The Rose Café

The Rose Café

Love and War in Corsica

John Hanson Mitchell

For my parents (
who endured
)

Contents

“You are astonished that I don't feel willing to leave a country so miserable as ours; but I cannot help it. I am as much a production of this island as its green oats, and its rose-laurels; I must have my atmosphere impregnated with the perfume of the sea, and the exhalations of its mountains. I must have my torrents to cross, my rocks to climb, and my forests to explore; I want space—I want liberty.”

Alexandra Dumas

The Corsican Brothers

“Whatever shall we do in that remote spot? Well, we shall write our memoirs. Work is the scythe of time.”

Napoleon Bonaparte

“
Là, tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté, luxe, calme, et volupté.
”

Baudelaire

Preface

The year I turned twenty I was living successfully disguised to myself as a student in Paris, not doing very much about anything to advance myself in life and not caring very much whether I did or did not. In early spring that year, suffering from the aftereffects of the interminable gray of the Parisian sky, I went down to Nice, where I had lived for a while the summer before. Here I fell in with an international group of sometime painters and students such as myself who were biding their time in the little warren of streets and squares in the old city, on the eastern side of the Baie des Anges.

One of my friends there was an aspiring writer named Armand, who was the child of a local White Russian family who had lived in Nice since the time of the Great War. Armand had a German girlfriend named Inge, and in early April, the three of us made a trip out to Corsica to have a look around.

I had been living in Europe for over a year by then, first in Spain and then in France, on the Riviera. Up in Paris, I was enrolled in an independent study program at the Sorbonne, and most of my friends were either French or part of a loosely associated international group involved in the same course. The fact is, however, we rarely went to class. Education took place in the cafés, in particular in a certain bar near the Saint-Placide Métro stop where we gathered each day to argue over literature, art, and politics as if we knew what we were talking about.

Like many young Americans in Paris in that era, I had in mind that I would somehow be miraculously transformed into a writer in Europe. My intention, such as it was, was to escape from my predictable life in the United States and leave everything I knew behind. In some ways the plan was a success. I didn't know a single American in Paris; most of the people I associated with did not speak any English, and I had effectively disappeared into the European student community. But my notebooks remained empty.

Then, in April, I went out to Corsica.

We took the ferry to Calvi, on the north coast, and then drifted eastward along the shore to the town of Ile Rousse, where we found a small auberge known as the Rose Café, set on a tiny, red-rock island halfway out a long causeway that led to a slightly larger island called Ile de la Pietra. The place had a decent restaurant with a terrace overlooking the harbor, and a few dusty bedchambers above the dining room. We took rooms and set out on foot to explore the hills of the interior.

The Rose Café was utterly unassuming, a two-story building with a red-tiled roof and two French dormers, a wide stone terrace, a pillared verandah, and an interior dining room with a cool bar in the back. Behind the main building there was a promontory that dropped down to a narrow cove, bounded on the north by a small, rocky island, which was surmounted by a seventeenth-century Genoese watchtower, one of many that were constructed along this section of the coast to keep the multiple invaders at bay. Set in a nook on the southern side of the cove, just behind the restaurant, there was a one-room stone cottage with two small windows.

Since there were people staying in the upper rooms while we were there, I was assigned to the cottage. It had a narrow bed, a rickety table and a candle, and not much else. But it was perched high above the cove, and all night I could hear the surge of the waters below, the dark cries of seabirds, and the ominous howl of the local winds streaming over the mountains and valleys of the interior.

I came to like the setting at the Rose Café and would sometimes forgo the daily expeditions of the ever-energetic Armand and his companion. Instead, I would simply spend the day lounging on the terrace of the café, talking to the local people and walking into town in the late afternoon to take a drink at one of the three or four cafés that surrounded the dusty town square, with its pillars of old plane trees.

True to form, Armand and Inge grew restless after a few days and decided to move on. I stayed. The pace suited me, I enjoyed the gossip of the people from the town, who came out to the café every day to stare at the harbor and spend the night playing cards. I liked them. They seemed to have no ambition other than to live from one day to the next and enjoy whatever small pleasures happened to present themselves. I liked the view across the harbor to the
maquis
, the wild impenetrable scrublands of the island, which were scented with a wealth of resinous arbutus, myrtle, rock rose, and clementine. I loved to watch the bright little fishing boats set out each day to fish the nearby banks. I loved the lizards that collected around the terrace lamps at night, and the dawn song of birds from the high ground across the cove from the cottage.

