The Corsican Woman

by Madge Swindells

  Rocca found them at last. He looked furious because Robin had missed the speeches. At the airport there were two Thunderbolt fighters and the clumsier, twin-engined DC-3’s bringing in hospital supplies. Robin was waiting for a Hudson that was to take him and some US Marines back to England.

  ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘we’ve had a taste of happiness, and it seems that it’s over, but the truth is it’s only just beginning. It’s up to us, isn’t it? We can build a life together any way we want — once we’ve won the war. It will be like this for always. Don’t cry. I may be back sooner than you expect. I’ll press for compassionate leave.’

  In spite of Rocca’s presence, they stood in the waiting line holding hands, gripped by their shared misery.

  ‘It’s going to be hard for you,’ Robin whispered eventually.

  ‘No, why? No harder for me than for you. At least I won’t be fighting.’

  ‘It’s harder to wait than to fight. Everyone knows that. It might be a year or two, maybe even longer. Of course I’ll write. I’m not much of a letter writer, but I’ll do my best.’

  ‘I will write to you often. Robin, my darling, promise me something. When you’re faced with danger, don’t be brave. Just remember Jules and I are waiting for you. Needing you.’

  There were shouts from behind: ‘Captain Robin. Where’s Captain Robin?’ Eventually he waved. Some of his squad had arrived to say goodbye. They had some bottles with them and were offering toasts, drinks, handshakes, singing. How different they looked in their best suits, faces bright red and sweating, necks bulging. Suddenly he was a foreigner. They were wishing him a safe journey home. They made him fed so alien. Where were the rest of his men? he wondered. He’d made a few enemies toward the end, he knew. The bond, if there had ever been one, was snapped. If only he could take Sybilia with him.

  Odd that the war's over here while the rest of the world is up to its neck in it. I wonder where they'll send me next? Wherever it is, it won't be for long. Maybe a year, maybe two. When it's over I'll come back for Sybilia. Maybe we'll live here. She would like that. We'll have to see how it goes. I feel depressed. More than depressed, I feel empty, disoriented. I've become dependent on the danger and the fighting. It's like a drug that's been keeping me on a high. Now it's over, and I've got withdrawal symptoms. That's all it is. A matter of adjustment. This is the beginning of our lives, not the end. Is she depressed, too, I wonder?

  It was good last night. She loves me, and I'm lucky. This sort of thing doesn't happen often. A girl like her is one in a million. She walks like a chamois: strong but full of grace. She's so lovely it makes me feel good just to look at her. She'll wait for me. I know she will. Yes, maybe we'll settle down here in Corsica. We'll work hard, we'll have fun together, we'll prosper, and we'll have plenty of children. Eventually her family will accept me.

  The night before he had awakened to find her leaning over him, her hair falling around his face, her eyes gazing at him. He’d thought he was still dreaming. He’d put his arms around her, and she had pressed forward, her breasts hard against him, her lips brushed softly on his. They had made love tenderly with their arms and legs entwined.

  ‘I love you,’ she had told him afterward. ‘I’ll be waiting when you come back.’

  ‘When I come home.’

  ‘Yes, home.’

  He had lain silently planning for a while. Then he’d bent and kissed the top of her head, moved her hair away from his mouth, and told her of his plans.

  ‘I never mentioned this, but I have quite a sum saved up. Enough to get us started. A legacy from Gran, plus my savings. I’ve been looking around. There’s some good places to start a farm. You know that plateau underneath our camp? Well, I was thinking…’

  At last he’d stopped talking to find that she had fallen asleep happily on his shoulder. He’d lain awake for the rest of the night, imagining exactly how it would be. He would not sleep. Not on their last night together.

  The Hudson taxied up. It was time to embark. He picked up his gear and tried out a cheerful smile. ‘Come on. Cheer up.’

  He was met by sad eyes and a dejected stoop to her shoulders. ‘Promise! For always,’ she said.

  ‘Of course. What else?’

  Rocca was back. Leaning forward, he shook Robin’s hand. He did not smile.

