Nicole, in turn, had found Corsica a summer landscape upon which to develop her alternative medicines, drawing upon the herbal and remedial benefits of many maquis plants and shrubs. For this specific purpose, she had bought the house perched halfway up the mountainside, overlooking the small enclosed bay, with only the taverne giving any other evidence of habitation. Here I had met the old couple, Antoine and Angelique, who scratched a living from occasional yachts anchoring in the cove. They were a rich source of tales of Corsica’s past. A violent history, of hard lives, whose stress-lines carried forward on their anxious faces.
For humans are a reflection of their landscape and no more so than this couple. Their old wrinkled faces were as battered as their shack, made of a wooden construction, long weather-beaten by sun and wind, with a central space off which were partitions, giving them an open living area, two bedrooms, a larder and une cuisine d’ête - an outdoor kitchen behind the boardwalk in front. Here, shaded by a vine pergola, they served meals to yacht crews who chose to row ashore. Fresh fish was the target of their appetites, washed down with quantities of wine. If these sea-hands were too drunk to row back they lay down overnight on the straw mattresses in the shed at the back.
There was only one other permanent inhabitant in the cove, and provider of the fish, Giuseppe, well-hidden in the ancient grotte, a natural cave feature on the shoreline that had been created millions of years ago by some primordial eruption. The full weight of his sad story would not emerge for some time.
The peace and quiet I first found was ideal for my work. The place was landlocked, accessible only by sea. We were out of reach, through the absence of roads. It presented a corner of heaven on earth, not least because it was also in a phone-free and internet dead-spot.
How it could turn to hell seemed impossible.
vi
In the taverne the second day, when I went to help Antoine load my luggage on the mules the talk was of the buoy and the dead man’s identity.
“The gendarmes say he was probably a low-level gangster, putting pressure on the fishermen along this coast. Trying to kill off their trade for his master’s benefit.”
“To kill for that?”
“Often for less.”
“Would Giuseppe have been involved?”
“His catch is too small to matter. The sea is overfished, so there’s increasing competition for what is left.”
I had not met Giuseppe at that time. As I got to know him, I shared Antoine’s doubts that he could have done the deed. Except he was the only person in this tiny community who had an interest in the fishing.
It was I who saw in Nicole a beauty others missed. I thought her to be around forty, like me, and she had matured from the prettiness of youth into a woman with a calm and deeper beauty. Not everyone noticed this or agreed, nor would she herself accept such an opinion of her looks. Peering into the mirror, a woman misses the most important inner view, as she fiddles at the edges of her make-up, applies a lipstick a shade too light, or frets at the smallest defect in her features. Out here she neither needed nor wanted make-up to resist the warm breezes that brushed across our lives. She allowed her already fair hair to bleach under the rays of the sun as it crinkled in the heat, so that it was a wild mane flowing from the back of her head when she crossed the hillside in search of flowers, grasses or plants.
In fact she seemed to float across the maquis, when her feet were hidden in the deep grass or undergrowth, as if she was in a dreamland. However she was a serious student of botany and its role in providing healing potions since time began. She was intent on finding new prescriptions from the range of herbs and plants which surrounded us, and would be out early determinedly. Later at the house she would be in her study, a laboratory in which, with mortar and pestle, she ground, crushed and powdered these elements into various samples. The plants proven to be safe she mixed in new combinations, new strengths to test if their efficacy might be improved. The dangerous or toxic plants, with which she was not familiar she treated with respect, yet would be unaware of their true toxicity until sampled or sipped. A risk that seemed to me to be potent, given that we were hours away from help in the case of accident, cut off from modern forms of communication. Only two hours’ journey by boat could render aid in an emergency.
Despite these risks, she had survived so far, and her dedication here to cram in as much research and sampling as she could in the summer months was to be admired. I sensed
some unexplained ambition behind such hard work, a cause that pushed her on, year after year. She gave no clue as to what it was.
