The Pillars of Hercules

She said, “The étangs are very salty, very smelly at low tide, but there are fish in them and lots of mussels.”

“I associate flamingos with Africa,” I said.

Rachel shrugged. “I have not traveled. You are traveling now?”

“To Arles, and then Marseilles.”

“I have never been to Arles,” she said.

It was thirty miles beyond her college dorm at Montpellier.

“Or Marseilles, or Nice,” she went on. “I went to Spain once. And to Brittany once. I prefer the sea in Brittany—it is rough and beautiful.”

“What about the Mediterranean?”

“It is not exciting,” she said.

I could have told her that the Mediterranean extended to the shores of Syria, was tucked into Trieste, formed a torrent at Messina, hugged the delta of the Nile, and even wetted a strip of Bosnia.

“And will you stay in Nice?” she said.

“For a few days. Then I’ll take the ferry to Corsica.”

“I have a friend from Corsica. He told me that the people are very traditional there. The women are suppressed—not free as they are here.”

“Is his family traditional?”

“Yes. In fact, when they heard that he was talking about life there they got really angry. Corsicans think it’s bad to repeat these things. I feel bad that I am telling you.”

So to change the subject, I asked her about her studies.

“I am studying psychology. It’s a six-year course. I chose it because I want to work with autistic children after I graduate.”

“Have you ever worked with autistic children?”

“In the summer, yes, several times,” she said. “Ever since I was twelve I knew I wanted to work with handicapped people. I knew it would be my life.”

“That’s hard work, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s hard. You give a lot. You don’t get back very much. But I don’t mind. Not many people want to do it.”

Such idealism seemed to me rare. These were not sentiments I had heard expressed very often, and they lifted my spirits.

The next day was sunny, and Arles was not far. I left my bag at Narbonne railway station and went for a walk along the étangs, and watched the flamingos feeding and flying.

This Mediterranean sunshine was like a world of warmth and light, and it was inspirational, too. It was easy to understand the feelings of T. E. Lawrence, who took a dip there in 1908 and wrote to his mother, “I felt I had at last reached the way to the South, and all the glorious East; Greece, Carthage, Egypt, Tyre, Syria, Italy, Spain, Sicily, Crete,… they were all there, and all within reach of me.”

I had thought that I had left Narbonne in plenty of time, but the early darkness of winter fell upon Arles just as the train pulled into the station. I had wanted to arrive in daylight. It was the seventeenth of February; Vincent Van Gogh had first arrived in Arles on the twentieth (in 1888), and because of that timing his life was changed.

“You know, I feel I am in Japan,” he wrote to his brother Theo.

It was the light, the limpid colors. It was, most of all, the trees in bloom. And strangely that February was very cold and snowy. To see branches covered in snowflakes and white blossoms thrilled Van Gogh—and this in a low Hollandaise landscape of flat fields and windbreaks by the Rhône. They were almond blossoms mostly, but also cherry, peach, plum and apricot. Van Gogh painted the almond flowers on the branches, a Japanese-style picture that resembled a floral design that he had seen before on a screen panel.

Even in the dark I could see some blossoms, and in the glary light of streetlamps the almond petals were like moths clustered on the black branches and twisted twigs.

Arles had three or four large luxury hotels, but I was put off by their ridiculous prices. I had found the name of a twenty-dollar hotel in a guidebook. This was called La Gallia. It was apparently a cafe and pizza joint.

The man at the coffee machine said, “Go outside, turn right, go around to the back and up the stairs. Use this key. The light switch is on the wall. Your room is on the second floor. You can’t miss it.”

“Do you want me to sign anything?”

“No name needed. No signature. Just the money in advance. No passport. Sleep well!”

“Is there a toilet?”

“It’s in the hall. But you have a sink.”

It was a medieval tenement on a backstreet, with a cobblestone courtyard and a winding staircase. I was halfway up the stairs when everything went black; the timer on the light ran out. I struggled in the dark to the landing, where I fumbled my flashlight out of my bag. I used this to find the light switch on the next landing. It seemed so difficult contriving to enter and leave this odd empty building that I stayed in my room and went out at the first sign of dawn.

That morning there was an old man with a wooden leg trying to climb the stairs.

“Softly,” I said.

There was only room for one person at a time on these precipitous stairs.

“This wooden leg of mine is heavy,” he panted. “It was the war.”

“My uncle was here in the war.”

Cpl. Arthur Theroux of Stoneham, Massachusetts.

“Fighting?”

“Running a blood bank. He was a medic. Thirty-third Station Hospital.”

We had to throw most of the French blood away, Paulie. They all had syphilis. The American whole blood was the stuff we used.

In the watery morning light I saw a profusion of almond blossoms. But I would have noticed them without the suggestion of Van Gogh; there was no subtlety. It was an explosion of flowers, the trees frothing with blossoms. The cherry blossoms of early spring in London and on Cape Cod always indicated to me that winter was almost over, and there is something magical about their appearing before the trees were in leaf.

Walking towards the river, a man—American—asked me directions to the railway station. He was Jim, from Connecticut, relieved to be in Arles after a harrowing trip—so he said—through Portugal and Spain.

“I hated Spain. I almost got robbed in Madrid.”

He was a recent graduate of Bucknell. Philosophy major.

“Ever heard of Philip Roth? He went to Bucknell,” Jim said. “We had to study him. Everyone at Bucknell reads him. I hated that stuff.”

I asked him whether he was on vacation.

“No. I quit my job. I hate the job market. I worked a little while for Cadbury-Schweppes. They were developing a home soft-drink dispenser. The whole bit. Syrup, gas, water—your own soft drinks on tap. It was like a coffee machine.”

“What were you doing?”

“Test-marketing it.”

“Did it fly?”

“It was a failure. It was too expensive—and who needs it?” He kicked along beside me. “They weren’t open to new ideas, so I quit.”

“I’m sure you did the right thing—and here you are, a free man, seeing the world.”

“What are you doing?”

His lack of interest in writing or reading encouraged me, and so I said, “I’m a publisher.”

“What do you look for in a novel?” he asked suddenly. It was a good question.

“Originality, humor, subtlety. The writing itself. A sense of place. A new way of seeing. Lots of things. I like to believe the things I read.”

I pulled a novel, The Rock Pool, by Cyril Connolly, out of my back pocket and waved it at him.

“This has some of those qualities, but not enough.”

“What’s it about?”

“People going to pieces on the Riviera.”

“Another one of those!”

True enough, I thought. “Do you do any writing?”

“No. I’m planning to go to art school, but at the moment I’m heading for Bratislava.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Supposed to be a pretty nice place.”

With that, he jogged off to the railway station, and I continued strolling through the backstreets of Arles to the river. In many respects this was much the same place that Van Gogh saw; many of the same buildings still stand, the same streets and squares and boulevards. There is a vast Roman arena in the town, a splendid hippodrome the size of a small football stadium, used at certain seasons for bullfights. One series had just been held, another, the Easter Feria (Feria de Paque), was coming soon.

Not far from here, the town of Nîmes was the center of French bullfighting and had been for a decade or so, since the revival of the nauseating—what? recreation? pastime?—you could hardly call it a sport. It had been dying out, but Nîmes’s right-wing backward-looking mayor, Jean Bousquet, provided guidance and enthusiasm. There are three bullfighting festivals a year in Nîmes, one attracting almost a million people. Of course French bullfighting had been denounced by animal-rights activists and foreigners, but nothing encourages the French so much as disapproval, especially from aliens.

“Do you go to the bullfights?” I asked a man walking a dog along the river.

“Sometimes. But you know these special events are to bring in the tourists,” he said. “I prefer football.”

Arles was a small town and it had the two disfigurements of pretty French towns in the provinces, dog merds and graffiti. The sidewalks were so fouled they were almost impassable because of the merds. As for the graffiti, there was something particularly depressing about spray-painted scrawls on the stone of ancient facades. Up your ass, Paris (Paris-t’on cule) and Gilly = a whore and a slut (Gilly = pute et salope) were two of the more picturesque obscenities.

The town had prepared itself for tourists, but on this winter day it looked especially empty: too many brasseries, hotels, gift shops, and stores; in July it would be packed, the people said. But Arles had an off-season friendliness and lack of urgency. The waiters were not surly. One explained the drinks available and laughed with me over the odd names Foetus Whisky, Delirium Tremens Beer (“It’s from Belgium”) and the blue cordial liqueur called “Fun Blue.”

I eavesdropped in Arles, though it annoyed me when people were talking and I could not understand them, because of the intrusive background music or other voices. It was like looking at something interesting while someone intruded on my line of vision. I felt stifled and frustrated.

Some of the snippets tantalized me:

A man said, “Let’s do in Italy what we did in France, back at the hotel—”

A woman said, “I am not going to go to another place like that again, because, one, it’s too complicated, and two, what if we got sick? And three, the other people look really strange—”

There were almond blossoms everywhere, which gave a great freshness to Arles and all its fields and made it seem still rural, picturesque and even inspirational. I liked the provinciality of the place, and its clear light.

But Arles was not all floral, and tweeting with sparrows. The mailman was doing his rounds, a hardworking housewife with big red hands down at the grocer’s was complaining about the high price of morel mushrooms. This so-called cup fungus was selling at 168 francs for a hundred grams, which worked out at $126 a pound. And even in the early morning there were drinkers leaning on bars. It was never too early for a drink in provincial France. Two ladies were tippling Pernod. And down the street a florid blowzy woman was nursing a beer. This was at seven in the morning in an Arles backstreet.

To verify that Arles is a seaport, I walked along the east bank of the Rhône, in a southerly direction for a day of sunshine and sweet air. There were windbreaks of twigs and boughs, and the wide flat fields. There had been floods a few months before which showed on the banks of the river. Some sections of it had been fortified, sections of the retaining wall and the embankment filled in.

In the late afternoon I walked back to town to take the train the short distance to Marseilles. At the small railway station at Arles there were almond trees on each platform and they were in blossom. Such a pretty station! Such lovely trees! And then the TGV was announced. The TGV is the French high-speed train, much too fast and too grand to stop at a little station like Arles. It screamed past the platforms with such speed and back-draft that a special yellow TGV line was painted on the platform, so that people would stand at a safe distance, giving the train six feet of leeway. It howled like an earthbound jet, doing about 160 miles an hour, and with such a rush of air that petals were blown from the almond trees. The sight, the sound, the rush of air, made it a deafening event, the train slicing the day in half and leaving such a vacuum that I had the sense that my brain was being sucked out of my ears.

Anyone who hankers for the romance of railways, of the branch lines jogging through Provence, ought to consider the fact that the newest trains are nearly as obnoxious—as noisy and intrusive—as jets.

But even by the little blue, normal, stopping train of French National Railways it was an hour or less to Marseilles—about sixty miles away. We crossed the low delta of the Rhône, the fields of horses and flowers and vegetables, thriving in the winter sunshine; through the towns of Entressen and Miramas and along the shore of the Étang de Berre. I stayed as close as possible to the shore of the Mediterranean, which meant bypassing Aix-en-Provence and all the rest of the romanticized and much-written-about villages of Provence. They were not on my coastal route, which was neither a gastronomic tour, nor a sentimental wallow in the life of rural Europe. That seemed a good thing too—from what I saw of those clumps of cottages, the tarted-up villages seemed more pretentious and expensive than the jammed ports and cities of the Mediterranean, where settlements were too active to be stuffy. And I had a sense that these coastal places had stronger links with each other than they had with the inland capitals and gentrified villages.

That was true of Marseilles, a wonderful city to arrive in by train, certainly one of the best in the world, because the ornate St. Charles railway station is on a bluff. You walk outside and all of Marseilles is spread out below—the Old Town, the Old Port, the boulevards, the rooftops, and chimneys and church steeples, and on the far hill the cathedral of Notre Dame de la Garde, a gold statue on its dome. I could see the islands, the bluffs, the earthworks and fortresses and lighthouses. All this from the high stairs of the railway station.

“I read so much about the crime in Marseilles in my guidebook that I’m going to skip it altogether,” Jim, the American, had told me in Arles.

I was suitably warned, not to say terrified. Until I found a hotel I left my bag in a station locker; I carried nothing in my hands; I had no camera and very little cash. I walked briskly, as though I had somewhere to go.

Marseilles was a frightener; it was famous for its boasters and liars, for the way its people exaggerated, and it had a wicked reputation—for its gangs, its badly housed immigrants, its racism, and most of all for its crime. No wonder people compared it to New York City. It was certainly a center for drugs. The cocaine that was produced in the former French colonies in West Africa, the raw paste was smuggled into Marseilles to be processed, made into crack or base or crystal, or else powdered and cut with dry milk from Italy and sold all over Europe. Petty crime was commonly spoken of in Marseilles; I kept my head down and was safe. Such wickedness as drugs and racketeering, which kept both the police and the gangsters busy, did not affect the idle wanderer that I was.

It seemed to me to be the ultimate Mediterranean city, for its size and its diversity. As soon as I left the station and started down the marble stairs to the city, I saw a Gypsy woman smoking a pipe in the sunshine, and another counting coins she had made from playing tunes on her accordion. These Gypsies were as sorry-looking here as in Spain where they are relentlessly romanticized by travel journalists and persecuted by locals. Gypsies are generally despised in the Mediterranean as they are in the rest of Europe. The same could be said for the Moroccans and Algerians, who were said to account for Marseilles’s being notorious for crime. But every Mediterranean race was represented here, the Arabs were as common as the French, and there were Greeks, Spaniards, and Italians; there were tall loping Tuaregs in blue robes, and Berbers from Tunisia, and Senegalese selling handbags and watches. Arab women begged, each one squatting and holding a snotty-nosed child instead of a pleading sign, in a futile attempt—the Marseillaise seemed impervious to the pleas—to elicit sympathy.

In Marseilles the foreign men linger on street corners in small groups, because they come from cultures without telephones, where men linger on street corners in small groups. There they stood, dusky men, yakking and smoking. The so-called Foreign Quarter is in the Old Town, just below the station. The Baedeker Guide, Mediterranean for 1911, mentions this area: “On the N. side of the Quai du Port, the scene of motley popular traffic (pickpockets not uncommon), lies the Old Town, with its narrow and dirty streets, inhabited by the lower classes, including numerous Italians of whom the city contains about 100,000.” Now it is Arabs and Vietnamese in the Old Town; and the same perceptions—motley pickpockets, lower classes, cutpurses, parasites.

I walked down the Canebière (“Can o’ Beer”) along the Promenade Louis Brauquier (“poet and painter”) to the mouth of the Old Port. Out of the wind, sitting in the sunshine against a wall, was a line of people in various postures—old Moroccan women in shawls, men in berets, dog walkers, men with their shirts off, other men stripped to their underwear grinning into the sunshine.

Farther on, standing at the limit of the fort I looked out, and the Mediterranean had the look of a limitless ocean. I walked on, to the Gare Maritime, where ferries left for Algeria and Tunisia, and Corsica. I was headed for Corsica but the station timetables told me that I could continue down the Côte d’Azur and catch the once-a-week (in the winter) ferry from Nice to Bastia, a port in the north of Corsica. At the ferry station passengers were boarding the French ship to Algiers, all of them Algerian Arabs. Not a single Frenchman, nor any foreigners. There was a good reason for this: at that point seventy-one foreigners, and tens of thousands of Algerians, had been killed by Islamic terrorists in Algeria in a fifteen-month period.

I kept walking. Because of Marseilles’s pleasant thoroughfares, its absence of heavy traffic, its venerable architecture and its hills, it is pleasant for walking in and full of views. It was not particularly expensive either. My hotel, near the railway station, was about forty dollars a night.

It was fairly easily to get lost in Marseilles, particularly in the Old Town. As the Arab quarter, it had the fiercest reputation, though all I saw were cats and stragglers and the mindless defacing of the ancient walls with spray-painted graffiti. From behind bolted shutters I heard Algerian hilarity and screechy music. This was the area which in 1911 had the disreputable Italians.

My greatest fear walking down these backstreets was of being killed by a garbage truck. These vehicles came quickly around the corners and did not slow down, and as they filled the entire street I found myself diving for a doorway and flattening myself against it.

Because Marseilles was so frightening to visitors it lacked the touristic triteness that was so common on the rest of the Riviera, expensive hotels, and sluttish recreations, and piggy food and curio shops. The day after I arrived I walked in a different part of the city and found a market crowding the narrow lanes of the town around Place du Marche des Capucines that was more like an Arab souk. Sacks of nuts, and piles of dates, ten kinds of olives, fish and fruit and couscous, and French, Arabs and Africans mingling and haggling. The Arabesque of Marseilles, loathed and feared by the French, was one of its most interesting and liveliest aspects.

The maddening thing was my inability to speak to any Arabs. Their French I found peculiar and I don’t speak Arabic. I felt there was the same vast cultural gulf between the French (Catholic, bourgeois, monoglot) and the Arabs (Muslim, peasants, Arabic-speaking). They really did not know each other at all.

Walking past a police station, I decided to go in and bluntly inquire about crime in Marseilles, since that was all that travelers talked about. I had seen no sign of it, not even on the previous night, as I loitered and lurked.

There was an anteroom where five policemen sat smoking cigarettes and twirling their truncheons.

One policeman said, “Yes, we have one big problem here in Marseilles. My colleague will tell you what it is.”

The others laughed, as—on cue—a policeman said, “Arabs, Arabs, Arabs, Arabs, Arabs.”

“They are the cause of all the trouble,” the first policeman said. “Be very careful.”

