I was to see much of this engineer, but I did not catch sight o him again until quite late the next morning.
We put into Ajaccio early—at dawn. The great U-shaped gulf‚ long enough to contain two thousand ships, received us with grey swelling waters, while on either side the black mountainous coastline raced out to sea; the first pink light burnt its foundry-glare into a chilled grey sky, a red glow had already painted the curious Iles Sanguinaires with the wet of new blood. Those three sinister islands stood off the cape in a line that seemed to move. Well inside lay Ajaccio and its few sprouting palms.
Even at that distance the town, huddled down low against the dark mountains, looked poor and squalid. And then, as we neared its long façade, and as the ship seemed to fly through the water with each flat square-windowed building marking its speed, that grey light showed clearly the scabrous texture of each wall, the cracked and peeling and stained surface of decay. Later, when the sun had risen and I was warming over a glass of coffee on the Cours Napoléon, the sun threw into sharper definition the ulcerous scars, the gutter-soaked patches that smeared the walls of all those tall barrack-like buildings. The kerbs had fallen away, sand from the pavements had run in rivulets out on to the pocked carriageway of this the main street of the capital; no soft grasses and lichens pursued such decay, but instead only sand and powdered asphalt giving with their dull ochreous aridity the tone of the town, a town of huge barrack-buildings, dry palms and now leafless plane-trees, of Senegalese troops and occasional statues of Napoléon, of garbage in the streets and a wide main square of sand, of sand and the tricolour. Two main avenues converged on that immense sandy Place Diamant; along one, the Cours Napoléon, men in many clothes were already sipping their pastis and talking.
I was to know later that in these lines of cafés and bars there was no dancing, only pastis and cards—this was much a garrison town, a port for sailors and land-locked soldiers, upon which one could feel written in the sand and round the monuments and over the acres of blighted plaster the hideous word ‘caserne’.
Suddenly I saw again my engineer. He was dressed as before—pale-blue overalls, képi, black glasses; he was thus sharply visible among the khakis and corduroys and greys of the growing crowd. He came gesturing and gangling from the dark door of a bar, as fast as if he had been ejected, holding under one arm a package and in the other the arm of a much shorter and fatter man whom he now dragged at speed along the street. Both men talked fast and without pause, even in their linked position managing to turn their faces close and vehement. They disappeared down one of the steep side streets to the Rue Cardinal Fesch.
Having nothing particular to do but look at the town, I rose and followed. They had chosen this little street for a transaction, and now stood, still gesturing and exploding, between a foot-high mass of cabbage and dung and one of the leaning housewalls with its fat china drainpipe. Then, at some climax, the engineer flourished his parcel, tore off the brown paper, and stood for a moment without talking, his wide black glasses staring wonderstruck at the beauty of what was revealed—an American army jacket and breeches. The smaller man showed instant disgust, looked up and down the street for something, anything amusing. But at the same time his left hand fingered the material of the jacket. The engineer was talking again. The small man kept shrugging his shoulders. At last, with the down-drawn lips and heavenward eyes of a dying martyr, he shuffled in his pocket and brought out some notes. He took the clothes, handed the engineer the notes. A pause. Then the blue form of the engineer exploded. He rose on his toes, bending over the other man like a furious bird, hands wide outstretched like eagle’s wings, his nose-beaked head pecking forward with every emphatic word. The smaller man parried this by staring up at him with his head on one side, a small smile of unbelief cocking the corner of his mouth—a sceptic child surveyed his hysterical uncle. But the volcano proved too much, its force grew until the smile disappeared. A last shrug of his shoulders. Then reaching into a pocket that small man drew forth a handful of red cylinders. Cartridges. And these instantly the engineer took, hiding them, subsiding and simultaneously throwing a hand of affection on his adversary’s shoulder. They then parted on the best, on the face of it, of terms.
