Corsican Fragments: Difference, Knowledge, and Fieldwork

7 Knowing

Knowing The tree imposes the verb “to be,” but the rhizome is woven of the conjunction “and . . . and . . . and . . .” —Deleuze and Guattari 1980 Collisions and Connections This story starts with a crash. On a rainy Thursday morning in February 2003, as I was heading toward the regional archives in Bastia, I lost control of the car in a particularly treacherous bend and collided rather spectacularly with an oncoming van. Luckily and rather incomprehensibly, no one was hurt, although the small bottle-green Peugeot which I had bought soon after arriving in Crucetta was crumpled beyond (affordable) repair. In the following weeks, I realized quite how much I had come to rely upon the fragile lump of metal which was now deposited on the tarmac of a garage in Ponte Leccia. But the now immobile vehicle was fast turning into a millstone around my neck. I could not afford to fix the car and on my relatively meager research budget could barely face the expense of having it towed to a dump, and the garage owner was threatening to charge for my use of his space. 146 | Corsican Fragments Fortunately, I knew someone. A colleague of my mother in Paris was close friends with a young Continental woman who was living with her Corsican fiancé in Bastia. Stéphanie was an energetic woman in her late twenties who had recently finished a master’s thesis on Proust, and when I met her she was a secondary school teacher and an aspiring novelist. Her fiancé, Antoine, was a short and muscular man some years her junior—calm, kind, and collected. Antoine, who worked as a part-time firefighter, sported short dark hair and a close-cropped beard, and never parted from his knife. “It’s a Corsican thing,” he once explained, acknowledging with a wry smile that it produced no end of teasing from his colleagues at the Bastia fire station, who called him Conan the Barbarian or “the little shepherd.” Be that as it may, Antoine made no secret of his attachment to Corsican things: his knife, his band which sang polyphonic songs, his village, and the little chapel in which he and Stéphanie would be married in the summer. Antoine was also into online role-playing games, a passion Stéphanie found hard to fathom. All in all, there was more than enough warmth and happiness in Antoine and Stéphanie’s flat in the suburbs of Bastia to spare for a stray, disoriented anthropologist—and I sought their haven more than once. Antoine, it turns out, had a brother, Phillippe, who knew about cars and many other things. So, when I called Stéphanie in desperation after my accident, she suggested Phillippe might be able to fix things. I arranged to meet Phillippe at the garage in Ponte Leccia, some fifty kilometers away from Crucetta, to hand over my car keys. He agreed to tow my car using his pickup truck and to give me some money for the remains of the wreck. He had his own uses for it. But first, I had to get to Ponte Leccia, and thus see Corsica through the eyes of the carless. The journey which I had so far only experienced as a straightforward half-hour drive suddenly looked very different. It now involved walking the five kilometers to the nearest train station in order to catch the one eastbound train of the day, which left at 6:45 am. I then had the option of either hitching a ride back or waiting for the westbound train from Ponte Leccia at 5 pm. Having hitched countless rides between Crucetta and the nearby town of Ile Rousse, in the early days before I had a car and since the crash, I carelessly assumed that hitching a ride back from Ponte Leccia would be equally unproblematic, particularly since Ponte Leccia, although a tiny town, is the central node of the entire road system of northern Corsica. My crucial mistake was that Ponte Leccia was not a place in which I was known. As I stood by the road for three hours, watching cars whizz past, I meditated on the fact that nearly every single ride I had ever hitched had been with someone who was either an acquaintance or who at the very least had seen me around in Crucetta and was keen to satisfy their curiosity. Finally, a car stopped—or rather, it returned after a ballet of indecision. The young woman...