The Corsican

by William Heffernan

  Sartene had remained impassive. Carbone would have known of any financial arrangements through Spirito. The remark had been intended as a condescension.

  “No,” Sartene had said. “I’m afraid I don’t have the advantage of a benefactor. As I said, things are not good in Europe now.”

  “Do you come to me for financial help, then?” Carbone had asked.

  Sartene had shaken his head. “I found a bit of good fortune toward the war’s end,” he had said. “It will be enough to help me earn my bread in a modest way. I’m here as a courtesy to you and to express my hope that if matters of mutual advantage come my way, we might do business together.”

  Carbone had extended his hands in a benevolent gesture. “I am always willing to help a fellow Corsican,” he had said. “Especially if it profits me as well. Will you stay here in Saigon?” His eyes had narrowed slightly as he asked the question.

  Sartene had shaken his head again. “I am going on to Vientiane. There’s more opportunity there to work without great competition, and at present my plans are small by your standards.”

  Carbone had smiled and nodded his approval. He was unaware that Sartene had already purchased business properties in Saigon and would undoubtedly remain ignorant of it for a long time. Too long for his own good, Sartene had thought.

  Carbone had heaved his heavy body from the chair and walked around the desk, still holding the medallion in his hand. Sartene had also risen, and as Carbone had reached him he had taken Sartene’s elbow and begun guiding him toward the door.

  “I want you to know, Don Sartene, that you can always come to me if you need my help. We’re alone here among these yellow heathens, and if we don’t help each other they’ll swallow us up like so many crumbs on a table. But fortunately for us they’re a stupid people, easily taken advantage of. They work and die for pennies.”

  When he had opened the door he had seen Francesco sitting in a chair in the hall. Sartene had brought Francesco with him so Carbone would know there were hard, young Corsicans beneath him, just in case he was cleverer than he appeared and decided to react harshly.

  “And who is this?” Carbone had said, raising his eyebrows.

  “Francesco Canterina,” Sartene had said. “One of our countrymen who has come with me to earn his bread.”

  Carbone had looked at Sartene closely. “And how many of you are there?” he had asked.

  “Only myself and my son and three others,” Sartene had said. Not too many, but still enough, he had known.

  “It’s good,” Carbone had said, still wary. “A man should have countrymen around him he can trust.”

  Carbone had taken Sartene’s hand, returning the medallion with it as they shook farewell. He had waved his hand in an expansive gesture. “If you’re going to stay in Saigon a few days, go to any of my restaurants, any of my bars, and you’ll be my guest,” he had said.

  “You’re very kind,” Sartene had said. “Everything that I’ve heard about you is true.”

  When they had left Carbone’s house, they had walked silently for several minutes.

  “Is he as much a donkey as he seems?” Francesco had finally asked.

  Sartene had nodded. “But donkeys have a nasty kick,” he had said. “We’ll let this one slumber in its stall for now. Later, when he wakes up, he’ll find his farm has been sold while he was asleep.”

  Over the next few months Carbone had made various inquiries about Sartene’s activities and had found little with which to concern himself. Sartene, in fact, had done little in those months. He had purchased a small bar in Vientiane, arranged some modest currency transactions with contacts in Hong Kong and established an insignificant protection network with some small Laotian gambling dens. All of it had been the work of a smalltime operation, exactly as Sartene had intended it to appear. When Carbone’s interest had waned, however, Sartene’s activities had increased. Within a year these interests had grown to an extent that rivaled Carbone’s, and six months later had surpassed them.

  During that later six-month period the donkey had awakened and some subtle but definite resistance to Sartene’s smuggling and currency operations had developed. What followed had been a minor conflict, in which several of Carbone’s Vietnamese employees had simply vanished from the face of the earth. Carbone had been upset, but not enough to risk a major confrontation. His main business, opium, had not been threatened, and until it was he could afford to live with the fact that he had been duped. But from that moment on he had watched Sartene closely.

