“I was posted here in 1942 from Genoa, and decided to stay on the island, after the war ended. Things changed here in autumn 1943 when our ‘partners’ the Germans retreated to the mainland to fight your people there. By that time the Allies were at Cassino, and looked like advancing to Rome. It seemed as if they might break through north. I was glad to see the back of the Germans. But of course, the Americans and French soon arrived and we Italians on Corsica all surrendered. What was the point of fighting them? We were put in camps near Corte to keep us out of the way. It wasn’t too bad. At least we weren’t going to get killed. I was only seventeen, I knew next to nothing.”
“But you met a local girl?”
“Not local. After we were released I knew there was no work for me on the mainland in my home region – Genoa, Liguria. Poverty there was worse. So I stayed and moved to Bastia on the Corsican east coast, because there was a great need to repair the war damage, and the Americans felt guilty about the mess their bombers had made, when the Germans held the town. I found work in the rebuilding and got a small wage. It was better than nothing, I didn’t starve and for a while became accepted.”
Giuseppe stopped and made to tend his nets, which were always at his side, needing stitching. His hands had been worn rough by years of the repair work that is the curse of fishermen. He seemed to drift into a haze of memory – and perhaps remorse, judging by the unhappy look on his rugged face.
“Then?’
“Yes, I met a girl in Bastia. She was a waitress at a rundown café where I used to catch a cheap meal. I could only afford to eat once a day. She was very pretty, even though her clothes were ragged. She wore black all the time and stood out from the brighter clothes people were beginning to wear post-war. Things were still basic of course, there was little money around. She had long glossy hair, which she kept covered with the old handkerchiefs that peasants traditionally wore in remote parts. One handkerchief knotted under her chin, and another from front to back over it. A sign of someone from the mountains, the unchanged core of the island. The whole effect was of a lost soul, sadness etched on her face. I thought she was a girl kept by the owner.”
“For his satisfaction? Putain. A prostitute?”
“We were all prostitutes then. In one way or another. We did whatever was necessary to survive. It looked as if, like me, she had no one to turn to.”
“Family?” Giuseppe ignored me and made a few stitches, twisting and turning the needles through the net.
“I began to call in at the end of the day, when work was finished. She would still be there. Must have worked a twelve hour day. I managed to get a few words with her, though the owner kept a sharp eye on her and would slap her wrist if she was slow or not paying attention to the clients. He was an ugly brute.” Again Giuseppe paused. The Adam’s Apple in his throat seemed to strain and block his voice. At these moments I learnt to wait for him to continue.
“I wrote her a note. It had to be in Italian, because my French then was so bad, but she understood that I wanted to see her, away from the café, when she could. I had to wait some weeks before she nodded to me one evening to follow her after work, and I stayed out of sight across the road until I saw her come out, wrapped in a light shawl. I followed her to a bomb-site and into the ruins of an old cliff-side villa overlooking the sea.”
“You were able to understand each other?”
“Some things don’t need saying. Important things. It took time and many other secret meetings before I knew her story, though I sensed at once she was in a very difficult spot. The reasons became clear after a month or two.”
“Which were?”
“She was not from Bastia. In fact Marianne was from a small mountain village in the heart of Corsica. One of those which had hardly changed since the beginning of time, it seemed. Girls were supposed to stay there, marry a local shepherd, and spend their entire lives on the cold, misty mountains, have children and feed their family. There vendettas were still the means of responding to insults or thefts between one family and another. People
lived in feudal conditions right up to the war. To try and leave could be a death sentence. Your own family would deliver the blow to protect their honour.”
“But that is what she had done? Escaped?”
“Yes, sacrificed everything. In the chaos of the war, the occupation, she had seen a chance and took it one day, convincing a passing German army lorry to take her to Bastia – to her the big city. They took advantage of her too, but Marianne accepted the price.”
I wanted Giuseppe to go on, but he suddenly leant forward and broke into tears. As if in a daze he went and took the pistol, which I had seen that once, out of a drawer. It was the one he sometimes hung just inside the entrance. On days I imagined he sensed danger. He must have put it away when the gendarmes had approached the grotte. He went through the motions of checking the weapon, put a bullet in the empty chamber, aimed it outside at a passing gull, paused, then lowered it again without firing. He uncocked the trigger, but left the bullet in the barrel, before putting it back.
“Just in case,” he muttered, but said no more.
I could not press him further, and took myself off along the beach. It was very hot and I doused my interest by swimming for an hour in the cool waters of the bay. After an uneasy doze, I went along to the taverne and got Antoine to give me a stiff whisky.
“Has Giuseppe ever told you the full story of his girl - Marianne?” I asked.
“No. It is too painful, I think. He came here one day on a fishing boat and dumped his few belongings on the shore. We gave him shelter for a while, but once he found the grotte he decided to move in there, and has made it a home over the years.”
Antoine sat me down and poured another whisky. “You have to understand that ‘honour’ would still have been an issue when Giuseppe took Marianne away. In years past
Corsicans kept to their unique notion of ‘honour’. Don’t think of it as in other European countries. Don’t compare it with some Italian gesture. Here it has been a serious matter. If you ran way with a girl you committed a mortal injury to her reputation – and the family’s. That may seem old-fashioned, but in the remote villages, where Marianne came from, the family would still be thinking in traditional terms. The wars may have opened up much of Corsica to new ideas since then, but in the mountains much stayed the same.”
