NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  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.

  7

  The Ferry Ichnusa to Sardinia

  My 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:

  … a curious bay with mountain walls of stone

  to left and right, and reaching far inland,—

  a narrow entrance opening from the sea

  where cliffs converged as though to touch and close.

  Curious about this island (“Lamos”), Ulysses moors his black ship against a rock and climbs the cliff to get his bearings. He and his men meet a young girl carrying water, and she directs them to the haunt of the queen (“a woman like a mountain crag”) and the blood-drinking Laestrygonian king, Antiphates. The rest is cannibalism and rout, as the crew face a whole howling tribe of Laestrygonians, “more than men they seemed, / gigantic when they gathered on the sky line / to shoot great boulders down from slings.”

  And the water where those angry boulders splashed was now stirred with dolphins gasping onward towards the little rocky islets, Lavezzi and Cavallo, that trickle south from Corsica’s southeastern shore. In an old quarry on Cavallo an ancient bust of Hercules has been carved into the side of a large rock, perhaps by Romans, more likely by ancient troglodytic islanders needing a god to bother.

  Back in Ajaccio, at our last meeting, Dorothy Carrington had told me a story about an experience she and her husband had had almost fifty years ago in Sardinia.

  “We took a boat from Bonifacio to Sardinia just to have a picnic,” she said. “We gave all the money we had to a fisherman and when we got there we sat on the beach eating our sandwiches. Then we saw a great line of women wailing and a boy sitting in the sand. The women were throwing sand onto his head and shrieking. It was because his father had decided to go to Corsica. This was their way of showing grief.”

  At the time there was no work in Sardinia and the Sards—as she called them—were resented for going to Corsica and taking jobs and working for very low wages.

  “The man came with us on our boat and when he saw the lights of Bonifacio he went mad and so he wouldn’t overturn the boat we held him down by sitting on him.”

  This brought to mind another of Dorothy’s amazing tableaux: Sir Francis and Lady Rose, imprisoning a demented Sardinian by jamming him against the deck of a fishing boat with the combined weight of their aristocratic bottoms.

  “A few days later I saw the Sard in a cafe in Ajaccio,” she said. “He was having a drink with two nuns!”

  The Ichnusa was no larger than the Martha’s Vineyard ferry Great Point, perhaps smaller. The distance it traveled was hardly more than from the Cape to the Vineyard—the Straits of Bonifacio are only seven miles wide between Cape Pertusato and Punta del Falcone. There were about ten passengers on board, all returning Sardinians, and two medium-sized trucks carrying stacks of cork bark from trees that had been stripped somewhere on Corsica’s east coast. Corsica was an island of no heavy industry. It grew and exported fruit and wine, and some lumber, and this cork. But in fact Corsica depended for revenue on the tourist trade. The island was the Corsicans’ own solemn stronghold for eight months or so; for the other sunny months they shared it with bargain-hunting vacationers from all over Europe, but mainly the despised French and the ubiquitous Germans who shocked the prudish locals with their petty stinginess and their assertive nudity.

  “The people are very unlike Italians in some respects: wanting their vivacity—but with all their intelligence and shrewdness,” Edward Lear had written about the Corsicans. The same seemed true of the Sardinians. (Or was it the Sardines? Or was it the Sards?)

  The ferry passengers were all returning Sardinians, not very jolly, but friendly enough. The crossing took only an hour
but the few people on board, and the infrequency of the ferry—once a day in the afternoon—made it seem something of an event. There was also the fact that it was traveling from France to Italy. This was only technically the case. Corsica was no more France than Sardinia was Italy. Both were strange little islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea, whose islanders were more interested in differences than similarities. Neither of them was fond of the mainland, and they rather disliked each other.

  “I’m not comfortable with those people,” a Sardinian woman told me in Santa Teresa di Gallura, the little port at the top of Sardinia, where the ferry landed. She was wagging her finger at Corsica, just across the straits. “I find that I have—what?—no rapport with them. So?”

