Virgin Immaculate

December 8th

We saw posters up around the town advertising, in Corsican, some kind of celebration for 'la festa di a nazione'. It is held on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, because in 1735, they chose the Immaculate Virgin as protectress of the island. I wonder whether getting the big guns out in the patron saint business (Mary, St Peter…) caused problems when going to war with someone who had adopted the same saint. Maybe having someone with awesome, universal power was worth it. The alternative, choosing someone genuinely linked to the place, probably would have posed problems too – a showdown between some dodgy local saint and the mother of God wouldn’t have inspired that much confidence.

Me and Lija went down to the church at seven, and found the mass still going on with the doors open, despite the cold, and people spilling out onto the steps, chatting and smoking. I started talking to one of my students and asked him to tell us what was going to happen. He gave us a long and garbled description of how they would carry God out, and how his dad was one of the people carrying him, except some years he didn’t if he had a bad back, and how there was blood on God’s head and hands and feet and side, but it wasn’t real, they drew it on with felt tip. He was very excited to be explaining everything to these strange ignorant foreigners, and took us into the church to see the statues, explaining how there were lots of photos of when they killed God, and how a statue showing John the Baptist baptising Christ was John helping his friend who had ‘mal au cœur’ (Jesus had his hand on his chest). It was terribly endearing, and made me wonder about how little children experience religion – it is such an epic fairytale to them, with love and tragedy and sacrifice.

Eventually the mass ended and a column of men in white robes with little capes in red, or green, or purple, filed out singing. It wasn’t God that they carried out, but Mary, a statue in painted wood with her outstretched arm holding a dangling rosary and an arch of lilies above her head. The men carrying her had leather slings like shoulder holsters, and one was so frail I thought he might fall down the church steps, but the others supported him as well as the statue. We filed after them into the windswept square and down towards the supermarket. It was strange to see teachers, students, the cleaning ladies from school, all these people from day to day life, in such a different situation. The little streets that we walk down every day to get to the bank or the shops seemed transformed with hundreds of people shuffling along singing and praying.

We stopped for prayers by the supermarket, under olive, clementine and palm trees hung with electric snowflakes swinging wildly in the wind. Then back into the main square, under strings of silver lights and the Christmas greeting in Corsican, ‘Pace e Salute’ with the moor’s head between the two. We walked out towards the sea, and stopped by the crib scene on a street corner to pray for sailors. I don’t know why Mary is called the Star of the Sea – is it just because of the similarity between Mare and Maria? At each stop, the men around the statue would strike up the same Latin hymn, which had the same keening harmonies as the Corsican polyphony we have heard.

The centre of Ile Rousse is tiny, so we were soon back at the church where more prayers were said, and they sang Dio vi salvi Regina, the national hymn of Corsica. The acoustic is good, and the song was so beautiful. It sounds like a love song, a lament, and a call to arms at the same time, and comes to these swift, sweet resolutions again and again, but breathlessly continues. When it was over we queued up to touch the statue’s feet, and a little scuffle broke out among some old women, who were admonishing those who took the flowers out of Mary’s garland.

Afterwards, we went down to the market, which is like a Greek temple but made in wood with a tiled roof, where food had been laid on by the mairie. For a while we gorged ourselves on the free beignets au brocciu, little doughnuts stuffed with brocciu, the sweetish sheep’s milk cheese they make here, which is something like ricotta. There was cheese bread too, and wine, but although I had already had supper I had to invest ten euros to try the full meal that was on offer. They had a little barbeque where they were grilling figatellu, the famous pork liver sausage which I have heard so much about, and in a high sided pot over a gas burner a man was using what looked like a broom handle to pound something mysterious. The figatellu, served like a hotdog in a baguette, was like the most salty, fatty, delicious sausage, and it turned out that the pot was full of polenta made with chestnut flour. They turned the brown paste out into a white sheet on a table, and the man wrapped it up and hugged it tenderly to him like a child. When it was firm, he unpeeled it from the cloth like an enormous plum pudding, dusted it with more flour, and started hacking off chunks for the eager crowd that had gathered. It was naturally sweet, warm and claggy, good with the hot sausage oozing its salty fat, and the slices of fresh cheese they were serving. I couldn’t finish my huge piece, and on the advice of several sage Corsican men I took it home for breakfast. Apparently you can either eat it cold with milk, or form it into a patty and dry fry it, which is what I did. With some fig and walnut jam, it was very nice second time round, with a sweet, smoky, nutty flavour.

