamlet hanging there, clinging to the rock-face, just like a bird's nest, and almost invisible against the immense backdrop of the mountain.

This long journey at a walk was beginning to irritate Jeanne.

'Let's canter,' she said. And she spurred her horse forward. Then, not hearing her husband cantering along beside her, she turned round and began to laugh wildly as she saw him coming towards her, white as a sheet, holding on to the horse's mane and bouncing up and down in the strangest manner. His good looks and general demeanour as the 'parfit knight' only made his clumsy panic seem all the more comic.

They slowed to a trot. The road now stretched ahead between two limitless thickets which cloaked the entire hillside.

This was the maquis, the impenetrable maquis, a mixture of holm oak, juniper, arbutus, gum, buckthorn, heather, laurustinus, myrtle, and box all bound together as though by twining strands of hair, with scrambling clematis and monstrous ferns, with honeysuckle, cistus, rosemary, lavender, and bramble, a tangled fleece laid across the backbone of the mountain-ridges.

They were both hungry. The guide caught up with them and led them to one of those delightful springs which are so common in mountainous terrain, a thin, rounded trickle of ice-cold water coming from a small hole in the rock and running down a  chestnut leaf which had been left there by some passer-by as a means of delivering the tiny rivulet of water safely into his mouth.

Jeanne felt so elated that it was with some difficulty that she refrained from shrieking with joy.

They set off again and the road began to descend, along the edge of the gulf of Sagone.
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Towards evening they passed through Cargèse,
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the Greek town founded there in former times by a colony of refugees who had been driven out of their own country. A group of tall, beautiful girls were standing beside a fountain, looking strikingly graceful with their slender hips, and long hands, and trim waists. When Julien shouted a greeting, they replied with lilting voices in the mellifluous language of their abandoned homeland.

On arriving in Piana they were obliged to ask for hospitality, according to the custom of ancient times and remote regions. Jeanne was trembling with excitement as they waited outside the door at which Julien had knocked. Oh, this was what you called a real journey, with all the unexpectedness of untrodden paths.

They so happened to have called on another young couple. They were received much as the messenger sent from God must have been received by the early fathers, and they slept upon a mattress of maize, in an old tumbledown house where every roof-timberperforated by woodworm and crawling with those long ship-worms that eat their way through beamscreaked, and seemed to breathe and sigh.

They departed at sunrise, and presently they stopped opposite what seemed like a veritable forest of crimson granite. There were pinnacles, and columns, and turrets, astonishing shapes wrought by the elements, by the biting wind and the sea-fret.

Rising to a height of some three hundred metres, these extraordinary rocksslender, round, twisted, hooked, grotesque, unplanned, fantasticalbore the likenesses of trees, plants, animals, monuments, human beings, robe-clad monks, horned devils, huge birds, of a whole monstrous multitude, a nightmare menagerie turned to stone at the behest of some whimsical deity.

Jeanne fell silent, gripped by the spectacle, and she took hold  of Julien's hand and squeezed it, overcome by the need to love as she stood face to face with the beauty of things.

And suddenly, emerging from this vision of chaos, they came upon another bay, entirely surrounded by a blood-red wall of granite. And in the blue sea lay the reflections of these scarlet rocks.

Jeanne stammered: 'Oh, Julien,' but could find no other words, overcome with wonder, as a lump formed in her throat. Two tears welled from her eyes. He looked at her in amazement and asked:

'What's wrong, my sweet?'

She wiped her cheeks, smiled, and in a rather unsteady voice said:

'Oh, nothing . . . It's just my nerves . . . I don't know . . . It took me by surprise. I feel so happy that I get quite overcome at the slightest thing.'

He did not understand women's 'nerves', these emotional disturbances to which the sensitive creatures were subject, becoming overwrought at a mere trifle, as easily agitated by some fond enthusiasm as by total disaster, and capable of being thoroughly upset, of being driven wild with joy or despair, by the least identifiable of sensations.