  ‘Goodbye, Captain Moore,’ he said. Then he took Sybilia’s arm and hung on as if he owned her. Robin joined the band of marines who were filing onto the plane.

  Part Four

  1955-1959

  Chapter 51

  15 April 1955

  A glimmer of grey in the east, the rise and fall of the steamer in the soft swell, the heady scent of the sea: evanescent streaks of fluorescence in breaking waves, a sense of belonging; all that and much more. I felt joined to the night by a mystical thread. I’d been waiting for the first glimpse of Corsica, which I knew so well from aerial photographs, geological maps, and travel books, but which I had never seen. As my hands tightened on the ship’s rails, I knew my career hung in the balance of what I would find here.

  Make or break… The cliché had sounded ominous when uttered by Professor Don Miller in the anthropological department of Boston University. We’d been facing each other across a worn desk, and Miller had looked angry.

  ‘I don’t know why you want it, Jock,’ he’d growled as he flipped through three hundred pages of detailed geological and archaeological evidence representing months of research.

  I’d tried to explain, without treading on his toes. He was an anthropologist. He had little interest in archaeology. Now I wanted to ally the two social sciences in a major project.

  ‘You and I have the same objectives,’ I began tentatively, ‘trying to understand man and his institutions in order to improve them. We search for origins and order in our social groups, our taboos, and our beliefs. But what do we really know about prehistoric man in Europe? We try to understand him by transferring data from contemporary primitive societies: the Polynesians, Eskimos, Amazonions, Aborigines, all of whom have vastly differing climatic conditions. My aim is to find an isolated European group, cut off for centuries by lack of communication and geographical barriers, and to study them side by side with an archaeological dig. A small village, perhaps, where certain life-styles, traditions — or merely legends or superstitions — reach back to the very dawn cf time. In order to bridge the gap, I need an isolated place that has withstood the twentieth century. Corsica is my target.’

  ‘There’s still time to call off the project,’ Miller said. ‘You’re the up-and-coming star of this faculty, you know that. You can count on the chair when I retire, if you’re still here, that is. I’d sure hate to see a promising career like yours knocked into a cocked hat by an expensive fiasco. Where’s your logic, Walters?

  ‘Look at it this way,’ he went on persuasively. ‘If you don’t pick up that envelope, you’ll certainly lead the Inca expedition next year.’

  ‘The Incas are played to death, but thanks anyway.’ I picked up the letter containing permission for the grant and thrust it in my pocket. It felt good there.

  ‘You’ve five years,’ Miller said, scowling. ‘Minimal expenses, but generous allowances for the dig itself, if and when you find those ruins — and the village you’re after. So meantime you’ll starve a bit. I’ll expect regular expense sheets and monthly reports.’ He stood up. He had seemed reluctant to shake hands.

  Suddenly I became aware of a change in the steamer’s direction, I looked up and shivered in the cool, predawn breeze. Around me, the sea and sky merged with the mist into one empty canvas, but slowly an outline of immense mountains was emerging. When the sky lightened I could see their summits shrouded in mist, their flanks dark with forests.

  Corsica! At last!

  It was then that I became aware of a curious scent, like a woman’s perfume: exotic, heady, tantalizing, and all-pervasive. It brought with it an unwelcome feeling of unease. It was almost as if the island were reaching out to m
e, to lure me to her secret places, to woo and enchant me as a woman had once done. I braced myself and smiled confidently. Days of enchantment were firmly behind me. I would make short work of the wooing, notch up another success, and move on. That was my style.

  Two years later I was beginning to regret my earlier, brash self-confidence. To tell the truth I was on the point of quitting. I’d been crabbing all over Corsica with nothing to show for it. I’d begun by moving south toward Filitosa. Not wishing to become involved in the French dig there, in spite of their friendly invitations, I’d moved north, cutting through the hinterland toward Bastia. The following year I’d succeeded in digging my way around the northern cape, known as Cap Corse, and down to Saint Florent. After that I’d spent a few months surveying and excavating the rocky mountain range of the northeast, extending up the centre of the island and rising to five thousand feet or more. When spring came I had crossed the narrow depression running diagonally through the north centre of the island, to explore the higher granite peaks of the west coast rising to nine thousand feet.

