The Pillars of Hercules

“Jew-lysses,” I said. “That’s what an American writer called himself, because he traveled all the time, like Ulysses, and he was Jewish. Henry Roth—Jew-lysses.”

“I don’t understand.”

He was instantly suspicious, thinking I was mocking him. He had that harsh, cynical everyone-else-is-a-sucker attitude that is common among certain citified Levantine Arabs and Jews in the Mediterranean. The country folk were capable of idealism. His sort were selfish and scolding.

Oddly, for a traveler in the Mediterranean, he confessed that his great fear was of the sea itself—any water. He got sick on all boats, on ferries, any vessel, whatever the size. Instead of taking the overnight ferry from Sicily to Sardinia, he had caught a plane and flown from Palermo to Cagliari. He had flown from Sardinia to Ajaccio, even though (as he said) it was a one-hour trip by ferry across the straits that separated Sardinia from Corsica.

“I get headaches. I get frights. I get sick,” he said.

But he loved trains. He was leaving for Bastia in the morning, and the same train connected to Ajaccio.

“So we go together?” he said.

“Maybe,” I said, but I knew better. He had seemed at first like a version of myself, shuttling around in a solitary way on trains, from one part of the Mediterranean coast to another, from island to island. But talking to him I had verified that he was not my double—perhaps that was why I had provoked him and interrogated him: to prove that we were not alike. I had proven to myself that we were utterly different.

Two days later the news from Israel was that twenty-nine Arabs praying in a mosque had been machine-gunned to death by a Jewish settler, Baruch Goldstein. Born in Brooklyn, a Kach member and a militant supporter of Meir Kahane, Goldstein was beaten to death by some of the surviving Arabs in the mosque. More Arabs were shot soon afterwards by Israeli soldiers.

This incident was the first in a wave of violence that continued throughout my trip. In a reprisal, some Arabs blew up a bus in Tel Aviv. After that an Arab leader was shot in his house. Then an Arab suicide bomber killed himself, and took three Israeli soldiers with him, at a checkpoint; and this was answered with more killings. Each side answered the other, as in a blood feud; each side was unforgiving.

That was happening in the Mediterranean, too, and reading these reports I was always reminded of this irritating little man, nagging me that night at Calvi harbor.

He was not on the noon train the next day. Rather than go all the way south to Ajaccio I bought a ticket to the old capital in the interior, the high-altitude and almost hidden town of Corte. In the early part of the trip, as we circled the shoreline, the strong winds picked up foamy veils of spoon-drift and flung this delicate froth at the windows of the clattering navette.

The line to Corte, by way of the junction at Ponte Leccia, wound through the valleys of the snowy mountains and ascended through fields of lavender and herbs, past trees of madly twittering birds, towards the center of the island, a spine of mountains, the highest of which, Monte Cinto (2,710 meters), was bleak and beautiful, gray and cracked rock, ledges and crevasses surmounted by a massive shawl of snow. Above it all, over the whole granite island, was a zone of blue, a winter sky—nothing but blue skies, smiling at me.

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.