Corsican Honor

by William Heffernan

  “Books could be written about his eating of pigs,” Meme snapped from behind the wheel. “That is truly great,” he added.

  CHAPTER

  29

  Antoine stood next to the shallow pit that had been dug in the ground, and basted the boar with a thick sauce, as one of his men slowly turned the handle of the spit from which the pig hung.

  Alex stood next to his uncle, watching the boar turn, its skin already a golden brown, the smell of the cooking flesh assaulting his nostrils and making his stomach rumble with hunger. The grounds were already filled with the people of Cervione, the young and the old and the children, and all had brought food to add to the feast. The village priest had come and blessed the food and the boar as it hung from the spit, and Alex had learned that the boar Meme had killed had been cut up and divided among families whose men had died during the year.

  Alex played with some of the children, but then returned to Antoine’s side and took up his role as joint provider of the feast. He felt very proud to be with his uncle, to have been part of the hunt. And the other children had treated him with a certain awe, and that had pleased him too.

  At a long table some twenty yards from the spit, Colette arranged an array of food, leaving a large space for the platter of meat that would be placed there, and which would signal the start of the feast. Children wandered up to the table to stare at the abundance, and Colette sneaked them tidbits and sent them on their way, smiling and laughing.

  Alex watched her. The side of her face that was undamaged was turned toward him, and he thought again that she was very beautiful.

  “How was Colette hurt?” he asked Antoine.

  His uncle’s face became somber, and he kept his eyes on the boar and continued basting it.

  “She was injured by a bomb,” Antoine said. “Some men—some communists—set it off because they could not have what they wanted.”

  “Why did they want to hurt her?” Alex asked. He was confused, not wanting to believe anyone would want to hurt the woman.

  “They didn’t want to hurt her,” Antoine said. “She was just there when it happened. But they didn’t care who they hurt. People who use bombs are like that. They are cowards. They have no honor.”

  Alex looked at Colette again, and he felt sad she had been hurt. But he was happy she had not been killed by the bomb.

  “What happened to the men who hurt her?” he asked.

  “They were killed,” Antoine said. “By men of honor.”

  Alex was glad the men had died. He wondered if it was wrong to feel that way.

  Meme and Piers sat on the terrace, surveying the crowd.

  “It is quite a gathering,” Piers said. “The people of Cervione show you great respect.”

  “We are a part of them,” Meme said. “And what we have achieved brings honor to them. And we also care for them and help them earn their bread.”

  He waved a hand down toward the sea. “The vineyard below the village is ours. We bought it several years ago from the Frenchman who owned it.” He smiled. “He agreed to our price without much difficulty, and then returned to France to a safer, happier life. The orchards beyond are also ours, and between the two, it provides steady work for many in the village.”

  He turned his head to Piers and winked. “Some still go to sea, as their fathers and their fathers’ fathers did before them. And many of them work for us too.”

  “It must give you great power and authority here,” Piers said.

  “It gives us more,” Meme said. “It gives us respect, and it gives us safety. Any man who entered this village to do us harm would find an army waiting for him.”

  “I still notice you have not abandoned your bodyguards,” Piers said.

  “Only a fool lets down his guard,” Meme said. “Even in a place where safety is assured.”

  The feast went on into the night, and when the villagers finally left, Alex stumbled to his room and fell immediately asleep. He dreamed of the hunt and of the great boar, as he had the night before, and he dreamed of Colette and of the bomb that had destroyed her face.

  The next morning after breakfast, he helped Colette work in the garden, while Meme and Antoine and his father talked in the house.

  “It’s unfortunate you cannot stay longer,” Meme said. “You do not visit us often enough, and when you do, the visit is always too short.”

  Piers nodded. “Not like the old days, when I was practically living in your hip pockets,” he said.

  “That is because you didn’t trust us,” Antoine said. “You thought we would kill everyone in sight, then pick the gold from their teeth.”

  “And you would have,” Piers said. He laughed. “Christ, you were a rough lot in those days. It seems impossible it was ten years ago.”

  “Much has happened,” Meme said. “And we owe much to you.” He leaned back in his chair, enjoying the luxury of reminiscence. They were in a large sitting room with a wall of French windows that opened to the terrace and a view of the sea, and there were glasses of marc before all of them.

  “We were clawing our way then—all of us were—holding onto what little we had by our fingernails.” He took time to light a cigarette, a strong, foul-smelling Turkish brand. “Everyone in the milieu then were babies. All the old ones—Spiritu, Carbone, and the rest—had all been killed off, or had been driven away because of the stupid choices they made during the war. The old factions were all run by men in their late twenties who only understood the knife and the gun and the garotte.” He blew a long stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “It could never be so again,” he said. “It was an …” He waved one hand, searching for the word.

  “An aberration,” Piers said.

  “Yes, that is it,” Meme agreed. “Oh, we all dreamed of it, all the young Turks. Just as they do today. But then, after the war, there were no strong organizations to be challenged. If it had not been so, we would still be working for some hard old bastard, and maybe ten years from now, we would be strong enough to make our move.” He shrugged. “So much of life is fate,” he said. “Being born to the right generation of men.”

