The Rose Café (8 page)

After we had an introductory toast, we went out and sat at a rickety table in the shade. The wine was terrible, and I could feel one of those sleepy midday headaches coming on, but Pierrot's father was warming up: He addressed me in the familiar and talked nonstop, placing his hand on my arm and squeezing periodically, whenever he wanted to make a point.

“You must understand,” he said, speaking now in French. “We are the last of the great Porto clan. My people, they married into the family of Napoléon. We had generals in the Grande Armée, skilled militarists who took the fields at Austerlitz and Marengo. We had big villas here and all through the south as well.” He lifted his head toward the ruin across the former courtyard. “Now, nothing. Only the name. And Pierrot, here, he's the last of a great line.”

He turned to Pierrot and spit out a torrent of dialect. I caught the word “girl.”

“What's he say?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Pierrot said. “Same as always.”

“He should marry,” the old man said to me in French. “He's the last. He should marry. And have ten children, all boys. And why not?” He winked at me and made an obscene gesture.

“I will Papé, someday I will, but give me time. I just have to find the right one,” Pierrot said.

“He always says that,” Fabrizio muttered. “Too much work, too little time, no girl around, at least not any good Catholic girls like he wants. All reading books now, and getting ideas. Better in the old days, eh? Womens is strange now. I can tell you that. Do you know how old is Pierrot?”

“No. Mid-twenties?”

“Thirty-one. No one is not married at thirty-one except priests and Nancy boys.”

“I didn't know that,” I said.

“Pierrot, he wanted be a priest but quit. And he's not a fairy. You're not a fairy, are you Pierrot?”

“No, Papé, I like girls—you know I like girls.”

“See what I mean?” the old man said. “He's no fairy, so why not marry and have children?”

This brought the conversation down to individual families in the region and their available daughters, and then we began to gossip with him about the regulars at the Rose Café, all of whom seemed to be well-known to old Fabrizio, and all of whom had either wives, or steady mistresses, or many girlfriends. Fabrizio had lived in Ile Rousse, and he knew their fathers and mothers and all their cousins and aunties all the way back, and knew also the daughters of all the cousins and aunties, among whom, as he pointed out, were many marriageable women.

We finally got around to rich families in the region and then finally to the question of le Baron, who was, Fabrizio said, a newcomer to these parts but an important one.

“Why is he living out here in the countryside? Do you know? And how did he get so rich?” I asked.

“Le Baron?”

“Yes.”

He waved his left hand and blew out a soundless whistle.

“He is very rich,” he said.

“I know, but why did he settle out here?”

He avoided the questions for a while and then reluctantly explained.

“I will tell you. But it is not pleasant, so don't think about it too much. And anyway, that was all in the past. Now he shares his wealth. He has helped us from time to time, eh Pierrot? Isn't that so? He has helped us. He pays the tax on this land here. And we up here, we like to let bygones be bygones, if you take my meaning. He is good to the local people. Not a bad type.”

But there was a dark side. According to the old man, the seemingly kind Baron had been a part of the Vichy government during the war. He and his informants, Fabrizio said, had identified all the Jewish families in the towns between Vence and Nice. Many of these families were rich, and these le Baron had befriended. He visited them often, sharing the stories of privation and the atrocities of the ruthless Milice, the local vigilante police.

“But then,” Fabrizio said, “you know the story. There were commandments from Berlin. From Pig Hitler. They want the French to turn in their Jews. So Vichy and the Milice and the Nazis they set out to do the work; willing too, I tell you. In the meantime, le Baron, he makes his usual rounds of certain property-rich families in the towns just ahead of the Vichy operatives. He warns them—and it was true—that orders have come down from Germany and they are in danger of deportation. But he says he can arrange the necessary papers, letters of transport, exit visas. He tells them—and this was true too—that he knows people in Paris, that he has influence. He can obtain letters. Visas will surely follow, along with the permits, and even the tickets from Marseille to Morocco and on to Lisbon.”

