Pain

October 11th

Patrice, one of the teachers at the lycée, took me and Lija hiking on Sunday with another teacher, Béa. Patrice is tiny, like a thirteen year old, and twitchy, with a drooping eye and manic gestures – he makes me think of some Dickensian character. It was kind of them to bring us along, since we are rather stranded without a car, and it would have been impossible on public transport. The drive there took us through a gorge where the only signs of human life for miles were stunted, rust-red pylons shaped like crucifixes, their arms tipped with green glass disks that glowed with the sun behind them. We came up through a village with pastel-coloured houses and pigs wandering in the streets.

According to the book I’m reading about Corsica (Portrait of a Granite Island by Dorothy Carrington), Diodorus Siculus wrote that in the 4th Century BC the Corsicans would let their animals graze freely in the maquis without fear that they would be stolen. Dorothy theorises that it was because they were so valuable that the retribution would be a bloody vendetta. One of the polyphonic choirs we went to see has a song about a lost goat, and you would think it was a love song – apparently stealing livestock was as serious, in terms of inciting bloody revenge, as raping a woman. Patrice told us that nowadays the animals wander because farmers are paid subsidies to keep them on the high pastures, and once they have collected the cheque, it is cheaper to let them go than to build fences for them. I don’t know how true that is but there are a lot of pigs, goats and cows roaming in the village streets, the chestnut woods and the mountain pastures which seem completely free - I don’t see how their owners would ever gather them in again.

We parked in the woods, at the Fontaine de Caroline, a trickle which apparently gives you diarrhea. It took about an hour to get above the tree line, and I realized how unfit I really am – the others were bounding along while I sweated profusely and started to feel serious pain. The entire four hour hike to the lake was uphill, and then we had to come down the same way, so things didn’t really improve on that front, but the views were worth it. Once out of the beech and pine forest we reached green fields with grazing cows and the sound of cowbells ringing across the valleys. Above that, it was bare rock and ranges of mountains, like a child would draw, trailing down to the sea. There was a hole in the mountain across the valley, you could see the sky through it. After several hours (of pain) we came to a meadow in a bowl of hills, which seemed bizarre after hours of staring at bare rock. There were trees covered in waxy red berries, and the leaves were turning. Coming over a rise, you saw the lake’s tributaries first, like the Amazon from above, snaking through verdant growth, then the lake reflecting the mountains behind. We sat by another trickling fountain and ate the pasta salad and fruit which Patrice had brought. No wonder these people are so healthy – if the catering had been up to me I would have brought industrial quantities of chocolate. Just after we all sat down, a group came down on ponies and galloped picturesquely along the shore.

I have lots of photos which make all this purple prose slightly unnecessary, but never mind.