It seemed as if the whole town had turned out, and many people from the surrounding villages too. I suppose the ceremony has the double appeal of Catholicism and nationalism, and we were button-holed late in the evening by Pierre, a teacher at the lycée, about Corsica’s political problems, the years of depopulation and huge losses in the second world war, the influx of radicalised Corsican students who had studied on the continent in the 60s and who fuelled the nationalist revival, the political infighting and deaths in Ile Rousse’s town square in the 90s, and the current appeals to dissuade speculation by restricting large purchases of land to people who have lived on the island for several years. I had worried that foreigners wouldn’t be welcome at a celebration of Corsican identity but, despite some curious looks, people were friendly and welcoming, especially since most of the children there knew me and came up to say hello. I got quite merry on the wine, despite the huge quantity of starch and fat which I managed to consume, and went home very happy.

Festivity

December 3rd

It snowed last night on the mountains and on my walk to school I looked out on the white peaks framed by the palm trees in the main square. They have put up silver lights in the trees outside my window, and today some men with a cherry-picker were wrapping lights round the palms. Ile Rousse is looking festive: the plane trees have their spiky little baubles, like ferrero rochers, and the clementine trees their beautiful orange fruits.

Advertising

December 2nd

Having so far failed to make any Corsican friends in Ile Rousse, I’m watching a lot of French telly, which is frequently surreal. My current favourite adverts are:

A jelly which inexplicably sings in English ‘Mr Jelly, flashy, Mr Jelly, funny!’, neither of which are valid attributes for a gelatin-based dessert.

A computer game called ‘les lapins crétins’, just because I like the word cretin.

An advert for dairy products in which the skeletons of the three little pigs, wearing paper pig masks and speaking with the creepy voices of small children, launch a ninja style attack on the big bad wolf and then get showered with milk from the udders of a giant cow.

Stella

November 30th

I spent the weekend in Corte with Emily, who was very tolerant of my incessant need to talk to people on skype, unaccustomed as I am to internet facilitated communication. She had spotted signs for a Christmas market and we invited Mathieu, one of the boys I met at Victoria’s party, along with us. We had visions of mulled wine and gingerbread, but it turned out to be a jumble sale in a prefab hut some way outside the city. For 3 euros I bought what looks to be a terrible novel about mystical 11th century treasures buried under Jerusalem, and a pair of dangly earrings for pierced ears, which I don’t yet have.

Afterwards, Mathieu drove us up to Tralonca, his family’s village where he has spent every summer. It was perched in the hills above Corte, and as we drove in we passed the old stone houses, square and windowless, that now house the animals. Mathieu told us about his childhood there, how the children used to build little villages in the same style out of pebbles, play human tetris, and lie in the road looking at the stars. There are no villages in sight of Tralonca, just wooded hillsides, it must be black as black at night. There is a yellow and white church with two bells, and a bar, A Stella, and a fountain which the villagers drink from, but which Mathieu advised me to avoid as my stomach probably wasn’t up to it. Everyone knew him, and spoke in Corsican, and his family have been there for three hundred years.

We walked out to the village cemetery, to a little chapel where apparently a priest was shot some time in the 19th century for starting mass before all the locals had arrived. If I understood correctly, they found the bullet stuck in the altar. Mathieu checked that his family graves were clean, and we walked back through the chestnut lined road to the car. We met a little boy on the way and when Mathieu asked him if he wanted to walk back with us, he said he was waiting for his father to get the cows in. We heard sporadic shouts in Corsican, and dogs barking in the woods, and then a line of cows filed out along the ridge above us, silhouetted against the blue sky. The boy passed us, grinning and clinging to his dad’s waist on a clapped out motorbike.