In such circumstances, talking to someone who was generalizing in such a racist way, I had a choice of challenging his logic, scolding him for uttering such offensive things, and in this way ending the conversation; or keep listening, without interrupting, nodding and smiling in mild encouragement.

“What will the Arabs do to me?”

“They will steal your bag, your money, anything.”

“Are they armed?”

“This is not New York! No, no guns. The knife is the favorite weapon of the Arab.”

“Who are these Arabs? From what country?”

“They are Algerians. Also Moroccans, but mainly Algerians. They are awful. And they are everywhere.”

The French are entirely frank in expressing their racism. I wondered whether this lack of delicacy, indeed stupidity, was an absence of inhibition or simply arrogance. Their public offensiveness ranged from smoking in restaurants to testing nuclear bombs in the Pacific. Perhaps they did not know that the world had moved on, or perhaps they just did not care; or, more likely, they delighted in being obnoxious.

I thanked the policemen for this information and pushed on, pondering the relationship between racism and xenophobia. By a coincidence I saw an article that day in a Marseilles newspaper describing a bill put forward by Jacques Toubon, the French Minister of Culture. This bill was intended to cleanse the French language; it would ban all foreign words—anglicisms mainly—and enforce linguistic purity. Everyone knew the words, everyone used them. In the course of traveling along the French part of the Mediterranean I picked up a number of them which were specifically denounced by the minister and which would have been banned by the bill.

Most English-speakers are aware that the French—indefatigable trend-spotters—have picked up words such as le weekend, un snack and le club; and as a result of this quest for novelty French is rife with anglicisms. The French feel the same frisson from saying le smoking (meaning a tux) that English speakers feel from saying frisson. There are roughly three thousand entries in the Dictionnaire des Anglicismes. For example, le pad-dock (also used for bed), l‘autostop (hitchhike), le ketchup, and le leader. Le jamesbonderie is French for a daring feat; surbooker means overbook, le best-of, le challenge and le hit parade are obvious, and se faire lifter means to have a face-lift.

But a large element in French officialdom (representing an element in public life) hated this. It seemed to me that hating foreign words was perhaps related to hating foreigners, and was another example of French insecurity. Three months later the bill was ratified—fines of up to twenty thousand francs (thirty-five hundred dollars) for the public use of an English word when a French one would do; the next problem lay in its enforcement, particularly in a polyglot city such as Marseilles.

On my last day in Marseilles I treated myself to a bouillabaisse, the dish that Marseilles gave to the world. The fish broth was pungent and flavorful, saffron-colored as in the classic recipe, presented with croutons and cheese and remoulade and potatoes. And the vital ingredients were the fruit of the Mediterranean—rouget (mullet), rascasse (red spiny hogfish found only in the Mediterranean), Saint-Pierre (John Dory), moules, whiting, monkfish, bass, gurnet, weever, conger eel, crab, crawfish, clams.

The crab was very small. The waiter lifted the shell with a fork.

“And this, as they say in English, you suck.”

This one meal cost nearly as much as my hotel room, but it was worth it to sit with a view of the port, stuffing myself and reading a book and glancing at the boats in the port. Marseilles was obviously a tough place, but it was neither irritatingly sophisticated nor conspicuously poor. That was what I liked most about it, its air of being a cultural bouillabaisse made up of distinctly Mediterranean ingredients. I also had a confidence that I could go anywhere in the city—not a confidence I had ever had in New York or London. There were no mansions in Marseilles. The rich stayed in outlying villages, behind high hedges and barbed wire and Chien Méchant (“Wicked Dog”) signs, pretending they are in the bosom of Provence, and not in the city of stray cats and prostitutes and wanderers from the Barbary Coast. The reality of Marseilles was Arabs, skateboarders, hookers, the drug trade, and people working, all of them together, usually in the same narrow lanes.

I took a boat—a small launch—to the islands in the Bay of Marseilles, to the tiny Château d’If of The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas lived in Marseilles) and to the Frioul Islands. Château d’If was a combination of Alcatraz and the Magic Kingdom, a Disney prison, and like the nearby islands of crumbly sun-faded rock that looked like stale cake. No trees here, but ashore there were dry treeless headlands dusted with green, which were the last of the bushes.

I liked being out on the blue Mediterranean, among the sailboats, again that feeling of being at the edge of the sea that obliterated any clear idea of nationhood—the ports having mixed populations and a common destiny, living by the sea.

“The Mediterranean is beautiful in a different way from the ocean, but it is as beautiful,” Victor Hugo wrote on a visit to Marseilles. He made some pleasing distinctions. “The ocean has its clouds, its fogs, its glaucous glassy billows, its sand dunes in Flanders, its immense vaults, its magnificent tides. The Mediterranean lies wholly under the sun; you feel it by the inexpressible unity that lies at the foundation of its beauty. It has a tawny stern coast, the hills and rocks of which seem rounded or sculptured by Phidias, so harmoniously is the shore wedded to gracefulness.”

When I returned from the little cruise I decided to take another launch, and let it be my departure from Marseilles. We sailed along the coast, past the offshore islands of Tiboulen, Maire, Jane, Calseraigne, stopping briefly at Sormion and Morgiouy, and ending up at Cassis, where I caught another train. It was “Le Grand Sud,” stopping at Toulon, St. Raphael, and Cannes, passing St. Tropez, Fréjus, and Antibes. Most of the time the line was within sight of the sea, and the Aleppo pines and the palms at the shore, but as the train approached Nice the large apartment blocks and tall buildings obstructed the sea view.

The dream of the Mediterranean is not the Albanian coast or the docks of Haifa or the drilling rigs at the edge of Libya. It is the dream of this part of France, the sweep of the Riviera as a brilliant sunlit lotophagous land—the corner of the Mediterranean from the outskirts of Toulon eastward to Monte Carlo, a hundred-odd miles of Frenchness—food, wine, style, heat, rich old farts, gamblers and bare-breasted bimbos. All that and art too. It is the Cagnes of Renoir, the Nice of Matisse, the Antibes of Graham Greene; the Cannes Film Festival, the casinos. In describing the machismo of the corrida, Hemingway had put Spain on the map. Fitzgerald in his short stories and Tender Is the Night was the first chronicler of the Riviera, the bon vivants and drunks and flappers and phonies of Antibes or Juan-les-Pins. It could be said that Fitzgerald invented the Riviera as a fashionable place, but he had many collaborators in keeping it in business.

Ten years after Fitzgerald the names had changed. “All along the coast from Huxley Point to Castle Wharton to Cape Maugham, little colonies or angry giants had settled themselves,” the dissolute Naylor ponders in Cyril Connolly’s novel The Rock Pool, summing up the literary Riviera in the thirties. “There were Campbell in Martigues, Aldington at Le Lavandou, any one who could hold a pen at St Tropez, Arlen in Cannes, and beyond, Monte Carlo and the Oppenheim country. He would carry on at Nice and fill the vacant stall of Frank Harris.”

Yet it rains on the Riviera too, the traffic is awful, and there is no elbow room. It has been called the zone nerveuse and a special sort of madness attributed to residence in this part of the Mediterranean, “the arid foreshore of that iodine-charged littoral.” It is mainly older people, retirees, crooks, tax exiles—who else can afford it?—and meretricious businesses and dog walkers and stony beaches on the sluggish sea. Nothing is sadder than a resort out of season, no matter how good the food. And there are times when even this dreamland is crammed with all the stale and wilted lotuses that no one wants to eat.

• • •

It was a rainy February night in Nice and I was walking down the wet gleaming street from the station. I was pleased with myself for having arrived here at the lowest point of the season. The hotels and restaurants were empty. No need for reservations: I felt liberated from having to plan ahead. And so I kept walking, to evaluate the likely hotels, avoiding the ones directly on main streets (car noise, motorcycle blast), or near churches (organ music, yakking), or schools (screams, bells), or near restaurants (drunks, music, banging doors). A hotel on the seashore would have been perfect—silence, a light breeze, the slop and wash of little waves; but not even the great hotels of Nice are on the sea. As in Brighton, to which Nice is often compared, a busy main road separates the sea front from the hotels.

On a quiet square, the Place Mozart, a little old woman rented me a room for forty dollars, and just to see what I was missing I walked down to the Promenade des Anglais to the Hôtel Negresco for a drink at the bar. It is said to be the most expensive hotel in Nice, if not the best. Ha! Built in 1913, but imitating the Belle Epoque style, it is a hodgepodge of fatuous Frenchness, the bellmen and concierge and flunkies in footmen’s breeches and frock coats, bowing and scraping, and groveling for tips under gilt and chandeliers and red flock wallpaper, candlesticks with lightbulb flames and copies of bad paintings.

What I liked the best about Nice that night was the heavy rain. Nice was smack against the sea, and so the many lights from the apartment houses and the old world streetlamps created a Whistlerish effect of glowing bulbs and reflections, like one of his wet nocturnes. Yes, that was possible in New Jersey, too.

The next morning I walked down to the port of Nice, the Genoese-looking harbor, which is not a fanciful comparison—Nice belonged to Italy until 1860, Garibaldi was born there—and I saw the Rainbow Warrior at one of the docks.

This Greenpeace ship—one of three or four in the world—had sailed there to educate the French about environmental threats to the Mediterranean. The crew members were selling t-shirts and bumper stickers and handing out leaflets detailing terrible pollution statistics.

“Pollution is only one of the problems,” Catherine Morice said. She was from the Paris office of Greenpeace. “Drift nets are legal in the Mediterranean. And Italian drift nets are extremely long. Many kilometers. Spain and France also use drift nets. That’s something that has to be stopped.”

She showed me some reports detailing the drift-netters’ abuses—and the length of the nets, ten and fifteen miles long. I told her I was traveling along the Mediterranean coast, and had just come from Marseilles and Arles.

“That is one of the worst regions for pollution.”

“But Arles is pretty—you mean the Rhône?”

“The Rhône at Arles stinks and it’s dangerous. It’s a terrible river. We call it the couloir chimique—chemical corridor. It makes the Camargue a mess.”

And where travel writers rhapsodize about Gypsies and horses and Van Gogh—well, I had done a little bit of that, hadn’t I?—she said the oil factories and chemical factories of the Camargue are the source of a lot of Mediterranean pollution.

“Are there nuclear plants along the Mediterranean as there are along the coast of Britain?” I asked.

At this point Catherine called over to Jean-Luc Thierry, the Greenpeace nuclear expert.

Jean-Luc said, “No. They are not built on the Mediterranean, they are inland. But they are not far. There is a nuclear reprocessing plant at Marcols-les-Eaux, a hundred kilometers up the Rhône. We’ve found traces of plutonium in the river and in the estuary.”

Where there were Gypsies and horses and almond blossoms, there was plutonium.

“What sort of a reception are you getting with your campaign in the Mediterranean?”

“The French are very suspicious of efforts like this. The first question we always get is, ‘Where does your money come from?’ ”

“That’s true of a lot of countries.”

“France is worse. They suspect us of having foreign influence—the French paranoia—money from America or Russia.”

As though if this were true it would cast doubt on the statistics or invalidate the effort to clean up the Mediterranean.

“Does the pollution vary from country to country, according to the part of the Mediterranean?”

“Yes, but the most serious division is the north against the south,” Jean-Luc said. “A lot of the waste and pollution on the European side affects North Africa.”

The next morning Rainbow Warrior sailed for Calvi in Corsica, to carry the environmental message.

Later that afternoon, reading Nice-Matin on a bench on the promenade, I saw there was a symphony concert that night at the Acropolis, Nice’s cultural center. It was a twenty-minute walk from my hotel, but when I got there a man was waving his arms and saying, “No tickets—all sold,” to some disappointed people. I suppose I had a look of consternation on my face, because a woman came up to me and asked me whether I wanted a ticket. Her mink coat, her look of evasion and aloofness, and even her air of innocence made her seem like a tout; and yet she did not scalp me, but asked for the exact price that was printed on the ticket.

She vanished a moment later, and only then—as I was congratulating myself on my luck—did it occur to me that she had sold me a fake ticket.

Soon afterwards, I found my seat, and in the seat beside it was the woman in the mink coat. She smiled at me.

“My husband is sick,” she said. “So you are lucky. This is a popular concert.”

She was not a tout, nor anything near it. She was a good, kind, compassionate and honest person, whom I had wrongly suspected of being a hustler.

“My husband is so sorry to miss it,” she said. “But now you can enjoy it. May I look at your program?”

She was Madame Godefroy, and, for the duration of the concert, I became her husband. We shared the program. We agreed that the playing was wonderful. It was Berlioz (Overture to “Beatrice and Benedict”) and Beethoven Piano Concerto Number Three, and a Dvorak symphony (No. 5). The soloist was French and warmly applauded. The conductor was Chinese, Long Yü, and young (born 1964). We chatted about the weather, what a terrible winter it was! What a wet day! What a lovely concert!

Flushed and breathless with all these exclamations, Mme. Godefroy and I went into the foyer and had a glass of wine.

“We were living in Clermont-Ferrand, where my husband was working,” she said. “After he retired, about eight years ago, we came here.”

“Is it more expensive here in Nice?”

“The apartments cost twice as much, or more, as in Clermont-Ferrand. Property is very expensive in Nice. But everything else is the same—food, clothes, whatever.”

“I liked Marseilles,” I said.

Mme. Godefroy winced but said, “Yes, there are the Le Corbusier buildings. But Marseilles is dangerous. It has all the problems, too—drugs, immigrants, AIDS.”

She was too polite perhaps to mention blacks and Arabs, but I was reminded of how the young blacks in Marseilles imitated American dress code: baseball hats on backward, track suits, baggy pants, expensive running shoes, and the same unusual haircuts. There were no other role models in France, or in Europe, but the Americanized look marked these youths out and must have seemed like a threat.

“So you’re happy here, Madame?”

“Nice is safe,” she said. “The weather is good, except for this year. It is youthful, because of the universities and language schools. There are many retired people—perhaps thirty percent. But Cannes is worse—it doesn’t have universities, so it’s mostly retired people.”

“I always imagined that the French were settled people. I didn’t realize that they retired and moved to the coast the way people do in Britain and the United States.”

“My parents never retired and moved,” she said. “It happened after the war, when children moved away from their parents to find work. Before, in France, everyone lived together, the children looked after their parents, and they lived in the father’s house. But—no more.”

So the breakup of the family home was an economic necessity, dating from the recent past, when the young were uprooted and had to search for jobs. And the nature of jobs changed—the decline of agriculture, and manufacturing, the rise of the service industries; all of this since the war.

“Do you have any relatives living in Nice?”

“No, and I miss them. I miss my children and my grandchildren. All my children are married. Well, my younger son has been living with his girlfriend for so long they are good as married.”

She sipped her wine.

“My father is dead. He was ninety-three when he died. My mother is alive. She is ninety-one—but in good health and very alert.”

“Where are your roots in France?”

“Strasbourg. I was born there and my family lived there for many generations.”

“Hasn’t Strasbourg also been German at times?”

“Yes, it has gone back and forth, from French to German and back again. During the war”—she sighed—“we had to leave Strasbourg. It was a bad time. The Germans occupied it. We fled to Aix-en-Provence.”

She told me about the fighting, the house-searches, the crowded train, the hunger. This woman in furs in the foyer of the concert hall in Nice, the very picture of bourgeois serenity, had once been a refugee, fleeing from town to town, ahead of the Huns, in a desperate struggle for survival.

This talk of the war clearly depressed Mme. Godefroy, who perhaps realized that she was talking with a stranger who had been sitting in her husband’s seat, an inquisitive American. I liked her, though—her rectitude, her stoicism, her clear-sightedness: law-abiding, polite, married for life.

“Are you staying in Nice?”

“For a while. I want to travel in this immediate area. And then I’m going to Corsica.”

“I have been there. Once. It is very different. The people, especially the ones in the mountains, are very severe.”

At her request, because it was late, and there were lurkers here and there, I walked Mme. Godefroy to the taxi stand. I said good night, and then headed back to the Place Mozart, through the empty city, and detoured down the promenade, which was bright with wet reflections, and the water, too, the Bay of Angels a sea of gleaming liquefaction.

The concert had been a local event, part of this wintry low season, not a tourist attraction. There were other events—dances, plays, and this week—because the Lenten season had just begun—a two-week festival of parades and exhibitions. I went to one of the parades, because it seemed to me to have been put on expressly for people who lived in Nice and the surrounding towns.

The parade was called “Le Bataille des Fleurs,” and it involved floats and flower tossing. It interested me as local events often did for the way they roused people from their homes, children and spouses, and revealed their fantasies and enthusiasms. Families lined the streets, and so did soldiers and policemen and priests and punks. These French punks were grubby youths, swigging wine, looking dirty and dangerous. They jeered and shouted at the floats which were piled with flowers, and on each float a pretty girl in a ball gown or a tight dress or sequins, stood flinging mimosa (which had just come into bloom) to the bystanders. The sprigs of mimosa, with tufty yellow fluff, had the look of baby chicks.

One of the flower girls was black and attractive, wearing a white wedding dress and a veil.

“She’s a good one,” said a man beside me to his friend.

“Oh, yeah,” the friend said, and leered at the girl. “Amazing.”

And they clamored for her to throw them some mimosa.

