NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  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.

  At the head of the valley looking west from the station of Ponte Nuovo I saw the snowcapped peak of Monte Asto, and there was nowhere else I wanted to be. Here, now, on this rail car rattling across Corsica under the massive benevolence of this godlike mountaintop—this for the moment was all that mattered to me, and I was reminded of the intense privacy, the intimate whispers, the random glimpses that grant us the epiphanies of travel.

  We came to Ponte Leccia where the line branched to Ile-Rousse and Calvi, and moved along through the mountain passes and the maquis in sunshine, and it all seemed so lovely that I felt frivolous, almost embarrassed by my luck, at this thirteen-dollar train ride past the nameless villages plastered against the mountainsides, visited only by the soaring hawks.

  I was writing this, or something like it, at a little place, La Regino, with its chickens on the line, and thinking: In German there is a word, Künstlerschuld, which means “artist’s guilt,” the emotion a painter feels over his frivolity in a world in which people work in a rut that makes them gloomy. Perhaps there is also a sort of traveler’s guilt, from being self-contained, self-indulgent, and passing from one scene to another, brilliant or miserable makes no difference. Did the traveler, doing no observable work, freely moving among settled serious people, get a pang of conscience? I told myself that my writing—this effort of observation—absolved me from any guilt; but of course that was just a feeble excuse. This was pleasure. No guilt, just gratitude.

  At Ile-Rousse the deep blue sea, the bluest I had so far seen, was beaten and blown by the west wind, and the sea foam of the whitecaps lay piled like buckets of egg-white whipped into fluff against the beach of the pretty town. It had a snug harbor and a headland and a lighthouse and yet another—there was one in every Corsican town, perhaps obeying a local ordinance—Hôtel Napoleon.

  The surf beat against the rocks near the train tracks that ran along the shore, and then in minutes we were at the next town, Calvi.

  Some of Corsica’s highest, snowiest mountains lay in sight of the harbor at Calvi, from a table at a harborside restaurant where I was drinking the local wine, a crisp white Figarella made from the Calvi grapes, and reading my Francis Bacon book (“Later, when we were alone … Francis showed me the weals across his back … The masochist is stronger than the sadist …”) and the owner of the restaurant was telling me that Christopher Columbus had been born here in Calvi, which was not true at all, so I had read (some Calvi families by that name gave rise to the myth). I thanked him for the information, and had fish soup that was heartier and more flavorful than in Nice, and rouget—four small red snappers en papillot, whole pink fish on a pink plate, like a surrealist’s lunch.

  Apart from this restaurant and the post office and a pair of inexpensive hotels (the Hôtel Grand was closed until April), everything was shut in Calvi, closed and locked and shuttered. Still, I stayed for the novelty of the sight of snow, and the exposed crags in the sunshine. After dark the town twinkled a bit, but it was empty, and the chill in the air and the black sea at its shore gave it a ghostly quality.

  Retracing my steps, I returned to the same restaurant that night, had the fish soup again, finished the Bacon book, and then walked around the harbor, looking at the lights over Calvi’s fortress. I passed by the little railway station and saw there was an early train out of here. Life had vanished, disappeared indoors. Walking back towards the harbor, I saw a woman whom I had seen just before sundown. She was perhaps selling something—she had that ready smile, and a ring binder thick with brochures—samples of furniture, maybe, or hotel accessories.

  “Good evening,” I said.

  “Good evening,” she replied, and she passed into the darkness.

  The next sound made me jump, because it erupted behind me, a shrill cautioning voice, saying, “You spoke to that woman.”

  It was English but accented.

  “How do you know I speak English?”

  “I know, I know. You spoke to that woman. You make a mistake. In Corse you never, ever speak to a woman. Never ever, never ever.�
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  “Why not?” I said, trying to discern this man’s features in the dim light of the harbor’s edge.

  “They put a bomb in your car.”

  “I don’t have a car,” I said.

  “They fight you—they kill you.”

  He had been sitting in the shadows, speaking confidently. He got up and came nearer, still nagging. He was young, balding, with a large pale face and an explosive and scolding way of talking. His French accent had something else in it that I could not place.

  “You’re English?”

  “American,” I said.

  “I hate the English.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I never went there. I just hate them. I meet them sometimes. They swear all the time.”

