The Corsican Woman

by Madge Swindells

  Chapter 45

  He took her to Maria and left her there. A day later he came back with bandages, disinfectants, ointments for bums and wounds — all that he thought she would need. He looked haggard and exhausted. Maria heard later that he had broken into the German army hospital and fought his way out again. After that he hung around the bistro for days and slept in the church, since no one invited him to sleep in their homes.

  He was waiting for Sybilia to snap out of the depression she was in. He needed her to replace Michel. And there was something else besides — he loved her. Sybilia sat in her room for days, but if anyone approached her, she hid her face against the wall. She could not hold her baby. Any type of physical contact seemed anathema to her, and Jules suffered. After two or three tantrums, Maria kept him downstairs.

  'Sybilia needs hospital treatment,' she confided in Robin. ‘We must do something.'

  But what? All the hospitals were in the occupied zone.

  ‘It’s as if…’ Sybilia could not explain. Not even to Maria. She hated herself. She studied herself in the mirror and planned how to do away with the image she saw there. She appraised her body: long, supple, sinuous legs; hips that could writhe and sway and tempt; breasts like goblets.

  ‘When you’re crawling with ants and maggots, you won't look so good,' she told the image. ‘When your bones are picked clean of flesh, perhaps you’ll be clean.’ She was contaminated, a filthy receptacle into which Dino had squirted his pus. All the cruelty of the war seemed to have been pumped into her womb. Her wounds festered, her feet became more swollen, poisoning her body, which reacted with pimples and boils. Her hair hung limp like rope, her eyes were dead, her mouth slack and downturned. She would not eat and seldom spoke.

  ‘I know a place where she can be looked after; where she will get better,' Robin told Maria one morning. ‘It’s a convent in the mountains of Cap Corse,' he lied.

  He carried her down, placed her on Father Andrews’s donkey, which he had borrowed, and led her away. The villagers came out to cheer her. They sang and waved flags because she was a heroine, but she did not look around. Father Andrews held a prayer meeting for her recovery, which everyone in the village attended.

  Robin took her up into the mountains, to that magical place he had first seen by parachute. It was a summer grazing hut owned by Romanetti, who had lent it to Robin for the duration of the war. It had become Robin’s private den, a place to go to when he had to be alone. He had a few books, some odd bits of furniture, a reconditioned wood stove, pots and pans. All begged and borrowed, but enough to get by. It was not just a case of indulging himself, he had often rationalized. There might come a time when he needed a hideout that no one knew about, except Romanetti, whom he trusted implicitly.

  Subtly sensing Sybilia's degradation and self-loathing, he thought his camp might act like a purification bath for her. It was the closest place to purity he had ever seen, a place of snow and ice even in summer, unadulterated by man. A lake of crystal-clear and deepest blue, ringed by a circle of icy mountain peaks. There was the hut among the pines, a glade where hares and chamois grazed, a place where only birdsong shattered the silence.

  It was dark when they arrived. He went to unlock the door and light the lantern. Then he returned and carried her into the hut. He laid her on the bed with a straw mattress and heaped hand-woven blankets around her with a box over her feet. He forgot nothing, but he wished he had something better for her.

  He said: ‘Funny how the donkey senses that you’re ill. She’s really behaved herself today. The priest says she’ll find her way home eventually, so I guess I’ll just smack her on the rump and say, “Thanks, pal. Be seeing you!” ’

  He kept up a stream of inconsequential chatter as he unloaded the donkey. Then he fiddled with the radio to find some music, lit the stove and another lamp, chopped more wood for the morning, and made some coffee laced with brandy.

  ‘You know what I miss more than anything else here? It’s a straight bourbon on the rocks. When I get back to the States that’s the first thing I’m going to have.’

  She never bothered to answer. Perhaps she didn’t hear, but Robin talked for two of them, bombarding the silence with his chatter, whistling, and singing. He liked country and western. He sang as he chopped wood, peeled the potatoes, made the soup.