These tears seemed ridiculous to him and, in his preoccupation with the poor surface of the path along which they were riding, he said:

'You'd do better to pay attention to your horse.'

They made their way down an almost impassable track to the bottom of this gulf, and then turned to the right with the intention of riding up through the dark shadows of the Val d'Ota.

But the way ahead looked particularly treacherous.

'How about going up on foot?' Julien suggested.

She wanted nothing better, delighted to walk and be alone with him after her recent excitement.

The guide went on in front with the mule and the horses, and they followed slowly behind.

The mountain, riven from top to bottom, gaped before them. The path leads into the cleft at this point and runs along the bottom between two enormous walls of rock; and a substantial  torrent flows through the crevasse. The air is icy cold, the granite looks black, and what blue sky is visible far above seems strangely surprising, dizzying.

A sudden noise made Jeanne jump. She looked up; an enormous bird had flown out of a hole, an eagle. Its outspread wings seemed to touch the two walls of the chasm, and it soared into the blue where it disappeared from sight.

Further on, the cleft in the mountain divides; and the path climbs in sharp zigzags between the two ravines. With nimble, reckless steps Jeanne went first, dislodging the pebbles as she climbed, and peering fearlessly over the edge. He followed her, a little out of breath, his eyes fixed on the ground to prevent vertigo.

Suddenly sunlight poured down on them; it was like emerging from hell. They were thirsty, and a trail of dampness led them through a jumble of rocks towards a tiny spring which had been channelled along a hollowed-out stick for the use of goatherds. A carpet of moss covered the ground round about. Jeanne knelt down to drink; and Julien followed her example.

And as she was savouring the coolness of the water, he grabbed her by the waist and tried to steal her place at the end of the wooden conduit. She resisted; and they tussled with their lips, pressing against the other's and trying to push them out of the way. As fortunes fluctuated in the struggle, each would grip the tiny end of the pipe and try to hang on to it; and the trickle of cold water, alternately consumed and released, would vanish and reappear, splashing their faces, their necks, their clothes, their hands. Little drops of water, like pearls, gleamed in their hair. And kisses mingled with the current.

Suddenly, in a moment of amorous inspiration, Jeanne filled her mouth with the clear liquid and, with cheeks bulging like water-skins, made to offer Julien some mouth-to-mouth refreshment.

He proffered his lips, smiling, head back and arms spread wide; and he drank in a single draught from this spring of living flesh as it decanted a stream of burning desire down into his innermost core.

Jeanne was pressing against him with unusual warmth; her pulse was racing, her bosom swelling, and her eyes seemed moist and soft. She murmured gently: 'Oh, Julien . . . I love you!', and now she in her turn pulled him towards her, falling back on the ground and bringing her hands up to a face crimson with shame.

He fell upon on her, embracing her wildly. She panted in excited anticipation; and suddenly she cried out, struck as though by lightning by the sensation which this anticipation had itself called forth.

They were a long time in reaching the top of the path, for she was trembling and aching all over, and it was evening by the time they reached Evisa where they were to stay with one of their guide's relatives, Paolo Palabretti.

He was a very tall, slightly stooped man, with the gloomy air of a consumptive. He took them to their room, a sorry bedroom of bare stone but handsome by the standards of this country where fine living is still unknown; and he was busy telling themin his own language, the Corsican patois that is a mishmash of French and Italianhow pleased he was to receive them, when he was interrupted by the bright sound of a voice; and a short, dark woman, with large black eyes, a skin warmed by the sun, a narrow waist, and teeth continually bared in endless laughter, rushed forward: she embraced Jeanne, shook hands with Julien, and kept saying: 'Good-day, Madame, good-day, Monsieur, is everything all right?'

She took their hats and shawls, bearing them all away on a single arm for she wore the other in a sling, and then bid them all go out, having told her husband:

'Take them for a walk until dinner-time.'