There were military bands with blaring trumpets. A Tyrolean oompah band. Another: St. Georg’s Bläser from Haidenbach. A brass band called The Wolves (Les Loups), playing loud and wearing baggy wolf costumes. More floats, more skinny fox-faced girls in pretty dresses flinging mimosa, and when they ran out of mimosa they tore flowers from their floats and threw those. There were Germans dressed as Mexicans, French cowgirls and drum majorettes, medieval knights and wenches, playing trumpets and twirling elaborate flags. Twenty little girls in traditional Provençal costumes tossing flowers and inviting the stares of elderly gentlemen. Zouaves, clowns, and a band of pink teddy bears. Musical policemen and “Miss Galaxie” and the forty-piece band of Stadtkapelle Schongau (Bavaria) in lederhosen: more oompah. “Los Infectos Acelerados” and a down-home band from East Texas State University—baton-twirling cuties in black leotards and short skirts.

Seeing Americans, the French children became hysterical and began spraying strings of goo at them out of aerosol cans, screaming, “Mousse!”

The day after the parade, I tiptoed to Nice Station. It is impossible to stride confidently through Nice, city of dog merds.

When the English painter Francis Bacon was seventeen he saw dogshit on a sidewalk and had an epiphany: “There it is—this is what life is like.” What enchantment he would have found in Nice, where pavements are so turdous that a special one-man turd-mobile trundles along sucking them up its long snout. Even that ceaseless activity hardly makes a dent.

The turd-mobile is defeated by an unlikely enemy: an older overdressed French woman, a widow, a retiree, a prosperous landlady, someone precisely like Mme. Godefroy. She is the last person you would associate with dogshit, and yet this delicate and dignified woman spends a good part of the day calculating the urgencies of her dog’s bowels. There are thousands of these women and their dogs all over the Riviera. They are forever hurrying their tiny mutts down the sidewalk and looking the other way as the beasts pause to drop a stiff sausage of excrement just where you are about to plant your foot.

At the station, I said to myself: If the next train goes east, I’ll head for Ventimiglia and eat spaghetti in Italy. If it goes west, I’ll eat in Antibes or Juan-les-Pins.

It was an eastbound train to Mention, and once again I was struck by the courtesy of the older French rail passengers, strangers to each other, who chatted about trivial things and seldom departed in silence; nearly always when they left a train compartment they said, “Bye, now” or “Bon voyage” or “Take care.”

There was something else about the train, that Fitzgerald mentions in Tender Is the Night. “Unlike American trains that were absorbed in an intense destiny of their own, and scornful of people on another world less swift and breathless, this train was part of the country through which it passed. Its breath stirred the dust from the palm leaves, the cinders mingled with the dry dung in the gardens. Rosemary was sure she could lean from the window and pull flowers with her hand.”

Beyond the pretty bay at Villefranche-sur-Mer, a little jewel among rocky cliffs, I could see St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, where King Leopold of Belgium, sole proprietor of the Congo, had built a regal estate that was so complete, even his mistresses and his private priest, his confessor, lived in a private mansion on the grounds. The idea was that the king could sin all he wanted, for the priest was on call to give him absolution on his deathbed. Somerset Maugham had bought the priest’s house, the Villa Mauresque—named for its Moroccan decor. I had planned to stop here, but the whole kingly place was now a set of condominiums.

Past Beaulieu-sur-Mer, palmy, sedate, piled against the hillside, with mansions on ledges; past Eze-sur-Mer, less grand, with great clusters of banana trees at the station. The bays beyond Eze were beautiful but the beaches were stony, the cliffs perpendicular, a wall-like coast similar to the one I had seen on the Costa Brava. After Cap D’Ail came Monte Carlo—bigger, sleepier, nastier than I had expected, and it was impossible to tell the condos from the grave vaults. I decided to stop there for lunch.

I walked from the station, trying to figure out where I was. There are three regions in the Principality of Monaco—Monacoville, the hill where Prince Rainier’s palace dominates; the valley of the Condamine; and another hill, Mount Charles—Monte Carlo. The whole place owes its existence to Grace Kelly, who provided Rainier with a son, thus maintaining the Grimaldi line. She met Rainier when the prince became involved as a human prop in a photo shoot in Monaco to promote one of her films; then he pursued her, with a priest acting as a go-between. He was well aware of the clause in Monaco’s treaty with France that asserted that Monaco would be absorbed into France if Rainier did not somehow produce an heir. Now it is for the young balding playboy, Albert Grimaldi, to secure the Grimaldi line with an heir of his own.

The Grimaldi family, said to be the oldest monarchical line in Europe, is—like most of those families—royally dysfunctional, filled with stressful and unsatisfying relationships, though Grimaldi self-esteem is not in short supply. They are well aware that their home was a dump until the mid-nineteenth century, when Prince Charles III built a casino. He did it in much the same spirit that the Pequot Mashantucket Indians introduced gambling to Connecticut, because it was forbidden everywhere else (France and Italy had banned it). So Monaco got rich, as the Pequots got rich, on suckers being encouraged to throw their money away.

But the wealthy people who live in Monaco are the opposite of gamblers. They are mainly anal-retentive tax exiles with a death grip on their cash and a horror of spending, never mind gambling. There are thirty thousand residents. Fewer than ten percent of them are natives, which says a great deal. Tax havens are by their very nature boring or else actively offensive; if they were pleasant, everyone would want to live in them. But only by promising tax incentives do the places attract their resident populations. This is not Happy Valley. For one thing, the chief characteristic of wealthy people is that they are constantly whining about how poor they are; the rest of us can take a malicious satisfaction in the fact that these tycoons have only each other at which to cry poormouth.

I had a pizza, and walked around, but all my attempts to start conversations with the Monagasques ended in failure. That was another unhelpful personality trait of tax exiles—paranoia.

Farther down the railway line, nasturtiums grew like weeds at Rocquebrune, and in Cabrolles there was space and light and a great valley slotted into a range of high snow-dusted mountains, with stony features that matched those of the local bourgeoisie.

Menton was a Victorian-looking seaside resort of indescribable dullness. The fat, philandering Edward VII used to like it here, for the apparently limitless opportunities it afforded him to eat and chase women. Menton was having its own celebration today, the Lemon Festival (Fête du Citron). This one was obvious and programmatic, and it was watched without much enthusiasm. The floats were constructed of lemons and oranges in the shape of whales, dinosaurs, the Eiffel Tower, airplanes, full-figured women, windmills and so forth. It was neither as rich nor as revealing as Nice’s parade with its flowers and oddballs.

I had decided that if I grew cranky I would simply move on to a better place, but it was not convenient for me to leave Menton. I did see the reality of United Europe at Menton station. Here we were on the border between France and Italy. A group of elderly Italians, none of them younger than seventy or so, were trying to buy cups of coffee and some cookies. The French woman at the counter was snarling at them.

“If you don’t have the money stop wasting my time,” she said.

They did not have French money, they did not speak French. The woman at the counter, a mile or so from Italy, did not speak Italian.

“What is she saying?” a man asked plaintively in Italian.

“She is asking for money.”

“If you want to buy, change your money!” the woman said in French.

“For francs, I think.”

An Italian said to her in Italian, “All we want to buy is coffee. It’s not worth changing money for that.”

Another Italian said to her in Italian, “We will give you a thousand lire apiece. You can keep the change.”

“Don’t you understand me?” the French woman said.

So there was no sale, nor were the Italians able to eat or drink anything; the border between France and Italy was simple to pass through, but the language barrier was insurmountable.

The European Union, seen from the Mediterranean, was full of misunderstandings which made that argument a trifle. People were so confused about EC regulations in the Mediterranean that Euro-rules had become Euro-myths. They were ludicrous, but still they were believed, and they made EC nationals angry. Fishermen will have to wear hair nets, it was said. All fishing trawlers will have to carry a supply of condoms. There would be a ban on curved cucumbers. British oak would no longer be used in furniture because it was too knotty. Donkeys on beaches would have to wear diapers because of droppings. Henceforth, all European Community coffins would have to be waterproof.

There were advantages to being in the European Community, but the Mediterranean was a community, too. At the fruiterer’s in Menton in February there were grapes from Tunisia, strawberries from Huelva in Spain, tomatoes from Morocco and Sicily, mandarin oranges from Sicily, and the North African dates, figs, prunes, nuts. Clementines from Corsica. And locally grown artichokes and lemons, and apples (Bertranne and Granny Smiths)—all from Provence. In addition, there were cheese, sausages, honey and preserves, and ten varieties of olives. Almost the whole of the world’s production of olive oil came from these neighboring Mediterranean countries. The suburban density in Menton and on the Riviera generally was misleading; the shoreline catered to the hordes of tourists and the complacent rich, but just across the coastal highway and railway tracks the land was still profoundly agricultural—both in mood and culture.

Back in Nice, I did my laundry, sitting in “Albertinette,” the launderette, and writing notes. On my right was a housewife folding clothes, on my left an Arab watching his clothes revolve in the washer. With maintenance in mind, I got a haircut afterwards. The woman cutting it was interrupted by a man who came up and began gesticulating and complaining.

He said in French, “Your hair is too long!”

“That’s why I am here,” I said.

“But it’s still too long, the way you have it.”

“You don’t approve of my hair?”

“No. You need to emphasize your body,” he said, becoming passionate, plucking at my hair. “Cut the hair shorter, show the energy of the face. Make it so you can run fingers through it—like this! Get some harmony!”

I was not sure whether he actually believed this or was simply teasing me by pretending to be a stereotypical Frenchman and demonstrating how passionately he could talk about trivialities. On the other hand, maybe he was serious. In any case, I ended up with very short hair.

I had traveled east to Menton; my ferry to Corsica was not leaving for another day and a half; and so I went westward to Antibes on the stopping train—Nice, St.-Laurent-du-Var, Cros-de-Cagnes, Cagnes-sur-Mer, Villeneuve-Loubet, Biot, Antibes.

A lovely blonde French woman got off the train at Antibes, and as she was struggling with a suitcase I offered to help. She gladly accepted, and we were soon walking from the station in Antibes together, her suitcase banging against my leg.

“I am sorry my suitcase is so heavy,” she said.

“I don’t mind,” I said. “I’m fairly strong. Ha-ha!”

“You are so kind.”

The thing weighed about fifty pounds. If I had not offered, how would she have carried it?

“I suppose you have tools in it, or guns of some kind?”

“Cosmetics,” she said.

“That’s all?”

“It is full of cosmetics,” she said. “I have just come from Nice where I was demonstrating them in a store.”

She was that attractive, rather formally dressed and businesslike coquette with mascara and red lips you sometimes see in the aisle of a department store waving a tube of lipstick or else offering to squirt perfume on your wrist.

I put the bag down. I said, “Just resting. Ha-ha!”

“Ha-ha.”

“What about having lunch?” I said.

“Thank you. But I have an appointment.”

“A drink, then? Or a coffee?” I said. “I am a stranger here.”

The word stranger had an effect on her. It is not the way a French traveler would describe himself. He would say, Je ne suis pas d’ici, I am not from here. My way of saying it was odd and existential, something like “I’m a weirdo,” and it did the trick. Moments later we were clinking glasses.

“Menton is for the old,” she said. Her name was Catherine. “So is Nice. St. Tropez is superficial. Money, drugs, rich people, lots of Italians. No culture, no mind at all.”

As a demonstrator of cosmetics, who did nothing but travel from town to town with her leaden suitcase, she knew France very well and the Riviera like the back of her dainty hand.

“And Monaco is just a joke,” she said.

“That’s what I decided, but I thought it was because I am an American.”

“Believe me, it is a joke. I spent five days there and it was like a year. I spend five days everywhere, showing the products. I was recently in St. Malo. Brittany is good, but it’s cold.”

She was about thirty, not married, slightly enigmatic. She said that in spite of its superficiality she liked the south of France.

“Where this wine comes from,” I said.

“Cassis, yes,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“Just looking around,” I said. “I was in Antibes about fifteen years ago, visiting a man. I want to see if his apartment is still here. Want to see it?”

Catherine smiled, and it seemed to mean yes, and so we finished our glasses of wine and walked down the street, to where Graham Greene’s old apartment, “La Residence des Fleurs,” stood.

On the way she said, “Some men disapprove of cosmetics.”

“Not me,” I said. “A woman wearing makeup likes to appear in a certain way.” I tried to explain this, but did not have the words.

“Attrayant,” she said.

It sounded right. I said yes, definitely, vowing to look the word up.

“As you do.”

She seemed pleased and embarrassed, and touched my hand. She said, “I know this address.”

“An English writer lived here. Graham Greene.”

“I don’t know the name. What did he write?”

“Novels, stories. Some travel books.”

“A good writer?”

“Very good.”

“I think you are a writer,” she said. “From your questions.”

“Yes. I want to write something about the Mediterranean.”

“You should go to a different part—not here. Nothing to write about here! Ha-ha.”

“Plenty to write about here,” I said.

I was thinking about my previous visit to Antibes. Then, I had not wondered why a millionaire novelist would choose to live in a small apartment three blocks from the harbor, with no sea view at all. But I wondered today. How could Greene have lived so long by the Mediterranean in a flat where all he saw from his windows were other houses? He had lived there more than twenty years, and I found it hard to spend a single afternoon in the place—the foreshore packed with apartment houses, the harbor jammed with yachts and sailboats, no beach to speak of, the little town blocked with traffic. Greene had wanted to avoid paying his British taxes—but what a way to go about it.

“It’s almost time for lunch,” I said.

“But I must go. My friend will be wondering where I am. He can get very excited.”

“He lives in Antibes?”

“No. He is visiting from Paris. He has a dangerous job.” She smiled at me. “A stuntman for films.”

So I ate lunch alone, more fish soup and fruits de mer and wine. I had not been trying to pick her up—I had love in my life. Yet I thought how there was no mistaking this word “stuntman,” which she had said in English. It seemed to me, as she spoke it, to suggest one of the most intimidating professions imaginable. If she had said he was a boxer or a marksman I would not have been more seriously cautioned. You see this lover of hers defying explosions and car crashes and hurtling through flames, enough for anyone’s manhood to shrink to the size of a peanut.

Attrayant means alluring.

After lunch, I hurried out of town, walking to Juan-les-Pins. In 1925, Gerald and Sara Murphy took up residence in their “Villa America,” at this end of Antibes. They were the bright couple who inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald to create the civilized and generous hosts Dick and Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night. He and Zelda supplied the dark side, the most interesting part, hysteria, madness and desperation, in those characters, “in the grip of fashion … while up north the true world thundered by.”

In great contrast to Nice, where the beach is shingly and stony, the beach at Juan-les-Pins is sandy, though it is small and narrow. “The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one,” Fitzgerald writes in his brilliantly observed novel. “In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by the sea-plants through the clear shallows.” To the west, under a reddened sky a complex and lovely view, where Cannes lay under a headland.

“A shameless chocolate-box sunset disfigured the west,” runs a line in The Rock Pool. That, in a single observation, is the English writer’s embarrassment in the face of natural beauty.

Since almost every other writer who has described the Riviera has praised it, it is worth looking at a paragraph of Riviera abuse, that is, a general unfavorable review of the whole Mediterranean Sea. It is rare to find a body of water accused of being so hideous and worthless.

“The intolerable melancholy, the dinginess, the corruption of that tainted inland sea overcame him [Cyril Connolly writes]. He felt the breath of centuries of wickedness and disillusion; how many civilizations had staled on that bright promontory! Sterile Phoenicians, commercial-minded Greeks, destructive Arabs, Catalans, Genoese, hysterical Russians, decayed English, drunken Americans, had mingled with the autochthonous gangsters—everything that was vulgar, acquisitive, piratical, and decadent in capitalism had united there, crooks, gigolos, gold-diggers and captains of industry through twenty-five centuries had sprayed their cupidity and bad taste over it. As the enormous red sun sank in the purple sea (the great jakes, the tideless cloaca of the ancient world) the pathos of accumulated materialism, the Latin hopelessness seemed almost to rise up and hit him. Like Arab music, utterly plaintive, utterly cynical, the waves broke imperceptively over the guano-colored rocks.”

The insults are almost comic—Connolly was actually a sucker for the voluptuousness of the Riviera, and returned to that landscape in one of his other books, The Unquiet Grave, where he wrote of “swifts wheeling round the oleanders … armfuls of carnations on the flower stall … the sea becomes a green gin-fizz of stillness in whose depths a quiver of sprats charges and counter-charges in the pleasure of fishes.”

Under the pines in the Jardin de la Pinede and at the Square F. D. Roosevelt in Juan-les-Pins, there were friendly folks playing boules. Why was this interesting? Because they were all men, they were all polite—they all shook hands before and after a match; and most of all because they seemed the antithesis of what people wrote about Juan-les-Pins. They were obviously hard-up, blue collar, manual workers, fishermen and cabbies and farmers. They completely possessed the center of the square. A number of them were Vietnamese. I watched three Vietnamese trounce three Provençal players—their winning technique lay in lobbing the steel ball in a perfect arc, so that it bombed the opponent’s ball and sent it skidding.

One of the players walked towards me to sit down and smoke, and so I talked to him. But he waved his hands at me, to get me to stop talking.

“It is not necessary regulation to speak to my face in the French,” he said in English. “I can catch all the majority of what you are saying.”

“I was watching you playing boules.”

“The game of bowlings is a genius, and you can perform so many skill-tricks to gain the winnership and shock the opponent, your enemy.”

“Of course.”

“So you see the French games nothing like American—hit people with ball and fight with hands or take—ha! ha!—your gun and gain. What you see is typical French bowlings.”

“Is it a sort of club?”

