* * * The Sea in Trance
Sometimes, in travel, the memory that really sticks is nothing to do with the place you actually went to. Sometimes – often – it’s about the transport method you used either side of it. The more time that passes since a trip I made to Corsica a couple of years ago, the more my thoughts tend to coalesce around a night spent aboard a ferry called the Girolata.
The Girolata is one of three vessels belonging to the French shipping company La Méridionale (itself owned by the conglomerate STEF, specialists in the movement of tourists, refrigerated foods, etc.) and it covers one of several ferry lines connecting the island of Corsica with mainland France. I was aboard having set myself the challenge of going from Sardinia, location of a just-completed holiday with my girlfriend, to Paris, where I live, without setting foot in an airport.
This was partly an experiment in low-carbon travel and partly to do with there being no other choice. My girlfriend Camille had organised her flight months ago, but I, having no pressing reason to return, had decided I’d do ‘something else’ afterwards without more than vaguely considering what ‘something else’ would be. On our last day in Sardinia we had lunch at one of the three restaurants in the world to serve a kind of pasta called su filindeu (‘thread of the gods’) which, having been made for 300 years by the female members of a single family in Nuoro, is the scarcest of all the world’s pastas. As I supped the straightforward mutton broth in which it was served, I still had no idea what I was doing when the holiday ran out. There had been a cheap thrill, an island thrill, to letting time drip by with no escape route, but when I checked flight prices, my dreams of Vienna, Barcelona or Trieste evaporated. The cheapest flight to anywhere had reached €500, and it was either stay in Sardinia indefinitely or take the boat.
* * * Having Sex With a Swan
To board the Girolata had taken me six days but I hadn’t been in a rush. I’d spent a night in a rose pink hotel room with an analogue TV in Santa Teresa di Gallura on the northern tip of Sardinia. From there I’d taken the one-hour boat trip to the clifftop citadel Bonifacio and wandered around the palatial crypts of its sea-view cemetery at dusk. I’d travelled by bus across the centre of Corsica. I’d spent four days in the island’s capital, Ajaccio, site of the cave where the boy Napoleon had decided to conquer the world, and I’d eaten a very good sandwich jambon beurre in that cave. I’d seen the art collection at the Fesch Museum, which, thanks to Napoleonic patronage, is of an astonishing stature far outweighing the average musée de beaux-arts.
Among that collection is the painting Leda and the Swan by Paolo Veronese. Princess Leda, naked but for pearls, and the swan, also naked and lifting its white wings, presumably for balance, make love on a bed of cushions. Her lips are wrapped around the swan’s beak. Her right hand grips its backside in a gesture both urgent and tender. Of course this is a scene from mythology: it was acceptable in 1585 for the Venetian artist to paint a woman having sex with a swan, as the swan is really the god Jupiter. But the seeming authenticity of their lust and the graphic nature of its depiction – no symbolic layering here, this is what that sexual encounter might have looked like – tilts the image into the realm not even of pornography but of the kind of dream that you wake up from and quickly decide to tell not a single person about.
* * * I Am Going To Enjoy This
My expedition through Corsica was coloured by the memory of one of the best travel books ever written, Dorothy Carrington’s Granite Island, which opens, in fact, with a ferry, with her first perception of the island from the deck of one: ‘Corsica came into view with the dawn. Almost colourless, its outlines uncertain, it swam in the early morning mist, a creation half-materialised, an ectoplasm of the sea in trance.’ She and her husband made that crossing in the summer of 1948.
Except islands seduce like swans: the author made four further visits before divorcing him and relocating permanently, dedicating her life to exploring the island ‘village by village, mile by mile.’ To stay. That is always the temptation. That had been my unspoken second option, having been priced out of flights. To stay and become the Dorothy Carrington of Sardinia.
Granite Island was published in 1971, the same year that Jim Morrison visited the island with his girlfriend Pamela Courson in what would be the Doors singer’s last ever holiday. Grainy Super 8 footage of their trip occasionally surfaces at auctions of rock and roll memorabilia. It resembles, as Travis Elborough once put it, ‘a low-rent version of the trip scene in Easy Rider.’ My Corsica–Paris itinerary was, now I think of it, identical to Morrison’s, though thankfully my fate didn’t keep tracking the lizard king’s all the way up to his body being found in the bath later that year, before being hastily buried at the Père Lachaise Cemetery (a mere ten-minute walk from where I live).
Like most ferries, the interior of the Girolata had something of the dog-track VIP lounge about it. As I stood on deck waiting for it to depart, I thought: I’m going to enjoy this. The sun was setting behind the craggy hills towards Villanova – hills which had once been frequented by shepherds, bandits and shepherd-bandits – and the shadows of the passengers and their cocktails were long across the metal deck.