“But,” I argued, “Marianne left on her own accord.”
“Maybe, but she did not have permission. She would still be bound in the family’s mind with the traditions. ‘Honour’ could be damaged by the slightest thing, speaking to an unrelated man or going out for a walk with him.”
“That seems archaic.”
“It was. Then even a gesture to a woman in public – the fatal attacar – was the main cause of murders and vendettas. This was when a man whipped off the headscarf of a woman in the street. It implied the man had taken possession of her. It was as if she had been raped. Whether or not she had unwittingly invited it, or the man just took an unwelcome liberty, she was dishonoured – disonarata – if she did not marry him immediately, in which case she might be faced with a life of misery, because no one else would touch her. But if the man did it as a public humiliation in front of her family, then the insult could only be resolved by murder or vendetta.”
Antoine paused and lit a cigarette. I learned this was his way of gathering his thoughts before he said something profound.
“Schioppetto – the gun. That would be the favourite weapon. Every man had a shotgun or pistol. Or the stileto – the thin bladed knife, sharp as a razor, kept in the lining of
the sleeve of the man’s jacket. It was concealed, but could be whipped out in seconds and thrust into the body of an unsuspecting opponent, severing his arteries and slashing the organs. Instant death.”
“But, for Giuseppe and Marianne, we’re talking the second half of the twentieth century, surely …?”
“You would think
so. But do these traditions, superstitions persist even now, tucked under the covers of modern life? After the second world war much changed, I agree, but not everywhere. Those who went off to fight saw another world and stayed away. Those that remained in the valleys and mountains knew little of the outside world and clung to their old ways.”
“But even so, that is some time ago.”
“How long ago is long ago? A grandfather remembering what his grandfather taught him, that is a span of over one hundred years. The tradition is kept fresh in the minds of successive generations if they want to.”
It seemed Giuseppe’s reluctance to discuss details of his life with Marianne hid greater truths, wider distress than he had been willing to release to me, a total stranger. Why should he have me intrude on his unhappy memories?
“She died in some sort of accident,” Antoine suddenly said.
“How?”
“He’s never told me the details.”
I felt a twinge of guilt for having gone over to Giuseppe’s grotte with my inquisitive intent. He had told me nothing of substance. Now I had a better understanding that the darkness in the back of his cave, his life, hid greater secrets and sadness. “There is another factor,” Antoine continued, blowing a further ring of smoke across my face, “ Giuseppe is Italian, from Genoa as you know. Came here in the war as a soldier. Corsicans have historically despised the Italians – the macaroni – because those whom most of them know have been poor migrant workers or detested occupying troops of the Second World War. You can see Giuseppe falls on both these counts. For Marianne to choose him will have caused offence – perhaps an unsatisfied revenge if they were discovered by her family.”
I thought through Antoine’s words. Shakespeare had written somewhere (I think for Falstaff) that ‘Honour’ is immemorial. A concept, a belief that would change – but only in degree - with time, and in a civilised modern society become nothing more than keeping one’s word or paying one’s dues to others. How ‘civilised’ had Marianne’s family been in the new post-war era?
Antoine seemed to have exhausted himself by these stories of the past. I wondered if he and Angelique had suffered too in exchanging their old-fashioned world in the deep south for the easier life of shepherding further north, away from some of the conventions that had restrained them from the chance to prosper on their own initiative. He had not yet told me much of their escape. He got up and went into the taverne. I left an extra euro on the table for my drink, though I doubted he would accept it. I was running the tab now and he would scribble a sum due on scraps of paper until the debt reached fifty euros. By that time I would have had double the worth in meals and drinks compared with the tourist cafés. But in this hidden corner, money did not mean much. Life was a struggle, but it hadn’t converted this old couple into charging steeply.
As I climbed slowly back up to the house, I realised that already, too soon perhaps, the simplistic images I saw around me of an idyllic spot were fraying a little at the edges. Yet, as soon as I saw Nicole’s cheerful face at the door, these images vanished from my mind, and her gentle kiss on the cheek removed all sinister thoughts from my mind.
xix
Water was not such a rare commodity in this sun-scorched landscape as it might have been. We used it with care but a spring above the house was fed by an aquifer within the mountains, which stored the winter rains, and sustained us across the summer months. When the house was built into the side of the mountain, the design had included a large stone water-tank in the rock-face, through which the spring water flowed on its way downhill. This constant, but modest refreshment, kept the water in movement and the tank surface protected from insects and mosquitoes. Used carefully it lasted until the next winter rains.
There were two clever facilities linked to this. Potable water taps in the kitchen and a flushing toilet that discharged into a fosse-septique away from the house. These two services made life here a degree more comfortable than otherwise would be the case for such an isolated spot. Antoine and Angelique had similar devices down on the shoreline, before the residue of their stream of spring water was finally wasted into the bay.
