The Rose Café (20 page)

“He says he's Belgian, but who knows?” André said. “Could be German, too. Alsatian maybe. Von Metz, or whatever his name is. He's just another con artist. On the lam, found a good place to hide.”

No one was overly interested in this definitive bit of news but me. They went back to their small talk. André engaged Maggs. Peter ordered another beer; Herr Komandante sipped his muscat and watched the incoming dinner guests.

“Does le Baron speak German?” I asked Herr Komandante.

“I don't think so—not to me, anyway,” he said. “But who knows?”

In due time Maggs and Peter departed for their table, leaving André and the Komandante. Karen and her troupe arrived and engaged Herr Komandante, who, I noticed, seemed to have an eye for young Laurent.

“You think le Baron is a swindler?” I managed to ask André. “You sure?”

“But of course. Big-time smuggler and forger. You didn't know? He was a double agent during the war. He was connected to the communists and the bandit gangs up in the Dordogne. Soleil and that crowd, you know, political but criminal at the same time.”

Soleil, I learned, was a criminal turned resistance fighter from the Marseille area. He was just one of any number of underworld figures, many of them Corsican, who had joined the legitimate resistance fighters and used their art to aid the cause. The Free French and the British were not opposed to cooperating.

“He could also have been working with the Gaullist network,” André added. “He was educated in London, speaks good English, and used to arrange shipments from the British SOE, the Security Office; they trusted him. But then he would manage to allow the criminal gangs to get to the air drops first. That's where he learned his trade. Then he started selling arms to whoever would pay. And then after the war …”

André waved his hand, indicating that after the war le Baron simply carried on his trade.

“He first came out here during the war to hide out. Things must have gotten hot for him on the continent, and maybe the British were after him as well as the Germans. He was up in the maquis somewhere, and he liked it here. So after the war he comes back with a younger woman and buys that big villa out there. She's a recluse, spends all her time in the garden. I don't think anyone has ever even seen her. Except maybe Jean-Pierre.”

I looked back at the terrace. Le Baron and Dushko were sharing a big, high-piled bowl of urchins, stripping out the meat with narrow little forks and tearing off hunks of bread. They ate slowly, and were sharing a cold bottle of local white. Whatever subject had so animated Dushko seemed to have been resolved.

chapter twelve

The Artful Dodger

I had heard from Pierrot that somewhere up behind the village of Speloncata, where there were some interesting grottoes, there were thought to be some menhirs and torri. His directions were vague, and he wasn't even sure they were located near Speloncata, but on one of those hot days when a sojourn in the mountains is refreshing, I took off.

As the summer wore on, I managed to negotiate free days for myself by arranging—with Chrétien's help—to have Karen take over my position one day a week as dishwasher. I would often take advantage of these times and go off by myself into the hills. Pierrot would give me a ride on his
moto
to the edge of town, and I would either walk or sometimes hitchhike higher and higher into the mountain slopes beyond the maquis, and then return before dusk, in time for dinner.

On this particular day, I hitched a ride on the back of a truck that dropped me in the hills somewhere south of Ile Rousse and began a long, more or less pointless walk, following donkey trails now and then in those sections that vaguely resembled the descriptions Pierrot had given me. In one village, Pioggiola, I stopped at the one café there and had a coffee and asked about the monuments. No one knew anything about them, but they suggested the next village. So I hiked on.

The roads became more and more rutted and the villages, such as they were, more and more run-down—some were mere piles of stones, half in ruins and inhabited, it seemed to me, only by old people and middle-aged women with gaunt faces and scraggly hairdos. In one collection of houses, a crone with a W-shaped mouth was sitting in a chair in the sun, and as I walked by she uttered a long, incomprehensible sentence in dialect and then cackled maliciously and shook her finger at me. I stopped and asked her in Italian—the closest language I had to the local dialect—if she knew about any stoneworks in the area. She pointed at me, continued to shake her finger in warning, and strewed out a long unintelligible answer. I thought I caught just one word:
morte
, “death,” and I couldn't help but wonder if she was a mazzera and was warning me not to continue.

Nevertheless, I waved and hiked on. I was clearly a long way from the cosmopolitan terrace of the Rose Café and the busy town square at Ile Rousse.