  Even though he had no respect for the man, Sartene did have respect for Carbone’s large force of manpower, which could not be discounted. His own force had grown as well. Laotians who had fought the Japanese during the war—men who would instinctively hate Carbone, who had been treated well by the Japanese because of his brother’s ties with the Nazis. Carbone also was strong with Viet Nam officialdom, which flagrantly peddled its influence. Sartene too had developed strong political alliances, in both Viet Nam and Laos, and he knew the Vietnamese would not welcome war between the two Corsicans, simply because it would reduce their graft by half. He knew too that a war would have been treated harshly and that such resistance would have caused difficulties for both groups. Now, with the support of the Americans, it would not. Still, it was a situation Sartene had tried to avoid. Conflicts like that only provided danger to those close to you, and he had always felt there was enough danger in the world without courting more, except when it could not be avoided. He had not foreseen that such a time would come, but it had.

  As a young man in Corsica there had been other things Sartene had not foreseen. He had been sickly as a boy and had been left thin, lanky, and pale by the time he had reached adolescence. He had grown up in the small village of Calvi, which sat on the northwestern coast with the massive bulk of Mount Cinto rising nearly nine thousand feet to the east. Because of his sickly early years he did not lead the life of a normal Corsican child, and his father, a traveling wine merchant, always returned home, true to his middle-class standing in the village, carrying books to occupy the boy’s time. Since there was little money for school and little energy for play during those formative years, the boy, whose name then was Bonaventure Marcosi, lived much of his life in the pages of histories and French novels, so much so that his peers in the village made jokes about his virility.

  When he was fifteen his father died, leaving his mother and sister without support, and young Marcosi took a job on the docks, unloading fishing boats when they returned with the day’s catch. To everyone’s surprise, including his own, the work seemed to agree with him, and the fishermen joked that the smell of dead fish had returned him to health. In fact it had. By the time he was eighteen he had gained twenty pounds and had begun to spend his Sundays hiking in the mountains with other young men his age.

  Now his life seemed set before him. Hard work; someday a marriage and children and continued life along the beautiful rugged shores and in the mountains of his homeland. It was what most had, and he saw no reason why it should not suit him as well. In the evenings there would still be his books and the life he lived within his mind. He had learned from his books that a man should content himself with the boundaries of his prospects, that to do otherwise led to misfortune. He had also learned that a man must live up to his responsibilities. And his were to his mother and his sister. His mother was a simple, strong peasant woman with the bulk of a small ox. His sister, Carmela, was entirely different, however, a delicate beautiful creature, who caused the eyes of young men to risk too long a look as she moved past. She was his closest friend, partly because of his inability to play with other boys as a child, but mostly because of her devotion to him. At night she would sit for hours and listen to everything he had learned from his books that day.

  Carmela was sixteen, two years younger than he, on the day she was killed. He had found her body near the edge of the town. She had fought the men who had raped her and had been beaten for her efforts. They had le
ft her there with her skirt still pulled up over her face, the underpants they had ripped from her body still stuffed into her mouth. She had choked on the cloth and they had just let her die. But she had also identified them in dying. Next to the body he had found a French army insignia, ripped from the collar of one of the men, and in the dirt around her were the footprints of at least five.

  Two days earlier a squad of five soldiers had camped outside the town. They were the advance unit of an army force that would engage in one of the regular sweeps of Mount Cinto is another vain effort to locate a group of Corsican bandits.

  On the evening after his sister’s funeral, Marcosi gave his mother all but a few francs of the money he had saved and told her she would leave that night for his uncle’s home in the village of L’lle-Rousse, ten miles to the north. At first his mother objected, knowing what he would do. But one look into those dark, piercing eyes told her she was no longer dealing with a child, and it also told her she would not see him again for many years.

  The Frenchmen slept in three tents, snoring deeply from the large amount of wine they had drunk the night before, the sound obscuring the young man’s movements as he went from one tent to the other shortly before dawn. It was simple and quick for the first four, a hand over the mouth and a quick slash of the throat severing the jugular vein. In the last tent was the sergeant. Marcosi had gone to that tent first, but when he saw the insignia missing from the sergeant’s tunic he had decided to save him for last.