“Also”—he wasn’t listening to me—“wonderful alimentation in Provence.”

“Where did you learn English?”

“From the war. From people,” he said. “But explain me one thing, why Americans speak English in France the manner they speak in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, everywhere, and so we cannot catch at all. But if I speak French to them the way I speak with my wife, ah, whoof! They will never catch!”

This went on a bit more. Then I walked back to Antibes by way of the lighthouse, the Phare de L’Ilette on the Cap d’Antibes.

The Mediterranean here was an enigma. It was corrupt, it was pure. There were horrible apartments, there were beautiful headlands. There were nasty tycoons, there were friendly folks. The sea was polluted and blue, the sea was a green gin-fizz of stillness. Everything that had been written about the Riviera was true.

6

The Ferry Île de Beauté to Corsica

It took all night, a twelve-hour trip in the Île de Beauté, a ferry as large as an ocean liner, to get to this other part of France; but it is a French province in name only. Corsica is Corsica.

I liked being on the water again, and I liked the empty ship, hardly anyone on the quay at Nice, just a few people in the cafeteria buffet which was open all night—spaghetti and rice and salad, and calamari that looked and tasted like shredded gym shoes. Some men were playing video games, Germans among them, bikers in tight leathers with shaven heads that gave them odd blue skulls. There was a lounge where people were drinking wine, some unruly children ran among the chairs, and there were the usual bronchitic French people coughing their guts out and chain-smoking.

The deck was empty, except for a man muttering solemnly to his dog in French, and a Tibetan woman clinging to the rail. The night was black, almost starless, like a pierced blanket, and not cold but cool in late February. I stood watching the foaming wake in this emptiness that was like a great ocean, and thinking how it must have been so easy for the Mediterranean people to believe that this was the whole world.

After a while I looked up and saw the Frenchman and the Tibetan were gone. I went to my cabin, and crept into my bunk and read a bit more of the biography of the painter Francis Bacon. “The truth comes in a strange door,” Bacon said. And as for his gory paintings and his frequently bloody subjects: “It’s nothing to do with mortality but it’s to do with the great beauty of the color of meat.”

The purr of the ship’s screws put me to sleep, and when I woke the sun was rising on a calm sea, a rubious dawn lighting Cap Corse and the distant mountains in the island’s interior, the great granite peaks and the ridge above the port of Bastia. There are twenty tall peaks on the island, which is the most mountainous in the Mediterranean.

The Île de Beauté (which is also a name for Corsica) docked, and I hoisted my bag and walked down the gangway into the middle of Bastia, empty at this early hour of the morning—only pigeons cooing and shitting on big bronze statues in the Place Nationale. I had breakfast in a cafe and immediately became aware that the men around me were not talking French but amiably and incoherently showing their teeth and joshing, gabbling in a sort of Italian. Corsican is a variety of old Tuscan, tumbling and Italian-sounding, like a secret tongue. I imagined that it seemed to an Italian the way a Scottish accent sounds to an English speaker, a regional dialect that was familiar even when it was incomprehensible. When I addressed the men—asking some directions—they became serious and polite and slipped into French or Italian.

The language business—no outsider I met spoke Corsican—heightened my sense of Corsica’s being a colonized place, with the secret life that all colonies have: the parallel culture lived in another language. The fact that Corsican life is known to be explosive makes it all the more enigmatic.

Bastia is a seaport in the shadow of a granite mountain. Most of the travelers who have passed through it express a measure of disappointment when speaking of the city, perhaps because it seems Italian rather than Corsican. Prized for its harbor rather than its fortifications (being hard to defend it was frequently captured), Bastia’s architecture is Genoese. In its older quarters it is still an Italian-looking town, with a picturesque old port. In Bastia I walked all over, in a way that I had not done on the Riviera, and I realized that it was probably true, as I had read, that a great deal of the pleasure to be had in Corsica was from walking—not only along cliff paths and mountain tracks, but on country roads and on the backstreets of the handsome city.

That night, at dinner, the Corsican waiter approached me shyly and asked in French, “How do you say bon appetit in English?”

Bastia is also well-served by ferries and is a simple place to leave. I could have gone to Nice or Sardinia or Tunis. I could have gone to Italy, leaving Bastia on the Corsica Regina in an hour or two for Livorno, and been in Florence in time for lunch.

There are small districts within the city, including a Moroccan—or perhaps Arab—quarter, near the old port. This exotic corner was also where the city’s only synagogue was located. Very small, in a narrow passage, Rua du Castagno, which is a long flight of stone stairs, it is called “Beth Meir” synagogue.

There was a recently erected sign on the wall, putting all the blame for the wartime anti-Semitism on the French government that had existed during the war: “La Republique Français/En hommage aux victimes/Des persecutions racistes and antisemites/Et des crimes contre humanité/Commis sous l’autorité de fait/Dite ‘Gouvernement de l’état Française’ (1940–1944)/N’oublions jamais.”

It seemed to me ironic that Arabs had taken up residence in what in former days had been the Jewish ghetto, and that they were being harassed at the moment.

Arabs in France are like The Tribe That Hides from Man, and so I deliberately sought one out in this district in Bastia, just to talk to. His name was Sharif—eyes close together, skeletal, skinny, his narrow shoulders showing through his burlap gown.

“I am from Gardimaou, in Tunisia, near Djanouba, on the border of Algeria. But the Algerians are—oh, well!”

“Are there many Tunisians here?”

“Lots of them in Corsica. Moroccans, too. But no Algerians.”

“Why is that?” And I was aware when I asked the question that Corsicans believed that island was full of Algerians, because no one differentiated among North Africans.

“There is something wrong with Algerians,” Sharif said. “In their heads. They are very nervous types. And you see, that makes them dangerous. They cause all sorts of trouble on the mainland. They are not like other people. And some of them hate foreigners.”

“Like me.”

“Unfortunately.”

Sharif had worked in Corsica for twelve years, but still the Corsican language was a mystery to him. He did not know a word of it. “It is too difficult.”

But no language is difficult. Language is an activity, a kind of play, learned through practice. It requires little intelligence. It is social. So you had to conclude that in his dozen years no one had ever spoken to Sharif in Corsican. That activity was closed to him.

There was no mosque in Bastia, indeed none in Corsica. He made a tentative face, as though he wanted to say more, then thought better of it. “Lots of Muslims, though.”

“In my village in Tunisia, life is good, but there is no money. In other places where there are tourists, life is fine but it is expensive. I came here for work.”

I pressed him about the nonexistent mosque. He said, “Yes, it is odd that there is none, but who can say why?”

It was later that I found out that two houses, where Muslims met to pray, near Bonifacio, had been blown up. And later, after the French government took over an oriental-style building in Ajaccio (crescent, archway, arabesque doorways, domes—it had been the headquarters of a company selling Turkish tobacco), that too had been torched by arsonists, who believed—because of its unusual decor—that it was going to be used by Arabs.

Some people in Bastia seemed impartial in their abuse. Not far away on an ancient pillar of Bastia’s cathedral, the fifteenth-century Église Ste. Marie: Jésus est mort (Jesus is dead).

I gathered that there were many ways to see Corsica. The most strenuous is on foot on the many paths, or from north to south on the famous high-level trail, the Grande Randonee 20, more than two weeks of trudging at such an altitude that you see the whole island but hardly meet Corsicans. There are the local ferries, from Bastia to Bonifacio, Ajaccio to Propriano. There is renting a car and driving through Corsica, the simplest and most popular way of traversing the island—on good roads, and nightmarish ones, some of them vertiginous, all of them spectacular.

And there is the little train from Bastia to Ajaccio, with a spur line to Calvi. There were two trains to Calvi, four a day to Ajaccio. It was hardly a train, just a rail car, a navette, literally a “shuttle.” It moved in jerks like a tram or a trolley. When I started the next day from Bastia there were only two of us on board; a few miles down the track, at Furiani, two boys got on.

It is not a popular train, though the Corsicans do everything they can to persuade people to use it. On an island of notoriously bad roads a trip on the Chemin de Fer de la Corse is one of the most restful ways to spend a day. The motto is: Prenez le Train, C’est plus Malin! (“Take the train, it’s smarter!”)

The mountains were still snowcapped, and I was told that there would be snow at their summits until July. I had seen them in Bastia, and even from the train I could see them: the men in clusters on street corners—talking, smoking, shaking hands, gesturing. There were few women on the streets, and those who were there walked briskly, not looking either left or right, giving an impression of great modesty and rectitude. This was the old world of the Mediterranean, the man’s world.

Winter had given the island a dramatic starkness that revealed the rugged landscape, the cliffs and peaks, the moorland that lay exposed through bare branches. This, and the behavior of Corsicans on the street, I was able to study at Biguglia, where the rail car stopped and the driver took out a newspaper and spread it on the console of his controls, and read it with close attention.

“I am going to look around,” I said.

“Don’t go far,” he said, without glancing up.

Twenty minutes passed. I smiled at a man on the platform, and we began talking harmlessly about the weather: how bright and cold it was, no rain, very nice, and then I said: “Have you ever been to Sardinia?”

He did not say no. He shook his head as though my question was insane, and he walked away. I wanted to tell him that I was going there. Sardinia is only four miles from Corsica’s south coast.

Another train pulled in, what in India would be called the Up Train, and because this was a single-line track we had to wait for it at this station in order to pass it. Then we were off again and deep in the low dense Corsican bush, universally known as the maquis.

• • •

Corsica is famous for having its own fragrant odor—the herbaceous whiff of the maquis—lavender, honeysuckle, cyclamen, myrtle, wild mint and rosemary. After he left Corsica as a young man, Napoleon never returned to the island, but exiled on Elba—which is just off the coast of Italy—he said he often savored the aroma of Corsica in the west wind. It smells like a barrel of potpourri, it is like holding a bar of expensive soap to your nose, it is Corsica’s own Vap-o-rub. The Corsican maquis is strong enough to clear your lungs and cure your cold.

This was not the Riviera, not France, it was definitely another country, and yet there were resemblances, Mediterranean similarities. The hint of herbs on a hot day in Provence was a fragrance in the breeze; here it was an aromatic feast, gusting through the window of the rail car. Here there were oleanders and palms and olive trees; and also dumps, and junkyards, and automobile graveyards. Yellow villages on the summits of high hills. There were miles of vineyards surrounding old venerable half-ruined villas. And there were fruit trees, some of the groves heavy with ripe lemons and pendulous bunches of clementines.

Two boys got off at Casamozza, one got on.

The villages were strange and lovely. They had the look of monasteries or fortresses, twenty stucco structures and a sentry-like church steeple, gathered at precipitous angles, and the deeper into the island we went, the higher up the villages were sited, until they almost crowned the summit. I could not imagine how the villagers lived their lives at such a steep angle, though it was obvious that these high and easily fortified villages were the reason the Corsicans had survived and had beaten off invaders. In these steep retreats Corsicans had kept their culture intact.

At the head of the valley looking west from the station of Ponte Nuovo I saw the snowcapped peak of Monte Asto, and there was nowhere else I wanted to be. Here, now, on this rail car rattling across Corsica under the massive benevolence of this godlike mountaintop—this for the moment was all that mattered to me, and I was reminded of the intense privacy, the intimate whispers, the random glimpses that grant us the epiphanies of travel.

We came to Ponte Leccia where the line branched to Ile-Rousse and Calvi, and moved along through the mountain passes and the maquis in sunshine, and it all seemed so lovely that I felt frivolous, almost embarrassed by my luck, at this thirteen-dollar train ride past the nameless villages plastered against the mountainsides, visited only by the soaring hawks.

I was writing this, or something like it, at a little place, La Regino, with its chickens on the line, and thinking: In German there is a word, Künstlerschuld, which means “artist’s guilt,” the emotion a painter feels over his frivolity in a world in which people work in a rut that makes them gloomy. Perhaps there is also a sort of traveler’s guilt, from being self-contained, self-indulgent, and passing from one scene to another, brilliant or miserable makes no difference. Did the traveler, doing no observable work, freely moving among settled serious people, get a pang of conscience? I told myself that my writing—this effort of observation—absolved me from any guilt; but of course that was just a feeble excuse. This was pleasure. No guilt, just gratitude.

At Ile-Rousse the deep blue sea, the bluest I had so far seen, was beaten and blown by the west wind, and the sea foam of the whitecaps lay piled like buckets of egg-white whipped into fluff against the beach of the pretty town. It had a snug harbor and a headland and a lighthouse and yet another—there was one in every Corsican town, perhaps obeying a local ordinance—Hôtel Napoleon.

The surf beat against the rocks near the train tracks that ran along the shore, and then in minutes we were at the next town, Calvi.

Some of Corsica’s highest, snowiest mountains lay in sight of the harbor at Calvi, from a table at a harborside restaurant where I was drinking the local wine, a crisp white Figarella made from the Calvi grapes, and reading my Francis Bacon book (“Later, when we were alone … Francis showed me the weals across his back … The masochist is stronger than the sadist …”) and the owner of the restaurant was telling me that Christopher Columbus had been born here in Calvi, which was not true at all, so I had read (some Calvi families by that name gave rise to the myth). I thanked him for the information, and had fish soup that was heartier and more flavorful than in Nice, and rouget—four small red snappers en papillot, whole pink fish on a pink plate, like a surrealist’s lunch.

Apart from this restaurant and the post office and a pair of inexpensive hotels (the Hôtel Grand was closed until April), everything was shut in Calvi, closed and locked and shuttered. Still, I stayed for the novelty of the sight of snow, and the exposed crags in the sunshine. After dark the town twinkled a bit, but it was empty, and the chill in the air and the black sea at its shore gave it a ghostly quality.

Retracing my steps, I returned to the same restaurant that night, had the fish soup again, finished the Bacon book, and then walked around the harbor, looking at the lights over Calvi’s fortress. I passed by the little railway station and saw there was an early train out of here. Life had vanished, disappeared indoors. Walking back towards the harbor, I saw a woman whom I had seen just before sundown. She was perhaps selling something—she had that ready smile, and a ring binder thick with brochures—samples of furniture, maybe, or hotel accessories.

“Good evening,” I said.

“Good evening,” she replied, and she passed into the darkness.

The next sound made me jump, because it erupted behind me, a shrill cautioning voice, saying, “You spoke to that woman.”

It was English but accented.

“How do you know I speak English?”

“I know, I know. You spoke to that woman. You make a mistake. In Corse you never, ever speak to a woman. Never ever, never ever.”

“Why not?” I said, trying to discern this man’s features in the dim light of the harbor’s edge.

“They put a bomb in your car.”

“I don’t have a car,” I said.

“They fight you—they kill you.”

He had been sitting in the shadows, speaking confidently. He got up and came nearer, still nagging. He was young, balding, with a large pale face and an explosive and scolding way of talking. His French accent had something else in it that I could not place.

“You’re English?”

“American,” I said.

“I hate the English.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I never went there. I just hate them. I meet them sometimes. They swear all the time.”

To give me an impression of this, he mimicked an Englishman swearing and it sounded as though he had swallowed something foul and was retching.

“Where do you live?” I ask.

“Nizza,” he said.

Calling Nice “Nizza”—it rhymed with pizza—seemed to indicate that he was Italian; I was sure he was not, yet there was something Mediterranean in his manner, in his irritating certainty.

“And you’re traveling in Corsica.”

“Not just Corse, but all over. And I don’t talk to women, like you just done. I don’t talk to anyone. I keep my mouth like so. These Corse people are giving problems if they don’t like you.”

“How do you know?” It was not that I doubted him, everyone said this; but I wanted some colorful evidence, preferably firsthand.

“I live in Nizza, I know. I read newspapers. If you are a tourist one week, two weeks, is okay. But you maybe want to stay long, buy a house, talk to people—talk to women. Then they put a bomb in your car, burn your house, fight you.”

“You’re sure of this?”

“Nazionalists, you know? And fanatics.”

“The Corsicans seem friendly,” I said, though I had hardly done more than exchange pleasantries. Actually they seemed not friendly but bluff, offhand, taciturn, rough and ready, with weather-beaten faces and horny hands, men and women alike.

“Maybe they are more friendly than the French. I hate the French.”

There is a point in every conversation with a stranger when you decide whether to end it or else press on. As soon as he said, “I hate the French,” I realized he was reckless and probably good for a laugh.

“Why do you hate the French?”

“Because they hate everybody. You have seen Nizza? You see all the peoples has dogs? Ha! Is the reason!”

“Reason for what?”

“They has no friends, so they has dogs.”

“The French prefer dogs to people?”

“Is the truth. Even me, when I stop traveling I buy a dog, a caniche, how you say it?”

“Poodle.”

“Everyone in the Côte d’Azur has a poodle.”

“But you can’t sleep with a dog,” I said.

“The dog is your best friend always.”

“Better than people?”

“Yes, I think.”

He said he had just arrived from Ajaccio and before that had traveled through Sardinia, Sicily and Croatia. This was helpful, since I was headed in the direction he had just come from. I asked him what Croatia was like. “No fighting in Zagreb,” he said. He did not know about the Croatian coast, which was my destination. But he had had no visa problems, and he had traveled most of the way by train.

“What sort of work do you do?” I asked.

“No work. Just trains and going, going, going.”

In life, it is inevitable that you meet someone just like yourself. What a shock that your double is not very nice, and seems selfish and judgmental and frivolous and illogical.