  “You still have to be smart enough to seize fate by the throat,” Piers said. “Men only become powerful and rich if they have daring.”

  “Large balls,” Antoine offered, and laughed.

  “Enormous balls,” Piers agreed.

  “And you must keep them,” Meme said. “If they shrivel up, if you become too content, too pleased with yourself, someone with big, hungry ones will come and snatch the eggs from your nest.”

  “That is unlikely with you,” Piers said. “You have the money, and you have the political power. And somehow I can’t imagine either of you becoming too content with yourselves.”

  “It is why my brother comes back to Cervione,” Antoine said. “That, and to renew his Corsican blood. He likes to remind himself of what he was, what he came from, and what he would be if he stopped clawing his way through life.”

  “You sound as though you don’t think well of these people,” Piers said.

  “No, I love them,” Antoine said. “But they have been seduced by this island. They see its beauty, and the beauty of its simple ways, and they say: ‘What more do I need? I have my family, I have Corsica. I am a fortunate man.’” He shook his head. “Perhaps they are right. Perhaps it is better than seeking more and risking a bullet in your head.” He smiled. “Sometimes I think … ahh …” He waved his hand, dismissing his own words.

  Meme laughed softly. “Can you see my brother working in the vineyard, then coming home to his fat wife and taking his son to the café so he could sit over a glass of pastis and talk with the other men about the great harvest that is coming?” He ground out his cigarette. “If he didn’t have heads to break, he would be like a whore without a cunt.”

  Piers laughed at the crude reference, but it made him think of Colette, of her life in Corsica, and what it must be like for her. He recalled how much she had loved Marseilles, the fine resta
urants, the beautiful clothes. Now she dressed like some young peasant woman, and her face—what the bastards had left of it—even denied her the warmth and comfort and companionship of a lover.

  Colette without sex, he thought. It was like denying a great virtuoso his violin. He had never known a woman with her talents. Not before, not since. He doubted he ever would again.

  “Tell me about Colette,” he said, surprising himself but realizing he needed to know.

  Meme stared at him. He was pleased he had finally asked. He did not object to what Piers had done to the woman. She had been a poule, and poules could never be taken seriously. But it was the way he had done it. It had lacked honor, manliness, and men like that, he knew, could never be fully trusted. He smiled inwardly at the thought. But then, no man could, he told himself.

  “She lives a simple life here.” He raised his chin toward his brother. “She works hard at teaching good, French manners to Antoine.”

  Antoine raised his arms, then let them fall, and rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “If the woman acted this way when she worked in the brothel, she would have starved,” he said.

  “But I think she is happy here,” Meme continued. He shook his head, as if trying to find the correct words, or perhaps trying to understand what he was about to say. He looked across at Piers. “Women who sell themselves are very strange. Most are beautiful. But they have no love for themselves, no respect for themselves. And it is not because of what they do. They are that way before they begin that life.” He grimaced. “Maybe their fathers fucked them. Or maybe they came to believe that their cunts were all they had to offer, the only way to make their way in the world. Who knows, except the poule herself? It is men who do this to them.” He gestured at all of them. “Men like us. All men. Sometimes I think if they didn’t have that thing between their legs, we would hunt them every year, like deer. We don’t respect them. And we don’t because they cannot beat us. They cannot overpower us physically. We respect them when they are old and ugly, because then we realize they are strong and wise. And we know this because they have survived us. And we respect them when they are our mothers, because they have had power over us and they have used it fairly. Men are asses,” he added, a bit ruefully, Piers thought. “We have something good, and we have a need to abuse it.”

  “Does she have a man now?” Piers asked.

  Meme shook his head. “She has no need of a man. I think she has finally come to believe she is better off without one. I think she would like children. But …” He let the idea die, then picked it up again. “I see her with children sometimes.” He grimaced again. “But men don’t see beyond the face and the body. They refuse to recognize that everyone will be old and ugly one day.” He laughed. “That is why so many end their lives married to shrews.”

  “I often think of her,” Piers said.

  “Ah, but you think of what you knew between her legs.” He waved his hand. “I don’t criticize you for this. It is natural. It is how we have been taught to think. It is why men are never happy, never content. When it comes to women, they think with their pricks in their hands.”

  “Some settle for even less,” Piers said.

  Meme wondered if he was thinking of his own wife now. “And some men settle for men,” he said. “I have never understood that either.”

  Piers glanced at his watch.

  “When does your plane leave?” Antoine asked.

  “Two hours. We had better get down to business.” He raised his glass of marc. “First an announcement. I am leaving Paris. I am being called back to Washington. It is a promotion, and I will be in charge of all operations in Western Europe.”

  “Merde,” Antoine said. “Now we will never see you. And my nephew will become a stranger to me.”

  “No, I will be back regularly. And I will bring Alex with me whenever I can. It will be good for him to grow up in his own country, but I want both my sons to have the benefits of Europe as well. Europe is where the money will be. In twenty years or so, it will be rich again. Rich and growing. And those who know it will have a great advantage.”

