“Isabelle has few friends out here. Me, she knows of course. Ten years now we have been together, and as you may know, or will perhaps learn someday, certain things wear thin after a few years.”
He drew on his cigarette.
“Familiarity, I suppose. But you, you must have a good time with Marie. She favors you, I can tell.”
I could see where we were headed and tried to cut him off.
“Actually no,” I said to le Baron. “Did you know that Marie is a devout Catholic? It’s probably a reaction to her parents; she says they’re atheists. She gives me speeches. She’s a virgin and she says that she intends to remain that way until she is married.”
Le Baron sighed. “Are you sure about that?” he asked.
He glanced over at me with those blue-flame eyes and paused briefly. In the pause, I changed the subject.
“One of the things I have been doing in Paris is following the stories of the war,” I said (only partly true). “It must have been dangerous here in the south as well.”
“It was the jungle,” he said bitterly.
“Let’s take another drink,” he said, and guided me back to the garden table.
He fetched the marc and poured two glasses and offered me a cigarette.
“Listen, I happen to know you are very curious about my livelihood and background,” he said.
I must have reddened and he must have spotted it even in the shadowy light. He chuckled.
“C’est normal,” he said. “But you and your journalistic doggedness. I knew journalists in Paris. As you may know, in all stories there may be some truth,” he said. “But there are often some very great lies.”
Le Baron said he knew what I had been hearing, and that there was an element of truth to some of it. He said he thought when he had a beer with me down in the town that day that he should really just have set me straight, but decided to wait for a time when he could explain more fully. That’s when he thought to have me out to dinner.
The money, “what is left of it,” he said, was his family’s money. They had a big estate outside of Charles le Roi in Belgium, even though he lived mostly in Paris and spent much of his youth there. He had been to school in England and still had friends in London when the war came. He was fluent in English by that time and was thinking of fleeing to England, but was contacted in Paris by the security service and was encouraged to stay on in France. Early on, his family estate had been taken over as a Nazi command center, as Micheline had said, and his parents and two sisters fled to Paris where they had an apartment. He remained in Paris, ostensibly working at a banking firm, but collecting information on money transactions and verifying who was being watched by the Gestapo and who was not being watched. He would then convey the news to other operatives, who would somehow radio the information to the British. Or so he thought. He claimed that he really didn’t know what happened once he transferred the information.
He said he was basically a peaceable man and did not want to get any more deeply involved in the underground. “It could only lead to killing,” he said, and he didn’t think he could live with that. So he quit the service, after some negotiation managed to get a pass to Nice, where he melted into the background. He moved up to Vence, behind Nice, but with the known world falling apart around him, he grew restless and contacted the underground networks again to see if there was anything he could do to help without getting deeply involved. The network head—or one of them, “you never knew who was who, in that world,” he said—asked him to help arrange documents for people. The Vichy government, at Berlin’s request, was deporting Jews by this time.
“We all know this now. But back then it was less clear, unless you were a Jew, of course, although even then some of the richer Jewish families refused to believe it. You could easily pretend that you didn’t know what was going on, you see. Don’t ask, don’t pry. It’s why I like your questions. You are not afraid to ask questions. So many of us preferred not to ask.”
He finished off his glass, stared at it for a minute, and then looked out at the black garden. I could see one of the white rose trees glowing in the sultry night. The crickets were pulsing in the shrubbery. A dog barked from one of the neighboring farms. I kept my mouth shut.
“It can be dangerous, though, too many questions. Even now, there is a certain danger,” he said.
After another short silence, he resumed.
In Nice he joined an underground forgery ring and learned to fake documents, and in time was able to arrange papers for families. He knew some Jewish families with big villas up behind the city and was able to help them. Then he began to help people who were living in the loosely guarded internment camps and still had family members on the outside—children, wives, and old grandmothers. He arranged false exit visas and letters of passage out through the Pyrenees into Spain, or outbound on ships from Marseille. Then he began to do it for families he didn’t know. And then, he said, he got caught.
He knocked back what was left of his marc and poured another.
“I don’t like involvement. I don’t like what I had to do during the war. I don’t like choices, but in order to survive in some situations, you have to choose. And then you’re stuck and you keep on doing what you know how to do.”
That was, in effect, the end of le Baron’s version of his personal story. All he told me was that later, after the war was over, he came out to Corsica to rest.
“I have to live with this past,” he said. “We all do. It is like some chronic disease that flares up from time to time. And so I came out here with Isabelle, and we live in the country, in isolation, trying to stay healthy. I want nothing more to do with the world, you understand. I learned this from Isabelle.”
He had married late in life, he said. He had met her at a friend’s villa in Nice at a dinner party.
“She was the shy one you see at such events, bright-eyed and seemingly interested in the chatter, but also preoccupied and silent. Later we talked privately. She had all the usual traumas of war, don’t you know. We all did, I suppose. But she was determined to avoid any remembrance. She loved silence and flowers, and she was the opposite of most of the other women I had known. I found refuge in her silences. We married. And then I remembered Corsica. The peace of nature.
