Dull-witted he may well have been, but I noticed that, like his father, Pierrot maintained a store of knowledge about lizards and birds and the uses of local plants.
He finished his beer and said goodbye, and I watched him amble off through the square, occasionally stopping to chat with a few of the men his age. Except for his walleye, he did not seem substantially different from anyone else in the village.
On my way back to work I watched the carousel for a while before I turned down the street that led out to the causeway. Worried mothers watched attentively as their little ones spun in the trapped circle, the horses and zebras rising and falling, rising and falling, the canned calliope music bouncing along.
The carousel slowed and stopped, and released one troupe of riders while the next group selected their chosen mounts. There was a little boy of about three or four who was afraid of the zebra, but his sister, who couldn’t have been older than seven or eight herself, leaned over him and escorted him forward; she encouraged him to pat the zebra, and then helped him up onto the saddle. He held on to the post tightly, wide-eyed and terrified. His sister got up behind him and circled him with her arms on the post and leaned forward with her cheek to his. And then they were off.
Up and down, around and around, the high, circling dog-trot waltz rhythm belling along, zebra heads up, horse heads down, appearing and disappearing in the fixed circle, wild eyes, gaping jaws, manes flying, and the innocent faces of laughing children, lost in the joyous absurdity of the circle.
When I left I noticed that the little boy was smiling proudly, tears still glistening in his eyes.
chapter eight
Migrants
Migratory birds begin to arrive on the western slopes and headlands of Corsica as early as February, flying north from their wintering grounds in Africa. By March their numbers swell, and by April the maquis is alive with the chirrups and chips and songs of the local nesting birds, including the fluted bell of the blackbird, the explosive little call of the Cetti’s warbler, and the various trills, churrs, squeaks, whistles, and buzzes of the linnets and the pipits, and the bee-eaters and buntings.
A pair of house martins began building a nest over a wall lamp earlier in the spring. We saw them first darting through the verandah like half-seen shadows and hovering around the wall lamp where the geckos used to collect at night. Then after a few days, they started to bring in nest materials. You would be lounging in one of the chairs on the verandah with a book and a drink, half-asleep from the heat, and imagine, or perhaps dream, that something just flew past your ear, and then, awake, you would see the bird fly out again in search of more twigs. The work went on for a week or so and then, after much scrambling and aerial display, the female laid her eggs and began incubating.
I brought a chair over one afternoon while the birds were off feeding and felt the warm little rounded shells and then quickly retreated before the mother returned.
Figaro, Micheline’s overweight tabby cat, expressed a passing interest in these two birds and would sometimes lie stretched out under the lamp, but he was too lazy to bother to try to catch one.
By late June the martins had hatched one brood of nestlings and were working on another. The parents were swooping in under the beamed roof at regular intervals with beaks full of insects that they would feed to their young. We could hear their cheeping as soon as the parents would arrive and see their gaping mouths just above the edge of the nest.
Another species of migrant began passing through about this time. A rude couple of pieds-noirs, as the European Algerians were called, booked a room in late June, but they so offended Micheline with their abrupt demands that she became curiously inactive whenever they would ask for something.
“Bring us two demis,” they would command.
“Straightaway,” she would say and rush off to the kitchen behind the bar, where she would sit in a chair just behind the back door of the scullery and smoke a cigarette. After five minutes or so, she would bring out one beer.
“We wanted two,” they demanded.
And off she’d go for another five minutes.
Dinners were equally slow, and soon they stopped eating at the restaurant, and then one day, they left.
The same thing happened—unintentionally this time—with two gentlemen from London who were traveling together and checked in, intending to stay for a few days. They were perfectly civilized types who dressed in collared shirts with cravats, stuck to themselves, and were always polite, albeit aloof from the locals.
Staff in the kitchen at the Rose Café had the sometimes unfortunate habit of giving nicknames, such as Herr Komandante, to guests and diners. One evening, one of the visiting Englishmen sent back a plate. Micheline snatched it up and charged into the kitchen, announcing that one of the English finocchio was not happy with his dinner. He had followed her in to explain something further, was apparently fluent in both Italian and French, and caught the homosexual reference. Coolly, but still civil, they checked out the next morning.
One night in midsummer a ketch came into the quay and dropped off a strange, silent couple, who arrived at the café and demanded rooms. Micheline went through her usual sham of checking to see if there was space, which there was, and the couple went silently to their room and remained there. They were a handsome pair, both tall and slim with an aristocratic air about them. They had Eastern European accents but French passports.
The couple came down in the morning and ordered coffee and pain beurré, and after breakfast they walked to town and did not come back till late in the evening. For three days they followed this routine, rising early, taking coffee and buttered bread, rarely speaking, even to each other. They wore the same clothes every day and did not seem to have much luggage. Then on Sunday night, having collected their papers on fictitious pretenses, they caught the ferry to the continent and left without paying.
