Corsican Honor

by William Heffernan

  Michelle smiled up at him. She wondered what he had been like as a child. Whether he had been the pampered son of a government official, or a little boy she would have liked as a child herself. The latter, she told herself. Spoiled little boys did not grow up to be men like this.

  “My father and uncles always hunt the pigs,” she said. “But they would never take me with them. Even though I am a better shot than they are. I should have asked Antoine. He always did what I asked of him. But I never knew he hunted. He had a big house just outside the village, and it was always crowded with men from the milieu, and I seldom went there. So I only saw him when he came into town each day, or down at the vineyard.”

  “You’re a better shot than your uncles?” Alex asked.

  “Of course. Don’t be a chauvinist.”

  “Ah, you’ve been reading American magazines.”

  “It would surprise you what I know. What I believe in.”

  Alex held up his hands in surrender. “I don’t think anything about you would surprise me,” he said.

  “Yes. Many things would,” Michelle answered.

  “So you grew up with Antoine and Meme,” he said. “I did too. They are like uncles to me. In fact, I call them uncle.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “I only wish they were in a different line of work.”

  Michelle’s head snapped around. “There is nothing wrong with their work.” Her voice was sharp, defensive.

  So she doesn’t know what they do. At least not the drugs, Alex thought.

  “I meant no offense to them,” Alex said. “Or to you.”

  They continued walking, Michelle silent, brooding, Alex thought.

  “You just don’t understand,” she said at length, her voice softer, with only a hint of an edge to it.

  “What is it I don’t understand?”

  “What it is like to be a Corsican. What drives men like Antoine and Meme into the milieu.” She paused, gathering herself. “If you are smart and capable, it makes no difference here. If you want to stay here, or in France, you are always just a Corsican. You can be a servant, work for a Frenchman, or a French business. But you will never be given the opportunity to run that business. And if you have your own business, you are subject to French regulations that keep you under their heel. We are treated like you Americans treat your Hispanics and your blacks. I have read about your people in Puerto Rico. And it is the same here for us.”

  Her voice had risen again, and her vehemence cut the air. Alex said nothing, preferring to listen.

  “So, if a Corsican wants to succeed, wants to have more than is allowed by the French, there is the milieu. And many choose it. My father works for the Pisanis, and therefore for the milieu. If he worked for a French-owned vineyard, he would pick the grapes, not manage the people who do. A Frenchman would be brought in to do that.”

  She was quiet for a time, and Alex waited for her to continue.

  “I know there is violence in the milieu, that there are things I cannot condone. But many of those who are part of it have been forced into that life. To have a life other than the milieu, other than what the French will allow them, they would be forced to leave their homeland, forced to leave all they know.” She hesitated again. “Do you know the term: un vrai monsieur?” she asked.

  “I’ve heard it,” Alex said.

  “It is a title given to those who head a faction within the milieu,” she said, ignoring his response. “It means a man of honor.” Her eyes flashed at him. “Antoine and Meme have that title, and I believe in my heart that for them it is a true one.”

  Alex stopped and turned to her, taking her arms in his hands. “I believe that too,” he said. “And even though I don’t approve of all they do, I trust them. And I love them.” He offered her a faint smile. “I have trusted my life to them.”

  Michelle lowered her eyes. She seemed embarrassed that he was holding her, even at arm’s length. He let her go.

  “I am sorry I became angry,” she said.

  “No, don’t be sorry. I enjoy hearing what you think. And I enjoy walking with you. Promise me we will do it again.”

  Michelle started walking again, Alex beside her. Her eyes were still lowered.

  “We will walk again tomorrow morning,” she said. “There is something I want to show you.”

  “What?”

  “I will show you tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER

  16

  They walked along the same road, but this time in the opposite direction from the village. Again the two duegne followed at a respectful distance. They were truly like chaperones, Alex thought. Except for the Mach 10 submachine guns under their coats.

  “You said yesterday you had something you wanted to show me,” Alex said as they were leaving the village. He spoke to her in French, the only language they had used together. And although his French was good, he spoke it formally, and the sentences always sounded stiff and unnatural to him.

  “It is not far,” Michelle said.

  She was dressed in a skirt today, full and unrevealing, and a dark blouse with long sleeves and a collar that she had turned up in a nod to fashion.

  Ahead a solitary donkey ambled toward them down the road, almost as though it were off to market to pick out a few choice carrots. As they passed, the donkey stopped and watched them with open curiosity, then, with a slight shake of its head, continued.

  When they rounded a bend in the road, they saw four stray pigs snuffling in the dirt. They were huge and fat, the kind of pigs, it was said, that wild boars would lure into the maquis, mate with, and produce a variety that was even wilder and more ferocious than the boar itself. A young boy came around another bend, carrying a long pole.

  “Ça va, Michelle,” he called, waving his free hand.

  “Ça va, Pierre,” Michelle called back.