  To give me an impression of this, he mimicked an Englishman swearing and it sounded as though he had swallowed something foul and was retching.

  “Where do you live?” I ask.

  “Nizza,” he said.

  Calling Nice “Nizza”—it rhymed with pizza—seemed to indicate that he was Italian; I was sure he was not, yet there was something Mediterranean in his manner, in his irritating certainty.

  “And you’re traveling in Corsica.”

  “Not just Corse, but all over. And I don’t talk to women, like you just done. I don’t talk to anyone. I keep my mouth like so. These Corse people are giving problems if they don’t like you.”

  “How do you know?” It was not that I doubted him, everyone said this; but I wanted some colorful evidence, preferably firsthand.

  “I live in Nizza, I know. I read newspapers. If you are a tourist one week, two weeks, is okay. But you maybe want to stay long, buy a house, talk to people—talk to women. Then they put a bomb in your car, burn your house, fight you.”

  “You’re sure of this?”

  “Nazionalists, you know? And fanatics.”

  “The Corsicans seem friendly,” I said, though I had hardly done more than exchange pleasantries. Actually they seemed not friendly but bluff, offhand, taciturn, rough and ready, with weather-beaten faces and horny hands, men and women alike.

  “Maybe they are more friendly than the French. I hate the French.”

  There is a point in every conversation with a stranger when you decide whether to end it or else press on. As soon as he said, “I hate the French,” I realized he was reckless and probably good for a laugh.

  “Why do you hate the French?”

  “Because they hate everybody. You have seen Nizza? You see all the peoples has dogs? Ha! Is the reason!”

  “Reason for what?”

  “They has no friends, so they has dogs.”

  “The French prefer dogs to people?”

  “Is the truth. Even me, when I stop traveling I buy a dog, a caniche, how you say it?”

  “Poodle.”

  “Everyone in the Côte d’Azur has a poodle.”

  “But you can’t sleep with a dog,” I said.

  “The dog is your best friend always.”

  “Better than people?”

  “Yes, I think.”

  He said he had just arrived from Ajaccio and before that had traveled through Sardinia, Sicily and Croatia. This was helpful, since I was headed in the direction he had just come from. I asked him what Croatia was like. “No fighting in Zagreb,” he said. He did not know about the Croatian coast, which was my destination. But he had had no visa problems, and he had traveled most of the way by train.

  “What sort of work do you do?” I asked.

  “No work. Just trains and going, going, going.”

  In life, it is inevitable that you meet someone just like yourself. What a shock that your double is not very nice, and seems selfish and judgmental and frivolous and illogical.

  I questioned him closely, of course, but I was merely verifying his answers; I was not surprised. His life was the same as mine. Wake up in the morning, walk somewhere. Drink a coffee, take a train, look out the window. Talk to strangers, read the paper, read a book, then scribble-scribble. Now and then passing a phone booth, punch in numbers—anywhere—and get a clear line to Honolulu and some love and reassurance. Then leave the solitude of the confessional phone booth and enter France again, back in Juan-les-Pins, the click of boules, the salt-sting of wind and waves at Calvi. Is this a life?

  “You write things down?” I said.

  I suspected from his eccentricity alone that he was a writer.

  “No. Just looking. Just going.”

  “It’s expensive.”

  “Trains are cheap.”

  “Eating is expensive.” The meal I had just eaten in Calvi had cost fifty dollars.

  “I eat sandwiches.”

  “What about Corsican food?”

  “What is Corsican food? It is French food! They have no spécialité, but I buy things to eat in the boulangerie.”

  “What about Nizza?” I said. I was thinking: What does this guy do for money? He wasn’t more than thirty-five or so—and he was dressed fairly well, from what I could see. “Nizza is expensive.”

  “I spend one thousand U.S. dollars a month. Six hundred for room, the rest for food.”

  “Isn’t it boring, not working?”

  “Sometimes I buy something, sell something, get money.”

  That was as specific as he got, regarding his employment.

  “Then I take a train. But here I am careful. You are not careful. Ha-ha! Is still a nice place. Corse has the bombs. Amsterdam has the drugs. San Francisco has the homosexuals.”

  “I don’t see the connection. Do you hate homosexuals too?”

