NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (19 page)

“I was watching you playing boules.”

“The game of bowlings is a genius, and you can perform so many skill-tricks to gain the winnership and shock the opponent, your enemy.”

“Of course.”

“So you see the French games nothing like American—hit people with ball and fight with hands or take—ha! ha!—your gun and gain. What you see is typical French bowlings.”

“Is it a sort of club?”

“Also”—he wasn’t listening to me—“wonderful alimentation in Provence.”

“Where did you learn English?”

“From the war. From people,” he said. “But explain me one thing, why Americans speak English in France the manner they speak in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, everywhere, and so we cannot catch at all. But if I speak French to them the way I speak with my wife, ah, whoof! They will never catch!”

This went on a bit more. Then I walked back to Antibes by way of the lighthouse, the Phare de L’Ilette on the Cap d’Antibes.

The Mediterranean here was an enigma. It was corrupt, it was pure. There were horrible apartments, there were beautiful headlands. There were nasty tycoons, there were friendly folks. The sea was polluted and blue, the sea was a green gin-fizz of stillness. Everything that had been written about the Riviera was true.

            
I
t took all night, a twelve-hour trip in the Î
le de Beauté,
a ferry as large as an ocean liner, to get to this other part of France; but it is a French province in name only. Corsica is Corsica.

I liked being on the water again, and I liked the empty ship, hardly anyone on the quay at Nice, just a few people in the cafeteria buffet which was open all night—spaghetti and rice and salad, and calamari that looked and tasted like shredded gym shoes. Some men were playing video games, Germans among them, bikers in tight leathers with shaven heads that gave them odd blue skulls. There was a lounge where people were drinking wine, some unruly children ran among the chairs, and there were the usual bronchitic French people coughing their guts out and chain-smoking.

The deck was empty, except for a man muttering solemnly to his dog in French, and a Tibetan woman clinging to the rail. The night was black, almost starless, like a pierced blanket, and not cold but cool in late February. I stood watching the foaming wake in this emptiness that was like a great ocean, and thinking how it must have been so easy for the Mediterranean people to believe that this was the whole world.

After a while I looked up and saw the Frenchman and the Tibetan were gone. I went to my cabin, and crept into my bunk and read a bit more of the biography of the painter Francis Bacon. “The truth comes in a strange door,” Bacon said. And as for his gory paintings and his frequently bloody
subjects: “It’s nothing to do with mortality but it’s to do with the great beauty of the color of meat.”

The purr of the ship’s screws put me to sleep, and when I woke the sun was rising on a calm sea, a rubious dawn lighting Cap Corse and the distant mountains in the island’s interior, the great granite peaks and the ridge above the port of Bastia. There are twenty tall peaks on the island, which is the most mountainous in the Mediterranean.

The
Île de Beauté
(which is also a name for Corsica) docked, and I hoisted my bag and walked down the gangway into the middle of Bastia, empty at this early hour of the morning—only pigeons cooing and shitting on big bronze statues in the Place Nationale. I had breakfast in a cafe and immediately became aware that the men around me were not talking French but amiably and incoherently showing their teeth and joshing, gabbling in a sort of Italian. Corsican is a variety of old Tuscan, tumbling and Italian-sounding, like a secret tongue. I imagined that it seemed to an Italian the way a Scottish accent sounds to an English speaker, a regional dialect that was familiar even when it was incomprehensible. When I addressed the men—asking some directions—they became serious and polite and slipped into French or Italian.

The language business—no outsider I met spoke Corsican—heightened my sense of Corsica’s being a colonized place, with the secret life that all colonies have: the parallel culture lived in another language. The fact that Corsican life is known to be explosive makes it all the more enigmatic.

Bastia is a seaport in the shadow of a granite mountain. Most of the travelers who have passed through it express a measure of disappointment when speaking of the city, perhaps because it seems Italian rather than Corsican. Prized for its harbor rather than its fortifications (being hard to defend it was frequently captured), Bastia’s architecture is Genoese. In its older quarters it is still an Italian-looking town, with a picturesque old port. In Bastia I walked all over, in a way that I had not done on the Riviera, and I realized that it was probably true, as I had read, that a great deal of the pleasure to be had in Corsica was from walking—not only along cliff paths and mountain tracks, but on country roads and on the backstreets of the handsome city.

That night, at dinner, the Corsican waiter approached me shyly and asked in French, “How do you say
bon appetit
in English?”

Bastia is also well-served by ferries and is a simple place to leave. I could have gone to Nice or Sardinia or Tunis. I could have gone to Italy, leaving Bastia on the
Corsica Regina
in an hour or two for Livorno, and been in Florence in time for lunch.

There are small districts within the city, including a Moroccan—or perhaps Arab—quarter, near the old port. This exotic corner was also where the city’s only synagogue was located. Very small, in a narrow passage, Rua du Castagno, which is a long flight of stone stairs, it is called “Beth Meir” synagogue.

There was a recently erected sign on the wall, putting all the blame for the wartime anti-Semitism on the French government that had existed during the war:
“La Republique Français/En hommage aux victimes/Des persecutions racistes and antisemites/Et des crimes contre humanité/Commis sous l’autorité de fait/Dite ‘Gouvernement de l’état Française’ (1940–1944)/N’oublions jamais.”

It seemed to me ironic that Arabs had taken up residence in what in former days had been the Jewish ghetto, and that they were being harassed at the moment.

Arabs in France are like The Tribe That Hides from Man, and so I deliberately sought one out in this district in Bastia, just to talk to. His name was Sharif—eyes close together, skeletal, skinny, his narrow shoulders showing through his burlap gown.

“I am from Gardimaou, in Tunisia, near Djanouba, on the border of Algeria. But the Algerians are—oh, well!”

