Sunrise with Seamonsters (29 page)

At Palombaggia, the tourist beach a few miles away, I hid behind a pine tree and put on my bathing trunks. I need hardly have bothered—the beach was nearly deserted. Rocks had tumbled into the sea, making natural jetties, and I decided to tramp over a dune and a rocky headland to get a view of the whole bay. There were, as far as the eye could see, groups of bathers, families, couples, children, people putting up windbreaks, strollers, rock collectors, sand-castle-makers—and all of them naked. Naked mummy, naked daddy, naked kiddies, naked grandparents. Aside from the usual beach equipment, it was a happy little scene from idealized prehistory, naked Europeans amusing themselves, Cro-Magnon man at play. It was not a nudist camp. These were Germans, as bare as noodles, and apart from the absence of swimming togs, the beach resembled many I have seen on Cape Cod, even to the discarded Coke cans and candy wrappers. I stayed until rain clouds gathered and the sun was obscured. This drove the Germans behind their windbreaks and one woman put on a short jersey—no more than that—and paced the beach, squinting at the clouds and then leering at me. I suppose it was my fancy bathing trunks.

I had decided to make a circuit of Corsica, to rent a car and drive slowly around the edge of the island, then pause and make my way over the mountains, from Moriani-Plage via Corte to Ile-Rousse, arriving where I had begun, in Ajaccio. The trains are too small and tram-like to be anything but practical for the Corsican and vaguely amusing to the visitor ; the three and a half hours by rail from Ajaccio to Bastia are not my idea of a railway trip. Besides, the best parts of Corsica are unreachable by train.

The first twenty miles south of Ajaccio, through the Col St Georges to the handsome port of Propriano were gorgeous—a fatal distraction because the road was so narrow and winding. Once out of the capital it is clear how underpopulated Corsica is, an emptiness of eucalyptus trees and deep blue hills, stubbly fields, and vineyards, and forests of cork oak and sweet chestnut. Ambitious Corsicans flee the island as soon as they can scrape the fare together, and the ones who stay rather despise the menial servicing jobs in hotels. Two decades ago the island was dying economically, but the arrival of ex-colonials from Algeria brought mechanized wine-making methods and the growing of mandarin oranges to Corsica. And now there is a degree of prosperity in Corsica's agriculture, with the export of cheap wine. The good wine—and it is not the plonk the mainlanders say it is—is drunk locally. I can vouch for the Torraccio, Patrimonio, Sartene, Domaine Vico and the resinous Clos de Bernadi. The Corsican table wine that is exported is little more than red ink.

Propriano has many good restaurants, specializing in the seafood that is caught offshore—the
langouste
and the ingredients for
bouillabaisse.
It has three excellent hotels and, like many other Corsican towns, a number of pizza joints. It is the sort of place you expect Antibes or Juan Les Pins to be, small, uncrowded, sunny and decked with oleanders and geraniums—geraniums so healthy they have become bush-like, three or four feet high. The climb by car to the fastness of the steep mountain town, Sartene, is not rewarded by anything other than a glimpse of one of the most forbidding (Prosper Mérimée called it "the most Corsican") towns I've ever seen. It is a town like a citadel, built on the summit of a rocky hill, with a dark main street and a reputation for the vendetta.

Beyond Sartene, still moving south, I saw two remarkable sights: the great granite mountain of white oblong boulders, called Montagne de Cagna; and, as I neared the coast, the splendid sight of a lion in stone crouched on Cap de Roccapina. The strange features along this road are preparation for something even stranger at the end of it, the sheer limestone cliffs which plunge past the fortified town of Bonifacio, the settlement on the fjord. It is a natural harbor, and the town one of the oldest in Corsica, but although it is spectacularly beautiful, it has no good hotel. For that I drove up the coast to Porto-Vecchio, Corsica's newest resort town. Porto-Vecchio, for all its sandy beaches (Palombaggia is the best of these), has a blowsy look of gimcrack modernism unrelated to the ancient town above it that shares its name.

From this point in the southeast to Bastia in the northeast are sixty or more miles of empty glittering beaches, rising to extensive vineyards which disappear at the foothills of tremendous mountains. Because this is Corsica's straightest road, it is also the island's most dangerous—the only
stretch, really, where you can get but of second gear. The seaside towns here are small likeable places, some looking as if they have been put up within the past year, others (such as Aleria) were resorts at the time of the Roman Empire. Further north, at Moriani-Plage, a seedy half-abandoned resort with one overpriced hotel flanking a stagnant swimming pool, it is hard to make out whether the town is in the process of being built or destroyed. I had no sooner concluded that I would never return to Moriani-Plage than the waiter, who was also the cook, said he had a plump pheasant in the kitchen which was mine for the asking.

