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.