The Pillars of Hercules

Such stones have been found elsewhere in Europe, but Corsica seems to represent the whole culture, not just the strange carved faces but weapons, implements and shelters, a whole community. And it is interesting that this community is inland, with access to the ocean but on a hill that offers protection, just as the Corsicans were to plan their towns so much later. No one knows who these people were.

It was only an hour or so by bus from here to the town of Sartène, where I stayed that night. Sartène was a classic Corsican town, like Corte, perpendicular, fortresslike, unwelcoming, piled against a hill. But once inside it, on the small main square, it seemed hospitable. I found a place to stay and that night had a hearty dinner in a Sartène restaurant. “They stew everything,” Dorothy had said. It was the tradition of cooking on the hearth that kept them faithful to the stewpot. Lamb, boar, mutton, even their fish soup was as thick and brown as stew. And this sauce? Oursin, the waiter told me. I had to look it up: sea urchin.

There was a man eating alone, not a tourist, probably a traveling salesman. He ate slowly, the way unhappy people do, with a downturned mouth, like someone taking medicine.

The rain continued all night and I lay under a damp lumpy quilt planning my onward trip. Out of Sartène tomorrow; to Bonifacio, the ferry to Sardinia, and then …

The bus from Ajaccio passed through Sartène at nine or so. I got up early and walked on the winding road to the edge of town with a book in my hand.

One day in April 1868, Edward Lear paused on this road, then a mule track just above Sartène. On that track he spent the day composing a little picture of the town. It is a severe but atmospheric portrait, of tall gloomy houses and a slender church steeple, a bluff of brooding masonry, its dark rain-dampened stone giving the town a look of mystery.

One hundred and twenty-six years later, I stood on the same curve of the road where Lear had sat sketching. I had with me Lear’s Journal of a Landscape Painter in Corsica, and held up his picture of Sartène. The rugged houses still stood, as unaltered as though they were rocks and boulders and cliffs, which is how Corsican dwellings seem—somewhat severe, defiant, and everlasting, vernacular aspects of the landscape. Corsica can seem a melancholy place (“Everything’s somber in Corsica,” Prosper Mérimée said). The misty afternoon gave the town the look of an etching in an old book. And I had the book in my hand. Hardly anything in Sartène had changed.

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.