“Are there many Tunisians here?”

“Lots of them in Corsica. Moroccans, too. But no Algerians.”

“Why is that?” And I was aware when I asked the question that Corsicans believed that island was full of Algerians, because no one differentiated among North Africans.

“There is something wrong with Algerians,” Sharif said. “In their heads. They are very nervous types. And you see, that makes them dangerous. They cause all sorts of trouble on the mainland. They are not like other people. And some of them hate foreigners.”

“Like me.”

“Unfortunately.”

Sharif had worked in Corsica for twelve years, but still the Corsican
language was a mystery to him. He did not know a word of it. “It is too difficult.”

But no language is difficult. Language is an activity, a kind of play, learned through practice. It requires little intelligence. It is social. So you had to conclude that in his dozen years no one had ever spoken to Sharif in Corsican. That activity was closed to him.

There was no mosque in Bastia, indeed none in Corsica. He made a tentative face, as though he wanted to say more, then thought better of it. “Lots of Muslims, though.”

“In my village in Tunisia, life is good, but there is no money. In other places where there are tourists, life is fine but it is expensive. I came here for work.”

I pressed him about the nonexistent mosque. He said, “Yes, it is odd that there is none, but who can say why?”

It was later that I found out that two houses, where Muslims met to pray, near Bonifacio, had been blown up. And later, after the French government took over an oriental-style building in Ajaccio (crescent, archway, arabesque doorways, domes—it had been the headquarters of a company selling Turkish tobacco), that too had been torched by arsonists, who believed—because of its unusual decor—that it was going to be used by Arabs.

Some people in Bastia seemed impartial in their abuse. Not far away on an ancient pillar of Bastia’s cathedral, the fifteenth-century Église Ste. Marie:
Jésus est mort
(Jesus is dead).

I gathered that there were many ways to see Corsica. The most strenuous is on foot on the many paths, or from north to south on the famous high-level trail, the Grande Randonee 20, more than two weeks of trudging at such an altitude that you see the whole island but hardly meet Corsicans. There are the local ferries, from Bastia to Bonifacio, Ajaccio to Propriano. There is renting a car and driving through Corsica, the simplest and most popular way of traversing the island—on good roads, and nightmarish ones, some of them vertiginous, all of them spectacular.

And there is the little train from Bastia to Ajaccio, with a spur line to Calvi. There were two trains to Calvi, four a day to Ajaccio. It was hardly a train, just a rail car, a
navette
, literally a “shuttle.” It moved in jerks like
a tram or a trolley. When I started the next day from Bastia there were only two of us on board; a few miles down the track, at Furiani, two boys got on.

It is not a popular train, though the Corsicans do everything they can to persuade people to use it. On an island of notoriously bad roads a trip on the Chemin de Fer de la Corse is one of the most restful ways to spend a day. The motto is:
Prenez le Train, C’est plus Malin!
(“Take the train, it’s smarter!”)

The mountains were still snowcapped, and I was told that there would be snow at their summits until July. I had seen them in Bastia, and even from the train I could see them: the men in clusters on street corners—talking, smoking, shaking hands, gesturing. There were few women on the streets, and those who were there walked briskly, not looking either left or right, giving an impression of great modesty and rectitude. This was the old world of the Mediterranean, the man’s world.

Winter had given the island a dramatic starkness that revealed the rugged landscape, the cliffs and peaks, the moorland that lay exposed through bare branches. This, and the behavior of Corsicans on the street, I was able to study at Biguglia, where the rail car stopped and the driver took out a newspaper and spread it on the console of his controls, and read it with close attention.

“I am going to look around,” I said.

“Don’t go far,” he said, without glancing up.

Twenty minutes passed. I smiled at a man on the platform, and we began talking harmlessly about the weather: how bright and cold it was, no rain, very nice, and then I said: “Have you ever been to Sardinia?”

He did not say no. He shook his head as though my question was insane, and he walked away. I wanted to tell him that I was going there. Sardinia is only four miles from Corsica’s south coast.

Another train pulled in, what in India would be called the Up Train, and because this was a single-line track we had to wait for it at this station in order to pass it. Then we were off again and deep in the low dense Corsican bush, universally known as the
maquis.

• • •

Corsica is famous for having its own fragrant odor—the herbaceous whiff of the
maquis
—lavender, honeysuckle, cyclamen, myrtle, wild mint and rosemary. After he left Corsica as a young man, Napoleon never returned to the island, but exiled on Elba—which is just off the coast of Italy—he said he often savored the aroma of Corsica in the west wind. It smells like a barrel of potpourri, it is like holding a bar of expensive soap to your nose, it is Corsica’s own Vap-o-rub. The Corsican
maquis
is strong enough to clear your lungs and cure your cold.

This was not the Riviera, not France, it was definitely another country, and yet there were resemblances, Mediterranean similarities. The hint of herbs on a hot day in Provence was a fragrance in the breeze; here it was an aromatic feast, gusting through the window of the rail car. Here there were oleanders and palms and olive trees; and also dumps, and junkyards, and automobile graveyards. Yellow villages on the summits of high hills. There were miles of vineyards surrounding old venerable half-ruined villas. And there were fruit trees, some of the groves heavy with ripe lemons and pendulous bunches of clementines.

Two boys got off at Casamozza, one got on.

The villages were strange and lovely. They had the look of monasteries or fortresses, twenty stucco structures and a sentry-like church steeple, gathered at precipitous angles, and the deeper into the island we went, the higher up the villages were sited, until they almost crowned the summit. I could not imagine how the villagers lived their lives at such a steep angle, though it was obvious that these high and easily fortified villages were the reason the Corsicans had survived and had beaten off invaders. In these steep retreats Corsicans had kept their culture intact.