  The boy, who was no more than eight, circled the pigs, then began prodding and hitting them with the pole, calling out oaths in Corsican that Alex didn’t understand. Slowly, unwillingly, the pigs began to move back along the road, until they finally broke into a trot, the boy still behind them, still jabbing them and shouting in his native tongue.

  “What is he saying to them?” Alex asked.

  The trace of a smile played across Michelle’s lips then was replaced by a sterner expression that did not carry to her eyes. “If his mother heard him, he would be in great difficulty,” she said. She turned her head away from him, and he knew she was smiling again.

  They stopped, no more than two hundred yards from the village, and Michelle pointed to a gently sloping area below the road. One section, some fifty yards square, held a small, walled cemetery, and from above Alex could see that almost all the graves held freshly cut flowers.

  “This is what I wanted to show you,” Michelle said, leading him down a narrow path and through an iron gate.

  The cemetery was made up mostly of stone slabs, some of which were elevated and enclosed on three sides, others flush with the ground. Most of the more recent ones held glass-enclosed photographs of the dead, placed just above the names and dates cut into the stone. Dotted throughout the cemetery were some small family vaults, almost all done in the Genoese style, with black and white stone roofs laid in an alternating checked pattern.

  Alex stopped just inside the gate. “When I was a boy, I remember wanting to come and look at a Corsican cemetery. But Meme told me I couldn’t. He said Corsicans became offended if they found strangers prowling about among their dead. He told me about a French tourist who had been driven off with sticks by women of the village because he had been found photographing the graves.”

  “It is true,” Michelle said. “But it seldom becomes violent now. We have become more used to tourists, so there is more tolerance.”

  She began walking down one row of graves. “Do you know the other customs we have about our dead?” she asked.

  “No,” Alex said.

  She stopped and turned to him. “Every day the e
ldest woman in a family—mother, daughter, grandmother—must come and tend to the family’s dead. She often brings flowers, makes sure there has been no damage, clears away any weeds that have grown up about the grave.” She smiled faintly at what she was about to say. “It is believed the dead will place a curse on the family if they are forgotten and their graves are left uncared for.”

  “What if a family has no women left? If the mother has died and the daughters have moved away, or the sons have not married?”

  “Then the eldest male must do it,” Michelle said. “They say women were chosen to do this centuries ago, because the men were often away at sea or hiding in the maquis, fighting whatever nation was occupying the country at that time—Roman, Genoese, French, whoever.” She allowed her eyes to roam the graves. “I like to think it was because women were more dependable, more conscientious about such things. Today, because so many children have left the island, you see many old men coming to care for the dead.” She looked up at him, her eyes sad. “The dead have a very large place in Corsica.”

  Michelle turned and led him on down the path, finally stopping before a family plot that held numerous graves. It was marked by a large headstone that held various photographs. Three of them, old photographs all in a row together, were of young men.

  “This is the Santisini family,” she said. “The father owned a small store in the village. He sold meats and cheese and canned goods, and made a small but decent living for his family. Another family, the Barellis, had been friends of the Santisinis’ for generations. Some of their children and cousins had even married in the old days.” She shrugged. “But then, it is almost impossible to find two families here who have not had some marriages between them.

  “Anyway, the head of the Barelli family, the father, had long envied the Santisini store, wishing he too could provide for his family in such a steady way. So he saved his money and one day opened a store of his own. The Santisini family was offended. They saw it as an attempt to take bread from the mouths of their children. One day Santisini and Barelli argued in the street, and Santisini killed Barelli, stabbed him to death. A month later Santisini was killed by one of Barelli’s sons. And then that Barelli son was killed. It went on that way for several years, until finally the Barellis moved to another village. But even today the two families hate each other. They are taught about the vendetta from the time they are children.” She looked down at the grave. “This all happened thirty years ago, but one day a Santisini or a Barelli will be killed, and the vendetta will continue for another generation.”

  Michelle drew a deep breath. “I could show you many graves here that hold similar stories. Most involve families from different villages, and in most cases the offense that started the vendetta was more serious. But the result has been the same. The deaths continue because no one will stop them. No one will let the authorities intervene. Corsica is an island bathed in its own blood because of this. And because of it, it never stops bleeding.”

  Alex looked at her and remained silent. He understood what Michelle was telling him; was not offended by it.

  “I have to do this thing,” he said at length.

  “I know,” she said. “But it will not ease your pain. It will not make your wife rest more easily.”

  “He butchered her. She was my family. And he took it from me.” Alex’s voice caught as he spoke, and he took time to steady himself. Then he told her about it, as gently as he could. He told her about Ludwig, how he had wounded him. About the kidnapping and the telephone calls, and how Ludwig had brought him to the filthy basement to find her body. “It is all I have left,” he said. “Killing him.”

  Tears had come to Michelle’s eyes, and she reached out and gently stroked his cheek. “I know there is much violence in you. I can see it there. But I can also see gentleness. This man should die for what he has done. And he should die badly. I believe that. But I don’t want you to die, Alex. I don’t want the women of your family tending your grave.”

