The Rose Café (6 page)

The spiny, tennis ball–sized mollusks were found in large numbers in certain sections of the cove below my cottage, and one of my regular jobs at the café was to collect them. Jean-Pierre had supplied me with the mask and flippers and instructed me to swim out to the middle of the cove, dive down and pry the urchins from the rocks with the fork, carry them to the surface, and dump them in the floating fruit basket. The underwater expedition on that hot morning was when I first met Marie.

The tide was in that morning and the sea was calm—the green waves merely rose and fell serenely at the rock edges—and I could smell the sharp mix of rosemary, thyme, and sea salt that seemed to always collect at the narrow shore of the cove. I fitted the mask to my face and, pushing the basket ahead of me, swam out to the middle of the inlet, watching the seafloor.

Below the surface here, the water was crystal clear and the combination of light and distorted colors and shadowy forms created a dreamy, surreal environment. Vast, dark cliffs dropped from the surrounding shores into obscure chasms and crevices where bright-eyed moray eels lurked. Spreading out from these dark mountain scarps was a veritable sub-marine Serengeti, a long, rolling plain covered with waving sea grass, dappled with shimmering, refracted light and great, smoke-like shafts of filtered sun. Moving over this undersea veldt were herds of brightly colored fish, with flights of smaller fish above and, in the shaded valleys, the ominous, silvery forms of larger fish.

The spiny black urchins, with their toxic stings, were common in the cove. I could see a few below me, nestled in the sea grass, and I dove down and loosed them from their holds with the fork, and carefully lifted them to the surface and placed them in the floating fruit basket.

When I rose from the third dive with my handful of urchins I saw a young woman in a tiny bikini carefully weaving her way down through the rocks, tentatively, her eyes fixed on the treacherous path. She was small, with a mop of short hair, square shoulders, and very feminine, dancelike moves. As she descended through the rocks step by step, she balanced herself with a canvas bag, her free arm stretched out, palm turned upward. Curious, I sank behind the fruit basket and watched as she selected a sheltered, flat rock, laid out a towel, and then stripped off her top and lay back to sunbathe.

So as not to embarrass her by my presence, I made a noisy dive for more urchins, with a loud splashing kick just before I descended. When I came up with my handful of captured mollusks she was sitting up cross-legged and staring out at me, shading her eyes with her right hand.

“What are you doing out there?” she called.

“Sea urchins,” I called back, holding a handful aloft. “I'm collecting them for dinner tonight.”

“Good,” she said, and lay back indifferently.

Once the basket was full I pushed it ashore and hauled it out on the stony little beach. The black mound of spines was gleaming in the late morning sun, and I stood there dumbly watching the reflected water drops on the moving spines as they waved slowly in the alien air. I did not feel at all sorry for these devils, having been spiked by one a few years earlier, one of the worst stings I had ever felt, worse than any hornet.

The girl on the rocks put on her top and came down to look at my catch.

“Why they don't sting you?” she asked.

“They're light under water, once you pry them off the rocks. You have to step on them, or brush hard against them to get stung.”

“Are you Italian?” she asked. “You have an accent.”

“No, American.”

“
Oh là là, le cowboy
,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “I like very much
le cowboy.
”

“Not a cowboy. I'm from the East. No horses, no red Indians, no wild bears.”

I said this because many of the people I had been meeting on the island presumed that there were still bears, cowboys, and Indians in America. They also seemed to think I should know Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio.

The young woman introduced herself, holding out her hand, and explained that she was here with her “stupid” parents, but that they would be leaving soon, and she would stay through the month.

“Maybe longer,” she said. “At least I hope longer.”

