The Rose Café (3 page)

But the constant there was the card game. It was a nightly ceremony that held their world together. Elsewhere, in the interior of the island in those times, there were still vendettas. Elsewhere there were smugglers and crooked politicians who conveniently disregarded the shipment of illegal goods from the continent. And somewhere out there in the real world beyond the red-rock shores and the green, flat seas, there were strikes and demonstrations, street bombings, wars, and revolutions. And always and everywhere, there was the aftermath of the big war, the war that shook the foundations of Europe.

Down in the dusty town square, every day at three in the afternoon, you could see old members of the Corsican underground with their long-distance eyes. They would gather there to roll
boules
and smoke and sit in the cafés and attempt to either recapitulate or obliterate their pasts. Sometimes at the local concerts, when the band played the old sentimental melodies from the time before the deluge, you might see a tear well up in the corners of the eyes of the older men. But out here at the Rose Café, on the little islet known as les Roches Rouges, the framework that sustained the universe was a deck of cards bearing the iconic images: the coin, the cup, the baton, and the sword.

Twenty minutes into the second round of cards, we heard a scraping at the steps to the terrace, and a figure in a white suit emerged out of the moist, warm night. Slowly, with a studied grace, a tall man climbed the steps and stood for a moment in the little stage of light at the edge of the terrace, his hand resting on the rail. He was dressed in a Belgian linen suit and a light blue shirt with a purple tie, and he had a deeply tanned face and silvery hair that he combed back over his ears like wings. Even in the half-light I could see the bright glitter of intense blue eyes.

Spotting the table of regulars, he walked toward them. Wordlessly, the players moved over to make space for him. Jean-Pierre spun over a chair from an adjacent table.

“Shall we begin again?” the tall man said.

This was the man they called “le Baron,” a gentleman of uncertain origins with a slight Belgian accent, who lived in a large villa at the end of a cypress-lined drive on the edge of the maquis. Le Baron did not often descend to play cards with the regulars at the Rose Café, but whenever he did I noticed that a subdued formality would settle over the table. Jacquis did not win as often when he was there. The regulars did not let him.

From my first glimpse of this man earlier in the season in the town square, I had a sense that there was something different about him, some odd mix of authority and benevolence, or maybe malice that set him apart from everyone else in the town. I had seen his type from time to time in Nice and in some sections of Paris, but never here, never in Corsica. He seemed to me an emblem of an old, dying culture, some player in an elemental European drama that had once held the stage and whose retired actors were still wandering amid the ruins of the postwar continent. I watched as he fanned out his cards and glanced around the table. Every motion, even the slightest gesture, seemed to have an elegant grace, a phrasing of manners accumulated over the centuries.

Once I had finished the last of the pots I went out and joined Micheline and Chrétien, who were sitting apart from the players at a table near the verandah.

“They found the fisherman,” Micheline said. “He was dead at the tiller. They brought him in at dusk. Apparent heart attack.”

Micheline, who was probably in her midthirties, was originally from Paris. She had olive skin and a fall of curly chestnut hair, and she always wore striped Moroccan slacks and hooped gold earrings. People told me she had been a painter before she met Jean-Pierre, and I would sometimes see her sketching at a table on the terrace on idle afternoons. Once, when no one was around, I surreptitiously looked through her sketchbook. The images were all wild, heavily inked abstractions that bore absolutely no resemblance to the landscape that she would refer to as she worked. She might have found a name for herself in Paris, I suppose, but now she mostly concerned herself with account books and dealings with local deliverymen, carpenters, and plumbers.

The card game forged on, a slow, shifting drama of obscure events complete with incident and resolution, climax and denouement. The world was contained in cards: An explosion of matchlight against the black wall of night. The slap of a card on the table. The occasional exclamation of victory or loss.

I cleaned up a few glasses and went to bed.