The engineer walked quickly up into the main street again and disappeared into a bar. I stood waiting for him to come out—fascinated by such volatility, by such an exquisite performance of the Mediterranean pantomime of buy-sell, where the marks of pity and contempt, ennui and obsession, despair and joy, are seen publicly at their finest extremes. That concession to the blind eye of the police when one moves off the main street yet deals in the open! That etiquette of silence while the other talks! That entrance at a predetermined point of the score into inspired duet … but now the engineer came bursting out from the bar with a shotgun under his arm. This altered his manner absolutely, the shotgun slaughtered innocence. With his dark glasses gazing obsessedly ahead, he strode off to the Place Diamant, whose circuit he made, keeping to the wall.
Along past the dark yellow military hospital, down the sea-wall with its row of stunted palms like elephant legs tufted wearily with green feathers. Along the road that skirts the side of the gulf, a road marked by a gradual scarcity of building, a greater decrepitude in the roadway, by refuse dumps and isolated half-finished concrete tenements, by bones and offal and driftwood lying puddled in the red rockpools: and always by the attempt of public work to be worthy of a capital, but an attempt forlorn, abandoned at its start, as though some tremendous force of nature had weighed too heavily down on the hopeless community of human hearts. A weight of nature was implemented—for now to either side the majesty of this island of mountains began to impress itself. Those mountains on the far side of the gulf raced their black humps far into the sea, snow on their peaks glittered like sugar in the sun, pockets of poisonous wool drifted longingly across the valley cuts; while to the right of our road rose the near slopes of the maquis, small ascending mountains thickly covered with aromatic scrub, so that they looked smooth and furry, like convulsed green baize.
The engineer walked fast, bouncing on his toes, throwing his elbows back and jolting like a professional walker. His head under that képi now searched the terrain to the right: he might have been looking for one of the few scattered villas that straggled about the slope. On he went. We passed a sudden, then endless cemetery of bright stone house-tombs, each built much more stably than the houses back in the capital—sealed evidences of Corsican pride and familiarity with death. Abruptly the cemetery ceased and the road grew houseless and wild, with no embankment against the gulf, and growing on either side wet green cactus studded with yellow flowers. The Iles Sanguinaires moved like a line of ships in the distance. The maquis rose unwalled on our right.
The engineer stopped, glanced keenly up the hill-side. Very quickly he took cartridges from his pocket—I saw them flash red as they were snapped away into the gun. Then he was off climbing up the steep, rough incline. He climbed like a frog, spreading his hands and long thin legs to grasp branches and to grip the greyish boulders, thrusting forward his body against the gradient. It was hardly prudent to follow him immediately—on a road my presence might have been coincidental, but on the pathless maquis not. I waited.
In fact, was it prudent to follow him at all? There he went, purposely armed, intent on some firm direction—probably some goat-herd’s shack, some outlying cottage. The morning paper had already told me that the day before, yesterday, there had been a shooting in the main café in Ajaccio—a husband seated with his wife and another man had suddenly risen to his feet and shot this other man bluntly in the stomach. And some time in the recent past a night-club manager had shot a sailor in the neck for disturbing his orchestra with an impromptu on the accordion. There had been bullet holes in the mirror of another café. And the Corsican is renowned for his history of proud summary justice. Whatever then the engineer would do might involve me, if I remained so close—either as an accomplice, or as a witness. Or the en
gineer himself would shoot me as a spy? However … the affair was too mature to abandon. Besides, we were in the country, with no easy diversions. So I decided to climb up into the maquis at a parallel distance from the engineer, to climb faster and thus higher than him, so that I could look down on his direction. With the cover afforded by scrub it would be fairly simple to remain unobserved—and my suit was grey, where his was bright-washed blue.
A sweaty climb under the rising sun. The maquis is a strange mixture of hard and soft things, of sudden aromatic carpets of herb, of eruptions of hard grey boulders, of soft arbutus and cystus, and then of spiny cactus. But mostly it feels soft, looking so moss-green, the hill-top a high ridge of green fur against the blue sky; the air smells sweet as so many odorous plants are crushed by the heel. Though it was steep and tiring, the climb was a joy: a sense of great freedom among such windwashed luxuriance in the warm winter sun made me forget the engineer. Or postpone him. But arrived at last at my eminence I took cover, and looked round. He was nowhere to be seen. I felt in my haversack for the glasses, and then began to scrutinize carefully the intricate shrub.
