The Pillars of Hercules

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.