“And so I read. I clip hedges like a peasant, tend the roses. It is my pleasure. But on some nights I am restless, the old animal past rises up on its haunches. It is then that you see me at the café.”
Marie and Isabelle came down the path from the house at this point, moving speedily, I thought, for such an unhurried entertaining evening.
Marie said bluntly that she was tired and had a headache, and that we really should be going. Le Baron glanced at Isabelle, I noticed, but otherwise seemed only slightly surprised, and so with much thanks and a few cool kisses, we were ushered out the wide front door to the car. We stood on the front steps for a few minutes, with a little more polite small talk, and then Marie and I crossed the gravel drive to the car. The two of them stood in the doorway, bathed in the light from a wrought-iron lamp beside the entrance, watching us go.
I steered the Citroën down the gravel drive and out onto the road back through the town.
Marie was uncharacteristically subdued during the drive, cool even, and when we got back to the café we sat in the car in the parking area and talked for a while. She was stiff and strangely formal.
“What did you think?” I asked.
“I think your friends are despicable people,” she said finally. “I am sure of it. They are spies or criminals of some sort. All those silly rumors about contraband and forgery, they’re not accurate. Those people are worse…”
“What are you talking about? Did Isabelle tell you something?”
“No. She said nothing. But they are loathsome people. Low-class scum of the earth. That’s how I know. That Isabelle, she is unbalanced, the things she wanted me to do with her. You too. You and I together. And they would watch. It was despicable. V
ile people. Pigs. I never want to see them again.”
chapter fifteen
Le Grand Bal
On one of my afternoons off a week later, I went up into the hills by myself to see if I could find old Fabrizio and have another chat.
I walked into town, passed through the back streets on foot, and began to hike up the road into the hills. The houses were fewer here, and after a ten- or twenty-minute walk, clear from side roads and other turnings, I began to hitchhike. A few cars, driven by older men with tinted eyeglasses, passed without stopping; a couple of fully loaded trucks lumbered on, and then the traffic, such as it was, died out for a while. I entertained myself by walking slowly upward, trying to identify the profusion of wildflowers that grew along the verges.
When I was well above the town, I came upon a few loose cows grazing by the side of the road. They looked up at me and watched closely as I passed, as if recognizing a foreigner in their midst.
Every time I would hear a car coming I would turn and hold out my thumb, and eventually a talkative man with a thick island accent took me upward for a few miles before he had to turn off. I walked on, rather enjoying myself, even if I wasn’t able to find the turn for the track up to Fabrizio’s compound.
At the village of Sant’Antonio, after a stiff climb to the center, I stopped and had a beer and asked if anyone there knew the old man. They had heard of him, but they laughed when I mentioned his name and twisted their fingers up alongside their temples—a screw loose, in so many words.
The views from Sant’Antonio were splendid. It was perched high on a steep crag, like an eagle’s nest, and provided a nearly 360-degree vista of the whole region known as the Balagne, which included the towns of Ile Rousse and Calvi to the northwest. The little hill towns in this region were said to be among the most picturesque in Corsica; in fact Sant’Antonio itself was apparently the oldest continuously settled village on the island, having been established sometime in the ninth century and occupied in the time of the Pisan rule over the island.
The many little villages perched on their hilltops were in decline in those years, the younger people having left the island in search of work. But some of them had been repopulated by people from the continent seeking solace, or refuge, or—in one case—anonymity. Southwest of Sant’Antonio in the agricultural village of Calenzana, not far from Calvi, there were said to be a few high-level members of the French underworld living out their lives in relative isolation and peace.
In spite of the loss of the local population, however, there were still a few local crafts being carried out, and there was still a certain amount of subsistence agriculture—olive groves, cheesemaking, a few vineyards, and of course, goats, cows, and feral pigs.
In Sant’Antonio I was told that Fabrizio—they thought—lived back in the direction I had come from. On the way up I had noticed what I thought was a familiar turn, but I had been too involved with the talking driver to ask him to stop. Now at a car park below the village, I hitched a ride north again, and got out at the turn.
Higher along the little spur road I saw the track to Fabrizio’s and hiked up to the old man’s compound.
He was there, but I had to reintroduce myself before he offered me his traditional glass of plonk. After a little small talk about Pierrot, I tried to ask him a few questions about le Baron again, but without the presence of Pierrot, he was far more polite and less talkative, and merely said yes or no to my reiteration of the various le Baron stories. It appeared that I was making him uncomfortable.
After another glass of wine, I told him I had had dinner at le Baron’s house a few nights earlier.
“Big place,” he said.
“Yes, very nice gardens.”
“What did you eat?”
I described the dinner.
“And so you met his wife,” he said.
I said that I had, and he merely nodded and grunted.
