Dagger has fixed the W-shaped crank in the Out position and is turning it.
I’m in the water way right of Dagger. I cup my hands to frame the boys in their yellow boats. The snorkler has come so close to their combat that one of them taps him on the head with the rubber end of a pole and he comes up suddenly as if he can’t hold his breath any more. Words would not improve on Dagger’s filming here. I could have held the mike near the camera to tape the observations of those at the observing end; instead I am out in the almost acidly salty water to the right of the naval encounter, which you can understand better if you know that it continues the dusty hostilities of last evening when the American and French boys at the école took on a bunch of locals in soccer.
The sky is a ground; I kick my toes to the surface, I fly at such a height I mark no progress overland. I rest my eyes, the salt sting when I close them also muscles my chest. Closed bodies like the Med build up higher salinity and the Med is one reason the Atlantic is saltier than the Pacific. Across my eyelids’ apricot inside, quick dry intercuts occur—a collapsed and folded yellow raft on a shelf in a shop along the Cour Napoléon, three bright headbands displayed in a Greenwich Village window, bikinis in a haberdasher’s drawer, pines contoured like children’s mountains at dusk against a final brightness of sky after the sun has dropped—it would be too obvious not to say ludicrous to bring on a destroyer as backdrop for this naval engagement—my mind approaches a condition of music or more likely the phrase itself Lorna and Geoff Millan said back and forth one night and I deliberately failed to understand even when it became a branch of the conversation kindly directed at me, to wit that a formula, yes even a formula, say in engineering, might approach the condition of music—and months too late I retort that I’ll take a mechanism over a formula any day; now take a servo-mechanism, in response to a control signal a servo like the sound of a dominant chord conveys to the control system the difference between a deshed state and the actual state again and again until the difference is eliminated, like a marital grievance in a soap opera—my ears here below the surface catch tremors of warble and concussion, I drift nearer the combat; I turn back.
I let my ghostly legs drop. Something happens. In the stern of the American boat if these boats had sterns, Mike, upon seeing the Scotswoman Mary, reaches at her with his pole and just as one of the Corsicans on the far side from me dodges a pole but hangs on to its rubber end and pulls so the American boat jumps toward the Corsicans, Mary grabs hold of Mike’s rubber end and pulls, and her move finds force in his move and weight. The sync is exact and like a thought proved. And into the water goes Mike and away goes his boat, a subtraction from the international event, an addition elsewhere. Yet Mike jabbed wantonly, and his may be a subtler judo still, as if, bored with battle in a suburban gulf, he looked at Mary and thought her emphatically worth not waiting any longer for.
Just two Yanks left, one drops his pole, grabs a paddle and maneuvers, leaving Mike still further off but Mike is wrestling with Mary. The Corsicans seem between the Americans and Dagger, a conjunction interestingly compressed by a zoom shot’s diminished depth of field. I’m twenty-five yards from Mike and Mary; some U.S. or French firm must have thought up an underwater housing for a Nagra, but I have only ears. The mountains at my feet are brownly harsh green with maquis but the yellow blooms are past, we’re too late except for postcards. The naval encounter turns serious, the Americans are in close, swinging their poles to hit the enemy with wood now, but except to Dagger at 120 mm. the hostilities will seem from the beach all in good fun. The Americans are now attempting to board the Corsicans. The two boats have drifted down the shore to a position opposite the café. Mary and Mike like a subplot discreetly spar. She says, I’ll tell my brother. He says, I’ll tell Melanie. She says, You don’t need to. Mike and Mary are gasping and grappling. Mike says, Your brother I hear is a very bad influence on Paul. Where did you get that? says Mary. From Gene? Mike strokes over to the bobbing dark pink butt of his pole. Mary goes under, Mike twists round laughing, she’s got his legs. He sees me as Mary surfaces and he is looking at me over her slim shoulder as she says, You didn’t answer me.
Mike’s look at me is blank. He says with a hand on Mary, I’ll answer you, and dives. She screams while he’s under. The fight is over. The yellow rafts are empty but being reboarded.
How do you know my brother? says Mary, and Mike’s answer is too low, and she says, But how do you know Paul?