My expectations of the trip were something like: eat dinner and read a paperback by a window, while looking pretty cinematic – given that I would be framed by grey sea and nautical poles. Then, if I couldn’t sleep, I would go and sit with a glass of wine in a place my imagination rendered as something between an all-night casino and the room where Kate Winslet dances with the Irishmen in Titanic.
* * * Eat, Flirt, Argue, And So On
‘To cover the world, to cross it in every direction, will only ever be to know a few square metres of it,’ writes Georges Perec. Quite a few of those square metres will incorporate boats, buses and planes. Travellers inevitably spend much of their time in different versions of the same place, the transit place, and inevitably their eyes will be caught by those who are also inhabiting it. Lots can then happen. Transit environments are of a kind where we are thrown in with our fellow citizens in a more haphazard way than usual, where many, though obviously not all, divisions of background and class are dissolved, randomised, temporarily obscured.
Movie idea: six or seven people representing a well-curated cross-section of society catch a train or ferry and eat, flirt, argue and so on, and nothing bad whatsoever happens to them. We enjoy the journey. It’s fine! Real transit is rarely a catastrophe like in the 1976 movie The Cassandra Crossing where the rail passengers are exposed to a deadly and fast-spreading virus, so have to be sacrificed by having the bridge beneath their carriage blown up. Nor is it as electrifying as the TV ad from 1990 in which two strangers on a bus through the golden fields of flyover country, bound for wherever, exchange flirtatious glances yet can’t quite break the ice until he breaks a stick of Wrigley’s spearmint gum and hands half over.
* * * Being in Transit
If there is some kind of social tension, a grand common flirtation, palpable in all transport modes simply because everyone is (1) there and (2) somewhat anonymous, then that is doubly true of the ferries and shuttle buses that are specifically implicit to the holiday experience. Whatever it is, is mostly suppressed, and that is undoubtedly a good thing. It is not that travel would be bearable if it was constantly breaking out into an orgy of spearmint-splitting or outright harassment, but there is a reason why the feeling of being in transit is appealing enough to justify an entire industry – the leisure cruise – whose justification of ‘an efficient way to see the world’ is really a limp fig leaf for something else. The true motivation, too eccentric for many to admit, is that being in transit (not, I must add, the free-spirited Easy Rider kind but the regimented variety defined by a lack rather than a surfeit of freedom) is a titillating state of affairs. To arrive, by contrast, to be a person rather than a passenger, is to return to a freedom that is in fact the cage of one’s limitations.
In March 2002 the ‘private residential ship’ – aka permanent cruise, aka permanent transit place – The World set off. The following year I ran into it in the harbour in Sydney, Australia, where it towered threateningly over the city for four days before disappearing.
* * * Camouflage For The Seasick
The worst thing about most ferries is the carpet. Whatever the phrase ‘romance of the sea’ means, it is not well represented underfoot: squares of lime green and sky blue dotted chaotically over a colour that can only be described as ‘carpet brown.’ Camouflage for the seasick, these carpets do a decent job of blunting any fantasies you might have about this being the height of the steamship era.
As for dinner, the restaurant was very funny though the food was disappointing. A certain amount of effort had gone into pretending this was a real bistro but the muscularity of the waiters combined with the brevity of the time (about an hour) that the ‘restaurant’ so much as existed gave the game away. Polo shirts stretched to breaking point across cartoon-character pecs – these were crew members – and surely my steak had been, as its flavour and texture implied, cooked in the engine room, in the engine itself.
I took myself to the lounge with my book but the common areas of the ship had emptied. It was as if everyone else had a manual, which someone had forgotten to give me. There would be no casino nor any dancing. Also, I had been too late to book a cabin so all I could do was make my way to the seat in which I was scheduled to sleep. It was located in the front row of a sort of cinema without a screen, a group bedroom for the cabinless. The seat was little better than a marketing device for getting a cabin next time: too small and uncomfortable for anyone to lose consciousness in it, and with arm-rests that wouldn’t lift, presumably a draconian measure to prevent people lying down if they hadn’t paid for the privilege.
* * * Suddenly, It Was Morning
At 3 a.m. I went for a walk. I will never forget the looks on the faces of the two or three other people I encountered at that hour. The closest description I have found in literature is in M. F. K. Fisher’s memoir The Gastronomical Me, where, in a description of a 1930s sea voyage from France to New York, she writes of men and women ‘drifting in their drugged ways about the corridors of peacetime liners, their faces full of a contentment never to be found elsewhere.’ This quote is perfect if you replace ‘contentment’ with ‘discomfort.’
Suddenly, it was morning. I walked out onto the deck. Marseille was visible against a clear blue sky, the island fortress of Château d’If (where The Count of Monte Cristo is set) gliding past us to port.
I had been uncomfortable. I had been cold. But that didn’t really matter. What matters is that I felt, and this is something I never experience with air travel, that I deserved to be there.