On holiday in Corsica in the early summer of 1993 I felt air moving freely in my chest again. It was as if my eyes had suddenly remembered how to see. I was a freshly divorced woman, momentarily released from pain, and everything I saw struck me as flawlessly clear and fantastically coloured: rocks, mountains, ocean, sky reared up in front of me, fiercer than dreams.

My divorce had been finalised some weeks before and, although I had been physically separated from my former husband for some time, it was not until the moment that I stepped onto Corsican soil that I suddenly felt a rushing sense of release. A sadness was loosed from me, some inner catch sprung open. I remember the anticipatory spasm of joy I felt as the plane from Paris swooped dangerously low over Corsican mountains. Calvi's Sainte-Catherine airport is famous for its death-defying approach, where planes and mountains engage in a complex choreography. All around me French women and men laughed nervously, some bracing their feet against the floor in unconscious preparation for collision. From the air, Corsica was a delirious smear of colours and shapes but the looming mountains held no terrors for me personally. The minute I stepped from the plane and the rich smell of summer and fruit and pine trees rushed to meet me, I felt loose in my skin again.

Simone, my friend from Paris, was waiting in the terminal, brown from the sun, all untied like a girl. She had clearly abandoned the slick of the city and as she led me outside to her old white battered Volkswagen with the hood folded back, I noticed that her feet in her sandals were cracked and weathered. She had paint stains on her fingers. Before I got into the car I took off my cotton sweatshirt: it was at least ten degrees hotter than Paris. The car did not go fast, or rather Simone didn't, and as we moved along the road I tipped my head back and looked up at the soaring shape of Monte Grosso and the perfection of the Mediterranean sky. The smell of burning was in my nostrils. Simone was wearing a hat turned up at the brim and I thought only her driving betrayed her age: she sat too close to the steering wheel, clutching it tightly as if it had alternative powers she had not yet divined.

"This is a place of violence," she announced in English, "violent people, violent beauty. Regard." She indicated towards distant mountains where smoke was rising from a forest fire. "Every summer, Corsica burns." The rushing air in my face smelt sweet to me, of oranges and fire and escape. As the car began to climb towards the mountains we passed olive groves, the sensuous green of orange and lemon orchards and I could see, high above us, walled towns built into cliffs. Here and there a church spire was visible. I knew that Simone was lucky enough to own property in Corsica only because her late husband was a Corsican. Complicated laws usually prevent anyone but Corsicans from owning or inheriting property (with the glaring exception of fabulously wealthy Italians with names likes Agnelli whose houses regularly get bombed by Corsican patriots).

Nothing Simone had told me had prepared me for the beauty of her house. Monte Grosso sat immediately behind it, looming, beautifully preposterous, a cartoon mountain, while the house itself was made of several different cubes, joined together by passages and walkways, ponds, rock gardens, and each section of it had a distinct and memorable character. On top of one cube was a roof garden, which lead to all the other roofs, with three hundred and sixty degree views. The mountain behind, the sea far, far away, the folds and sweeps of the valley below. In the garden around the house(s) were fig trees, grapes, cherries, insects, birds: the very air was quick with life. Inside the house, Simone's drawings and collages hung from the walls. And everywhere there were mementos of her late husband: an old raincoat, still hanging behind the door; all his jazz records; his books. He had spent a complicated working life writing parliamentary reports for the French parliament but I immediately knew what Simone meant when she said he was a peasant at heart. In Corsica they had lived a life of the body: swimming, climbing the enormous mountain in both summer and winter, skiing in the depths of winter when all the tourists had gone home. They had no children and he had died skiing on a different mountain back in France, falling down dead in the snow.

Together and separately they had many friends and invited guests to the house in Corsica every summer. The summer of 1993 was no exception and we ate every meal on the roof, hearing the peal of church bells from the town perched on top of the next hill. We ate hard local cheese, sharp on the tongue, and drank Corsican wine tasting of fruit and earth. In my memory, every day after that was per fection. We travelled to little towns and ate cabrettu a l'Istrettu, a kind of Corsican tomato stew with kid; we swam in water so clear and blue I could not have imagined it (I saw my toes and the depths of the sea far beneath them); we travelled to the tops of mountains and swam in fresh water streams so cold and transparent they might have come from freshly melted ice. We drank diabolo menthes in tacky tourist cafes in Calvi and in Ajaccio, Napoleon's birthplace, and took long walks along white sandy beaches. I had never seen a place of such extremes: near desert, alpine forests, beaches, ancient towns, lush farmland. I fell heedlessly into the arms of one of Simone's other guests, a man I had known before in Paris. Because he was Italian-American he could understand the local dialogue, a mix of French and Italian, and together we walked through browned summer fields, speaking of our lives as if they belonged to other people.

At the time I wasn't really living anywhere. I had left Australia for Paris in 1989, inadvertently ending up in Hong Kong, married to a British lawyer. The marriage was brief and incendiary: I had gone back to Paris, back to Sydney for a while, returned to Paris. I couldn't decide where my life was. On those long walks with the Italian-American I talked about wanting to live in Australia, about wanting to live in France, about wanting someone else to decide my life for me. I willed myself to fall in love with my companion but his lips were too thin and every time I kissed him it felt wrong. My lost husband was physically gone from me but my lips remembered the imprint of his mouth.

Still, my husband's ghost was not at that summer's feast. Corsica had somehow banished him and when I dozed in the afternoon heat I felt only weightless. And once, when my new lover and I were walking in an abandoned village, an old man insisted on accompanying us, telling stories of an Australian sea captain who fell in love with a local woman and never went home again. I wondered if Simone would let me live in her house forever, until I grew old like some wizened monk in a cave. I would clean out the fireplaces in winter, prevent fires and learn to talk like a peasant. But when everyone went home it was just her and me and she sadly informed me of plans for a mineral water plant right next door. "I intend to fight," she said, looking out over the hills, a tanned general preparing for war. I thought of the film Manon des Sources and the metaphorical implications of water. "A factory," Simone said, "a factory of water. Can you imagine?" I looked out over the trees below to the land next door where the mineral spring had been found. There was a kind of buzz in the air, wasps perhaps, busy French bees. I could not imagine. The next morning it was my turn to leave. As I climbed the stairs to the plane I actually had tears in my eyes, whether from joy or grief I could not tell. I was thirty-four years old but I felt my life was beginning. Even now, all these years later, whenever I think of Corsica I feel free again.