Sunrise with Seamonsters

by Paul Theroux

  For the first fifteen years of my life, or more, all my needs were met, all the society I required was available to me; practically and intellectually I was provided for within the family: books, clothes, conversation, jobs, medical care, spiritual comfort, even a girlfriend—they were all part of the family paraphernalia. It seems like a recipe for insularity, an argument for never leaving home. But home was huge—not one house but a score of them in which one was always welcome. I was assured that the family was permanent and immoveable, that no matter what happened it would continue to exist and observe the informal rules. With this sense of membership, an identity more profound than nationality, it is not difficult to leave, for a year, or—in my own case—for sixteen years. Though I have returned nearly every summer and found the temper of the country a bit sourer on each visit, the family is bigger but otherwise unchanged. Great travelers seldom come from small unstable countries, and children who leave a house and two parents behind do not often return, since they seek to attach themselves to something greater or to find a new identity. One of the last things Alexander Selkirk (the model for Robinson Crusoe) did before leaving home was to kick his father down a flight of stairs. He was escaping; but the extended family is inescapable.

  And living abroad I do not have to go through the contortions of adapting. My sense of familyhood—the Swahili word ujamaa is not easily translated—has kept me from any temptation to take out citizenship or to adopt that grotesque Anglophilia that is characteristic of loners in England (I would go further and say that Anglophilia is the hardest sentiment to sustain in England). Since I am, at every turn, reminded of my difference, I am content to live as a foreigner and expect no more than I would if I happened to be living in Costa Rica, treating my annual tax demand as something like a hotel bill. In any case, England operates like a small family, "a rather stuffy Victorian family," wrote Orwell in England Your England, "a family with the wrong members in control—that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase." Recruitment in Britain is selective and a man is considered a South African, or a Jamaican, or a Hungarian until he bats a century or knocks someone senseless in the ring or makes a million pounds selling mackintoshes. When a man is too rich or famous to ignore he is turned into an Englishman and given a place on the Honors List, but a "West Indian" here is like an "Asian" in Uganda—a poor slob who has lived for two or three generations in a country his color doesn't match. There is no real grudge in that sentence. I know I do not belong here, and when my bill gets too large I will go home. But if I were not a part of an extended family I think it would have been impossible for me to travel or stay away for any length of time.

  My own tendency is to extend the limits of my family even further, partly for my own purposes—it seems more worthwhile and it is certainly much easier to write if one enjoys the affection of a large family—and partly to graft this branch onto the family tree. I would like my children to understand, that they can expect little from the state; that they will be swindled by politics and short-changed by every authority except the family. It is even more important for my children than it was for me. My children, born in Singapore and Uganda, living in a country in which they are officially aliens, must feel that they are part of an extended family which is settled and which will never disown them.

  If my notions of the extended family are exaggerated, it might be because no one in three generations of the family has cared a damn for status in America, where only status matters—not family esteem but public esteem. One can't dismiss public esteem without supplanting it with another system of values, and if a family has decided to go it alone it needs genuine love and loyalty. Numbers help, so does property—there has to be space. If we all lived in one house we would get on each other's nerves; even a village would not contain us—but who would want to live in that sort of village? The pleasure of the extended family is the knowledge that one is not alone, the visible proof of love, the faith in this happy nation—it is like a believer's satisfaction in religion.

  In less settled places there are alternatives, but they are short-lived. The extended families of the hippies can only last one generation, though they are more complete in any definition of "family" than the inadequate nests that produced them, the small over-tidy households that were answered with communes. Still, I am not in favor of communal living. Life is easy if sentiments are shared; it is intolerable if one is expected to share one's radio—it was an incursion of just this sort that a very good friend of mine gave as his reason for fleeing a kibbutz. And few books get written or paintings get painted in communes, which seem little more to me than occasions for gardening or arguing or displacing natives. The separate households in my own extended family are not an example of joint ownership, though anyone in need of a car or a house will find it his for the asking. The item will be returned and the favor remembered, but it is a favor, not a right. When an extended family falters, or alienates a member, it does so because that member is carrying an unfair share of responsibility. Usually, if the sat-upon man does not make for another country (America was populated by these escapees from the extended families of Europe, some of whom resurrected the practise in order to establish themselves or defy their cultural enemies) he finds himself in a house bursting with sponging relatives.

  So I was surprised last summer when my mother, announcing that she had bought a new plot of land, said that she wanted us to meet together to discuss it. She described its features. It was large, she said, a corner plot away from the road, a very choice piece of land. In my mind I saw a house, the kind of communal dwelling I have always loathed: the bathrooms never free, dishes in the sink, the family garden in need of a good hoeing, nowhere to write, no peace, the clatter on the stairs, the washing machine continually sudsing, "Let me borrow your radio."

  I had arrived a bit late and caught only her description of the site, the southerly view and "... room for all of us." I raised an objection. I said I didn't see why it was necessary for us to live on top of each other, or why, since we were all content in our own houses and with everything running smoothly, we needed another plot.

