The Rose Café (9 page)

Sometimes there in the middle of the black, starlit nights at the Rose Café, I would hear some guest let out a terrible scream from one of the upstairs rooms, awakened by the all-too-real nightmare of the past war. Once I heard a vast, deep, male bellow, like a terrified beast suddenly caught in the jaws of a lion. Later I looked out the cabin door and saw Herr Komandante alone on the promontory, the night wind fluttering at the hem of his bathrobe.

Maggs swirled the ice in her glass and held it up against the light spilling in from the terrace and the harbor. A reddish glow from the Campari shadowed her face.

“Such a lovely sound,” she said. “The sound of summer, isn't it? Ice on glass.”

For dinner that night Jean-Pierre was in the process of creating a bouillabaisse, an
aziminu
, as it was called in Corsican. I was instructed to go down to the rocks at the edge of the harbor and collect virtually anything that moved—periwinkles, limpets, baby octopus if I could catch them, snails, crabs. These Jean-Pierre tossed into the stew pot along with moray eel, rascasse,
dorade
, and rouget; a coulis of tomatoes; plus healthy dashes of pastis and white wine. Vincenzo took on the perhaps futile task of teaching me to make a rouille at this time. He did this mainly by demonstration, lapsing into dialect or Italian as he worked, and even then giving only limited instruction:

“This! Eh?” He snatched a garlic clove and smashed it with the flat of his knife and mashed it around and threw it in a stone bowl.

“Then,” he said, “potato.” He scooped a potato from the soup and chopped it, flicking the knife so fast I could hardly see it. Then he took a pinch of a bouquet garni and threw it in the bowl, then chopped up a red pepper and dipped in a few spoonfuls of soup from Jean-Pierre's simmering bouillabaisse, and then began mashing the whole of it around with a pestle, all the while pouring in olive oil from an earthenware pitcher in dribbles.

“Now,” he said, handing me the pestle. “You squish.”

I took the pestle and began weakly mashing the mix around.

“
Mais non
,” he shouted. “Harder!”

“OK,” I said.

“No, no, no. Mush it!” he said.

I tried again.

He took the pestle away and leaned into his work, pounding and swirling and mashing and dripping in olive oil until the whole of it took on the consistency of a thin, reddish mayonnaise.

Then he dipped up a teaspoonful, tasted it, and stared at something located far beyond the dark wall of the kitchen, something up in the maquis above the harbor, beyond the three nuns and the high peaks.

“More,” he said to himself, and pinched in some red pepper powder and tasted it again.

“You,” he said, handing me the spoon.

I could taste myrtle and thyme, rosemary, fish, potato, pepper, and a hint of salt and fish scale.

“Good,” I ventured.

“Yes, good, now. Next time—you make.”

The lesson was hardly completed when Lucretia appeared at the door.

“You!” she shouted at Vincenzo.

He turned to face her, cupped the fingers of his right hand upward and spread his left hand flat and lifted his arms.

“Wha …?” he said.

There followed a machine-gun outburst in dialect from Lucretia that went on tirelessly. The tirade begat a counterattack that only served to increase the decibel level of the litany of whichever crimes he had committed that day (or more probably, the previous night). He pointed at her, shaking his finger, and shot out a short burst of flak, and then threw out his left hand, turned, and snatched up the fishing pole he kept in the back room by my washing sink and stormed out to the cove. She followed him to the back door and let fly another blast as he marched down the path.

“You don't know him,” she said in French to the assembled kitchen staff. “Everyone, they think Vincenzo is a good man, a hard worker, pleasant to be around. Me, I know different. I know the other side.”

Jean-Pierre shrugged and tasted his bouillabaisse.

Micheline retreated to the terrace.

Chrétien began selecting more silverware for the settings.

“What do you all know? Nothing.” She turned toward me. “Only him. He understands me, I can tell. You know what a pig Vincenzo is because you work with him every night, is it not true?”

“I'm not sure …” I said.

