The Pillars of Hercules

“The man came with us on our boat and when he saw the lights of Bonifacio he went mad and so he wouldn’t overturn the boat we held him down by sitting on him.”

This brought to mind another of Dorothy’s amazing tableaux: Sir Francis and Lady Rose, imprisoning a demented Sardinian by jamming him against the deck of a fishing boat with the combined weight of their aristocratic bottoms.

“A few days later I saw the Sard in a cafe in Ajaccio,” she said. “He was having a drink with two nuns!”

The Ichnusa was no larger than the Martha’s Vineyard ferry Great Point, perhaps smaller. The distance it traveled was hardly more than from the Cape to the Vineyard—the Straits of Bonifacio are only seven miles wide between Cape Pertusato and Punta del Falcone. There were about ten passengers on board, all returning Sardinians, and two medium-sized trucks carrying stacks of cork bark from trees that had been stripped somewhere on Corsica’s east coast. Corsica was an island of no heavy industry. It grew and exported fruit and wine, and some lumber, and this cork. But in fact Corsica depended for revenue on the tourist trade. The island was the Corsicans’ own solemn stronghold for eight months or so; for the other sunny months they shared it with bargain-hunting vacationers from all over Europe, but mainly the despised French and the ubiquitous Germans who shocked the prudish locals with their petty stinginess and their assertive nudity.

“The people are very unlike Italians in some respects: wanting their vivacity—but with all their intelligence and shrewdness,” Edward Lear had written about the Corsicans. The same seemed true of the Sardinians. (Or was it the Sardines? Or was it the Sards?)

The ferry passengers were all returning Sardinians, not very jolly, but friendly enough. The crossing took only an hour but the few people on board, and the infrequency of the ferry—once a day in the afternoon—made it seem something of an event. There was also the fact that it was traveling from France to Italy. This was only technically the case. Corsica was no more France than Sardinia was Italy. Both were strange little islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea, whose islanders were more interested in differences than similarities. Neither of them was fond of the mainland, and they rather disliked each other.

“I’m not comfortable with those people,” a Sardinian woman told me in Santa Teresa di Gallura, the little port at the top of Sardinia, where the ferry landed. She was wagging her finger at Corsica, just across the straits. “I find that I have—what?—no rapport with them. So?”

It had been a fairly long walk from the port to the town—so long that darkness had fallen just as I reached the piazza of Santa Teresa. With darkness the town began to roll down its shutters and put an end to the day’s business. But even in daylight business could not have been very brisk. Santa Teresa, the port in the narrow Bay of Longo Sardo, was a small place, hardly bigger than a village that sprawled along the cliffs, but with a cheerier feel than its equivalent in Corsica. People were perambulating in the square, and doing the last of their shopping; there were raised voices and even some loud laughter.

I wanted to go to Olbia, where there was a train south. There was a bus to Olbia, but no bus station. It stopped on a backstreet, no one was quite sure where. And the bus tickets—ah, yes, I should have known. They were sold at a small coffee shop three streets away. Having established all this, I was told that the bus had left. I would not have been able to buy a ticket anyway. The cafe owner took only Italian money, and all I had were francs, and the banks were closed. So I had a pizza and found a hotel. The hotel owner said, “The Corsicans in Bonifacio speak a very similar dialect to us, but they are neither French nor Italian. And—you know?—we don’t really understand them.”

Never mind the delay, I went to bed contented, and I woke in a good mood. The weather seemed milder than in Corsica, and I was happy to be in a place where I spoke the language reasonably well—the lingua franca, actually, since there were four distinct Sardinian dialects, several of them closer to Latin and Spanish than Italian (yanno—from janua—for door; mannu—from magnus—for huge; mesa for table). A Sardinian told me that there is an organization which is committed to bringing Corsica and Sardinia closer by twinning towns, sending schoolchildren back and forth, and arranging cultural exchanges. Having disclosed this idealistic plan, he then burst out laughing, as though he had just described something absurdly far-fetched, something like a scheme for teaching dogs to walk on their hind legs.