NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (23 page)

“Asphodels,” Dorothy said. “They call it ‘the poor people’s bread,’ because the poor ate the bulb. Until Paoli introduced potatoes to Corsica everyone ate them. The Greeks called it ‘the flower of death,’ but it is edible. It is the flower of life. Lear mentions them.”

“I’ve got his book with me,
Journal of a Landscape Painter.”

“Lovely book.”

The village was empty, though the church had been recently renovated,
and the war memorial, commemorating the Corsicans who had died resisting the Italians in the Second World War, had fresh flowers on it.

Michael Bozzi, Héros de la Resistance. Fusillé le 30.8.1943.

“Fusillé—shot?”

“Executed,” she said. “They like the word ‘resistance’—better to resist than be for something. Corsicans can be so negative. A greater feeling of Corsican identity has caused more and more bombing incidents—against quite nice people, in some cases. The Williamses are a lovely couple. Lived here for years. They had a water mill. They were bombed.”

I said, “Corsicans have had a history of invasion, maybe that accounts for their resistance.”

“The Corsican way of life is a resistance to foreigners,” Dorothy said. “And Catholicism gives a life to the villages, like the Good Friday observance in Sartène, which is a jolly good picnic, and the men take their hats off as the statue of the Virgin goes by. Many of those men are gangsters, who rehabilitate themselves through the church.”

In the churchyard of Chiavari’s lovely church, looking down at the bay of Propriano and beyond to Ajaccio, Dorothy became thoughtful.

She said, “Corsicans helped the French run their empire, they worked in the colonies in Indochina and Africa.” We were walking among gravestones, with foreign place-names chiseled into them, where each deceased Corsican had breathed his last—Algiers, Oran, Tonkin.

“The Corsicans had always gone abroad, from the turn of the century until the 1960s. The nationalist movement started when there were no more colonies to exploit and no more jobs. It’s a Marxist argument, yes, but there it is.”

We went back to Ajaccio and had tea in her apartment. There were some of Francis’s paintings on the wall. I understood what she meant when she said people either loved them or hated them. I did not love them. It was an austere apartment; and yet Dorothy made no apologies. It was a writer’s apartment, a sitting room, a narrow kitchen, a bedroom—books and papers, an old typewriter, notes, drafts, notebooks, and some flowering plants in pots. But it was chilly there. The winters could be cold, she said.

She was frail, and yet she gave classes in poetry appreciation to get some income. She had just finished a book about belief in the supernatural in Corsica,
The Dream Hunters of Corsica.
“My rationalist friends will hate
it.” Her life was full. She was settled here. “This is all I want,” she said, and it was not clear whether she meant the apartment in the first basement or the island of Corsica; but it came to the same thing.

Over tea we were talking about England.

“Margaret Thatcher!” Dorothy said. “Isn’t she awful? Look at her, a very humble upbringing in a grocer’s shop. But listen to her. That’s why she’s so careful in the way she talks, so ‘refained.’ And so careful in the way she dresses. And she is so intolerant.”

She had ceased to be a Marxist, but Lady Rose was still a bohemian.

In heavy rain, I left Ajaccio the day after my lunch with Dorothy, detouring around the village of Petreto-Bicchisano and down a winding road to Filitosa. Seeing the strange, almost monstrous beauty of Filitosa helped me to understand passages in
Granite Island
where Dorothy had been transformed in something akin to a spiritual experience—though in her brisk practical way Lady Rose probably would not use that word (but Dorothy Carrington might). She was changed: “On that day I entered Corsican life and became part of it,” she wrote.

In slippery mud and pouring rain I made my way through the cold forest to the simple settlement of stones. I saw no other people until I reached the place, and then as if in a bizarre reenactment I saw a wet family sheltering from the rain in the remains of a Filitosa stone hut—beefy Father, red-cheeked Mother, two pale children. Two thousand years fell away, as the cliché goes. They were German tourists, but it was a vivid glimpse of early man in the Mediterranean, in his hideout in the hills. At first the little tableau startled me, and then I walked on, laughing.

