Maggs looked back at me.
“They do this every day, don’t they?”
“Heavy rain keeps them in,” I said. “But not wind.”
Just then the one-armed man took up his post. The mumbling of the chorus softened. He scraped away a few stones with his left foot. Stood eyeing the cochonnet, bowed, tipped his arm, and threw. The boule swept over the pitch, angled down, and nestled against the little pig. A kiss. A palpable kiss.
“That’s Robespierre,” I told Maggs. “He’s the best of the lot here.”
“Robespierre is his name?”
“Yes, the barber told me that. He was a leader of an underground network around here. Lost his arm in an ambush on an armored car. Robespierre was his code name. They all had code names. That little man with the squinty eyes was known as Mouse, but they don’t call him that anymore.”
“What do you do?” she asked. “Come down here all the time and watch? How do you know all this?”
I told her that on certain days I would come here in the late afternoon, take a drink, and watch the action on the square, but on other days I would go out to the Ile de la Pietra to the tower, and at other times I would hitch a ride and take a hike in the maquis, alone. I realized as soon as I said it that she might suspect that I had spotted her with André. But it was too late.
“What a life,” she said.
“Yes, but I also have to clean fish every day and get pricked by rascasse spines.” I showed her my swollen thumb.
“You know, it’s odd,” she said. “I saw you sitting here, and I felt a flash of something, maybe it was just recognition but maybe something else. You look more natural here. I see you more as you are, perhaps. You do know that we’re on to your trick, don’t you? You play at being that dimwitted busboy who shuffles out from the kitchen in his stained apron and sweeps the floors or cleans fish and pretends not to know what’s going on. But I see you listening. I see you pretending not to understand French or even English when you want. Speaking in Italian with Vincenzo. You are more than they all think you are, aren’t you?”
“Well, cleaning fish was never my ambition, exactly—I don’t think.”
“What is?” she asked bluntly.
This stopped me. Except for my vague, as-yet-inactivated idea of becoming a writer, like many people of my time, I had given up on words like ambition, career, and duty.
I said as much to her.
“But that’s quite enough, really, that’s perfect. You should just write and don’t worry about duty and conviction. You don’t need to be certain. You don’t need to believe. That’s one of the things I learned in Warsaw, isn’t it, not to believe in anything. The Nazis believed. The Jews believed. And look what happened. Don’t bother to believe in any one thing. Just go ahead and write.”
She reached over and patted my wrist. Then she rested her hand on mine for a second, and then she squeezed and patted my hand again, looking me in the eye.
“You are an engaging young man,” she said, still resting her hand on mine.
She had that same steady look that le Baron had—a direct, unblinking stare that seemed to have the ability to penetrate and expose any element of untruth in what you said. It was a look that made me nervous, and, coming from her, with her warm hand still on mine, I wondered—briefly—if I was perhaps being propositioned. I didn’t know what to say.
“Never mind,” she said. “I’ve got to go. Peter will be coming back from his spearfishing, and he’ll be wondering where I am again.”
She stood. Then, smiling sadly, she said something in Polish.
I didn’t dare ask her to translate.
chapter fourteen
The Dinner Party
The dinner invitation came through after all, as I feared it would. Jean-Pierre mentioned, almost casually, that le Baron had invited me and Marie to come out for an informal evening at his villa.
“You can take the night off. Take the car.”
Marie was sitting in the nook with Giancarlo, swinging her right leg nervously and pretending to pay attention. She glanced over at me. I think she knew what we were talking about.
“Marie knows?”
“Yes, I told her.”
For all my interest in le Baron, I was not entirely happy about this upcoming event and went around the rest of the day killing time and not enjoying myself very much. I didn’t look forward to a whole evening with this formal old gentleman and his penetrating blue eyes. It seemed like work to me, even though I was genuinely curious to learn more about his life. By that time in the season, anything that even remotely resembled something out of the ordinary line of work displeased me. I liked my unadventurous routine of sweeping floors, clearing tables, and cleaning fish and dishes. I liked my afternoon hours in the town or my rambles in the maquis or the hot sojourns on the rocks of the Ile de la Pietra. I didn’t want anything to interrupt the routine.