  It had been a fairly long walk from the port to the town—so long that darkness had fallen just as I reached the piazza of Santa Teresa. With darkness the town began to roll down its shutters and put an end to the day’s business. But even in daylight business could not have been very brisk. Santa Teresa, the port in the narrow Bay of Longo Sardo, was a small place, hardly bigger than a village that sprawled along the cliffs, but with a cheerier feel than its equivalent in Corsica. People were perambulating in the square, and doing the last of their shopping; there were raised voices and even some loud laughter.

  I wanted to go to Olbia, where there was a train south. There was a bus to Olbia, but no bus station. It stopped on a backstreet, no one was quite sure where. And the bus tickets—ah, yes, I should have known. They were sold at a small coffee shop three streets away. Having established all this, I was told that the bus had left. I would not have been able to buy a ticket anyway. The cafe owner took only Italian money, and all I had were francs, and the banks were closed. So I had a pizza and found a hotel. The hotel owner said, “The Corsicans in Bonifacio speak a very similar dialect to us, but they are neither French nor Italian. And—you know?—we don’t really understand them.”

  Never mind the delay, I went to bed contented, and I woke in a good mood. The weather seemed milder than in Corsica, and I was happy to be in a place where I spoke the language reasonably well—the lingua franca, actually, since there were four distinct Sardinian dialects, several of them closer to Latin and Spanish than Italian (yanno—from janua—for door; mannu—from magnus—for huge; mesa for table). A Sardinian told me that there is an organization which is committed to bringing Corsica and Sardinia closer by twinning towns, sending schoolchildren back and forth, and arranging cultural exchanges. Having disclosed this idealistic plan, he then burst out laughing, as though he had just described something absurdly far-fetched, something like a scheme for teaching dogs to walk on their hind legs.

  Santa Teresa was only on the map for its port and the ferry landing; it was otherwise ignored, and yet it was the sort of provincial place that I liked. It had a hill and a pretty church and a dramatic view of the sea; and everyone knew everyone else. The local dish, a man told me, was wild boar (cinghiale, he said, with big zanne—tusks), and it was prepared in a variety of ways.

  “But I’m a vegetarian,” I said.

  “You want vegetables? You came to the right place.” And then he remembered that he had an uncle in Vermont.

  In daylight everything was simple: I changed money, I bought a bus ticket, I found out the times of the buses, and then I was headed east across the top of the island on my way to Olbia.

  At Palau, the bus stopped for passengers and a coffee break.

  “There’s a place in the Pacific called Palau,” I said to the driver.

  “Another one! Amazing.”

  After talking casually for a little while I nerved myself and asked, “There used to be a lot of kidnappings in Sardinia.”

  “You mean, a long time ago?”

  “No, fifteen years ago, maybe a little more,” I said.

  “Yes, I’ve heard there were a few kidnappings.”

  A few! In the 1970s kidnapping of foreigners had amounted almost to a cottage industry, and Sardinia was known to have developed a culture of kidnapping. The style of crime had deep roots in mountainous regions of the island. Almost anyone with a little money visiting Sardinia was snatched and held in a peasant hut in the mountains by semi-literates demanding millions from their desperate family.

  “Kidnapping is labor-intensive,” a Sardinian, Questore Emilio Pazzi, told Robert Fox, who described the encounter in his chronicle of the modern Mediterranean, The Inner Sea: “A band needs at least twelve men to act as look-outs, messengers and negotiators, as well as seizing and guarding the victim. Unlike the Mafia families of Sicily and Calabria, the gang works together for one crime only, and then disperses.”

  “So this was long ago?” I asked the driver. “Who was responsible?”

  “Bandits.”

  “I read that it was sheep-stealers”—I did not know the Italian term for sheep-rustling—“but they ran out of sheep to steal, and so they decided to kidnap people.”

  “Who knows these mountain people?”