Without prompting she began to tell me all about her life in Paris and her friends there, and a new café on the Champs Elysées called “le Drugstore” that served American ice cream sodas and hamburgers, and on and on about weekends with her parents at her grandmother's villa outside Paris and how her parents, or at least her mother, had money but worked as a journalist and spent all her time helping people like Algerians who really shouldn't be helped at all and in fact shouldn't be allowed to come to Paris in her opinion and how her father, who was also a journalist, had got himself into trouble for a story he had just published and how he had a mistress who, in her opinion, was more sensible than her own mother because she agreed about the Algerians and then, almost in midsentence, she asked if this was a good spot to swim.

“Yes, I swim here every morning. I live just up there. In the stone cottage.”

“Good,” she said. She waded into the waters and struck out for the middle of the cove.

She had a smooth stroke and strong shoulders, and when she reached the middle of the cove she arched down into a dive, and like a gleaming porpoise, slipped beneath the waters and didn't come up for a long time. I was wondering whether I should worry when she burst up with a great splash.

“Be careful of the moray eels in the rocks,” I called as I went up the path back to the restaurant.

Chrétien was in the kitchen when I came in with my basket of urchins.

“You were in the cove, yes? You must have seen Marie. She is beautiful, no?”

“Cute,” I said.

“Like a little rabbit,” he said.

I hadn't thought that Marie looked at all like a rabbit.

“More like a sprite …” I said, searching for the word in French.

“A what?” Chrétien asked.

“
Une fée
?” I ventured.

“
Mais non
,” he shouted. “Not a fairy. Not at all. A rabbit. A beautiful little squirrel.”

Things were getting worse as far as Marie's appearance, I thought.

“In the night, she transforms herself; she wears a hint of the best Molinard, just a trace you know, and you can taste the salt on her skin, and her hands, like the small busy hands of a monkey, so
delicata, si tanta bella
. I kiss her.”

He cupped his left palm in his right hand and lifted it to his lips.

“She is like the small antelope that scampers beneath the acacia of the African savannah.”

“She has a good walk …” I said.

Chrétien, I had come to understand by then, was fond of animal metaphors.

Later that afternoon I saw a new couple out on the terrace, taking the sun and a glass of beer.

“You see them?” Chrétien said quietly. “Marie's parents. Simone and Teddy. I cannot wait until they leave.”

Simone had blond hair cut in a pageboy and the same hazel eyes as Marie, and she wore a large, flower-patterned muumuu, which she had hoisted above her knees as she stretched herself out at the café table, her feet up on a chair, an empty beer glass perched in front of her. I noticed how tanned her legs were, and her finely shaped feet—toenails painted a bright red.

Her husband was a small man, well formed, blue-eyed, but he had a surprised, almost frightened look as if he were unsure of whatever it was that he was saying or doing. In fact, however, he was a troublemaker, having published, according to Chrétien, a scathing article in
Le Monde
attacking both de Gaulle's policies concerning Algerian independence and, with equal vehemence, the policies of the colonialists and the right-wing French generals. Both sides detested him, Chrétien said.

“Somebody blew up his car a month ago,” Chrétien said.

That Sunday night, after the ferry had left for the mainland, the man they called le Baron came into the dining room. He arrived early, while the dinner guests were still at their desserts and coffee, and sat at the bar. Micheline was in the kitchen at the time, and I happened to be at the bar when he came in. He settled in the front at the polished-wood counter and turned to face outward, toward the terrace, ignoring me. I think he was watching for his card partners, who had not yet arrived.

I had seen the Baron off and on over the past few weeks. I saw him in the square a couple of times, once standing under one of the plane trees with another foreign-looking blond man in a gray suit and a pressed white shirt, and another time with a large group of obvious continental types at one of the cafés. He would usually come out to the Rose Café later in the night, sometimes quite late, as if perhaps he had been unable to sleep and decided to entertain himself by slumming. He was always well attired, but in contrast to his appearance, he would assume a jocular, play-along-with-the-boys style once he was settled into a game and had had a few drinks. I would always go to bed long before the game was over, so I never saw him leave, although late one night, I saw him standing alone up on the promontory above my cottage. It was one of those nights when the scirocco was up—the moist, hot wind that blows in off the Sahara—and people were restless. Le Baron was standing, leaning slightly forward into the wind, his hands in his jacket pockets, his white coattails and dark tie flapping behind him in the high wind.