I questioned him closely, of course, but I was merely verifying his answers; I was not surprised. His life was the same as mine. Wake up in the morning, walk somewhere. Drink a coffee, take a train, look out the window. Talk to strangers, read the paper, read a book, then scribble-scribble. Now and then passing a phone booth, punch in numbers—anywhere—and get a clear line to Honolulu and some love and reassurance. Then leave the solitude of the confessional phone booth and enter France again, back in Juan-les-Pins, the click of boules, the salt-sting of wind and waves at Calvi. Is this a life?

“You write things down?” I said.

I suspected from his eccentricity alone that he was a writer.

“No. Just looking. Just going.”

“It’s expensive.”

“Trains are cheap.”

“Eating is expensive.” The meal I had just eaten in Calvi had cost fifty dollars.

“I eat sandwiches.”

“What about Corsican food?”

“What is Corsican food? It is French food! They have no spécialité, but I buy things to eat in the boulangerie.”

“What about Nizza?” I said. I was thinking: What does this guy do for money? He wasn’t more than thirty-five or so—and he was dressed fairly well, from what I could see. “Nizza is expensive.”

“I spend one thousand U.S. dollars a month. Six hundred for room, the rest for food.”

“Isn’t it boring, not working?”

“Sometimes I buy something, sell something, get money.”

That was as specific as he got, regarding his employment.

“Then I take a train. But here I am careful. You are not careful. Ha-ha! Is still a nice place. Corse has the bombs. Amsterdam has the drugs. San Francisco has the homosexuals.”

“I don’t see the connection. Do you hate homosexuals too?”

I had just finished the Francis Bacon biography and was indignant on Bacon’s behalf.

“I never went to America,” he said, being evasive. “Is too many people. And I like Nizza. But here in Corse”—now he was becoming agitated—“these people cannot get food if the French don’t give them money. They want freedom but they has no food.”

“You’re not French, are you?”

“No. Israel.”

“Oh, God.”

“You don’t like Israel?”

I laughed. “I was thinking of the four billion dollars a year America gives to Israel, so the Israelis can eat.”

“We don’t need the money,” he shrieked. “They give it, so we spend it. They are stupid to give it.”

“I agree. But where would Israel be if they didn’t get the money?”

“No problem. Israel don’t need it.”

“Maybe we should give the money to Corsica.”

“Planes! Guns! Israel buys planes for millions. Some politicians steal it. Spend it. Throw it away. Israel is not stupid like America!”

“And yet you live in France.”

“I hate the Arabs in Israel, the way they make trouble,” he said. “There are thirty thousand Jewish in Nizza. Synagogues. Everything. I feel it is like home, all these Jewish. So I am happy there.”

“But you travel all the time.”

“All the time,” he said.

“In the Mediterranean.”

“Only in the Mediterranean,” he said.

“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.

I had been here before and found it so moribund and spooky I wrote a short story about it (“Words Are Deeds”). That was on a brief visit to the island in 1977. In 1982 it became a university town and it was now a bustling place, filled with youthful students and cafes. Many Corsicans told me that after this university started there was a greater feeling of Corsican identity and more resistance. This was also a way of saying that the graffiti on the ancient walls of Corte was of a political character: Liberta pa i Patriotti! (Freedom for the patriots!), Speculatori Fora! (Out with Speculators!), Colon Fora! (Out with Colonists!), and so forth.

Corsican courtesy is deferential, a sort of shy dignity, and it is in great contrast to that sort of defiant graffiti scrawled in the Corsican language on most public walls. I had lunch at a cafe, sitting in the sunshine. The town I had thought of as forbidding had been rejuvenated by the presence of students. I talked to some of them at the cafe, and when I asked them about Corsican politics they suggested that I attend a lecture later that afternoon.

“Which sandwich did you choose?” one girl asked.

“It’s a Freud,” I said.

The sandwiches were named after great thinkers or writers, Pascal, Newton, Verlaine, Rimbaud. Rimbaud was ham and cheese, Freud was mozzarella, tomato, basil, olive oil.

I had no luck understanding the lecture, “The Clan Is the Cancer of Corsica,” which was given by a Corsican, Professor Sinoncelli. It was highly technical, it concerned the social structure, the family, and the relationship of politics to the Corsican activists, who had organized themselves into marauding gangs.

My problem was linguistic. I had no trouble chatting with people on trains or in casual encounters, but the intensity of an academic lecture, full of jargon and unfamiliar terms, was beyond me. It was clear, though, that a problem of identity was being debated, and that there were contradictions. Here was a large island, with a remote and mountainous interior, and a people whose culture meant everything to them. How to reconcile this with being a province of France? The Professor seemed to be suggesting that the nationalist movement had been subverted by a selfish and violent minority, who did not represent the Corsican people.

“This word ‘clan’?” I asked a student afterwards. “Does it have some special meaning in Corsica?”

“In Corsica as in France it is a word to describe any political group, not only of the Corsican nationalists,” he said. “But the underlying meaning is that the group is close-knit and militant.”

The girl with him said, “That is what we have made of democracy!”

Corsican pride ranges from ferocious nationalism to quiet dignity, and it has been remarked upon by every visitor since James Boswell, who got interested in the cause of Corsican independence and introduced Dr. Johnson to Paoli.

The most common generalization I had heard before I returned to Corsica after those seventeen years was that it had changed a great deal. The island had always been well-known for being dangerous—an unjustified reputation, partly based on some highly publicized bombings by the nationalist group Resistenza as well as the Corsican separatists’ proclivity for defacing signs. I had seen such signs in Spain, where they had been scribbled over in the Catalan language. Few acts of vandalism are more threatening to the visiting stranger than road signs that have been messed with, and they are usually the very ones you need to avoid being lost. Most signs in Corsica are either rewritten or, worse, obliterated.

There are many such signs on the road from Corte to the high village Evisa, through the Niolu Region and the towering Forest of Valdoniello. I had been told that this area is best experienced on a bicycle. I was lucky enough to be able to rent one in Corte for an excursion here.

Valdoniello is perhaps the only genuine forest in the Mediterranean. In the whole of my trip I did not see anything like it. It is a world of pines, but not just pines—it is valleys and rushing streams, snowy peaks and granite crags. The pines are gigantic and elegant, very tall and straight. While it was still a wilderness of primeval trees, this forest was first described and depicted in etchings by Edward Lear. Some of the earliest images of the Corsican landscape, especially its interior, are those of Lear.

Lear, who was famous for writing light verse with his left hand and painting Mediterranean landscapes with his right, came to Corsica just a few months after writing “The Owl and the Pussycat.” He traveled all over the island in a mule-cart. In his time Lear was better known as a brilliant watercolorist, as well as a painter in oils, rather than a writer of nonsense poetry. He had the idea of illustrating large-format bird books, much as Audubon had done, and Lear’s book of parrots is a masterpiece. But the book made no money. He abandoned ornithology. Looking for new subjects, and restless by nature, Lear became a great traveler in the Mediterranean—France, Italy, Greece, Egypt—and also in India; he wrote and illustrated books on Albania and Corsica. His book about Corsica, Journal of a Landscape Painter in Corsica (1869), introduced Corsica as a wild paradise to British readers, and created Corsica’s first tourist boom. Lear was the twentieth of twenty-one children. He was a kindly, whimsical man, but given to periods of great sadness and loneliness. So ashamed was he of being an epileptic that he hid his affliction—never spoke the word—and so he remained a lonesome traveler.

He was one of the first foreigners to penetrate the Corsican interior, though in the 1860s the French had already begun to exploit Corsica for its fine trees. By the time Edward Lear ventured into the forest he saw “the ravages of M. Chauton’s hatchets; here and there on the hillside are pale patches of cleared ground, with piles of cut and barked pines … giant trees lie prostrate …”

I was told that the French had recently made this forest a national park but, being colonists in Corsica—the activists’ slogans were justifiably indignant—French lumber companies were still intensively cutting trees. The signs of logging were everywhere—marked trees, cut timber, clear-cut slopes, every sort of abuse that goes under the weasel term “forest management.”

The narrow road traversed the valleys, westward, through the trees. The best way of seeing this forest was on a bike, in the open air, for the fragrant scent of the tall pines. The valleys were dappled with shadow and spread thickly with a litter of pinecones and needles, warmed and made fragrant by the sunlight.

Lear had rhapsodized about it. He wrote in a letter (to Emily Tennyson): “I have seen the southern part of the Island pretty thoroughly. Its inner scenery is magnificent—a sort of Alpine character with more southern vegetation impresses you, & the vast pine forests unlike those gloomy dark monotonous firs of the north, are green and varied Pinus Maritima. Every corner of the place not filled up by great Ilex trees and pines and granite rocks is stuffed with cistus and arbutus, Laurentinus, lent & heath: and the remaining space if any is all cyclamen & violets, anemones & asphodels—let alone nightingales and blackbirds.”

It is much the same today. The trip through this region is a combination of forest, of meadow and mountain, all this leading from one side of Corsica to the other; and after Evisa with its tall narrow houses and graceful church steeple, the road descends through the sheer rocky gorges of Spelunca to Porto, haunt of tourists.

At Evisa I met the Dunnits, from England. I was admiring the steep striated gorges and the sloping ledges of pinkish stone, the pinnacles and scalloped ridges, and a car drew up. The driver asked me how far to Corte.

“An hour or so, through the forest,” I said.

“You just come by push-bike?”

“Right.”

“Stopping in Corte?”

“I have to go back there to return my bike. I’m on my way to Ajaccio.”

“We were there—we done that.”

“Calacuccia’s very pretty.”

“We done it, as well.”

I decided to tease them.

“Bonifacio—have you done it?”

“Done it.”

And then the Dunnits began to reminisce about the Hebrides, how they had done it, and how the people were just like the Corsicans, insisting on speaking Celtic (“Or Gaelic,” said Mrs. Dunnit). Eventually the Dunnits drove off.

This was just a day off for me—a picnic. Instead of bicycling all the way downhill to the seaside village of Porto, I pedaled back to Corte and caught the train to Ajaccio.

• • •

It was the last train to Ajaccio. I arrived in darkness, passing through the back of the city, and hardly entering it on the train, because the station is some distance from the center. It was only eight in the evening, but the streets were empty. I was later to discover that Ajaccio is a city of convulsions—busy from seven until noon, the market, the banks, the fruit stalls, the fish shops, the bus station, the stores, all bustling; then dead from noon until three or so; and then convulsed until six-thirty, when it expired until the following morning. And the streets, like the streets in many Mediterranean towns, were a men’s club.

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?”

“I saw you on the ferry from Nice.”

Hearing English conversation, a novelty to them, the soldiers goggled like dogs, their mouths hanging open.

“She is my friend,” I said in French.

“Okay, okay.” And they went away, muttering and laughing, and kicking sand.

“Thank you,” the young woman said.

“You are traveling alone?”

She replied in French. She said, “My English is no good. Do you understand French? Good. Yes, I travel alone. Usually I have no problems.”

“Where are you from?”

“Japan.”

She said that she was studying French in Lyons and that she wanted to learn it well enough to read French literature when she got back to Japan. She was twenty-two. Her English was poor, her French was shaky.

I said, “I was under the impression that Japanese people traveled in groups.”

“Yes. But not me.”

“Aren’t Japanese women taught to be dependent and submissive?”

“Now they are the equal to men.”

Her name was Tomiko. She was four foot ten. She hardly spoke any language but her own. Here she was sitting on the beach at Ajaccio, alone.

I said, “Would you do this in Japan? I mean, go to a place alone, where people were all strangers?”

“No, I would go with a friend. But my friends did not want to come with me here to Corsica.”

“Maybe you’re brave. Maybe you’re foolish.”

“Foolish, I think,” she said.

“I admire you, but please be careful.”

All this convinced me that she was a good person, and she followed me back into town, talking ungrammatically. I realized that by being disinterested I had won her confidence, and she clung for a while, until I sent her on her way.

That night, Gilles Stimamiglio gave me the telephone number of Dorothy Carrington, the author of the only good modern book about Corsica, Granite Island. I called her from a phone booth and asked whether we might meet for a meal.

She said, “I am very old. It has to be lunch—I am no good in the evenings. And I’m slow. I have ‘intellectual’s back’—the discs are all bad from sitting. Or it might be called ‘hiker’s back.’ I’ve done so much hiking here.”

She gave me elaborate instructions for finding her apartment (“I am in what the French call ‘first basement’ ”) and I said I would take her to lunch the next day.

James Boswell visited Corsica in 1765; Flaubert visited as a young man and filled nineteen notebooks in ten days; Lear traipsed around in 1868 and produced pictures and his Journal. Mérimée roamed Corsica, looking for settings for his novels. But although these people raved about Corsica’s beauty, they left after their visit.

One person visited and stayed and distinguished herself by writing the best modern book in English on Corsica: Dorothy Carrington, author of Granite Island. Frederica, Lady Rose (her proper name), was in her eighties, with a radiance that certain serene people achieve in old age, with pale eyes and the gasping expression of the elderly that is also a look of perpetual surprise. She warned me over the phone that she was frail, and yet in person she gave an impression of being unusually hardy, game, alert, not deaf at all; one of those down-to-earth aristocrats that the English have always exported to thrive in hardship posts.

She had once been truly gorgeous—the proof was a Cecil Beaton photograph propped on the mantelpiece in her small damp apartment. In the photograph she was a willowy blonde, languid, reclining on a sofa, a cigarette holder in her dainty fingers. A frowning man stood over her, and they were surrounded by hideous paintings. Beaton had been a friend. She had had many friends in her long interesting life.

“I’d like to take you to a good restaurant,” I said.

“That would be Le Maquis. It’s a bit out of town, but it’s good food.”

It was a fifteen-minute drive to a spot on the coast south of Ajaccio, a five-star hotel with a restaurant which had been awarded three forks by the Michelin guide. Only one other table was taken.

“No one can afford to come to Corsica anymore,” Dorothy said. “Now what would you like to know?”

“How did you happen to come here?”

She began, at my insistence, with her birth in England. Her mother had been diagnosed as having cancer. “Have another child and you’ll be cured,” the local quack had assured the woman. And so Dorothy was born, and when she was three her mother died, of cancer. Her father, General Sir Frederick Carrington, had (with Cecil Rhodes) helped conquer Rhodesia and claim it for Britain. Dorothy was raised by uncles and aunts in rural Gloucestershire, in Colesbourne, “in a very grand house, much of it built by my Elwes grandfather when he was having an attack of megalomania.”

They were landed gentry, with the usual mix of soldiers and misfits. It was not a farming family. “We thought the soil was too bad and we were too high—three hundred meters.”

“What did the family do?”

It is an American question, What do you do?, but there it is.

Perhaps reflecting on the intrusiveness of the question, Dorothy Carrington’s pale eyes grew even paler.

“We rode to hounds,” she said.

She attended Oxford, and scandalized her family by having an affair with an Austrian in Spain. “Nowadays I would have spent some time with him and moved on. My uncles and aunts showed up—in Paris, where I was living with the man—they dragged us off to be married.” And so she was forced to leave Oxford University. This was in the 1920s.

“I went to Vienna and lived with my mother-in-law while my husband was in Rhodesia. I thought as my father had conquered Rhodesia I’d have all sorts of welcomes. We went. My first husband was good with horses. He could tame a wild horse, fix a roof. Clever farmer. But he had no mind at all.”

“What did you do in Rhodesia?”

She didn’t smile.

“We rode to hounds,” she said.

“Of course.”

“We chased every animal in Rhodesia. They were in great supply then. We lived about thirty miles from Marandellas—that was where we went for supplies, fording streams on the way. It was a rough life. We hardly knew the Africans. I spoke what they called ‘kitchen kaffir.’ It would have been different in Kenya. There were all sorts of diversions there. Rhodesia was second-rate.”

Everything was fine until Germany invaded Austria. “My husband could not claim to be Austrian anymore. He automatically became German. And I had no choice. I had to take his nationality, as his wife. We eventually divorced. Have I mentioned that he was excellent with horses but he had no mind? I went to London. I was a German national!”

“That must have been inconvenient.”

“We were at war with Germany, you see,” she said. “I put that right by marrying an agreeable little Englishman, to get a passport. It was a marriage of convenience.”

After a spell in Paris, she returned to London, and by chance entered an art gallery where paintings by Sir Francis Rose were being exhibited.

“Very strange ones. People either loved or hated his paintings. I thought to myself, I’m going to marry that man. I just had that feeling.”

And so it happened. She married Sir Francis Rose, and lived, as she put it, “absolutely at the center of things.” She was photographed by Beaton, knew Gertrude Stein and Picasso. “Picasso was a bit of a Sun King, such a personality. And such a libido.” Picasso had made a fruitless attempt on her virtue. Gertrude Stein, surprisingly, had not; but she had bought sixty-eight of Sir Francis’s paintings, and immortalized him by mentioning him in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

We had ordered our meal—“Notice the stew on the menu? Corsicans stew everything.” Dorothy had the charcuterie for which Corsica is famous, and then oxtail. I had the soup and the fish. Meanwhile we were drinking wine, Patrimonio, from the north of the island; tippling and talking in the bright still restaurant by the sea.

“I am not betraying a secret when I say that Francis was homosexual,” Dorothy said. “Everyone knew. What’s the secret? And, well, men are unfaithful to their wives. That is how men are, that is what they do. But when a man is unfaithful in a homosexual way there is a sort of guilt that comes over him. That was the bad part.”

“You knew that he was homosexual when you married him?”

“Um, yes. I thought I could cure him.”

“What was his libido like. Not on the Picasso scale, was it?”

