The Rose Café (7 page)

All this made me wonder why le Baron knew them—of all people—so I asked.

“I don't know,” he said. “I was around that area at the time. One accumulates people as one ages,” he said. “People. Things. Sometimes wives. They used to talk about their home a lot. I think the man, whatever his name was, missed his home. He used to talk about those cliffs.”

“I think they were in some kind of trouble in our town,” I said. “They were accused of being communists.”

“Really?” he said. “They were such a likable couple. So you are a student here in France, I take it?” he asked in a friendly manner, clearly indicating that we were to change the subject.

I told him I was, and he asked me why I had chosen to go to school in Europe rather than America.

“There are perfectly good colleges there, are there not?” he said.

When he spoke to you he looked directly at you, with a fixed-from-under stare. It was a gaze that was clearly intended just for you, as if he had forgotten altogether that he was there to play cards with the locals and had come solely to talk to me in particular.

I tried to answer, but in fact I wasn't sure I had an answer.

He carried on, though, and began to ask me about student life both in Paris and back in the United States, and the more I told him the more he asked. He seemed to grow increasingly interested in my life, and even began to veer into personal matters. Did I have a girlfriend. What was I doing in the neighborhood in Nice where I had lived (not a particularly savory area, I gathered, although I'm not sure I knew that then) and on and on, and all the while I was growing more and more interested in his life but was unable to ask.

Other than his wings of silvery hair and tanned good looks, the most characteristic thing about le Baron was his eyes. They reminded me of the sea beyond the harbor: bright with sun, ultramarine, with an interior light that gleamed even in the half-light of the bar. Whenever he asked a question he lowered his head slightly and fixed your eye confidentially. It was a little solicitous, and slightly disconcerting.

“What time is it?” he asked suddenly.

“Sorry, don't know,” I said. “I don't have a watch, actually. The only clock is in Jean-Pierre's bedroom.”

“Odd, isn't it? I have a watch. After I came here I put it in a drawer. I don't use it. Who needs it, I suppose.”

“When did you move here?” I asked, turning the tables.

Before he could answer (if indeed he intended to answer) I saw his eyes light up, and Micheline appeared.

“Monsieur le Baron,” she said with mock grandeur. “And how is it with you?”

“Oh, you know,” he said, smiling sheepishly now. “The same, always the same. Living day to day. Dawn. Midday. Dusk. The year round. And you, Madame Green Eyes, how are you?”

“Busy busy,” she said.

“Always busy. Give me another drink, please,” he said to Micheline.

The weather had changed decidedly with le Baron, and the sexual repartee began to dart back and forth across the bar. I thought it time to retreat to my lowly scullery and the dessert dishes, and I said goodbye.

He lifted his glass to me as I departed.

Later, after the card game commenced, I joined Micheline while she sat smoking at a remove from the players. She would commonly sit in a lighted corner of the verandah after hours, reading novels and cutting the pages with a long kitchen knife.

“What about him?” I asked, lifting my head toward le Baron, who sat with his back to us, eyeing his deck through a drift of cigarette smoke.

“Oh him,” she said, indifferently. “He's just another dog in the pack, although he believes himself to be from some old line of counts. He's from some industrial nouveau riche family up in Belgium. They made a huge lot of money selling coal, exploiting the miners and so on. They had a big villa and a title—so he says—but they probably purchased it from some defunct noble family. Then the Nazis came along. The story is that they took over his family compound as a command center and kicked them all out. They went down to Paris where they had a big apartment. After that le Baron came south, to Nice, I think. But who knows? Now he's just another crook.”

“A crook?” I exclaimed. “Him? That classy old man?”

She shrugged. Blew out a cloud of smoke.

“Maybe not. I don't know. But he lost all his money in the war, and now he's rich? Never works? Lives in Corsica. So what do you think? He's generous, though. He privately funded a medical clinic near here,” she said. “He has also paid off the debts of a few doltish peasants from the interior. He has even helped us out from time to time.”

“The barber told me he came out here during the war. He didn't say why, though.”

“He did come out here. Twice. But we don't ask why. Better not to ask, sometimes.”