  Someone guffawed, but my mother silenced him with a glance and my father said, "Hold on, Jack."

  "Not a house, Paul," my mother said. "This is a burial plot, and we're very lucky to get it. The graveyards around here are filling up fast, and it's very unusual for something this size to come on to the market. They say it's designed for eight, but look at the plans"—she unrolled the map—"we could easily fit in more if we were buried a bit closer together."

  A Circuit of Corsica

  [1977]

  Corsica is France, but it is not French. It is a mountain range moored like a great ship with a cargo of crags a hundred miles off the Riviera. In its three climates it combines the high Alps, the ruggedness of North Africa and the choicest landscapes of Italy, but most dramatic are the peaks which are never out of view and show in the upheaval of rock a culture that is violent and heroic. The landscape, which furnished some of the imagery for Dante's Inferno, has known heroes. The Latin playwright Seneca was exiled there, Napoleon was born there, and so—if local history is to be believed—was Christopher Columbus (there is a plaque in Calvi); part of the Odyssey takes place there—Ulysses lost most of his crew to the cannibalistic Laestrygonians in Bonifacio—and two hundred years ago, the lecherous Scot (and biographer of Dr Johnson) James Boswell visited and reported, "I had got upon a rock in Corsica and jumped into the middle of life."

  The landscape is just weird enough to be beautiful and too large to be pretty. On the west are cliffs which drop straight and red into the sea; on the south there is a true fjord, on the east a long flat and formerly malarial coast with the island's only straight road, on the north a populous cape, and in the center the gothic steeples of mountains, fringed by forests where wild boar are hunted. There are sandy beaches, pebbly beaches, boulder-strewn beaches; beaches with enormous waves breaking over them, and beaches that are littl
e more than mud flats, beaches with hotels and beaches that have never known the pressure of a tourist's footprint. There are five-star hotels and hotels that are unfit for human habitation. All the roads are dangerous, many are simply the last mile to an early grave. "There are no bad drivers in Corsica," a Corsican told me. "All the bad drivers die very quickly." But he was wrong—I saw many and I still have damp palms to prove it.

  On one of those terrible coast roads—bumper-scraping ruts, bottomless puddles, rocks in the middle as threatening and significant as Marxist statuary—I saw a hitch-hiker. She was about eighteen, very dark and lovely, in a loose gown, barefoot and carrying a basket. She might have been modeling the gown and awaiting the approach of a Vogue photographer. My car seemed to stop of its own accord, and I heard myself urging the girl to get in, which she did, thanking me first in French and then, sizing me up, in halting English. Was I going to Chiappa? I wasn't, but I agreed to take her part of the way: "And what are you going to do in Chiappa?"

  "I am a naturiste," she said, and smiled.

  "A nudist?"

  She nodded and answered the rest of my questions. She had been a nudist for about five years. Her mother had been running around naked for eleven years. And Papa? No, he wasn't a nudist; he'd left home—clothed—about six years ago. She liked the nudist camp (there are nine hundred nudists at Chiappa); it was a pleasant healthy pastime, though of course when the weather got chilly they put some clothes on. Sooner than I wished, she told me we had arrived, and she bounded towards the camp to fling her clothes off.

  At Palombaggia, the tourist beach a few miles away, I hid behind a pine tree and put on my bathing trunks. I need hardly have bothered—the beach was nearly deserted. Rocks had tumbled into the sea, making natural jetties, and I decided to tramp over a dune and a rocky headland to get a view of the whole bay. There were, as far as the eye could see, groups of bathers, families, couples, children, people putting up windbreaks, strollers, rock collectors, sand-castle-makers—and all of them naked. Naked mummy, naked daddy, naked kiddies, naked grandparents. Aside from the usual beach equipment, it was a happy little scene from idealized prehistory, naked Europeans amusing themselves, Cro-Magnon man at play. It was not a nudist camp. These were Germans, as bare as noodles, and apart from the absence of swimming togs, the beach resembled many I have seen on Cape Cod, even to the discarded Coke cans and candy wrappers. I stayed until rain clouds gathered and the sun was obscured. This drove the Germans behind their windbreaks and one woman put on a short jersey—no more than that—and paced the beach, squinting at the clouds and then leering at me. I suppose it was my fancy bathing trunks.

  I had decided to make a circuit of Corsica, to rent a car and drive slowly around the edge of the island, then pause and make my way over the mountains, from Moriani-Plage via Corte to Ile-Rousse, arriving where I had begun, in Ajaccio. The trains are too small and tram-like to be anything but practical for the Corsican and vaguely amusing to the visitor ; the three and a half hours by rail from Ajaccio to Bastia are not my idea of a railway trip. Besides, the best parts of Corsica are unreachable by train.