“He had a libido, yes. And very low friends. Francis Bacon—you know who I mean?”

“I’ve just read a book about him.”

“He had a very grisly talent. Nostalgie de la boue, perhaps. And my husband’s friends were very rough.”

Ready for yer thrashing, now, Frawncis? the young men muttered to Bacon, flexing a leather belt, and then the whipping began. So the book (written by Bacon’s friend Daniel Farson) had said. I told this to Dorothy Carrington.

“Oh, yes, I suppose so. All of that,” she said. “But these low friends kept him going. Our marriage didn’t last. After he died I felt a duty to go back. I met some of them. They had given him money, they had kept him.”

“They were loyal to him?”

“Yes. In a strange way. I think they were atoning for something in their own past.”

It cannot have been a blissful marriage, yet she was as compassionate and uncritical as it was possible to be.

“Francis always had his own set. Cyril Connolly was one. He was frightfully rude to me in 1972—he snubbed me. I said hello to him. He turned away. ‘I was always Francis’s friend, not yours,’ he said. He was horrid.”

“What about Corsica?” I asked. It seemed the right question—we were now on dessert.

“Francis and I started coming to Corsica when we were absolutely penniless,” she said. She began to describe episodes in marriage that greatly resembled the plot of a D. H. Lawrence novel: aristocratic couple, escaping England, find an earthy people and life-affirming landscape, living in peasant huts, hiking the hills, sailing the coast in fishing smacks. It does not cost much. He paints, she writes. Even the sexual ambiguity was Lawrentian. Eating bad food, catching cold, moving slowly up and down the island; most of all, making friends and growing to understand Corsica.

“Francis was an artist, and I was a writer, so we didn’t expect any more. After the war, it was amazing here—mule tracks, nowhere to live, very primitive, still the code of the vendetta.”

Sir Francis and Lady Frederica! Artist and writer! People with class living on the margins! I remarked on that, but she dismissed it. “A title is nothing. I think it is no use at all—it is probably a disadvantage these days.”

And then she let drop the fact that she had been a Communist: Comrade Frederica, Lady Rose, waiting for the socialist millennium in a muleteer’s hut on a Corsican mountainside.

“But I left the party when I realized they were trying to influence my mind. I didn’t want anyone to tell me how to think.”

There were other parties for Sir Francis and his lady. Because of their bohemian habit of just scraping by, living at the edge, they got to know Corsica well; and after Sir Francis decamped to overdo it with his cronies in London, Dorothy stayed on and made Corsica her passion, seeing Corsican culture as something distinct from anything in Europe.

“People talk about the Arab influence, but they overrate it. Here, sentiment as we know it, does not exist. Very violent feelings exist. This mindset still exists among the older people—revenge and superstition.”

“For example?”

“Marrying for love, our idea of love, is quite remote here. I know a woman who had an affair with a young man. She became pregnant. The man went to the mainland to make some money, he said, but when he returned he was still dithering about marrying her. By then she’d had the child. She met him secretly and they talked, and when he made it plain that he was not going to marry her she took out a pistol and shot him.”

“That happens in other countries.”

“Perhaps. But she got a very light sentence,” Dorothy said. “Women occupy a special position in Corsica. In spite of what you see, the absence of women in the streets and in the cafes, they have their little trysts and assignations. I know it. There is a great risk.” And she smiled. “That is part of the attraction.”

She seemed to be speaking from intimate knowledge.

She said that if I saw nothing else in Corsica I should visit Filitosa—it was on the way to Bonifacio, where I would be catching the ferry to Sardinia. I had seen Bastia and Calvi and Corte and the Niolo region. Yes, get out and about, she said. It was how she herself had become acquainted with Corsica. Granite Island, still in print almost twenty-five years after it was first published, is full of excursions, long walking tours and risky and difficult journeys to the interior. It is a book without sarcasm or belittling or any complaints; only gratitude that she had been accepted as an honorary islander. It is no wonder she had lived there happily for almost fifty years.

We went together to Chiavari, one of those little villages high on a mountainside. I was interested in the Italian name, a place name from coastal Liguria. On the way we passed wildflowers—many of the same kind, a meager flower on an attenuated stalk.

“Asphodels,” Dorothy said. “They call it ‘the poor people’s bread,’ because the poor ate the bulb. Until Paoli introduced potatoes to Corsica everyone ate them. The Greeks called it ‘the flower of death,’ but it is edible. It is the flower of life. Lear mentions them.”

“I’ve got his book with me, Journal of a Landscape Painter.”

“Lovely book.”

The village was empty, though the church had been recently renovated, and the war memorial, commemorating the Corsicans who had died resisting the Italians in the Second World War, had fresh flowers on it.

Michael Bozzi, Héros de la Resistance. Fusillé le 30.8.1943.

“Fusillé—shot?”

“Executed,” she said. “They like the word ‘resistance’—better to resist than be for something. Corsicans can be so negative. A greater feeling of Corsican identity has caused more and more bombing incidents—against quite nice people, in some cases. The Williamses are a lovely couple. Lived here for years. They had a water mill. They were bombed.”

I said, “Corsicans have had a history of invasion, maybe that accounts for their resistance.”

“The Corsican way of life is a resistance to foreigners,” Dorothy said. “And Catholicism gives a life to the villages, like the Good Friday observance in Sartène, which is a jolly good picnic, and the men take their hats off as the statue of the Virgin goes by. Many of those men are gangsters, who rehabilitate themselves through the church.”

In the churchyard of Chiavari’s lovely church, looking down at the bay of Propriano and beyond to Ajaccio, Dorothy became thoughtful.

She said, “Corsicans helped the French run their empire, they worked in the colonies in Indochina and Africa.” We were walking among gravestones, with foreign place-names chiseled into them, where each deceased Corsican had breathed his last—Algiers, Oran, Tonkin.

“The Corsicans had always gone abroad, from the turn of the century until the 1960s. The nationalist movement started when there were no more colonies to exploit and no more jobs. It’s a Marxist argument, yes, but there it is.”

We went back to Ajaccio and had tea in her apartment. There were some of Francis’s paintings on the wall. I understood what she meant when she said people either loved them or hated them. I did not love them. It was an austere apartment; and yet Dorothy made no apologies. It was a writer’s apartment, a sitting room, a narrow kitchen, a bedroom—books and papers, an old typewriter, notes, drafts, notebooks, and some flowering plants in pots. But it was chilly there. The winters could be cold, she said.

She was frail, and yet she gave classes in poetry appreciation to get some income. She had just finished a book about belief in the supernatural in Corsica, The Dream Hunters of Corsica. “My rationalist friends will hate it.” Her life was full. She was settled here. “This is all I want,” she said, and it was not clear whether she meant the apartment in the first basement or the island of Corsica; but it came to the same thing.

Over tea we were talking about England.

“Margaret Thatcher!” Dorothy said. “Isn’t she awful? Look at her, a very humble upbringing in a grocer’s shop. But listen to her. That’s why she’s so careful in the way she talks, so ‘refained.’ And so careful in the way she dresses. And she is so intolerant.”

She had ceased to be a Marxist, but Lady Rose was still a bohemian.

In heavy rain, I left Ajaccio the day after my lunch with Dorothy, detouring around the village of Petreto-Bicchisano and down a winding road to Filitosa. Seeing the strange, almost monstrous beauty of Filitosa helped me to understand passages in Granite Island where Dorothy had been transformed in something akin to a spiritual experience—though in her brisk practical way Lady Rose probably would not use that word (but Dorothy Carrington might). She was changed: “On that day I entered Corsican life and became part of it,” she wrote.

In slippery mud and pouring rain I made my way through the cold forest to the simple settlement of stones. I saw no other people until I reached the place, and then as if in a bizarre reenactment I saw a wet family sheltering from the rain in the remains of a Filitosa stone hut—beefy Father, red-cheeked Mother, two pale children. Two thousand years fell away, as the cliché goes. They were German tourists, but it was a vivid glimpse of early man in the Mediterranean, in his hideout in the hills. At first the little tableau startled me, and then I walked on, laughing.

The little glade below Filitosa, where there were upright sculptures, was full of wildflowers. Now I knew what an asphodel was, and there were two varieties growing here, with buttercups and broom and pink lavender. A big middle-aged man and woman, wearing yellow raincoats, were embracing and kissing in a stone shelter farther down the hill, and still the rain fell. There was thunder, so loud a horse was spooked from where it stood under a tree, and it bolted into the downpour.

In the late forties and early fifties, this tiny village in the south of the island was just a place of mythical prehistory, a litter of strange stones, a nameless Stonehenge. Dorothy mentions in her book how a Corsican farmer realized that a convenient flat stone he had been using for a bench for years was actually a priceless historical object, an ancient carving of a man with a sword.

Only in the 1960s did the knowledgeable archaeologists arrive in Filitosa; then the megalithic ruins of Corsica become codified and the apparently barbarous carvings were more elaborately described and seen for what they are, wonders of Mediterranean prehistory. Dolmens, menhirs, and statue-menhirs—the most ancient of them probably four thousand years old. The terminology is not especially helpful, but it is almost irrelevant when you see the settlement at Filitosa, the shelters, the high walls, the battlements, the altar and the standing stones, the weird masklike portraiture of the heads on slender stalks of stone—perhaps gods or warriors—of this enigmatic culture.

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.

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.

“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.

Santa Teresa was only on the map for its port and the ferry landing; it was otherwise ignored, and yet it was the sort of provincial place that I liked. It had a hill and a pretty church and a dramatic view of the sea; and everyone knew everyone else. The local dish, a man told me, was wild boar (cinghiale, he said, with big zanne—tusks), and it was prepared in a variety of ways.

“But I’m a vegetarian,” I said.

“You want vegetables? You came to the right place.” And then he remembered that he had an uncle in Vermont.

In daylight everything was simple: I changed money, I bought a bus ticket, I found out the times of the buses, and then I was headed east across the top of the island on my way to Olbia.

At Palau, the bus stopped for passengers and a coffee break.

“There’s a place in the Pacific called Palau,” I said to the driver.

“Another one! Amazing.”

After talking casually for a little while I nerved myself and asked, “There used to be a lot of kidnappings in Sardinia.”

“You mean, a long time ago?”

“No, fifteen years ago, maybe a little more,” I said.

“Yes, I’ve heard there were a few kidnappings.”

A few! In the 1970s kidnapping of foreigners had amounted almost to a cottage industry, and Sardinia was known to have developed a culture of kidnapping. The style of crime had deep roots in mountainous regions of the island. Almost anyone with a little money visiting Sardinia was snatched and held in a peasant hut in the mountains by semi-literates demanding millions from their desperate family.

“Kidnapping is labor-intensive,” a Sardinian, Questore Emilio Pazzi, told Robert Fox, who described the encounter in his chronicle of the modern Mediterranean, The Inner Sea: “A band needs at least twelve men to act as look-outs, messengers and negotiators, as well as seizing and guarding the victim. Unlike the Mafia families of Sicily and Calabria, the gang works together for one crime only, and then disperses.”

“So this was long ago?” I asked the driver. “Who was responsible?”

“Bandits.”

“I read that it was sheep-stealers”—I did not know the Italian term for sheep-rustling—“but they ran out of sheep to steal, and so they decided to kidnap people.”

“Who knows these mountain people?”

His pride dented, he had become a trifle cool towards me, because I had impugned something in his culture.

“More people get killed in America,” he said.

“So true,” I said.

“Let’s go.”

It was only an hour or so from here to Olbia. After we arrived I walked the streets like a rat in a maze, looking for a likely place to stay: quiet, not expensive. As in most of the towns I had visited since Spain, business was terrible and in this wintry low season there were plenty of available rooms.

The weather was pleasant, brilliant sunshine, mild temperatures, lemons on the trees; and March was only a few days off. Olbia was on a gulf, but the port that served it was about five miles away at Golfo Aranci, the end of the train line. Just to see where these Italian ferries left from I took the train and walked around Aranci, marveling at how easy it was—generally speaking—to travel in this part of the Mediterranean. There were several ferries a day to different parts of Italy. But my idea was to take a train the length of Sardinia and then get a ferry to Sicily.

The woman who ran my boardinghouse in Olbia urged me to go to a particular restaurant that night where they were serving Sardinian specialties.

“No wild boar, thanks.”

“Many good things,” she said.

The first dish I was served was, appropriately, sardines. The root is the same, related to Sardinia, just as the word for a Sardinian plant (“which when eaten produced convulsive laughter, ending in death”) had given us the word sardonic—derisive, sneering—because sardonios in Greek meant “of Sardinia.”

“People in the country around here eat these all the time,” the waiter said.

Squid with celery and tomatoes; chickpea and bean soup; goat cheese covered with dried oregano; seaweed fried in batter; then fish, grilled triglia, and finally pastries.

Normally I hated eating alone, but this was Italy, the waiter was talkative, and after the emptiness and general solemnity of Corsican restaurants, this one was noisy and friendly. It was not a fancy place, and yet several grinning middle-aged men were talking on cellular phones as they ate. It was not business, it was just yakking in Italian. Uh, and then what did she say? Oh, yeah? Did you tell her you had the money? You imbecile!

After dinner I took a walk through the town and Olbia seemed, as many places seem while they are twinkling in the dark, a magical place—and I was glad I had come. The reality of daylight was that it was a rough place, and the more I walked the more miserable it seemed, with clusters of mean houses, or else apartment houses, and beyond them stony fields and sheep and goats. The poverty and all the talk of emigration in search of work made Sardinia seem like Ireland, an offshore island that had plenty of culture but no money. Apart from the touristy parts, the Costa Smeralda of the speculating Aga Khan, there was little development. This was a remote Italian province of narrow villages and a hinterland of sheep and emptiness.

One of the Sardinian habits that was inescapable was the advertising all over town of a death or an anniversary of death by sticking up posters of the deceased on any vertical surface. Many of the posters were as large as a bath towel, and except for the black border could have been mistaken for election posters. With the photo, many in color, was a name in bold letters—PADRE or FRANCESO or MARIOLINA or PIERO or SALVATORE. It is a variety of lugubrious advertising of grief, common in Irish newspapers, but fairly bizarre appearing on fences and walls, though the funereal faces had a strange appropriateness on the sides of derelict or condemned buildings.

I was copying down some names and sentiments from these grieving flyers when I looked over and saw that an African was staring at me. I had seen such Africans, very dark and silent, in Palau and also at Santa Teresa. They were in Marseilles and in some of the other large cities on the Riviera, and I guessed they were from the former French colonies in West Africa. Tall, unsmiling, with swollen eyes and matted linty hair, with clawed and scarified cheeks, they hovered near squares of plastic on which were arranged various items for sale, sunglasses, watches, belts, purses, wallets, toys—junk, on the whole, and one unsmiling African’s junk was identical to another’s. It had not seemed odd to me to see them in the south of France—it was the modern version of the empire striking back; after all, innumerable French people had insinuated themselves in Africa for hundreds of years, hawking all sorts of dubious merchandise. But what were these Africans doing in a small town in Sardinia?

“Hello—good morning,” I said to that staring man in Italian. “Are you looking at me?”

“No,” he said, his reddened eyes, with dark-flecked whites, fastened to me.

Almost purple, with dusty hair, his wool coat wrapped around him, long legs, discolored and broken teeth, and those spotty staring eyes; he could not have been a stranger apparition in this small town with its unaccommodating provincial air.

“What are you selling?”

“Whatever you want.”

“It looks like a lot of Chinese merchandise to me.”

“No. These are good things.”

His Italian was shaky, supplemented by French, which was better than mine. His name was Omar.

“Chinese watches. Chinese glasses. Chinese picture frames. Cigarette lighters from China.”

“What do you want to buy?”

“One kilo of hasheesh.”

Omar did not smile.

“Just a joke,” I said.

Two of his friends, thinking that he was in trouble with a plainclothes policeman, stepped over to listen. Their names, they told me, were Yusuf and Ahmed.

“Three Muslims in a little Catholic town.”

They stared at me.

“From what country?”

“Senegal,” Omar said. He was older and taller than the others. “I come from a place ten kilometers from Dakar. My town is called Tuba.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“More than ten years,” Omar said.

By “here” he meant the Mediterranean generally—out of Africa. He explained that he had lived for six years in Cannes, and also in Livorno and Florence. He had lived in Olbia for two years.

“And them?” I nodded at Yusuf and Ahmed.

“A few months.”

“Why here?”

“Olbia is a good place—not expensive,” Omar said. “We have two rooms. We all live together.”

“Do you have any Italian friends?”

“No—well, maybe a few.”

“What about North Africa? There are lots of Muslims in Algeria and Morocco, and business might be better than here.”

Business might have been better anywhere but here in Olbia where they stood, ignored and idle, while the townsfolk hurried past them looking slightly nervous. There were no tourists in Olbia.

“We can’t go to those places. No documents. But here I have a paper. So I come and go. The police don’t bother us at all.”

“When you say ‘come and go’ do you mean you return to Africa occasionally?”

“Yes. I plan to go there in a few months. My family is there. Wives. Children. All that.”

He had a clumsy clacking way with Italian, and I thought I might have misheard. “Did you say ‘wives’?”

“Yes.”

“More than one?”

“Only two.”

“Children?”

“Only a few,” he said. “Six.”

The young ragged man and his apprentices fascinated me, and seemed to represent an entirely new kind of penetration in the Mediterranean, a region which had known so many immigrants over thousands of years. It was a poor town on an island that was so poor the local people left it to find work. But it was also a town which had never before seen Africans.