The next day we helped Stella, another person I met at Victoria’s party, to write a presentation for her English business studies class about an imaginary product, the BeepBang, which locates your keys by making them beep. Many astronomical puns ensued. I didn’t intend the weekend to be all about stars, and the old and the new, but there you are.

Hunter-gathering

November 22nd

Appetites whetted by the sea urchin Pierrot had given us on a kayaking trip, me and Lija embarked on our own echinoderm killing spree one weekend. We walked along the railway lines, which is the only way to get to the bay west of Ile Rousse by foot, and stopped at the first pebbly beach. We had asked Rafaël along, but he proved disappointingly squeamish when he realised that we really did intent to stab, crack open and disembowel sea creatures, and went off to read some Spanish novel on a rock.

Undeterred, me and Lija waded in and began the hunt. For obvious spine-related reasons you can’t get a firm grip on a sea urchin, so once they are firmly stuck to a rock it is hard to catch one. Several times I accidentally cracked them open with the knife I was using to prise them off the rocks and their entrails seeped out in a dark cloud and floated around my ankles. We did eventually gather about six of them, and they sat forlornly waving their spines, awaiting their fate.

We had vaguely seen what Pierrot had done to them on the first expedition, but he had tactfully got rid of the guts before giving us the edible parts, so the first urchin was a shock. They have a frightening fanged mouth, and are full of gritty brown slime and mucus the colour of liver. Underneath all that, once they have been rinsed out in the sea, is a surprisingly beautiful five pointed star of bright orange flesh. It has the texture of a smooth mousse, not chewy or grainy at all, and tastes of salty fishiness. We spread them on baguette, and then dried off while reading our books in the sun.

Bobbing Along

November 19th

Like teaching, I have been sailing every week but haven’t really written about it, because it is pretty repetitive. The sailing club is open on Saturdays and Wednesdays, and me and Lija go out in ‘funboats’, which are tiny yellow plastic things with lurid fuschia sails, or in catamarans with someone competent to take charge, or we go kayaking if there is no wind. The weather has been amazing, and it is so exhilarating to scud along in the sunshine, being drenched with salt water, and to see the mountains topped with snow above the town. Apart from a minor mishap involving me tearing a hole in a wetsuit while trying in vain to get it to accommodate my thighs, we have been doing pretty well. Recently, there hasn’t been much wind, so we have taken the kayaks out to chase cormorants or fish for edible sea urchins.

The ile rousse has a collection of little rocky islands to navigate around and cliffs to jump off for the more adventurous. The adrenaline junkies include the teenage boys from the sailing club and Lija, rather than me. I have been swimming though, although the water is chilly now that it’s the end of November. One week the sailing instructor, Pierrot, who is friendly and leathery and reassuringly knowledgeable about the sea, dropped us off on one of the little islets and we scrambled around on it. It is bare orange rock, so covered in guano that I thought there was some sort of white quartz mixed in with the other stone. The seabirds leave piles of fruit stones and tiny white snails in sheltered places.

Although I say it is repetitive, the sea is completely different each time. Today we finally had some wind and the water was slate blue. Once we left the harbour’s shelter the big waves rolled around the island, bucking our little plastic boats about, and the breeze ruffled the water so that it looked as if it was pocked by raindrops.

The best day so far was a kayak trip when the sea was eerily calm. Sea kayaking is strange because you are so close to the water and can see to the bottom where shoals of silver fish hang above the sand, almost motionless. I always feel very small on the empty sea, with the huge sky above, almost as if I can see the curve of the earth. Anyway, that day the water was like some other substance, a silvery gel rather than a liquid, and not a single wave. It looked computer generated. So we paddled out and Pierrot spotted some dolphins a little way out to sea, and we went after them as quietly as we could, trying not to let the paddles knock against the hull. We came close enough to see them very clearly. There were three of them, chasing the tiny fish that leap out of the water. The dolphins puffed out their clouds of breath and we followed them until they disappeared.

