The Rose Café (15 page)

“Did you know le Baron during the war?” I asked.

“He used to come up here,” Fabrizio said. “Someone over by Monticello was hiding him. They took him up into the mountains from there, and we didn't see him for a few months. Then after the Germans pulled out, he lived down there behind Ile Rousse somewhere. He went back to France after that, but returned here after the war. That's when I got to know him. He used to hunt boar up here, him and some other rich people. Big parties, all dressed up. There was two kinds of resistance, you see. One in Nice and Marseille and Bordeaux. And then here. Here it was different. Back there, in France, everybody is fighting everybody else, communists, Gaullists, British. Out here, single-minded. All grudges forgotten. Only one big vendetta to carry out.”

“What was that?”

“Kill fascists.”

He grunted again and nodded to himself. “Wait here,” he said. He got up slowly and hobbled off to his little stone house and was gone for a while. When he came back he was carrying a bundle of cloth tied with old twine. He set it down at his feet, untied a knot, and spread out a uniform jacket in front of me. It was a Nazi jacket, complete with epaulets, and a collection of various emblems and badges, none of which had any real meaning for me. Folded into the jacket was a small, leather-bound sketchbook. Fabrizio opened it reverently and showed it to me. Inside were refined little ink sketches of plants, birds, and butterflies of the maquis, clearly labeled in German, with the species names in Latin.

“This was Hansi's,” he said. “Too bad about old Hansi, right, Pierrot? He wasn't a bad sort.”

Pierrot blew out a dismissive sigh.

“That's enough, Papé.”

There arose then an energetic stream of curses in dialect from the old man. Then he looked up at me.

“Pierrot here, he is young. He doesn't know what it was like.”

“Neither do I,” I said.

“You don't want to.”

On the way back down the track with Pierrot I asked what his father had done during the war, and who was this Hansi. He told me that Hansi was a German officer and that he was a friend of his father's. He talked about Hansi often, Pierrot said. His father had told him that Hansi was an odd man out, a solitary type who liked nature but was stuck in an unfortunate war. He had no real interest in being a soldier and used to use his free time to wander over the maquis, looking for flowers and birds. He carried a box over his shoulder and would collect plants. He would sketch them and make little notes, and then press the plants between the pages of his notebook. One day while he was out on one of his forays, he accidentally happened upon Fabrizio's compound with its square of ruined buildings. Pierrot said that even though his father could have killed him on the spot and buried him and no one would have known, the two of them fell into conversation and became friends. They shared a general interest in, among other things, the local natural history, about which Fabrizio knew a great deal. Hansi would stop in from time to time and talk about the plants and animals of the countryside. He was especially amused by Fabrizio's collection of donkeys. One day, late in the afternoon, Hansi came walking into the compound. Fabrizio was there with a group of maquisards, and as soon as Hansi appeared in the clearing, they shot him.

“Papé was very upset,” Pierrot said. “But he didn't show it, or the others would have suspected him as a collaborator. ‘Leave him here,' Papé said. ‘I'll bury the bastard.' So after they left, he gave Hansi a proper burial and said some prayers. He hid his emblems and badges and kept his jacket and his notebook.”

Down in the square in the town, Pierrot and I shared a beer. The old boules players had gathered—dark lines on either side of the pitch. Hawklike eyes following the flight of the cochonnet, explosive outbursts when the boules landed, jocular sparring and familiar banter.

Gulls and terns skimmed the sand-colored buildings and the red-tiled roofs north of the square, white sails against the searing Mediterranean blue, flights of sparrows in the dust at our feet, women with carriages, young children spinning on the carousel at the west end, shouts and laughter, dog barks, the clank of glasses on china plates, the smell of old beer and cigarettes and dry plane-tree leaves. I was suddenly conscious of a comfortable familiarity here. I felt that I had landed in a place that had a sense of itself, a community forged by deep history rather than intentional town planning.