The old woman was not out of place here, and in fact was mild compared with some of the other characters that appear in Corsican history and legend. Homer had identified half-wild, man-eating giants on Corsica. Seneca, who was banished to the island in
AD
41, portrayed the place as a barren, rocky wasteland—without sustenance. Balzac, who was stranded in Ajaccio at one point, praised the beauty of the island—as did the ancient Greek merchant sailors—but Balzac felt the interior was inhabited by a somber, paranoid race that isolated itself in a mountain fastness. Flaubert passed through Corsica the same year as Mérimée and, like Mérimée, enjoyed the lawless freedom of the people of the maquis, although he perhaps tended to place them in the same romanticized category as Rousseau's natural man. Alexandre Dumas, author of
The Corsican Brothers
, also overemphasized the romance of the place.

In fact, life on Corsica was never easy: The land is not suited to agriculture because of the mountainous terrain; sustenance was hard-won; and, as in isolated cultures the world around, the local people tended to be withdrawn and suspicious of snooping foreigners. Nevertheless, from the perspective of an outsider, the island does have a flair of the exotic—the nearest of the far-flung places, as the English used to claim: great green peaks rising above the scented foothills, misty chasms, waterfalls and rushing streams, rocky sea coves and isolated sandy beaches; and handsome, dark-eyed men in black corduroy and bright red sashes, women in flowing dark skirts and the traditional
messera
, a long, flowing mantilla. And also danger. Armed men, even at church, and powerful, possibly treacherous women (Colomba carried a stiletto inside her messera). Mérimée managed to evoke all this and at the same time portray the tough realities of life in the interior.

All this is not to say that Corsicans themselves did not have a local poetic tradition. There were a few urban writers who attempted to portray the island life, but they were perhaps too close to their world to give an accurate perspective. There was also a regional tradition of improvised verse performed by a
voceratrice
, a woman who invented rhymed laments over a body at a ritual wake. These imaginative verses can go on at length, and they were still being practiced when I was there. One of the last
voceratrice
was interviewed in the mid-1960s by the best of the modern-day interpreters of Corsican life, Dorothy Carrington, for her seminal book
Corsica: Portrait of a Granite Island
. Carrington's
voceratrice
explained that it was not she herself who was singing, but that the voices came to her from the other side.

Beyond the last village on a spur road, the track gave out altogether, and I began following a sheep trail that ran up into the hard foothills. After an hour or so of hiking, skirting all the while a great, granite, east-facing escarpment, I came upon evidence of another dying island tradition, a stone hovel, rounded, with a corbelled roof. From a distance I thought this could have been the ruins of a torri, but when I drew closer, I could see that this pile of stones was actually a shepherd's summer quarters. There was bedding inside, and there was a well-used cooking ring of stone nearby.

Transhumance herding was still going on in the mountains in Corsica at this time. Each winter the shepherds would graze their flocks in the lowlands near the coast, where the pastures were green and snow-free. As soon as the snows melted back from the high pastures, they would bring the flocks up, a journey that could take as much as a week or two. The sheep would spend the summer feeding on the fresh, snow-fed grasses in the high meadows, and then, with the first frosts, start to move down to the coast again.

Earlier in the spring, when I first came out to the island with Armand and Inge, we had taken a bus from Calvi up to a little town in the central mountains called Calacuccia. A few days later we hitched a ride to Ajaccio in the bed of a truck, and on the way down we were halted en route by an immense sea of baa-ing sheep, headed up to the summer pastures.

They were led by a ram with a bronze bell, and there were four or five dogs busily keeping the sheep together as they moved upward. Behind the dogs was a shepherd with a staff, and there were two other men on either side of the flock. In back of them were two donkeys, overloaded with baggage, and behind that there was a wagon pulled by an old nag with a white nose and suspicious eyes.

The men were a rough-looking bunch—unshaven, dressed in many layers of ragged clothing and double-breasted suit jackets, much worn at the elbows—and although one or two of them greeted the driver of the truck, for the most part they kept their eyes on the flock and passed without so much as a word. The man in the wagon was more friendly. He wore the traditional black corduroy, and when he spotted the lovely Inge he whistled and lifted his hat as he passed, and clucked as if to say sorry, but this is the old way, this is the way it's done, and that infernal machine of a truck will just have to wait for the sheep. Inge waved at him with both hands, fluttering her fingers.

