by C. K. Stead
In the course of that afternoon Hirondelle got separated from his men among olive trees on the slopes below the village. There seemed to be nobody about and then, somewhere in front of him among the trees, there was an Italian soldier who for the moment seemed equally lost, and unaware he’d been seen. Hirondelle took rapid aim and fired, and was astonished (he was no sniper, he assured me) to see the enemy soldier reel back, dropping his rifle, and stagger away. Alarmed at what he’d done, never having shot a man before, Hirondelle followed, more in the spirit of wanting to help, or at least take a prisoner, than of wanting to ‘finish him off’. They came to a little valley, like a small interruption in the predominant downward slope, with a couple of whitewashed farm cottages deserted on either side of a stream. The Italian was getting weaker. He crossed a small bridge and slumped against a wall in the sun. There was a curved wayside shrine like an upended bath tub with a painted Madonna inside against a blue background. The Italian dragged himself to the shrine, dragged himself up to sit inside it in the shade. He didn’t move again, but slumped back and sideways, held by the shrine. Hirondelle waited. The sound of gunfire was still audible, but there was less of it and receding. It was possible to hear the stream running below the road. Hirondelle approached, watching for the least movement. There was none. The Italian was dead.
Because he stopped at that point and was silent I asked, ‘What did you do?’
‘What did I do?’ he repeated. And then, in a tone heavy with irony, ‘Like Jesus, I wept.’
IT WAS THE MORNING of the day I was to call on Hirondelle that I met Javine. I went into a café near the Casino. It was almost empty but a young woman was standing with her hands on top of the jukebox, nodding to the song that came from it. It might even have been ‘Miss American Pie’. She was singing along, and I joined in. When it stopped she looked up and smiled. I invited her to come and sit with me.
She brought her cup of coffee to my table. She didn’t speak a lot of English and I wasn’t fluent—in fact I struggled—in French, but we made our way. She told me she had lived her whole life in the town (she pulled a face). Her parents had a small farm up in the hills but she had a room in her uncle’s house down near the fishing port. One day soon she was going to go and find herself a job in Paris. In the meantime she was doing courses at the University of Nice along the coast.
I asked her why she wasn’t there today and she shrugged. The boredom, you know. Now and then one had to give oneself a holiday.
She put a coin in the machine and chose another song, Italian this time, ‘Estate senza te’—Summer without you. It’s one I remember because she liked it so much, and soon so did I. When I knew her better I bought her one of those small LPs of it, a ‘45’. The singer’s name was Christophe, and soon I could sing the refrain, which asked where someone had gone and what would the singer do if she didn’t come back. There was something sorry-for-itself about those lyrics, and it’s hard for me now to see quite why it was to mean so much to us; why it should have become, as the cliché was, and is, ‘our song’.
Javine was a small neat girl with pale-olive skin and very dark eyes so you expected black hair but it was light brown, almost chestnut but paler, the colour of lager. She was slow, graceful, somehow withdrawn behind eyes that looked at you very directly, smiling. Everything was hidden but nothing was absent.
We parted in the street outside the Casino. The billboard was advertising Walt Disney’s The Aristocats, which had become of course Les Aristochats. I told her I was probably going to buy a car that afternoon and asked her whether she would like to come for a drive.
When she looked up to answer she hesitated a moment, smiling, her mouth closed, her eyes full of intelligence, so that I felt, without knowing what it was I wanted to hide, that I was giving myself away.
I got to L’Atrium at the appointed hour. The sky had cleared and the sun struck down among the heavy brown stems of the vines and lit up the grey stones of the old wall that enclosed the garden.
Madame Hirondelle showed me in and left me alone with her husband. He was sitting stiffly in his chair, carefully dressed and brushed. He excused himself from standing as he held out his hand. His breathing was heavy and his hand was weak.
But after a general conversation, including the war anecdote, he came abruptly to the point. ‘The price is eight thousand francs, Monsieur Miller. That is less than the car is worth. My wife is not satisfied but that is my price. You see I can’t get downstairs to drive— there is no lift—and she does not drive. I am an architect, Monsieur, and I designed this building when I was young and fit—an athlete, but an aesthete first. It had to be beautiful. Functional yes, but beauty came first.’
