Marie was out on the terrace dancing a hot caper with a couple of local boys who had seen her in the town periodically. She was wearing a red skirt, cut close at the hips but flared just below her knees, and she had on a tight, striped sailor’s jersey, cut square at the neck, and big hooped earrings and dark little ballet slippers. Every time I would go out to serve a table she was there with a new partner, swinging her hips, twirling under his arm, swaying back, and then reuniting with her partner, cheek to cheek, only to break away again and spin off into a twirl. She put them all to shame, old and young alike, with her speed and her lithe turns and dips.
After the events of the afternoon, I felt a little resentment seeing her out there with questionable local toughs from the village, but I was too busy to dance with her anyway. In any case, this sentiment was nothing compared with the green eye of jealousy that was piercing the night from Chrétien. Every time he went out on the terrace with a tray he glared at her. At one point, she floated past him in a slow number, cheek to cheek, and for a second perceived his venomous glare. She turned quickly and spun into her partner’s arms, and the two of them twirled off, their bodies molded together.
It occurred to me that the young town boy was lucky that Chrétien was a civilized graduate student in philosophy at the Sorbonne whose parents had a big flat on the Champs Elysées. Up in the isolated hill towns, incidents of this sort still begat knife fights. As it was, he retreated to the bar and was downing a glass of fiery marc when I came in for more orders.
“Not worth it,” he muttered. “Not a chance. She’s a tease. A mindless, egotistical little tease. A nanny goat coming into estrus but not yet ready to receive the male. I’m through with her.”
I tried to find the French idiom for “there are many fish in the sea,” but I couldn’t come up with it.
At one point, later in the night, I saw le Baron sitting at the bar with Max. He was dressed as always in his clean linen suit, and he had turned to face the dance floor. I noticed that he was eyeing Maggs, who was at this point dancing a slower number with Peter and looking rather bored, I thought.
“Busy night, isn’t it?” le Baron said to me when I passed.
I agreed and carried on, and when I passed by him again, he said, “I hope you’ll get some time to dance. There are some pretty little dark-eyed Corsican girls out there for you, no?”
I laughed and carried on. “No time so far,” I said.
Slowly, the night began to calm. The gypsies took a break and sat on the terrace wall drinking beer and smoking privately. Micheline went over and sat with them for a while sharing a cigarette, and I saw them eyeing her in a way I didn’t like when she left them and walked off across the terrace. She had on her Moroccan striped trousers, masses of clanky jewelry, and she looked good that night, flushed, with coppery skin and her fall of uncontrollable hair.
One of the gypsies said something out of the corner of his mouth to his partner as he watched her walk away, and the other smiled and snickered through his nose.
After a break they picked up again but started playing slower numbers. The dancers clung together now, circling the floor as the music swept along—pale rose petals, floating across the stone terrace under the half-light of the Chinese lanterns.
Le Baron came out from the interior and danced with Micheline in a formal, graceful style, holding her around the waist with his left arm crooked, his back ramrod straight. He looked down on her kindly from his upright position—even lovingly, you might say if you were the type to read significance into superficialities. But the number wound down, then ceased, and she broke away and went back to work. Five minutes later I saw le Baron dancing with Marie. He moved with the same solicitous formality, the same glowing look of kindly love, chatting on with her as they ranged around the terrace, feet stepping delicately. She didn’t miss a beat, and she threw back her head and laughed at something he said, arching her body into his, and then spinning off into one of her perfect twirls. Their feet moved gracefully together in a patterned foxtrot with an airy lightness, as if they were not touching the heavy stone of the terrace.
The music slowed even more, and then the gypsies played “Good Night Ladies,” and the little tripping circlets of the guitar runs spiraled upward and outward, and the violin complained, and then they segued into an apparent favorite for the evening, “Red Sails in the Sunset,” and then it was over, and the people slipped off arm in arm down the causeway into the darkness.