I had carried with me into the hills a big tranche of Pierrot's bread, a hunk of sheep cheese, and half a bottle of a local white wine from Cap Corse, and I settled with my back to the wall and had some lunch. Then I stretched out after eating and was soon asleep—daily naps were a part of everyone's routine at the Rose Café.

In my sleep, I was vaguely conscious of the sound of running water and sheep bells in the distance, and when I woke, I followed the sound of the water and came to a small, bounding stream. I washed my face, drank some of the clear water, and was headed back to pick up my pack when I saw an old man with a dog making his way along the escarpment, followed by two or three belled goats. We met at the tiny stone hovel.

He was a wiry old type, cut in the same style as Fabrizio—dressed in a corduroy suit and a dirty flannel shirt, buttoned at the neck. He wore a cloth cap and a cartridge belt, and slung over his shoulder was a long-barreled rifle. He also had a mean-looking dagger stuck inside his cummerbund.

In spite of his fierce demeanor I did not fear for my safety when he first appeared. I had not heard of any kidnappings here on the island, and I knew also that one of the old traditions of the vendetta culture of Corsica was that strangers were out of bounds. In any case, this man was no bandit; he had kindly old eyes and smiled as he approached.

He greeted me in dialect, and when I returned the greeting in French he switched languages, but his French was so accented, or so mixed with dialect, that I could hardly understand him. I was far from the coast at this point, several miles above Fabrizio's compound and in a relatively remote area, so I was not surprised by his broken French. I tried Italian, he went back into dialect, and together we managed to communicate—a little.

All I could understand was that he and his dog were searching for a lost goat. I did catch a few other phrases,
alla campagna
, for example, which was a local term for an outlaw, or someone who makes his living in the hills illegally. I think I also heard him say something about people who live in Bastia. The name
Bastiaccio
here in the interior was a derogatory term. Mountain people distrusted the
Bastiese
, I had heard. They were a race apart and not dependable. (Of course the Bastiese said the same thing about the mountain people—a somber, cheerless race.) I gathered that what the old man was telling me was that someone had stolen his goat. Probably a Bastiaccio.

I offered him a little wine, which he accepted and drank in the Spanish style, holding the bottle above his open mouth and swallowing without closing his lips. Then I asked him about the little stone cabine. It was not his apparently, but was used by a shepherd who passed through this valley in summer. He told me a long story following this which was totally lost on me, although I feigned comprehension, agreeing and nodding with interest. I think it had to do with the shepherd who lived in the cabine and I think he was saying that he was not coming back this year.

“
Bene
,” he said, after a few minutes. “
Vadu cercare di piu questu maldettu chevre
”—I'm going to search for that cursed goat, and he tipped his hat and wandered off. I watched him descend toward the stream and disappear into the thickets of holm oak and beech, the goats and the dog tagging along. He was a sprightly old man, a little like a goat himself.

On a hunch, I calculated that if I followed the stream downhill, bushwhacking, I would come to the road I had left earlier in the day, so I followed him and then turned downhill through a relatively open stony forest. A few hundred yards downstream, I could see another clearing off to my right, so I went over to investigate, still half-hoping to find a torri, and came to another pasture, where I picked up a sheep trail back to the road.

The intermittent vistas from this height were spectacular. I could see a whole descending range of maquis and flat pasture-lands falling toward the distant blue sea. Behind me there loomed a vast, ominous peak, Monte Pardu, I think, clothed on the lower slopes with a local species of evergreen known as laricio pine. The air was cool; the sun was warm; the rising mixed odor of maquis and forest filled my lungs; and I swung along the open road, refreshed and free and young, with no baggage of any sort weighing me down and no thoughts other than those of the moment. I could hear the cry of rooks, the sound of rushing streams, and the throaty jangle of cowbells from the unseen high pastures, and presuming myself alone, I began a skipping jig and started to sing aloud as I tripped onward and downward toward the sea and whatever future awaited me beyond these sceptered shores.