Fabrizio said that in the process of the various exchanges and forgeries and permits, le Baron also managed to legally acquire titles to the properties as a cover.

“Temporarily, eh?” Fabrizio said, scrunching up the side of his mouth and clucking. “We know what that means. Shortly thereafter, eh? The Milice show up. Families are marched to the town squares, and, whoosh, off they go into the trains and on to we don't know where.”

He swept his hands together and pointed his thumb over his shoulder, toward the beech woods.

“Some Baron, eh?” he said. “But now …”

He lowered his head, looked me in the eye, held out his right hand, and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “Le Baron,
il a du fric
. He's got dough …

“Of course, we had our own problems up here back then,” he continued. “But we're good hunters here in the country. A well-placed shot. One less Nazi. But we get by. We're used to that. The Italians, they see the way things are going and switch camps. They throw away their uniforms and dress like the locals. Even marry locally. You hear that, Pierrot? Even the little Italian fascist conscripts with no family name. They find womens.”

Back in the town square, the old men were bowling. They formed a double line and watched as a middle-aged man in a serge suit stepped forward. He eyed the cochonnet at the end of the pitch. He crouched and swung back his arm, hooking the ball underhanded, stepped forward, and then, with a long swing, let fly.

The ball arched over the course, struck ground, and rolled toward the cochonnet.

“
Ai yo
,” the spectators shouted. “Not bad. Not too bad …”

Another took his place, crouched, swung his arm back, and threw. The ball arched, landed, and knocked the first ball away.

More shouting.

Another player. Another round.

At my table in the square, the hunchbacked barber watched.

“Not so bad,” he said. “Fiero is good. But just watch this one.”

An old, one-armed man with his sleeve tucked into his left suit pocket came forward. He stood erect,
contrapposto
, the ball held in his hand and facing outward against his right hip, and eyed the situation. Silence descended. In the double line, the old warriors held their breath. Sparrows took flight. Glasses clinked behind me. A waiter stepped out from the bar.

Slowly the one-armed man held the ball forward, formally, as if in presentation to the gods. He drew back his arm, curling the ball with his hand facing his chest, and made his throw. The ball arched high over the pitch. It crossed in front of the shops at the north end of the square, it flew over the allée between the sand-colored buildings, black against the blue-green harbor beyond. It sailed onward, descended, and plunked down next to the cochonnet, knocking off the closest ball—the one Fiero had thrown—and then it rolled two inches forward to stop, nestled against its target.

“You see what I mean,” the barber said.

And so it went. Winners and losers. War played with six balls and a little pig.

The English woman and her tall gentleman friend whom I had had seen at dinner earlier showed up the next day to ask for rooms. I happened to be the only one around the restaurant that afternoon, so there was no one else there to check them in. The English woman, who seemed to be the one in charge of things, said they had booked a room the night before and had reserved for a couple of weeks. I checked the book and found an indifferent, almost indecipherable, scrawl in Micheline's hand and finally analyzed the details. I showed them to their room and took their passports, which I studied after they left.

Her name was Magda and she had been born in Poland in 1926, which would have made her thirty-five years old. Her husband's name was Peter, and he had been born of English parents in Tunisia in 1925. The two of them lived now in London and were presumably married, although Magda did not have a ring, I noticed.

They stayed up in their room unpacking and within the hour, Peter appeared in his bathing trunks, carrying a net bag with flippers, as well as a mask and a mean-looking fish spear. He asked where he might do a little spearfishing. I told him about the cove behind my cottage, and he set off down the path. He reminded me of a gangly giraffe.

Magda came down to the bar a few minutes later and asked for a Campari and soda, which I mixed and set before her. She cupped her hand around the sweating glass, and then lifted it to her right cheek and closed her eyes.

“So cool, isn't it,” she said. “It's been beastly coming over from Calvi. Steaming.”