  “I have too much hatred, Michelle. It won’t go away until I’ve killed him.”

  “Yes, I can see it in you,” she said. She lowered her eyes. “There is a saying that if you seek revenge, you must first dig two graves. I hope one of them is not yours, Alex.”

  Michelle walked down the path, turned, and crossed the cemetery, then turned again. She had picked some flowers along the roadside as they walked, and she stopped before a grave and laid the flowers atop it. The marker, Alex saw, bore her familial name.

  “Was there a vendetta in your family?” he asked as he stood beside her.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “There is always a vendetta. Some say without the blood, nothing would grow here.” She turned to him. “Do you think that is true?”

  “No,” he said. “No, I don’t.”

  His name was Alberto Montani, and he was twenty-two, and already he had been fighting for Corsican independence for five years. It had begun when he was a boy in nearby San Nicolao, when he had shot the French policeman who had been extorting money from his widowed mother. She had been running a small bakery his father had begun years before and which she had continued as her only means to support her family after his death. But then the French flic had wanted his share of the weekly profits, and soon—in his greed—he wanted more, until there were hardly any profits at all.

  His mother’s friends told her to go to the milieu and have them deal with the French pig. But his mother said they were pigs themselves—and even worse than pigs, they were killers and gangsters. And so she paid, until there was little food for the three children she was struggling to raise.

  It was then that Alberto had taken his father’s old shotgun, and had blown the kneecap off the flic as he climbed from his car one night. And then he had run and hidden in the maquis until the police had lost interest in their investigation, and had sent their crippled pig home to France on a fat pension.

  A year later, at the university in Corte, Alberto learned that the abuse visited on his mother had not been isolated. He discovered how the French exploited the people throughout his island, and he joined the Corsican Liberation Front and vowed to spend his life—all of it, if necessary—fighting to free Corsica of French domination. It was then too that he became a communist, although few in the movement were, convinced it was the only way to free Corsica of all exploiters, including its own, the milieu.

  And the communists saw to his needs, sending funds from France to support the cause. And he, in turn, served them. It was how he came to inform the Soviet consulate in Marseilles that the Pisani brothers were hiding an American in Cervione. And it was how he decided to kill the American pig himself, if only to repay the long-standing debt he owed to those who supported him and his cause.

  His Soviet handler did not ask him to take that action. In fact, he was told only to watch and await further instructions, and to tell them if the American was moved. But Alberto decided to kill the American himself. He knew that no foreigner would ever breach Cervione and live, and that only a Corsican could get close enough to the American for a sure kill. It would be a blow against an imperialist supporter of the French, and an even greater blow against that other abuser of his people, the milieu.

  Alberto was a handsome young man, and like most of the independence fighters in the region, he was known to the people of the village. He was short and slender, with a shock of black curly hair, and his mouth never seemed to carry a smile. He was a didactic young man whose words were largely ignored, but his attack against the French police officer was known to all, and so he was considered a young man of honor and courage, and therefore his fanaticism was tolerated.

  Alberto had been coming to the village for three days, under the guise of recruiting young men for the cause, and he had discovered that the American would sometimes slip out of the apartment where he was hidden and walk alone at night. Thus, he had taken a position at the top of the small village square, seemingly to talk to some of the teenagers who gathered there in the
early evening, but actually to watch the entry of the building where the American was being guarded.

  It was eight o’clock when the American emerged that night, and Alberto watched as he passed the café and turned into the road that led along the maquis. Then he left the teenagers as quickly as he could, and walked slowly across the small square, to avoid raising any suspicion, and quietly slipped into the brush that grew below the road the American had taken. He had no gun with him—that would have been too obvious to the people in the village. They would have remembered that he had been armed. And after the American’s body was found, the milieu would know, and they would hunt him for the rest of his life. But he had a knife, and he knew how to use it. He had no need of a gun. It would only have made it easier.

  Alex walked along the road, knowing it would be foolish to go far. Even the walk itself, without the ever present bodyguards, was foolish. But he needed time to himself. Time to think. Time to be alone with his pain. And in a few days he would be in Libya, and then he would be very much alone anyway. And in far greater danger.

  He walked as far as the cemetery, then turned and headed back, his mind filled with the words beautiful young Michelle had spoken that morning. But she couldn’t understand the pain that gnawed at his gut like some hungry animal. She saw only the senselessness of killing—and there was no argument against that. She couldn’t understand the pain and anguish and hatred that could fill someone’s mind and heart. And there was no way for her to know the type of animal who lived in the world, whom only killing could stop.

  And he was glad she did not. Let her have her innocence for as long as life would allow it. For her entire life if possible. There were people who went through the world untouched by anything more than their newspapers or television sets. He hoped it would be that way for her. He could wish her nothing better in life than untainted innocence.