I talked to Marie later that afternoon about our upcoming date, and she said she felt the same way.
“I don’t like it,” she said. “I think he has designs. I don’t know what. We must be on guard.”
“Max told me he just likes younger people,” I said.
“Yes, of course, but why?”
For all her youth and chatter and professed Catholicism, Marie was not naive.
After I cleaned the fish for the evening meal, I went for a swim in the cove, then dressed in a clean shirt, and went to the bar, where I sat fortifying myself with a glass of wine, waiting for Marie.
As usual, just before the dinner hour she made her grand entrance at the door. She was dressed in a light silk blouse and a dark skirt and big hooped earrings. I noticed that she had made a point of wearing her small silver crucifix necklace and that she had buttoned her blouse higher up on her chest than she usually did. The ruse didn’t work, though. Even if she had gone in disguise as a nun, any experienced older lecher such as le Baron—if that’s what he was—could spot the coiled sexuality beneath the habit by her walk alone.
“Ready?” I asked her.
She signed herself in jest.
Jean-Pierre’s car was an old black Citroën with red leather seats. It was too big a car for me, too grand, I felt, but I got in and managed, after some fiddling, to get it started. I backed out onto the causeway from the parking area, shifted gears, and drove slowly down the road, bouncing on the ruts and stones as we moved. I was dreading navigation of this excellent chariot through the maze of back streets of Ile Rousse, not to mention the narrow, winding, donkey-blocked road that ran toward the village of Santa-Reparata and le Baron’s villa. But I forged on.
About a half-mile beyond the village, just where the maquis began, we turned off on a side track and jounced down a rocky road. Below us was the straight, cypress-lined drive that led to the villa. We drove in and parked in the courtyard on the left side of the house. A scruffy, one-eyed man dressed in worker’s blues was in the yard, raking. He must have been mute, since he merely indicated the door with a sign and then led us to it, knocked on it for us, and backed away. A dark-eyed maid with a 1940s hairdo and a white apron opened the door, eyed us, and then guided us through the hallway to another set of French doors opening onto a garden behind the house.
“He’s out there someplace,” she said. “You’ll find him.”
There was a raked-earth path leading to a fountain, and in one of the side gardens off the main allée, among the tea roses, we saw le Baron. He was dressed in pressed khaki trousers, a white collared shirt and a paisley cravat, and a houndstooth jacket—dressed down on this occasion, for our sakes perhaps. He advanced enthusiastically, his hand outstretched, his smooth, tanned face shining. He kissed Marie on each cheek, and then gathered up her hands and kissed them, laughing.
“Two young roses,” he said, speaking in French. I don’t know whether he meant Marie’s hands or the two of us.
“Please,” he said, spreading his right hand back to the garden.
A woman appeared during our g
reeting and stood in the middle of one of the paths. She seemed horrified at our presence at first, wordless, as if we were invaders, her big china-blue eyes wide and her hand at her throat.
“May I present,” said le Baron, “my wife, Isabelle.”
Her apparent surprise dissipated, and she approached and took my hand warmly and then kissed Marie on both cheeks, as if they knew each other.
She had ash-blond hair and smooth, papery skin, delicate hands and well-manicured nails, and she was dressed in a simple white blouse, a small gold necklace, and pearl earrings. I would have said she was about forty-five, but she was one of those women whose age cannot be determined.
After small talk, we moved to a terrace by the French doors, and the maid brought out a silver tray with a bottle of Heidsieck—a 1959, I noticed, a vintage year that everyone was talking about at that time. She came back out with a plate of fresh crudités and olives, which she set down on the filigreed iron garden table.