We cleared the tables, straightened the chairs, and then extinguished the lanterns and we were suddenly alone under that black, star-pierced curtain of the Corsican night.
chapter seven
The Barefoot Contessa
Marie and her tutor never worked out very well. She was supposed to meet with him twice a day, once in the morning and then again in the afternoon—at the unheard-of hour of two o’clock, when the sun was at its hottest and the air at its thickest, and the café and the town square were emptied of all life. I would often see Marie and the tutor sitting together at a shaded table on the verandah: Giancarlo, the professor, in his gray suit and tie, Marie in as few clothes as possible, swinging her leg restlessly and allowing her eyes to stray over the landscape beyond the harbor while her would-be teacher fixed her with his hawkish glare.
“Oui, oui, oui, je comprends, je comprends, oui,” I could hear her saying impatiently.
“You understand what?” Giancarlo would insist, “To understand is to acquire. What is the origin of the word understand? It is to stand beneath, to take in mind an idea, a phrase, the depth of a human soul, and if, in fact, you take it in mind, then it is a part of you. Therefore, I wish you to tell what part you have taken in, please? I do not observe any empirical evidence of comprehension on your part, mademoiselle.”
And on it would go. Giancarlo would back up, analyze every word and phrase in every possible combination and permutation, and then, little by little, move on to the next possible interpretation of the next idea. He was driving her crazy. But Chrétien found him intriguing and would sometimes join them, arguing over the connotations of certain phrases, citing various interpretations from various linguistic authorities. Marie would excuse herself to go to the bathroom during these sessions and then go to the beach. Giancarlo would by that time be so engaged in a discussion of Bergson’s theories of duration and simultaneity that he would fail to notice that he had lost his pupil. And so it went, until finally, whenever he was free, Chrétien would take the place of Marie. They argued about everything: the doctrines of the church, intuitive knowledge, the question of the stream of consciousness, Sartre’s being and nothingness, as well as the question of Gide’s acte gratuit and the nature of free will, a subject on which Giancarlo’s pupil was perhaps the ultimate local authority.
At the end of June, Marie’s parents came down for a few days, intending to take her with them to visit an auntie who had a villa for the season near Vence. They stayed on for the long weekend, but unlike the other guests—many of whom had no particular passions other than to eat and drink and relax in the sun—they grew restless and were forever walking into town to the public phone offices to put through calls to their respective news bureaus.
I saw Simone out on the terrace one afternoon, her flowery muumuu lifted above her knees, head back to the sun, half-asleep and yawning periodically.
“Tired?” I asked as I passed her table.
“Yes,” she said. “Tired of nothing to do.”
I moved a few chairs and picked up a journal someone had left, and read a few passages about popular music in Paris.
“What are you doing out here, anyway?” Simone asked. “You’re a student someplace?”
There followed the usual small talk. And when I expressed an interest in writing, she jokingly advised me against it.
“Look at us,” she said, “dogged by everyone. If you write, someone will hate you.”
I told her about the interesting stories I had been picking up here on the island
about local resistance fighters.
“Yes, but don’t believe it. You do know that after liberation, all of a sudden half the males in France were in the resistance?”
“I don’t believe. But the stories are entertaining.”
“That’s it. All entertainment. Except for some. Some are too real. Then you try to tell it and they try to shut you up. That’s the job of the state, isn’t it? Keep the press quiet.”
She began to spin out a long story that had recently broken about what some journalists were calling a police “massacre” that had taken place in Paris back in October. The Algerians in Paris, long oppressed and living under a curfew, had turned out on the streets in huge numbers one night to protest the curfew. Police responded accordingly and put down the demonstration.
“Only they were killing protestors in the process,” she said. “Papon and his troupe.”
Maurice Papon was the Paris chief of police, a man hated by the left and a Nazi sympathizer who would later be convicted for his role in the deportation of French Jews from the Bordeaux area.
Simone’s story astonished me. I think I had been there that night.
