strangers?

Location:
France

traveling friendship hospitality

By Haley Malm

When traveling, sometimes we stretch normal hospitality etiquette to the limit. I once visited a girl I met for three minutes in a bookstore because she moved to a locale that suited my itinerary, and I have hosted people referred to me by other people I couldn’t pick out of a crowd. So when a painter named Jetsun from my hometown befriended me because he was intrigued by Corsica, and I was moving there for a year, I found it most natural. I extended the casual, “come visit, I’ll make room,” that can mean so many things. When he decided to capitalize on my offer, I shrugged and smiled and told him that if he timed it right I would have vacation and we could explore the island birthplace of Napoleon together.

Jetsun turned out to be an excellent houseguest, turning my empty refrigerator into delicious meals, and not complaining about the thinness of the foldout couch mattress. Soon after his arrival we rented a car and moved south from my home in Bastia. We headed for the southernmost tip of Corsica, where you can almost spit to Sardenia.

Now, Jetsun had a friend who’d backpacked through Corsica and stayed with a guy named Franck, or maybe François or Frances, when he was in the south. This person apparently enjoyed hosting travelers, so we decided to seek him out. The sun began to set as we rolled into a port town, and Jetsun started reciting the direction to Fransomething’s house. “On the left there’s a stone wall with a path running beside it that goes through an olive grove.” We left the car and followed the directions on foot, squinting in the fading light to determine that the branches poking over the wall were attached to olive leaves. “Above the town you cross a road, and then the first or second driveway leads to Frances’ place,” he concluded. We followed the directions, my confidence waning as Jetsun appeared less sure of the final steps. He had nothing written down, and there are a lot of olive groves in Corsica, and a lot of Corsicans who hunt in them. So when we were confronted by a gate with no sign of civilization in the vicinity, we were stumped. “Give me your cell phone,” he said, but I hesitated. He proposed calling someone at home who might be able to get more concrete directions. At this point the light was all but gone, so I relented, seeing no other option besides jumping the gate. Three unsuccessful international phone calls later, we jumped the gate, loudly declaring the inutility of technology.

Once on the other side, we each upheld our bravado, but I was feeling wary about the whole situation. A hundred feet or so down the path, the Corsican maquis, or bushes, grew thicker, filling the dusk with the pungent aroma of wild rosemary and thyme about to bloom. We glimpsed the warm yellow glow of a house in the distance, and then, abbreviating the hope it instilled, came an eruption of ferocious barking and a series of large dark shapes racing at us. Never had I been afraid of dogs, but in that moment I imagined a pack of hunting dogs, like those I’d seen tied up outside so many rural houses, fangs barred and shotgun-toting hunter following. “Jetsun,” I said, reaching out and clutching his arm fiercely. The vicious beasts, three of them, trundled up to us, tails wagging and tongues slobbering. I exhaled slowly, trying to regain my cool. “We still don’t even know who we’re looking for,” I pointed out sharply, embarrassed.

Onward we pressed, and I started feeling shy, knowing that I would have to do the talking because I was the one who spoke French, and wishing that we would never arrive at the house. When we reached the front door, there was nothing to do but knock. A woman answered, and we asked for Franck, fingers crossed that we had picked the right name. “He’s in the maquis making a phone call,” she answered, “the reception in the house is crappy.” I made small talk with Elodie, as she was called, explaining the convoluted series of events that had led us here. She was friendly and seemed unfazed by the situation, smiling as we stood in the kitchen taking in the mania of the house. She explained that Franck’s wife had been an artist with a penchant for mirror mosaics. The house was littered with them, glinting and winking at us from the most unexpected places. There was artwork everywhere, in fact. There was also a mentally disabled teenager named Pierre who appeared and disappeared throughout the conversation. He seemed to be Franck’s son. At length Franck appeared, eying us coolly with impassive blue eyes and assessing the situation. Halfway through my bumbling explanation he cut in. “So you’re looking for a place to stay the night,” he said bluntly.

I blushed. “Yeah. More or less.”

“Well there’s no place in the house; there’s Elodie this weekend, and she has the other bedroom. But there’s the cabin if you want. There’s no heat or anything, and it’s a mess, but I can give you blankets.”

“That’s great,” I assured him, “We’ll go into town for dinner and then get our things.” We made a hasty retreat. The awkwardness of the situation vied with the charming zaniness of it all, and Jetsun and I were suddenly teammates planning our next move. Compared with the fact that our host stood at a distance of three degrees of separation from me, Jetsun suddenly seemed like and old buddy. We went into town and came back armed with take-out pizza and a bottle of wine. “Can we borrow a corkscrew?” I asked, and we were invited in.

The night that ensued was as memorable as the approach to Franck’s doorstep. It turned out that Elodie spoke English beautifully and the two of us translated for the monolingual men. We shared our wine, and then their wine, and talked of everything that mattered to us: art, travel, home, politics. And then, when the hour grew late, Jetsun and I thanked our hosts profusely and stumbled out under the starry sky. Franck and Elodie joked about the cold and how we would have to keep each other warm. I laughed, and thought about how little they knew us, and how little we knew each other, and how it didn’t matter. There is infinite possibility in the existence of strangers, and the opportunity of recreating yourself in their eyes. We all exchanged contact information in the dark, knowing we might never see each other again, and wasn’t it grand.