  ‘Bet you’re going to love this soup, Syb,’ he told her. ‘You’re going to wonder where I got this recipe. Well, I'll tell you a secret. It’s Russian. Called borscht. My granny used to make it. She came out from Russia with my grandfather, but Mama ran away from home and married a gentile, my pa.’

  Robin had been the cherished son of an all-American deputy sheriff and a typical Yiddish mother, he told her. He wore his mother’s Star of David always, although he himself was a Catholic. He showed it to her. His face lit up when he talked about his home. He and his family had lived in a clapboard house in a high village in Silverton, Colorado.

  ‘Best guy in the world, my dad. And Mom loved him. The old — ’uns forgave her eventually and invited us every Sunday.

  That’s when I learned about borscht, and many other things. Quite honestly, Syb, I think I’m more of a Jew than anything else. I used to listen to my granny, and I liked what she told me. They had some fine old ways in those days, although their lives were grim. Boy, I can tell you some stories And he did! Day after day, night after night. After a week she knew him better than any person she had ever known in her life. She tried to resist the knowledge but failed. His earnest, happy, easygoing voice kept seeping into her psyche. While he talked he dressed her wounds, fed her, brought her warm water to wash with, carried her out into the sun. Sometimes he left her.

  The first time, he was gone for most of the day. He went to fetch his motorbike and check that the donkey had returned to the priest. Afterward, with his bike, he could whiz up and down the goat track at high speed. When he fetched provisions or saw Rocca he was always back within a few hours. He ran the Resistance by proxy. This wasn’t too difficult since he had pushed Rocca firmly back into the leadership… at least as far as the men were concerned.

  Robin cleaned their hut, cooked their food, washed her clothes, and she said very little. Sometimes she read to him while he cleaned his guns, put together explosive devices, or peeled the potatoes. To Robin, all work, however lowly or complicated, was just another job to be done. He got on with it cheerfully. Sybilia was watching, learning, soaking up his warmth and humour. She was like a poor half-drowned kitten, drying out in the sun. He understood.

  He spent hours describing his school, which he had loved. Sometimes he talked about his passion for zoology and biology. At home he’d always been out in the woods and the hills. In winter he skied during much of his leisure time.

  He used to go hunting with his father, but when he reached his teens he’d lost his taste for it. Conversation was his passion. He spent his summer holidays camping in the Rockies, taking photographs and studying wildlife. The Colorado scenery was much like this camp here, he told her. 'Although we have chipmunks and bears and hummingbirds.’

  ‘I would like to see a chipmunk,’ she surprised him by saying. So he drew her one, and she discovered yet another part of Robin. He was a naturally gifted artist with a passion for wildlife.

  When he was fifteen both his parents had been killed in a car crash. ‘That’s when I got this bent nose.’ It had destroyed his faith for a while, he told her. He couldn’t believe in a divine providence somewhere up there looking after him, after such a tragedy. He’d gone to live with Gran, who was a widow by that time, and she’d replaced his church schooling with her religion. She’d enabled him to live with himself and with God. After that he became a loner. He felt he didn't fit in with others his age.

  A year later he studied forestry at Denver University and worked for the Forest Service of the US Department of Agriculture in Colorado. That gave him an excuse to be alone, which he’d needed at the time. He still considered himself a loner.
r />   Day after day he wrote up his reports. He was meticulous and painstaking, and everything had to be described in detail: how they had hijacked the armaments, the failure of Major Krag’s ambush, the atrocities perpetrated on Corsican civilians.

  As the weeks passed, Robin became depressed at the war, which dragged on and on. He complained at the lack of backup from the British or the Free French. He hardly ever received a parachute drop, and it was never what he’d requested. ‘We’re running our own private war here,’ he told her. ‘If we need arms or medicines, we have to raid the Macaronis. They’re an easier touch than the Boche.’

  Days merged into weeks. With Robin running the Resistance by proxy only, through Xavier Rocca, he was able to spend much of his time with Sybilia.

  He wanted to love her physically, touch her, kiss her, feel her in his arms. He watched her all day long, hoping to glimpse that veiled, sensual, provocative smile that used to tempt him so. Her expression remained mute and secretive, like a bird that would not be tamed.

