The Rose Café (18 page)

“Um,” she mumbled.

A gull slipped over the island, white against the azure blue. I watched it disappear over the point of land to the south.

“I say, did you happen to know, by the way of passing, that Henri Bergson believed in direct intuition as a means of attaining knowledge rather than the mechanistic, rational means of scientific, formulaic discovery so commonly employed here in the Western Hemisphere? And did you know, further, that his famous works were banned by the Church?”

She spun over and grabbed me by the throat, pushed me back, and began to strangle me, shaking my head gently against the hot rocks. “You are a crazy cowboy,” she said. “Crazy American atheist cowboy. But just the same …” Then she kissed me.

“I am going for a swim,” she said.

She tracked down through the hot red rocks, waded in, and struck off for the opposite shore with a fast, four-beat crawl.

“Hail Mary full of grace,” I called after her in English.

And all the while, Chrétien was getting along famously with Karen. Early one morning, I caught a glimpse of something in white sweep past the stairwell in the upstairs hallway and guessed it was Karen, retreating from a night in Chrétien's narrow little bedroom over the kitchen. Sometimes she joined us in the kitchen peeling potatoes and chopping carrots for Vincenzo. And one afternoon, at a café on a side street away from the square, I saw the two of them nuzzling and kissing at one of the tables.

“She is beautiful, don't you think?” Chrétien asked me.

“Oh yes, in a wild sort of way,” I said.

“That's it. A wild animal. But I do not know what kind. Not a gazelle.”

Karen had long, loose bangs that fell below her brows, almost covering her eyes.

“An English sheepdog, maybe?”

“A sheepdog?” He thought about it for a minute. “
Non, non
. Not a sheepdog. She's too smart. It's not that—she's too refined.”

“A boxer, maybe?”

I tilted my head knowingly toward Nikita, who was asleep (of course—he slept most of the day). He was on his back, paws cocked in the air, mouth open, seemingly dead. I thought he was a profoundly ugly dog.

Chrétien looked back at me without expression. He had an interesting, probably studied, mannerism of not responding to statements that were obviously absurd jokes, as if he didn't get it. Then he would lose control, and after a few snickers break into peals of laughter. Now he snickered, caught himself, and then gave in and let fly with his long, hyena-like laugh and reached across the table and pretended to strangle me.

“I will kill you!” he said in dialect.

chapter ten

War and Remembrance

Back home in the United States, my parents had the unfortunate habit of collecting official-looking mail addressed to me and forwarding it to me in one large envelope. Jean-Pierre handed me one of these dreaded packets one morning, and I began sorting through what seemed to me a pointless collection of extinct bank notices, school fund-raising appeals, and other tedious, inconsequential form letters. But one of these letters had an ominous U.S. Government return address. I opened the envelope and found there an official summons from the draft service. I was to report for a pre-induction physical, the document read—without fail—on April 14. This was now early August, four months past the deadline. I stared dully at the notice for a while, threw it on the table with the other papers, and drank some more coffee. What was I to do?

Out in the harbor, the old
Bagheera
was just making off from the quay. With much backing and filling, the vessel began moving steadily in reverse toward the rocky shore below the café, then swung its bow toward the open waters beyond the jetty and headed out at a slow, steady pace, leaving a faint V-shaped wake astern. She was headed off on her usual rounds of the Mediterranean: Marseille, Toulon, Ceuta, Crete, Naples, Livorno, Bastia, and wherever else she could find a cargo. I had a passing fantasy that I could be on board.

I had been watching this little tramp steamer appear and disappear in the harbor all through the spring and summer. She had no set schedule, and the nature of her cargo was a great mystery to me: a collection of small and large crates, barrels, and boxes, often off-loaded in a pendulous net and dispersed along the quay. Horse-drawn wagons and old motorized trucks, summoned by what mysterious alchemy I did not know, would appear, pick up a selection of crates, and then disappear into the hills and hinterland.

I asked Max one night about the
Bagheera
, but he avoided a direct answer. He merely indicated that she had been coming in and out of the harbor for years—the same thing Pierrot had told me.