She was small and angular, with high Slavic cheekbones, blue eyes, and wavy blond hair, one strand of which often fell across her left eye and which she habitually flipped back in place. She had strangely elongated canine teeth that gave her an engaging, sad look whenever she smiled. Her husband was a sculptor, she told me, a former student of Henry Moore, and she was a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics. They had no real plans in Corsica, she said, but had come over from Menton because they thought it too crowded and had heard about this place while they were in Calvi, which they also thought too crowded.

“We are just looking for some place to lie low. And here …” she lifted her head toward the harbor. “It's quite beautiful really, with this view back to the little town and the hills and high peaks. And that island behind us, with the old crumbling tower. Lovely.”

The Ile de la Pietra, the high island just beyond the restaurant, was the second gem on a necklace of the two islets suspended from the long causeway that ran out from the town. Except for a modern lighthouse and the ancient Genoese watchtower, this outer island was steep and unhoused, and cut with tiny green coves where cormorants floated. Near the tower there was a crumbling ruin, the site of the chapel of Sainte Agathe, which had been constructed at the site a thousand years ago. It was the presence of this red-granite island that gave the town Ile Rousse its name, Isula Rossa, the rose island. Beyond this outer island there were three other small islets, also unhoused. The whole complex of cliffs and islands, and the grand views to the west and back to the port, made the area into something of a sanctuary. It was a good place to be alone.

Magda, who I learned was known as Maggs, was a willing talker and was very good at initiating conversation about small, immediate things, such as the flight of the house martins that were beginning to build a nest in one corner of the verandah. Like many of the people I was meeting outside of Paris or Nice, she was interested in contemporary life in the United States, which at that time was out of the range of most Europeans and still existed as a mythic isle where cattle and bears lived side by side with a crass, commercial, empty-minded culture with no traditions and bad food. Maggs was intrigued by the current youth culture, which, unfortunately, I didn't know much about since I had been out of the country for over a year at that point. I had never even heard of the dance called the twist, which was all the rage at that time, for example. She told me that she had been a teenager during the war years, and had grown up in Warsaw, where, as she hinted, she had seen some repulsive atrocities at the hands of Nazi soldiers. I gathered from her descriptions of her life back then that she had come from a family that had some money. She herself had not suffered privations, she said. She merely lived side by side with adversity, which apparently was bad enough.

“I missed childhood,” she said. “It was a very different way of life from the American youth.”

The one aspect of America that she knew something about was jazz. Was there not a great deal of good jazz around New York, as she had heard, and what about the Negroes, were they really lazy and shiftless? And why did the Americans isolate them in ghettos and forbid them to appear in public, even though they had—in the European view at least—created one of the great artistic contributions to world music?

“I knew an American Negro,” she said, “he was a great scholar and also a jazz saxophonist, and hardly lazy, he was a student at Oxford.”

“He must have made a break,” I said. “There are many exceptions, you just don't hear about them if you live in America. Even in my town in the north, the Negroes are isolated in a ghetto.”

“As if they have a disease,” she said dreamily, and spun the ice in her drink. She looked over to the town. “Like the Germans with the Jews; they saw Jews as a cancer.”

“What did the Poles think?” I ventured.

“Yes, the Poles. Just as bad.”

“Everybody's bad,” I said. “Americans are bad. Bad to Negroes. Bad to the Japanese.”

She laughed cynically, showed her winsome canines, and looked out on the town again.

“But what can you do?” I said.

“Right well I know what you can do,” she said, flipping the hair from her eyes. “You can just forget.”

She looked away. Her jaw tightened.

This was now the beginning of summer, and where I had come from all the colleges would be finished for the season, and the students of the East Coast schools would have dispersed to the resorts to work at the hotels, or teach tennis, or simply idle among the happy few that thronged the beaches of both coasts and all the lakes between, there to lounge and drink and socialize, while all the pretty little sailboats fluttered across the blue waters like flights of white butterflies, and laughter spilled out across dark mountain lakes from the porches of summery hotels. It was all sweetness and light, an ever-emerging present with no past haunting your every move and coming into the night bedrooms to sit on people's chests to keep them from breathing.