I noticed no faults in her, because I saw the whole, a masterpiece of form that roused my inner passion as much as pure affection. ‘Nothing spectacular’, others might say, but they were wrong. Back in England on first acquaintance I had noticed her not through rose-tinted spectacles, or because she had made something of an entrance into the room. Not that at all. It had been my discreet observation of her animated face as she described some latest calamity to others, at the other side of the gathering.
That had been before she had escaped once again to this Mediterranean island, and detached herself from the humdrum reality of London life, the ever-present family anxieties and money problems. Issues I did not learn of until we were enmeshed in intimacy.
Nicole had travelled often to this granite island and walked its mountainous interior, which still carried in its genes the bandit-ridden past. On a whim she had bought this small hillside house from Antoine and Angelique, when they had given up shepherding and moved down to the cove to run the ramshackle taverne in ‘retirement’.
Antoine and Angelique made just enough money in the summer months from their beach trade to survive the year, with essential supplies brought in once a month by arrangement with a fishing boat in Calvi. Wines and spirits, beers, coffee, cigarettes and bottled gas cylinders were the main items missing from the provisions they could find on the landscape laden with olive trees, their oil used for lighting and cooking. La carte was dependent on that day’s catch out at sea, brought in by Giuseppe, if the weather or his mood allowed. The rest of what they needed to sustain us grew on the land behind or lived in the paddocks. Their almond and other fruit trees, the remaining sheep, goats, a few pigs and the
vegetable patch provided a diet – and meals for visitors. Bread was made from chestnut flour, stored every winter in great quantity from the large number of these trees up the mountainsides. They had two mules for carrying heavy goods – mainly for things that needed to be brought up to Nicole’s house. An old mongrel slept most of the day on their terrace.
The couple took time to get to know, their past buried beneath a lifetime of
nomadic moves around the core of Corsica before settling here when their limbs could no longer manage shepherding large flocks on the steep mountainsides. I had to get used to their rough-edged French, which I translate with some smoothing at the risk of distorting their history. At times Antoine lapses into Corsican, particularly when he is angry, reminiscing about the old violent days, explaining to me the realities of banditry and vendetta. He hurls words at me like periculu, azardu, gattiru, insidiu, which are to leave me baffled for some time, as did schioppetto until its murderous significance expressed itself later. For some I can make an educated guess: morte, rivolveru, venditta (sic) and if misguidedly stileto, whose deadly work only exposed itself long into my stay.
Antoine’s face bears the weather-beaten hallmarks of a life spent in the mountains, alternatively burnt with the sun or swept by the driving rain and mist at altitude. His white hair deceives as to his sturdiness, the latent strength that has not yet left him. He could carry a sheep on his back or lift a goat over a fence as needed. He moved heavy timbers and raised water from the well without breaking a sweat. His mind remained alert and he would tell me those daunting tales of Corsica’s past, while smoking some vile and pungent cigarette of dubious origin.
Angelique’s hands gave the
better clues as to the nature of her long life, coping with a mountain existence in stone bergeries that had previously sheltered sheep. From her stories one could picture the blank granite walls acting as freezers in winter, the outdoor well requiring the raising of heavy water buckets, the grinding of wheat or chestnuts to make the flour for bread, or the wood collected for the open hearth on which she had to cook as well. The streaks of grey in her hair reflected these strains, but the constant exercise had kept her slim, though the outline of her body was lost in the traditional black cloth dress of the mountain villages. Though the taverne was itself an ancient shack, it proved an advance on what they had to put up with down the years. “A little luxury,” Antoine would joke, as Angelique glowered in the background.
