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.