No sound. No movement over all the expanse of rolling lichenous sward—only sometimes the silent glint of a bird skimming the low branches, or curving up suddenly like a feather kicked on hot air. The arm of scented green stretched out to sea—for this was the thick upper arm of a cape—and on either side extended, far and near, the sea. No forest murmur here, no trees to move in those slight breezes that fanned the two shores: it was deadly set, like a painted plaster model. In ancient times pilots knew this island from a distance because of the perfume that drifted far out over the sea, a perfume of flowering scrub that caused those ancient oarsmen to call it the Scented Isle. But now it was winter, warm but flowerless—and still.
The black sockets of my binoculars traversed slowly. Up the slight hills, down suddenly into the overgrown ravines, past a ruined goatherd’s hut, over a circle of stones that had once based a sheep-pen or a Genoese watch-tower. Suddenly I saw the peaked blue képi, a pale-blue tropical bird above a bush of myrtle. The man was crouched, moving sideways with the gun stealthily creeping to his shoulder. The dark glasses were fixed emotionless and ruthless on something at the centre of a circle he was making; my glasses were focused clear on those dark others. A slow movement, trying to make no sound—and in the binoculars there was an augmented silence. Over all, the immense quiet of the day.
It was difficult to move the binoculars off him. At such a moment he might have made some decisive move, disappearing into the bush. But at length, as his movements seemed to remain so steady, I shifted those black circles carefully across. There was nothing.
I searched in vain—for a hut, for some other man’s movement, for the movement of a branch that might show up some other man. But there was nothing—and I knew by the direction of his glasses that he was anticipating no long shot. Whoever he was after lay close. No movement, no life in that scrub—only suddenly a pinpoint of colour that intensified the strange stillness. A robin sat on one of the branches. Its orange breast caught the sunlight, it was opening and shutting its beak as if trying to sing—for of course no sound came.
It did not seem possible. At first I discarded the idea. But as the minutes passed the truth emerged; irrefutable and, through the glasses, of strange isolated power. The engineer was stalking that robin. I switched the glasses to and fro, certainly the gun’s barrel was trained on the little bird’s level. But—why not shoot? Then, as the engineer quietly lowered his head to the gunsight, it was plain to see why he held his fire. He had been moving round behind the robin. Some deep amazing instinct had instructed him to shoot this little bird in the back.
For a long time the scene stayed fixed. That man’s head was now lowered to the sights, so that the peak of his pale képi ran parallel with the gun. It looked more than ever like a bird, or like some false effigy of a bird, a pointed blue-beaked thing like a carnival mask, like the cruel disguise of some grotesque birdwatcher’s hood. And a few yards across the scented foliage, whose every fragile leaf was set so still, there sat the other bird, the real little bird. With its back turned. So that the two made a silent unmoving procession of birds. Not a leaf shivered; they were like leaves seen on a cinema film, bright and unreal. The figure in the képi seemed cast in wax. Only the little bird’s mouth could be seen faintly moving—perhaps eating. That small movement only accentuated the silence, as though the bird were singing without sound.
Suddenly it rose in the air, blasted by a sudden wind, and then with scattering wings dropped. At the same time the foliage behind shivered. Then a drift of smoke came, and a prancing blue figure—just as the echoing shot-sound cracked as if behind my ear. I kept the binoculars fixed, my two holes of vision showed the blue figure thrashing excitedly in the tangled shrub, eagerly pouncing then lifting aloft, with a backward-leaning motion of triumph, a small furry ball of grey and orange.
*
Some hours later, having lunched in Ajaccio, I saw him again. He was talking to two elderly Corsicans. He held in his hand a small bunch of little birds—three at least were robins. These he brandished in the faces of the two old men, who seemed annoyed and looked pointedly away. This time I determined to hear what was said. They were standing at a point that I could approach without seeming inquisitive.