The little glade below Filitosa, where there were upright sculptures, was full of wildflowers. Now I knew what an asphodel was, and there were two varieties growing here, with buttercups and broom and pink lavender. A big middle-aged man and woman, wearing yellow raincoats, were embracing and kissing in a stone shelter farther down the hill, and still the rain fell. There was thunder, so loud a horse was spooked from where it stood under a tree, and it bolted into the downpour.

In the late forties and early fifties, this tiny village in the south of the
island was just a place of mythical prehistory, a litter of strange stones, a nameless Stonehenge. Dorothy mentions in her book how a Corsican farmer realized that a convenient flat stone he had been using for a bench for years was actually a priceless historical object, an ancient carving of a man with a sword.

Only in the 1960s did the knowledgeable archaeologists arrive in Filitosa; then the megalithic ruins of Corsica become codified and the apparently barbarous carvings were more elaborately described and seen for what they are, wonders of Mediterranean prehistory. Dolmens, menhirs, and statue-menhirs—the most ancient of them probably four thousand years old. The terminology is not especially helpful, but it is almost irrelevant when you see the settlement at Filitosa, the shelters, the high walls, the battlements, the altar and the standing stones, the weird masklike portraiture of the heads on slender stalks of stone—perhaps gods or warriors—of this enigmatic culture.

Such stones have been found elsewhere in Europe, but Corsica seems to represent the whole culture, not just the strange carved faces but weapons, implements and shelters, a whole community. And it is interesting that this community is inland, with access to the ocean but on a hill that offers protection, just as the Corsicans were to plan their towns so much later. No one knows who these people were.

It was only an hour or so by bus from here to the town of Sartène, where I stayed that night. Sartène was a classic Corsican town, like Corte, perpendicular, fortresslike, unwelcoming, piled against a hill. But once inside it, on the small main square, it seemed hospitable. I found a place to stay and that night had a hearty dinner in a Sartène restaurant. “They stew everything,” Dorothy had said. It was the tradition of cooking on the hearth that kept them faithful to the stewpot. Lamb, boar, mutton, even their fish soup was as thick and brown as stew. And this sauce?
Oursin
, the waiter told me. I had to look it up: sea urchin.

There was a man eating alone, not a tourist, probably a traveling salesman. He ate slowly, the way unhappy people do, with a downturned mouth, like someone taking medicine.

The rain continued all night and I lay under a damp lumpy quilt planning my onward trip. Out of Sartène tomorrow; to Bonifacio, the ferry to Sardinia, and then …

The bus from Ajaccio passed through Sartène at nine or so. I got up early and walked on the winding road to the edge of town with a book in my hand.

One day in April 1868, Edward Lear paused on this road, then a mule track just above Sartène. On that track he spent the day composing a little picture of the town. It is a severe but atmospheric portrait, of tall gloomy houses and a slender church steeple, a bluff of brooding masonry, its dark rain-dampened stone giving the town a look of mystery.

One hundred and twenty-six years later, I stood on the same curve of the road where Lear had sat sketching. I had with me Lear’s
Journal of a Landscape Painter in Corsica
, and held up his picture of Sartène. The rugged houses still stood, as unaltered as though they were rocks and boulders and cliffs, which is how Corsican dwellings seem—somewhat severe, defiant, and everlasting, vernacular aspects of the landscape. Corsica can seem a melancholy place (“Everything’s somber in Corsica,” Prosper Mérimée said). The misty afternoon gave the town the look of an etching in an old book. And I had the book in my hand. Hardly anything in Sartène had changed.