Later that night, while I was asleep, the wind came up. I could hear it first ranging over the red-tiled rooftop of the little auberge with its emptied café and its papered upstairs rooms. The sound woke me, and I went to the east window and looked back at the harbor. In the light of the moon, I could see a strange white ketch with a wishbone rig just dropping anchor. Then I heard the surge of waves in the cove below my cottage, and then the wind took on a deeper growl. The libeccio was beginning to blow, the warm, moist wind that would swirl off North Africa, cross Gibraltar, and sweep over the Mediterranean to the east coast of Italy, hammering all the islands in its path.

The wind undid people, it was said. On such nights there were vendettas and dark assignations. On such nights, the Corsican zombies known as
mazzeri
awoke to roam the wildlands, wantonly tearing apart any wayward sheep or goat or dog they happened to encounter.

The wind unsettled me, too. On certain nights there, when it howled across the mountains and made ominous moans and whispers as it swirled through the rocks above my cottage, I would wake, light a candle, and write until it burned out.

chapter two

The Nearest of the Distant Lands

In the old days there was a saying that if Corsica were a woman she would suffer great temptations, for she is very poor and very beautiful. They also used to say—still do in fact—that when you approach from the sea and the wind is right, you can smell the island before you actually see it. I don't know whether the first axiom is true. But I can attest to the second.

On my way back to the island from Nice, I went out onto the foredeck of the ferry and caught the scent of something—the sharp resinous smell of laurel rose and thyme, of arbutus, broom, and eglantine. It was the smell of maquis, the scrubby thickets of small trees and shrubs that characterize the vegetation of the foothills below the higher peaks.

Corsica was out there somewhere, still lost in the luminous emerald-green mist where the sea met the sky.

It was warm; the sea was calm; a spaceless green spread out before us, and astern the wake trailed off in two long white furrows. No wind. No gulls. And, except for the steady throb of the engines, no sound. It was as if at some point after the last of France sank beneath the horizon, we had become unhinged from time and had entered into an unbounded blue-green atmosphere where past and future ceased to exist.

Corsica is nestled in the northeast corner of the Mediterranean, a fist-shaped island of approximately 3,352 square miles, with a single forefinger—Cap Corse—pointed northward to the border with Italy and France. For three thousand years, the island served mainly as a stopover for the civilized world beyond, a harbor of refuge or at most a defensive outpost or staging area for raids on the mainland for the various cultures—Greek, Roman, Carthaginian, and Phoenician—that stopped off here en route to someplace else. The indigenous islanders were said to be savage and somber and not given to warm welcomes.

Odysseus landed on Corsica, Homer says, on his way back to Ithaca. He and his fleet put into a narrow island harbor surrounded by high cliffs and anchored there, hoping for welcome. Odysseus climbed to a rocky promontory and surveyed the land but could see no trace of cattle or any signs of habitation other than a few columns of smoke rising from the forested interior. He sent three scouts ashore to find out what manner of man lived in this desolate place. On shore, the scouts encountered a young woman drawing water from a well. The men asked who was the king of her people, and she pointed to a high-roofed house on a rise, the castle of her father, Antiphates, the king of this mountain-backed fastness. The sailors entered the house and beheld an enormous woman there, as large as a mountain peak, Homer says. She summoned her husband, Antiphates, who instantly snatched up one of Odysseus's men and prepared him for dinner. The other two barely managed to escape and fled to the ships, but the king raised an alarm and from all points, a huge race of giants, the dreaded Laestrygones, came swarming down to the harbor. They stood on the cliffs and rained down immense boulders on the fleet, sinking the ships and spearing the men who were left struggling in the waters like fish. These they retrieved and carried off for dinner.

The wily Odysseus had left his black ship at the outer edge of the harbor, and seeing the hopeless carnage, he cut the anchor cable. His men threw their weight into the oars and they sped out from under the overhanging cliffs and the rain of boulders to open water, leaving a wake as they raced away. The rest of Odysseus's fleet was destroyed, and, glad to have escaped death but grieving for their lost companions, the small company sailed on to the island of Aeaea, where the lovely-haired witch, Circe, resided.

