NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  I was happy in this descent through the island, knowing that I would be island-hopping for a few weeks: Corsica, then Sardinia, then Sicily, and finally the Italian mainland.

  Corte was only a few hours away. The little place is almost perpendicular. It is the heart of Corsica, and the apotheosis of the steep Corsican village. This small town was chosen as the capital for its remoteness, its altitude, its seemingly impregnable topography. “Seemingly”—you wonder how it could ever be captured, yet it has been captured a number of times, by the Saracens, the Genoese, the Corsicans, the Italians. It was at last snatched by the French (in 1768) after Pascal Paoli, the father of Corsican independence, established it as his capital, the site of the national assembly. Paoli is still regarded in Corsica (his portrait is everywhere) as U Babbu di a Patria. Paoli’s name is a sort of rallying cry even today for Corsican patriots, whose efforts at expression range from eloquent appeals for sovereignty, assertions of cultural identity, to crudely made pipe bombs and the systematic torching of foreigners’ houses.

  I had been here before and found it so moribund and spooky I wrote a short story about it (“Words Are Deeds”). That was on a brief visit to the island in 1977. In 1982 it became a university town and it was now a bustling place, filled with youthful students and cafes. Many Corsicans told me that after this university started there was a greater feeling of Corsican identity and more resistance. This was also a way of saying that the graffiti on the ancient walls of Corte was of a political character: Liberta pa i Patriotti! (Freedom for the patriots!), Speculatori Fora! (Out with Speculators!), Colon Fora! (Out with Colonists!), and so forth.

  Corsican courtesy is deferential, a sort of shy dignity, and it is in great contrast to that sort of defiant graffiti scrawled in the Corsican language on most public walls. I had lunch at a cafe, sitting in the sunshine. The town I had thought of as forbidding had been rejuvenated by the presence of students. I talked to some of them at the cafe, and when I asked them about Corsican politics they suggested that I attend a lecture later that afternoon.

  “Which sandwich did you choose?” one girl asked.

  “It’s a Freud,” I said.

  The sandwiches were named after great thinkers or writers, Pascal, Newton, Verlaine, Rimbaud. Rimbaud was ham and cheese, Freud was mozzarella, tomato, basil, olive oil.

  I had no luck understanding the lecture, “The Clan Is the Cancer of Corsica,” which was given by a Corsican, Professor Sinoncelli. It was highly technical, it concerned the social structure, the family, and the relationship of politics to the Corsican activists, who had organized themselves into marauding gangs.

  My problem was linguistic. I had no trouble chatting with people on trains or in casual encounters, but the intensity of an academic lecture, full of jargon and unfamiliar terms, was beyond me. It was clear, though, that a problem of identity was being debated, and that there were contradictions. Here was a large island, with a remote and mountainous interior, and a people whose culture meant everything to them. How to reconcile this with being a province of France? The Professor seemed to be suggesting that the nationalist movement had been subverted by a selfish and violent minority, who did not represent the Corsican people.

  “This word ‘clan’?” I asked a student afterwards. “Does it have some special meaning in Corsica?”

  “In Corsica as in France it is a word to describe any political group, not only of the Corsican nationalists,” he said. “But the underlying meaning is that the group is close-knit and militant.”

  The girl with him said, “That is what we have made of democracy!”

  Corsican pride ranges from ferocious nationalism to quiet dignity, and it has been remarked upon by every visitor since James Boswell, who got interested in the cause of Corsican independence and introduced Dr. Johnson to Paoli.

  The most common generalization I had heard before I returned to Corsica after those seventeen years was that it had changed a great deal. The island had always been well-known for being dangerous—an unjustified reputation, partly based on some highly publicized bombings by the nationalist group Resistenza as well as the Corsican separatists’ proclivity for defacing signs. I had seen such signs in Spain, where they had been scribbled over in the Catalan language. Few acts of vandalism are more threatening to the visiting stranger than road signs that have been messed with, and they are usually the very ones you need to avoid being lost. Most signs in Corsica are either rewritten or, worse, obliterated.