“Why didn't you get called to go fight in Algeria?” I asked Pierrot. He was about the right age for the army.

He looked over at me sadly. Then he tapped his cheek just below his walleye.

“Maybe you're lucky,” I said.

Someone made a good throw on the boule pitch. There was an outburst from the players. Pierrot looked over dully and drank some of his beer. A gull barked. A truck engine fired up in the market stalls. A door slammed.

Knowing how the tide of gossip washed over the Rose Café, I was pretty certain that Pierrot knew I had been hearing stories about his father, but he never offered any information himself. He was a very good island guide when it came to plants and animals and unfounded local rumors, but he never talked much about himself. His mother died when he was young, and he was raised by a maiden aunt who lived in the village of Monticello, just behind Ile Rousse. When he was old enough to make the trip on his own, he started going up into the maquis to stay with his father, and for a while helped him out with his donkey herd and the half-wild cows and pigs that Fabrizio laid claim to. (All the seemingly feral livestock that you would see in the middle of nowhere in the maquis actually belonged to someone.) Pierrot soon grew bored with this way of life and moved down to Ile Rousse, where he managed to get the delivery job for the local baker. People around the café claimed that he was dull-witted and slow and knew very little about his father's activities during the war, save what the old man told him, which he accepted as truth. He accepted everything as truth, they said, still believed in the power of the signadore and was scared of mazzeri, the evil eye, and other occult forces that lingered on in Corsican folklore.

Dull-witted he may well have been, but I noticed that, like his father, Pierrot maintained a store of knowledge about lizards and birds and the uses of local plants.

He finished his beer and said goodbye, and I watched him amble off through the square, occasionally stopping to chat with a few of the men his age. Except for his walleye, he did not seem substantially different from anyone else in the village.

On my way back to work I watched the carousel for a while before I turned down the street that led out to the causeway. Worried mothers watched attentively as their little ones spun in the trapped circle, the horses and zebras rising and falling, rising and falling, the canned calliope music bouncing along.

The carousel slowed and stopped, and released one troupe of riders while the next group selected their chosen mounts. There was a little boy of about three or four who was afraid of the zebra, but his sister, who couldn't have been older than seven or eight herself, leaned over him and escorted him forward; she encouraged him to pat the zebra, and then helped him up onto the saddle. He held on to the post tightly, wide-eyed and terrified. His sister got up behind him and circled him with her arms on the post and leaned forward with her cheek to his. And then they were off.

Up and down, around and around, the high, circling dog-trot waltz rhythm belling along, zebra heads up, horse heads down, appearing and disappearing in the fixed circle, wild eyes, gaping jaws, manes flying, and the innocent faces of laughing children, lost in the joyous absurdity of the circle.

When I left I noticed that the little boy was smiling proudly, tears still glistening in his eyes.

chapter eight

Migrants

Migratory birds begin to arrive on the western slopes and headlands of Corsica as early as February, flying north from their wintering grounds in Africa. By March their numbers swell, and by April the maquis is alive with the chirrups and chips and songs of the local nesting birds, including the fluted bell of the blackbird, the explosive little call of the Cetti's warbler, and the various trills, churrs, squeaks, whistles, and buzzes of the linnets and the pipits, and the bee-eaters and buntings.

A pair of house martins began building a nest over a wall lamp earlier in the spring. We saw them first darting through the verandah like half-seen shadows and hovering around the wall lamp where the geckos used to collect at night. Then after a few days, they started to bring in nest materials. You would be lounging in one of the chairs on the verandah with a book and a drink, half-asleep from the heat, and imagine, or perhaps dream, that something just flew past your ear, and then, awake, you would see the bird fly out again in search of more twigs. The work went on for a week or so and then, after much scrambling and aerial display, the female laid her eggs and began incubating.

I brought a chair over one afternoon while the birds were off feeding and felt the warm little rounded shells and then quickly retreated before the mother returned.