Obeying at once, Monsieur Palabretti placed himself between the young couple and began to show them round the village. He drawled away as he shuffled along, coughing repeatedly and commenting with each bout:

'It's the cold air from the valley, it's got to my chest.'

He led them along a remote path beneath some huge chestnut trees. Suddenly he stopped and said in his expressionless voice:

'This is where my cousin Jean Rinaldi was killed by Mathieu

Lori. Look, I was standing there, right beside Jean, when Mathieu appeared ten paces away. ''Jean," he shouted, "don't go to Albertacce, don't go, Jean, or I'll kill you, I will." I took Jean by the arm: "Don't go, Jean, he will, you know." It was all about a girl they were both chasing after, called Paulina Sinacoupi. But Jean began to shout: "I'm going, Mathieu, and you're not going to stop me." Then Mathieu aimed his gun, before I could even lower my own, and fired. Jean rose two feet into the air, like a child skipping, honestly, Monsieur, and he fell back on top of me, so that I dropped my gun and it ended up under that big chestnut-tree over there. Jean's mouth was wide open, but he never uttered another word, he was dead.'

The young couple gazed in amazement at the tranquil witness to this crime.

'And the murderer?' Jeanne enquired.

Paoli Palabretti coughed for a long time and then continued:

'He escaped into the mountains. It was my brother who got him, killed him the following year. You know, my brother Philippi Palabretti, the bandit.'

Jeanne shivered:

'Your brother? A bandit?'

A flash of pride shone in the placid Corsican's eye:

'Oh, yes, Madame, he was famous, he was. Felled six gendarmes. He died with Nicolas Morali when they were cornered in the Niolo, after putting up a fight for six whole days, and already near dead from starvation.'

Then he added with an air of resignation: 'That's the way it has to be round here,' in exactly the same tone of voice as he kept saying: 'It's the cold air from the valley.'

Then they went back for dinner, and the little Corsican woman treated them both as though she had known them for twenty years.

But Jeanne was anxious. Would she again experience in Julien's arms that strange, urgent jolt to the senses that she had felt as she lay on the moss by the spring?

When they were alone together in their bedroom, she was worried that once more she would remain unmoved by his kisses. But she was soon reassured; and that was her first night of love.

The next day, when it was time to depart, she could not bear to leave this humble dwelling where it seemed as though a new form of happiness had begun for her.

She inveigled the Corsican's little wife into her bedroom and, having made it quite clear that she was not trying to give her a present in return for her hospitality, she insisted, crossly even, that she wanted to send her a memento from Paris once she had returned home, a memento to which she seemed to attach an almost superstitious significance.

The young Corsican woman refused for a long time. Finally she consented:

'Very well, then,' she said. 'Send me a little pistol, a small, tiny one.'

Jeanne stared at her. The woman added, whispering it in her ear as though she were sharing some sweet, intimate confidence:

'So I can kill my brother-in-law.'

And with a smile she quickly unravelled the bandages round her bad arm, and then, displaying her plump, white flesh and the scar which had almost healed where the arm had been stabbed right through by a dagger, she said:

'If I hadn't been as strong as him, he'd have killed me. My husband is not a jealous man, he knows he can trust me; and of course he's not in good health, you know, and that cools his blood. In any case, I'm an honest woman, Madame, I am; but my brother-in-law believes anything anybody tells him. He gets jealous on my husband's account; and he'll be at it again, I know he will. Then I'd have a little pistol, and I wouldn't need to worry, I'd be sure of getting my revenge.'

Jeanne promised to send the weapon, and embraced her new friend tenderly before departing on her way.

The remainder of her journey was like a dream, just one long embrace, a wild intoxication of caresses. She saw nothing, neither the landscape nor the people nor the places where they stayed. She had eyes only for Julien.

There then began a period of intimacy at once childish and full of charm, as they whispered sweet nothings, and left silly, delightful messages for each other, and gave pretty little names to every  highway and byway of their bodies, each nook and cranny, where it pleased their mouths to roam.