“During the war,” he said, “she used to carry shipments of arms, ammunition maybe, and radio parts. But these would be deported off the coast, offshore, somewhere else, east of Cap Corse maybe. Nowadays, who knows?”

He knew, of course. But I waited.

Then I dared to ask if any of the cargo that was off-loaded went up to the Baron's.

“Le Baron's?” he said, surprised. “No, why do you ask?”

“I don't know. There are stories.”

“About what?”

“His money. How he gets his money. Somebody told me he was a smuggler.”

Max laughed. “That's what everyone says. If somebody out here has money, he must be contrabandist.”

“Is he?”

Max laughed again, a forced laugh this time. “Maybe. Probably no. In fact definitely no. I think.”

“So how did he get so rich? And why does he live out there on the edge of the maquis in solitude?”

“I thought you knew,” Max said.

I told him what I had heard from Fabrizio.

“And you believed that?”

“I don't know, Vincenzo said Fabrizio is a crazy old liar. A mazzeru, even.”

“Maybe,” said Max. “Maybe no. Part true, maybe. But I know le Baron, he was in Nice during the war, and he was somehow attached to Vichy. But then, you know, the espionage is the espionage. He was reverse spy, it could be. Anything was possible back then. He does not seem the Vichy type.”

He began to spill out various permutations of unoccupied France. Max said he thought the Vichy thing might have been a cover and that le Baron was connected to the anticommunist White Russian community in Nice, and that he was a Gaullist but at the same time was helping to undermine the communist cell of the resistance around Nice. He snatched arms shipments intended for the communists and then turned the arms over to the Gaullist resistance fighters and even tipped off the Milice, the local Vichy police thugs, as to the whereabouts of certain communist leaders.

“Was dog eat the dog over there, you know. Here not so bad. Everyone here in Corsica, we all hate the Nazi—the bandit, the mothers, the childrens, the bankers. We all hate the fascists. The mountain people up in the villages, if the Boches come looking for you, and you can mount into the hills, in the little villages, the peasants, they put you in the barn, bury you in the hay. Then when the Nazis come, they look them in the eyes and sign themselves”—Max crossed himself—“and they say, oh yes, they saw you headed for Bastia, over the mountains. They show the trail you took. Later, maybe that night. Boum. Boum. One less Nazi. But over on the continent, big dog fight. Communist, Gaullist, and local criminals, still arguing among each others. But all want to kill first the big dog, the Nazi, so they can get on top, you see.”

“What about that weird yacht with the wishbone rig that comes in at night and always leaves before dawn?” I asked.

“That's from Nice. We see it come, we see it go. One knows nothing. One does not ask. But probably this is a friend of le Baron.”

“And the
Bagheera
—what do you think it carries now?”

“Who knows? That's not my trade. Not my business. She carries what must be carried.”

“Kif, maybe?”

He looked at me and raised an eyebrow. It was apparently a good guess.

“Why you say this?”

“Just a guess.”

“No. No kif.”

“Hashish?”

Max drew a breath and sighed. He was getting tired of this.

“Who knows. I am sixty years, you know. I have seen the wars. Who knows what
le Bagheera
carries—kif, hashish, guns, cigarette, whiskey, women—who cares. It is not our business. In Ajaccio, one sees the big bandit, the capu, the vendetta. Up in the mountains, the country men come to town—to Mass even—with guns slung over their shoulders. I am tired of all this, you see. These little ants. You kick over their hill and they swarm out. Just don't kick the hill, eh? Allow me to give you a little lesson of life.”

“What's that?”

“Don't worry about things.”

A few nights after the draft notice arrived, Chrétien and Giancarlo had a heated discussion that started with André Gide's idea of the
acte gratuit
, the pointless, motiveless crime that sums up the meaningless existential universe and serves only to establish the fact that one is truly free. That led to a discussion of the theoretical morality of killing someone—in this case Hitler. Giancarlo argued that the murder of Hitler would be the opposite of the gratuitous crime committed by Lafcadio in Gide's
Les Caves du Vatican
, and would have been an ethical, preordained act that—sixth commandment notwithstanding—would even assure the killer entrance into the Christian heaven, “… were such a place to exist,” he added.

