Cut to outside. Long shot of classroom windows, silent vines above.
Cut to last night’s beach café this morning full of the same men. I remember we’re in black and white when a woman in a black dress comes trudging by (stout calves, posture straight) with a tiny kid in pink shorts, and Dagger cuts to them but I don’t know if the Beaulieu is running.
Cut to downtown Ajaccio, but I have to explain it’s near noon, and we’ve acquired four young people: the American boy Mike whom Dagger talked to last night, the admiring girl next to him in class this morning, a French boy and a French girl with pigtails and a little face like a fairy. We find the historic alley near the port and the blank seventeenth-century edifice where Napoleon was born. There’s a delicate tree in its courtyard that they light at night. The French boy says what has this to do with Corsica; he says it to impress. The French girl laughs but she is well brought up, a nice girl from Paris who gets A’s at the Sorbonne, and she has not seen the interior and she takes the American girl’s arm and draws her in along the walk. Mike nods at the house and says to the French boy, You can see why Napoleon was a high-achiever, and the French boy nods rapidly and laughs. They stroll after the girls and enter the house.
Cut to them coming out: on film it will look as if they stayed about half a second.
Melanie the American girl we decide to let speak. I hook up and Dagger shoots her close with the Bonaparte house behind. She surprises me by reeling off straight-face a speech: Napoleon’s father Carlo Bonaparte served as secretary to the great Republican leader Pasquale Paoli. Carlo was of Genoese and Florentine ancestry. When Genoa sold Corsica to the French, Paoli fled to England. The French subdued the Corsican patriots. When Carlo Bonaparte fled south over the mountains, his wife Letizia was six months pregnant with Napoleon. Carlo and Letizia traveled by mule over dangerous mountains. They made it to Ajaccio and Napoleon was born in this very house. Melanie turns, and in good guided-documentary style with a sweep of her long brown arm ushers the camera forward, but Dagger doesn’t move, we are as yet zoomless, Dagger hasn’t phoned his contact. Two ladies with cameras and floppy straw hats step from the house. One carries a Blue Guide, the other says quite loudly in an educated English accent that she hopes they haven’t butted in. Dagger says, We’ll call you if we need you again, what hotel are you staying in, and the woman with the Blue Guide comes back at him with the name so calmly it’s as if she’s telling him the hour their lithological expedition sets off tomorrow, or perhaps she’s defending her relation with her friend.
Melanie continues, but she is not being filmed or recorded. At the time of the French Revolution Paoli returned to Corsica and set up an independent state. His supporters because of the late Carlo’s disloyalty drove Letizia who was by now a widow out of this house with her children and plundered it. Napoleon restored his mother to the house but by then the family’s feeling for Corsica had turned to bitterness.
We have already cut. We are at the market, the French boy saying Corsicans aren’t the fishermen the Italians are, Dagger filming flanks of tuna the deep beefy shade of whale, but we are in black and white, and he’s been busy talking to Mike and Melanie about women, art, poverty, identity, and revolution here and in Sicily, and he was swinging off on the one hand to Scotland and on the other to Poland, so he may have forgotten if we were in color or not.
The French students take us to a big café where a lot of scowling men are reading form sheets and placing bets at a counter where lottery tickets are also sold. Dagger pans across the round iron tables. The English tourist-ladies come by, walking toward Place Foch where there are shops and restaurants. The American boy Mike excuses himself, he’ll meet us at Hachette’s book store say half an hour. This is not on film. Melanie tries to go with him but he raises a hand and shakes his head. The French girl’s English is charming. Where do I live in America? I say I come from New York, I live in London. The French girl asks the difference between Pawnee and Sioux. The Sioux are a group of tribes; the Sioux came originally from Virginia—I surprise myself. The French boy wants to look at the Beaulieu. Dagger puts it in his hands. He squints through the rubber-lipped viewfinder. The girl met a man from New Mexico in the casino last night, he is a friend of Mike’s, he told her how the government cheats Indians and the only thing in America is to make as much money as you can as fast as you can. Dagger wants to pick up a Paris Herald and he too will meet us in Place Foch in half an hour, why not make it that book shop—go ahead and shoot something on impulse.