I wanted to ask, of course. I never did like unanswered questions; they only served to sharpen my curiosity, and I never had been able to leave things alone when told to. But so be it, I thought, and went to bed.

There was a light cloud cover that night; you could just see the silvery pale moon to the east, riding through the cloud breaks. The high peaks were obscured, but the three nuns were throwing off a dull, sandy-colored light and seemed to have drawn closer. You could see them hunched there above the town with its little glittering lights winking along the harbor shore. Silent. Ever present. Reproachful.

Somewhere up there in the hills, beyond the nuns, in the twisted little valleys of the mountains, the old Corsican ghosts must still have lingered. Here roamed the restless spirit of the old liberator Sampiero Corso, who strangled his wife, believing—wrongly—that she had betrayed him to his enemies. Here was the bombastic self-proclaimed German nobleman, King Theodor, who, on the run from marriages, gambling debts, and political intrigues, came out to Corsica and led an uprising against the Genoese, declared himself king of the island, failed in that little venture, and died in debtors' prison. Here too was Gian Pietro Gaffori, who stormed the bastion at Corte in spite of the fact that the Genoese commander held Gaffori's kidnapped son over the fortress walls in an attempt to stop the charge. And perhaps, somewhere up there in the clouds, you could find the most restless spirit of all, the humanist and revolutionary Pasquale Paoli, who for the first time in its history came closest to liberating the island and, had he succeeded, would have set up a constitutional government two decades before the American colonists got the idea.

chapter four

The Donkey King

News of the outside world did not regularly trouble this part of Corsica. But someone left a copy of
Le Figaro
at the bar one morning and I read it while waiting for Pierrot, the bread man. There was a front-page story with a banner headline.

Algeria had finally been given independence.

This was big news. The Algerian struggle for independence, which had begun in 1954, had by 1960 effectively split France into several disparate factions. On one side were the pro-independence Algerians of the National Liberation Front, who had started the movement and were supported by the French left. On the other side were the so-called
pieds-noirs
, the European Algerians; and the
harkis
, the pro-French Arabs supported by the French right wing and the army. The French had sent in the military to root out the insurgent independence fighters shortly after the first uprising in November of 1954, but the struggle escalated into war, and by 1960 the reverberations reached France, with street bombings and demonstrations and even attempts on de Gaulle's life.

There were, of course, other events in the world at large in that year. Patrice Lumumba had been murdered in Africa—with the help of the CIA, according to my student friends. Kennedy had sent “advisors” (trained fighting forces, according to Chrétien and company) to Vietnam. Salazar had a repressive hold on the citizens of Portugal; Franco maintained an iron glove in Spain with Guardia Civil soldiers posted at rural crossroads throughout the country. Plastique bombs were going off regularly in the streets of Paris, and the OAS, the secret army organization, consisting of procolonialist generals, was still gunning for de Gaulle. Corsica sat in the middle of this maelstrom, at once indifferent and mired in its own problems.

We at the Rose Café seemed to provide a stopover and hideout for those in flight from these various political intrigues (myself included in some ways, I suppose). Uprooted African families sometimes alighted at the café restaurant. A Cuban refugee named Mendoza spent a couple of weeks there later in the season. A mysterious man named Dushko without an apparent country would often come out to the bar. And toward the end of the season, in September, a young French woman with mouse-brown hair arrived, in flight from Indochina, which the French had given up on in the mid-1950s. Russians and Eastern Europeans who had wandered out of the postwar camps for displaced persons that were scattered all across Europe occasionally stopped in, bearing with them their unfortunate histories; and southeast of us, below Bastia, the French government was providing agricultural lands for the pieds-noirs, some of whom would periodically spend a night or two with us in the upstairs bedrooms.

Corsica itself was slowly emerging out of the old traditions of weighted Catholicism, clans, vendettas, and insurgencies. In fact at this period, for the first time in two thousand years, there were no enemy invaders lurking off the coasts—other than French and Italian yachtsmen, who were generally tolerated since they brought in money.