They were standing near to the old fountain in the barrack wall. Here, in a stone recess behind an iron railing, was a place where old men habitually forgathered. Such old men stood there for hours, leaning on the iron railing, gossiping, gazing at the passers-by of the Place Diamant and past them across the sandy waste to the leprous line of houses stretching to the gulf-wall, at the gulf and its sombre mountains beyond. The engineer and his two acquaintances were standing outside the railing. It seemed that only the poorer went inside, men who had had their day; and somehow they must have formed a focal point for street standing, because it was around here that a ragged crowd always loitered and talked. This I now joined.
After a few hours on the island my understanding of the patois was growing clearer. They spoke Corsican—not the romance language of the midi, but a mixture of French and Genoese. The two old men were pure islanders. They wore the wide curl-brimmed black hats, the long jackets of chestnut brown corduroy, the bright-scarlet cummerbunds that still form a much-worn national dress among the older country-people. And Ajaccio, besides being a caserne, still retained some of the feeling of a large market town, it attracted people from the hills, the farmers, the millers, the sons of labourers and gentlemen and bandits. These old two, with their lean high cheekbones and their draped moustaches, were Corsicans of old stock, men of the bandit days. Their bearing was proud.
Such pride, such granite unconcern must have proved a formidable barrier to the engineer’s commerce. But a barrier that perhaps he welcomed, as many small illnesses are welcomed, for the passionate pain they provoke. There was no doubt that he was now in pain. He had pushed his dark glasses on to his forehead, agonized eyebrows reached up to them like the stretched legs of frogs, his dark searching eyes glittered, his lips seemed to move in a motion faster than the flow of words—and all the time that small wedge of little birds fluttered between his mouth and the stern eyes of the two disapproving old men. The old men—perhaps owners of a restaurant, perhaps of good wives—were potential buyers of the robins. One of them said:
‘I have offered you six francs the bird.’
He said this without vehemence, as having stated not a price but some patriarchal law. He said nothing further, only pulled slowly at a tooth under his moustache. The engineer burst into an appeal of despair—for ten francs the bird. Ten francs! Ten small francs for the most savoury, the delicious little bird! Shot even that morning, fresh from eating the odorous maquis—the exquisite bird of the red throat!
But obduracy had hardened in the veins of those old men. Many Mediterranean peoples buy, sell, bargain, run after coins bright and round as their sun, run after them wit
hout shame and with laughter, even without avarice and only as a reasonable means to an end. These Corsicans are different. Centuries of fighting against imperialists from the mainlands, against Spain and France and always Genoa, have welded them into firm communities, groups of the family and of the village and of the island. Their need was always to be self-provident, independent in their mountains and thence independent in their hearts. That which they own they give freely—but they will fight bitterly if it is snatched by force. Such a pride does not allow them to bargain. They state their view, their fair price. It is the last word.
Infuriating for the sinuous engineer. This one was now driven by his sunsoaked frenzy into a beatification that soon rose far beyond his wares, rose from praising the dead bird to a lyric of the bird alive, the bird he had shot, but of whose life and beauty he was deeply aware. Of course, he exaggerated:
‘Fine, the little rouge-gorge! High in the maquis she sits, her breast shines like the red arbutus. Small, yes, but up there in the green it is the only little person that is alive—like a mouse she darts among the low branches.’
As he spoke his eyes rolled, his fingers played with air as lightly as birds’ wings—this shooter of birds in the back. But transported now, it was plain that while killing birds he loved them, or knew their live mystery, their freedom. I who while eating flesh condemn any joy in its killing was astounded—it had never occurred to me that you could love these things exactly at the same time as killing, that in fact the processes of loving life and killing it for one’s own survival could occur in the same brain at the same time, fully, without the trammelings of pity. To all this the old men just nodded. They too knew.
‘There was the sky, blue and wide, the great sky, and up flew the little bird, its red breast shining in the sun, I saw the red, I aimed….’
The Stories of William Sansom Page 13