I was coming back to my room after dinner and was talking to a friend of mine on the phone in a booth at the end of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, near the Seine, when I was engulfed by a sea of Algerians surging down the boulevard toward the river. I remembered the incident distinctly because this was the first time I had ever seen Algerian women, and because they were ululating in loud, ringing cries that filled the night air. I described the scene to my friend as it was occurring, and he became very agitated and told me to get down to the nearest Métro and take the first train, no matter where it was going.
I stepped out of the booth and was instantly swept along by the crowd. No one seemed to resent my presence, in fact my memory of it is that they were having a good time. The women were waving their hands in the air and chirping and shouting and laughing, and I was carried along by this great sweeping tide to the station by the river. I had no choice; there were so many, and they were packed so tightly, you had to move with them. My inclination was to stay and watch, but my friend had been so agitated that I took his advice, fought through the current to the corner, and ducked down into the station.
I couldn’t be certain, but I thought that above the roar of the first train I had heard gunshots.
Simone was shocked by this story.
“You were there?” she asked, horrified. “You actually saw them? Do you know that the police killed maybe as many as one hundred people that night, right at that spot? They threw the bodies into the Seine. A massacre, but it was completely covered up. I don’t know whether you remember the news the next day. They reported the riot and little else. People with information—witnesses like you—they were ignored. Police wouldn’t talk to the press to corroborate. Of course they wouldn’t. Why should they? You kill people and then throw them in the river, you’re not going to admit it to the press. We really don’t know the whole truth yet. But there are people working to find out. Still, no authorities are talking, but there are some who say de Gaulle knew all about this pending demonstration and let Papon have his way. He was saving himself with a bow to the right, they say. You know, there was genuine fear that there was going to be a right-wing coup d’état. Someone had to give the right a little breathing room is the theory. So de Gaulle, he looks the other way. Let it be.”
She went on to spin out stories of the big news breaks in Paris that she and her husband had been dealing with over the past winter. It was indeed an exciting year in France, with the forces of the right-wing generals and the police, who supported the European Algerian colonials, opposing the left, which supported independence for Algeria. I was surprised to realize how many incidents I had witnessed.
I had gotten used to the dreaded predawn pounding on doors of the cheap rooms around Place Monge where I often stayed, and the shakedowns for proper identity cards, plus a few incidents of police brutality inflicted upon my left-wing student friends. And one night that winter, staying with an au pair friend at a good address on the Left Bank, I was awakened by the thud of a predawn explosion. That night the right wing, the OAS, had tried to blow up Jean-Paul Sartre’s apartment, which was located just down the street from where I was staying.
Many of my friends in Paris were intensely political, some actively involved with the FLN, the National Liberation Front, and every night at the café near Saint-Placide they would get into intense arguments over Algeria—or over anything political, it seemed to me. You could not enter a WC in those years without reading through political graffiti advocating one cause or another. Most of my student friends, French and German alike, had very little allegiance to their countries. “We’re for Europe,” they would argue.
All this was in sharp contrast to the detached life I had been leading in the green and budding suburbs of the East Coast of the United States, where the biggest concern was to find the next party.
“I heard from Marie that you are interested in this man they call le Baron?” Simone said.
I tried to seem indifferent but admitted that I was.
“Sort of,” I said. “He’s interesting. He’s so different from anyone else around here. More like a type you’d see in Saint-Tropez.”
“He is the type you see in Saint-Tropez,” she said.
I asked if she knew anything about him.
“No, only his sort,” she said. “Old money. Too much time on his hands.”
“But was it old money? Or did he get it some other way?”
I told her Fabrizio’s story.
“Not impossible,” she said. “But then some of those old monarchist types—if that’s what he is—Hitler would just put them under house arrest. Some of them helped the underground. A few got caught and executed. But I never heard of anyone from old Belgian families actively helping Nazis.”
“But couldn’t he have just been helping himself?” I said.