In truth Angelique did well with the limited resources she had to hand. Beside her potager with its range of herbs and vegetables, she used the small flock of sheep and goats as well as one or two pigs as the occasional providers of meat. Once Antoine had slaughtered an animal, he would make the most of the meat, butchering it all up into cuts that could be smoked or stored in the old bottle-gas freezer to serve their guests for the month ahead. This ancient appliance relied on a steady supply of gas cylinders from Calvi, brought in by the supply boat. One year the boat had been held up by storms and the gas ran out. The loss of stored meat was a heavy blow to their provisions. Angelique used her cuisine d’ête, en plein air – a two-chambered stone structure away from the reed thatch of the shack, where there was a hand-turned rotisserie, that could smoke and spew ash without causing a roof fire.
But above all, Angelique was mistress of a cuisine that offered some of Corsica’s traditional foods. The light and creamy brocciu – a cheese-like ricotta, made from the whey of her brebis’s milk and formed into little round wheels. Served with her canistrelli chestnut cakes. The same chestnuts that were the source of the ground flour and châtaignes en pots de crème. These and other delicacies I was to enjoy over the summer.
At the other end of the cove, living a hermit’s existence, weather-beaten too beyond his years, Giuseppe would also have tough stories to relate, a violent past that came out in the passage of time. As Antoine had predicted, Giuseppe was not going to tell me much at first, other than as a conscripted Italian teenager fighting in the second World War he had been posted in 1942 to the island, amongst forces supporting the German occupiers. Taken prisoner by French forces in 1943 just before the Germans and Italians retreated to the mainland, as Allied forces swept up the backbone of Italy, he had fallen for a local girl during his confinement. No more than that, when pressed, would he then say, other than she had died in an accident.
Giuseppe, in his distress, had come to this remote cove and found himself the grotte that had in ancient times been formed at one end of the beach. The rough natural rock shelter lay in the gully of a hillside, with the stream of a spring further up, running past to drain into the bay. Some ancient man, perhaps megalithic had made the first structure, for the roof slab was a prehistoric tolmen, which had supporting sides of granite blocks dry-walled into position to create a large enough space for a bed of army canvas on one side, a wood cooking fireplace on the other and a large living area in the middle in which he ate and ‘worked’. To protect himself from the blows of storms or gales he had rescued an old tarpaulin, flotsam off some ship, and anchored it to the frame of the entrance. He used oil lamps in the darker winter days. His few possessions lay on lopsided shelves, whilst his personal possessions were kept in an old tin trunk. He carried the look of a ship-wrecked Robinson Crusoe. “What do I need?” was his refrain whenever I spoke with him later about his girlfriend. “Marianne was all I wanted. Nothing else matters.”
vii
Of the five senses, sight is the most indispensable. Without it I would not have seen the glance from Nicole that created our contact. I would have missed her slim figure floating on the landscape, her body half-hidden by the undergrowth as she searched for plants. The delicate watercolours of those captured botanicals would have been unappreciated. The amphitheatre of the cove would not be the visible stage upon which we played.
One could manage however without hearing. Dangers would present themselves on these mountainous slopes and cause one to miss the soft clop of the mules, the clang of sheep bells, the occasional barking of the taverne dog. Gunshots would be undetected.
“Yes, true,” Antoine was to say, “you have your hearing, but it didn’t do you much good, when it mattered.”
A lack of a sense of smell or taste one could tolerate. Yet what a penalty that would be. To live under the blanket of scents that the maquis spreads over us and not enjoy every aroma, a terrible loss. When Nicole pressed a bunch of flowers to one’s face or invited the cataloguing of a herbal flavour – these pleasures would be sacrificed.
But it was touch that defined our lives. The brush of her arm as she slipped by me in the corridor, the hand on the shoulder, the kiss on the nape of my unsuspecting neck, or our legs combining to thrust aside the shrubs as we battled our way through the undergrowth of the maquis. It was indoors, sheltering from the blazing afternoon sun, that touch took on the challenge of desire, when Nicole allowed us to break her rules. Regulations that did not empower me to interrupt her work, nor make advances unless the mood took her – and me with it. For all that our eyes had met across that crowded room, she did not accept an exchange of glances now as a trigger to act, to take her in my arms. I had to wait. Until in time the lightest of touches might prompt a willingness to be enjoyed.
