Lookout Cartridge (38 page)

The peace in the blue of the sky and the chalky hues of the pier crowd over the water comes again, a peace beyond Dagger’s prodigality with the Anscochrome (a minute still left), comes again in the blossoms, the green, a girl’s miniskirt, a maroon Renault broadside through the arcade hung with vines and blooms like New England wistaria mingled with tiny whites and yellows more like buds, the maroon of the car now sliding out of view leaving on the far side of the driveway a stone wall, but Dagger has switched off. Here comes his American friend with a tall woman. She is vivid, she has auburn hair and speaks with a Scots clip. I tell her I have a friend who goes up there all the time to visit a clan chieftain.

The peace is in the color, and in the hope of something beautiful in the growth between authentic black and white and the color living in that strongest thing of all, surface. One of the American boys here—the one with the Sony recorder—will back us up against the wall before supper saying we’re crazy to mix color with black and white.

Cut to morning. Next footage, b & w.

Sublime morning, the sun has a smell, or compounds the sweet bark-burn of coffee and the thick breath of hot milk from the kitchen, last night’s wine bottles fish bread bougainvillaea Gauloises, exhaust fumes and sea two blocks away, it is not garbage, or even drains, but it is an unsieved odor of natural use—I can’t imagine Dagger caring to convey it.

I mean to include here only what we film.

We are in black and white, and side by side we shoot thirty seconds next door upstairs. An American girl, hair in rollers under a pink kerchief, bangs “Rhapsody in Blue” on an upright at the back of the classroom; there is on each desk a headphone-with-mike and a metal switch box; the simultaneous interpreter who is taking a six-week break from NATO is reading yesterday’s Ajaccio paper—how the students can listen to a lecture here with island sun glimmering through the upper branches of the école trees and white boats winking in the gulf and the beachboys hanging around last night’s café is beyond me, and bare legs morning-cool upon a metal and educational chair—the interpreter puts away his paper and with a wave at us spreads his headset, it’s hooked into the room’s system, and anything of him we pick up only through the omnidirectional I’ve placed on an empty front-row desk. The last students have wandered in after breakfast, they put on their headsets and switch on their boxes, the professor from the Sorbonne has appeared in shorts, the girl in curlers relents and leaves her ringing piano. The class is depleted by a field trip. Dagger ignores the professor sitting at the desk on the podium and gets a close shot of a French girl and the American boy Dagger happened to know through Hampstead friends and spent a while with last night in our beach café down the street—I explain too much—while a group of us left our tables and swam out into the night.

We swam far out, each stroke directly into darkness, though out ahead the lights across the bay seemed close; the phosphorescent life all round vanished to the touch, but I felt them holding me up, loafing, treading a hundred yards off the beach, girls’ shoulders slick under moonlight.

When I came back with a sandy towel on one shoulder and the café was closing, the American boy (whose somber self-importance Dagger refused to be put off by) was saying he’d thought Dagger was someone else and Dagger asked if he’d been expecting someone; the American stood up and said No—as if he felt he’d talked enough or drunk enough cassis on top of the rosé we get at the école.

This morning the girl Dagger shoots with that American boy is self-conscious; she takes her headphones off (her French is good), she keeps trying to stare at the professor (who is invisible except in my untranslated tape) but she keeps breaking her gaze and smiling first to her right at the boy—he’s around twenty—then left at us. Too late I think of using a spare headset to tape French and English simultaneously.

We have our footage and the students watch it as we pack up and get out of there. They are sorry to see us go. The professor says
L’année prochaine à Cannes
.

Cut to outside. Long shot of classroom windows, silent vines above.

Cut to last night’s beach café this morning full of the same men. I remember we’re in black and white when a woman in a black dress comes trudging by (stout calves, posture straight) with a tiny kid in pink shorts, and Dagger cuts to them but I don’t know if the Beaulieu is running.

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.

I raise my hands like a camera to frame a girl in a crisp flowered frock getting into a panel truck, and I murmur, The Egyptian cotton hasn’t taken, by the way.
Taken?
says Guy, puzzled.

Cut to a new street a quarter of a mile away at the end of a section of hot fortress wall. My eyes throb. Our cast has split to buy the French boy a swimsuit. Yes, that is what Guy needs.

Copy of
Figaro
in Dagger’s hip pocket. You can buy newspapers at Hachette’s. Dagger conveys the heat shooting a second or two of a Chinese sweating in a laundry. We cross to the petrol-station side of the street. I cross back to look in a shop. My position matters here only in that I can now presently cross so as to be caught on film by accident after the minute or so of equally accidental comedy Dagger himself will track. Yet in turn my being caught is possible because in a moment Dagger himself will cross. But this might not be implicit enough in the finished film, so perhaps it doesn’t belong in my diary; yet the
Corsican montage
has enlarged beyond the hours Jenny took to type it in London, the magazine opens to let in a future unphraseable there on a street in Ajaccio, never mind. My spine between my shoulder blades is wet, my temples hot. Dagger ambles powerfully along, and I have again this sense of introducing my motion into a field without motion, and now in my brain (that is suspended in fluid and has, they say, no sensitivity to pain) the amateur thought circles like a series of instructions performed repeatedly till some specified condition is satisfied whereupon a branch instruction is obeyed to exit from the loop—the thought that Dagger doesn’t have a clue, maybe he knew once but he doesn’t now know what he’s doing. But I can’t take the exit offered because Dagger has stopped and though I’m across the street and can’t hear the hiss of the camera I know it’s turning.

Is there a knob that turns visibly? I pan to what even from my acute angle I see he’s shooting in the near-noon glare and the sharp shade here and there along the street fragrant of petrol and hot olive oil: his subjects are moving slowly up their street which crosses where ours ends, or up that portion of their street that’s all we can see; they are three, a girl in a little white and black skirt and a white midriff blouse, a blond man in shorts and an orange terrycloth shirt, and a man also young but totally bald whose head seems to contain the deep brownness of the three of them—he’s lean and bony and looks lithe and swift. They walk single-file like tourists who’ve had a drink in one of the fisherman’s cafés and are now strolling toward the beach, except that the girl isn’t carrying anything so maybe they are going somewhere else first. They are so slow they seem almost acting. The fort wall is glaring bright, the sidewalk is narrow. But now the girl points at Dagger, her midriff blouse stark white. The blond man steps off the curb toward us but is checked by the other young man who now jabs him in the ribs with his index finger. The three continue along the fortress wall, the bald man has his hand on the girl’s back where it’s bare. We are fifty yards from the end of our street where theirs crosses coming up from the port. I cross to Dagger’s side. The three go almost out of sight to our right and he has the camera right on them. Dagger breaks to the left and is almost brushed by a car as he crosses the street to the side I was on in order to shoot a bit more of the three. I can’t see them now, for I am still on the right side. Dagger trots to the end of the street, shoots again. They did not want to be filmed. The English have that sense of privacy, but the English would never so openly assert it and would suffer it and ignore it.