I had been apprehensive—as who would not be?—by the thought of crossing the spine of Corsica's mountain range. I took what I later realized to be one of the worst roads on the island. But if one proceeds slowly along these mountain tracks (the road to Corte follows the course of the Tavignano River—Edward Lear went this way in the 1860's purely for its scenic beauty) one can get from the east coast to the northwest via Corte, in less than a day's drive. Corte is a bright windblown town on a crag, with at least one fine restaurant (in the Place Paoli). It is the heart of the island's political and cultural identity, and was the capital of the brief republic declared by Pascal Paoli in 1755. At Corte, if one seeks a destination, one has many choices: a short drive to the hunting lodges at Venaco, or the longer drives to Bastia, the quiet promontory of Ile-Rousse, the noisier resorts of Calvi or Porto. I struck out for Ile-Rousse and ended up at the two-hundred-year-old Grand Hotel Napoleon Bonaparte, a bizarrely ramshackle château with a billiard room and a porter who tells you to go to bed when the clock strikes eleven. Ile-Rousse is a neglected town, a bit geriatric in tone, with a great deal of charm. Some of this charm still lingers in the narrow streets of Calvi, but in the oversettled gorge which is Porto—a harrowing four-hour drive away—the charm is gone. It is as if, having accepted that German tourists were inevitable, the Corsicans decided to dump them wholesale in this almost inaccessible notch to bellow away their vacation.

Because it is purely for vacationers, I think Porto is a place for vacationers to avoid. The fact that it is probably the most beautiful corner of the island is a bit sad, for what is inescapable is that it is overcrowded, overdeveloped and irredeemably Teutonic. The pseudo-luxury is similarly a feature of the newer resorts at Sagone and Tiuccia, but none of these west coast watering-holes have the down-to-earth hospitality and comfort that I found elsewhere in Corsica.

A car seems a necessity, but cars are easy to hire and, driving, one discovers how small Corsica is, how much can be seen in a week. There is no need to be stuck anywhere on the island, and the Corsicans speak French badly enough so that no visitor need feel self-conscious. I spoke nothing but Italian for a week and managed very well. The only Corsican
I met who spoke English was the girl nudist near Chiappa, but I guessed that she came into contact with all sorts of people.

The Corsicans have a reputation for being unfriendly. They certainly look gloomy, and their character is incontestably dour; but they are not smug or critical, they can be helpful and they seem genuinely interested in strangers. "Simple in manner and thoroughly obliging," wrote Edward Lear; "anxious to please the traveler, yet free from compliment and servility." One old woman in the market at Ile-Rousse told me in pidgin Italian that she thought Americans were "sweet". It is not a sentiment I have heard expressed anywhere else in Europe.

The San Clemente "City Song" was written in 1970 by Marjorie and Walter Botts before, as one San Clemente surfer put it, "they caught the crook." When a local group such as the Elks or the Junior Woman's Club meet they often sing
San Clemente by the Sea:

There's a spot so breathtaking
Where waves are softly breaking
And the sands are like a golden shawl.

There I take my troubles
And just like bubbles
They disappear into nothing at all.

The last verse is about the Nixons ("The native folk are joyful that they picked this lovely town"). These days that verse is not usually sung.

There I take my troubles.
Having seen an aerial photograph of it, the Nixons moved there in 1969 and dubbed the Spanish-style, twenties house ("Damas" on the Ladies, "Caballeros" on the Gents) the Western White House. After his resignation he fled there and he has been pretty much in residence ever since. Yet he is not at all a ghost figure: he plays golf regularly at a local club and his servant Manolo Sanchez makes a weekly trip to the nearby Alpha-Beta Supermarket to buy food; Pat has been spotted strolling on the old rum-runners' path to the beach (the town was founded by smugglers and bootleggers) and Mr Nixon often waves to the townsfolk from his limousine. Some people wave back. Opinion in town is about equally divided on the man. Last year the San Clemente
Sun-Post
asked three hundred and fifty local residents, "Are you still interested in reading news about Richard Nixon?" 47% said yes, 53% said no. Nearly everyone I spoke to said it was a real shame he had to resign. So what if he was crooked? They say: all politicians are crooked. But it was still a blow to civic pride that their leading citizen was just like the rest.