  ‘Is your gran still alive?’ she asked one day out of the blue. It was the first time he realized she’d been paying attention to his monologues. His heart lurched with happiness.

  ‘She died of old age a couple of years ago. I felt it worse than the death of my parents. Perhaps because she was all I had. I felt bad that I couldn’t be there with her at the time. She died alone, and that’s tough.’

  ‘Now you have me,’ Sybilia said.

  He looked around — caught off guard. He’d longed to hear her say that, but lately there had been no indication of any bond between them. Not any more.

  ‘You mean that? You really mean that?’

  ‘Be patient, please. I just need time to forget.’

  ‘We don’t have much of that, Syb. Time’s running out this time round. After the war it’ll be different, but that’s a long way away.’ She didn’t respond any further.

  Chapter 46

  The first time she offered herself to him, it was with such casualness that he felt hurt. For days afterward he went around looking humble and offended. Surely she realized that he loved her. Not just for her body or her looks, which, if the truth were to be told, had faded. No, he loved her for her brave, defiant, obstinate, endearing self. For her intellect, her subtle sense of humour, her wisdom, all these things and more. He tried to tell her, but those abused, dead eyes gazed sullenly back at him.

  After that he refused to sleep in their bed at night, but made a makeshift mattress of hay on the floor.

  ‘Why do you torture yourself? What are you trying to prove? You are a man, after all. Men need sex. I’m here, willing and available.'

  ‘Don’t talk like a tramp,’ he grumbled. ‘You can’t sell yourself as payment for services rendered. Syb, if you can’t love me as much as I love you, then it’s no go.’

  Love him? That was foreign. That was new. A new dimension! She worshipped him, but she had never expected a man to want her to love him. She was not sure that she believed in love between a man and a woman. There was comradeship, which came with time. Sometimes there was loyalty or trust; but love?

  She came to him in the night. She said: ‘Help me. I want to love you, but maybe you won’t want me to when I tell you what happened.’ It all came pouring out in pitch darkness: her loneliness; her failure in marriage, then Dino, who had turned her into a whore. He had defiled her, made her inhuman, until all that was left was her own self-loathing and disgust.

  ‘Renucci’s dead. I wish he wasn’t,’ Robin snarled angrily. ‘I’d like to kill the bastard again.’

  ‘Now you know, will you go away? Will you leave me?’

  ‘I love you.’

  Suddenly she wanted him so much. She stripped off her clothes and snuggled down beside him on his bed of rugs on the floor. He pushed his coat over her and pulled her roughly against him. ‘I’m going to cherish you all my life,’ he said softly. ‘You’re the greatest thing that ever happened to me, Syb. You’ve got no idea how much I love you.’

  He couldn’t explain to her. There weren’t any words, but he could show her. He had to show her with his body. He had to know each part of her, had to own and cherish each small particle of this soft, warm, clinging body melting into his. She lay quiet and close, trembling slightly, a mixture of fear and lust. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that they be joined as one. That was how fate had intended them to be-joined as one.

  It was too dark. He fumbled beside him for his matches and lit a candle. Her eyes shone. He glanced round at the rough wooden beams of the chalet, gleaming yellow in the golden light. This was what it was built for — for this moment. For this moment in time, the beams had mellowed and aged and reached this precise richness of texture. For this moment the fire had blazed and died and left the smouldering, scented pine embers. All this! All of it had been brought together with this lustrous, sensual woman to create this specific moment of perfection which was etched on his mind, never to be forgotten.

  He was bursting with desire. He felt himself rearing up like a massive, selfish limb bent only on impaling itself into yielding flesh, but he wanted so much more. He took her hand and guided it gently, wrapped her fingers around him, felt their soothing touch. He buried his face in her neck, ran his lips over the soft, moist skin, licked her musky, salty taste, sighed.