  For all this time I’d lived frugally, sleeping out like a hobo when weather permitted, catching fish and shellfish to offset my diet of bread when I was near the coast, and staying in the cheapest rooms. I’d endured the extremes of the Corsican climate, languorous and subtropical in the summer months around the coast, while Alpine conditions prevailed in the high mountains. And then deluges of rain would come in autumn and spring.

  In spite of my meagre spending, it was clear that my academic grant was hopelessly inadequate. I’d have to find my site before the end of the year, or lack of funds would force me to quit. So I’d begun to work frenziedly, seven days a week, but I knew that hard work alone wouldn’t be enough. Success required luck as well, and lately I’d not had much luck. I was feeling pretty low and sorry for myself as I ambled toward the sea, dragging my harpoon through the sand.

  Taking off from the rocks at Girolata was like plunging into a psychedelic maze. The craggy passages and caves were choked with multicoloured algae and anemones. Shoals of sargue, their silvery-green flanks striped with black, hung motionless around the rocks. Brown sea turtles galloped past. Fan-shaped shellfish quivered and opened, while a grotesque sunfish, which Corsicans perversely call ‘moon-fish’, was dogging me.

  I didn’t waste much time gaping at the view. I was too hungry. Rounding the lip of a deep cave, I saw a shoal of corbes noir, with dark, iridescent heads and large fins attached to their graceful olive bodies. They hung motionless until I approached and took aim; then they sped like arrows into the safety of a cave.

  Swimming northward, I came across two man-size fish called dentis because of the formidable teeth for grinding Crustacea. They stayed just out of reach, their eyes watching me mistrustfully. Time and ag&in I homed in for the kill, but half an hour later, after an exhausting swim, they were still just out of my range.

  At the top of a tall rock I came face to face with a superb bass. I was so desperate I was shaking. I steadied myself by gripping a rock, aimed, and fired, impaling the fish. Then, minutes later, I shot another, but by now the water was becoming cloudy. The sirocco was whipping the bay into white caps overhead, so I surfaced and set out in a lazy crawl to the beach.

  An hour later I’d cooked and eaten one of the bass, and I was feeling great. I decided to take the other back to my landlady, who as usual would offer a free supper in return, with some good local wine.

  Thinking about my room in the tiny boarding house by the sea made me feel vaguely anxious. The rent was overdue, and cash was dwindling. I’d written to Professor Miller for more funds, but so far there’d been no reply. At the back of my mind was the nagging fear that my mail was not catching up with me. That was the main reason I'd hung around Girolata for two weeks, in a state of enforced lethargy. I told myself that I needed the rest, but I had to admit I was tired and fed up and didn’t know where to look next.

  At dusk I ambled back to the small, rose-painted house by the wharf where I lodged. Madame Bartoli, my landlady, was in the kitchen. She was a buxom, apple-cheeked woman with bright green eyes which lit up when I presented the fish to her. She promptly kissed me on both cheeks and invited me to supper, as I’d planned.

  ‘Oh, monsieur, wait a moment,’ she called as I went upstairs. ‘This your mail — yes? It came this morning, but you had left. You are a doctor, yes? Yet you did not register as a doctor.’ Her expression was a mixture of pride, annoyance, and curiosity.

  I fumbled rapidly through the airmail envelopes, and my heart lurched as I recognized Miller’s unique typeface. Fingers twitching with impatience, I explained, ‘I’m not a real doctor, ma’am, and I don’t want to mislead people, particularly if there were an accident. I’m a doctor of archaeology, and I sure as hell can’t think of anything more useless around here.’

  ‘Useless?’ Madame Bartoli said with genuine amusement. ‘Around here? Well, really, what have you been doing with yourself all these weeks? Never mind. I can see you want to open your letters. You go ahead.’ She began to scale the fish in the sink.

  It was no, I realized, as I skimmed through the first two pages of excuses. I crumpled the letter and threw it into the bin. Miller had explained that I could expect further amounts only when I provided solid evidence of my theory, in the form of datable artifacts.

