The Pillars of Hercules

Bastia is also well-served by ferries and is a simple place to leave. I could have gone to Nice or Sardinia or Tunis. I could have gone to Italy, leaving Bastia on the Corsica Regina in an hour or two for Livorno, and been in Florence in time for lunch.

There are small districts within the city, including a Moroccan—or perhaps Arab—quarter, near the old port. This exotic corner was also where the city’s only synagogue was located. Very small, in a narrow passage, Rua du Castagno, which is a long flight of stone stairs, it is called “Beth Meir” synagogue.

There was a recently erected sign on the wall, putting all the blame for the wartime anti-Semitism on the French government that had existed during the war: “La Republique Français/En hommage aux victimes/Des persecutions racistes and antisemites/Et des crimes contre humanité/Commis sous l’autorité de fait/Dite ‘Gouvernement de l’état Française’ (1940–1944)/N’oublions jamais.”

It seemed to me ironic that Arabs had taken up residence in what in former days had been the Jewish ghetto, and that they were being harassed at the moment.

Arabs in France are like The Tribe That Hides from Man, and so I deliberately sought one out in this district in Bastia, just to talk to. His name was Sharif—eyes close together, skeletal, skinny, his narrow shoulders showing through his burlap gown.

“I am from Gardimaou, in Tunisia, near Djanouba, on the border of Algeria. But the Algerians are—oh, well!”

“Are there many Tunisians here?”

“Lots of them in Corsica. Moroccans, too. But no Algerians.”

“Why is that?” And I was aware when I asked the question that Corsicans believed that island was full of Algerians, because no one differentiated among North Africans.

“There is something wrong with Algerians,” Sharif said. “In their heads. They are very nervous types. And you see, that makes them dangerous. They cause all sorts of trouble on the mainland. They are not like other people. And some of them hate foreigners.”

“Like me.”

“Unfortunately.”

Sharif had worked in Corsica for twelve years, but still the Corsican language was a mystery to him. He did not know a word of it. “It is too difficult.”

But no language is difficult. Language is an activity, a kind of play, learned through practice. It requires little intelligence. It is social. So you had to conclude that in his dozen years no one had ever spoken to Sharif in Corsican. That activity was closed to him.

There was no mosque in Bastia, indeed none in Corsica. He made a tentative face, as though he wanted to say more, then thought better of it. “Lots of Muslims, though.”

“In my village in Tunisia, life is good, but there is no money. In other places where there are tourists, life is fine but it is expensive. I came here for work.”

I pressed him about the nonexistent mosque. He said, “Yes, it is odd that there is none, but who can say why?”

It was later that I found out that two houses, where Muslims met to pray, near Bonifacio, had been blown up. And later, after the French government took over an oriental-style building in Ajaccio (crescent, archway, arabesque doorways, domes—it had been the headquarters of a company selling Turkish tobacco), that too had been torched by arsonists, who believed—because of its unusual decor—that it was going to be used by Arabs.

Some people in Bastia seemed impartial in their abuse. Not far away on an ancient pillar of Bastia’s cathedral, the fifteenth-century Église Ste. Marie: Jésus est mort (Jesus is dead).

I gathered that there were many ways to see Corsica. The most strenuous is on foot on the many paths, or from north to south on the famous high-level trail, the Grande Randonee 20, more than two weeks of trudging at such an altitude that you see the whole island but hardly meet Corsicans. There are the local ferries, from Bastia to Bonifacio, Ajaccio to Propriano. There is renting a car and driving through Corsica, the simplest and most popular way of traversing the island—on good roads, and nightmarish ones, some of them vertiginous, all of them spectacular.

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.