At the house, however, one facility in summer was open only when a storm brought heavy bursts of rain. The builder had shaped the roof tiles in a series of curves so that they
drained the water into a single pipe that overflowed to one side. Nicole had a tin funnel attached to this outflow, to which was fitted an old shower head. This allowed for a cooling rain shower after a downpour. A pleasure Nicole and I had a chance to enjoy from time to time.
It was such a summer storm that brought me a bonus. Nicole had been out all morning in the maquis under a burning sun and I had been oppressed by the simmering heat, whilst I tried to write on the terrace. The shade there had been little protection. Indoors we were contemplating some light refreshment for lunch, when the sky filled with fast-moving clouds, a stiff breeze got up, a darkness overcame the landscape. Even as we looked outside, the first drops of rain spattered on the roof, before quickly becoming a downpour. The shower head started spraying water over the ground.
We exchanged glances, forgot about food, drawn to the chance of cooling off. Nicole was wearing only a light shift and pants. Myself shorts and a shirt only. Whether the heat had got to our brains - or our desires, I did not question, but instinctively Nicole shed her clothes and I did the same. We shared the sheer joy of the cold water running down our bodies. Her glances remained innocent as she splashed water over her delighted body - and then mine. This playfulness lasted as long as the motive was to cool down, but I could not hide the evidence that my passion was rising alongside her body.
Nicole looked down and swiftly took hold of me and drew me tight against her. “I think Monsieur is pleased to see me?” There was no need to answer. Then a mischievous whisper in my ear, “Just a quick one.” I put my arms around her and lifted her feet off the ground, before pushing her body against the wall of the house. The spray still covered us, but could not stop me driving straight into her, as she raised one leg and wrapped it around my
waist. In her tight clasp, there was no way to stop my lust and at that moment her hand forced my head against her shoulder as we together enjoyed the thrill of pleasure simply taken. I had not even had to solve a riddle. I was a lucky prize winner.
xx
Why do I record our moments of intimacy in such detail? To buy attention? Or is it because I want to eradicate from my own mind the current vogue for tales, in which some thirty-year-old unlikely virgin falls for the whipping practices of a highly successful business man, who never seems to do any work? Has that route to literary success defied the odds, attracting women supposedly to pleasures one doubts they would succumb in such massive numbers? I prefer to record the evidence of reality.
Or is it that the life of Nicole and I on this remote landscape might prove to be a mirage, against the shimmering gleam on an apparently calm sea? A surface beneath which, all too soon, undercurrents swept away the raft of my naivety. In my defence it seems right to record events in full, as they occur, before death began to darken our lives. Only later did I realise our lovemaking was a screen for hidden motives, a mechanism for Nicole to control events; to maintain the peace for reasons outside my knowledge. I was skimming my way along, without consideration of others.
She had invented the game and I was a willing player. She was building a catalogue of passion and I did not want to forget any of it, and took to words to record its loving detail. I seemed to win every time. Perhaps also I wanted to reassure myself that we had indulged happily and unreservedly, without thought to the consequences. To me there seemed none. As Antoine was to say much later, “You never noticed anything at all, did you?”
No, old man, I did not. I wasn’t even looking.
xxi
It was the incident of the taverne dog that forced my mellowed mind to accept that all was not as it seemed. Triggered by Antoine‘s words, I recogni
sed that my idyll was perhaps too good to be true. One day I heard a gunshot on the distant landscape. Then later a second, this time closer to the house. Finally a third much closer than ever before. Shepherds protecting their flock concealed in the maquis undergrowth, no doubt? But from what? What could these chasseurs be targeting with shots that were the next interruptions in my complacency? Or had it not occurred to me before that we could never be totally isolated from the outside world? Was I conveniently blotting the man on the buoy from my memory?
Looking only inwards I had become seduced by Nicole and never questioned the simple impulses that had brought about the freedom of our intimacy. The game which had evolved simply intrigued me as well as providing a satisfying love life, all the more enjoyable for being conducted under the warmth of the Mediterranean sun. What could possibly interfere with this bliss?
Maybe these shots that broke the silence, the stupor of my daydreams, were not so unusual. Then silence resumed. No, I had to accept that the shepherds and hunters who very rarely crossed this maquis in pursuit of game were an accepted element of life, albeit at a distance. We were off the beaten track, cut off from the hikers’ trails, and thus an open landscape where old customs could play themselves out, as they had done from the days of
bandits – and vendettas. As Antoine had confirmed, shepherds in the countryside carried guns for hunting game but also as ‘protection’. Weapons otherwise were in the hands of zealous nationalists or criminal gangs, trading in drugs and fake goods, and the spirit of vendetta lived on in the internecine killings that one gang inflicted on the other or its supporters. Beneath the friendly surface of island life ran a stream of murder that had even brought violence onto the streets of the capital.
I had assumed we could wander across these mountainsides without being shot at in error, though the scrub was often head high with broom and holm oaks shielding one’s movements. But given the hunters’ predisposition to shoot at anything that moved, the taverne dog had had a small bell attached to its collar for the very purpose of distinguishing it – when concealed in the undergrowth – from the hunters’ prey.
The Dark Side of the Sun Page 6