NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  She had once been truly gorgeous—the proof was a Cecil Beaton photograph propped on the mantelpiece in her small damp apartment. In the photograph she was a willowy blonde, languid, reclining on a sofa, a cigarette holder in her dainty fingers. A frowning man stood over her, and they were surrounded by hideous paintings. Beaton had been a friend. She had had many friends in her long interesting life.

  “I’d like to take you to a good restaurant,” I said.

  “That would be Le Maquis. It’s a bit out of town, but it’s good food.”

  It was a fifteen-minute drive to a spot on the coast south of Ajaccio, a five-star hotel with a restaurant which had been awarded three forks by the Michelin guide. Only one other table was taken.

  “No one can afford to come to Corsica anymore,” Dorothy said. “Now what would you like to know?”

  “How did you happen to come here?”

  She began, at my insistence, with her birth in England. Her mother had been diagnosed as having cancer. “Have another child and you’ll be cured,” the local quack had assured the woman. And so Dorothy was born, and when she was three her mother died, of cancer. Her father, General Sir Frederick Carrington, had (with Cecil Rhodes) helped conquer Rhodesia and claim it for Britain. Dorothy was raised by uncles and aunts in rural Gloucestershire, in Colesbourne, “in a very grand house, much of it built by my Elwes grandfather when he was having an attack of megalomania.”

  They were landed gentry, with the usual mix of soldiers and misfits. It was not a farming family. “We thought the soil was too bad and we were too high—three hundred meters.”

  “What did the family do?”

  It is an American question, What do you do?, but there it is.

  Perhaps reflecting on the intrusiveness of the question, Dorothy Carrington’s pale eyes grew even paler.

  “We rode to hounds,” she said.

  She attended Oxford, and scandalized her family by having an affair with an Austrian in Spain. “Nowadays I would have spent some time with him and moved on. My uncles and aunts showed up—in Paris, where I was living with the man—they dragged us off to be married.” And so she was forced to leave Oxford University. This was in the 1920s.

  “I went to Vienna and lived with my mother-in-law while my husband was in Rhodesia. I thought as my father had conquered Rhodesia I’d have all sorts of welcomes. We went. My first husband was good with horses. He could tame a wild horse, fix a roof. Clever farmer. But he had no mind at all.”

  “What did you do in Rhodesia?”

  She didn’t smile.

  “We rode to hounds,” she said.

  “Of course.”

  “We chased every animal in Rhodesia. They were in great supply then. We lived about thirty miles from Marandellas—that was where we went for supplies, fording streams on the way. It was a rough life. We hardly knew the Africans. I spoke what they called ‘kitchen kaffir.’ It would have been different in Kenya. There were all sorts of diversions there. Rhodesia was second-rate.”

  Everything was fine until Germany invaded Austria. “My husband could not claim to be Austrian anymore. He automatically became German. And I had no choice. I had to take his nationality, as his wife. We eventually divorced. Have I mentioned that he was excellent with horses but he had no mind? I went to London. I was a German national!”

  “That must have been inconvenient.”

  “We were at war with Germany, you see,” she said. “I put that right by marrying an agreeable little Englishman, to get a passport. It was a marriage of convenience.”

  After a spell in Paris, she returned to London, and by chance entered an art gallery where paintings by Sir Francis Rose were being exhibited.

  “Very strange ones. People either loved or hated his paintings. I thought to myself, I’m going to marry that man. I just had that feeling.”

  And so it happened. She married Sir Francis Rose, and lived, as she put it, “absolutely at the center of things.” She was photographed by Beaton, knew Gertrude Stein and Picasso. “Picasso was a bit of a Sun King, such a personality. And such a libido.” Picasso had made a fruitless attempt on her virtue. Gertrude Stein, surprisingly, had not; but she had bought sixty-eight of Sir Francis’s paintings, and immortalized him by mentioning him in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

  We had ordered our meal—“Notice the stew on the menu? Corsicans stew everything.” Dorothy had the charcuterie for which Corsica is famous, and then oxtail. I had the soup and the fish. Meanwhile we were drinking wine, Patrimonio, from the north of the island; tippling and talking in the bright still restaurant by the sea.

  “I am not betraying a secret when I say that Francis was homosexual,” Dorothy said. “Everyone knew. What’s the secret? And, well, men are unfaithful to their wives. That is how men are, that is what they do. But when a man is unfaithful in a homosexual way there is a sort of guilt that comes over him. That was the bad part.”