  His pride dented, he had become a trifle cool towards me, because I had impugned something in his culture.

  “More people get killed in America,” he said.

  “So true,” I said.

  “Let’s go.”

  It was only an hour or so from here to Olbia. After we arrived I walked the streets like a rat in a maze, looking for a likely place to stay: quiet, not expensive. As in most of the towns I had visited since Spain, business was terrible and in this wintry low season there were plenty of available rooms.

  The weather was pleasant, brilliant sunshine, mild temperatures, lemons on the trees; and March was only a few days off. Olbia was on a gulf, but the port that served it was about five miles away at Golfo Aranci, the end of the train line. Just to see where these Italian ferries left from I took the train and walked around Aranci, marveling at how easy it was—generally speaking—to travel in this part of the Mediterranean. There were several ferries a day to different parts of Italy. But my idea was to take a train the length of Sardinia and then get a ferry to Sicily.

  The woman who ran my boardinghouse in Olbia urged me to go to a particular restaurant that night where they were serving Sardinian specialties.

  “No wild boar, thanks.”

  “Many good things,” she said.

  The first dish I was served was, appropriately, sardines. The root is the same, related to Sardinia, just as the word for a Sardinian plant (“which when eaten produced convulsive laughter, ending in death”) had given us the word sardonic—derisive, sneering—because sardonios in Greek meant “of Sardinia.”

  “People in the country around here eat these all the time,” the waiter said.

  Squid with celery and tomatoes; chickpea and bean soup; goat cheese covered with dried oregano; seaweed fried in batter; then fish, grilled triglia, and finally pastries.

  Normally I hated eating alone, but this was Italy, the waiter was talkative, and after the emptiness and general solemnity of Corsican restaurants, this one was noisy and friendly. It was not a fancy place, and yet several grinning middle-aged men were talking on cellular phones as they ate. It was not business, it was just yakking in Italian. Uh, and then what did she say? Oh, yeah? Did you tell her you had the money? You imbecile!

  After dinner I took a walk through the town and Olbia seemed, as many places seem while they are twinkling in the dark, a magical place—and I was glad I had come. The reality of daylight was that it was a rough place, and the more I walked the more miserable it seemed, with clusters of mean houses, or else apartment houses, and beyond them stony fields and sheep and goats. The poverty and all the talk of emigration in search of work made Sardinia seem like Ireland, an offshore island that had plenty of culture but no money. Apart from the touristy parts, the Costa Smeralda of the speculating Aga Khan, there was little development. This was a remote Italian province of narrow villages and a hinterland of sheep and emptiness.

  One of the Sardinian habits that was inescapable was the advertising all over town
of a death or an anniversary of death by sticking up posters of the deceased on any vertical surface. Many of the posters were as large as a bath towel, and except for the black border could have been mistaken for election posters. With the photo, many in color, was a name in bold letters—PADRE or FRANCESO or MARIOLINA or PIERO or SALVATORE. It is a variety of lugubrious advertising of grief, common in Irish newspapers, but fairly bizarre appearing on fences and walls, though the funereal faces had a strange appropriateness on the sides of derelict or condemned buildings.

  I was copying down some names and sentiments from these grieving flyers when I looked over and saw that an African was staring at me. I had seen such Africans, very dark and silent, in Palau and also at Santa Teresa. They were in Marseilles and in some of the other large cities on the Riviera, and I guessed they were from the former French colonies in West Africa. Tall, unsmiling, with swollen eyes and matted linty hair, with clawed and scarified cheeks, they hovered near squares of plastic on which were arranged various items for sale, sunglasses, watches, belts, purses, wallets, toys—junk, on the whole, and one unsmiling African’s junk was identical to another’s. It had not seemed odd to me to see them in the south of France—it was the modern version of the empire striking back; after all, innumerable French people had insinuated themselves in Africa for hundreds of years, hawking all sorts of dubious merchandise. But what were these Africans doing in a small town in Sardinia?