The promontory was a favorite watch post for locals and visitors; the site offered a fine view to the western horizon, and people often came out to watch the sun go down. Before I started working at the Rose Café I used to go up there myself. Sometimes after the sun had set, a lilac curtain of dusk would draw across the eastern sky, and the whole Mediterranean would shade from green to violet and then take on a deep purple cast. Watching the changing colors, I could understand the origin of Homer's enigmatic phrase “the wine-dark sea.”

The little outcropping was also a night watch. Periodically I would see an old woman, hooded in a kerchief and wearing the traditional long black skirts, standing there. She was a widow, I was told, who had lost her husband at sea many years before. Later in the season I would sometimes see, very late at night, the Polish-born guest called Maggs up there on one of her sleepless nights, wrapped in her terry-cloth robe, and during the early evenings Herr Komandante would often post himself there to watch the red sun sink below the green horizon.

Lounging at the bar, le Baron watched the terrace for a while and then in due time he turned to me.

“You're the new man here, aren't you?” he said in English.

I acknowledged that I was, and he turned and went back to watching the terrace.

“Have you seen Max?” he asked over his shoulder.

“No,” I said. “He hasn't come out yet. No one has. I don't know where they are. It's a little early, maybe.”

“Maybe,” he said.

Then he turned and faced me.

“Give me a Cap Corse if you please.” This was the brand name of a local aperitif called
averna
, made from chestnuts, a drink favored along this coast.

I served him, he thanked me, and then he turned again to watch the terrace. He spoke with a slight French accent and refined English inflections.

After a few minutes he turned around again and sipped his drink, swirling it first in the glass, watching the lemon slice circle.

“You're in the little cottage in the back, aren't you?” he asked indifferently. “Did you happen to see a white ketch with an odd rig come into the cove late the other night?”

I said I had seen such a ketch a few weeks earlier but not recently.

He nodded and contemplated his drink.

“And where are you from?” he asked.

“United States,” I said.

“Yes, but where?”

I told him I was from Englewood, a suburb of New York City.

“Really?” he said, taking a sudden interest. “But that's surprising, I actually think I know some people from there. Are there cliffs there, above a river?” he asked.

There were, in fact. The Palisades, which ran along the west bank of the Hudson for miles.

He said that he thought he had known a couple from the town during the war. They had worked with a church group around the internment camps east of Perpignan.

“They helped out with a milk-distribution network,” he said. “But at the same time they were trading in the black market. Later I heard they began escorting Jewish children over the Spanish border crossings. Working with
chasseurs
, you know, the local people who help refugees across borders.”

I asked their names.

“Pierce, I think. Mary and her husband, don't remember his name. She was very pretty, I recall. She used to dress in rather appealing clothes and distract the guards so they wouldn't check people's documents so carefully. I liked her, but her husband, he was a bit of a prig. Holier than thou. That kind of chap, don't you know. I think the Gestapo caught up with them at one point but they managed to pay somebody off and got free. I happen to know that they were very good at getting forged exit visas for people, letters of transit, that sort of thing.”

I had heard of this couple and had even seen them once or twice at a restaurant called the Rathskeller where my parents would sometimes eat. I remember my mother pointing them out and telling me some stories about them.

“Did this woman have gray hair that she would tie back in a bun?” I asked. This was an unusual hairstyle for the period.

“Yes, although she had black hair back then. Very attractive, with straight dark eyebrows and haunting blue eyes. But how did you know them?”

“I didn't. I would just see them around the town,” I said.

In fact this couple was active in leftist causes in the town and was somehow associated with my father, who was also a political animal and later had been caught up in the McCarthy scandals, as had the Pierces.