Meteorology

Every Monday, a teacher from the village school in Monticello picks me up and drives me up the hill for the afternoon classes. We usually manage to talk about the weather for ten whole minutes, thanks to the innately interesting nature of Corsican weather and the natural weather-chat gifts of English people. She always says that she couldn’t stand to live in Paris, with the low grey sky for months on end. Here, with the mountains so close to the sea, it is always changing. After a whole day of rain yesterday, the sky began to clear and the view down to the sea was so beautiful that I got distracted from teaching and just stared at it. Against the charcoal of the storm clouds, the sun lit up the new white clouds in pink and gold. The sea was deep indigo, striped with silver below the patches of clear sky. Later on I walked home, and the neon lights of the shops matched the pastel pink, baby blue sunset.

Chestnuts and Clementines

After Corte, I spent four nights in Bastia with some of the assistants there. Bastia is a somewhat unlovely city on the north-east coast of the island, looking across the sea to Italy. Maria, a Lebanese-American girl who has spent the past couple of years teaching in Korea, introduced us to gnocchi with sage butter and parmesan and a bud of Chinese flower tea which unfurled like an anemone. I introduced Ellen, an American from New England whose family farms Jersey cows, to cooking with garlic, and spent a whole day reading Harry Potter in French with her on the beach. Helen, a very sweet and softly-spoken girl from Nottingham, introduced me and Lija to singing Corsican polyphony when we went along to her choir. It was a roomful of old ladies, led by a voluptuous woman with a huge, raucous, mellow voice. Apparently she is quite famous in Corsica. We had the words, and followed as well as we could with the unfamiliar pronunciations and intervals and strange close harmonies that almost grate. At one point a woman said that the English girls were singing better than the Corsicans! I wish there was a choir in Ile Rousse, or even just bars where men will casually start playing traditional music, like I’ve seen in Corte.

The next day, some teachers from Helen’s school invited her chestnut picking, and she very kindly let me tag along. We drove out of the city into the hills, stopping on the way to buy Corsican clementines and huge, succulent muscat grapes. From the winding road you could see down to sea, past the chestnut forests and little villages perched on peaks, where the haze made the sky bleed into the water so that there was barely a horizon. We went out with baskets to gather chestnuts, discarding those with little holes. I thought that they were from dormice, but apparently flies lay eggs on the chestnut blossom, and they become worms inside the nuts and burrow out. There were wild boar tracks by the road, where they had been foraging like us.

The teachers, two couples and another man, were very welcoming and warm. We sat round the table drinking red wine, shelling chestnuts and shovelling them down our throats. One of the woman had an adorable adopted baby from Cambodia called Titine, which is a Corsican pet name for Clementine. The children watched Wall-E, and the adults had a heated and linguistically unsuccessful debate about the veil. Everyone disagreed with me and Helen, and my French just isn’t up to constant interruptions. It is hard to defend any argument when you can’t conjugate verbs. Obviously, I knew that many French people had strong opinions on laïcité, but I wasn’t prepared for the personal affront these men seemed to feel when someone wore a religious symbol. One man seemed outraged that he had been sold stamps in England by a Sikh with a turban, and both said that they could never tolerate one of their students wearing the veil. One of them told an involved story about how pork had been banned completely at a school canteen, because Islamic extremists were intimidating less observant Muslim students who ate it. He was incensed by this, but thanks to my terrible French and possibly the innately dubious nature of arguments by analogy, I failed to convince him that banning the veil might a similar over-reaction. They were similarly unconvinced by our suggestion that any Muslim women could make an informed decision to wear the veil for their own reasons, rather than because of intimidation by male clerics or family members. I hadn’t realised how vitriolic this debate could get – they seemed personally offended by the sight of these women, who apparently must by definition be subjugated by their veils and their faith. I can never resist analogies, and felt as if the willingness to bar women from certain public spaces unless they comply with the Republic’s dress code, and the failure to listen to their voices, spoke volumes.

Afterwards, we had lasagne and much less acrimonious discussions until midnight.