The Stories of William Sansom
Page 14
Of course he never saw the red. Nor did he see what I saw—thrushes I had eaten at lunch, little naked birds served whole and still on thick toast. Birds featherless as fledglings, with their beaks and big-lidded eyes shut and saurian, baby pterodactyls. A delicacy, for their flesh was nurtured on the aromatic scrub. Others in the restaurant lifted the birds with their fingers and picked with their teeth at the heads.
‘I sprang forward! I picked her up, and she was still warm. See, only this morning, warm and fresh from the herbs of the maquis….’
And there he was tacked back again on to his selling course. The flight of fancy was over. But it had been real. He was no poet, he was an engineer and apart from his looks a not uncommon one. Yet, here he was one of a curious breed—the breed of the loving hunter. No regrets, he faced up to the cruelty of life and lived his part of it; and he loved life. An aesthete of the open field, he saw his prey as a thing of beauty. But he saw it according to the scale of his own animality, not with sentiment as a fellow creature. It could only have been love that gave him such joy in killing. He cared much more than on the score of prowess. He cared much more than an ordinary lover of beauty—the debased aesthete who is held to be all heart and sympathy, but who so often becomes the most intolerant of men, a creature refined beyond generous living. But here was the predatory aesthete, a fine mind if a dark one.
However—his words were now of no use—the thoughtful patriarchs rebutted him with their pride. They made no further offer, but simply let him speak himself back into silence. As for him—perhaps he had the whole afternoon to spare and a whole town of buyers to try, or he was defiant on his own terms. In any case, he suddenly turned away, and with a brief word of parting went striding fast round the corner into the afternoon crowd of the Cours Napoléon. I followed. Once round the corner he stopped, undecided. He was still quivering with his extraordinary vehemence, more alive and alight than ever. He paused, one could hear him raging inside: ‘Where now, where now with my little robins?’ Suddenly he decided; in his awkward but swiftly efficient way he darted away into the crowd, into the mixed moving mass of corduroy and dark blue and Latin black and Senegalese red and all the patched-up khaki that made the fashionable throng of this capital street. He disappeared. But I was to see him frequently throughout the afternoon—before the tumultuous evening ever began.
In such a small town it is difficult to avoid meeting again such an acquaintance—particularly as my own afternoon was spent wandering and looking. Thus I saw him in the market town by the quay, out by the railway station with its earnest small trains winding off up the mountains to the old capital of Corte, in a cool stone restaurant spacious with pots of plants and lean tailless dogs, in a bar whose fixtures were of the Empire’s gold and mahogany, in one of the cavernous dark shops sacked with grain and pasta. Each time he was bargaining, brandishing the robins. Not only with the imperturbable Corsican, but with other more vociferous Latins. As the hours passed, so the feathers of the little birds grew fluffed and scragged. But it seemed no one would pay his price; perhaps he deceived himself by applying the higher prices of the mainland to the simpler island economy. It seemed, at all costs, such a small transaction; but the engineer had plainly become obsessed. The transaction had become more important than the profit. Besides, many other small deals could be seen loitering round those streets—there was one tall Senegalese walking slowly from restaurant to restaurant like a priest in his red fez, a single blue-black crayfish weaving its worried feelers from his purple-black hand.
*
Towards four o’clock the sun grew milky and disappeared, massive clouds came lowering in from the sea. The ochreous town grew pale beneath a giant darkness. An hour later, the storm had still not broken. Still it massed strength, piling up weight upon weight of cloud, darkness upon darkness. It was about then, at five o’clock, that I noticed a crowd taking a direction: everyone seemed to be moving down from the Cours and the big Place towards the harbour, in fact towards another square enclosing yet another statue of Napoléon and at the same time the Hotel de Ville.
It was outside this pillared and balconied seat of government that a large crowd now collected. A newly elected deputy was formally taking over his office. Ajaccio had assembled to acclaim him. Now they waited, strolled, chattered, milled; a feeling of storm, of tense expectation, of suppressed revelry tautened the air—and suddenly all the electric lights were switched on. Wired among the branches of the plane and palm trees covering this little square, the yellow bulbs blazed gaudily, lit up the autumn leaves, cut themselves bright against the slate-dark sky above. Through the tall window of the balcony a glittering glass chandelier shone, telling of rich official pomp, of soft ambassadorial feet within.
All Ajaccio! That hot, seedy crowd gathered to the centre of their sun-soaked town with not much more purpose than just to gather, to stir into life. Throughout those latitudes townspeople gathered for the evening parade, for the strolling and passing and turning about in their thousand twilit squares; but this was more—some came with political feeling, others stirred patriotically, for all there was the expectation of an ‘occasion’! So they stood about on the sandy ground under the plane-trees and palms, all eyes on the central yellow building with its chandelier, with its draped swathe of tricolour, with its ionic portico and its old red carpet frayed and holed. Blue-uniformed cadets lined the entrance. A loud-speaker attached to the balcony roared out music from a gramophone—Viennese waltzes, giddying javas, jazz. That loudspeaker seemed to be made all of wire, it grated so. And so also the bell that suddenly chimed five from the clock-tower—a thin wiry bell shrill above the metal music; and the wired feeling of the electric lights among the branches—through the warm air all these makeshift wires galvanized the night. The yellow tower steadily grew paler against the monstrous cloud looming indigo above; soon its stucco seemed to shine against so much darkness; then, from far across the mountains, there flickered sudden violet flashes, like shadows of light growing huge and as swiftly gone—the pagan lightning crossed the mountains with angry leaps, bewildered the electric night.
Such giant violet flickerings made the little square smaller, exaggerated the dreadful clarity of those high wide mountain spaces above. The town huddled closer; nursing its shoddiness; boasting its claim with bright-yellow bulbs and loud music. And several little boys were already letting off ground fireworks, so that crimson and green flares began to colour the crowd, casting fantastic shadows, while small drifts of smoke drifted a light fog here and there.
Napoléon stood moveless in white marble, encircled in his grove of withered palms. Four lions slobbered at his feet, their mouths green with moss over which slow water trickled; it seemed that these lions, snub-faced as pekingese, dropped their saliva as the townsfolk themselves spat, with no ejaculatory effort—it was too hot—only leaning their heads aside and letting the saliva fall. By the railings of this statue a small dark man in khaki plus-fours was tearing up long strips of white paper for makeshift confetti; past him walked two fine dark beauties, black-eyed nubiles of the south, their hair a chemical gold; a group of middle-aged men passed—grey sweaters, brown boots, black hats, silver bristles, striped dusty trousers—and their women with them, shapeless in black; a muscle-chested brown young man in a striped singlet, with a white cap set squarely over his head—the cap had a great white button round as his roving eye; two naval airmen, quiet in their disciplined nonentity, their fear; a large girl with high flat cheek-bones like her thick-boned ankles, as if an olive-skinned Swede; youths slouching quickly, swinging their arms, kicking at odd stones, vigorous and laughing braggishly at each other; a man in khaki breeches and woollen stockings, a motor-racer’s leather cap flapping over his ears; Senegalese; Tunisians; Italians; French—and suddenly, thin and knobbly in pale blue came jerking along that engineer! Now his glasses were off. He still held in his hand the bunch of robins.
As he came round the railings and took a course diagonally across the square, his s
harp inqusitive face pecked in every direction, his eyes darted everywhere—no one in that whole crowd could have escaped him. Then, as usual, he disappeared into a bar.
This bar lay down towards the sea end of the square, whose lower end was open to the quay. It was a cavern bar, with a wide opening like half a huge egg. When I came in, the engineer had already engaged himself heavily with another man, a short man (they all looked short against his long figure). This man wore a leather motor-coat with a fur collar, American army boots and breeches, a beret. As always the blue képi was lowered down at his face, before which swung the robins. However, this time there was a difference. The engineer now held a glass of pastis in his free hand. Moreover, the shorter man had also taken a glass of pastis, and perhaps more than one. He hardly played his part in the discussion of the robins correctly, he was unserious, he smiled, he laughed, he interrupted the engineer to lay an arm on his shoulder, protesting his delight in seeing his old friend the engineer, declaiming and pouting his manly love with a puffing of cheeks and a bracing of biceps. Worse, he praised the robins.
‘Oui, mon Dominique, fine birds! Beauties!’
‘Eh?’
‘Beauties! And good shooting, Dominique, mon cher.’
‘Ah. Mm. But you are right. You see them, you know. There’s no more to be said. I’ll——’
‘Yes, old fellow, good shooting. Dominique knows a rifle. Remember, Dominique, the night at Porto when——’
‘For you especially, for you my old friend, I offer them for only twelve francs the bird. Twelve! No more.’
‘—the night you enaged the good macaronis——’
‘Listen, Emilio, the birds——’
‘Ten macaronis and a beautiful machine gun, phat-ta-ta-tat. And my Dominique with his old rifle, jumping about in the dark, firing from here, there and everywhere like twenty men. By God, you could not blame them.’
‘Emilio, I shot them this morning, five of them.’
‘Macaronis?’
‘Macaronis hell—red-breasts!’
‘Ah, the beauties.’
‘Emilio—ten francs the bird.’
But already Emilio was signing for two more pastis making large round generous signs with his muscular hands, so that two double glasses of the milk-white absinth faced them on the zinc. With an abrupt gesture of impatience the engineer tossed back his first glass, then took up the new one. For a moment he said nothing, but looked down darkly at the robins. Emilio went on to talk of old times in the maquis. Behind them a weak electric light cast the shadows of its bracket across a wall alive with menacing shapes, giant brown sunflowers on an oil-green paper. The paper had been laid over previous embossed decorations, and now bulged and receded, rose and fell without moving. Two bicycles stood against a wicker table. Outside, through the dark arch of the entrance, the Place des Palmiers showed brightness and movement, the crowd was still growing, the flare and smoke of more fireworks veiled it with a sense of furnaces, of carnival. Music echoed across the warm air like the throbbing steam-music of a fair. Emilio had begun a marching-song.
The engineer suddenly emptied his glass and called for two more. He frowned, and as if making a decision emptied also his new glass of pastis. Then, at the top of his voice, he began trying again to sell the birds to Emilio. He shook the birds savagely. One or two small feathers floated down to the wine-stained floor. But Emilio went on singing, now with closed eyes, feet marching up and down, his forearm bunched to slope an imaginary rifle. So that the engineer Dominique’s voice rose also louder, he began to rave. I moved away to the arched door. Emilio, who was neither acting nor insensitive that he was being spoken to, occasionally broke off in the middle of his song to pat the birds and enquire after Dominique’s family.
‘And your mother? How is your mother? Lola, how is Lola? A big girl? Beautiful?’
‘All their lives they have been feeding on the maquis, the herbs. Emilio, eight francs, you rob me.’
Emilio had turned away and was paying much more—sixty francs—for two large pastis. As indeed previously the engineer had done—he who had spent a day trying to sell five birds for about fifty francs. But it was the transaction, not the profit. But now suddenly the arm holding the little birds drooped low, another blue arm reached out to Emilio’s neck—and softly, with an oddly open mouth, the engineer began to croon. He sang in a sweet tenor the same song as Emilio, holding tremulously on to the sustained notes. His whole rapacious face took on the look of a thin old woman transported by sentimental thoughts; now wide open, his lips disappeared thinly stretched to show—a shock—that he had no teeth. The black hole of a mouth looked like one black sunglass.
I could hear gusts of their talk—for every so often they stopped singing and, embracing, exchanged greetings and reminiscence. The glasses of pastis, strong drink of wormwood that first tastes weak, came and went. They grew more and more friendly. Sometimes one said:
‘Eh, Dominique!’
While the other, leaning back the better to survey his old friend, would intone his reply with a frown of loving bravado:
‘Emilio!’