It was interesting that after our first meeting he was not as talkative as he had been. I began to wonder if perhaps he had gotten word somehow that I was checking his story. Certainly it was clear to me by this time that there were tales to be told here on this part of the island, and that everyone knew more or less what those stories were, but that there was no need to expand on them—especially not certain tales.
To change the subject, I began to talk about my work at the Rose Café and Vincenzo and Max, whom he said he knew, and also Jean-Pierre, whom he said he had heard of.
“Is he the one who is married to that artist woman they call Micheline?” he asked.
I told him he was, and he merely nodded and said no more, although he obviously knew more.
I had my notebook with me, and I had tucked a few wildflowers into the pages, so I took them out and asked if he knew what they were.
At this he became more animated. He knew each one, and he also knew their uses, and along with their names he offered a long string of remedies, flavorings, potions, and other folkloric qualities. Much of this was lost on me, even though he was speaking in French. But I did manage to note the names. (Not that that did any good either; I never could find the English equivalent for most of them.)
I was intrigued by a thyme-scented plant he called sarriette, which he said he would cook with his goat stews. He also named some of the plants I was already familiar with, such as pimpernel, goat’s beard, and myrtle, a common pot herb in Corsica, for which he named a few uses other than culinary. I think he said, among other benefits, it was good for the prostate.
In this same vein he snatched up a ranunculus-like sprig of leaves that he called cuglione di prete, which, if I understood the local term from my knowledge of Italian, meant “priest’s balls.” He identified another flower called puncicula, which he said was good for your fingernails and your hair. And he also identified a plant he called herbe des moines—monk’s plant—which he said could help men resist temptations of the flesh. Also snakebites.
Like most older country people, Fabrizio spoke with his hands and was not shy about demonstrating, bodily, the uses for certain herbs, so it was easier to understand some of his plant identifications than his abstracted gossip about le Baron and others.
At one point he asked to see my book, with its scrawled notes and sketches.
He looked them over, turning the pages with his stubby thumb and nodding. “Momento,” he said, and went back into the cascading heap of stones he used as his retreat.
When he came back, he had the notebook created by the German soldier who used to come up to his compound to talk about nature. Fabrizio had apparently forgotten that he had showed this to me on an earlier visit.
I flipped through pages—sadly, I should say—and found there a couple of sketches of wildflowers I either knew or had collected. There was something poignant in the old yellowed pages and Hansi’s spidery ink sketches, browned-out now with age. Inscribed there was some element of the absurdity of human conflict that contrasted with the endurance of nature.
Fabrizio explained again the story behind the notebook, leaving out the fact that Hansi had been killed by his compatriots, I noticed.
I handed the book back to him and he looked through it himself, reviewing it.
“He was my friend,” he said reflectively. “German. But not a bad sort.”
Given the rumors about the old man as a mazzero, his knowledge of local uses of herbs allowed me to swing the questions around and ask him about witches and signadore and local voceratrice, the women who sing poetic laments over the body of a vendetta victim.
He tried to explain. I think he said that up here in the villages, when he was younger, many of these old traditions endured, but since the war the old world was passing.
“How about mazzeri?” I asked finally. “Are there any mazzeri left up here?”
“Any what?” he asked.
“Mazzeri!” I said, emphasizing the Italianate pronunciation.
“Mazzeri?” he said with finality, raising his voice.
“Si, m
azzeri, are there any around here?” I asked in Italian.
He spouted a very long animated sentence in dialect, not one word of which I was able to catch.
“I see,” I said, to be polite.
There followed another explanation, even longer. He waved his hand up toward the villages higher up in the hills, and swept his palms together and poked his thumb backward over his shoulder—no more left, in other words. At one point, though, he also drew his finger across his throat, indicating a foretold death, maybe, or perhaps a vendetta. I began to wish I had Pierrot with me to translate.
Whatever his explanations, the fact that he himself was rumored to be a mazzero did not seem to affect his answers to my questions, at least not as far as I could read it. As Vincenzo had said, probably the stories about him were just gossip from the women who lived high in the stone villages, cloistered in their kitchens and narrow winding streets with nothing to get excited about but newly settled Sardinians and Arabs, and the life of local eccentrics. Micheline told me that some of those older women had never left their tiny towns.
On my way back down to the main road, I started to think about the German officer again and felt a wave of sympathy for the man, even though he had lived at a remove from my world and was a Nazi. He was probably just a shy student type who never fit in, even in his own community, a member of the international company of naturalists who seem to spring up in all industrialized cultures.
Later, farther down the track but in this same reflective mood, the logical answer to all this obfuscation of le Baron’s story came to me.
It should have been obvious from the first day.
Why should an island people with their own culture, their own histories, their own demons, and perhaps most importantly, a nasty reputation on the continent, share anything with a fresh young American (via Paris, no less) who comes rooting around in their personal affairs to uncover events that are best left unexplained? It occurred to me that I could have learned a thing or two from Prosper Mérimée, who, it was said, had the ability to come into a strange country, pick up the language quickly, and gain trust with the people and record their folklore.
The Rose Café Page 19