The Rose Café (10 page)

Mérimée lived in the first half of the nineteenth century and was a versatile man of letters and a member of the senate in the Second Empire. He was also a translator of Russian, something of an early cultural anthropologist, and an archaeologist. For years he was the official Inspector General of historical monuments in France, and it was one of his official tours of duty in association with this office that brought him to Corsica in 1840.

As was his custom, Mérimée immersed himself in the local culture. He traveled widely in remote districts, learned the dialect, and recorded the traditions of the mountain people. His fictional portrait of the Corsican culture, the characters and action of his novel
Colomba
, is considered to be a more accurate and controlled representation of the island than most of the other fictional or nonfiction accounts set in Corsica.

I read late into the night, and later I could hear the wind come up again. At one point I stepped out of the cottage to check the night sky. The clouds were slipping quickly across the half-moon and I noticed, standing on the promontory to the west, a lone figure, staring out to sea.

It was a man dressed in a pea jacket, the collar turned up high around his neck and his hands deep in his coat pockets. He stood motionless, almost like one of the upright stone menhirs of the interior. I watched him for a while wondering who he was and why he was up so late, a seemingly lonely, perhaps troubled person. I picked up the book again and tried to read, but I couldn't concentrate because of the lonely man. He was probably from the yacht that had anchored, and had come ashore to contemplate his demons.

Just as I was musing on his fate and the fate of all the lonely people who went up to this headland to think things through, I heard a gentle tapping at my door, and I called out to come in, figuring it was Chrétien with yet another night complaint about having been refused entry to Marie's bed. The door opened tentatively, and the man in the pea jacket loomed in the door frame.

“Excuse me,” he said in somewhat halting, accented English, “I saw your light and this little hideaway, and I could not help wondering who lived here. Then I see you come out and look up at me.”

He was about forty years old, probably German or Dutch, with prominent cheekbones and small eyes.

“Can one rent this room?” he asked.

“Maybe, but I work here,” I said. “They've put me up in this place for the season.”

“This is a beautiful house, high up, the great sea below. You are what, English man?”

“American.”

“Ah yes, Anthony Perkins. I like the American movies. Have you seen
Some Like It Hot
with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon? It is very amusing, do you not think?”

Given the contemporary rumors about the sexual preferences of Anthony Perkins and the subject matter of the film my visitor happened to choose, my antennae went up, but I carried on politely and we began chatting about American movies, a subject that he was actually more familiar with than I was. As we spoke he slowly edged himself into the room, and, eventually, after ten minutes or so of talk, without invitation, he perched himself on the edge of the far end of the bed, leaning back against the wall. I was suspicious, but in fact there was no other place to sit, and we had a lot to talk about. I liked boats, and I was very interested in the cutter he had come in on and where he had been.

He said he was with a group of friends from Amsterdam, and they had chartered the cutter in Naples and were circumnavigating the Mediterranean. They had come up the Italian coast, stopping at various ports, and had then sailed over to Elba for a few days, then made their way to Bastia. Now they were cruising around the northeast coast of Corsica.

“That's great,” I said. “I would love to do that sometime. I was on a little interisland steamer from Brindisi to Piraeus last February; we stopped at many little islands, some for no purpose at all. I vowed to myself I would come back someday and sail through the Greek Isles.”

“Yes, the Isles of Greece. Sappho's Isle.”

“What was that?” I asked, even though by now I suspected where this was going.

He laughed to himself, privately. “But of course, Sappho, you know about the poet Sappho, don't you?”

“I have heard of her,” I said.

“She was a great poet, but you know where she lived, don't you?”

I did but pretended not to. I was trying to figure out by this time how to get him out.

“The island was called Lesbos. The women there, they loved each other, in that way, don't you know. Sappho, she was one of these. It is where the word lesbian comes from.”

I grunted in disgust.

“But really, young man, you should follow your dream and go to the Isles of Greece.”

He reached over and patted my ankle. I shifted my leg away quickly.

“You have a girlfriend?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“Well good. That's that. You two must make a beautiful couple. I love the beauty of youth. It's why I so love Greece, if you know what I mean.”

“I think I do. But for my part, you understand …”

“Yes, yes, of course I understand. And I now will be going. And so good night, young man.”

He stood, paused at the door for a moment, and then fled into the night.

I had been propositioned before, but never in such a close setting, and as soon as he was gone, even though it was by now two in the morning, I went up to the restaurant to tell the troupe of my adventure.

They were still up, of course, sitting at a wide table inside because of the wind, slapping cards. They looked up in surprise when I burst in.

“What has happened?” Vincenzo said. “You're in shock.”

I explained.

Much false consternation and alarm at the news. They threw down their cards and threw out their arms in horror.

“A fairy?” one of them shouted, “here in this very place? It is not possible.”

“No no,” said Jean-Pierre, shaking his finger vigorously. “Not here, not ever—why, this is an outrage! What are we to do?
Oh là là.
”

“We must hunt him down,” André said.

“Yes, but what if he comes back while we're out hunting him?” Max said. “The poor boy, alone in his
cabine
—he will be molested and scarred for life. We shall post a night guard. Then go hunting.”

“Just give him the gun,” Micheline called over from her lighted corner, where she was reading.

“Yes, yes, get the gun,” they all shouted. “An outrage. What horror.”

They were braying with laughter and in fact didn't give a damn, but Jean-Pierre rose stiffly from the table, walked over to the cash register, and took a small revolver out of a drawer and checked the chamber.

“All right, then, you take this now. Go back to bed. If he comes again, just shoot through the door. Don't wait, don't ask, just shoot.”

“Perfect,” they said.

“The boy will be safe that way.”

“You have to protect yourself at all times.”

“You can't be too careful.”

“Shoot first,” Max repeated. “Don't ask.”