There were some more Africans at the railway station. I asked them the question I had meant to ask Omar. Why not get a job?

“There is no work. We would work in a factory if we could find one. But there are no factories.”

“So what’s your plan?”

“No plan. Stay here.”

Heading south, I took the train to a town in the north-central part of the island, Chilivani, a railway junction. Out of Olbia, the rocky sheep-nibbled hinterland of scrubby trees and low hills were all tumbled together and blown by the wind, like the Scottish lowlands. There were rocky peaks in the distance where, in the manner of Corsicans, the Nuraghic people of Sardinia had traditionally made their homes, away from the coasts, and fought off the numerous invaders. Beyond Chilivani, the people in the mountainous region of Barbagia (“extreme examples of the Sardinian national character”) had never acknowledged any rule over them and had never paid taxes. The Romans had failed to make them citizens (which was why they called these people Barbagians—barbarians). Sardinia had been annexed but so little did it figure in Rome’s plans that it was used as a place to which Jews were deported under the rule of Tiberias (A.D. 14–37). More recently, the Italians had no more luck than the Romans in bringing Sardinians under control, even with enormous numbers of policemen sent from the mainland to pacify the remote districts. Still, rural crime—murder, sheep-stealing, extortion—were unusually high in Sardinia. The Barbagians had been Barbagians for two thousand years.

There were stone walls everywhere along the line, and as far as I could see, every mile of landscape demarcated. I was in a two-coach train filled with yelling youngsters on their way home from school. They were going fifteen or twenty miles away, and though they were very loud, and even rowdy, cackling in their incomprehensible dialect, when a woman straightened up and said, “Excuse me, but would you please close that window?” two of them instantly obeyed.

It was a bleak untidy beauty in a sparsely populated island. We were among vineyards, running past a range of granite peaks. There were sheep grazing inside the walls in the foreground and in some places cork trees, like those in Corsica, stripped of their bark.

The noisiest youngsters got off at a country station called Berchidda, where there was a small settlement, and others at Oschiri, which had the look of a penal colony. Many Sardinian towns looked like that, and others looked ancient, and some had the prefabricated look of having been thrown up last week.

Chilivani was no more than an intersection of two railway lines, in a strong wind. I sat for a while and eventually connected with a train that was coming from Sassari, a bigger faster train that sped past a continuous landscape of walled-off pastures, all over the hillsides, under a large sky of tumbling woolly clouds that somewhat resembled the unshorn sheep in these pastures.

We were less than twenty miles from the western coast, but so little connection was there between these sheep farms and the coast we might have been a thousand miles from the sea. That was a Mediterranean feature. Life was different away from the shore. Five or ten miles inland from anywhere in the Mediterranean and you were in a separate world.

Much of what I saw was solid rock, long slopes of veined and wrinkled stone, and meadows of stone too, the whole place like an ancient lava flow, except that this was not fertile and volcanic but ironlike crusts of granite. Some of the smooth stone slopes also were partitioned with bouldery walls. I had never seen such a landscape before, nor had I ever imagined it except on a distant planet.

At the town of Bonorva all the newer houses were made of gray cinder blocks. Out of town was a vast stony landscape of tussocky grass and dark twisted trees, the big sky full of smoky clouds. I made a note, the landscape looks abused, and only later discovered that many mining companies, foreign as well as Italian, had come and ransacked it for minerals, for antimony, coal, lead, silver and zinc.

Farther south the sight of a mustached man in the middle of nowhere, leading sheep down a path from one field to another. A shepherd—the first of many I saw. Shepherding was as old an occupation in the Mediterranean as fishing, and this man with his flat cap and his crook and his dog represented to me a timelessness that was both melancholy and indestructible.

Around four, I looked at my map, saw that we were near the town of Oristano, and decided to get off here and spend a night and a day, what the hell.

Oristano seemed to be a port on the map, but my map was not very accurate. Oristano, five miles inland, might have been a hundred, for it had no real connection to the sea. It was just another small simmering town in the middle of a hot plain, the most provincial of places, at a great remove from the world. The far-off whistle of my departing train gave me a pang of regret, but then I thought: No—this is the Mediterranean, too! Everything matters! and generally consoled myself with the thought of all the money I was saving by staying here for the night, rather than in the bright lights of big-city Cagliari.

Oristano had a moribund atmosphere that was almost palpable, enervating heat, and an audible monotony that was like the drowsy buzz of a single futile bumblebee. I felt a sort of ghastly frivolity in the idea that by parachuting off the train with no plan in my head I was pointlessly insinuating myself in a small Sardinian town which was off the tourist trail—not because it was obscure and hard to reach but because it was utterly boring.

It was a marketplace for the nearby farms, and the townies measured themselves against the peasants who turned up to sell vegetables or meat at the market. These peasants, Barbagians to their gnarled fingertips, were toothless and skinny and undersized people. The women wore shawls and four skirts and argyle knee socks and were more whiskery than their menfolk, who chewed broken pipestems and look oppressed. After the Oristano market closed I imagined them scuttling back to the hills and sheltering under toadstools. But they were also noted for their toughness—ferrigno, they were called, made of iron.

The only aspects of the outside world that had penetrated here were the extremely violent American videos and Disney comics—we are cultural leaders, after all, specializing in the criminal and the infantile. Italian culture in Oristano was represented by the Church, porno comics, chain-smoking, a plethora of shoe stores. The rest was harmless obsession, Italian here—but generally true of the Mediterranean region—the mild ostentation of the middle-class women in cutting a good figure, and the male passion about sports that bordered on the homoerotic.

Italy had allowed Sardinia to be self-governing and given it a degree of autonomy that prevented the island from nursing the sort of political grievances that were so common in Corsica. There were no bomb-throwers in Sardinia. It was a rugged place—none of the poodles and lapdogs of France, only functional mutts that had to work to earn their keep—sheep dogs and guard dogs.

My landlady in Oristano, Regina, was a voluble Italian, whose husband worked in Cagliari. “I want you to be happy. I want this to be like your own house.” Her flunkies and room cleaners were Sardinian women from the interior, who were not forthcoming when I asked them about their own language and culture. It seemed a vaguely colonial arrangement of the memsahib and her native servants, but they got along well and worshiped in the same church.

The more I saw of Oristano, the stronger I felt that my chief objection was that it was the sort of inbred town, with its own rules and snobberies, that I grew up in. It was full of lowbrows but it was neighborly. Strangers in the boardinghouse always greeted each other, and when someone entered a restaurant everyone said hello, calling out “How are you?” from where they sat. It was perhaps not very different from Medford, Massachusetts, and friendly and frightening in about equal parts. Excessive friendliness is perhaps a philistine trait; in a place where no one reads, no one values or understands contemplative solitude, and so they need each other to be friendly and talkative.

I was on my way to the station in Oristano when I was accosted by an oriental man. He said, in Italian, “A hundred lire,” and clicked a cigarette lighter in my face.

“Where do you come from?”

“China.”

Another Chinese man appeared.

“You want a lighter?” he asked in English.

“How did you get here?”

“Cargo ship.”

“Do you live here?”

Yet another Chinese man joined us, and he muttered to his friends. They were all in their thirties, and were decently dressed. They spoke little Italian and even less English. They had chosen an unpromising place to hawk cigarette lighters. Perhaps this was a town that was not dominated by African hawkers. My questions and my lack of interest in their twenty-cent cigarette lighters seemed to drive them away, but where to?

Africans living by their wits in Olbia, Chinese seamen boosting lighters in Oristano. What was this all about? The natives of the Mediterranean were always harking back to the past, which was glorious; but the present was much stranger, and baffling.

The railway to Cagliari rattled down a long flat valley of Campidano. I dozed and made notes, and I was surprised by how warm the weather was—sunny and lovely this day in early March.

Along with the Catholic chapel in the midst of Cagliari station, with the Holy Eucharist present in the tabernacle (a mass every Monday at ten-thirty, and every feast day at ten), there was also a pornographic bookstore, a photocopy machine, a barbershop, a coffee shop and three public telephones. This was the new Italy, after all.

The city itself, built on a slope, old brown houses and offices, resembled Marseilles but without the Marseillaise air of criminality. Cagliari seemed huge after my experience of Sardinia’s provincial towns, but after a day it seemed very small. I had the impression that no one ever went there, but when I mentioned this the local people said, “This place is crowded in the summer. You should see Spiaggia de Poetto!”

I went there, to this beach, and walked and saw the flamingos in the nearby lagoons. On this weekday in winter the beach was almost deserted, but that hardly mattered. I sat in the sunshine, read for a while, and walked back to town.

In a Cagliari restaurant that night I was writing my diary, having finished my meal, when I noticed that the place was empty—all the customers had gone. The waiters, the cashier and the cook were just about to sit down to eat, having put a sign saying Closed on the front window.

I caught a waiter’s eye. “I’d like to pay.”

“But you’re not finished,” he said.

“Yes, the meal was good.”

“Your work,” he said, and gestured to my notebook, my papers and paraphernalia. “Look, I can see you’re busy. Finish your work. It’s no problem for us. We’re just eating here.”

After I was done they invited me to join them. I asked them about Sardinia, but they said it was a horribly dull place, nothing ever happened here, and so they engaged me on their favorite subject, American basketball. Now about this Michael Jordan …

There were Africans in the streets of Cagliari. The next day, on my way to buy a ferry ticket, I asked a man about them.

“They’re Africans,” he said, and he shrugged, the Italian gesture for Who cares? “They’re here in the summer, lots of them. They sell little things.”

“They’re from?”

“Who knows? Africa. Ghana—down there.” He shrugged again.

“What do Sardinians think of them?”

He jerked his shoulders again and grunted, the fatalistic Eh! His tolerance was a variety of indifference. Italians are not threatened by abstractions, and unless they are directly provoked, Italians are great live-and-let-livers. In spite of their manic stereotypes, their refusal to fuss is one of their most endearing characteristics; coping with disorder is part of Italian life; and conscious of this they often make a virtue of not getting excited.

The scariest-looking people in Sardinia were not the Barbagians, the Senegalese, the toothless shepherds, sheep-rustlers, kidnappers and Gypsies, but rather the punks of Cagliari. Young, filthy, ragged, with greasy hair and dreadlocks, rings through their noses, their lips, sniffing glue, gagging on wine and shouting vicious abuse at passersby.

There were plenty of these strange young people hanging about in gangs near the castle, where I had gone for its good view of the harbor.

“So what have we got here?” I asked a man, while six punks quarreled over a bottle. They wore studded dog collars and chains, and one had a tin cup that clinked at his belt.

“It’s a shame,” the man said.

“Anarchists?”

“No. They believe in nothing.”

“Nihilists, then?”

“No. They are abandoned.”

“There are young people like that in England and America.”

“I’ve seen them in Latin America,” the man said.

Now we were walking along, up a steep cobblestone street.

“In Brazil,” he said. “I lived in Brazil for three years. I never thought I would see them here. It was very strange there. It was ridiculous, really. Brazil is a huge country—rich too.”

He laughed out loud.

“So there were these paupers sitting on a mountain of gold!”

The expression made me laugh, and my laughter encouraged him.

“Here it’s the opposite. We’re rich, but we’re sitting on a mountain of ruins.”

I asked him whether he ever went to Sicily.

“Why would I want to go there?” he said, and tapped my shoulder. “Just a joke. It’s surely a nice place. But when I leave here I go to the continent”—by which he meant the Italian mainland.

The travel agent who sold me the ferry ticket to Palermo said, “You’d be better off taking the plane. It costs the same.”

It was sixty-seven dollars for the ferry from Cagliari to Palermo, but this way I had a first-class cabin and because it was an overnighter it was both my fare to Sicily and a bed. And there was the added pleasure of setting out from Cagliari in the evening, watching the lights of the city recede; and after a good night’s sleep, seeing the coast of Sicily appear with the sunrise.

8

The Ferry Torres to Sicily

It would have been quicker for me to sail to Africa. It was a much shorter trip from Sardinia to Tunisia. Cagliari was only about 120 miles from Bizerte, city of Berbers; it was more like 180 to Palermo, Sicily. But it was generally bad manners, if not heresy, to mention Italy’s proximity to Africa and its melanzane—“eggplants,” as black Africans are described in Italian slang.

Under a full moon in a cloudless night sky the ferry glided out of the Gulf of Cagliari, past the lighthouses and beacons, and soon the city and its twinkling hill was far astern. We were at sea and, as another Ulysses—James Joyce’s—saw it, “the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.”

The Sicilian crew were offhand and seemed to make a virtue of being unhelpful, so busy were they being themselves, smiling at each other with yellow faces and fangy teeth, muttering backtalk in slushy accents, and shrugging, and avoiding eye contact with any of the passengers, and all the while preserving their shabby dignity. At first there had been few passengers, but just before we left, a great number hurried on board, but few of them were cabin people. They slept in chairs, smoked on the deck, lurked in the passageways, played cards in the lounge.

The galley steward fussed when he saw me showing up for dinner.

“You’re late—I can’t help you.”

“The ship’s just leaving,” I said. “What time do you close?”

It was a buffet, there was food all over the place and not many eaters. But this was just a little spirited obstinacy on the part of the steward.

“We were going to close right now,” he said, and sighed and looked overworked, and shook his head. “Oh, I don’t know.”

“I am just an ignorant American, but I’m hungry.”

“Where did you learn Italian?”

“From my mother.”

“Okay, go ahead. But all we have is menu food. No natural.”

“What’s ‘natural’?”

That set off in him a virtuoso flurry of gestures, hurried shrugging, the what-do-you-expect-me-to-do? pursing of hands, and he looked around in his impatience, as Italians do, as though pleading for a witness.

I paid my money, I got my receipt, I chose my food, as the ship’s engine made a meat-grinder noise of departure. “Natural” was a sign of the times; the theory of sensible eating had arrived in the island of spaghetti-benders: it meant health food, low-fat mozzarella and low-sodium pasta. The rest was fried and fatty.

A young man, monotonously complaining and stuffing his face with pasta, had put one foot on the arm of his girlfriend’s chair, in a sort of misplaced tenderness, as though chunking his big clumsy foot against her elbow was a romantic gesture.

I hate the noisy way you eat

,

I hate your nose, I hate your feet.

Because in Italy there was such an ingrained contempt for the law, la legge, it continued to amaze me that anything as orderly as meals and departures and arrivals were timely; yet my experience of boats and trains was favorable—there were very few hitches. Mealtime, for example, was sacred. It would have been unusual if the steward had turned me away from the buffet. Traveling in Italy, I could nearly always depend on a meal at the end of the day and a cheery person to serve it. I was seldom disappointed.

The life of the mind was something else. Any honest thoughtful effort, any attempt at seriousness or intellectual ambition, was usually ridiculed. I knew that I would be made a fool of for my diligent note-taking and—though I tried to hide it—my air of scholarly industry. Only suckers tried to get ahead, bookish people were laughable, and already I could sense that once again I was among philistines, with all the responsive jollity and hearty appetite that was usual with philistinism.

As far as I could tell there were very few Sardinians on the Torres, but there were all sorts of Sicilians: city slickers (Armani suits, pointy shoes), smug Palermitanis (overcoats draped on their shoulders like a cape), sinister toughs (sunglasses at midnight), and all the rest: the students, the punks, the poor; from “men of respect” (as the mafiosi called themselves) who looked stylish and unreliable, to Gypsies with gold teeth and long skirts and scarves, squatting on the floor and breast-feeding babies.

I saw a sign, Your Muster Station is—(II Vostro Punto di Riunione è—) and it filled me with alarm.

Supine in my cabin, listening to the engine’s drone and the thumping of the screws, I could just imagine the panic and clawing and yelling and colorful language and class warfare if the ship ran into trouble. I thought: Do I want to be in a sinking boat with these people? Do I dare to share a lifeboat with them?

In a sunny Sicilian dawn, the sun blazing behind a golden haze, we entered the Bay of Palermo, mountains on either side and a great harmonizing background of stucco-colored peaks behind the ancient buildings. The tallest man-made structures were the church steeples and cathedral domes.

Rather than stay in Palermo, where I had been before, I wanted to spend a day in Cefalù, just down the railway line; and then go to Messina and Taormina and Siracusa, places I had never seen. Still, I needed to walk in order to stretch and get the stiffness out of my legs, and I wanted just to browse in the city. So I left my bag at the station and then looked around, and decided on a hike.

Whenever I asked directions I was usually told the place I wanted was “very far” (lontanissimo) even when it was a fifteen-minute walk. I was urged to catch a bus.

“But you’ll need a ticket.”

“Of course.”

“You buy one there.”

Silly me for not knowing that bus tickets were sold in a seedy little tobacco and porno shop, Bar “T”—Cafe Stagnitta—Articoli da Fumo, Articoli da Regalo, Articoli da Gioca—smoking paraphernalia, presents and games. And bus tickets, of course. It was preposterous to think that a bus ticket would be sold in a bus or in a vending machine. A man who sold bus tickets had to have a large stock of cigarettes, and candy, and tit-and-bum magazines.

The swagger of the Sicilian men in Palermo was remarkable for its confidence, the men, swarthy as Arabs, shouting to each other. Anthony Burgess once heard a young man in Palermo telling his friends how he had devised a foolproof method for discovering whether his new bride was sexually innocent on his wedding night. “He was going to paint his penis purple, he said, and if his bride evinced surprise he was going to cut her throat.”