“Oh, but you do, poor boy. Poor little lamb. Why, Jean-Pierre? Why do you sacrifice this poor American lamb to that animal? It is not fair.”

She came over to me and threw her arms around me, tousled my hair, and drew me to her bosom, rocking me back and forth and looking back at Jean-Pierre over my shoulder.

“Look at him. He is quivering with fear.”

“No, it's OK,” I tried to say, but my head was buried in maquis-scented black cotton. She didn't hear.

“Poor lamb.” She pinched my side. “You must give him more food, Jean-Pierre. He is too skinny.”

“He's a student,” Jean-Pierre said.

“A student. A poor, hardworking scholar, bending all day over books, never to see the light of the sun. And then at night, subjected to the cruelties of Vincenzo.”

“He's actually nice to me,” I muttered weakly.

She released me and stepped back, nodding.

“Just a trick. You'll see. I am a going to kill him. What else is there to do?”

She turned on her heel and walked out the back door. A second later she was back. She glared at us, snatched up a kitchen knife, and took the path down to the cove.

“What was that all about?” I asked Jean-Pierre.

He half-shrugged. “They'll be back,” he said without looking up from his soup.

I peeled a few more potatoes and chopped some tomatoes and began cutting old bread for the rouille.

Ten minutes later Vincenzo and Lucretia came in together and set to work.

André came out early for the card game that evening and took a drink out on the terrace, selecting his table in the corner of the verandah so he could look over the guests from the continent. After dinner, Maggs and Peter appeared and took a drink at a table near the outer edge of the terrace. She was wearing a short, flowered skirt and a light blouse. I saw André look her up and down sleepily as she passed his table.

Peter selected a table at the edge of the terrace, facing the harbor, and they sat with their backs to the restaurant, staring out at the waters and not saying much to each other. After a while Peter got up, patted her shoulder, and went up to their room. Maggs stretched out her legs, shifted a chair over with her right foot, and set her heels on it, drawing up her skirt above her knees.

André observed all this. After a few minutes he got up, went through the kitchen and out the back door, and then returned by the stairway leading to the causeway on the other side of the terrace. He selected a table near Maggs, and stared indifferently out at the harbor, then called to Chrétien for a muscat, which he nursed silently. After some time, he shifted his chair a little, and said something to Maggs, as if noticing her for the first time. She answered. He said something else. She answered. And within a few minutes he had turned his chair toward her table and was carrying on like a tour guide. I could see him sweeping his arms back toward the town and the mountains beyond, and pointing out to sea. Like all islanders he spoke with his hands; you could almost follow his conversation without hearing it.

When I went back to my scullery, they were still chatting amiably.

chapter five

The Professor

Corsica has seven winds. In winter, the chilling mistral comes scything down the Rhône valley and the Massif central, lifting tiles from the roofs and screaming across the Gulf of Genoa to Corsica, where it is sometimes joined, or followed, by an easterly companion called the
tramontana
, which blasts in off the plains of the Po and is the bane of those living along the northwest coast. The scirocco charges up from the Sahara, carrying desert sands and hammering at Bastia as many as one hundred days a year. The
grecale
brings rain from the Apennines every winter. The
levante
storms in from the east, the
ponente
from the west. The
mezzogiorno
comes at midday and the
terrana
at dusk. And finally there is the libeccio, the sickle of the northwest coast. It crosses the Mediterranean and comes cutting in from the southwest, slamming itself against Cap Corse and beating the sea to a froth.

Very late one windy night, when the libeccio was blowing, after the dinner was served and the players had gathered for cards, we saw the local taxi come bouncing off the causeway. The car stopped and a small, older man, carrying a variety of black bags and satchels, climbed the steps and proceeded to the bar accompanied by Paul, the driver.

The new arrival was dressed in a neat gray suit with a white shirt, a tie, and shiny black shoes. He had a narrow, hatchet face and iron-gray hair neatly swept back.

“A new guest for you,” Paul said to Micheline, with a decided wink.

At the bar, the new guest ordered a glass of cognac and announced that he intended to reserve a room.