  He had knocked the sergeant unconscious as he slept, then tied his hands and feet, spread-eagled, to the four stakes of the tent. When the man regained consciousness he lit the kerosene lantern in the tent. He wanted to see this man, but even more, he wanted the sergeant to see what would happen to him.

  Slowly he opened the sergeant’s trousers as the man screamed for mercy. Marcosi did not speak. His eyes told the sergeant the reason. He pulled the man’s genitals from his trousers as his body bucked violently, fighting to escape. The knife moved in three quick motions and the blood spurted from the severed arteries as he placed the prize on the man’s chest. Now he worked even more quickly. The blade of the knife slipped under the socket of one eye and with a quick twist of the wrist the eye popped forward and dangled on a cord against the sergeant’s cheek. Within seconds the other eye followed. Marcosi pulled the gray egg-shaped testicles from the severed scrotum and placed one in each empty socket. The sergeant’s screams were deafening, turning into a muffled gagging sound as Marcosi forced the severed penis down his throat with the blade of his knife. The sergeant choked to death on his own member before he could lose consciousness from a loss of blood. The man suffered and died just as his sister had.

  Marcosi sat staring at the dead man for several minutes, then tore open his tunic and, with his knife, carved a message on his chest, knowing it would be found by the French army unit that would discover the bodies. It was a simple message. In memory of Carmela Marcosi. Murdered at the hands of French pigs.

  When the Guerini family found him in the mountains a week later, they had already heard of young Marcosi’s vengeance. It so impressed Papa Guerini that he adopted the boy at once and told his two sons that from that moment they would consider him a brother. But he was not given the Guerini name, which Papa insisted would be as dangerous as his own for the present. After two weeks of thought, Papa renamed him Buonaparte Sartene. The first name, Papa explained, was owing to his love of history and Corsica’s great hero. The second was the name of a village far to the south. The French, he had said, thought all Corsicans were ignorant, and because of that if they discovered his new name, they would look in the area of that village. If he remained in the north he would be safe.

  But safety came from another source. Within months, World War I erupted, and for the next three years he lived in the mountains with the Guerinis, relatively safe from Frenchmen occupied with war. Papa Guerini was truly a father to him during that time, teaching him the ways of the mountains and how to earn his bread despite the enslavement by the French. Throughout that period travelers along the coast lived in fear of Guerini raids, and banks in the larger villages repeatedly suffered the indignity of unauthorized withdrawals.

  Papa, who never used his given name, Pierre, was a large jovial man with a full black beard and bald head that was constantly covered with a black beret, even when he slept. He carried a thick cane that had been fitted for a sword, and a lupara, the short-barreled shotgun common to the mountains. His sons, Antoine and Barthélemy—known as Mémé—were several years older than Buonaparte, but quickly took him under their wing and taught him all they knew. In exchange, Buonaparte would spend his evenings by the campfire teaching them Corsican history and filling them with his endless stories about Napoleon.

  They were still in the mountains when the war ended in 1918. The news was brought to them from Bastia by Papa’s favorite niece, a surprisingly self-possessed girl of seventeen whose raven-black hair and soft dark eyes immediately attracted young Sartene. He had seen her before in Bastia, but only briefly. Her name was Maria Guerini and she was the daughter of Papa’s only brother, who had been killed by French police when she was only a child. There was a simple peasant beauty about her and a great deal of the mischief that was in Papa. She was more like him, in fact, than were either Antoine or Mémé, who were dour and serious most of the time.

  He did not speak to her during the two days she remained with them, except when normal amenities required it. But he watched her almost constantly. Mémé and Antoine noticed and teased him about it in private. He suspected that Papa had noticed as well, although he gave no outward indication. She was just so beautiful Sartene could not help himself. And she was strong and healthy, the way Corsican women were expected to be. Not like the frail, delicate, washed-out women who came to the island for the sun, or to recuperate from some imagined illness. He had seen those women since he was a child and could never understand why men found them attractive, with their small breasts and narrow waists. They could not serve a man as a partner through life, he had decided. They could only be one added burden.