‘It is,’ I said. ‘Very beautiful. And the garden … Yes, magnificent.’
‘Yes, I think so. Thank you. But now, you see … If I went down those stairs I would not get up again.’ He smiled. ‘The artist trapped inside his design—isn’t it so?’ And then, ‘The price is right for you?’
I said it was right if the car was as good as it looked.
‘You won’t be disappointed,’ he said. ‘The young man from the garage has brought it over. He’s waiting in the carpark beside the market. Perhaps you would like to go down to him …’
I stood up to go.
‘My wife believes you are some kind of artist,’ he said. ‘Is she right?’
I shook my head. ‘Not yet, anyway.’
He smiled. ‘If Madame believes you are an artist, that’s that. That is what you are.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I said.
It was a time when drivers still spoke enthusiastically of the corniches, though even then the autoroute was replacing them in importance: grande, moyenne and basse (high, middle and low) corniches—the three famous and romantic coast roads of the Côte d’Azur. I imagined Hirondelle as a young man, the aesthete-architect-athlete, wearing a long scarf, driving with the hood down and the wind in his hair, young Madame beside him holding down a hat.
He said, ‘I hope for you it will be a lucky purchase.’
‘Thank you, Monsieur, I’m sure it will.’
Twenty minutes later I was driving up to Cap Martin, the garagiste beside me. Up there on the heights I stopped and looked back at the town.
‘Elle marche comme un rêve, n’est-ce pas?’ he said.
‘Like a dream,’ I agreed. But I would have to get used to driving on the right.
JUST BEYOND GARAVAN THERE were still the frontier and customs posts where a passport, or at the very least a carte d’identité, was needed. You went through the French border guards, crossed a white line marking the bed of a stream that ran under the road, and forward to the Italian guards. Clifton Scarf’s kids used to get him to stop the car on the line so that Mummy and Dad in the front were in Italy and the kids in France. Or they would get out and stand astride it, one foot in either country. Later, of course, when the euro arrived and Western Europe’s borders became notional, that whole set-up would be abandoned and the buildings that housed it left more or less to rot or be ransacked. Now, as I write, all at once it’s back in use again, with France trying to stem the flood of people coming across the sea from North Africa and the Middle East through Italy—cars being searched, refugees walking along the railway lines, or living on the rocks in makeshift camps just over there on the Italian side, waiting for a chance to make the breakthrough or for liberal voices to win the argument. So Europe, the magnet, changes—and nothing changes: plus ça change plus c’est la même chose. Some cynic said recently that the only people who still believe in the ideal of European collectivity that established the EU are the refugees risking their lives by crossing the Mediterranean in small boats.
But in those days the barrier was still the passage from one country to another, France to Italy; and the moment I crossed that line I seemed to feel it like a sudden alteration in the weather. There was more poverty, more colour, more style. Life in Italy was more primitive, more civilised, less bourgeoi
s, more extreme. There was a government and democratic elections (I remember a banner VOTA COMMUNISTA stretched across the roadway); but there were also the Church and the Mafia. And there was the currency—the absurd lire in such huge multiples, thousands, hundreds of thousands, just for small purchases, as if everyone, even the poorest, was a millionaire.
As the Fiat gathered speed Javine’s hair blew across my face. The cliffs dropped to rocky blue bays, the hill slopes rose in terraces or lifted abruptly to bald bluffs. Neither mountains of rock nor empty canyons had been allowed to present themselves as obstacles. Kilometre-long tunnels succeeded one another, and between the tunnels immense flyovers. Our path was direct, fast, mountains to the left, sea to the right, Genoa ahead. And beyond Genoa … I couldn’t find a word for what lay beyond, except the literal one, that it was ‘Tuscany’—or better still, ‘Liguria’. It was (I would have said in my naïve enthusiasm) a sense of space, freedom, movement, colour and light; as if you were about to take off into something like the Infinite, knowing its blue filmy walls would be done out with frescos of the gardens of Paradise.