In the end, I fell into a strange, perhaps unhealthy, lethargy at the Rose Café. I would rise early and take a café crème and a fresh-buttered baguette on the terrace above the harbor. Later in the morning, I would slip down to a tiny pebble beach in the cove below my cottage for a morning swim, then a morning nap, then a midday meal of local fish, another nap, another swim, a walk to town for coffee in the square, an aperitif at the bar, dinner, and then a deep dreamless sleep, lulled by the susurration of the sea in the cove below. I would sometimes awake in the mornings there and have to figure out where exactly I was, who I was, and what I was doing in this place. I was in a state of suspended animation.

It was a good place. You could easily lose yourself there if you so desired, forget that you ever had a past, or a future for that matter, and simply fall into that idyllic condition the locals called the sweet do-nothing,
il dolce fa' niente
. For hours, for days, finally for weeks, I simply paced through the uneventful days: swimming and sleeping and staring across the harbor to the green slopes of the hills that rose up to the jagged, snow-covered peaks beyond.

In spite of the languorous nature of the environment, however, in spite of the bright weather and the slow and easygoing pace of the people, there seemed to be some latent story in that place: some powerful, perhaps tragic, history that was not spoken of by anyone but which seemed to manifest itself in the ironic contrast between the brooding, snow-capped mountains above the harbor and the light-filled, festive air of the coastal community. I don't think I had ever been in such a powerful setting before.

I could not say that I was entirely conscious of any of this at the time. I was merely living day to day there, with no plans and no ambition. All I know is that, suddenly, feverishly, I began to write. Night after night in my narrow stone cell, I began to fill the notebook that had remained empty for over a year.

One evening, after I had been there for two weeks,
le patron
drew me aside and poured me a small glass of a local marc and began to question me about my plans for the next few months. I explained that I had nothing definitive in mind as yet.

“You have not the papers for France?” he asked.

“Passport, I have.”

“No I mean working papers, you have none?”

“No, I'm a student here, I have a student card only.”

“Doesn't matter,” he said. “You want a job? Spring is coming. It's going to be the busy season. You can cut fish for us, sweep up, do the dishes. I'll teach you some sauces. It's not real work in any case, so the fact that you have no papers …” He shrugged.

“We'll pay you a little something at the end of the season, plus room and board. Nobody out here cares,” he said.

“Sounds interesting,” I said. “But are you saying that it's not exactly legal?” (Possession of working papers was an important issue among the poverty-stricken group of international students with whom I traveled.)

He stared out into the black waters beyond the terrace and then looked back at me tiredly. “You understand, Corsica is not—how shall I say it—is not well-known for its allegiance to the laws of the continent.”

He lifted his left shoulder, tilted his head, and smiled regretfully.

He was a sleepy, unambitious man from Paris who wore the black-rimmed glasses of a Left Bank intellectual and always needed a shave.

I didn't know much about Corsica at that point other than the usual clichés. Inasmuch as Corsica is known at all, it is known for its vendettas and its notorious underworld connections, and also as the birthplace of Napoléon. More to the point though, I didn't know anything about the Rose Café, or its environs, or the people who hung around the café. But it seemed to be a place where any migratory bird of passage, such as myself, any refugees from any of the world's miseries, either personal or political, could settle briefly to rest and feed and enjoy themselves before flying onward to nowhere. I decided to take the job. Why not? I was running out of money, and in that particular year the American draft board had been sending me ominous notices requiring me to register for military service—to fight in an escalating little conflict in Vietnam in which I had no particular interest and whose origin did not seem to me entirely logical. I was young and apolitical and had perfectly pleasant friends in Europe who described themselves as communists—“enemies of the people.” Corsica seemed a fine place to wait things out.

I went back to my old haunts in Nice to pick up my things and ran into Inge. She had left Armand in some isolated mountain village after he had decided that they must—they absolutely must—hike Monte Cinto, the highest peak in Corsica, even though there were still heavy snows there.

We had dinner and went out dancing at one of the local nightclubs. Inge was about my age, nineteen or twenty, and she had black hair and wide blue eyes—and many older gentleman friends with smooth tans who wore silk cravats and houndstooth jackets. I was never sure what, exactly, she was doing in Nice since she never seemed to have any money of her own.

We ended up that night in a café where there was an old-fashioned band that played Eastern European music. There were some local White Russians there, as well as expatriate Hungarians with handlebar mustaches. The band played old waltzes and polkas, and then an older woman in an evening gown rose and sang “Dark Eyes” and a long and sad czardas, a lament for her homeland. Grown men took out their handkerchiefs and wept, and when the band played the Hungarian national anthem some of them stood up, hands on their hearts, longing for some mythic older order that had been replaced by the all-too-real disorder of the current state.

At one point, while Inge danced with a tall Hungarian with hair cut
en brosse
, I went outside alone and leaned over the rail above the bay. The night air was warm, and I could smell the Mediterranean and hear the pitch of the sea and the sad music from the café. I looked out at the black waters beyond the lights of the harbor and was suddenly very happy to have fixed a place for myself.