I was fumbling with my wallet, when a woman took me aside. She said, “You’re a stranger?”

“Oh, yes. American.”

“Watch your pockets,” she said.

“Thanks. I’ll do that.”

“You see, Palermo is very beautiful—eh—”

She lifted the fingers of her right hand and flicked forward, beneath her chin.

“We’re good people—eh—”

Again she grazed her chin with her fingers.

“And you’ll be all right here—eh—”

Her gesturing continued, as she looked slightly away, and then with a final caution, she walked off.

I had seen this chin-flick gesture before. I had understood it to mean a deep defiance, Up yours, so to speak. But that is another, more severe use of it, say in Naples and north. Here, the flicking fingers were meant as a contradiction. Yes, I am saying this is a nice place but notice that I am indicating with my hand that it is not true in every instance; be warned.

That was nicely candid. Standing at a bus stop, the gestures were more subtle as a priest joined the little crowd. There were some mutters but no one spoke to the priest. Italians—men especially—squint at priests’ skirts. They believe that priests who pass butcher shops turn the meat bad. Priests are neither men nor women. They have the evil eye.

I was alert to everyone around me when I saw a priest in Italy. A silence fell when this one appeared, but often there would be a series of simultaneous gestures, because of the belief that priests had the evil eye. For an Italian man, the commonest and most effective way of dealing with the clerical evil eye was to touch his own testicles and subtly prong his fingers at the priest. I never found out what Italian women did. Perhaps they prayed, but in any case they were less anxious than the men in matters that related to the supernatural.

I took a bus to Monte Pellegrino, on the recommendation of Goethe, who had written about it. The high hill was outside the northwest corner of the city and as this was a weekday in March, there was hardly anyone else on the footpath. I had been told that I could see as far as the Lipari Islands from the summit of Pellegrino; the day was too hazy to see any distance, yet the view of Palermo and its bay was splendid, enough of a reward for a two-hour walk.

But the view had stirred something in me. Walking down the slope towards the bus, I became agitated about my trip. Perhaps it was the sight of all that coast, and the thought that almost two months into it, where was I? Kicking along a dusty path in Sicily made me feel tiny, overwhelmed by everything that lay ahead of me—Italy, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Egypt, all the rest of North Africa, not to mention the war in Croatia and Bosnia, the islands of Cyprus and Malta.

Then I remembered that I had plenty of time. I had no job, no deadlines, nothing else; and I reminded myself why I had come here. To eat spaghetti and talk to people and, first of all, to see Cefalù.

Cefalù was where the English Satanist Aleister Crowley had lived in the 1920s and 30s, studying yoga and black magic and writing dismal poetry. He was also a mountaineer, and had climbed a number of high peaks—had even worked out a method for climbing Mount Everest, “rushing the summit.” His Confessions, published only in 1970, showed him to be one of the loonier figures in recent history. He was a dabbler and a dilettante, and as a wealthy man—he had inherited a fortune from the family brewing business—he could afford to be. There was no end to his high spirits. He filed his teeth to points. He showed these fangs to women and said, “Would you like a serpent’s kiss?” A number of women doted on him. Today he would be called a New Age guru, they would be called groupies or cultists. He had named his favorite sex partner The Ape of Thoth.

So, after a late lunch, I traveled about twenty miles down the coast on the line to Messina and stopped at Cefalù to see whether anything remained of the Crowley ménage. But no one in town recognized the name of Aleister Crowley and, though I walked the streets, I could not find the house where he had worked black magic and tried to bamboozle visitors and wore a sorcerer’s funny hat.

But mine was not a wasted trip. There was something pagan and animistic in the monstrous lions carved in the facade of Cefalù’s cathedral—how appropriate that Crowley had chosen to live in a place where the supernatural still mattered. There were oranges and lemons on the trees and behind the little town, snowcapped mountains. And from the cliff at Cefalù, I could at last see to the east the Lipari cluster of islands, also known as the Aeolian Islands. The volcano Stromboli was regarded in ancient times as the home of Æolus, god of the winds.

Late in the day, I caught an express train to Messina. It was called “The Archimedes” (the mathematician was born in Siracusa, on the other side of Sicily) and it was due in Messina in a couple of hours.

More interesting than the fruit trees and the sight of the sea and the snowy peaks was the man next to me in the compartment, scribbling notations on sheets of paper lined for musical scores. He was murmuring, but he was not humming. He was thoroughly absorbed in his scribbling. Occasionally he tapped his foot. He was writing music?

I would not have believed such a thing was possible except that various people had claimed they had done it, the most famous example being Beethoven in his deafness.

The man was small and bald, about fifty, with a pleasant face. He quickly filled three sheets of paper with music. Then I interrupted him with a grunt.

He stopped tapping his feet. He smiled. “Yes?”

“Are you writing music?”

“Yes,” and showed me the sheet with beads and squiggles on it. “I usually write music on this train. It’s not hard.”

“But you have no instrument. There’s no music.”

“This is music. And I don’t need an instrument. I write from memory.”

“Amazing.”

“The music is already in my mind before I write it. When I get home I will continue.”

“In silence?”

“I use a piano at home for composing, but my favorite instrument is an accordion.”

This odd word fisarmonica I had learned in high school as a joke, and this was the first time in my life I had ever heard it spoken. And this man was a fisarmonicista.

“It’s a typical Sicilian instrument. But I am the only composer of accordion music that I know. I think I might be the only one in Sicily. I love modern music, and mine has folkloric melodies in it.”

His name was Basilio. He had just been in Palermo playing in a piano bar, both piano and electric keyboard. Not only his own music but Frank Sinatra hits.

“‘Staranger Een Danah,’ ‘Conflowah Me,’ ‘Myweh’—they are the most beautiful,” he said, mingling English and Italian.

“You spend a lot of time traveling back and forth to Palermo.”

“I don’t have a problem. I’m not married,” he said, and laughed. “I have a girlfriend, though. My family is always asking me when I’m getting married, but I say to them, ‘Eh, what about my music?’ ”

We were passing more orchards and a stretch of coast where there were empty beaches.

“Look, all empty,” he said, seeing that I had glanced out the window. “It’s so lovely. Sicily is warm from March until October, but no one comes here—why?”

“Maybe something to do with the Mafia?”

“The newspapers! The newspapers! It’s all lies,” Basilio said. “All the news is about Mafia and danger. Eh, where’s the Mafia? Do you see them?”

“I haven’t looked,” I said, startled by his sudden energy.

“Forget it—it’s lies. As for beauty, listen to me—three-fourths of Sicily is untouched. Absolutely untouched! No one comes here—they’re afraid. Of what?”

“Yes, it is very pretty,” I said, wishing I had not roused his fury.

He was now talking to the other person in the compartment, a man in a heavy sweater and purple socks, holding on his lap a damp and stained parcel that stank of cheese.

“We have—what—a million people or so?” Basilio said.

“About a million,” the man agreed.

Surely more? I thought. In fact, there are more than five million people in Sicily.

“A little island. Not many people. And so that makes it all the more friendly,” Basilio said. “What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a writer, Basilio.”

“That’s great. Please, when you write”—he put his hands together in a little prayer gesture, then he held them apart, cupping them in a Do-me-a-favor mode—“tell people it’s nice here.”

It’s nice here. Lemons, oranges. Composers on trains. Staranger Een Danah!

“I travel a little myself,” he said. “We find Sicilians everywhere. You don’t have to speak French or English. There’s always a Sicilian taxi driver!”

“You’ve been in Sardinia?”

“To my shame, no, not to Sardinia. The purest dialect is Sardinian—the worst is Bergamo. As for Corsica—what’s wrong with them? Why don’t the Corsicans admit they’re Italians?” He was laughing. “I love to travel, of course. Although I haven’t been to other places in Italy, I have been everywhere in Sicily.”

He sounded a bit like Henry David Thoreau, who wrote, I have traveled much in Concord.

“Sicily fascinates me, the way the dialects here reflect Spanish, French, and Arabic.”

“I am headed for Siracusa.”

“One of the best places,” Basilio said. “Ancient. And natural too. Up north, the beaches are filthy. But here they are clean.”

We happened to be passing one that was brown with muddy water from runoff.

“Some of the beaches are a little muddy from the recent rains.”

“Very muddy, I’d say.” And they were strewn with such rubbish and rocks, and bounded by trash-filled streams and open sewers. Italians were such litterers.

“It will pass! Listen, Germans come here in November and go swimming. For them the water is warm!”

Protesting that I was a wonderful person, and urging me to tell people how delightful Sicily was at all times of the year, he called out, “See you again!” and got off at Santa Agata di Militello. Then it was just small hot stations and embankments and so many tunnels it was as though we had traveled to Messina in the dark.

The most God-fearing places in Italy were those that had experienced a natural disaster; such an event was inevitably a goad to Italian piety, and nothing provoked prayer like a flood or an earthquake or a tidal wave. Messina had all three just after Christmas in 1908, when almost the entire city, in fact this whole corner of the island, was destroyed. Part of Calabria was also leveled. Almost a hundred thousand people died in the one-day disaster (earthquake at 5 A.M., tidal wave just after that, then flooding; cholera came later)—it was equivalent to the entire population of the city.

That is why there are no ancient buildings in Messina, though quite a lot of talk about how the Virgin Mary engaged in vigorous correspondence with Messina’s city fathers and reassured them, “We bless you and your city.” There is a large pillar in the harbor of Messina, too, with a statue of Mary, making a gesture of blessing that also looks as though she is dropping a yo-yo, and under it, for every ship to see, the same message in Latin, Vos et ipsam civitatem benedicimus.

A melancholy plaque at Messina railway station records the fact that 348 railway workers died in the earthquake (A pietoso ricordo dei 348 funzionari ed agenti periti nel terremoto del 28 dic MCMVIII).

It was easy enough to find a place to stay in Messina, and no problem eating, but apart from strolling along the harbor, and admiring the Calabrian coast across the straits—lumpy gray mountains streaked with snow—there was not much to do in this rebuilt city. It had obviously been brought back to life, but it was not quite the same afterwards. Or perhaps it was something else.

I fell into conversation with a man in Messina who told me that, without any hesitation, Catania was an absolute haunt of crime.

Catania is a port about halfway between Messina and Siracusa on the southeast-facing side of the Sicilian triangle.

“The Mafia control the whole city,” he said.

Now and then you got one of these Sicilians who admitted flat-out that the Mafia was pervasive and dangerous; and they could be specific, too, about certain towns or cities.

“How do you explain it?”

“Business is good there. They get a share of it. And the drugs.”

“Because it’s a port?”

“That’s probably the main reason.”

“Palermo and Messina are also ports. So perhaps the Mafia is strong in these places as well.”

His reply was the Italian lip-droop and finger signal, a combination of affirmative gestures that meant Indubitably.

I could well believe that Messina was one of the Mafia strongholds. Such a place seemed shut and unwelcoming and buzzing with suspicion. There was plenty of money to be made by getting a stranglehold on the port; it was so easy to be disruptive if you controlled the wharves. Organized crime was seldom entrepreneurial; it was mainly a lazy business of bullying and intimidation. The idea was to find someone with a cash flow and strongarm that person or business.

All areas of Italian life, even the Church, had been penetrated by the Mafia. In 1962, the Franciscan monks of the monastery of Mazzarino in central Sicily were put on trial, charged with extortion, embezzlement, theft, and murder. The prior, Padre Carmelo, was the capo of this band of Mafia monks. He was a sinister, sprightly man—greedy and libidinous, with Mazzarino in his foxy jaws. The monks were eventually found guilty of most of the charges at their trial in Messina. And it emerged that what was perhaps the most surprising aspect of their criminality was that it had not interfered with their religious routines. The fact that they entertained prostitutes, and ordered killings, and amassed large sums of money in their extortionate activities never prevented their hearing confessions, saying masses, or preaching at funerals—in at least one case, the monk in question saying a funeral high mass and preaching piously over the body of a man he had ordered killed.

Italians use obscure gestures and elaborate euphemisms whenever they talk about criminal organizations—the Mafia in Sicily, the ’Ndrangheta of Calabria, the Camorra of Naples. Even the most specific word in Italian for the fees the gangsters charge to businessmen they threaten is somewhat vague—tangenti. It is a simple word, meaning “extras.” But anyone in the know defines it as “extortion.”

Bored with Messina—and anyway I would be back here next week to take the ferry to Calabria—I caught a train to Taormina, twenty-five miles down the coast.

Lovely beaches! Basilio had said to me, but the beaches outside Messina were littered with old fridges and rusty stoves, junked cars, hovels, plastic trash and rusty tomato cans. Then it was just driftwood, and finally stony beaches. At Nizza di Sicilia station I saw my first tourists in Italy. They were of course Germans, two young women wearing army boots and heaving forty-pound rucksacks and studying their handbook Sizilien; they were sturdy, short-haired, sapphic.

They got off with me at Taormina, the elegant shoreline station. The town itself is high on a cliff, glittering and vertical.

At the station a man approached a conductor of a train going in the opposite direction and said, “Where are we?”

“Taormina Giardini,” the conductor said.

“And where are you going?”

“Venice.” And the conductor turned his back and reboarded the Venice Express, Siracusa to Venice, a long haul of more than seven hundred miles.

I began walking up the hill, thinking that it was not far, but a shrewd taxi driver followed me, guessing that I would get sick of the climb. He laughed when I got in.

“Gardens, lovely view,” he narrated, then glanced at the people by the road. “Germans.”

Farther along, he said, “English church. Beautiful, eh?” and paused. “Germans.”

They were the inevitable low season people wherever I went.

The main attraction at Taormina was said to be its ancient theater, built by the Greeks and completely remodeled by the Romans. But that was simply a backdrop, the classical excuse. Taormina had been taken up by the Edwardians as a place to droop and be decadent. It was a lovely town, but it was now entirely given over to tourists. There was nothing else generating income for the local people. It was one of the more anglicized seaside resorts of Italy, and though it was now simply a tourist trap, retailing ceramics, and postcards, and letter openers, and clothes of various kinds, it had once known true scandals, mainly imported ones, perpetrated by the northern Europeans escaping the cold winter. It was strictly seasonal. In the early part of this century all the hotels in Taormina were closed in the summer.

Taormina had been mainly for wealthy foreigners, though a title helped. Any number of sponging aristocrats idled away their time among Taormina’s flower gardens, and a German baron who was an unrepentant pederast became something of a local celebrity for taking photographs of young Italian boys holding what certainly looked like lengths of salami. These pictures were sold with views of Mount Etna in Taormina’s shops.

D. H. Lawrence had spent time in Taormina, writing poetry. His well-known poem “Snake” he had written in Taormina, describing how he had been standing in his pajamas and seen a thirsty snake and bashed it over the head; and how he had to expiate his pettiness. But snakes were not Lawrence’s problem in Taormina. His daily chore was finding ways to control his wife, Frieda, in her adulteries.

Night in Taormina was silence and skulking cats. These tourist towns shrank in the off-season, and yet at this time of year eighty years ago the place would have been thronged with visitors. Taormina’s season was the winter. Now it was busy mainly in the summer.

The next day, I found Lawrence’s house on the Via Fontana Vecchia, and walked up and down the main street, looking at the shops. I looked at the old amphitheater. The only other people there were the two German women from yesterday’s train.

But the spectacle here was not the amphitheater—it was the volcano, Mount Etna. I had not expected to get such a dramatic view. With lantana and palms and bougainvillea and marigolds, sunny and serene, it was hard to imagine a prettier place or a more dramatic setting. The ancient Greeks praised Taormina in similar terms. But these days it exists only to be patronized and gawked at. It was not a place to live, only to be visited, one of the many sites in the Mediterranean that are almost indistinguishable from theme parks.

Looking down the coast, I was startled by the sight of it, an old bulgy mountain covered in snow, with a plume of smoke rising from its cone. The morning light took away its shadows and its grandeur and made it clumsy and pretty, with a splendor all its own, because its potbellied shape was unique for a mountain on this coast—and the sea so near emphasized its height.

In a fit of self-aggrandizement, Empedocles jumped into the crater of Mount Etna. In doing so, the Greek philosopher, who believed in reincarnation, hoped to inspire the sense in others that he was godlike.

In a different fit of self-aggrandizement, the writer Evelyn Waugh, passing through here on a cruise ship, refusing to go ashore to visit Taormina, peers from the deck and gets a glimpse of the volcano beyond.

“I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of Etna at sunset,” he writes in his first travel book, Labels (1930), “the mountain almost invisible in a blur of pastel gray, glowing on the top and then repeating its shape, as though reflected, in a wisp of gray smoke, with the whole horizon behind radiant with pink light, fading gently into a gray pastel sky. Nothing I have ever seen in Art or Nature was quite so revolting.”

Sudden and strange, the description is marvelous for its utter perversity. You have to read it twice to make sure you haven’t missed a word. Labels is full of such snap judgments and hilarious generalizations. It recalls Cyril Connolly writing “a chocolate-box sunset disfigured the west”—Waugh and Connolly were friends and in mocking a sunset they believed they were against nature. Theirs was the ultimate rebellion—so they thought; defying every notion of harmony, by refusing to be impressed or admit that such loveliness could be moving. It was a self-conscious and envious way of needling other writers, but most of all it was diabolical blasphemy, for isn’t criticizing a brilliant sunset an English way of blaming God?

Waugh’s work is always a salutary reminder that satire is usually more purposeful than veneration, and that one of the virtues of a good travel book is the chance to see a traveler’s mind, however childish, ticking away.