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.