  I had just finished the Francis Bacon biography and was indignant on Bacon’s behalf.

  “I never went to America,” he said, being evasive. “Is too many people. And I like Nizza. But here in Corse”—now he was becoming agitated—“these people cannot get food if the French don’t give them money. They want freedom but they has no food.”

  “You’re not French, are you?”

  “No. Israel.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “You don’t like Israel?”

  I laughed. “I was thinking of the four billion dollars a year America gives to Israel, so the Israelis can eat.”

  “We don’t need the money,” he shrieked. “They give it, so we spend it. They are stupid to give it.”

  “I agree. But where would Israel be if they didn’t get the money?”

  “No problem. Israel don’t need it.”

  “Maybe we should give the money to Corsica.”

  “Planes! Guns! Israel buys planes for millions. Some politicians steal it. Spend it. Throw it away. Israel is not stupid like America!”

  “And yet you live in France.”

  “I hate the Arabs in Israel, the way they make trouble,” he said. “There are thirty thousand Jewish in Nizza. Synagogues. Everything. I feel it is like home, all these Jewish. So I am happy there.”

  “But you travel all the time.”

  “All the time,” he said.

  “In the Mediterranean.”

  “Only in the Mediterranean,” he said.

  “Jew-lysses,” I said. “That’s what an American writer called himself, because he traveled all the time, like Ulysses, and he was Jewish. Henry Roth—Jew-lysses.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He was instantly suspicious, thinking I was mocking him. He had that harsh, cynical everyone-else-is-a-sucker attitude that is common among certain citified Levantine Arabs and Jews in the Mediterranean. The country folk were capable of idealism. His sort were selfish and scolding.

  Oddly, for a traveler in the Mediterranean, he confessed that his great fear was of the sea itself—any water. He got sick on all boats, on ferries, any vessel, whatever the size. Instead of taking the overnight ferry from Sicily to Sardinia, he had caught a plane and flown from Palermo to Cagliari. He had flown from Sardinia to Ajaccio, even though (as he said) it was a one-hour trip by ferry across the straits t
hat separated Sardinia from Corsica.

  “I get headaches. I get frights. I get sick,” he said.

  But he loved trains. He was leaving for Bastia in the morning, and the same train connected to Ajaccio.

  “So we go together?” he said.

  “Maybe,” I said, but I knew better. He had seemed at first like a version of myself, shuttling around in a solitary way on trains, from one part of the Mediterranean coast to another, from island to island. But talking to him I had verified that he was not my double—perhaps that was why I had provoked him and interrogated him: to prove that we were not alike. I had proven to myself that we were utterly different.

  Two days later the news from Israel was that twenty-nine Arabs praying in a mosque had been machine-gunned to death by a Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein. Born in Brooklyn, a Kach member and a militant supporter of Meir Kahane, Goldstein was beaten to death by some of the surviving Arabs in the mosque. More Arabs were shot soon afterwards by Israeli soldiers.

  This incident was the first in a wave of violence that continued throughout my trip. In a reprisal, some Arabs blew up a bus in Tel Aviv. After that an Arab leader was shot in his house. Then an Arab suicide bomber killed himself, and took three Israeli soldiers with him, at a checkpoint; and this was answered with more killings. Each side answered the other, as in a blood feud; each side was unforgiving.

  That was happening in the Mediterranean, too, and reading these reports I was always reminded of this irritating little man, nagging me that night at Calvi harbor.

  He was not on the noon train the next day. Rather than go all the way south to Ajaccio I bought a ticket to the old capital in the interior, the high-altitude and almost hidden town of Corte. In the early part of the trip, as we circled the shoreline, the strong winds picked up foamy veils of spoon-drift and flung this delicate froth at the windows of the clattering navette.

  The line to Corte, by way of the junction at Ponte Leccia, wound through the valleys of the snowy mountains and ascended through fields of lavender and herbs, past trees of madly twittering birds, towards the center of the island, a spine of mountains, the highest of which, Monte Cinto (2,710 meters), was bleak and beautiful, gray and cracked rock, ledges and crevasses surmounted by a massive shawl of snow. Above it all, over the whole granite island, was a zone of blue, a winter sky—nothing but blue skies, smiling at me.