  Was that his loving voice coming from so far away? A stranger talking. His consciousness was hovering somewhere between his thighs. He clutched her breasts. They were smooth and strangely cool to his touch. Then he ran his mouth over her nipples, felt the puckered skin, so rough against the tip of his tongue. He wanted to touch all of her, all at the same time, so he ripped off his shirt and lay over her, smoothed his hands down her sides, and cradled her buttocks in his hands. ‘Cold, so cold. Why are you cold?’

  Her body gave a long shudder. Then her mouth was searching like a small bird impatient for food. It found his. Her arms coiled round his neck, strong as a python, and her legs clamped over his thighs. She was shifting and moving, her skin creating vibrations and feelings that sent his body into a fever of impatience. ‘Do it, do it!’ A whispered voice in his ear.

  He was so near, yet still he held back. Uncertain! He wanted her to want him.

  She bit his shoulder, and the pain was excruciating. It merged with his desire and momentarily angered him. He lost all control, thrust hard and deep, heard her moan with passion. Then he gave up. Let his body ebb and flow with the rhythm of their shared passion. Faster! Until he lost all sense of himself and every spurt was molten joy.

  Later he gathered her into his arms and brushed his lips over her brow. ‘Next time,' he promised. ‘Next time I’ll wait longer. Was it all right for you?’

  She turned her face toward him. She looked replete and satisfied; her muscles were slack, her mouth slightly open; she was smiling, and her eyes were glowing with pride.

  ‘Can’t you tell?’ she asked.

  Sybilia felt reborn. The idyllic days that followed were links in a long chain of happiness. Seemingly there was no end to it. She was thrilled to feel a vibrant new vitality flooding through her. To Robin she was a living miracle, testament to the power of love. Together they milked their cow and collected eggs from the hens he had brought her. When the cow escaped into the mountains they hunted for her and laughingly led her back. They loved the mornings, the squirrels that scampered down the pines, every flower in its turn, the sunsets, the starry night sky. It was a wonderful place for lazing around — broken only by the need to make love or eat. There was only one sadness, and that was Robin’s increasingly long absences, for it was August, and he was travelling over the island to see the various Resistance leaders.

  Then, on the seventeenth, Allied armies reached Messina, and Sicilian Resistance ended. Suddenly Robin was tense and excited. A different person. He had to get back in control, he explained.

  ‘Rocca and I are at loggerheads. I can’t stay here any longer. You must follow soon. I suppose we’d best not
arrive together. Bring the cow, we’ll fetch the rest later.’

  She was shaking her head obstinately.

  ‘Syb, darling, I need you. There’s no one I trust enough to replace Michel. I want you to run communications and the arms drops — at long last we’re back in communication with the outside world. I’ve got to watch out before the whole lot gets spirited away by Castelli and his commie mob…

  She didn’t respond.

  ‘Come on, Sybilia. You’re better. No more shirking. There’s work to be done.’

  ‘I’m not shirking,’ she said. She sat on the bench he had made, outside the door, and buried her face in her hands. ‘You’ve spoiled me. I don’t want to go back to… all that.’ She waved her hand vaguely in the direction of Taita. ‘After what we’ve had here, I don’t want to have to pretend, to hide around corners, to talk to each other like strangers.’

  ‘Then marry me now. Father Andrews will marry us. What difference does it make if we marry now or later?’

  ‘Oh,’ she gasped. ‘We must think of Rocca and Maria. Michel has been dead for less than four months. It would be like an insult to his memory.’

  ‘You know best.’

  After that they both felt awkward with each other. Their mood was strained and depressed. They ate their last meal in silence, and Sybilia snapped at Robin once or twice.

  All too soon he was ready to leave. He stood at the door and looked at her. She sensed his hurt.

  ‘It’s just that I can’t stand leaving all this… ‘ she gasped, then choked and burst into tears.

  Robin put down his haversack and his gun, came inside and shut the door, and wrapped his arms around her.

  ‘And me? D’you think you’re the only one who’s grieving?’

  Suddenly they were close again. They made love passionately, promising each other to be brave and loyal. When Robin left, Sybilia felt calm and sure of herself and ready to face the world again.