Touch too was the sense that mattered most to her work. The shapes and textures of each plant defined its purpose. The possibilities of a remedy lay in the milk of the leaves she pressed, or the juice of the fruit, the crush of the seeds, the stain from the berries, the pollen on the stamen, sticky secretions on the stigma, sugary liquids of the nectary, or the scrape of woody fibres. Each one assessed first by touch rather than taste, lest it prove narcotic or poisonous, and then checked rigorously against ancient records. Every plant Nicole held in her hands for study and painting, and her catalogue of botany which had grown over the years was carefully annotated with notes that built into a large volume. A work of dedication.
“But it took a disaster to make you understand its true significance.”
Yes, Antoine, right again.
viii
I had readily accepted the choice of this summer stay, making an essential contribution to Nicole’s costs, whilst I would pursue my freelance work to meet deadlines that others dictated. For a long time, based in Brussels, I had been the European Business Editor for a leading national newspaper, dealing with the good, the bad and the ugly on the continent. After fifteen years a new Managing Editor had thrown half the editorial staff overboard, and I had moved to being a freelance contributor, and lately in the literary review arena. This new freedom to pursue a subject of interest had started well, but had its risks.
The reality was we shared a downward curve in our occupations. Nicole was an alternative medicine researcher, botanist and water-colourist. The aquarelles, though beautifully drawn and swathed in colour wash, were not selling well and her pursuit of herbalistic treatments was under attack from the medical profession. My articles of literary criticism began to suffer from an increasing shortage of space allocated to reviews in the newspaper and magazine markets. For both of us, in different ways this summer escape offered a time to pause and consider other important matters, emotional freedoms and the chance to express them.
This year I was to find a cocktail of emotions, inspirations and sensitivities played out at her hilltop house, and drink in the views that never lost their charm. Looking down on the small bay and sandy cove to see the bright sunlight shimmering on the sea, whispers of wind lifting the seabirds on its thermals, the purple haze of mountains behind us, and the muted tones of the maquis. Down at the taverne’s rickety jetty old Giuseppe might pitch up on his good days with a small basket of fish, often the only movement
to catch the eye other than transient yachts at anchor. We were becalmed, as it were, and it gave me the chance to observe Nicole closely – in fact to feel her presence, to share a brief kiss, even when she found my attention a little pressing.
“But you did invite me.”
“I know, Jack, but slow down.”
The influence of ‘rules’ was soon evident, and the closer I came to her, the more I had to fall in line with them. I was not allowed to give her too much praise, and she was reluctant to accept my blandishments, scoffing at my compliments on her beauty, resisting my touch unless she softened at that moment to let me hug her as any admirer would have wanted. Even then I was not allowed to sustain my hold on her for long, before she would break away and attend to some botanical study.
For all her friendliness she wore an invisible cloak, a carapace, a defence against some inner emotions, fears perhaps, or some past event that inhibited her ability to let go. My
growing desire for her was in conflict with these factors, except for when by some chance I found an hour, an evening, a day when tensions had evaporated and she let me into her shell.
She would, of course, not accept these observations if I had expressed them. Perhaps she had become wary from past experiences with husbands or partners – though I did not know of any. Or she was cautious about my over-presumptive attempts to love her at this third visit, though my actions were driven by pure emotion, not gain. My increasing desire for a languorous afternoon making love in the sun-draped bedroom was “off-piste” (as she was wont to say) and called for a loosening of anxiety that never lay far under the surface.
But in time she did mellow – albeit slowly, and I persuaded her to begin thinking freely, to relax and enjoy herself indulgently whilst we were together in this unique place. To think of me not as a hindrance, an invader of her privacy but at least as a companion.
The Dark Side of the Sun Page 2