The French girl is reading Tender Is the Night, do I like it? She thinks it is sublime. I confess I’ve never read it.
We shift to French and the French boy inquires why New York lacks effective air pollution control.
It’s hot. I see us all separating: Mike, Dagger, Melanie, the French girl. The waiter comes. I am not writing well, Jenny. The French boy passes me the Beaulieu. The waiter goes, I answer in English that the landlords and entrepreneurs who schedule sneak pollution with their weekend cleanup crews burning incinerators they won’t pay to have upgraded don’t live in the central city so they don’t care.
You live in Manhattan, the French boy says. He has a pallidly honest face.
No, London.
Dagger comes back a moment leaning over us, his hands on our shoulders. He wants to check the battery for the pistol grip, he’ll just take the camera along. I can still see Mike up the street, he was looking in a window, he’s taking his time. I’d like to follow Dagger.
Melanie is from Brooklyn, a big girl with a handsome head and a profile for a hero’s bowsprit. Hippies are known to be out in the caves along the coast. Corsica is more than a hundred miles long.
The French boy asks if I’ve heard about the bomb that went off when an American cop jimmied open the window of an illegally parked car to let off the brake so the car could be towed away. The drinks have levitated from a dark corner of the bar and are approaching us. I say to Guy, the French boy, Next they’ll work out a way of sending a charge along the chain to blow up the tow truck. The French girl says, I like the man from New Mexico; the French boy shrugs. Melanie pats me on the back; she says, Good boy. I reckon she has a doting dad. But, says Guy, it’s not always police who do the towing, there are civilian tow trucks in America. I ask if he, too, is interested in American Indians. The French girl says the man from New Mexico tried out for the Olympic decathlon. Plenty of people try out, says Guy.
I have some malaria of the heart, and this young law student who’s at the ecology seminar for a holiday finds my bad spots like a dumbly true X-ray camera. He is extolling the Corsican Resistance which was so tough the island was free by September 1943. Not even the Green Berets could subdue this crazy island, he says in English. The French girl says she thinks the man from New Mexico may be violent. Guy shrugs.
I have a friendly wave of dislike for Dagger, and it passes. Melanie says she loves it here but can’t find anything made-in-Corsica that’s creative to bring home to her parents. Guy now gleefully tells how the Yanks bombed the swamps on the east side of the island at the end of the war to get rid of the mosquitoes, and this is where the Algerian pioneers went to work in so un-Corsican a spirit and created an agricultural showspot, grapes, vegetables—reclaimed the swamps as they had reclaimed the North African desert—Egyptian cotton, Guy believes too.
I point out that those very emigrants were of Corsican descent. Guy guffaws and says do I know how their prosperity has been greeted here? (I don’t think I put that in the pages Jenny typed. The Corsican capsule parts to let in which elements?) Sabotage, says Melanie. Correct, says Guy—certain unsavory elements blow up a power station over on that side of the island from time to time. Mike told me, says Melanie nodding reverently.
I raise my hands like a camera to frame a girl in a crisp flowered frock getting into a panel truck, and I murmur, The Egyptian cotton hasn’t taken, by the way. Taken? says Guy, puzzled.
Cut to a new street a quarter of a mile away at the end of
a section of hot fortress wall. My eyes throb. Our cast has split to buy the French boy a swimsuit. Yes, that is what Guy needs.
Copy of Figaro in Dagger’s hip pocket. You can buy newspapers at Hachette’s. Dagger conveys the heat shooting a second or two of a Chinese sweating in a laundry. We cross to the petrol-station side of the street. I cross back to look in a shop. My position matters here only in that I can now presently cross so as to be caught on film by accident after the minute or so of equally accidental comedy Dagger himself will track. Yet in turn my being caught is possible because in a moment Dagger himself will cross. But this might not be implicit enough in the finished film, so perhaps it doesn’t belong in my diary; yet the Corsican montage has enlarged beyond the hours Jenny took to type it in London, the magazine opens to let in a future unphraseable there on a street in Ajaccio, never mind. My spine between my shoulder blades is wet, my temples hot. Dagger ambles powerfully along, and I have again this sense of introducing my motion into a field without motion, and now in my brain (that is suspended in fluid and has, they say, no sensitivity to pain) the amateur thought circles like a series of instructions performed repeatedly till some specified condition is satisfied whereupon a branch instruction is obeyed to exit from the loop—the thought that Dagger doesn’t have a clue, maybe he knew once but he doesn’t now know what he’s doing. But I can’t take the exit offered because Dagger has stopped and though I’m across the street and can’t hear the hiss of the camera I know it’s turning.
