Being whisked around

September 23rd

Catherine, a friend of my friend Sam’s parents, strangely happens to have been born very near to where I’m living. She works in Paris now, but came back to look for locations for a film which she is directing about Marie Mattei, a nineteenth century Corsican heroine who lived in the little village up the hill from Ile Rousse, invented a false identity and gallivanted around Europe with various famous lovers. Catherine is a force of nature, long red hair flying everywhere, very warm and dynamic and sometimes slightly intimidating!

She whisked me off with her to drive around in the hills, where we met a horse trainer and his friendly, reeking collection of dogs, then drove back to a very swanky hotel bar in Ile Rousse for macaroons and green tea with a man who owns some land with ancient olive trees (I washed off the dog hair in the space age toilets), and then back into the hills to see the villages as the sun set. It was so kind of her to take the time, especially since, two months later, that is still the first and only time I’ve made it to the further villages, as it’s impossible without a car. I am still completely lost when people speak French. It is like being a child again; everything just washes over you and your attention drifts as you concoct fanciful versions of what the grown-ups mean.

The light here is strangely hazy, it makes everything seem unreal. Part of that is from the Corsican habit of constantly burning things (damp autumn leaves, rubbish of all kinds) in the streets, so that on still days you look out into the hills behind the town and see the smoke hanging in the valleys like that heavy vapour from dry ice. But even without the smoke, the light is strange. That evening, Catherine took me up to San Antonino, a tiny village. The fields around it were golden red in the sunset and black and white sheep flocked around a little extra-mural cemetery with white walled, black roofed family tombs. We watched the sun set over Calvi’s citadel from an empty beach where the landscape was even more unreal: mountains on the horizon that seem lit by a different light, colder as if seen through mist, towering clouds in pink and lilac, and the lights flicking on in the villages.