The Pillars of Hercules

In travel, as in most exertions, timing is everything. There is the question of weather; of seasons. In the winter Corsica was stark and dramatic, the mountains were snowier, the valleys rainier; at the coast the tourist tide was out. Traveling to places at unfashionable times, I always think of the Graham Greene short story “Cheap in August,” or Mann’s Death in Venice. All I had to do was show up. I never had to make a reservation. I liked Corsica’s cold days of dazzling sunshine, its cliffs of glittering granite, the blue sky after a day of drizzle, its lonely roads. It was an island absent of any sense of urgency. I could somehow claim it and make it my own.

Four hours until the ferry left for Sardinia, and no restaurants open. I bought a croissant and a cup of coffee, and then climbed to the fort and walked along the cliff path and found a warm rock and read my Burgess book, and snoozed and thought of the Laestrygonians.

I could see Sardinia clearly on the far side of the channel, beyond a scattering of rocks that they called islands. At three I walked down the slope to the quay, as the Corsican men were coming out to congregate and smoke and banter.

A few Bonifacians left their ancient tenements to see the ferry appear. Apart from them this port town was motionless. Out of season, a place is at its emptiest, and most exposed, but also it is most itself. Bonifacio had been a garrison and a fishing port. It was now suspended in time; the summer strangers would seem to alter it for a few months, but its soul was its own. If, like Corsica, an island is remote enough and self-possessed, it can seem—far beyond merely insular—like another planet.

7

The Ferry Ichnusa to Sardinia

            My reward after all the fuss and delay of getting to Bonifacio harbor was a classical glimpse of the harbor itself, the pale fissured limestone, the caverns at the shoreline, as the Ichnusa plowed past the last ramparts of the citadel, and then, as though splashing from between the rhythmic chop of two Homeric couplets, a pair of dolphins appeared, diving and blowing, with that little grunt and gasp that all good-sized dolphins give out as they surface, as though to prove they are worried little overworked mammals just like you.

That triumphant sight of Mediterranean dolphins made the whole inland sea seem ancient and unspoiled, peopled by heroes, terrorized by Laestrygonian giants, and all the goddesses and warriors that Ulysses encountered. It was the sea of triremes and sea monsters and big fat-faced gods, like the ones from the corners of old maps, with pursed lips and blown-out cheeks that created strong winds.

Bonifacio was the first place I had come to that could be identified in The Odyssey. The bay and harbor of Bonifacio is described in Book 10, and Robert Fitzgerald’s translation depicts it clearly, with the directness that characterizes the whole epic:

… a curious bay with mountain walls of stone

to left and right, and reaching far inland,—

a narrow entrance opening from the sea

where cliffs converged as though to touch and close.

Curious about this island (“Lamos”), Ulysses moors his black ship against a rock and climbs the cliff to get his bearings. He and his men meet a young girl carrying water, and she directs them to the haunt of the queen (“a woman like a mountain crag”) and the blood-drinking Laestrygonian king, Antiphates. The rest is cannibalism and rout, as the crew face a whole howling tribe of Laestrygonians, “more than men they seemed, / gigantic when they gathered on the sky line / to shoot great boulders down from slings.”

And the water where those angry boulders splashed was now stirred with dolphins gasping onward towards the little rocky islets, Lavezzi and Cavallo, that trickle south from Corsica’s southeastern shore. In an old quarry on Cavallo an ancient bust of Hercules has been carved into the side of a large rock, perhaps by Romans, more likely by ancient troglodytic islanders needing a god to bother.

Back in Ajaccio, at our last meeting, Dorothy Carrington had told me a story about an experience she and her husband had had almost fifty years ago in Sardinia.

“We took a boat from Bonifacio to Sardinia just to have a picnic,” she said. “We gave all the money we had to a fisherman and when we got there we sat on the beach eating our sandwiches. Then we saw a great line of women wailing and a boy sitting in the sand. The women were throwing sand onto his head and shrieking. It was because his father had decided to go to Corsica. This was their way of showing grief.”

At the time there was no work in Sardinia and the Sards—as she called them—were resented for going to Corsica and taking jobs and working for very low wages.