Palm Sunday

Last time I went to the supermarket, some of the kids from school were loitering in the foyer with strange woven things laid out in rows on the ground. I asked them what they were, and they explained incredulously that they were rameaux of course, to decorate the house. I didn’t know the word, but assumed they were for Palm Sunday. They had the little crosses that we have back home too, but I had never seen palm leaf sculptures before, except for once in Florence where a Chinese man was making crickets and butterflies for the tourists. These Corsican ones were abstract, leaving the fronds intact and attached to the stem, and I bought one for 5 euros, which seemed more than fair given how intricate it was. One of the boys, a little troublemaker with an endearing sense of humour, descended on the girls and started telling them off for charging ‘la prof d’anglais’. Then I went to do my shopping, and on my way out, he offered me a free sculpture of his own, holding it out gallantly with a flourish, but then mumbling and backing off shyly when I thanked him.

I took them home and hung them up. The internet tells me that they keep the leaves pale yellow by tying up the branches at the heart of the palm months before, to stop photosynthesis and give them the pale colour symbolising purity. The plaited palms are called palmes tressées, and the custom only seems to be common here, in Nice, and in parts of Southern Italy. It seems poetic, to take such trouble over a branch symbolizing those to be thrown in Christ’s path, or nowadays, to be kept all year and brought into Church on Ash Wednesday and burned to mark the congregations’ foreheads.

This video, from the 1960s, shows Palm Sunday in Ajaccio and so much is the same: old men in flat caps, palm sellers around the town square nimbly weaving the leaves into the little crosses for last minute customers, and everyone gathering around the priest to have the branches ‘bathed’ (they use the word 'baigner') in holy water.


We went down to the church and hung around until they announced that the procession would start at the seashore. Lots of children I teach were there, several of them selling plaited palms in the church square, and many more dressed in approximations of Biblical dress – the boys like little monks, the girls like brides in white dresses and veils. I knew most of the altar servers too, and it was funny to see them so solemn and well behaved, wielding the censer and turning the pages for the priest. The effect was slightly ruined by their nikes or converse peeping out from the white robes. We trooped out to the sea just across the square, a huge crowd, the children sang a song and we all walked back to the church steps with our armfuls of greenery and raised them in the air while the priest scattered us with holy water. It was a little anticlimactic really – I had been hoping for a proper procession round the town like the one for the immaculate conception, but we went into church and listened through a long rendition of the Easter story in which the priest lost his place and had to be prompted several times by an increasingly frantic old woman: ‘And Jesus SAID…!?’

There were no hymns, just a quavery voiced choir of old women, which seemed sad since the church was packed. But a man behind us took it upon himself to sing every word in a beautiful baritone. Some of my students, Marie, Marie, Fanny, Léa and Melissa, were lined up in the front row looking lovely in their dresses and veils, whispering surreptitiously and preening whenever the photographer from the mairie turned his zoom lens towards them. Poignant and terrible, with all these cases of child abuse in the news, to see how much children often adore religion: the responsibility, the chance to dress up and be the centre of attention, the colour and pomp and singing.

I hadn’t really thought before about how the reformation must have split communities, which until then had all come together to worship. As a Catholic in England, you just don’t get that sense of meeting almost everyone in the town in church on a Sunday. I love exchanging the sign of peace: the old man sitting alone behind me smiled so warmly when I turned to shake his hand: they say ‘La paix du Christ’ instead of ‘Peace be with you’ – so that in French the exchange is implicit and the peace explicitly Christ’s. It must have been interesting, translating the Latin mass into all the vernaculars – there must be studies on the different nuances.

I was struck by several things as I stood there through the long mass, letting the familiar but unfamiliar words wash over me in a new language. Shamefully, I had never realised that when you accept the sacrifice of the bread and wine, you say ‘Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed’. Throughout years of Catholic school, catechism and church I had always managed to mishear it as ‘I shall be here’! Some things become much clearer in a different language. It’s strange, as an atheist, how emotive I find religious services – thinking of Mary, so young herself, watching her child taunted and killed as he willingly gave up his life made me well up. Looking around at the kitsch, pastel-coloured statues waiting to be hidden for Holy Week I saw how powerful it is to have the whole of Christian time represented all at once: the Nativity, the marble statue of Christ kneeling for baptism, his slim waist and fragile ribcage in the crucifixion, his pale body in the glass coffin like Snow White, Mary crowned and triumphant in heaven, and then all the saints, bringing the story into France and almost into the present with Joan of Arc, Bernadette of Lourdes, Teresa of Lisieux.

This post has been Catholictastic! I'm sorry if I lost you there. Here is Saint Augustine, doing what he does best - nunc stans, the eternal present:

“Who will hold [the heart] and fix it so that it may stand still for a little while and catch for a moment the splendour of eternity which stands still forever, and compare this with temporal moments that never stand still, and see that it is incomparable…but that all the while in the eternal, nothing passes but the whole is present.”

Confessions XI, 11, 13

Back to the Beach

I feel happier and more settled than I have for months, as finally the next year of my life is planned out. I’m going up to York to study some more Medieval history, and I’m so relieved to have been given the money, and to have been rejected by UCL, because the thought of living in London and suffering through 3 hour Latin translation exams there was filling me with dread. I hoped life after university would be more clearly mapped out, but I can deal with these small steps, a year in Corsica, a year in York. I think that being here influenced my disquiet about London: things move so slowly now that the thought of an old city, small enough to get to know in a year and with the Shambles instead of the rat race, just seemed so much more appealing.