Is there a knob that turns visibly? I pan to what even from my acute angle I see he’s shooting in the near-noon glare and the sharp shade here and there along the street fragrant of petrol and hot olive oil: his subjects are moving slowly up their street which crosses where ours ends, or up that portion of their street that’s all we can see; they are three, a girl in a little white and black skirt and a white midriff blouse, a blond man in shorts and an orange terrycloth shirt, and a man also young but totally bald whose head seems to contain the deep brownness of the three of them—he’s lean and bony and looks lithe and swift. They walk single-file like tourists who’ve had a drink in one of the fisherman’s cafés and are now strolling toward the beach, except that the girl isn’t carrying anything so maybe they are going somewhere else first. They are so slow they seem almost acting. The fort wall is glaring bright, the sidewalk is narrow. But now the girl points at Dagger, her midriff blouse stark white. The blond man steps off the curb toward us but is checked by the other young man who now jabs him in the ribs with his index finger. The three continue along the fortress wall, the bald man has his hand on the girl’s back where it’s bare. We are fifty yards from the end of our street where theirs crosses coming up from the port. I cross to Dagger’s side. The three go almost out of sight to our right and he has the camera right on them. Dagger breaks to the left and is almost brushed by a car as he crosses the street to the side I was on in order to shoot a bit more of the three. I can’t see them now, for I am still on the right side. Dagger trots to the end of the street, shoots again. They did not want to be filmed. The English have that sense of privacy, but the English would never so openly assert it and would suffer it and ignore it.
But I didn’t give Dag £12 in London for film just to piss it away.
I cut across toward him, at an angle, for he’s already at the intersection. I’m calling something to him, I cannot know what the three are doing, but now as if they are just part of a larger scene Dagger pans to me running toward him, switches off saying that I’ve run right out of focus. I don’t know why I was running. I felt for a second almost between him and them. I turn again and the girl and the two guys are there almost out of sight up their street but turning out of it toward Place Napoléon, and the blond man looks back and then they’re gone.
The exit from that loop swings by again and I don’t quite make it out but I say to Dag (and feel this takes me part way, for maybe this is a soft exit), On film I’ll look like I’m running at the cameraman to protect those people from him.
Dagger is at once, though with a certain casual slowness, into a tale about a New York friend who in the early fifties was doing a TV history-simulation called See It Now. So one day he was taping the show and put his eye to the viewfinder to check that he was getting what he wanted—and suddenly like a face from another dimension into the viewfinder comes an old college pal who owes him money and plans to borrow more and figures if he wanders onto the set he might even get a bit part.
Dagger’s Beaulieu may have caught in my face some record of the French boy knocking America or Melanie touching me through my wet shirt and setting off a fatherly nerve that circles a memory that, because they grew up in London, I never had of taking my daughter fishing in Sheepshead Bay on a Sunday, my family to Lindy’s in Coney Island for lobster, my children to see the sea lions and giant turtles in the aquarium that moved from the Battery to Coney Island the year Will was born in England.
Tourists, says Dag, tourists, against the wall of a fortress.
But I don’t believe him, I don’t believe he has a real idea.