I knew this was all operatic drama, but I played along and took the pistol back to the cottage, put it under the bed, and blew out the candle. Enough action for one night.

It took me a long time to get to sleep, and just after I drifted off I heard a gentle tapping at the door.

“
Jeannot
,” someone said in lispy French, “
Jeannot? Tu es là. Est-ce que je peux entrer encore
?”

My erstwhile night visitor had spoken in English, so I knew it was someone from the troupe.

I thought of firing a few rounds out the window to scare him but instead shouted “
Fous le camp ou je tirerai
,” and kicked open the door.

There was Jean-Pierre, crouching against the wall, and two or three others up on the rocks, watching.

“What if I had believed you and shot through the door?” I asked.

Vincenzo, who had not been there, asked me all about this incident the next day while I was peeling potatoes. He too found it amusing, but he was less tolerant of the poor lonely man.

“No one cares what he does, but he should stick to his own kind,” he said definitively.

“I suppose,” I said. “He actually did leave me alone. I probably should never have let him in.”

To change the subject I told him about my visit with Fabrizio.

“Ah yes,” he said. “The old impostor.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“He thinks he's from some great Corsican family, a cousin of Napoléon of course, but in fact he's just like anyone else. If that family ever had money it's because they stole it. Now they have nothing. Just a few donkeys and chickens.”

I told him Fabrizio's story of le Baron.

“He told me le Baron made his money stealing Jewish properties around Nice during the war,” I said.

This begat one of Vincenzo's great rolling outbursts of laughter. He had a laugh that would cause the diners to pause, midbite, whenever it spilled out of the kitchen.

“Fabrizio?” he shouted. “He said that? And you believed it?”

“Why?” I asked. “Shouldn't I have?”

“You didn't hear about old Fabrizio, did you? What they say …”

I told him no, but he seemed a friendly old man.

“By day, yes,” Vincenzo said. “By night, some people say he is one of the mazzeri.” He started laughing again.

In certain sections in the interior of Corsica, you could still find the ancient menhirs constructed by megalithic cultures who lived on the island and practiced their chthonic faith well into the Christian era. I later learned that some of the traditions of these ancient death cults were still practiced on the island, including the curious tradition of the night walkers known as mazzeri. Even as late as the 1960s there were said to be a few mazzeri living in the mountain villages. As far as I could understand, they were a Corsican species of zombie, living dead, who seemed to be slightly eccentric individuals who went about their business during the day but by night transformed themselves into walking dead who circulated in the interior valleys, killing sheep and goats, and on some occasions, pet dogs or even people. They were unable to stop themselves, it was said.

Traditionally, in the interior hill towns of Corsica, people believed that the soul of someone who was going to die would desert the body one year to the day before the actual death. And from time to time, out on their night forays in the maquis, the mazzeri would come upon the funeral procession of someone who had not yet died. The mazzeri were therefore able to say—if asked in the proper stylistic manner—who was going to be dying in any given year. Not that it would do anyone any good to know. Once your fate had been sealed, there was no escape. I later heard stories of peasants trading their best sheep or cows to a mazzero to intervene in a foretold death, but it never did any good.

Vincenzo, who was from the interior but lived in the cosmopolitan town of Ile Rousse, knew a little of both worlds. He said that basically, the mazzeri, as far as he was concerned, were just the sort of people that turn up in any small village anywhere in the world. Eccentric types, who for whatever reason, separate themselves from the normal customs of daily life—including the church.

“Back in the mountains, they don't understand this. So they revert to this mazzeri legend,” Vincenzo said. “That's what they say about old Fabrizio, just because he prefers to live up there in the ruins of his old property.”

Vincenzo told me that there were also still a few
signadore
living up in the mountain villages. These were a form of white witch who were also able to predict the future and could break the spell of the evil eye, the
occhju
, through ritualistic practices. To predict the presence of evil, or things to come, they would spill a few drops of oil in a china dish filled with water and read events through the patterns of the floating oil drops. They were able to absorb this evil into themselves, whereupon they would grow mysteriously ill and then recover, having saved the soul of the petitioner. They were, Vincenzo said, especially powerful on Christmas night, when—as everyone knew—all the evil spirits would be forced into hiding.

“But all that…” Vincenzo said with a wave “… just myth. Nowadays, no one believes that nonsense but a few old crones. Maybe there is some crazy old signadora up there in that valley who started spreading rumors about Fabrizio, just because he's a little off center and collects donkeys. They are probably the same ones who say he was a collaborator. Which of course, is not true. If Fabrizio had helped the Nazis he wouldn't be alive today.”

The fact is, Vincenzo said, Fabrizio had the habit of ingratiating himself with the invaders, either Italian or German, and then once he had their trust, murdering them. The old man had operated on his own and was not really a part of any organized network.

I thought this sounded like a reversal of Fabrizio's story on the background of le Baron. But Fabrizio had le Baron's history mixed up, according to Vincenzo. He said that le Baron was not associated with the Vichy regime, although he had indeed lived around Nice during the war. He worked in a bank but had acquired his real money by trafficking in the black market, arranging imports and then privately financing the underground. No one in the Vichy government suspected him because of the bank job and his formal demeanor, and the way he would appear at the casinos with Nazi officers and Vichy authorities. He would buy champagne for everyone, gamble freely, and talk loudly against the terrorists who blew up German supply trains.

“He was never one of the rough-dressed country types who camped up in the hills and blew up trucks,” Vincenzo said. “Everybody knows that. He was a gentleman, always dressed well, but when things got hot around Nice, he came out here and disappeared into the maquis. That's when le Baron rumor started. But the Belgian accent is a fake. You listen carefully, you can hear. He's French. Alsatian maybe—somewhere up there in the north.”