  “Does this mean we will work through someone else now?” Meme asked.

  “No,” Piers said. “The fewer who know of our arrangement, the better.” He leaned forward. “My associates who control the American end will still do that. But I will also be there to watch them more closely.”

  “You think they are cheating us?” Antoine asked.

  “No. But I think the men they deal with would like to control what you control. It would make sense from their standpoint.” He pursed his lips. “But that would not be good for anyone. Not for the business, not for my agency. These American Italians would come here, and within a year they would have lost all the political strength you now have. They don’t understand Europe, and especially not France, and they never will.”

  “They would find it difficult to rob our nests in our own tree,” Antoine said.

  “But I think they already try to go around us,” Meme said. “I think they ship some of their product to Amsterdam. But it is a small amount, so we ignore it.”

  “Amsterdam is not a safe port,” Piers said. “Not like Marseilles. So they can’t ship it there in quantity. And they cannot bring it here and then ship it to Amsterdam, because once it comes here, you control it.”

  “Perhaps we will let them transship some there,” Meme said. “For a fee. We run at full capacity now, and the business is growing, and it would be more profitable than to pay more protection for more laboratories.” He laughed. “Now we must pay even the fire department because the process is so explosive.”

  “Someday some fool will light a match, and the opera district will disappear,” Antoine said.

  “You should move it all to the country before that happens,” Piers said. “Buy an old farm.”

  “I like it under my nose,” Meme said. “Here I have people who watch it for me, and it is easier to watch the watchers.”

  Piers pursed his lips again. He couldn’t argue with the sentiment. It was the way he ran his own business. He glanced at the time. “I’m afraid we have to get to the technical side of things,” he said.

  Meme nodded. Piers’s move to Washington would require some changes, but they would be only minor ones. And it would be good for business. It would make it safer. It was good to have people in high places. And there was no place higher than Washington.

  Alex carried the basket of tomatoes to the long table that had been used for the feast the previous day. He and Colette had been working in the garden for over an hour, and the baskets of various vegetables had grown so, it appeared large enough for yet another party. But she had explained they were needed to satisfy Antoine’s appetite. And she made another reference to living with a goat in the house. He laughed and she joined him in the laughter, and he knew she really liked his uncle when she did.

  They had also picked lemons and oranges from the trees that dotted the property, and one had been located next to a large burial vault that was down near the front gate. It was empty, she explained, and had been built for the day Antoine and Meme died.

  “The filou,” she said, “like to be buried on their own patch. They don’t like to rot with the rest of us.”

  But it had been fun. Except for picking lemons near the burial vault. That was spooky, and he had this vision of the roots of the tree growing up into the vault someday and into the caskets that were sitting there. All the movies he had watched—the ones his mother never wanted him to see, the ones he sneaked off to anyway—always had scenes in cemeteries, where the trees were all gnarled and scary, and made him think they were going to reach out and grab anyone who walked by.

  They sat under a different tree now, eating oranges. Colette’s head leaned back against the trunk, and the fine features of the right side of her face looked peaceful and relaxed.

  “Where in Paris do you live?” she asked.

  “Off the Boulevard des Italiens,” Alex said. “Not far from the
Opera and the Place Vendome. It’s near where my father works, so he can just walk there.”

  “Do you like it?” she asked.

  “Paris? Yes, very much.” He hesitated. “Some of the people aren’t very nice if they think you’re a foreigner. But most of them are fine. And I don’t tell them I’m an American.”

  “You speak French very well. Better than me. You talk like a French filou.”

  Alex smiled, pleased by what she had said. She had told him what a filou was, and he liked the idea of being thought of as a “sharp operator.”

  “Have you been to Paris?” he asked.

  Her eyes seemed to grow distant. “Once,” she said. “A friend took me there.” She looked at him and smiled. “Far back, when you were only a baby. But it was very beautiful, and I loved being there.”

  “You should go back,” Alex said. “Come and visit me.”

  Colette gave him a faint smile. “I would like that very much,” she said. “But Paris is not for me anymore. I live here now, and here it is also very beautiful. And I go to Marseilles sometimes, and I go to Lyons to visit my parents. It is enough.”

  “But then I’ll only see you when I come to Corsica,” Alex said.

  “So you must come more often. And you must stay longer.” She hesitated. “Does your father never bring your mother when he comes?”

  “No,” Alex said. “I don’t think she likes my uncles too much. I’m not sure why, but I just don’t think so.”

  Colette thought about asking him about his mother. Piers had never told her much about the woman. But she decided it was better not to know.

  “It is probably because Antoine eats like a goat,” she said. She looked away, off toward the house, and was silent for a long time. Alex wondered what she was thinking about.

  “Does your brother ever come?” she asked at length.

  “Sometimes. But he’s back home in the United States now, going to boarding school. Richbird likes it better there, I think.”

  Colette questioned the name Richbird, and Alex explained it was his baby name for Richard, and that his brother had always hated it.