The surfers are the exception. They are delighted that he was forced to resign, because the best surfing waves on that part of the coast rise in frothy peaks below "La Casa Pacifica." While Nixon was President, the Secret
Service declared the beach a security area. "It was a problem," says Dave, a surfer who looks—as surfers do—like John the Baptist. "We still surfed there, but if we got near the beach they grabbed our boards and confiscated them."

Now the beach is open again to surfers, morning joggers, pot-smokers ("Are you a pig?" one surfer asked me), beer-drinkers (a six-pack at sundown on Nixon's beach is an especially favored recreation), dog-lovers, time-killers, strollers—the town is full of people old and young who, like Mr Nixon, are in retreat from the world. "But it isn't what you might think—a sleepy small town," a lady told me. "A lot of wealthy people live here. Real important people with character, like bank presidents. And there's no smog."

Under clear skies, the town (pop. 28,000) of bleeding pastels and dusty palmettos and hamburger joints seems to tumble down a hillside of biscuity cliffs, pausing in clumps on the main street, El Camino Real ("The Royal Road"), and continuing to the lizard-haunted shore where a cosy wooden pier puts one in mind of Heme Bay. Its most bizarre feature is never mentioned: the town is sliced in half by the ten lane San Diego Freeway, Interstate 5. Mr Nixon lives on the posh, ocean side of the freeway in a house on a five-acre corner plot of the Cyprus Shore Estate. Many of those hundred Cyprus Shore families are millionaires, who have chosen San Clemente for the reason its planner Ole Hanson chose it in 1925: "This will be a place where a man can breathe." Hanson was a nimble real estate speculator. He bought two thousand acres; he decreed that all the houses would have red-tiled roofs and be white, and no blacks would live in them. Hanson went broke, but remains a local hero. He was in character and career remarkably like Mr Nixon, a busted operator. "And to this day," says Warren Estes, editor of the
Sun-Post,
"you won't see many blacks in San Clemente."

Cyprus Shore Estate is so closely guarded even the police stay out ("We have real neat parties," the son of a resident told me), and Nixon's house, a fortress within that fortress, is impenetrable to anyone who hasn't got a contract with Mr Nixon. It is secured by a system of walls, hidden mikes, tv cameras, and chain-link fences that make it seem like Gulag-by-the-Sea. It is amazing that a house on such high ground is so hidden. It can't be seen from the hills or the freeway or the drive; it is invisible to surfers and yachtsmen, and though it is smack on the Amtrak railway line to San Diego, all the train-traveler sees is a board fence and beyond it an eight-foot wall; and beyond that the dense trees and green closed-circuit tv cameras on Nixon's bluffs. You can walk a mile and a half along its perimeter from El Presidente Road down to the shore and see nothing more than cypresses and the out-buildings of the Coast Guard Station, which are Nixon's sentry-boxes. It can only be seen from a helicopter. If
the helicopter comes in too low, the guards say, "We'll deal with you as if you came over the wall"—they'll shoot.

"You look over the wall from Nixon's garden," says the film-maker Peter Bogdanovich, and he laughed as he remembered the party he went to at the house a few years ago. "You expect to see the ocean or the beach. But no—there's a huge chain-link fence and a
railway track!
About ten times a day the train goes by, clackedy-clack, whistle blowing. That's his idea of privacy."

"Who said Nixon was a hermit?" said Warren Estes. "You call a regular golfer a hermit? No, he doesn't address the Elks now, but he didn't before he was dumped. He's interested in the South Coast Boys' Club. They're building a gym—he throws a few bucks their way. Sure, if things had been different he would have shown up at a Rams football game, but he's no Howard Hughes. Go up to the golf course—you'll probably see him."

I had been turned away by the telephone operator ("President's office," she'd said) and by the polite security guard, Mr Richard Phillips, at the Cyprus Shore gate. ("What Nixon did was awful dumb," he said. "But I still think he's a smart man and I wave to him when he goes by in his car—that man pays my salary.") I had been rebuffed by the Coast Guard and Nixon's publisher, Warner Books; I had been flummoxed by the fences and the screens of trees. A bad week for me because it had been a bad week for Mr Nixon: his golf pro had received more than the usual hate-mail and the day before I arrived a lady had shown up at Cyprus Shore waving a pair of scissors in the direction of La Casa Pacifica. "It wasn't funny," said Mr Phillips. "She was going to kill him with them scissors."