The Pillars of Hercules

“Also”—he wasn’t listening to me—“wonderful alimentation in Provence.”

“Where did you learn English?”

“From the war. From people,” he said. “But explain me one thing, why Americans speak English in France the manner they speak in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, everywhere, and so we cannot catch at all. But if I speak French to them the way I speak with my wife, ah, whoof! They will never catch!”

This went on a bit more. Then I walked back to Antibes by way of the lighthouse, the Phare de L’Ilette on the Cap d’Antibes.

The Mediterranean here was an enigma. It was corrupt, it was pure. There were horrible apartments, there were beautiful headlands. There were nasty tycoons, there were friendly folks. The sea was polluted and blue, the sea was a green gin-fizz of stillness. Everything that had been written about the Riviera was true.

6

The Ferry Île de Beauté to Corsica

            It took all night, a twelve-hour trip in the Île de Beauté, a ferry as large as an ocean liner, to get to this other part of France; but it is a French province in name only. Corsica is Corsica.

I liked being on the water again, and I liked the empty ship, hardly anyone on the quay at Nice, just a few people in the cafeteria buffet which was open all night—spaghetti and rice and salad, and calamari that looked and tasted like shredded gym shoes. Some men were playing video games, Germans among them, bikers in tight leathers with shaven heads that gave them odd blue skulls. There was a lounge where people were drinking wine, some unruly children ran among the chairs, and there were the usual bronchitic French people coughing their guts out and chain-smoking.

The deck was empty, except for a man muttering solemnly to his dog in French, and a Tibetan woman clinging to the rail. The night was black, almost starless, like a pierced blanket, and not cold but cool in late February. I stood watching the foaming wake in this emptiness that was like a great ocean, and thinking how it must have been so easy for the Mediterranean people to believe that this was the whole world.

After a while I looked up and saw the Frenchman and the Tibetan were gone. I went to my cabin, and crept into my bunk and read a bit more of the biography of the painter Francis Bacon. “The truth comes in a strange door,” Bacon said. And as for his gory paintings and his frequently bloody subjects: “It’s nothing to do with mortality but it’s to do with the great beauty of the color of meat.”

The purr of the ship’s screws put me to sleep, and when I woke the sun was rising on a calm sea, a rubious dawn lighting Cap Corse and the distant mountains in the island’s interior, the great granite peaks and the ridge above the port of Bastia. There are twenty tall peaks on the island, which is the most mountainous in the Mediterranean.

The Île de Beauté (which is also a name for Corsica) docked, and I hoisted my bag and walked down the gangway into the middle of Bastia, empty at this early hour of the morning—only pigeons cooing and shitting on big bronze statues in the Place Nationale. I had breakfast in a cafe and immediately became aware that the men around me were not talking French but amiably and incoherently showing their teeth and joshing, gabbling in a sort of Italian. Corsican is a variety of old Tuscan, tumbling and Italian-sounding, like a secret tongue. I imagined that it seemed to an Italian the way a Scottish accent sounds to an English speaker, a regional dialect that was familiar even when it was incomprehensible. When I addressed the men—asking some directions—they became serious and polite and slipped into French or Italian.

The language business—no outsider I met spoke Corsican—heightened my sense of Corsica’s being a colonized place, with the secret life that all colonies have: the parallel culture lived in another language. The fact that Corsican life is known to be explosive makes it all the more enigmatic.

Bastia is a seaport in the shadow of a granite mountain. Most of the travelers who have passed through it express a measure of disappointment when speaking of the city, perhaps because it seems Italian rather than Corsican. Prized for its harbor rather than its fortifications (being hard to defend it was frequently captured), Bastia’s architecture is Genoese. In its older quarters it is still an Italian-looking town, with a picturesque old port. In Bastia I walked all over, in a way that I had not done on the Riviera, and I realized that it was probably true, as I had read, that a great deal of the pleasure to be had in Corsica was from walking—not only along cliff paths and mountain tracks, but on country roads and on the backstreets of the handsome city.

That night, at dinner, the Corsican waiter approached me shyly and asked in French, “How do you say bon appetit in English?”