Part 3

The organizers of the school had arranged for a bus to shuttle the people arriving by air in Ajaccio to Cargèse, but for people arriving by sea, of which there were five including myself, we had to take a public bus.  The five of us had arranged via email to meet in the ferry terminal after my boat had arrived, the last of those in our group, but my computer had most recently found an effete wifi signal from my lap while in a hard plastic bucket seat in a laundromat in Nice, nearly 12 hours ago, and my phone had no connection in Europe.  Unfortunately, the delays had meant that I landed an hour late, so after another hour of waiting in the terminal, I resigned to exploring another Mediterranean city alone for several hours, starting with much-needed breakfast at a nearby café.  As I perused the menu, I overheard a nearby table of twenty-somethings talking physics and I decided that the odds of physicists my age in Ajaccio that had nothing to do with the only summer school on an island with a total population of few hundred thousand was exponentially too small to be ignored.  By simply walking over, they recognized me immediately through my well-labeled shirt, and pulling up another chair rounds of introductions began anew.  They were all European with two from Germany, and one each from Spain and France, and so travel like this, across porous borders into a new culture and language, was familiar.  Naturally, they had each slept in a cabin last night.

The old town of Ajaccio is a compact wedge that reaches into the Mediterranean from the lip of the Gulf of Ajaccio, and we wandered around most of it, past Maison Bonaparte, watching donkeys graze near the stone fort of the citadel, and poking our heads into the orange pastel cathedral.  Our bus departed from the harbor, and with mid-afternoon rush hour and ancient narrow streets, leaving Ajaccio was slow, like a pinball continuously hitting the bumpers, and then the drive wound through the mountains and along the fractal coastline.  Nevertheless, we conveniently alighted in the center of Cargèse, at its one major intersection, exactly when the school’s secretary was distributing apartment keys to the students who had flown in.  My apartment sat above a row of businesses, with a small galley kitchen, a central dining room with a balcony that opened over the street, and three bedrooms shared amongst five students, two friends from Korea, two others from the US, and myself.  I bunked with Alejandro, a self-proclaimed Anglo-Inca, from Peru but grew up and was currently a student in the US.  The bedroom was simple, a mottled tiled floor with the window draped in a cream lace curtain, a single nightstand in the corner, and a sliding door wardrobe on the wall adjacent to the door, and while chatting with Alejandro I created a makeshift dresser by unzipping and opening my suitcase, and then sat on my bed, though nothing special and I could feel the individual springs, it was sufficient to keep my towel and airplane pillow packed away.

The small and only grocery store in town had probably never seen such a crowd on a Monday night, overrun with all of the students of the school coincidently acquiring breakfast and dinner provisions.  While the selection was limited and dwindling fast, I was successful in finding usual morning fare like yogurt, bananas and fruit juice, and my Korean flatmates offered to make dinner this first night, a taste of home for them modulated by ingredients available in this rural French town.  The gentle, warm, and salty breeze snuck into our flat by way of the balcony, drifted around our chairs and over the table, uniting new friends breaking bread in a foreign land.  The conversation had been buoyed by the heaps of rice and sausages and fried greens and as our stomachs filled and the plattered mountains turned to hills turned to mounds and plates and trays returned to the kitchen, the quaintness of the apartment was amplified by its lack of internet, and none of us really knew how to entertain ourselves for the hours until sleep without it.  Chasing rumors that there was some wireless signal back at the supermarket, we planned a surreptitious mission to nibble crème brulée and sip moscato at a café across the street, just close enough to wring out the minimal connection to check emails and let my world know I had made it.

CeeLo Green’s vulgar though catchy break-up tune and Alicia Keys and Jay-Z’s collaboration celebrating Gotham streamed from the first-generation iPod nano into my ears while walking to the Institute.  Mornings were dark, the mountains keeping the sun at bay, and only the fact that the traffic on the highway was very sparse was the dirt shoulder that hugged the road out of Cargèse that could generously be called a trail safe at all.  The flora consisted of some small trees but mostly just low scrub brush and dried grasses punctuated by a towering, flowering agave, and as the buildings disappeared, sweeping views of the Gulf of Sagone replaced them, dramatically bounded from the south by a long-fingered cape beyond 10 miles of sea.  Well-labeled by signage, the narrow road to the Institute veered off, down the slope to the beach, and hung on to its pavement just long enough to pass beyond visibility from the highway.  Our welcome packet claimed the total distance was only 2 km, but I had already passed that point above, and still had to dodge potholes in the steep gravel path that rendered the Institute completely inaccessible if you had any issues walking, which of course was never considered because this is France.  Out of the brush the auditorium, the dining hall, and smaller outbuildings arose on a grassy bluff on which chairs painted in the Mediterranean palette were haphazardly placed, but all faced west, a few feet above the sandy beach.  One couldn’t help but marvel at Lévy’s forethought.

The three physicist organizers and the secretary guarded the threshold to the auditorium, presenting a cotton tote bag on which the emblem of the Institute was silkscreened, an outlined drawing of the western and eastern rite churches of Cargèse that opposed one another across a canyon in town.  Within was a folder with a detailed daily schedule, a scratch notepad, wifi passwords, and name badges to anyone who wished to enter.  One of the organizers, Géraldine, was further armed with a camera for entering our photos in the trombinoscope, the official school directory, and immediately recognized me though we had never met, and asked if I was ready to give a talk.  I had received no response to my email reply to the student speaker volunteer request, and so held out no hope of a talk, but why email when it’s so much easier to talk in person.  The wind off the water lapped the breaking waves, then continued up over the lawn and lightly gestured me through the ever-open doors to the stage of the auditorium, with slate chalkboards hung on the back wall, though mostly obscured by the projection screen suspended from the ceiling.  The number of participants at the school was clearly limited by seating as just enough rows of desks to fit all of the students very comfortably filled the stadium slope, parted by concrete stairs, and I made my way to a desk near the top to settle in as my office for the next 10 days.