Granite Island by Dorothy Carrington

Author:Dorothy Carrington
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141918198
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

11

The Disinherited

Isles of the straits – a Roman quarry – shepherds – the bard of Chera – cave-dwellings – banquets – a bleak Christmas – hero-bandits – a retired bandit of today

Why are remote places so fascinating? What drives one to backward and primitive pockets of the world? According to the ethnologist Levi Strauss, not to evade civilisation, but to rediscover it as it once was: something rare and precious, diversified and colourful. ‘There is nothing else to be done,’ he concludes, ‘civilisation is no longer that delicate flower that one cherished, that one cultivated with great difficulty in a few sheltered corners of a land rich in wild species, menacing, no doubt, by their vitality, but which could be used to vary and invigorate the seed beds. Humanity has adopted the system of monoculture; men are preparing to mass produce civilisation, like beetroot. Their daily fare will be this sole food.’1

Bonifacio is a place where civilisation still manifests its pristine quality of exoticism. Here, if anywhere, it appears a marvellous plant, acclimatised in defiance of environment. Many towns are more beautiful in their architecture; Bonifacio is magical simply because it has been created and has survived. Every arch and campanile, doorway and moulding, acquires a supernormal intensity of existence by reference to its setting. One notes such details and delights in them; they remained engraved on one’s memory when the masterpieces of the great historic cities have receded into the lumber of the mind.

So I thought as I walked down towards the port in the twilight. This view, I knew, would stay with me: the honey-coloured bastions confronting the white cliffs of Corsica’s wilderness; in the distance, beyond the harbour, a rambling mansion at the head of a green valley; and close beside me, plumb above the darkening creek, a column, roughly shaped, hewn from a single block of granite. It is the war memorial, the only inspiring one I have seen in Corsica (or for that matter anywhere else), and it was brought here, so reads an inscription, from ‘the lost islet of San Baïzo’. The house in the valley is something that has overflowed from the city, a Franciscan monastery planted just outside its walls;2 the column was gathered in, relic of an earlier phase of civilisation, the product of a Roman quarry on an island in the straits.

The islands lie about an hour’s voyage by fishing boat off the south-eastern extremity of Corsica. Known to few people except coastguards and fishermen, they are shrouded in almost perpetual wind and storm. Many ships have foundered on their reefs, including the Sémillante, wrecked on the southernmost, Lavezzi, when transporting French troops to the Crimean War. All the seven hundred and fifty men aboard, soldiers and crew, without exception were drowned.3 In the course of the following weeks hundreds of their bodies were washed ashore, mostly naked, and so horribly mangled that only a single one could be identified. In the face of this tragedy the sole inhabitant of the island, an old shepherd, lost his wits.

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