I shared the news of the Algerian independence with Pierrot when he arrived with his bread delivery. He wondered about this momentous event for a while and then wondered aloud if that meant that more Arabs would be coming to the island. It turned out he was worried about losing his job.

Pierrot had invited me to accompany him into the maquis that day to visit his father, a man whom he talked about often over our bread and coffee. The two of them shared a flat on the back side of Ile Rousse, but in summer the old man spent most of his days up in the hills, on an old farm property that he owned.

Pierrot picked me up at the café later that day after his deliveries, and we puttered out the causeway from the café, motored around the plaza, and took a narrow street through the town that led back into the hills. As we passed little, faded wooden doorways, Pierrot shouted out the names of the people who lived there, including the names of a few of the regulars who would come each night to the Rose Café. Here was the house of André. Over there was where Jacquis lived, and around the corner was the place where Max was staying.

Beyond the town the road began to climb, and at one point below the hillside we passed a drive lined with cypress trees, with a sand-colored villa with a red-tiled roof at the end, set among landscaped gardens.

“Le Baron's place,” Pierrot shouted back over his shoulder. “I have delivered bread there. A mute ogre guards the garden there. There is a woman in there, but she never leaves the garden.”

The village gave way to cultivated fields, the fields to maquis, and the maquis to an upland forest of holm oak and beech. The road climbed higher, and we began to motor around terrifying bends over green chasms, some marked with crosses where people had failed to make the sharp curves. At some turns, half-wild pigs and cows loomed ahead of us and jerked out of the way at the last minute.

After a half-hour, Pierrot pulled up to a small collection of stone buildings where the narrow, paved road twisted up into a valley. From here, a stony, rutted track fit mainly for sheep and goats wound up to the left. We bounced over the rough terrain until the ruts grew too deep.

“Now we walk,” Pierrot said.

It was hot in the sheltered valleys, the sort of greeny midday heat that undoes the local dogs. The high stridulation of the cicadas was filling the air, and we could hear the jangle of goat bells ringing from the surrounding hills and the clatter of loose stones in the gorges as sheep or mouflon, the native wild sheep, scattered. Deep, rocky brooks cascaded below us, stubby-winged buteos coursed above, and the air was thick with the tang of vegetation.

In time we came to a well-worn trail leading across some pastureland into the dense shrubbery. In the middle of the open ground I saw a small crumbling heap of stones, the ruins of a tower.

“
Torri
,” Pierrot said. “They are from the original people, a tribe who lived here two thousand years ago and practiced human sacrifice. My father says they are still living here in the gorges. He says they stole my older brother before I was born. Or sucked his blood. I don't remember which. He died before me.”

We hiked on. Pierrot had a net bag of bread for his father slung over his shoulder that bounced rhythmically from side to side as he tripped along, and finally we broke out of the thickets and entered a pasture where a donkey was grazing. Around the clearing lay the ruins of old stone buildings, as if the area had once been a small town square or a large estate. At the south end there was a larger building without windowpanes, an open door gaping ominously. Looking out the door, as if he lived in the house, was another donkey. An old man emerged from behind the donkey and slapped its haunches to clear the way. He was dressed in traditional black corduroys and a wide-brimmed black hat, and had tucked his trousers into high calfskin boots. He had small, coal-black eyes and a crooked nose, canted off to one side as if it had been broken a few times. Pierrot kissed his stubbled cheeks and introduced me.

“Fabrizio Porto, my father,” he said.

The old man smiled, revealing a piano keyboard of gold and yellowed teeth, pumped my hand heartily, and spit out a long sentence in a thick island dialect that I couldn't understand. He chased out the donkey and waved us in. I could smell wine on his breath, and garlic.

The interior was cool and squalid, the floor littered with straw and donkey droppings; it had a few bare shelves, a black stove with a pot on it, and a small wooden table with a red-checked oilcloth cover. Pierrot took down a big, dark flagon of red wine and three cheap glasses, and proceeded to argue with his father about the wine. The old man didn't want any, or didn't want Pierrot to have any, I couldn't tell which. But Monsieur Porto apparently liked me. He kept smiling and shook my hand again, repeating
Americano
proudly over and over. I think he liked the Americans.