  “You knew that he was homosexual when you married him?”

  “Um, yes. I thought I could cure him.”

  “What was his libido like. Not on the Picasso scale, was it?”

  “He had a libido, yes. And very low friends. Francis Bacon—you know who I mean?”

  “I’ve just read a book about him.”

  “He had a very grisly talent. Nostalgie de la boue, perhaps. And my husband’s friends were very rough.”

  Ready for yer thrashing, now, Frawncis? the young men muttered to Bacon, flexing a leather belt, and then the whipping began. So the book (written by Bacon’s friend Daniel Farson) had said. I told this to Dorothy Carrington.

  “Oh, yes, I suppose so. All of that,” she said. “But these low friends kept him going. Our marriage didn’t last. After he died I felt a duty to go back. I met some of them. They had given him money, they had kept him.”

  “They were loyal to him?”

  “Yes. In a strange way. I think they were atoning for something in their own past.”

  It cannot have been a blissful marriage, yet she was as compassionate and uncritical as it was possible to be.

  “Francis always had his own set. Cyril Connolly was one. He was frightfully rude to me in 1972—he snubbed me. I said hello to him. He turned away. ‘I was always Francis’s friend, not yours,’ he said. He was horrid.”

  “What about Corsica?” I asked. It seemed the right question—we were now on dessert.

  “Francis and I started coming to Corsica when we were absolutely penniless,” she said. She began to describe episodes in marriage that greatly resembled the plot of a D. H. Lawrence novel: aristocratic couple, escaping England, find an earthy people and life-affirming landscape, living in peasant huts, hiking the hills, sailing the coast in fishing smacks. It does not cost much. He paints, she writes. Even the sexual ambiguity was Lawrentian. Eating bad food, catching cold, moving slowly up and down the island; most of all, making friends and growing to understand Corsica.

  “Francis was an artist, and I was a writer, so we didn’t expect any more. After the war, it was amazing here—mule tracks, nowhere to live, very primitive, still the code of the vendetta.”

  Sir Francis and Lady Frederica! Artist and writer! People with class living on the margins! I remarked on that, but she dismissed it. “A title is nothing. I think it is no use at all—it is probably a disadvantage these days.”

  And then she let drop the fact that she had been a Communist: Comrade Frederica, Lady Rose, waiting for the socialist millennium in a muleteer’s hut on a Corsican mountainside.

  “But I left the party when I realized they were trying to influence my mind. I didn’t want anyone to tell me how to think.”

  There were other parties for Sir Francis and his lady. Because of their bohemian habit of just scraping by, living at the edge, they got to know Corsica well; and after Sir Francis decamped to overdo it with his cronies in London, Dorothy stayed on and made Corsica her passion, seeing Corsican culture as something distinct from anything in Europe.

&
nbsp; “People talk about the Arab influence, but they overrate it. Here, sentiment as we know it, does not exist. Very violent feelings exist. This mindset still exists among the older people—revenge and superstition.”

  “For example?”

  “Marrying for love, our idea of love, is quite remote here. I know a woman who had an affair with a young man. She became pregnant. The man went to the mainland to make some money, he said, but when he returned he was still dithering about marrying her. By then she’d had the child. She met him secretly and they talked, and when he made it plain that he was not going to marry her she took out a pistol and shot him.”

  “That happens in other countries.”

  “Perhaps. But she got a very light sentence,” Dorothy said. “Women occupy a special position in Corsica. In spite of what you see, the absence of women in the streets and in the cafes, they have their little trysts and assignations. I know it. There is a great risk.” And she smiled. “That is part of the attraction.”

  She seemed to be speaking from intimate knowledge.

  She said that if I saw nothing else in Corsica I should visit Filitosa—it was on the way to Bonifacio, where I would be catching the ferry to Sardinia. I had seen Bastia and Calvi and Corte and the Niolo region. Yes, get out and about, she said. It was how she herself had become acquainted with Corsica. Granite Island, still in print almost twenty-five years after it was first published, is full of excursions, long walking tours and risky and difficult journeys to the interior. It is a book without sarcasm or belittling or any complaints; only gratitude that she had been accepted as an honorary islander. It is no wonder she had lived there happily for almost fifty years.

  We went together to Chiavari, one of those little villages high on a mountainside. I was interested in the Italian name, a place name from coastal Liguria. On the way we passed wildflowers—many of the same kind, a meager flower on an attenuated stalk.

  “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 oce
an 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.