All in the mind? ‘Subjective’? Unreal? Yes, perhaps—if you say so. But in those days, a still young and newly liberated New Zealander with so much to learn, I would have said with that brilliant old culture-snob Cyril Connolly, ‘I am for the intricacy of Europe, the discrete and many-folded strata of the Old World … the world of ideas.’
Coming back into town that evening I stopped at a rest area, and Javine and I climbed down a path below the autostrada into a gully wooded with pines. It was quiet except for the call of birds and the occasional whoosh of cars above. We held on to one another, steadying ourselves as we made our way down over the uneven ground. Javine stopped and leaned back against the trunk of a tree. Her head was back, her hair spreading against the rough bark, catching in it. She was wearing a leather jacket and the leather creaked faintly as she moved. I was aware of the curve of her breast just there under the flap of her jacket, and the shape of her jeans tight over thighs and crotch—and I kissed her. It was a very nice mouth to kiss; an enthusiastic recipient; a satisfactory and satisfying first kiss; a memorable thank-you-to-the-stars moment.
I was older by a dozen or so years but we were both young. I had trained as a journalist and, like every second person in the trade then (or so it seemed to me), I thought that ‘one day’ I would ‘write something serious’, meaning a novel. An unmarried great-uncle, almost certainly gay but never out of the closet, had recently died and left me an amount of money, encouraging me to see it as my chance to become ‘a real writer’. I knew it might equally be an opportunity to prove that I was no such thing, if by ‘real writer’ was meant a serious novelist. I was a journalist—and why not? It was a job to be taken seriously, needing talent and ambition and application. In fact it was to be my future. But for the moment I thought I was gathering material and preparing myself to write fiction. So everything, including Javine, including the kiss, might be ‘material’.
It’s true I had been married and divorced—another learning experience. My learning had been mostly by mistakes. I’d thought in very conventional terms of marriage and children. She (her name was Deirdre) had thought, in a way still somewhat advanced for the time, of marriage and a career—kids could be thought about maybe later. So we set off on different feet and never saw eye to eye until it was too late. It was as if we were competitors rather than allies. We quarrelled, seriously, and she left me—that about sums it up. I was angry and resentful, and then regretful, understanding only when it had all gone too far and was beyond compromise. In the end Deirdre would have both, the kids and the career, which was as it should be—but not with me. When I left her behind, I left my country as well, which was one of the reasons why I enjoyed finding the Scarf family, fellow New Zealanders, in the same town.
As for the other half of the kiss—I suspect that Javine too was a bit behind the times, and that she thought of herself as a character out of Colette: the new, the modern, Claudine. I don’t know for sure that she had read much Colette, though I did see a copy of Le Blé en herbe, and one or two others, among her books.
So let me give this encounter some literary colour and suggest you imagine a Colette-gal and a Hemingway-guy kissing rather nicely, and rather well, under those pines through which even at this present moment—I mean now, as I write—real refugees may be escaping across the border; and then you will understand, perhaps, that in the end I stayed a journalist, and even became proud of it, and successful, only to live into this present time when newspapers are vanishing into the internet and even books as solid objects are in doubt.
So even in the era of ‘Miss American Pie’, Javine and I were probably a bit behind the times—but as that song in the movie Casablanca has it, ‘a kiss is still a kiss’, and never out of date, and we enjoyed it knowing there would be more.
… It was Clifton got us moving. He knew a way down. The light from the burning car made it easier. I took Peggy by the hand and we slid down together, following him, braking with our heels. Fabrice followed with Katy.
We gathered ourselves together on a grassy shelf. There was still no sound of anyone coming after us up on the autoroute. The Fiat was burning fiercely. It wouldn’t be easy to get past it on that narrow road but there was a track straight down the hillside—we could get down there.
We got as far as the wooden platform before the sound of the first klaxon reached us. We all stopped.
‘That’s coming up from Garavan,’ Fabrice said. ‘It must be the CRS. They have a barracks down there.’