She began to laugh. “Maybe. Why not?” she said.
At the end of the weekend, Marie and her family left for Calvi to get the ferry back to Nice. They took Giancarlo with them and paid his bill.
After the dance and their falling-out, Chrétien purposely stayed away from Marie on the day she left, even though most of the staff came out to kiss her goodbye. She would be back in ten days, but without her somehow the café lacked some of its decoration. She was like some exotic animal that lived around the estate grounds and emerged from the forest at dusk, to the delight of her watchers.
For a while after Marie left, Chrétien would corner me on the terrace with complaints about her absence. He seemed to be attempting to convince himself that it was a good thing that they were no longer together. I had to listen over and over again to his descriptions of his tender nights with her and her earnest declarations of love and admiration for him. “And then what?” he said. “Nothing. A few kisses, a few intimate caresses, and it is over. Go back to your own room. Finito. Basta. Noli me tangere.”
He slapped the bar and spread out his palms to the world at large, raising his arms. “Ma che?—what can you do? It is finished.”
“Good,” I said.
“What do you mean good?” he asked loudly. “Why good? You want her?”
“No,” I said. I did not tell him about our wrestling match in the water.
“She loves you. I can see it,” he said. “She eyes you when you are not watching. She watches you when you come out with that broom and go around pretending to sweep the floor and clear dishes. You are to be her next victim. Be careful.”
“Will you pray for me?” I asked.
He fell into one of his paroxysms of laughter.
“But of course,” he said. “But it is not necessary. She will pray for you herself if you get too close. She will tell you she is going to pray for you. She will tell you she is going to go into a nunnery and pray for you if you persist with her.
“Catholic!” he shouted suddenly t
o no one in particular. “Theist! Believer in myths and fairy tales, fabrications to hold the worker in thrall to the anvil and the plow. I tell her there should be no religions in the world. She asks God to forgive me, so I challenge God to strike me dead. I shout at the sky and he doesn’t strike. ‘He will,’ she says. ‘Later.’ So I tell her that if there is some god up there he’s a creep. She is better than God, far more beautiful, and not as cruel. ‘Stop,’ she says. ‘Don’t go on.’ She is in shock. ‘What can I possibly mean, better than God? Nothing is better than God.’ So I ask her, would she go out and kill people with plagues and wars, would she cause innocent babies to suffer and then die, would she purposely allow those with no hope of salvation—animals, for instance—to suffer? ‘Stop!’ she says. ‘No more.’ She stuffs her ears.
“But it’s all a joke, you see. She’s not a real Catholic. She doesn’t believe in the Church any more than I do. Ask her parents. This is a new thing with her. Her parents are good atheists. She was never confirmed, never went to Mass until she was fourteen, and then she went on her own, against her parents’ will.”
“Well, that explains it,” I said. “It will pass.”
“Maybe. But why could it not have passed in the bedroom during an embrace?”
One afternoon toward the end of that week, I saw Chrétien leering from the terrace, crouching half-hidden by the verandah walls.
“Look what’s coming,” he said when I joined him.
Out on the road, three people were approaching: a young red-haired man with glasses, a dark, short-haired woman in her late twenties or early thirties, and behind them, striding along, a voluptuous young woman in a white shift with tanned skin and a fall of chestnut hair, barefoot.
“It is the Barefoot Contessa coming here,” Chrétien said. “What a beauty. The Queen of Night.”
“More like a contadina,” I said, “a peasant, coming in from the fields.”
“Non, non, non,” Chrétien said. “Not a contadina, not at all, she is from a good family—nobility. A long line of Italian dukes, conceived in the night gardens beside the moonlit fountains of Tuscany. Look at the way she walks. The peasant waddles when she comes in from the field, tired from work, carrying the heavy-fruited baskets. Look at the forceful, straightforward stride of this young noblewoman. She may be a contessa, but she is lit within by burning animal passions, you can tell.”
The Rose Café Page 10