While they were there, a Cuban man named Mendoza showed up with his daughter and booked a room for a week. He was of recent Spanish extraction and was cut from the same stone as Vincenzo: dark eyes, high cheekbones, and a mass of curly black hair above a brush mustache. His daughter, Conchita, was a dark-eyed young thing, about fourteen years old. Mendoza was a guitarist who made his living by taking gigs at small local bistros on the Riviera—or so he claimed. In fact, he seemed to have access to private funds; he certainly could not have made very much money at the locales in which he performed. The two of them had been traveling for months, he said. They stayed in Seville, where he still had family; in Malaga; the Balearic Islands; Cannes; and then Nice, where he had played at a local club and where (so he said) he fell in with a rich widow for a few months. He must have retreated to Corsica to untangle himself from some web of love, although he didn’t say that.
He and his daughter stayed on for three weeks, and at no charge would sometimes entertain guests on the terrace with Cuban folk tunes and Spanish fandangos. When she was in the mood, Conchita would dance in the flamenco style, snapping her fingers and clapping rhythmically, clicking her tongue and stamping her feet. Chrétien would occasionally attempt to join her when he had had a little too much to drink.
One afternoon about this time I saw a blond man of about forty, with a bulbous nose and little, piggy eyes, sitting on the verandah nursing a beer. I passed his table as I was sweeping the floor, and he asked me if I knew anyplace in the town that rented rooms. I told him we had rooms here, and that he should speak to Micheline.
“Where are you from?” he asked. “Italy?” This was a question that was becoming de rigueur.
I told him and we fell into conversation. He had been hanging around Monte Carlo for a few months, he told me, apparently with some success—until recently.
“Just lost a fortune,” he said.
He ordered another beer, which I brought out to him.
“So you’re an American, eh?” he stated. “I’ll wager you fifty francs you can’t name the fifty states.”
“No deal,” I said.
“I can’t do it.”
I had been around small-time gamblers in Nice long enough to know that this was an old trick. Very few Americans can actually name all the states. The petty shills knew it and would exploit American pride. The blustery patriotic ones would always take the bet and invariably lose. (Although once, in Nice, I overheard a well-traveled New York woman take the bet, and when she started to run out of states begin to make them up—Texarkana, Ozark, Cayuga. The shill never knew.)
“Look here,” the blond man said, “do you know a man in town named Van Zandt, lives in a big villa somewhere around Ile Rousse?”
I told him I didn’t know such a person, but there was a man named something like Von Metz who lived outside the town.
“People around here call him le Baron,” I said.
“What’s he look like?”
“Tall man with white hair, a good dresser.”
“That’s him. Where does he live?”
I told him he would have to ask the patron, who was at that hour involved in his midafternoon tryst with Micheline, although I didn’t spell that out for him.
“Go ask the boules players in the town square,” I said. “They all know where he lives, and they’ll be down there now; they’re there every afternoon. Are you a friend of his?”
He dodged the question, as I figured he would, but indicated that he had had some sort of business dealings with the gentleman in the past and would like to pay his respects.
“Sometimes he comes out here late at night to play cards,” I said. “If I see him I’ll tell him you were looking for him. What’s your name?”
“Dushko,” he said. “What did you say they call him here?”
“Le Baron. I thought his name was Von Metz, though. Might not be the same man.”
“No, that’s him,” Dushko said. “Le Baron, eh?” He laughed privately.
The last of these birds of passage was the man Micheline called Karamazov.
He was a thick-necked man with a wide head and short-cropped black hair, and he was wearing madras Bermuda shorts and a white tennis shirt and sneakers when I first saw him, an unusual costume for that time and place.
“Excuse me,” he said in French as I passed his table. “Can one rent a room here?”
“Yes, but I think they’re all full,” I said. “Come back tomorrow, maybe.”
He asked how much we charged, and how much would it be if he stayed for a week or more, would the price be lower, and was there a full pension perhaps, and did I know any similarly isolated spots on this part of the coast where he might spend a week or so?
I noticed that he had an American accent, so I asked him in English where he was from.
“Les Etats Unis,” he said.
“Interesting. What state?” I asked.
“Wisconsin,” he said, pronouncing the W as a V, as in French.
“I’ve been there once,” I said. “The Wisconsin Dells. Beautiful. Are you just passing through here?”
“Non, je travaille ici en France,” he said.
“You can speak English, if you like, I’m American.”
“Je sais,” he said.
“Vous parlez anglais, non?” I asked.
“Oui.”
“I am American, you can speak English with me if you like.”
“Oui, je sais,” he said.
We chatted on in this way for a while in English and French, with the usual small talk about travels and the weather and the local customs, but I finally asked him why he didn’t want to speak English to me. He said he had come to France to learn French and was therefore determined to speak only French, no matter what.
“OK,” I said, continuing in English. But I was mystified. He was, after all, a countryman, the first I had talked to in a number of months, and what new French could he possibly learn from me anyway? He was pretty fluent already, although he still had the flat A of a Midwesterner.