I can’t hear Mike.
Halloween, says Mary I think, and becomes aware of me.
I swim in.
I wade out, firm and sleek.
Melanie meets me disconsolately. What were you doing out there? Aren’t you making the film too?
Dreaming, I say.
Want to have a drink? she asks; and then: He stopped filming the boats when Mike fell in.
Good, that means more film left.
He dropped a reel on his instep and now he’s limping around in agony, Melanie says, but he just went on shooting Mike and that Scotch woman.
She’s old enough, I say.
Mike said he had to discuss something with your friend tonight. Do you know where?
Can’t drape sea water over your toes like you can a blanket. Floating in the Gulf of Ajaccio, drape a line from eye to toe. Then one from toes to mountain like a suspension bridge. Document your daydream with fact.
Well here you talk about the condition of music whatever the hell that is, and let’s say in a suspension bridge like Brooklyn Bridge there’s as much melody heating up in its cables as in the formulas John Roebling used to arrive at just a couple of cables each 12½ inches in diameter and containing, helically wrapped with galvanized wire, almost as many wires as there are feet in a mile; what if we take it the other way round and, instead of finding beauty in calculations, make measurements of the beautiful, what about the cyano-meter Ruskin devised to measure the blue of the sky?
Mad Ruskin.
I could no more have contained in its solid slot that Corsican cartouche than in the diary part I gave Jenny to type add to the after-all relevant dialogue a measure of the warm span of Melanie’s breasts unbra’d beneath a spanking white T-shirt sporting a black Napoleon horsed at Waterloo, right hand inside his coat. Yet Jenny was to say next week that my style grew on her.
Once coming out of our Welsh dairyman Mr. Jones’s I converged upon Tessa who was coming to have tea with Lorna, and right there in the middle of the road in Highgate Tessa gave me a book about the Maya and told me to read the bit about physical characteristics, also Le Plongeon’s theory that through their own colonists the Maya influenced the culture of Babylon, Syria, Asia, and Africa.
You have me. Even if you have not the book. I put it in my jacket pocket. I half read it the first night but to this day I have not returned it. I told Dudley I hadn’t finished and he said the less of that we have around the house the better.
In Jenny’s typescript of the Marvelous Country House the first week in August, the name Gene hit me, but the night we filmed at Stonehenge and I saw that the deserter from the Unplaced Room had turned up, I thought to ask Dagger how Mike in Corsica had known Gene. Through Cosmo, Dagger said; Mike was mainly in New York.
Place Foch: we dine outside.
Back at the école they’ve finished dinner an hour ago no doubt and have grabbed their guitars.
We are near the hips and elbows of promenaders. Stiff thick old palms stand around the square; flowers in the middle and a newsstand now closed where I bought postcards of sights I won’t see. The strings of festival lights are not so fancy as the façade of lights hanging over Cour Napoléon that depict Napoleon’s hat. Beyond, high above a side street off Place Foch a line of laundry sags near the light of a bare window. I put my hand on the Beaulieu where it lies on a chah between Dagger and me. A German was shot in a bar last night. In the leg from behind, in the foot from the front, in the buttock from the side—the tale chculates. They say every other car in Corsica has a gu
n in the trunk. Tonight the week has gotten away from us. But my prospect of ball games (soft and steel) and malaria bombs and rings of fire and glaring chalky walls with tourists plodding single-file holds as firm as the New Orleans I visited on business a fortnight after Mardi Gras once.
We have shot footage of the seminar students sagely taking down names on mailboxes in the lower street of shops that runs parallel to Cour Napoléon, to determine the residents’ ancestry, French, Italian, Greek. We have shot festival fireworks—no telling what explosively experimental fruit-storms have lathered our celluloid skies. Cartouche means fireworks and cartridge. We’ve shot and taped the école youths feeding, drinking, singing “Auprès de ma blonde” and “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” and marching around the long tables but not like ’68. (Corsica is too strategic for its own independence.) I want to go diving with the camera to deepen the Bonfire in Wales and the Naval Engagement. There’s no way to take the camera down, I’ll have to go alone.
