Cut to downtown Ajaccio, but I have to explain it’s near noon, and we’ve acquired four young people: the American boy Mike whom Dagger talked to last night, the admiring girl next to him in class this morning, a French boy and a French girl with pigtails and a little face like a fairy. We find the historic alley near the port and the blank seventeenth-century edifice where Napoleon was born. There’s a delicate tree in its courtyard that they light at night. The French boy says what has this to do with Corsica; he says it to impress. The French girl laughs but she is well brought up, a nice girl from Paris who gets A’s at the Sorbonne, and she has not seen the interior and she takes the American girl’s arm and draws her in along the walk. Mike nods at the house and says to the French boy, You can see why Napoleon was a high-achiever, and the French boy nods rapidly and laughs. They stroll after the girls and enter the house.
Cut to them coming out: on film it will look as if they stayed about half a second.
Melanie the American girl we decide to let speak. I hook up and Dagger shoots her close with the Bonaparte house behind. She surprises me by reeling off straight-face a speech: Napoleon’s father Carlo Bonaparte served as secretary to the great Republican leader Pasquale Paoli. Carlo was of Genoese and Florentine ancestry. When Genoa sold Corsica to the French, Paoli fled to England. The French subdued the Corsican patriots. When Carlo Bonaparte fled south over the mountains, his wife Letizia was six months pregnant with Napoleon. Carlo and Letizia traveled by mule over dangerous mountains. They made it to Ajaccio and Napoleon was born in this very house. Melanie turns, and in good guided-documentary style with a sweep of her long brown arm ushers the camera forward, but Dagger doesn’t move, we are as yet zoomless, Dagger hasn’t phoned his contact. Two ladies with cameras and floppy straw hats step from the house. One carries a Blue Guide, the other says quite loudly in an educated English accent that she hopes they haven’t butted in. Dagger says, We’ll call you if we need you again, what hotel are you staying in, and the woman with the Blue Guide comes back at him with the name so calmly it’s as if she’s telling him the hour their lithological expedition sets off tomorrow, or perhaps she’s defending her relation with her friend.
Melanie continues, but she is not being filmed or recorded. At the time of the French Revolution Paoli returned to Corsica and set up an independent state. His supporters because of the late Carlo’s disloyalty drove Letizia who was by now a widow out of this house with her children and plundered it. Napoleon restored his mother to the house but by then the family’s feeling for Corsica had turned to bitterness.
We have already cut. We are at the market, the French boy saying Corsicans aren’t the fishermen the Italians are, Dagger filming flanks of tuna the deep beefy shade of whale, but we are in black and white, and he’s been busy talking to Mike and Melanie about women, art, poverty, identity, and revolution here and in Sicily, and he was swinging off on the one hand to Scotland and on the other to Poland, so he may have forgotten if we were in color or not.
The French students take us to a big café where a lot of scowling men are reading form sheets and placing bets at a counter where lottery tickets are also sold. Dagger pans across the round iron tables. The English tourist-ladies come by, walking toward Place Foch where there are shops and restaurants. The American boy Mike excuses himself, he’ll meet us at Hachette’s book store say half an hour. This is not on film. Melanie tries to go with him but he raises a hand and shakes his head. The French girl’s English is charming. Where do I live in America? I say I come from New York, I live in London. The French girl asks the difference between Pawnee and Sioux. The Sioux are a group of tribes; the Sioux came originally from Virginia — I surprise myself. The French boy wants to look at the Beaulieu. Dagger puts it in his hands. He squints through the rubber-lipped viewfinder. The girl met a man from New Mexico in the casino last night, he is a friend of Mike’s, he told her how the government cheats Indians and the only thing in America is to make as much money as you can as fast as you can. Dagger wants to pick up a Paris Herald and he too will meet us in Place Foch in half an hour, why not make it that book shop — go ahead and shoot something on impulse.
The French girl is reading Tender Is the Night, do I like it? She thinks it is sublime. I confess I’ve never read it.
We shift to French and the French boy inquires why New York lacks effective air pollution control.
It’s hot. I see us all separating: Mike, Dagger, Melanie, the French girl. The waiter comes. I am not writing well, Jenny. The French boy passes me the Beaulieu. The waiter goes, I answer in English that the landlords and entrepreneurs who schedule sneak pollution with their weekend cleanup crews burning incinerators they won’t pay to have upgraded don’t live in the central city so they don’t care.
You live in Manhattan, the French boy says. He has a pallidly honest face.
No, London.
Dagger comes back a moment leaning over us, his hands on our shoulders. He wants to check the battery for the pistol grip, he’ll just take the camera along. I can still see Mike up the street, he was looking in a window, he’s taking his time. I’d like to follow Dagger.
Melanie is from Brooklyn, a big girl with a handsome head and a profile for a hero’s bowsprit. Hippies are known to be out in the caves along the coast. Corsica is more than a hundred miles long.
The French boy asks if I’ve heard about the bomb that went off when an American cop jimmied open the window of an illegally parked car to let off the brake so the car could be towed away. The drinks have levitated from a dark corner of the bar and are approaching us. I say to Guy, the French boy, Next they’ll work out a way of sending a charge along the chain to blow up the tow truck. The French girl says, I like the man from New Mexico; the French boy shrugs. Melanie pats me on the back; she says, Good boy. I reckon she has a doting dad. But, says Guy, it’s not always police who do the towing, there are civilian tow trucks in America. I ask if he, too, is interested in American Indians. The French girl says the man from New Mexico tried out for the Olympic decathlon. Plenty of people try out, says Guy.
I have some malaria of the heart, and this young law student who’s at the ecology seminar for a holiday finds my bad spots like a dumbly true X-ray camera. He is extolling the Corsican Resistance which was so tough the island was free by September 1943. Not even the Green Berets could subdue this crazy island, he says in English. The French girl says she thinks the man from New Mexico may be violent. Guy shrugs.
I have a friendly wave of dislike for Dagger, and it passes. Melanie says she loves it here but can’t find anything made-in-Corsica that’s creative to bring home to her parents. Guy now gleefully tells how the Yanks bombed the swamps on the east side of the island at the end of the war to get rid of the mosquitoes, and this is where the Algerian pioneers went to work in so un-Corsican a spirit and created an agricultural showspot, grapes, vegetables — reclaimed the swamps as they had reclaimed the North African desert — Egyptian cotton, Guy believes too.
I point out that those very emigrants were of Corsican descent. Guy guffaws and says do I know how their prosperity has been greeted here? (I don’t think I put that in the pages Jenny typed. The Corsican capsule parts to let in which elements?) Sabotage, says Melanie. Correct, says Guy — certain unsavory elements blow up a power station over on that side of the island from time to time. Mike told me, says Melanie nodding reverently.