Figaro, Micheline's overweight tabby cat, expressed a passing interest in these two birds and would sometimes lie stretched out under the lamp, but he was too lazy to bother to try to catch one.

By late June the martins had hatched one brood of nestlings and were working on another. The parents were swooping in under the beamed roof at regular intervals with beaks full of insects that they would feed to their young. We could hear their cheeping as soon as the parents would arrive and see their gaping mouths just above the edge of the nest.

Another species of migrant began passing through about this time. A rude couple of pieds-noirs, as the European Algerians were called, booked a room in late June, but they so offended Micheline with their abrupt demands that she became curiously inactive whenever they would ask for something.

“Bring us two
demis
,” they would command.

“Straightaway,” she would say and rush off to the kitchen behind the bar, where she would sit in a chair just behind the back door of the scullery and smoke a cigarette. After five minutes or so, she would bring out one beer.

“We wanted two,” they demanded.

And off she'd go for another five minutes.

Dinners were equally slow, and soon they stopped eating at the restaurant, and then one day, they left.

The same thing happened—unintentionally this time—with two gentlemen from London who were traveling together and checked in, intending to stay for a few days. They were perfectly civilized types who dressed in collared shirts with cravats, stuck to themselves, and were always polite, albeit aloof from the locals.

Staff in the kitchen at the Rose Café had the sometimes unfortunate habit of giving nicknames, such as Herr Komandante, to guests and diners. One evening, one of the visiting Englishmen sent back a plate. Micheline snatched it up and charged into the kitchen, announcing that one of the English
finocchio
was not happy with his dinner. He had followed her in to explain something further, was apparently fluent in both Italian and French, and caught the homosexual reference. Coolly, but still civil, they checked out the next morning.

One night in midsummer a ketch came into the quay and dropped off a strange, silent couple, who arrived at the café and demanded rooms. Micheline went through her usual sham of checking to see if there was space, which there was, and the couple went silently to their room and remained there. They were a handsome pair, both tall and slim with an aristocratic air about them. They had Eastern European accents but French passports.

The couple came down in the morning and ordered coffee and
pain beurré
, and after breakfast they walked to town and did not come back till late in the evening. For three days they followed this routine, rising early, taking coffee and buttered bread, rarely speaking, even to each other. They wore the same clothes every day and did not seem to have much luggage. Then on Sunday night, having collected their papers on fictitious pretenses, they caught the ferry to the continent and left without paying.

While they were there, a Cuban man named Mendoza showed up with his daughter and booked a room for a week. He was of recent Spanish extraction and was cut from the same stone as Vincenzo: dark eyes, high cheekbones, and a mass of curly black hair above a brush mustache. His daughter, Conchita, was a dark-eyed young thing, about fourteen years old. Mendoza was a guitarist who made his living by taking gigs at small local bistros on the Riviera—or so he claimed. In fact, he seemed to have access to private funds; he certainly could not have made very much money at the locales in which he performed. The two of them had been traveling for months, he said. They stayed in Seville, where he still had family; in Malaga; the Balearic Islands; Cannes; and then Nice, where he had played at a local club and where (so he said) he fell in with a rich widow for a few months. He must have retreated to Corsica to untangle himself from some web of love, although he didn't say that.

He and his daughter stayed on for three weeks, and at no charge would sometimes entertain guests on the terrace with Cuban folk tunes and Spanish fandangos. When she was in the mood, Conchita would dance in the flamenco style, snapping her fingers and clapping rhythmically, clicking her tongue and stamping her feet. Chrétien would occasionally attempt to join her when he had had a little too much to drink.

One afternoon about this time I saw a blond man of about forty, with a bulbous nose and little, piggy eyes, sitting on the verandah nursing a beer. I passed his table as I was sweeping the floor, and he asked me if I knew anyplace in the town that rented rooms. I told him we had rooms here, and that he should speak to Micheline.

“Where are you from?” he asked. “Italy?” This was a question that was becoming de rigueur.