Nor had the landscape from here to Bonifacio. I could see this on the ride there, in the small country, four old women on board, and me, and the chain-smoking driver. The coastal towns were fuller of houses and people, but the hinterland was still the land of Lear’s etchings—its steep cliffs, its small ports, its mountain roads and mule tracks, its remote settlements, small villages clinging as though magnetized to steep slopes.

What modernity existed was superficial; Corsica’s soul of indestructible granite remained intact. But it was more than just the look of the land. Corsica is physically nearer to Italy. Its nearest neighbor is Sardinia, but there is hardly any traffic between the islands. Because Corsica is so far from the French mainland, with its own language and culture and dignity and suspicions, and visited mainly in the summer, Corsica’s differences endure. Corsica is small enough and coherent enough for people to feel free to generalize about. Corsicans themselves, when they are encouraged to speak to strangers, are tremendous generalizers. The statements are usually debatable, but there is a grain of truth in some of these Corsican comments: the haunted quality of the island, its vigorous language, its folk traditions, the sweet aroma of its
maquis
, the fatuity of its cult of Napoleon.

It was two hours to Bonifacio, because the bus took a long detour to the town of Porto-Vecchio to drop off one of the old women. There were no cars on the road, no one on the move. I liked Corsica for that, the low-season flatness, the rain, and finally just me on the bus that moved down the coast, past steep white sea-sculpted cliffs, the wind moaning in the brushy vegetation.

Bonifacio at noon was empty, a narrow harbor flanked by hotels shut for the season. Some fishing boats, honey-colored cliffs, an enormous fortress.

In travel, as in most exertions, timing is everything. There is the question of weather; of seasons. In the winter Corsica was stark and dramatic, the mountains were snowier, the valleys rainier; at the coast the tourist tide was out. Traveling to places at unfashionable times, I always think of the Graham Greene short story “Cheap in August,” or Mann’s
Death in Venice.
All I had to do was show up. I never had to make a reservation. I liked Corsica’s cold days of dazzling sunshine, its cliffs of glittering granite, the blue sky after a day of drizzle, its lonely roads. It was an island absent of any sense of urgency. I could somehow claim it and make it my own.

Four hours until the ferry left for Sardinia, and no restaurants open. I bought a croissant and a cup of coffee, and then climbed to the fort and walked along the cliff path and found a warm rock and read my Burgess book, and snoozed and thought of the Laestrygonians.

I could see Sardinia clearly on the far side of the channel, beyond a scattering of rocks that they called islands. At three I walked down the slope to the quay, as the Corsican men were coming out to congregate and smoke and banter.

A few Bonifacians left their ancient tenements to see the ferry appear. Apart from them this port town was motionless. Out of season, a place is at its emptiest, and most exposed, but also it is most itself. Bonifacio had been a garrison and a fishing port. It was now suspended in time; the summer strangers would seem to alter it for a few months, but its soul was its own. If, like Corsica, an island is remote enough and self-possessed, it can seem—far beyond merely insular—like another planet.

            
M
y reward after all the fuss and delay of getting to Bonifacio harbor was a classical glimpse of the harbor itself, the pale fissured limestone, the caverns at the shoreline, as the
Ichnusa
plowed past the last ramparts of the citadel, and then, as though splashing from between the rhythmic chop of two Homeric couplets, a pair of dolphins appeared, diving and blowing, with that little grunt and gasp that all good-sized dolphins give out as they surface, as though to prove they are worried little overworked mammals just like you.

That triumphant sight of Mediterranean dolphins made the whole inland sea seem ancient and unspoiled, peopled by heroes, terrorized by Laestrygonian giants, and all the goddesses and warriors that Ulysses encountered. It was the sea of triremes and sea monsters and big fat-faced gods, like the ones from the corners of old maps, with pursed lips and blown-out cheeks that created strong winds.

Bonifacio was the first place I had come to that could be identified in
The Odyssey.
The bay and harbor of Bonifacio is described in Book 10, and Robert Fitzgerald’s translation depicts it clearly, with the directness that characterizes the whole epic: