The Rose Café

by John Hanson Mitchell

  Marie had arrived with her parents a few weeks earlier and although she had many admirers, she had selected Chrétien as her consort. At the time, he happened to be the only one around the café who was about her age. He was a lanky young man with crinkly black hair and long-lashed, somewhat effeminate blue eyes who was a distant cousin of the patron, Jean-Pierre.

  Just before the dinner push, I walked down the narrow path to my room behind the restaurant to get a clean shirt. I saw the German guest they called Herr Komandante standing on a promontory above the cottage where I lived, his arms folded over his chest and one leg cocked forward. He was a portly man, dressed now in a blue-striped bathrobe and white espadrilles. His thinning, sandy-colored hair was wet and slicked back from his high, smooth forehead.

  “Been for a swim?” I called.

  “Yes. And now I shall prepare for my dinner,” he said.

  “Jean-Pierre has done a good rabbit fricassée,” I told him.

  He considered this silently, nodding. One of his pastimes here was eating.

  “And what fish?” he demanded.

  “The usual,” I said. “But Vincenzo has just come in with a big grouper.”

  “Good,” said Herr Komandante. “I will take that grouper. Grilled. And I shall begin with a plate of urchins, or perhaps the fish soup, and also a green salad,” he added. “You will tell Micheline, please. I will have one salad. Chestnut flan for the dessert.”

  “I will tell her,” I said.

  “And coffee.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And I will take my digestif on the terrace this night,” he said as an afterthought.

  People at the Rose Café used to mock Herr Komandante behind his back. It was said, among other unfounded rumors, that along with his love for food and sun he had an eye for young boys. But I suddenly felt a wave of compassion for him, here alone on a French island, a German in the midst of a people with long memories, isolated by language and culture, and seeking only to enjoy a few sensual pleasures. Who could blame him?

  Back in the kitchen, the evening meal was in full swing. Chrétien and Micheline were rushing in and out, shouting for plates. Jean-Pierre was sweating and smoking, the ash salting his standard dish of grilled rascasse, a spiny red fish that he would season with myrtle, bay, rosemary, and other herbs brought in from the countryside. Micheline had started to spout her Sunday litany of complaints about the idiosyncrasies of certain diners; Vincenzo shifted his pans at the stove like a timpanist; and his wife, Lucretia, who helped on busy weekends, wandered in and out, talking loudly in patois and contributing little more than gossip about the diners.

  I filled a copper tub with boiling water from the stove and prepared for the evening onslaught, and soon the dishes were coming in, one load after another like wounded soldiers from the front: first a table setting of soup bowls, then a few smaller plates, then some dinner plates, and forever, like foot soldiers, the silverware.

  There was a perennial shortage of settings at the restaurant; it was not the cooking of Jean-Pierre and Vincenzo that slowed the service, it was the lack of plates and silverware. I had to wash, dry, and return settings as soon as they came in or there would be nothing for the guests to eat from. It was not so bad on ordinary nights, but sometimes on weekends, in the rush, the flood of plates and the swirl of dirty water and the outcry from Chrétien and Micheline for more plates came on relentlessly. No one was proud at the Rose Café. When a backlog built up and the main courses were served, Jean-Pierre himself would wander back and wash a few of his pots; so would Vincenzo.

  In due time, as the departure hour for the ferry grew nearer, the incoming stream dwindled, as it always did. Chrétien sat in the corner for a few minutes, drinking a coffee and gossiping about the diners, his long legs stretched halfway across the narrow kitchen. Micheline brushed back her hair and goosed Jean-Pierre as she slipped by him with a tray of desserts, and then Vincenzo loomed behind me in the scullery door with a small glass of marc, which he set on the stone sink.

  “Drink up, old man. It’s over for the day,” he said.

  Now, in the quiet darkness of the terrace, the geckos emerged and waited in the little pools of lamplight on the white stucco walls, snapping at insects. The few lingering guests sat with their chairs pushed back, enjoying a coffee or a glass of marc and the night air coming in off the harbor. Herr Komandante stepped out from the warm interior of the dining room and stood at the edge of the terrace, gazing outward at the black wall of the mountains beyond the harbor, his hands jammed into the side pockets of his blazer. A fishing boat came in, its lights fragile against the vast darkness of the water, and slowly, one by one, the guests disappeared, and we were alone with the sharp perfume of salt air and the high black screen of the night.

  It was at these times, just as the quiet little village on the other side of the harbor was putting itself to bed and the lights began winking out in the bedrooms, that the life of the Rose Café would begin to stir. Now the night crowd began to collect.

  Max was the first to come in. He mounted the steps to the terrace slowly, favoring his right leg—an old war wound, they said. He extended his hand to me, limply.

  “It goes?” he asked.

  He was an amiable sort who always asked after my well-being and spoke English, although he tended to translate literally and had such a thick accent it was necessary to know French to understand him. Max had a pencil-thin mustache and always dressed in loose gabardine slacks and sandals with socks and a white shirt, open at the neck. He was from Ajaccio and, like many on the island, claimed to be a descendant of Corsica’s most famous son, Napoléon. The rumor around the café was that Max had played an important role in one of the local resistance networks in the south and had been in charge of surreptitious arms shipments from North Africa. But maybe that was just another story.

  Max walked over and shook Vincenzo’s hand and then sat down heavily at a table at the edge of the terrace and stared out at the harbor.

  Two more figures materialized at the far end of the causeway, walking slowly, one with a coat draped over his shoulders. This was André, who was accompanied that evening by a man with a long, sad face named François, who sometimes joined the nightly card game. The two of them shook hands all around and took their places.

  André slapped a deck of cards on the table.

  They stared out at the harbor.

  André was fair, with blond hair and blue eyes and a slow, somewhat studied gait. In the hot light of the day he always wore sun-faded blue shorts and a sailor jersey. He was soft-spoken and smoked lazily, and would often sit at the edge of the verandah in the shade, nursing a coffee, his eyes ranging among the guests in search of newly arrived pretty women. I had heard that when he was young, at the insistence of his grandmothers, he had studied to be a priest and had worn short wool pants and little schoolboy caps. But he left the church altogether as soon as his grandmothers died.

  The night drew closer; something splashed in the darkness of the outer bay, and then we heard the whine of an engine on the road to the town. A speeding motorbike darted out onto the causeway and streaked toward the café, its headlight bouncing on the rough road. It pulled up abruptly, and a small man with high cheekbones and narrow blue eyes bounded up the stairs to the terrace. This was the sometime glassmaker, Jacquis. He was a wiry type with extravagant gestures and fiery delivery, and whenever he won at cards, which was often (I suspect the others let him win), he would slap the table and shout victoriously, even if it was two in the morning and the guests were sound asleep overhead. Jacquis had many stories of criminal families who had devised ingenious revenges, cruel police, and hideous atrocities committed by the Nazis against the maquisards, the local resistance fighters.

  Jean-Pierre ambled out from the interior of the kitchen. He had removed his stained apron and toque, and he wore faded blue trousers, a short-sleeved shirt, and worn-down espadrilles that slapped on the terrace when he walked. He took his place at the tab
le.

  “OK?” he said. “Shall we begin?”

  André passed the deck to Jacquis, who snatched it up and dealt with practiced speed. The players fanned out their cards, eyeing them through their cigarette smoke.

  Every night this same troupe would come out to the restaurant to play a card game known as brisca, a local variation of the Italian game briscola, which is played with a forty-card deck with suits marked with coins, cups, batons, or swords. Sometimes the troupe came out early, just before dinner, and would wander back into the kitchen sampling Jean-Pierre’s sauces with hunks of fresh bread, brought in that morning by Pierrot, the little walleyed bread man. Sometimes they arrived with obscure women from the hill towns, and from time to time one of them would show up with a new consort from the continent. With the women present, they would play the courtier, holding out the chairs, bowing and scraping, making introductions proudly, and fetching glasses of cold rosé from the bar. On some weekend nights a band would appear, and the regulars would dance on the terrace, holding their partners cheek to cheek and bending forward in the apache two-step dance style that used to be popular with Parisian lowlifes in the old days.

  But the constant there was the card game. It was a nightly ceremony that held their world together. Elsewhere, in the interior of the island in those times, there were still vendettas. Elsewhere there were smugglers and crooked politicians who conveniently disregarded the shipment of illegal goods from the continent. And somewhere out there in the real world beyond the red-rock shores and the green, flat seas, there were strikes and demonstrations, street bombings, wars, and revolutions. And always and everywhere, there was the aftermath of the big war, the war that shook the foundations of Europe.

  Down in the dusty town square, every day at three in the afternoon, you could see old members of the Corsican underground with their long-distance eyes. They would gather there to roll boules and smoke and sit in the cafés and attempt to either recapitulate or obliterate their pasts. Sometimes at the local concerts, when the band played the old sentimental melodies from the time before the deluge, you might see a tear well up in the corners of the eyes of the older men. But out here at the Rose Café, on the little islet known as les Roches Rouges, the framework that sustained the universe was a deck of cards bearing the iconic images: the coin, the cup, the baton, and the sword.

  Twenty minutes into the second round of cards, we heard a scraping at the steps to the terrace, and a figure in a white suit emerged out of the moist, warm night. Slowly, with a studied grace, a tall man climbed the steps and stood for a moment in the little stage of light at the edge of the terrace, his hand resting on the rail. He was dressed in a Belgian linen suit and a light blue shirt with a purple tie, and he had a deeply tanned face and silvery hair that he combed back over his ears like wings. Even in the half-light I could see the bright glitter of intense blue eyes.

  Spotting the table of regulars, he walked toward them. Wordlessly, the players moved over to make space for him. Jean-Pierre spun over a chair from an adjacent table.

  “Shall we begin again?” the tall man said.

  This was the man they called “le Baron,” a gentleman of uncertain origins with a slight Belgian accent, who lived in a large villa at the end of a cypress-lined drive on the edge of the maquis. Le Baron did not often descend to play cards with the regulars at the Rose Café, but whenever he did I noticed that a subdued formality would settle over the table. Jacquis did not win as often when he was there. The regulars did not let him.

  From my first glimpse of this man earlier in the season in the town square, I had a sense that there was something different about him, some odd mix of authority and benevolence, or maybe malice that set him apart from everyone else in the town. I had seen his type from time to time in Nice and in some sections of Paris, but never here, never in Corsica. He seemed to me an emblem of an old, dying culture, some player in an elemental European drama that had once held the stage and whose retired actors were still wandering amid the ruins of the postwar continent. I watched as he fanned out his cards and glanced around the table. Every motion, even the slightest gesture, seemed to have an elegant grace, a phrasing of manners accumulated over the centuries.

  Once I had finished the last of the pots I went out and joined Micheline and Chrétien, who were sitting apart from the players at a table near the verandah.

  “They found the fisherman,” Micheline said. “He was dead at the tiller. They brought him in at dusk. Apparent heart attack.”

  Micheline, who was probably in her midthirties, was originally from Paris. She had olive skin and a fall of curly chestnut hair, and she always wore striped Moroccan slacks and hooped gold earrings. People told me she had been a painter before she met Jean-Pierre, and I would sometimes see her sketching at a table on the terrace on idle afternoons. Once, when no one was around, I surreptitiously looked through her sketchbook. The images were all wild, heavily inked abstractions that bore absolutely no resemblance to the landscape that she would refer to as she worked. She might have found a name for herself in Paris, I suppose, but now she mostly concerned herself with account books and dealings with local deliverymen, carpenters, and plumbers.

  The card game forged on, a slow, shifting drama of obscure events complete with incident and resolution, climax and denouement. The world was contained in cards: An explosion of matchlight against the black wall of night. The slap of a card on the table. The occasional exclamation of victory or loss.

  I cleaned up a few glasses and went to bed.

  Later that night, while I was asleep, the wind came up. I could hear it first ranging over the red-tiled rooftop of the little auberge with its emptied café and its papered upstairs rooms. The sound woke me, and I went to the east window and looked back at the harbor. In the light of the moon, I could see a strange white ketch with a wishbone rig just dropping anchor. Then I heard the surge of waves in the cove below my cottage, and then the wind took on a deeper growl. The libeccio was beginning to blow, the warm, moist wind that would swirl off North Africa, cross Gibraltar, and sweep over the Mediterranean to the east coast of Italy, hammering all the islands in its path.

  The wind undid people, it was said. On such nights there were vendettas and dark assignations. On such nights, the Corsican zombies known as mazzeri awoke to roam the wildlands, wantonly tearing apart any wayward sheep or goat or dog they happened to encounter.

  The wind unsettled me, too. On certain nights there, when it howled across the mountains and made ominous moans and whispers as it swirled through the rocks above my cottage, I would wake, light a candle, and write until it burned out.

  chapter two

  The Nearest of the Distant Lands

  In the old days there was a saying that if Corsica were a woman she would suffer great temptations, for she is very poor and very beautiful. They also used to say—still do in fact—that when you approach from the sea and the wind is right, you can smell the island before you actually see it. I don’t know whether the first axiom is true. But I can attest to the second.

  On my way back to the island from Nice, I went out onto the foredeck of the ferry and caught the scent of something—the sharp resinous smell of laurel rose and thyme, of arbutus, broom, and eglantine. It was the smell of maquis, the scrubby thickets of small trees and shrubs that characterize the vegetation of the foothills below the higher peaks.

  Corsica was out there somewhere, still lost in the luminous emerald-green mist where the sea met the sky.

  It was warm; the sea was calm; a spaceless green spread out before us, and astern the wake trailed off in two long white furrows. No wind. No gulls. And, except for the steady throb of the engines, no sound. It was as if at some point after the last of France sank beneath the horizon, we had become unhinged from time and had entered into an unbounded blue-green atmosphere where past and future ceased to exist.

  Corsica is nestled in the northeast corner of the Mediterranean, a fist-shaped island of approximately 3,352 s
quare miles, with a single forefinger—Cap Corse—pointed northward to the border with Italy and France. For three thousand years, the island served mainly as a stopover for the civilized world beyond, a harbor of refuge or at most a defensive outpost or staging area for raids on the mainland for the various cultures—Greek, Roman, Carthaginian, and Phoenician—that stopped off here en route to someplace else. The indigenous islanders were said to be savage and somber and not given to warm welcomes.

  Odysseus landed on Corsica, Homer says, on his way back to Ithaca. He and his fleet put into a narrow island harbor surrounded by high cliffs and anchored there, hoping for welcome. Odysseus climbed to a rocky promontory and surveyed the land but could see no trace of cattle or any signs of habitation other than a few columns of smoke rising from the forested interior. He sent three scouts ashore to find out what manner of man lived in this desolate place. On shore, the scouts encountered a young woman drawing water from a well. The men asked who was the king of her people, and she pointed to a high-roofed house on a rise, the castle of her father, Antiphates, the king of this mountain-backed fastness. The sailors entered the house and beheld an enormous woman there, as large as a mountain peak, Homer says. She summoned her husband, Antiphates, who instantly snatched up one of Odysseus’s men and prepared him for dinner. The other two barely managed to escape and fled to the ships, but the king raised an alarm and from all points, a huge race of giants, the dreaded Laestrygones, came swarming down to the harbor. They stood on the cliffs and rained down immense boulders on the fleet, sinking the ships and spearing the men who were left struggling in the waters like fish. These they retrieved and carried off for dinner.

  The wily Odysseus had left his black ship at the outer edge of the harbor, and seeing the hopeless carnage, he cut the anchor cable. His men threw their weight into the oars and they sped out from under the overhanging cliffs and the rain of boulders to open water, leaving a wake as they raced away. The rest of Odysseus’s fleet was destroyed, and, glad to have escaped death but grieving for their lost companions, the small company sailed on to the island of Aeaea, where the lovely-haired witch, Circe, resided.