To the Ends of the Earth (46 page)

C
ORSICA IS
F
RANCE, BUT IT IS NOT
F
RENCH
. I
T IS A
mountain range moored like a great ship with a cargo of crags a hundred miles off the Riviera. In its three climates it combines the high Alps, the ruggedness of North Africa, and the choicest landscapes of Italy, but most dramatic are the peaks, which are never out of view and show in the upheaval of rock a culture that is violent and heroic. The landscape, which furnished some of the imagery for Dante’s
Inferno
, has known heroes. The Latin playwright Seneca was exiled there, Napoleon was born there, and so—if local history is to be believed—was Christopher Columbus (there is a plaque in Calvi); part of the
Odyssey
takes place there—Ulysses lost most of his crew to the cannibalistic Laestrygonians in Bonifacio—and two hundred years ago, the lecherous Scot (and biographer of Dr. Johnson) James Boswell visited and reported, “I had got upon a rock in Corsica and jumped into the middle of life.”

The landscape is just weird enough to be beautiful and too large to be pretty. On the west are cliffs that drop straight and red into the sea; on the south there is a true fjord; on the east a long, flat, and formerly malarial coast with the island’s only straight road; on the north a populous cape; and in the center the gothic steeples of mountains, fringed by forests where wild boar are hunted. There are sandy beaches, pebbly beaches, boulder-strewn beaches; beaches with enormous waves breaking over them, and beaches that are little more than mud flats, beaches with hotels and beaches that have never known the pressure of a tourist’s footprint. There are five-star hotels and hotels
that are unfit for human habitation. All the roads are dangerous, many are simply the last mile to an early grave. “There are no bad drivers in Corsica,” a Corsican told me. “All the bad drivers die very quickly.” But he was wrong—I saw many and I still have damp palms to prove it.

On one of those terrible coast roads—bumper-scraping ruts, bottomless puddles, rocks in the middle as threatening and significant as Marxist statuary—I saw a hitchhiker. She was about eighteen, very dark and lovely, in a loose gown, barefoot, and carrying a basket. She might have been modeling the gown and awaiting the approach of a
Vogue
photographer. My car seemed to stop of its own accord, and I heard myself urging the girl to get in, which she did, thanking me first in French and then, sizing me up, in halting English. Was I going to Chiappa? I wasn’t, but I agreed to take her part of the way: “And what are you going to do in Chiappa?”

“I am a
naturiste
,” she said, and smiled.

“A nudist?”

She nodded and answered the rest of my questions. She had been a nudist for about five years. Her mother had been running around naked for eleven years. And Papa? No, he wasn’t a nudist; he’d left home—clothed—about six years ago. She liked the nudist camp (there are nine hundred nudists at Chiappa); it was a pleasant, healthy pastime, though of course when the weather got chilly they put some clothes on. Sooner than I wished, she told me we had arrived, and she bounded toward the camp to fling her clothes off.

At Palombaggia, the tourist beach a few miles away, I hid behind a pine tree and put on my bathing trunks. I need hardly have bothered—the beach was nearly deserted. Rocks had tumbled into the sea, making natural jetties, and I decided to tramp over a dune and a rocky headland to get a view of the whole bay. There were, as far as the eye could see, groups of bathers, families, couples, children, people putting up windbreaks, strollers, rock collectors, sandcastle makers—and all of them naked. Naked mommy, naked daddy, naked kiddies, naked grandparents. Aside
from the usual beach equipment, it was a happy little scene from idealized prehistory, naked Europeans amusing themselves, Cro-Magnon man at play. It was not a nudist camp. These were Germans, as bare as noodles, and apart from the absence of swimming togs, the beach resembled many I have seen on Cape Cod, even to the discarded Coke cans and candy wrappers. I stayed until rain clouds gathered and the sun was obscured. This drove the Germans behind their windbreaks and one woman put on a short jersey—no more than that—and paced the beach, squinting at the clouds and then leering at me. I suppose it was my fancy bathing trunks.