Outside, the tension had reached some sort of a climax—the appearance of the deputy seemed to be due. The crowd had grown thick round the portico of the hotel, I could see the brass instruments of a band flashing dully about the bottom steps. From this centre the square beneath those trees was forested with groups of people, black against the lights, against the whitish firework smoke. Not a crowd dense as in a great city, but a large crowd dispersed, populating the whole square. The plane branches and their dried November leaves made a ceiling of the electric light, such foliage looked papery, like illuminated theatrical trees. Such a ceiling a few feet above the people’s heads existed throughout all the twenty-four hours of all southern towns—in daytime the leaves enclosed with shade the pavement, while all light and energy lay high in the sunlit air above; at night at the same level the shade became reversed, the dark inactive night stretched its black vacuum above, while beneath the same low ceiling all was light and movement.
‘Chestnut cakes at Piana—remember? Fresh from the wood!’
‘The Rizzanese—a real river that, fine cold water!’
‘Ah! le petit vin blanc—
Qu’on boit sous les tonnelles.’
Now they were singing together the generous little waltz-tune. Their movement as they swayed, as the engineer beat time with his bunch of birds, seemed, with the sound of their singing, to fill the dark little bar. Outside night had not yet fallen. There was still in the air, besides the occasion and the music and the fireworks, that excitement, that air of prelude that charges the twilight air with promises of night. Against now a sky the colour of dark iron, the facades of the buildings shone incandescently white, pearl-coloured, pale as bone. Only the decorated Hôtel de Ville broke the regularity of these square façades with their black regular windows; the Hôtel de Ville with its clock-tower, its coat-of-arms, its ionic pillars, its balcony, its brave draping of the blue, white and red flag of France.
‘Emilio, old friend, listen! A mark of esteem in honour of our meeting, in celebration of the Deputy. His Honour. Emilio—a gift —I give you the birds!’
‘Uh?’
‘The birds, my little robins! I give them to you.’
‘What?’
‘For nothing!’
‘Eh?’
‘There, take them.’
‘But … well, many thanks. Many, many thanks.’
‘Ah!’
‘But——’
‘Yes?’
‘But Dominique, my Dominique——’
‘Ah! le petit vin blanc.’
‘But Dominique, I cannot take them. I must pay. Here, fifty francs.’
‘No!’
‘Forty francs.’
‘You insult me!’
‘Take twenty.’
‘If you insist.’
‘There!’
‘Now. Permit me to offer you a pastis.’
Over by the steps now everyone and everything had collected. A passage had been cleared by cadets and police. Down this the old red carpet, dusty and holed, stretched its royal channel. As it finished, so there began the band, an elderly and jovial group of players in assorted clothes—from plus-fours to breeches of corduroy—but each wearing a dark jacket and an old peaked cap. They looked like railwaymen; but each held proudly his brass or silver instrument, and one man was already bent backwards against the weight of his big bass drum. Several small boys ran about in the aisle carrying white boards on sticks. On the boards were written ‘Vive la Republique!’ and ‘Criez le 20 Octobre!’ And on all sides the crowd, old and young, men and women, pressed forward, singing, jostling, shouting, and all waving long strips of white paper.
A brief hush. Movements occurred at the back of the hall inside. The loudspeaker music abruptly stopped. The band raised their instruments to their lips. And on the steps there emerged the deputy and a little procession of officials.
At the same moment the loudspeaker above the balcony burst into music louder, faster, wilder than any before. But it was not the Marseillaise, nor a Corsican anthem, nor any martial song at all. There came the hot thunderous cacophony of negroes—‘Washboard Blues!’ Simultaneously the band began to play—but only the loud thumping of the big drum could be heard above the loudspeaker. The procession began to move down the steps and away. Instantly—for the crowd stood only three feet off on either side—they were mobbed. The air flew with white paper strips. A hundred arms reached forward to touch the deputy. Shouts, cheers, wild whistling. From all sides a battery of fireworks burst—green, yellow, Mephistophelian red. Through all this, the procession struggled away as it could, fighting through the smoke and colour and laughter, then turned sharply right into the Rue Fesch. The famous old street, narrow and winding, was filled to the walls of its tall houses with a jostling mass. All along its serpentine way the people crammed. Away in front, growing dimmer, the beat of the big drum echoed. After it, flexing like a dragon, wound the procession of all Ajaccio. Banners swayed, arms tossed hats high, the dragon swarmed waddling on a thousand unseen legs.