We dine in Place Foch, giving the seminar’s bonhomie a rest. A child is being force-fed yogurt, yogurt is good for the liver. We return the zoom tonight. I discuss the fish soup with a huge-nosed old waiter. People click by. You can see the pier. A bronzed foursome occupy a table near us. They’re speaking Italian, I may have seen the dark girl on the Genoa boat. The older man who has a blue-and-gold captain’s hat on holds the menu up to one side and talks from it to the obsequious girls and back, as if it describes them.
I ask Dagger what we have achieved here. He is putting away the rich peppery fish soup. The Italian in the hat claps his hands and calls out in French for someone higher up than the handsome waiter who stands by. Dagger says, We’ve got a lot of good stuff, the Naval Engagement, the market, the fortress. I say what about Mike and Mary playing games. I say I feel like we’ve been sleepwalking or waiting for something to happen when we should have been making it happen. Dagger is glad we ate out tonight—did I ever hear about the man who’s been in a coma since early 1957? Dagger pilots a hunk of bread around his soup, sinks it, lifts it out, and puts it in his mouth: Well, this man wakes up from his coma and learns that Eisenhower is dead and says My God, then Nixon is President.
I propose shooting the east side of the island where the Algerians settled. Mussolini comes up at the Italians’ table. Mussolini’s son. Dagger agrees we might look at the east side of the island. I suggest we interview someone there who knows about the reactionary sabotage, for some of it may be anti-American. Dagger with his mouth full says, That’s getting pretty wild.
This was not in what Jenny typed, though what she typed she said was the best I’d done. The Corsican cartridge has opened and spread, like the paper of gunpowder Dudley Allott told me of, that by joke or chance turned up instead of salt in the bread and eggs and fowl that Stephens and Catherwood had packed for a leg of their toiling trek through Guatemala seeking ruined cities. “It was,” Stephens said, “the most innocent way of tasting gunpowder, but even so it was a bitter pill.” But lucky for them they weren’t cooking that night.
Our langouste comes, long narrow crayfish with spines. Paris fixes the market price.
The man in the captain’s hat is at least sixty, and tough. The young man could be a film actor. The blonde inclines her head to our side and takes a relaxed look around.
We go to work. The wine is cool.
The Italian has sent a bottle back.
I put my hand on the Beaulieu—the business (or right-hand) side with knobs and a switch for frame-power and the two tiny windows over the footage gauges—the top with the vertical needle registering meters and feet, the bottom with horizontal needle registering frames 1 10 100. Dagger doesn’t notice. OK, he says, you tell me: what should we be doing here? Here I thought I was looking after your health, education, and welfare—free grub at the école, girls on the beach, and you learned that there are five towns in the U.S. named after Pasquale Paoli.
The Italian with the hat does business with il Duce’s nephew. I say Oh sure, Boswell got Ben Franklin interested, but Boswell got the Scots excited about the plight of Corsica, now what’s that Scots lassie doing in Ajaccio with Mike?
The man in the captain’s hat passes on to a Belgian ambassador named Duprat who is also a friend of his and who has been killed in a coup along with more than ninety dinner guests of King Hassan’s. My Italian fails me so I don’t get the link with Allende’s copper coup the bad effect of which upon U.S. Anaconda the man in the captain’s hat boasts can but be to his own advantage. My Italian fails me again and all I make out a moment later is It’s just a matter of time, and then Mussolini is mentioned, and the dark-haired girl tries to put in an opinion but the skipper shut her right up saying he too was a partisan in ’43 but no Red (he shakes a finger smiling).
He lifts his hat and he’s bald. He runs his finger along a sculpted cleft where the Americans shot out a piece of bone and when he recovered he was a new man. He has stopped the conversation with his head but at the same moment the young handsome waiter has put down a big salad bowl full of shrimp. The skipper nibbles one, his full lips seem dyed purple on his burnished tan. He picks off a rib of shell, eyes the waiter, and chucks the shrimp back into the bowl. In Italian he says to the waiter, We always throw the babies back. His guests laugh, but that wasn’t what the skipper meant—he speaks to the waiter again in Italian, the others stop laughing, the waiter shakes his head with wary eyes that could mean he doesn’t get the point or is implying Fuck You.