  There are many such signs on the road from Corte to the high village Evisa, through the Niolu Region and the towering Forest of Valdoniello. I had been told that this area is best experienced on a bicycle. I was lucky enough to be able to rent one in Corte for an excursion here.

  Valdoniello is perhaps the only genuine forest in the Mediterranean. In the whole of my trip I did not see anything like it. It is a world of pines, but not just pines—it is valleys and rushing streams, snowy peaks and granite crags. The pines are gigantic and elegant, very tall and straight. While it was still a wilderness of primeval trees, this forest was first described and depicted in etchings by Edward Lear. Some of the earliest images of the Corsican landscape, especially its interior, are those of Lear.

  Lear, who was famous for writing light verse with his left hand and painting Mediterranean landscapes with his right, came to Corsica just a few months after writing “The Owl and the Pussycat.” He traveled all over the island in a mule-cart. In his time Lear was better known as a brilliant watercolorist, as well as a painter in oils, rather than a writer of nonsense poetry. He had the idea of illustrating large-format bird books, much as Audubon had done, and Lear’s book of parrots is a masterpiece. But the book made no money. He abandoned ornithology. Looking for new subjects, and restless by nature, Lear became a great traveler in the Mediterranean—France, Italy, Greece, Egypt—and also in India; he wrote and illustrated books on Albania and Corsica. His book about Corsica, Journal of a Landscape Painter in Corsica (1869), introduced Corsica as a wild paradise to British readers, and created Corsica’s first tourist boom. Lear was the twentieth of twenty-one children. He was a kindly, whimsical man, but given to periods of great sadness and loneliness. So ashamed was he of being an epileptic that he hid his affliction—never spoke the word—and so he remained a lonesome traveler.

  He was one of the first foreigners to penetrate the Corsican interior, though in the 1860s the French had already begun to exploit Corsica for its fine trees. By the time Edward Lear ventured into the forest he saw “the ravages of M. Chauton’s hatchets; here and there on the hillside are pale patches of cleared ground, with piles of cut and barked pines … giant trees lie prostrate …”

  I was told that the French had recently made this forest a national park but, being colonists in Corsica—the activists’ slogans were justifiably indignant—French lumber companies were still intensively cutting trees. The signs of logging were everywhere—marked trees, cut timber, clear-cut slopes, every sort of abuse that goes under the weasel term “forest management.”

  The narrow road traversed the valleys, westward, through the trees. The best way of seeing this forest was on a bike, in the open air, for the fragrant scent of the tall pines. The valleys were dappled with shadow and spread thickly with a litter of pinecones and needles, warmed and made fragrant by the sunlight.

  Lear had rhapsodized about it. He wrote in a letter (to Emily Tennyson): “I have seen the southern part of the Island pretty thoroughly. Its inner scenery is magnificent—a sort of Alpine character with more southern vegetation impresses you, & the vast pine forests unlike those gloomy dark monotonous firs of the north, are green and varied Pinus Maritima. Every corner of the place not filled up by great Ilex trees and pines and granite rocks is stuffed with cistus and arbutus, Laurentinus, lent & heath: and the remaining space if any is all cyclamen & violets, anemones & asphodels—let alone nightingales and blackbirds.”

  It is much the same today. The trip through this region is a combin
ation of forest, of meadow and mountain, all this leading from one side of Corsica to the other; and after Evisa with its tall narrow houses and graceful church steeple, the road descends through the sheer rocky gorges of Spelunca to Porto, haunt of tourists.

  At Evisa I met the Dunnits, from England. I was admiring the steep striated gorges and the sloping ledges of pinkish stone, the pinnacles and scalloped ridges, and a car drew up. The driver asked me how far to Corte.

  “An hour or so, through the forest,” I said.

  “You just come by push-bike?”

  “Right.”

  “Stopping in Corte?”

  “I have to go back there to return my bike. I’m on my way to Ajaccio.”

  “We were there—we done that.”

  “Calacuccia’s very pretty.”

  “We done it, as well.”

  I decided to tease them.

  “Bonifacio—have you done it?”