N
EW
Y
ORKERS SAY SOME TERRIBLE THINGS ABOUT THE
subway—that they hate it, or are scared stiff of it, or that it deserves to go broke. For tourists it seems just another dangerous aspect of New York, though most don’t know it exists. “I haven’t been down there in years” is a common enough remark from a city dweller. Even people who ride it seem to agree that there is more Original Sin among subway passengers. And more desperation, too, making you think of choruses of “O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark.…”

“Subway” is not its name, because strictly speaking more than half of it is elevated. But which person who has ridden it lately is going to call it by its right name, “The Rapid Transit”? You can wait a long time for some trains and, as in the section of T. S. Eliot’s “East Coker,” often

It is also frightful-looking. It has paint and signatures all over its aged face. People who don’t take it, who never ride the subway and have no use for it, say that these junky pictures are folk art, a protest against the metropolitan grayness, and what a wonderful sense of color these scribblers have—which is complete nonsense. The graffiti are bad, violent, and destructive, and the people who praise them are either malicious or lazy-minded. The graffiti are so extensive and so dreadful it is hard to believe that the perpetrators are not the recipients of some enormous foundation grant. The subway has been vandalized from end to end. It smells so hideous you want to put a clothespin on your nose, and it is so noisy the sound actually hurts. Is it dangerous? Ask anyone and he will tell you there are about two murders a day on the subway (though this is not true). It really is the pits, people say.

You have to ride it for a while to find out what it is and who takes it and who gets killed on it.

It is full of surprises. Three and a half million fares a day pass through it, and in 1981 the total number of murder victims on the subway amounted to thirteen. This baker’s dozen does not include suicides (one a week), “man under” incidents (one a day), or “space cases”—people who quite often get themselves jammed between the train and the platform. Certainly the subway is very ugly and extremely noisy, but it only
looks
like a death trap. People ride it looking stunned and holding their breath. It’s not at all like the BART system in San Francisco, where people are constantly chattering, saying, “I’m going to my father’s wedding” or “I’m looking after my Mom’s children” or “I’ve got a date with my fiancée’s boyfriend.” In New York, the subway is a serious matter—the rackety train, the silent passengers, the occasional scream.

* * *

W
E WERE AT
F
LUSHING
A
VENUE, ON THE
GG
LINE, TALKING
about rules for riding the subway. You need rules: the subway is like a complex—and diseased—circulatory system. Some people liken it to a sewer and others hunch their shoulders and mutter about being in the bowels of the earth. It is full of suspicious-looking people.

I said, “Keep away from isolated cars, I suppose,” and my friend, a police officer, said, “Never display jewelry.”

Just then, a man walked by, and he had Chinese coins—the old ones with a hole through the middle—woven somehow into his hair. There were enough coins in that man’s hair for a swell night out in old Shanghai, but robbing him would have involved scalping him. There was a woman at the station, too. She was clearly crazy, and she lived in the subway the way people live in railway stations in India, with stacks of dirty bags. The police in New York call such people “skells” and are seldom harsh with them. “Wolfman Jack” is a skell, living underground at Hoyt-Schermerhorn, also on the GG line; the police in that station give him food and clothes, and if you ask him how he is, he says, “I’m getting some calls.” Call them colorful characters and they don’t look so dangerous or pathetic.

This crazy old lady at Flushing Avenue was saying, “I’m a member of the medical profession.” She had no teeth, and plastic bags were taped around her feet. I glanced at her and made sure she kept her distance. The previous day, a crazy old lady just like her came at me and shrieked, “Ahm goon cut you up!” This was at Pelham Parkway, on the IRT-2 line in the Bronx. I left the car at the next stop, Bronx Park East, where the zoo is, though who could be blamed for thinking that, in New York City, the zoo is everywhere?

Then a Muslim unflapped his prayer mat—while we were at Flushing Avenue, talking about Rules—and spread it on the platform and knelt on it, just like that, and was soon on all fours, beseeching Allah and praising the Prophet Mohammed. This is not remarkable. You see people praying, or reading the Bible, or selling religion on the
subway all the time. “Hallelujah, brothers and sisters,” the man with the leaflets says on the BMT-RR line at Prospect Avenue in Brooklyn. “I love Jesus! I used to be a wino!” And Muslims beg and push their green plastic cups at passengers, and try to sell them copies of something called
Arabic Religious Classics
. It is December and Brooklyn, and the men are dressed for the Great Nafud Desert, or Jiddah or Medina—skullcap, gallabieh, sandals.

