The Rose Café (27 page)

I looked down at the square with its statue of the Corsican liberator. But I could not help but also notice the two ice cream stands on the north side of the square, and near the statue, the blinking lights of the carousel circling round and round, carrying its passengers to the next generation.

I had had perhaps too much to drink that night, and for the first time, deigned to venture an opinion.

“The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream,” I said.

They all turned on me with blank stares. Marie laughed and covered her mouth.

“What is that you say, my son?” Giancarlo asked.

“Sorry,” I said. “It's just a quote from an American poet.”

They all nodded politely and dashed headlong back into their various predictions.

The next day, a Friday, Giancarlo took a hired car down to Calvi and left on the afternoon ferry. On Sunday, Marie spent most of the morning packing her bags. I hadn't seen much of her over the weekend. It was the end of summer and turned out to be a busy period. I had a lot of fish to clean, and the tables were full throughout lunch and dinner. I was constantly at work. Whenever we managed to get a few minutes together, Marie seemed sad and pouting.

When the inevitable Sunday evening push rolled around, the workload was even worse, with whole battalions of soldierly dishes streaming in, and pots and pans piling in stacked mountains on the stone sink counters. It was a hot night, and I had to work furiously to keep up, my sleeves rolled high on my arms and the front of my apron soaked and stained with food.

Just before she and her parents carted their baggage down to the quay to board, Marie came into the scullery and, without saying anything, spun me around by my shoulders, threw her arms around me, and kissed me, pressing her body against my wet apron.

“Call me,” she said.

“I will.”

We finally managed to say goodbye to one another and she backed out the door looking sad, as if she was about to cry.

She pushed out her lower lip, looked at me from under her brows, and waved weakly with her fingers.

“Cowboy,” she whispered.

Half an hour later, in a lull between courses, I stepped out of the scullery and climbed the little rise behind the back door. The white ferry was just making its way out of the dark harbor, and as I watched, it cleared the jetty and made its turn to the north, and then headed across the night waters to Nice.

Its lights were bright against the black sea, but slowly they grew smaller and smaller and finally disappeared, and after that there was nothing but the distant
thud
of the waves and the canopy of stars, the Great Bear circling above the Ile de la Pietra.

One by one, the players left the stage.

Herr Komandante packed his bags one day and left midweek in a hired car for Calvi. The four of us on the staff stood with him on the terrace to say goodbye.

He shook my hand warmly before he got in the car.

“Be brave in life,” he said.

I was a little mystified and started to say something, but by that time he was in the backseat of the car, waving from the window and smiling and showing his teeth.

“I always liked him,” Jean-Pierre said, as the car bumped down the causeway, “even if he was a German.”

“He was a good German,” Chrétien said.

“Not a bad sort,” said Micheline.

The next weekend Maggs and Peter left. I saw their bags out on the terrace with Peter's diving gear and knew what was coming. Peter spotted me in the dining room and shook my hand formally, and later Maggs sought me out in the scullery and kissed me on both cheeks in the French style and held my wet hands in hers.

“You will come and see us now in London, when you have time.”

I said I would.

“Take the night train from Paris. You can stay with us in Kensington. We have a room. We'll have a dinner party.”

I said again that I would come. She was looking at me with that fixed stare. And then spontaneously, she embraced me in a motherly way, rubbing my back vigorously.

“Have a good season in Paris,” she said. She kissed me again and walked out.

Chrétien asked to borrow Jean-Pierre's Citroën one day, explaining that he would like to drive Karen and her troupe over to Calvi to catch the midweek ferry. I was free that afternoon and went along with them. We all piled in: Laurent, Clotilde, and I in the backseat and Karen lolling against Chrétien's shoulder in the front.

It was a subdued drive. Everyone was sorry to be leaving, and since we had some time, we took a turn on a side road and drove down to a beach Chrétien knew about and sat by the water watching the waves.

