I was awake before five because of a dog, and then I stayed awake because of the smell.
It comes in off the hill behind the town and it is not a flower smell. It is resinous and herbal and slightly bitter, rosemary and juniper and something like eucalyptus underneath, and at that hour with everything still wet it is so strong you could describe it to somebody as a taste. That is the maquis. The whole island is covered in it and nobody warns you.
The practical Corsica, the ferries and the roads and where to stay, is in my complete guide to Corsica. This is a morning.
I went down to the harbour at half past five because there was no reason not to.
Three men were doing something with a net across the stone and none of them were talking. Not unfriendly. Just at that stage of the morning where speaking would be a decision. One of them looked up and did the smallest possible movement of the chin, which I have decided is the entire local greeting, and went back to it.
The water in the harbour was completely flat and the boats were sitting on their own reflections, so the whole thing had that doubled look, and the sky behind the headland was going the colour of the inside of a shell.
I sat on a bollard for a while and did nothing at all.
Here is what I had got wrong about this place before arriving.
I had assumed, because it is administratively France, that it would feel like France. A version of the Riviera with worse roads. It does not feel like France at all. The language on the signs is closer to Italian and half of them have been shot at. The food is smoked pork and chestnut and sheep. The villages are not on the coast where you would put them, they are up in the hills with their backs turned, because for five hundred years anything arriving by sea was a problem rather than an opportunity.
You can read that in a book. It is different standing in it at half past five in the morning.
At about seven a woman opened the bakery and the smell of the maquis lost, temporarily.
I bought a thing I could not identify, which turned out to be made with chestnut flour and was denser and darker than bread has any business being, and slightly sweet. I ate it walking back up and got most of it down my dress.
My father would have known what it was. Not because he knew about Corsica, but because he would have asked, in whatever language was going, and then he would have found out where the flour was milled, and by the end of the day he would have driven us there.
I did not go and find the mill. I want to be honest about that. I thought about it, standing in the lane with the paper bag, and then I went and had a coffee instead and watched the town wake up.
The rest of the day was a long drive up the west coast and I will not pretend I remember it in order.
Red rock. More red rock. A road with no barrier and a drop I stopped looking at after the first hour. Pine growing directly out of granite at an angle that suggested it had opinions about the wind. A view around every corner so consistently that by the middle of the afternoon I had stopped stopping, which I feel slightly guilty about.
Two goats standing in the middle of the road, entirely unbothered, who moved when they were ready and not before.
And then in the evening I came out on a headland at the point where the sun had already gone but the light had not, and the whole hillside of scrub below me was going from green to grey to black while the sea beyond it stayed silver for much longer than it should have.
There was one light on a point somewhere far off. Somebody’s house, or a tower, or a boat.
I understood something there that I had been circling all day, which is that this island is not beautiful in the way the Amalfi Coast is beautiful. The Amalfi Coast is beautiful the way a room is beautiful, arranged, meant to be looked at, and it knows. Corsica is beautiful the way weather is beautiful. It is not doing it for you. It would look exactly like this if nobody came.
I found that restful in a way I did not expect and cannot entirely explain.
The dog started again at four the next morning.
I got up and went down to the harbour and the three men were there with the net, and one of them did the chin thing, and I have thought about that small movement more than I have thought about most of the views.
V.
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