“And don’t sit next to the door,” the second police officer said. We were still talking about Rules. “A lot of these snatchers like to play the doors.”

The first officer said, “It’s a good idea to keep near the conductor. He’s got a telephone. So does the man in the token booth. At night, stick around the token booth until the train comes in.”

“Although, token booths …” the second officer said. “A few years ago, some kids filled a fire extinguisher with gasoline and pumped it into a token booth at Broad Channel. There were two ladies inside, but before they could get out the kids set the gas on fire. The booth just exploded like a bomb, and the ladies died. It was a revenge thing. One of the kids had gotten a summons for Theft of Service—not paying his fare.”

Just below us, at Flushing Avenue, there was a stream running between the tracks. It gurgled and glugged down the whole length of the long platform. It gave the station the atmosphere of a sewer—dampness and a powerful smell. The water was flowing toward Myrtle and Willoughby. And there was a rat. It was only my third rat in a week of riding the subway, but this one was twice the size of rats I’ve seen elsewhere. I thought:
Rats as big as cats
.

“Stay with the crowds. Keep away from quiet stairways. The stairways at Forty-first and Forty-third are usually quiet, but Forty-second is always busy—that’s the one to use.”

So many rules! It’s not like taking a subway at all; it’s like walking through the woods—through dangerous jungle, rather: Do this, Don’t do that …

“It reminds me,” the first officer said. “The burning of that token booth at Broad Channel. Last May, six guys attempted to murder someone at Forest Parkway, on the J line. It was a whole gang against this one guy. Then they tried to burn the station down with Molotov cocktails. We stopped that, too.”

The man who said this was six feet four, 281 pounds. He carried a .38 in a shoulder holster and wore a bulletproof vest. He had a radio, a can of Mace, and a blackjack. He was a plainclothesman.

The funny thing is that, one day, a boy—five feet six, 135 pounds—tried to mug him. The boy slapped him across the face while the plainclothesman was seated on a train. The boy said, “Give me your money,” and then threatened the man in a vulgar way. The boy still punched at the man when the man stood up; he still said, “Give me all your money!” The plainclothesman then took out his badge and his pistol and said, “I’m a police officer and you’re under arrest.” “I was just kidding!” the boy said, but it was too late.

I laughed at the thought of someone trying to mug this well-armed giant.

“Rule one for the subway,” he said. “Want to know what it is?” He looked up and down the Flushing Avenue platform, at the old lady and the Muslim and the running water and the vandalized signs. “Rule one is—don’t ride the subway if you don’t have to.”

T
HE BOAT SLID DOWN THE BANK AND WITHOUT A SPLASH
into the creek, which was gray this summer morning. The air was woolly with mist. The tide had turned, but just a
moment ago, so there was still no motion on the water—no current, not a ripple. The marsh grass was a deeper green for there being no sun. It was as if—this early and this dark—the day had not yet begun to breathe.

I straightened the boat and took my first stroke: the gurgle of the spoon blades and the sigh of the twisting oarlock were the only sounds. I set off, moving like a water bug through the marsh and down the bendy creek to the sea. When my strokes were regular and I was rowing at a good clip, my mind started to work, and I thought:
I’m not coming back tonight
. And so the day seemed long enough and full of possibilities. I had no plans except to keep on harbor-hopping around the Cape, and it was easy now going out with the tide.

This was Scorton Creek, in East Sandwich, and our hill—one of the few on the low, lumpy terminal moraine of the Cape—was once an Indian fort. Wampanoags. The local farmers plowed this hill until recently, when the houses went up, and their plow blades always struck flints and ax heads and beads. I splashed past a boathouse the size of a garage. When they dug the foundation for that boathouse less than twenty years ago, they unearthed a large male Wampanoag who had been buried in a sitting position, his skin turned to leather and his bones sticking through. They slung him out and put the boathouse there.