Chrétien and Karen took a walk down the shore and disappeared behind some high rocks at the east end of the cove. They were gone for a while and looked disheveled and flushed when they came back. Just before we left, Karen waded out into the water and stood with her skirts hoisted and tucked into her waistband. She looked like a sea nymph, there with her white dress bunched like a tunic and the light waves breaking over her thighs. She stood alone for a long time, staring out to sea, then she turned and came striding back through the waters. I think she had been weeping.

“Let's go,” she said. “Let's just get it over with.”

In Calvi, we sat in a quayside café waiting for the ferry, which after half an hour or so appeared in the harbor. A band had assembled to greet a visiting dignitary from France, and the players stood around in a loose group, smoking and talking. They wore a strange collection of hats and uniforms from various wars and government agencies—army, navy, police, and fire—and they had old battered coronets and drums. The gangplank was lowered, and when the dignitary came out from the passageway the band struck up an off-key version of the “Marseillaise,” and the petty official descended. He had lost an arm and had tucked his coat sleeve into the left pocket of his gray suit, and he waved with his right hand as he picked his way down. No one seemed to notice his grand arrival except for a few men, also in suits, who stood on the quay to meet him.

Finally, it was time to board. Karen and Chrétien stood nuzzling at the gangplank, promising to find one another. I kissed Clotilde and shook hands with Laurent, and they all walked slowly up the gangplank—Karen in her white shift, her small backpack slung over her shoulder, and her mass of hair flying in the sea wind. On the little staging area at the top, she turned and waved.

“What a beauty,” Chrétien said sadly. “What a wild white horse. Captured in the marshes of the Camargue. Never tamed.”

Ile Rousse grew dull after that.

I shared coffee and hot baguettes with Pierrot each morning as usual, but except for the adventure of the big dance, there didn't seem to be much to talk about. I went for my daily swim, cleaned the dishes, cut fish, and worked the dinner shifts, and when I was free, wandered into the square to watch the boules players. The same troupe was there, of course. They were there before I came. They would be there long after I left.

On some afternoons I continued on from the square through the village and up into the hills, and followed sheep trails to nowhere. Birds were everywhere in the maquis—warblers and finches, thrushes and bee-eaters, all southbound. One afternoon there I met a cross-eyed goatherd who told me winter would be coming soon up in the mountains. Another day I went out to the Ile de la Pietra and circled under the Genoese tower and made my way along the shore, clambering over the rocks, resting from time to time to watch the sea and the sky beyond. But it was lonely there in the coves, empty, with only the pointless rise and fall of the green waves, the echoes of past conversations, and only the cormorants and the alien limpets, periwinkles, and snails as company.

With no woman to occupy him Chrétien grew more talkative. He sat with me after dinner, spilling out his plans to flee to Andalusia in the spring with Karen, where he said they would go to the big horse fair in Seville and then to the feria.

“We will drink sherry under the walls of the alcazar,” he said. “And she will dance with the gypsies of the Macarena. During Holy Week we will make love in an upstairs pension above the Serpiente as the Christian processions pass below us in the streets.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

I meant it. I knew at some point I would have to leave Corsica and my suspended life at the Rose Café, but I was not looking forward to Paris and its seamless gray skies. I knew also that I would at some point have to deal with the little problem of the American draft board. But I was ready for some new direction, something other than the nightly round of cafés and bars and futile political chatter. In fact, as things turned out, I finally began to write. A year later I went back to college in America, managed to avoid the draft and the war, and after a little more wandering, began freelancing.

Sometimes in September, new guests would arrive, but they were older people mostly—a few English pensioners, an older German couple who would come down for breakfast in their slippers and bathrobes. There was a strange Belgian man with a younger woman, who seemed more like his secretary than his girlfriend, and also a very polite but very boring couple from Brittany who had never traveled outside of France and, like the nineteenth-century English travelers before them, thought Corsica was an exotic foreign country.

One night I heard a wind come up. The noise woke me, as usual, but I noticed that there was something different in the sound and went outside. There was a new scent in the air, a sharper, saltier smell. The mistral was beginning to blow, the cold north wind that sweeps down off the Rhône Valley in France.