Micheline gave him a room, and for the next week we would see him around. He was always polite but humorless and, unlike the other guests, not very fun-loving. He would disappear for much of the day and come back for dinner, but somehow Micheline learned that he had studied Russian at Yale in the United States and seemed to know a lot about communism. She was in charge of names in the kitchen and subsequently dubbed him Karamazov. Chrétien picked it up and took to addressing him as “tovarich”—drinking companion—whenever he spotted him at the bar. He would sometimes pound Karamazov on the shoulder and invite him to take a vodka—which of course Karamazov would always refuse. Chrétien’s free spirit made him nervous.
The last of the summer sojourners to arrive was Marie. One morning I came up from my morning dip, and there she was on the terrace with her parents, having a café crème and a croissant.
“You’re back,” I said as I walked by.
She had that contained little angry pout she sometimes assumed when her parents were around.
“Yes, but so is he,” she said, glancing back at the dining room. Inside, just selecting his corner table, I could see the old tutor Giancarlo.
Her parents regarded her solicitously.
As the new arrivals began to come in there were also a few departures, some of them poignant.
Eugène, the dentist, left one Sunday on the night ferry. He and I were standing on a little rise behind the kitchen, looking out to the north as the white ferry hove into view. We watched as it slowly materialized out of the green sea, a bright, shimmering, formless thing at first, then something with an apparent structure, and finally, after twenty minutes or so, the details—rounded flared topsides, row upon row of dark ports, upper decks, and pilot house.
Eugène and I had been talking about the life he was about to resume, and at a lull in the conversation, in what must have been for him a brave and intimate statement, he revealed that he spoke a little English.
He stared out at the ferry, started to say something, hesitated, and then decided to make his one and only attempt.
“The big fish comes,” he said, smiling proudly.
I didn’t bother to correct him.
Mendoza left with Conchita and went around kissing all the women goodbye—first Micheline, then Lucretia, then Maggs, and then a pretty young married woman who had been there for her honeymoon, off and on, since June. The sad part of his departure had come a few nights before though, long after most of the guests had gone to bed and there remained only the cardplayers, Jean-Pierre and Micheline, and, interestingly enough, Pierrot, who I think had come out because he was infatuated with young Conchita. Herr Komandante was still up having a nightcap, and there was another couple from the village whom I did not know, a sad-eyed older man and a short, stocky woman with bobbed hair, too plain to be anyone other than his wife, as Vincenzo pointed out.
Mendoza had been playing folk tunes and flamenco dances most of the evening, but as the night wore on he had retreated to a corner on the verandah to play for himself. No one was paying much attention to the music; they were all lost in their own dreams or the machinations of the card game. But suddenly in the midst of the dull silence, Mendoza hit a discordant, ancient chord, then another, louder, and then he began to sing a cante jondo, the “deep song” of gypsy tradition—slow and sad and all in a minor key.
Something happened then. The cardplayers put down their hands and looked over at him as if he had just arrived. What little conversation there had been at the tables died altogether. Micheline halted on her way to the kitchen and leaned in the door frame. Herr Komandante looked up from his drink and rested his cheek on his right hand.
Mendoza’s singing circled the terrace. It snaked into the interior dining room. It moved out across the road and down to the shore. It flowed out over the harbor and then began to climb into the hills and ran up into the maquis, sending the goats and sheep into flight, and then it moved on to the wild mountains, where nothing endured but the snow and the mouflon. And it went on and on. He was pouring into his singing something we had not heard before from
him; you seemed to be able to perceive all of history in his tragic minor chants, a lament for the end of time: dark, hopeless, inevitable. The world was immobilized, and when—finally—the singing ended, there was an uncharacteristic, heavy silence. No one applauded, no one breathed, there was only the lap of waters at the shore, the chirrup of a cricket in the rosemary.
For the rest of that evening no one seemed happy anymore. Some dark dream out of the European sleep had been remembered.
chapter nine
Herr Komandante
Up until the late 1960s, Corsican society was a structured hierarchy with an old patriarch at the head of the family or clan. Below him there was a related familial pack of male wolves, one or two of whom would be in line to take over the old king’s role. Below them were young unmarried men, and then—living side by side in the same households—women.
Wives and mothers held sway within the household and were responsible for provisioning, cooking, serving, cleaning, childbearing, hen-keeping, and tending the dooryard gardens. Within her sphere, the female head of household was the one in control, even though she might have been the one who stood by the kitchen door, spoon in hand, while the males fed and slurped their plonk at a long table. But even beyond the hearth and home, women traditionally maintained a certain amount of power and respect. As with the archetypal character, Colomba, they were often the driving force behind a vendetta, and Corsican women often fought side by side with their men when it came to defense or liberation. During one battle against the French, they poured boiling pitch down onto the struggling soldiers below the walls. There was even a local term for the traditional powerful woman—tintinajo—which was also the word for the belled ram that leads a flock of sheep.
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