The argument became more and more heated and expanded into the morality of war in general and ended up, as these talks often would do, with the Second World War, which, as Chrétien argued (for the sake of argument alone, it should be said; he was a pacifist), was the only ethical war he could think of. This discussion was taking place indoors, near the bar, and the hedonists who had gathered around the bar that night, including Herr Komandante, were getting nervous and moving away, as if to shun any mention of the war would cause the memory of it to disappear.

I had just read
Les Caves du Vatican
as part of a French civilization course at the Sorbonne and was inclined to join the discussion. Not only that, the draft notice had gotten me worried that I would, at some point, have to make a commitment—an existential act, as my friends back in Paris would argue—that would be a statement of the way that I would have the universe function. I wasn't buying it, though. I was more in the camp of Marie and Herr Komandante.

In the past, when it came to commitment to violence or war, the Corsicans did not seem to have a problem. The only debate on the subject that I know of occurs in the case of Mérimée's character, Orso della Rebbia, who had been influenced by continental mores.

When Orso waffles as to avenging his father, Colomba outlines the chain of absolute necessity that requires Orso to act. For one thing, everyone in his native village of Pietranera expects him to carry out the vendetta. It is his duty as his father's son. He wavers, finds excuses not to seek revenge. He accepts the cover-ups that had protected his father's murderer and summons memories of his civilized comrades in the drawing rooms of Paris and the English lady who has promised to be his bride. But Colomba presses in.

Traditionally in Corsica, the women would carry the blood-soaked shirt of a victim of a vendetta. Colomba hands Orso a little chest at one point that contains the bloody shirt his father had been wearing when he was killed, and she places the two rusted bullets that took his life on the shirt. Then she leaves Orso alone, hoping that the terrible relics will exert the inherent spiritual force that will force him to act. She seems to have retreated to the ancient pagan belief, not uncommon on Corsica, that the actual blood of a murdered relation literally cries out for vengeance.

The barricaded tower of Orso's ancestral enemy, the family Barricini, is just across the square, and here the murderer lies secluded, an aged and doddering man now, protected by two violent sons, hot to kill. Orso finally decides to take his revenge on these two country toughs rather than the father, who actually carried out the murder. But even then he refuses to kill them outright, and instead challenges them to a fair duel. Later, on a narrow road between two stone walls, the two brothers ambush Orso and wound his arm. Nonetheless he manages to get off two quick shots, and when the smoke clears, he finds that he has killed the two brothers.

Mérimée points out in a footnote that this fictional account is based on actual events that took place while he was staying in one of the isolated mountain villages on Corsica.

What was true for local revenge killing was true also in the larger sense. Over the three-thousand-year period of invasion, whenever Corsicans were not happy with the current political regime, they would take to the hills and carry on their ancient custom of resistance. This was no less true when the Romans and the Genoese invaded than it was when the fascists moved in.

In 1943, shortly after the German and Italian invasion of Corsica, the Allied forces contacted the maquisards and began to arrange clandestine supply drops, some of which were carried out in daring landings at obscure beaches along the east coast. The
Casabianca
, one of twelve French submarines that were docked in Toulon in November of 1942 when the Germans took over, was one of the heroes of this period. All the other submarines in the port were sunk by the British in order to keep them from falling into German hands, but the
Casabianca
escaped and joined the Allied naval forces in North Africa.

Under the command of Captain Jean L'Herminier, the vessel began making daring arms drops on the coasts, hiding by day on the sea bottom like a moray eel, and then approaching the beaches under cover of darkness to off-load its cargo. In September 1943, the Italians abandoned their alliance with the Germans. Later that month, the
Casabianca
dropped off 109 Free French shock troops, who joined the local maquisards. By October, after some severe fighting with the Germans around Nebbiu and Bastia, the resistance finally drove the Nazis out. It was the first section of France to be liberated.