But if he’s using me—for what? fun and friendship? camera practice? Will Claire’s boss pay our gas and film? I kicked in £12 in London for color stock Dagger ordered from L.A. I thought there was energy in his good nature as in the rechargeable power pack that drives the Beaulieu motor and can “transport” as many spools as we’ll conceivably need. A chance plunge yields new power. My exit comes again and I find my branch instruction and leave the loop. I have seen how to use the Corsican footage. Between the silent Softball Game and the Marseillaise game of bowls with its arcing, thudding steel balls, there will have intervened the Unplaced Room with its barren venue and its military subject matter; the Bonfire in Wales with its burning branches and the Unknown Man running from darkness to darkness; the Hawaiian hippie (whose face will connect with that of the American Indian of the preceding scene) steadfastly drumming his guitar not on the road any more but in the great long pedestrian subway that leads to the South Kensington tube station; the colors and names of things going into the Suitcase Slowly Packed opening into the colors of the pier crowd here in Ajaccio. We will then cut ahead to footage not yet taken of the U.S. Air Force base in England but just for ten seconds of NATO first-strike bombers taking off silently against Guy’s remarks about the bombing of the malaria swamps (which we’ll get him to repeat at the casino tonight against the baccarat croupiers’ calls). Then to Carlo and Letizia’s house and Melanie’s spiel, then use what she said when she wasn’t being filmed or recorded (talking about Paoli’s supporters driving Letizia out of her house) as sound track for the tourists against the fortress wall (though we’ll have to establish that it is a fortress).
Cut to the fortress street from which the girl and the two men have just disappeared (though any potential justness in our finished film will hinge on how we edit). I ask Dagger to move up and shoot along the fortress wall to see down into the courtyard behind the wall—where they used to shoot the condemned.
Something newly sound and solid is coming. I’m excited. I do not know what the Marvelous Country House will yield—Americans, another fortress, a nice life perhaps shivered into montage with the air base and thus made to seem close to it in green England. We’ll see when we get back from Corsica.
I decide we’ll take a day’s jaunt over to the west side of the island (where there’s a Roman town at Aleria) and film that area where the U.S. Air Force bombed the fever mosquitoes.
Cut to Tuesday. The film will show the offshore battle of the landing craft. Across the Gulf of Ajaccio at a depth of forty meters are the shelves of coral the scuba man said he’d take me to for fifty francs. A gray outboard rounds a giant buoy. The eye-ear-nose-and-throat man from whom Dagger borrowed the zoom this morning lives in a large dusky apartment with heavy furniture and a calm beautiful blond woman. It is an Angenieux zoom with focal length variable from 12 mm. to 120 mm. Since one of our own prime lenses is 15 mm., our advantage w
ith the zoom is at the long narrow end not at the short wide. It’s not even the quick lens change between shots but the flexibility while shooting that turns Dagger on. But on the way back to the école for lunch he has said he’s sorry we couldn’t dig up a 12—240, and for less than eight inches long this here zoom is awful heavy and he’s got to handle it like a China doll it’s so expensive and he’s not going to be able to do one combination he’d planned, moving the camera back while zooming at the same rate toward the boys in the yellow raft, because with a zoom the weight increases so much with the thing sticking out in front that you have to use a tripod; and he can’t see holding the grip with his right hand, working the zoom crank with his left, to say nothing of pan zooms and going backward on sand stumbling over ladies and babies. I had nothing to say. Dagger said it was impossible to have anyone else turn the crank, it had to be the one looking through the viewfinder. I got his point.
Dagger’s American friend is on the beach with Dagger and wants to help out. The magazine is mounted on top so we won’t have to reload for two hundred feet and its shape suggests cans of films. A giant soccer player in an ingenious bikini stands hand on hip, there are bare brown girls and boys discussing the camera and asking who is in the film. Dagger wears sawed-off jean shorts below his hairy torso, the San Francisco Seals baseball cap above. The Scotswoman wears two strips of black. The sand is molten. Dagger tries a five-second shot of her at ten feet. A tot is peeing in the water but perhaps not in focus. Out near the boys in their yellow rubber rafts a snorkler’s yellow hose sticks out of his head like a periscope. Melanie is not in a swimsuit. She is watching the two teams a hundred yards offshore ramming each other with rubber-ended poles. She asks Dagger if she can look, but he says the gear’s pretty tricky; then he says Oh sure.
The Scotswoman charges the water—her long-legged run is slowed, she launches a flat dive.
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