  ‘Oh, heck!’ I felt sick.

  Thrusting the remaining letters into my pocket, I ambled off to take a hot shower. Only later, when I was sitting in the communal living room with a glass of wine, did I open the others. My mother had written the sort of letter widows always write to errant sons. My bank wrote to inform me I was low in funds. And lastly I opened the letter from my literary agent. A few seconds later I let out a roar of joy and rushed off to find someone to share my good news.

  ‘My God! Just listen to this.’ I read the letter to my bemused landlady.

  ‘Dear Doctor Walters, Regal Publishers have agreed to publish your manuscript, Learning from the Past. Publication of the hardback is scheduled for November this year. They have offered an advance of ten thousand dollars. Cheque to follow soon, Regards.

  It was a good excuse for a celebration. I stood several drinks for the clientele, mainly local fishermen who came for a chat and an inexpensive meal. Then I sat back in an alcoholic haze while they told me about the war. Much later, when they were still drinking, Madame Bartoli placed a shoebox full of crude handaxes on my lap and informed me that they had been left behind by a party of archaeology students from Oxford University.

  ‘They said they were important, but they couldn’t be bothered to take them back with them. What do you think?’ she asked. ‘They said it wasn’t their period. They were studying something else, a funny name. I don’t remember anymore.’

  I was filled with a kind of wild hilarity, although I felt ridiculous. I’d chased around the island for two years, and a bunch of limey students had found precisely what I’d been looking for so painstakingly, but it wasn’t their period. I began to laugh.

  ‘Where did they find them?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, of course I don’t know that,’ she replied anxiously.

  ‘Someone must know.’

  ‘No. Why should we? We are not archaeologists.’

  It no longer seemed so funny. ‘But you must know where they spent their holidays?’

  ‘No. Somewhere in the mountains, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ I groaned. ‘I think I’m going to throw up.’

  ‘Over these stones?’

  ‘Not stones. Stone Age weapons, axes, chisels, man’s first survival tools, made possibly thirty thousand years ago or more. Makes you think, doesn’t it?’ I felt a tremor run through me as I gazed at the palm-size fragments of chipped flint. Undoubtedly they were late Magdalenian, and if they had truly been found in Corsica, then man had settled here during the final stages of the Pleistocene Ice Age, just as I had guessed.

  ‘I’m sure they wouldn’t have lied about them,’ sh
e said. ‘They really were very pleasant young men. Perhaps my husband will remember where they’d been.’

  Her husband, a small, dark man with a ready smile marred by bad teeth, said he knew the route the students had taken. Sensing a captive audience, he was unwilling to relinquish his hold on me until he had talked about his experiences in the war. He had run foul of the Italians, he explained. They had caught him and thrown him into prison and fed him on singe, the local equivalent of corned beef. They had shipped him to the mainland, but he had escaped.

  The Italians and the Boche had left eventually and then an American division had been stationed in Corsica to drain the swamps of malaria. He shrugged significantly and then lapsed into silence as if to spare any feelings.

  Much later, when we had finished eating and a visiting shepherd was singing doleful melodies to the throb of his guitar, Monsieur Bartoli suddenly remembered that the students had found the hand axes in Taita, a primitive village somewhere in the mountains.

  Two weeks later I stood with concern at the bottom of the steep, zigzagging track that led to Taita. The village hung on a rock face over a sheer cliff in rugged terrain and looked as impregnable as any Gothic castle. I would never get my Jeep up there, and all my equipment would have to be hand-carried with the help of donkeys. For the moment I decided to take a chance and leave most of the equipment in the jeep and continue on foot. I took my compass, notebook, pickaxe, and spade and began the long hot climb to Taita.

  Chapter 52

  Halfway to the summit, I detoured from the path and made for a nearby lake that curled moatlike, in the shape of a half-moon, around the base of the western cliff face. Coming closer, I could see that the slope above the lake had once been carved into a series of narrow strips of cultivated land, each one separated by high stone terraces. Most of them were overgrown now, but I saw an occasional row of olive trees or vegetables.