Le Baron poured the champagne. We toasted America; we toasted a safer world; we said we were all worried about Nikita; and we all laughed heartily at this double entendre because we all knew this was the name of the lazy dog belonging to Jean-Pierre and Micheline, but that there was, over in Russia, another Nikita who bore watching, as le Baron said, and on and on, and le Baron was at his most charmant, winking and smiling to Marie and back to his wife, and leaping up to help with the service, and bowing and scraping and acting young at heart in the company of such young blood, such fresh young roses, as he said.
As the champagne sank lower in the bottle, we all began to relax, another bottle, another ’59, appeared and soon Marie, who was not a heavy drinker, was chatting on about her stupid parents and their stupid political views. Le Baron and Isabelle laughed warmly at her monologue, and then, Isabelle—as she insisted I call her—cornered me privately and asked me all about my studies and why had I chosen France, and did I like the current president, John Kennedy, and then the maid appeared again and dinner was announced.
We went indoors through the airy main foyer, and through a formal dining room to a conservatory on the south side of the house, where the table was laid with crystal and silver and Limoges dinner plates. The glass doors to the conservatory were flung open, and as dusk fell I could hear the ringing chirp of crickets and night birds in the garden tangle beyond the more formal garden rooms. It was a sound I was not used to in my sea-eagle aerie above the cove, and it spoke of moist luxuriance, of fecund life, with a hint of savagery.
Dinner began with a light fish broth that tasted of fennel and orange, served with a local white malvoisie wine. Following this, there was a serving of several small cakes of pâté. Isabelle identified each one as the plate was passed: a pâté of rouget, another of rabbit, and another of merle, the local blackbird. Then came the main course, a succulent dish of partridges cooked with white grapes and wine. Le Baron had a little discussion with the maid in patois, and she came back with a bottle of wine, which le Baron himself opened and tasted first.
I didn’t know wines that well, but I knew enough to notice that it was a Montrachet, also 1959.
We carried on with our political discussion in a lighthearted manner. They seemed to be interested in what we, the younger generation, thought of all that was going on: Algeria liberated, the right wing on the rampage in Paris, John Kennedy and Cuba, Nikita Khrushchev in Russia, Indochina, and the American advisors now loosed in Vietnam in the wake of the French failures. They had picked the wrong people to ask; along with Herr Komandante, we were the least political players around the Rose Café. But this did not stop Marie from contributing her opinions. In the main, she was tired of the Arabs.
“In Paris now, you cannot go into the parks. Some dirty Arab man will come by and ask you to go to bed with him, and when you ignore him he persists, and you have to get up and find another place. And no sooner are you seated than another dirty man comes by.”
“Oh, but this is so disturbing,” Isabelle said in sympathy. “I do not think I would enjoy Paris anymore.”
Le Baron remained silent but shook his head and clucked, as if to say that this is the sad course of history but that worse things could be happening.
I tried to spot Isabelle’s accent. It sounded like upper-class Parisian to me, with that high, ascending, cracked voice at the end of each phrase. Le Baron’s French, which I had never heard for any length of time, since he usually spoke English with me, did not seem to me to have any particular inflection—none that I could recognize, in any case.
The partridge dish was cleared, and the maid brought out a plain green salad and a couple of bottles of sparkling water, and the conversation turned to local intrigues, mainly the noisy fights of Vincenzo and Lucretia, André and jacquis and the nightly card game, and Pierre Corsini (the man they call Moonface) and his notoriously bad family, who were always in some scrape or another. Then le Baron told a few stories of famous bandit families of Corsica who lived long ago in the mountains and who still were legendary.
“Fortunately, those days are over now,” le Baron said.
I wanted to ask if they knew of Pierrot’s old father Fabrizio, but given Fabrizio’s version of le Baron’s history, I was afraid to bring it up.
The salad was cleared and a plate of cheeses appeared: a sheep’s cheese called bastilicacciu, a soft goat cheese, and a hard, somewhat sharp cow’s cheese.
Then the dessert was served. It was a fiadone, a local specialty made with pureed brocciu that had been soaked in spirits and was flamed at the table by the maid just before it was served.
