The Pillars of Hercules

The other train passengers quickly vanished. I walked out of the tiny station down the main street, the Cours Napoleon, past the Napoleon Restaurant, and the Boutique Bonaparte, to the Hôtel Napoleon. The Napoleon was never the luxury hotel in a Corsican town but it was always one of the better ones.

As soon as I got into my room and shut the door, which had a strange device for locking it, the lights went out. I struggled to find my flashlight in the darkness and then got the door open.

“My room has no electricity,” I said to the manager.

He smiled at me. He said, “You are the writer, eh? You wrote Le royaume des Moustiques and Voyage excentrique et ferroviaire autour du Royaume-Uni and Le sîles heureuses d’Océanie.”

“That’s me.”

“Are you making a trip here to write a book?”

“I don’t know.”

It was the truth. It was too early in my Mediterranean journey for me to tell whether it might be a book, and what had I seen so far? Only Gibraltar, Spain and France. I did not want to jinx it by being confident, so I said that I was still groping around.

His name was Gilles Stimamiglio, a Corsican from the Castagno region in the northeast, the province of chestnut trees and Roman forts.

“Where are you going from here?” Gilles asked.

“South, to Sartène and Bonifacio.”

“Bonifacio is a very pretty place. You know Homer’s Odyssey? Bonifacio is where the Laestrygonians live.”

That was beautiful, that he referred to the distant little port, not for a good restaurant or a luxury hotel or its fortress or a trivial event, but as the place where a group of savage giants had interfered with Ulysses. When it comes to literary allusions you can’t do better than using the authority of The Odyssey to prove that your hometown was once important. In Gibraltar Sir Joshua Hassan had jerked his thumb sideways toward the Rock and said to me, “That’s one of the Pillars of Hercules.”

I went for a walk through the empty town, got a drink at an empty bar, then went back to my room to read Anthony Burgess’s autobiography, You’ve Had Your Time. I liked this book because it was about his writing life as well as the various places in the Mediterranean where he had become a tax refugee: Monte Carlo, Malta, Italy, all of them more or less disastrous for him.

The next day I tried to get information about the ferries to Sardinia. The travel agents could give me precise details of the flights to Dallas or Miami, they could make reservations for me at Disneyland; but they had no idea if or where or when a ferry traveled the few miles from Corsica to Sardinia. I inquired at eight agencies and finally found one with the right information.

“So a ferry leaves at four every afternoon from Bonifacio,” I said. “What time does it arrive?”

The clerk did not know.

“Where do I get a ticket?”

The clerk did not know, but guessed that someone in Bonifacio would be selling them.

“Is there a bus or a train that meets the ferry in Sardinia?”

This made her laugh. “That is in Italy!” she cried, highly amused, as though I had asked her the question about New Zealand.

I spent the day walking up the coast road, which went past a cemetery and some condominiums and a hotel to a point where I could have caught a little boat to the Isles Sanguinaires. I took a bus back to Ajaccio and as the sun had still not set—not yet the hour for a drink and diary writing—I walked along the Ajaccio beach and saw a Tibetan woman mourning in the sand, being watched by three beefy Corsican soldiers.

This Tibetan looked familiar. It happens traveling in the Mediterranean that you often keep seeing the same people on your route. I had seen this small roly-poly woman on the quay at Nice boarding the Île de Beauté. I had even seen her at Bastia, where she had hurried down the gangway and vanished. Here she was again, round-faced, brownish, orientalish, in a thick jacket and heavy trousers, hardly five feet tall, pigeon-toed, with a floppy wool hat.

The men were leaning over her. You never saw men talking to a Corsican woman this way. I suspected they were pestering her. Having seen her at Nice and Bastia, I felt somewhat responsible for her welfare, even if she did not know that I was observing her.

So I walked over to her and said hello in English.

The men—young mustached Corsican soldiers—were startled into silence.

“Are these men bothering you?”

“I’m not sure,” she said.

But as I was speaking, the men stepped aside. Just like soldiers to pick on a solitary woman sitting on the cold beach sand in the winter. She had been scribbling—probably a letter—it lay on her lap.

The hairy Corsicans looked like potential rapists to me, with the confident, hearty manner of soldiers, who would not dare to defy a superior officer but would be very happy bullying a subordinate.

I said, “Look, you should be careful. Are you alone?”

“Yes,” she said. She peered at me. “Do you know me?”