The next day was bright and clear, and the wind was charging down across the harbor, stretching the flags out straight and slapping the halyards of the few yachts that were left on their moorings. By late afternoon it set the whitecaps flying, and it blew all the following night, howling over the Ile de la Pietra, forecasting winter and discontent.

That evening, Jean-Pierre turned the kitchen over to Vincenzo and went off with Micheline in the car without telling anyone where they were going. I was mystified by this, since they usually shared their plans with the staff. I asked Vincenzo if he knew where they had gone and he dodged the question, which of course only served to whet my curiosity. Finally, to shut me up, he told me that they had gone out to le Baron's place.

“Just a little business affair. Then a little dinner,” he said.

“On business?” I asked. “They have a business together?”

“I don't know,” he said. “Maybe. Something like that.”

I let it go. I was finally getting used to mysteries.

A few nights later, after dinner, Jean-Pierre poured me a glass and sat with me out on the terrace.

“It looks like the season is over,” he said. “It is finished. And so for you…” He spread his palms with a helpless shrug.

“I know,” I said. “I have to get back anyway.”

“The
Bagheera
is coming in a couple of days; I can arrange passage for you to Marseille,” he said.

We drank quietly, watching the harbor and the causeway, as one by one the cardplayers began to arrive: Max first, then Jacquis, then André. They greeted us, shaking hands all around, lazily, and went over to their table on the harbor side of the terrace and sat staring out at the harbor. Waiting. After a while, Jean-Pierre said he should probably join them. He rose, walked over and sat down, and accepted whatever hand was dealt to him.

I left with Chrétien a few days later. We stood on the quay with Vincenzo, Jean-Pierre, and Micheline, smoking and making small talk and watching the stevedores argue over the great nets of cargo that were lowered from the decks.

Jean-Pierre drew me aside to say goodbye and pressed a thick manila envelope into my hands.

“For you,” he said. “For all the fish and dishes.”

We shook hands all around and kissed and pounded one another's shoulders, and Lucretia buried me in her arms and sniffled. Then Chrétien and I boarded and stood in the stern as the old vessel rumbled and growled, made its turn, and headed out from Ile Rousse harbor.

The freighter rounded the jetty and laid a straight course northward, a few gulls following and a long stream of dancing furrows spreading astern in a north-facing arrow. The promenade along the shore grew smaller; the red-tiled roofs of the Rose Café receded, blended with the surrounding rocks, and then disappeared. Then the town diminished, leaving only the judgmental nuns hovering above. Then the nuns faded, and all I could see were the jagged, indifferent heights of the interior.

For a while, the island floated above the horizon, a gray wash of abstracted peaks, unattached to anything tangible in the midst of a turquoise sea. The engines thrummed below me with a rhythmic
thud
. I caught a whiff of the maquis, and as I watched, the ambiguous peaks slowly faded to memory—a rose-red island where blue-green valleys swept down to the sea, and sea rolled out to the wide azure sky.

Epilogue

In a quiet moment on the deck, while Chrétien was asleep, I opened the envelope and found there six crisp $20 American bills. I had not seen American notes in a long time, and they had a clean sharpness to them that I had forgotten. I hid them in my pack and spent the rest of the journey sleeping and daydreaming of Paris and Marie and the lonely, cross-eyed goatherd I had met coming down from the mountains. It struck me that I never did get a chance to say goodbye to old Fabrizio, although I had told Pierrot to tell him I was leaving. It also occurred to me that I never said goodbye to le Baron either, whoever he was.

Although I learned more details than I sometimes cared to hear about the sad pasts of the visitors at the Rose Café, I never did learn very much about the private lives of the regulars who frequented the place. And mainly, I never did learn anything definitive about le Baron.

In spite of my dogged snooping, I never came to know which of the intertwined stories about his past was true. Was he the generous benefactor who aided the local people? Was he the miserable dealer in Jewish properties, as Fabrizio had told me? Was he an important player in the French resistance? Was he the capu of a successfully obscured smuggling ring? Or was he a skilled forger of exit visas and a financier who liberated desperate Jewish families, as he himself explained? Or was le Baron perhaps a little of all of that and then some?