  The first twenty miles south of Ajaccio, through the Col St Georges to the handsome port of Propriano were gorgeous—a fatal distraction because the road was so narrow and winding. Once out of the capital it is clear how underpopulated Corsica is, an emptiness of eucalyptus trees and deep blue hills, stubbly fields, and vineyards, and forests of cork oak and sweet chestnut. Ambitious Corsicans flee the island as soon as they can scrape the fare together, and the ones who stay rather despise the menial servicing jobs in hotels. Two decades ago the island was dying economically, but the arrival of ex-colonials from Algeria brought mechanized wine-making methods and the growing of mandarin oranges to Corsica. And now there is a degree of prosperity in Corsica's agriculture, with the export of cheap wine. The good wine—and it is not the plonk the mainlanders say it is—is drunk locally. I can vouch for the Torraccio, Patrimonio, Sartene, Domaine Vico and the resinous Clos de Bernadi. The Corsican table wine that is exported is little more than red ink.

  Propriano has many good restaurants, specializing in the seafood that is caught offshore—the langouste and the ingredients for bouillabaisse. It has three excellent hotels and, like many other Corsican towns, a number of pizza joints. It is the sort of place you expect Antibes or Juan Les Pins to be, small, uncrowded, sunny and decked with oleanders and geraniums—geraniums so healthy they have become bush-like, three or four feet high. The climb by car to the fastness of the steep mountain town, Sartene, is not rewarded by anything other than a glimpse of one of the most forbidding (Prosper Mérimée called it "the most Corsican") towns I've ever seen. It is a town like a citadel, built on the summit of a rocky hill, with a dark main street and a reputation for the vendetta.

  Beyond Sartene, still moving south, I saw two remarkable sights: the great granite mountain of white oblong boulders, called Montagne de Cagna; and, as I neared the coast, the splendid sight of a lion in stone crouched on Cap de Roccapina. The strange features along this road are preparation for something even stranger at the end of it, the sheer limestone cliffs which plunge past the fortified town of Bonifacio, the settlement on the fjord. It is a natural harbor, and the town one of the oldest in Corsica, but although it is spectacularly beautiful, it has no good hotel. For that I drove up the coast to Porto-Vecchio, Corsica's newest resort town. Porto-Vecchio, for all its sandy beaches (Palombaggia is the best of these), has a blowsy look of gimcrack modernism unrelated to the ancient town above it that shares its name.

  From this point in the southeast to Bastia in the northeast are sixty or more miles of empty glittering beaches, rising to extensive vineyards which disappear at the foothills of tremendous mountains. Because this is Corsica's straightest road, it is also the island's most dangerous—the only stretch, really, where you can get but of second gear. The seaside towns here are small likeable places, some looking as if they have been put up within the past year, others (such as Aleria) were resorts at the time of the Roman Empire. Further north, at Moriani-Plage, a seedy half-abandoned resort with one overpriced hotel flanking a stagnant swimming pool, it is hard to make out whether the town is in the process of being built or destroyed. I had no sooner concluded that I would never return to Moriani-Plage than the waiter, who was also the cook, said he had a plump pheasant in the kitchen which was mine for the asking.

  I had been apprehensive—as who would not be?—by the thought of crossing the spine of Corsica's mountain range. I took what I later realized to be one of the worst roads on the island. But if one proceeds slowly along these mountain tracks (the road to Corte follows the course of the Tavignano River—Edward Lear went this way in the 1860's purely for its scenic beauty) one can get from the east coast to the northwest via Corte, in less than a day's drive. Corte is a bright windblown town on a crag, with at least one fine restaurant (in the Place Paoli). It is the heart of the island's political and cultural identity, and was the capital of the brief republic declared by Pascal Paoli in 1755. At Corte, if one seeks a destination, one has many choices: a short drive to the hunting lodges at Venaco, or the longer drives to Bastia, the quiet promontory of Ile-Rousse, the noisier resorts of Calvi or Porto. I struck out for Ile-Rousse and ended up at the two-hundred-year-old Grand Hotel Napoleon Bonaparte, a bizarrely ramshackle château with a billiard room and a porter who tells you to go to bed when the clock strikes eleven. Ile-Rousse is a neglected town, a bit geriatric in tone, with a great deal of charm. Some of this charm still lingers in the narrow streets of Calvi, but in the oversettled gorge which is Porto—a harrowing four-hour drive away—the charm is gone. It is as if, having accepted that German tourists were inevitable, the Corsicans decided to dump them wholesale in this almost inaccessible notch to bellow away their vacation.

  Because it is purely for vacationers, I think Porto is a place for vacationers to avoid. The fact that it is probably the most beautiful corner of the island is a bit sad, for what is inescapa
ble is that it is overcrowded, overdeveloped and irredeemably Teutonic. The pseudo-luxury is similarly a feature of the newer resorts at Sagone and Tiuccia, but none of these west coast watering-holes have the down-to-earth hospitality and comfort that I found elsewhere in Corsica.

  A car seems a necessity, but cars are easy to hire and, driving, one discovers how small Corsica is, how much can be seen in a week. There is no need to be stuck anywhere on the island, and the Corsicans speak French badly enough so that no visitor need feel self-conscious. I spoke nothing but Italian for a week and managed very well. The only Corsican I met who spoke English was the girl nudist near Chiappa, but I guessed that she came into contact with all sorts of people.