We all stood listening, uncertain what to do.
‘We’ve got to move fast,’ Fabrice said. ‘We’ve got to get away from that car. Then Rod only has to go into the gendarmerie tomorrow and report that it’s been stolen and we’re safe. We can forget the whole thing.’
I wondered what my insurance would cover, but said nothing.
‘There’s a telpher,’ Clifton said.
The cage was parked at a platform among pine branches. We decided to try it. Fabrice was first in, then Peggy and Clifton. There wasn’t room for a fourth. Clifton moved to come out but I shut the door on them.
‘Hurry. And send it back.’
Fabrice pulled a lever, an electric motor started, the cable slipped over well-oiled rollers, the cage swung away—out and down through a gap cleared for it among the pines.
Katy and I huddled together on the platform, listening, watching the Fiat burn. She shuddered. ‘We might all have gone down with it.’ I knew what she was thinking—what would have become of her children? Who would have looked after them?
The CRS truck was grinding on up the hill, its klaxon sounding, its orange light flashing among the pines of Les Colombières. The cable had stopped buzzing. Now it started again and the cage was climbing back to us.
Up on the autoroute another klaxon wailed and another orange light flashed on the concrete rim protecting the tunnel entrance. Two men in Italian police uniform came to the edge and looked down. The CRS truck was just turning on to the stretch of road that would bring it to the burning Fiat.
The cage arrived. Katy got in. Down the road the truck had stopped. One man got out, then another, with fire extinguishers and set about dousing the flames. I got into the cage, clanged the door shut, pulled the lever. The pine branches brushed over its windows. We plunged away down the hill slope and lost sight of everything up there but the glare of flames and the flashing orange of the police lights …
2. The storm
THE STORM BLEW UP one evening not long after the lemon festival. An American warship had anchored off the Baie de Garavan. The town was full of sailors and Fabrice Laurent decided that as Chief of Tourism for the region he should do something to entertain the captain and the first officer. So he got together the little group of us in the town who were fluent in English and congenial together—which at that time meant Fabrice himself, Katy and Clifton Scarf, the Dutchman Ernst Bergen from the
Agence Bienvenue and his American wife, Peggy, and me. We took the two naval officers to a restaurant called La Belle Escale down by the fishing port, close to the steps that zigzagged up from the waterfront to the old town and the Square of the Churches. In those days it was the town’s best restaurant, run by Italians and specialising in seafood, and we ran through the fish courses, choosing this or that among soupe de poissons, moules marinières, loup de mer, bouillabaisse, paella and so on. The paella was their best dish, but their senior cook, who was Spanish, insisted on calling it arroz à la Valenciana, giving full force to the ‘c’ as ‘th’—Valenthiana. It was quite distinct from paella, he insisted, though it seemed the same to me—same ingredients: rice base, with saffron (though perhaps the soupçon of red peppers gave it a Spanish tang); and then all the usual kai moana—the white fish, mussels, scampi, prawns, and what we New Zealanders would call pipis.
The captain talked about Jacques Cousteau and the marine laboratories at Marseilles and Monte Carlo. Katy and I shared a corner of the table. When it came to the choice of wines, Fabrice asked the officers, ‘Which would you prefer—Virgin’s water or the tears of Christ?’ It was his joke of course, but there was certainly Lacrimae Christi on the table.
I asked Katy why Clifton was so determined to resist the offers of jobs outside New Zealand. Her answer was complicated. Partly what she said was that Clifton was temperamentally conservative, at least in the sense that once he’d made a decision it was almost impossible to shift him. So he was committed to our homeland, and to his university, and that was that. But I suspect that she was also and equally committed, and I detected a defensive tone, that same note of defiance I’d heard from Clifton—as if merely by asking the question I was proposing, or supporting, something improper, a disloyalty.
It grew late and the restaurant emptied out. Our waiter came with a tray of brandy glasses and a bottle of cognac. ‘Le patron sends his compliments,’ he announced, ‘to the American Navy.’