  “Done it.”

  And then the Dunnits began to reminisce about the Hebrides, how they had done it, and how the people were just like the Corsicans, insisting on speaking Celtic (“Or Gaelic,” said Mrs. Dunnit). Eventually the Dunnits drove off.

  This was just a day off for me—a picnic. Instead of bicycling all the way downhill to the seaside village of Porto, I pedaled back to Corte and caught the train to Ajaccio.

  • • •

  It was the last train to Ajaccio. I arrived in darkness, passing through the back of the city, and hardly entering it on the train, because the station is some distance from the center. It was only eight in the evening, but the streets were empty. I was later to discover that Ajaccio is a city of convulsions—busy from seven until noon, the market, the banks, the fruit stalls, the fish shops, the bus station, the stores, all bustling; then dead from noon until three or so; and then convulsed until six-thirty, when it expired until the following morning. And the streets, like the streets in many Mediterranean towns, were a men’s club.

  The other train passengers quickly vanished. I walked out of the tiny station down the main street, the Cours Napoleon, past the Napoleon Restaurant, and the Boutique Bonaparte, to the Hôtel Napoleon. The Napoleon was never the luxury hotel in a Corsican town but it was always one of the better ones.

  As soon as I got into my room and shut the door, which had a strange device for locking it, the lights went out. I struggled to find my flashlight in the darkness and then got the door open.

  “My room has no electricity,” I said to the manager.

  He smiled at me. He said, “You are the writer, eh? You wrote Le royaume des Moustiques and Voyage excentrique et ferroviaire autour du Royaume-Uni and Le sîles heureuses d’Océanie.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Are you making a trip here to write a book?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It was the truth. It was too early in my Mediterranean journey for me to tell whether it might be a book, and what had I seen so far? Only Gibraltar, Spain and France. I did not want to jinx it by being confident, so I said that I was still groping around.

  His name was Gilles Stimamiglio, a Corsican from the Castagno region in the northeast, the province of chestnut trees and Roman forts.

  “Where are you going from here?” Gilles asked.

  “South, to Sartène and Bonifacio.”

  “Bonifacio is a very pretty place. You know Homer’s Odyssey? Bonifacio is where the Laestrygonians live.”

  That was beautiful, that he referred to the distant little port, not for a good restaurant or a luxury hotel or its fortress or a trivial event, but as the place where a group of savage giants had interfered with Ulysses. When it comes to literary allusions you can’t do better than using the authority of The Odyssey to prove that your hometown was once important. In Gibraltar Sir Joshua Hassan had jerked his thumb sideways toward the Rock and said to me, “That’s one of the Pillars of Hercules.”

  I went for a walk through the empty town, got a drink at an empty bar, then went back to my room to read Anthony Burgess’s autobiography, You’ve Had Your Time. I liked this book because it was about his writing life as well as the various places in the Mediterranean where he had become a tax refugee: Monte Carlo, Malta, Italy, all of them more or less disastrous for him.

  The next day I tried to get information about the ferries to Sardinia. The travel agents could give me precise details of the flights to Dallas or Miami, they could make reservations for me at Disneyland; but they had no idea if or where or when a ferry traveled the few miles from Corsica to Sardinia. I inquired at eight agencies and finally found one with the right information.

  “So a ferry leaves at four every afternoon from Bonifacio,” I said. “What time does it arrive?”

  The clerk did not know.

  “Where do I get a ticket?”

  The clerk did not know, but guessed that someone in Bonifacio would be selling them.

  “Is there a bus or a train that meets the ferry in Sardinia?”

  This made her laugh. “That is in Italy!” she cried, highly amused, as though I had asked her the question about New Zealand.

  I spent the day walking up the coast road, which went past a cemetery and some condominiums and a hotel to a point where I could have caught a little boat to the Isles Sanguinaires. I took a bus back to Ajaccio and as the sun had still not set—not yet the hour for a drink and diary writing—I walked along the Ajaccio beach and saw a Tibetan woman mourning in the sand, being watched by three beefy Corsican soldiers.