Over dessert and a bottle of Cap Corse muscat, le Baron entertained us with a long, tedious story of a fishing expedition he made once with Jean-Pierre, who had tried to teach him to spearfish. They had taken a boat around to one of the coves to the east, toward Cap Corse. But while they were out the libeccio picked up, and they couldn’t get back. They had to leave the boat, hike up to a small collection of houses on the hillside, and hitchhike back to town in their bathing suits and sailor’s jerseys. I think the humor of the story arose from self-mockery; le Baron was not accustomed to such deshabille.
Following this, the maid brought coffee, four tiny glasses, and a bottle of Hospices de Beaune marc, which, le Baron commented, was not easy to obtain in those times and had been purchased at an auction. He offered around Gitanes, and Marie, who did not normally smoke, accepted one and coughed—I think she was fairly well lubricated at this point. In the brief interlude of Marie’s coughing, le Baron said something sotto voce to his wife.
It crossed my mind that these two were plotting something and that they were both opium addicts or hashishiens and were going to bring out a pipe next. But maybe that was the result of too much le Baron gossip.
The marc was poured, formally, by le Baron. The air grew closer. The odor of the garden and the maquis filtered through the windows. I could smell eglantine and arbutus, roses, and the cinnamon-flavored scent of stock. The cricket calls increased and throbbed with a belling, rhythmic pulse, and far off, somewhere in the greeny tangle beyond the gardens, a nightingale poured out a single phrase.
Marie excused herself to visit the bathroom. She rose from the table and steadied herself with her left hand on the back of the chair while Isabelle gave her directions. She was still able to maintain her poise, however, and I saw le Baron watch her disappear down through the rooms, her white blouse growing dimmer and dimmer as she moved through the passageways.
I could tell she was drunk. She had relaxed her balletic grace and was moving casually, her hips swaying.
“She is very lovely, your friend,” Isabelle said in English. “I know of her parents. You must be careful if you meet them sometime up in Paris. They will draw you in. They’re very political, you know. The right wing hates them, both of them. And Marie, too, she should be careful, she seems so fragile, so innocent.”
Le Baron chuckled privately, as if he knew something that Isabelle did not know, but that I probably di
d know. Isabelle caught his drift.
“Mais non, Edouard,” she said. “She is a rose. The last rose of summer.”
Le Baron leaned toward me, smiling conspiratorially. “My wife,” he said to me, “she is, you understand, a lost romantic. She lives for beauty. And a young woman such as your Marie…” He gestured in the direction of the hall she had passed through and nodded slowly.
“Who wouldn’t want only roses?” Isabelle said. “You’ve seen what we have seen.”
“I gather,” I said, seeing an opening. “It must have been terrible in these parts during the war years. I’ve read about it a little. But we were so isolated from it all in America. It seems unreal, you know, unless you were a soldier.”
“Or a mother,” Isabelle said.
Marie returned, and the curtain closed again. But it opened later in the evening when Marie herself launched into another one of her requisite anticommunist lectures. Her father’s car had been blown up that winter by some right-wing terrorist group, probably the OAS, but Marie was decidedly reactionary and was unafraid to offer her generally unexamined opinions. Her views, outrageous though they seemed to me, were entertaining to our hosts.
The evening slowly wound down, and at a lull in the conversation Isabelle offered to show Marie an antique pearl necklace that had belonged to someone in the Bonaparte family. Le Baron asked if I would like to take a stroll around the garden.
“Your little friend Marie,” le Baron said, once we were alone, “she really is very energetic. Older people such as Isabelle and I, we enjoy very much that energy, no matter how it is directed. Isabelle loves the flowers, the fresh cheeks of youth. She is shy, you understand. We live alone out here, and she prefers to remain here, reading and sketching flowers.”
We walked on and turned down one of the axis paths. He had a lighted cigarette, which he carried between his thumb and forefinger and smoked reflectively whenever we stopped.
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