Villages, Boats, Boulevards, Bars, Break in France and Italy, Aegean Tour continue… July 4, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Accommodation, Africa, Aquarium, Art Gallery, Beach Resorts, Cars, Coliseum, Destination, Dolphinarium, Europe, France, Hotels, Library, Motel, Museum, New York, Oceanarium, Planetarium, Restaurant , trackbackFabienne wakes us. She is pretty in a New York Jewish sort of way — cracked nose, olive skin, beautiful drooping eyes with lot’s of kohl, smoker’s teeth and bitten nails. Wrapped in a peasant blanket she talks of “le business” in Soho and Piccadilly — prostitution to pay for her drug addiction. Her arms are scars, dead veins with hanging skin which will take no more abuse, and so her ankles have become the focal point of her masochism. Corsica is vacation after hospitalisation in Amsterdam and, more importantly from her point of view, stamping ground of many Moroccans who come from the hash crops of North Africa to supply France from this paradise isle.
Mathieu now lets us sleep under the tables in his café and feeds us coffee and croissants. In return we fetch his one hundred baguettes steaming from the bakery in the silver dawn in one huge basket which feeds the beach at lunchtime. Then we jog behind the French Legion whose Mediterranean base is in the hills at Cap Corse. The annoyed P. T. instructor quickens the pace and we soon fall behind in the 8am heat. Bottled water for lunch. Jasmine tea from flasks with the learned Chinese Parisians from the Sorbonne as an afternoon ritual. Then more bottled water (by this time boiling) until the beach is empty and we light our gas burner to boil eggs for supper.
“Look at what happens to the bad boys and girls,” a man warns his little son as they stare at us over the beach wall.
The ferry arrives with new beach bums and we play guitar and sing American Pie into the night, although none of us wants to look any further for the Promised Land. Richard arrives from trekking in the Sahara with another burner so we feast on pasta and ratatouille.
The next day we decide that haircuts are in order. Someone produces nail scissors and a Swiss Army knife and the Ajaccio set look on in horror as we create Sassoon’s on Sea. A German under the next parasol who works for Der Spiegel takes photographs while the New Assymmetric is being created. We hear Mathieu tell the old town codgers that he feels duty bound to help us, “les jeunes malheureuses”.
We live on fifteen francs a day but still lend our precious coins to an English family for their taxi fare back to the next resort when we meet them arguing noisily in the main square under the fountains. They return to our home on the beach the next day with the money and two bottles of wine. Everything is shared in this communal society we have founded — food, advice, confidences, waterlogged newspapers and our bible, Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe. We shower under the cold hosepipe on the beach yet become accustomed to our permanent sandy skins. We swim all day to keep cool and only when our faces blister do we long for a tiled villa with dark recesses instead of our parasols. We have lost our Aberdeen granite looks and are now sinewy, lean, mahogany animals used to twenty-four hours a day in the open air and terrified of enclosure.
We travel to Bonifacio, the southernmost tip of Corsica. Huge sedimentary rocks rise as high as cliffs out of the sea, having fallen from the mainland centuries ago. The town juts out of the cliffs and seems in danger of tumbling into the blue-green algue below. We watch the flat, barren coast of Sardinia twelve kilometres across the strait enviously. Another land to discover but the fifteen franc ferry crossing is a whole day’s survival.
And so the summer draws to a close as the money runs out. We pack up our temporary home and leave the Island to face another year of law school. Malheureuses? Perhaps now, yes.
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