Our langoustes have been on a diet. Dagger is gnawing thoughtfully. I get hold of the camera. Dagger raises his eyebrows, a shard of abdominal carapace and a couple of spines in front of his moustache. No doubt what’s happening. The Corsican is being told, now in French, to shell every last shrimp, and the girls are smiling.
The waiter goes away. The patron appears. The skipper is going to charm the patron, almost. The bottle of Château de Tracy ’67 is almost finished, the skipper wants another, he talks French to the patron. The patron seems to charm the skipper, who in the way he looks up at the patron seems almost to be rising. The waiter goes away, the patron and the skipper (about the same age but in very different shape) discuss the shrimp and the size of the langoustes to come. I have the Beaulieu out of its case and without noting what lens we’re on I focus quietly as the sullen garçon appears with a second misted bottle of Tracy ’67 and a wood-handled knife which sticks out of his fist in the upward or number-one stabbing position. Dagger says, For Christ sake, and I let my thumb off the button. OK, he says, to get to Aleria on the east side you have to drive up to Corte in the middle where Paoli had his capital, didn’t he?
Other tables have noticed. The waiter is shelling the shrimp. The event has lost its prankish magic. He has pulled the bowl to the edge and is using the wood-handled knife. The foursome are looking at each other but not moving. I’m shooting again. I haven’t checked the light. We’re on 50 mm., which is fine. Dagger says, I wouldn’t. He might be Mafia.
The waiter is moving his hands as if he’s trying to insert a tiny screw into a fixture at a bad angle. The blonde drinks, but the four are essentially motionless. The fruits of the sea accumulate on a plate.
I feel like a lookout looking opposite ways waiting to warn. Warn the waiter? The odious bigshot?
The bigshot has popped two babies into his mouth and has complimented the waiter, who is spilling tiny jets of rage as if from his ribs each time his elbow slightly rises or from his eyes each time he blinks. The energy is in an unstable state but feeding at a regular clip into the Beaulieu. The skipper spots me.
I switch off as he rises, and I have felt a new thing—that energy has been sent from me as well as received by me. My eye away from the viewfinder sees more. Dagger says, Watch it. The skipper asks in French what I think I’m doing. The waiter drops his knife into the bowl of unshelled shrimp. The skipper tells him he’s not finished.
I call in English, We’re doing a film on Corsica.
What about Corsica? the skipp
er demands, and when he turns eye-to-eye with the waiter and sees the shelling has again stopped and nods so sharply to the waiter it looks like the last OK to the executioner to go ahead, the waiter resumes performing his instructions and in spite of me is in even worse shape.
The Italian smiles with his purple lips, looks at his three guests, and says with a smug shrug, I am not exactly Onassis. He sits down and waves a hand at the waiter and says to me, Let him be the star, eh?
He is, I call.
Hello there!
Dagger’s voice revolves me on the seat of my chair to Mary and Mike just a couple of close-ups away. She’s in a pale sleeveless shift, her hair all over her shoulders.
The Italian calls: What is your film?
Revolution, I call. It’s about revolution.
I raise the camera and shoot.
The Italian with a sweep of his hand over his table, stopping shy of the shrimp bowl above which the knife picks away, calls back in French this time, But there is no revolution here.
I cut. We can dub his words.
I’m reaching the Beaulieu back onto its chair but this is where Mike wants to sit.
Revolution? he says quietly to Dagger. You didn’t tell me.
Dagger begins some tale about the passionate guitarist Prince Yusupov who assassinated the Tsar’s favorite, Rasputin, escaped to New York, and later bought two houses up in Calvi.
Mike doesn’t pursue my remark about revolution.
I post a card to Jenny: dark slender mules being loaded with cork bark, the unseen sun pumpkin orange in the inner trough of each chunk; my message: SOMETHING STRANGE GOING ON HERE.
To Will, a high stone viaduct and two neat white and red train carriages presumably moving from one dark blur of green foliage to the other while through the gray arches can be seen sky and cliffs in the distance; my message: TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION COMES TO CORSICA.
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