“You intended?” Micheline asked.

“Yes, I meant to,” he said.

“You intended, but you did not reserve?” she asked.

“The statement is true,” he said. “Insofar as anything, in passing discourse, can be determined as truth.”

“So you did not reserve a room but you would like a room. Is that what you are saying?”

“Yes, that would have been my intention,” the old man said.

She looked over the book. This was mere ritual. She knew perfectly well there was a single room available.

“I am sorry, monsieur, but we have no rooms available,” she said.

“How can that be?” he said. “I intended to make a reservation.”

“But intention does not validate a reservation, monsieur, I am sorry.”

“That is not, I'm afraid, entirely accurate, madame, if I may be so bold as to say so. Intention is, in point of fact, a reality. If you intend, it is so.”

“I disagree,” Micheline said. “One may intend, for example, to fly to the moon. But it is not possible to fly to the moon.”

“Not yet,” said the old man. “Perhaps someday we will be able to travel to the moon. If a voyage to the moon is intended, it will become a reality. Because it is intended, it will eventually be. If it is true that the room does not exist, then the discussion is not about the room, since the room does not exist. Conversely, if the discussion concerns the room in question then the room must exist.”

Chrétien had been listening to all this with interest, and now joined in. He took the side of the old man.

“He's right, in a way,” Chrétien said. “This is the puzzle of negative belief. How can you say that the room does not exist, when in fact we know it does. In other words, there is a room.” He turned to the old man. “That's true, isn't it?”

“I'm not arguing about the existence of the room,” Micheline said. “I'll grant you that it exists, it's just not available.”

“Ah,” said the newcomer. “The original proposition is true, then. Now, as to availability. The room exists, therefore I have a place to sleep, at least at some point in the so-called continuum of time. Now we must concern ourselves with the elusive question of linear instance. At what period in the normal flow of hours and days, say, would it be possible for me to occupy said room?”

“Wait a minute, just a minute please,” Micheline said, abruptly.

Micheline was very fond of arguing. She could have carried on all night with this, but she was tired and merely looked again at the book.

I knew what was coming. She took out her pen and made some flourishes. Crossed something out.

“Let me see,” she said, mumbling to herself. “If we move the dentist to the east room, then shift the honeymoon couple to the back … perhaps we could …”

“What does she say?” the old man asked Chrétien.

“I am saying that it's all right. I will make some arrangements. You will sign here, please, and give us your papers. The boy will show you to your room.”

She aimed her head at me, as much to indicate that I was to play along as if to inform him that the auberge had a bellhop.

“Let me,” Chrétien said, and snatched the old man's valise. They climbed the stairs and were gone for an hour.

“That's Marie's tutor,” Chrétien said when he finally came down. “He wants to stay for a month.”

A big yacht came into the harbor a few days after Marie's tutor arrived. We could see it tentatively nosing around for a good anchorage and it eventually settled just offshore from the café. It was an older design: a cutter rig with a single mast, a straight-stemmed bow, and a short bowsprit—altogether a fat, rather sturdy vessel. After dark we could see her lights and hear drunken singing and loud voices with German inflection echoing across the waters.

I was tired that night, and after cleaning up, I took a glass with Chrétien and Marie and then went down to my cottage to make notes and read. I was attempting to learn a little more about Corsican history at the time and was reading Prosper Mérimée's
Colomba
, the story of a reluctant avenger named Orso della Rebbia. Mérimée's female character, Orso's sister, Colomba, is one of the more powerful women in French literature: beautiful, intelligent, and cunning, she carries a stiletto under her mantle, and through her powers finally convinces her brother—who has been living in Paris and has evolved into an ineffectual dandy—to avenge his father, who had been murdered two years earlier by his ancestral enemies.

Mérimée seems to have had a penchant for strong female characters; probably his best-known creation is Carmen, the fiery gypsy who is the driving force in Bizet's opera, which was adapted from Mérimée's short novel of the same name. Colomba is equally powerful, although not as promiscuous, or as deceitful, as Carmen.