I spent the afternoon on the beach with a book, having opted out of sailing because of the gusty wind and a lingering hangover. On the long stretch of pristine white beach I was sandblasted, so I kept going, away from the town, until I reached the little cove past the last of the beachfront restaurants. It was rocky and littered with seaweed and shallow algae filled pools, but there was a patch of sand in the wind shadow of a bleached log so I settled down and read about a soldier returning from Burma and feeling suffocated by village life and resentful of his unknown son. I have read perhaps 5 books since I came to Corsica, which is slightly frightening. I thought it was something I couldn’t live without – when I was a child I would have 5 or 6 books on the go at a time, leaving them splayed open, scattered around the house. Gutting five a day at university seems to have broken my addiction. I hope it comes back soon.

I lay there for three hours, all alone with the sea except for one woman hiking past who said bonjour. Then a man came and squatted down next to me and started asking me whether I was living in the town, whether I was German (because I’m pale and podgy? More evidence of my weird accent in French?), what was my name, what was I doing that night, would I give him my number. He was polite, and smiled, and didn’t say anything obscene or touch me, but I was lying on the sand with no one within sight or shouting distance and I just wanted him to walk away.

It’s hard, when you are taught to be polite, make eye contact and smile, to successfully reject someone, especially in another language. Even harder when as a women you know, although you learned this through experience rather than parental injunctions, that an explicit rejection, even a polite one, can be dangerous. Even when you are willing it to end, you want to keep your interaction on a light, social level, so a passer-by might think you were acquaintances having a chat. You don’t want him to call you a bitch, or tell you you’re lucky to get any attention, you don’t want him to get angry, and you don’t want him to touch you. You also don’t want to explicitly tell him to leave you alone, because if he refuses, you have crossed a line and you know for sure that he doesn’t care what you want. It must be hard, as a man, to learn that you have to get women to sleep with you in order to be respected, that you always have to be the one to approach them, and that sometimes women who are interested in sleeping with you will coyly refuse many times before they say yes. And to have women be afraid of your approaches, when you are respectful and wouldn’t dream of harassing them, because they have been harassed by so many men before you.

It’s such a shame, because he was probably a very nice man. Maybe we could have been friends. Maybe he had no sexual interest in me whatsoever. I want to give people the benefit of the doubt, and what is so frustrating is that I desperately want to meet people here, but sometimes I can’t stand the effort of making it clear from the start that nothing is going to happen beyond friendship. Anyway, it was fine. I answered some of his questions, dodged others, smiled at him, and said a couple of times that I just wanted to get back to my book. He stayed for a few minutes, then got up, smiled and we wished each other a good day. It was getting cold though, and the spell of being on my own deserted island was broken, so I went home.

Spring

Spring is here at last - it was 21 degrees today, sailing has started again, and bars and restaurants are opening their doors after a long winter hibernation.

Here are some pictures of our walk around Corte on one of the first Spring Sundays: almond and mimosa blossom, herds of sheep, white-capped mountains and a neolithic statue. And for lunch I had a tarte aux herbes (a little calzone-type thing with sweet onion, leek and herbs inside), and a moëlleux à la châtaigne (chestnut cake with a sticky centre). All that and the lovely company of Lija and Emily - a perfect day!

Ruins

Last Sunday, when I arrived back from two lovely weeks at home, me and Zoe decided to make the most of the (short-lived) sun and walk up to Occi, a ruined village above Lumio. It was beautiful: orange olive nets in piles under the trees, almost the same scarlet as the bottlebrush flowerheads, the ruins glowing in the sunshine and teetering improbably, splashes of lichen like paint. I think the village was abandoned because Lumio, a kilometre or two below, had a better water supply and access to roads, and one lintel was carved with 1788. We talked about narrow boat holidays and being dragged round castles as children, and when we had explored all the ruins we drove down to Calvi to have a drink in a harbour cafe, and then on to Algajola for a crêpe, a moelleux à la chataigne and hot chocolates.

Kites and a hazelnut

I was going to write that Corsica never really feels wintry, even when it's cold. There are always some fruit or flowers on the trees and to me, used to English winters, colourless except for holly berries, that doesn't feel like winter. Here, there are clementines, oranges, grapefruits and arbouses, the 'Chinese strawberries' that take a year to ripen and hang on the branches until the new flowers have blossomed and fallen. There are also a few persimmon trees, with their orange fruits which ripen in winter once the leaves fall. In January, the almond trees blossom before the leaves have grown so that the tree is a cloud of pink or white, like candyfloss. I don't like the colour of the mimosa trees, violent yellow like laburnum bushes back home, but they do brighten up the hillsides. So there is always colour in the landscape.

That said, this past week was miserable: driving rain and wind, grey for days at a time, and freezing. We were lucky here by the sea though: in the mountains they had a foot of snow, and according to the news, 10,000 homes were left without power. The sun came out yesterday and me and Lija ventured out along the railway track to the sea urchin beach for some air. The railway is still out of action, and they had parked a train in the gorge, but we scrambled past it and got down to the sea. The strange aloe vera plants that look like bloodied fingers were glowing in the sunlight, and meltwater was running down the paths and had made a river cutting through the beach with miniature sand cliffs, striped in sedimentary lines. That is one of the great things about staying in a place for a while with nothing much to do as the seasons change - you have time to notice the little shifts each day. Lija realised that it was the first time it had been sunny enough to draw the scent out of the maquis herbs for months. We found tracks in the sand that looked like deer, and were disappointed that it wasn't wild boar. A picket fence, half buried in the white sand, made lovely shadows, and it was warm enough to sit by the sea with the red kites flying overhead. I found a hazelnut bleached by the sun and sea - the base looked like an iris or a pressed daisy.