Because of its isolation, its wild interior, its independent-minded, sometimes violent native people, Corsica became a haven for corsairs, contrabandists, and anyone else who preferred to live outside the law. In the late eighteenth century, after the publication of James Boswell's popular 1768 book
An Account of Corsica
, the island became a holiday stop for English gentry on the grand tour. Because of its uncultivated exoticism it was said to be the nearest of the distant lands. Trade and shipping of a milder sort continued into our time, and by the late 1950s, some of its more accessible ports, such as Ile Rousse, Calvi, and Ajaccio, became popular stopovers for yachtsmen from Italy and France. Nevertheless, even into the late twentieth century, the island still had a reputation as a harbor for underworld types and also a certain amount of maritime trade—some of it, as in earlier times, of questionable legality.

A minor incident during my first week at work gave me my first hint of all this. We were all sitting on the terrace late one evening after the dinners and the coffees had been served, when the local man they called Faccia di Luna—Moonface—appeared on the terrace, pale and sweating. He walked directly to the table of cardplayers and said something. Chairs were pushed back abruptly, Jean-Pierre went into the bar—moving quickly, I thought, for Jean-Pierre—and came back with a glass of brandy, which he placed before Moonface. They quit the game and made a circle of chairs around him, leaning toward him, asking questions, and then Jean-Pierre headed back for the bar. Micheline stopped him en route.

“What is it?” she asked.

“We don't know exactly, he is so shaken. Ambush or something. He and Lucas and the others were coming back from Calvi. At the turning near Lumio, two cars cut them off. Santini, he thinks. They leaned in the windows, waved pistols around, slashed the tires, and drove off. Just a warning, they said. Next time not so polite.”

What was it all about, I wanted to know.

Micheline explained: Moonface was an innocent, slightly paunchy member of a large, perhaps shady family on that part of the island. He happened to have been with two more active members of his family clan coming home from a night in Calvi. A rival family, the Santini brothers, had—presumably—suffered some offense from the family of Moonface and the ambush was a little warning.

Historically, Corsica was famous for vendettas and powerful outlaw patriarchs who, though sought by various authorities from the continent—first the Genoese, and later the French—managed to lead successful lives outside the law and died peacefully in bed, confessing their murders to the local priest. In some sections of the island, the vendetta was the only governing principle until the early part of the twentieth century, and in fact worked well enough to maintain a functioning local agrarian economy, independent of the coastal communities, which were under the control of various continental nations over the centuries. Ruling authorities, such as the Genoese courts, would commonly favor the rich or landed gentry in their decisions, with the result that the local peasantry developed its own system of justice.
La vendetta corsa
became the stuff of legend and was often the driving conceit of Corsican literature (written by French authors, it should be noted). Prosper Mérimée's short novel,
Colomba
, had revenge killing at its heart. And Guy de Maupassant, Honoré de Balzac, and Alexandre Dumas also used the vendetta in their Corsican stories.

There was, unfortunately, a great deal of historical truth behind the legend. In one short thirty-year period in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, more than thirty thousand people were killed for revenge. The cycle of murder often began with an insignificant, minor event such as the theft of a pig or a hen, and then escalated over the generations as one male after another was knifed or shot in the back in payment for an earlier murder. The great eighteenth-century Corsican liberator Pasquale Paoli had managed to slow and almost halt the killings through the establishment of an effective and just local court system. But after the French government got back into power, the courts no longer seemed to be able to legislate what the islanders considered sufficient punishment, and the vendetta returned.

By the mid-twentieth century the practice of revenge killing had almost died out, and the last vendetta (or at least the last reported vendetta) occurred the year after I was there. There was still violence in the mountain villages, however—café brawls over women, underworld conflicts such as the little event that had just taken place on the Calvi road, and political differences. Two newly elected mayors had been shot at in the month before I arrived, for example.