  This Tibetan looked familiar. It happens traveling in the Mediterranean that you often keep seeing the same people on your route. I had seen this small roly-poly woman on the quay at Nice boarding the Île de Beauté. I had even seen her at Bastia, where she had hurried down the gangway and vanished. Here she was again, round-faced, brownish, orientalish, in a thick jacket and heavy trousers, hardly five feet tall, pigeon-toed, with a floppy wool hat.

  The men were leaning over her. You never saw men talking to a Corsican woman this way. I suspected they were pestering her. Having seen her at Nice and Bastia, I felt somewhat responsible for her welfare, even if she did not know that I was observing her.

  So I walked over to her and said hello in English.

  The men—young mustached Corsican soldiers—were startled into silence.

  “Are these men bothering you?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said.

  But as I was speaking, the men stepped aside. Just like soldiers to pick on a solitary woman sitting on the cold beach sand in the winter. She had been scribbling—probably a letter—it lay on her lap.

  The hairy Corsicans looked like potential rapists to me, with the confident, hearty manner of soldiers, who would not dare to defy a superior officer but would be very happy bullying a subordinate.

  I said, “Look, you should be careful. Are you alone?”

  “Yes,” she said. She peered at me. “Do you know me?”

  “I saw you on the ferry from Nice.”

  Hearing English conversation, a novelty to them, the soldiers goggled like dogs, their mouths hanging open.

  “She is my friend,” I said in French.

  “Okay, okay.” And they went away, muttering and laughing, and kicking sand.

  “Thank you,” the young woman said.

  “You are traveling alone?”

  She replied in French. She said, “My English is no good. Do you understand French? Good. Yes, I travel alone. Usually I have no problems.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Japan.”

  She said that she was studying French in Lyons and that she wanted to learn it well enough to read French literature when she got back to Japan. She was twenty-two. Her English was poor, her French was shaky.

  I said, “I was under the impression that Japanese people traveled in groups.”

  “Yes. But not me.”

  “Aren’t Japanese women taught to be dependent and submissive?”

  “Now they are the equal
to men.”

  Her name was Tomiko. She was four foot ten. She hardly spoke any language but her own. Here she was sitting on the beach at Ajaccio, alone.

  I said, “Would you do this in Japan? I mean, go to a place alone, where people were all strangers?”

  “No, I would go with a friend. But my friends did not want to come with me here to Corsica.”

  “Maybe you’re brave. Maybe you’re foolish.”

  “Foolish, I think,” she said.

  “I admire you, but please be careful.”

  All this convinced me that she was a good person, and she followed me back into town, talking ungrammatically. I realized that by being disinterested I had won her confidence, and she clung for a while, until I sent her on her way.

  That night, Gilles Stimamiglio gave me the telephone number of Dorothy Carrington, the author of the only good modern book about Corsica, Granite Island. I called her from a phone booth and asked whether we might meet for a meal.

  She said, “I am very old. It has to be lunch—I am no good in the evenings. And I’m slow. I have ‘intellectual’s back’—the discs are all bad from sitting. Or it might be called ‘hiker’s back.’ I’ve done so much hiking here.”

  She gave me elaborate instructions for finding her apartment (“I am in what the French call ‘first basement’ ”) and I said I would take her to lunch the next day.

  James Boswell visited Corsica in 1765; Flaubert visited as a young man and filled nineteen notebooks in ten days; Lear traipsed around in 1868 and produced pictures and his Journal. Mérimée roamed Corsica, looking for settings for his novels. But although these people raved about Corsica’s beauty, they left after their visit.

  One person visited and stayed and distinguished herself by writing the best modern book in English on Corsica: Dorothy Carrington, author of Granite Island. Frederica, Lady Rose (her proper name), was in her eighties, with a radiance that certain serene people achieve in old age, with pale eyes and the gasping expression of the elderly that is also a look of perpetual surprise. She warned me over the phone that she was frail, and yet in person she gave an impression of being unusually hardy, game, alert, not deaf at all; one of those down-to-earth aristocrats that the English have always exported to thrive in hardship posts.