  Maria was different. Her dark olive skin was soft and rich and she moved gracefully yet with an undeniable strength. And she was not awed in the presence of men. She kept silent on matters she knew nothing about, but freely told them what she thought, when she felt she did. And her loyalty to Papa reminded him of his own sister. That, and other things as well.

  The evening of the day she left he approached Papa as he sat alone before their campfire and, with great nervousness, asked formally for the right to court his niece.

  Papa listened to the words solemnly, stroking his bushy beard with one hand. He did not speak for several moments, then looked up at the sky, rotating his head along the horizon. “Funny,” he said, “I’ve not seen any lightning in the past two days. How is it you were struck then?”

  Buonaparte stammered helplessly, and Papa burst forth with a roar of laughter, then slapped him on the back so hard he almost tumbled forward into the fire. He reached out and took Buonaparte’s face between his hands, pulled him close and kissed him on the forehead. Then he held Buonaparte’s face away in his bearlike grasp, and his eyes filled with tears. “Buonaparte, nothing would give me more joy. But are you sure?” he added with a growl.

  “Yes, Papa. I’m sure.”

  “Good,” Papa roared. “Then it is done. Later in the week, when we’ve gotten you some decent clothes and some gifts to bring with you, we’ll go to Bastia and I’ll speak to Maria’s mother.”

  Papa looked at him for a long time, his eyes still warm, but with an added touch of seriousness. He held his hands in front of his chest, as if in prayer, then shook them up and down.

  “But before I do, you must tell me about your future, what you plan for your life. This is an important decision you make, this decision to marry. And it means great responsibility. No longer will you be able to worry just about yourself. There will be a woman, and one day, God willing
, there will be children.”

  Buonaparte’s brow knitted; he stared deeply into Papa’s face, searching for some clue. “I don’t understand?” Papa roared. “Your life, you donkey. What will you do with your life?”

  Buonaparte’s eyes seemed bewildered. “I planned to stay here,” he said. “I planned to work with my family. With you, and Mémé, and Antoine. The French would never let me have any other life.”

  Papa leaned forward, his eyes coming hard from his bearded face. “And if they would? Would you then choose another life?”

  Buonaparte thought for several moments. He stared into the fire, his mind searching out his own feelings. He looked back at Papa, the hint of a smile on his lips. “Yes, I would, Papa. I would like very much to be respectable. I would like very much to do good, honest work, and earn my bread and come home to my family at night, and not worry about the police coming to my door. But here, in Corsica, I have only two choices. To be what I am, or to be a victim of the French. And I don’t want to be any man’s victim.”

  Papa sat back and pulled on his beard. He stared at his boots, then back at the young man seated before him. When he spoke his voice was soft. “You have learned much these past years,” he said. “And you have spoken a great truth, something that many men never learn their whole lives.” He leaned forward and placed his hand gently on Buonaparte’s knee. “A man can only be what fate allows him to be. True, there are different paths he can follow, but even those paths are chosen by fate. When I say this, I don’t mean that a man can’t become rich or powerful or respected because fate won’t allow it. Any man can do this if he has the courage. But he must know where to find the path.” Papa squeezed Buonaparte’s leg and smiled through his ragged beard. “I’m a simple man, and in understanding life, I’ve always thought of each man being surrounded by a circle. Some men have very big circles, some very small. But within each circle are the paths. It’s the man who seeks a path outside his circle who fails.” He raised one bearlike hand and let it fall. “For us it is a very small circle. The French have seen to that, and they will continue to see to it. A Corsican who wants to earn his bread with honor will always be so much shit to them, a criminal to be spat upon, to be hated.” He paused, bringing one hand up in a massive fist. “But also to be feared and respected.” The fist fell away and he smiled again, his head nodding slowly. “And fate will condemn men like that to remain criminals in their eyes. The French and their kind will never understand our need for honor, our need to give more to our families and our friends than they would allow us.”