“How long have you been here? How well do you know him?”
I realised I did not at all. Only the few things Giuseppe had so far told me. Not much. Only what he wanted me to know? Girard had worked that out for himself.
“Fooled you then?”
“I can’t tell. He doesn’t say much. Antoine knows him better. Been here for so many years. Ask him,” was the only defence I could muster.
“We have, but he didn’t know much either. Time to speak again to Giuseppe.”
“He’ll be in his grotte.”
Giuseppe wasn’t.
Girard came back after his gendarmes had made a cursory glance into the empty cave. There was a look of thunder on his face. He had come a long way only to miss his target. He took a notebook out of his pocket and wrote down a few details.
As the last man to arrive, to reach this cove, I knew very little about anybody, as my visit to Nicole’s house in the previous year had been very brief. Girard went to speak to Antoine and Angelique, who said they had seen Giuseppe leave in his small boat in the morning. Nothing had seemed out of the ordinary, and they expected a catch of fish. Girard moved off to brief his gendarmes.
Giuseppe did not return, and the patrol-boat crew had not spotted him either on their way in. Antoine had not spoken with him before he left so there seemed no immediate action. Both of us refused to believe Giuseppe had murdered the man out on the buoy.
“What could be his motive?”
“An old quarrel. A threat to call in past dues. Calabrian debts?”
“But Giuseppe is from Genoa.”
“Still an Italian.”
“He left there when he was only seventeen. Conscripted and found himself in Corsica almost at once. He has never mentioned he went south to Calabria.”
“Why would he, if …,” Girard had come back and left the question hanging in the air. “Maybe a wartime fellow soldier, someone with a grievance.”
“It would have to be a very strong one.”
“More likely a debt. More recent.”
“But surely Giuseppe doesn’t have contact with those gangs,” I interjected.
“As far as you know?”
Antoine made an obvious point, “He’s always here. Or that’s how I think of him.”
“You said he goes out almost every day,” Girard pointed out.
“Yes, but only just along the coast. Never far.”
“So where is he today?”
Antoine and I looked at each other. Blankly. “Well …” Antoine said.
“Exactly,” Girard interrupted, ” he’s out there somewhere. Not too difficult to have a rendezvous at sea.”
That was true. Yet the whole thing seemed out of character. Was Giuseppe keeping things from us? Was that why I found him so reticent?
“There is something from his past,” I volunteered, “ but it has to do with his girlfriend. The one that died in an accident. That’s why he is always sad and keeps himself to himself. It’s why he is content to live in a cave, a grotte.”
Inspector Girard called his men together. “We’ll take a look outside, at sea, on our way.” He turned to Antoine and me, “we’ll be back, but don’t tell Giuseppe – if he returns – that we’ve been here today.”
“We won’t.” But as I said that I knew we couldn’t keep the secret from our friend. Would they find him out there or would he be tucked inshore, lifting his lobster pots in one of the many rocky inlets, the tiny calanques, where bigger boats could not venture safely? For the moment we needed to protect him.
It felt as if Girard was wanting to make Giuseppe the scapegoat for his lack of success in resolving the murder. He appeared desperate to have a culprit. It didn’t seem to fit with what I had learned about the man. Giuseppe couldn’t be a murderer could he?
xxvi
At this time I got to know Antoine and Angelique better. Their life had been hard, shepherding flocks of sheep and goats on the central mountainous spine of the island to the
south. Much of the land was so rocky that only the goats could climb to feed on it, and the weather was different from that of the coast – and the bay. They had been refugees from feudal ways, escaping with a small dowry to fund a flock that then had taken years to gain a size sufficient to maintain a living across the year. They had eventually settled twenty kilometres inland from this coast near a small village off the road, but found the herding tiring due to the steep slopes of the escarpment, and the constant milking burdensome. Everything they produced had to be taken some distance by cart to the nearest village market. Milk, cheeses and the occasional carcass, that Antoine had himself slaughtered. In driving rain or snow in the depths of winter at altitude. The effects of this weather were imprinted on their beaten faces.
“You came down here for an easier life?” My lame retort.
“Only easier in some ways. With the animals – if we didn’t lose too many to disease, wolves or weather, we knew we had a constant income. Just enough to keep us going. Here it is an easier life – we are old now – but we never know from day to day if we will have any customers and for how long.”
“The vital summer months.”
“We would not manage without them.”
This much was obvious. On quiet days, with an empty cove, I would sometimes feel a sense of guilt in not supporting their existence. I had plenty of money and I was all too aware what it meant to them. More often than I needed I would make the effort, particularly if Nicole was out, and order a dish and sink a bottle of wine. The plat du jour was whatever they had left over or bits and pieces in the old refrigerator. Or Angelique would boil up some water on the wood fire for pasta, served with her own pesto sauce from herbs of the maquis.
I didn’t mind helping their business, and felt good afterwards, chatting with one of them over coffee.
In the afternoons they would rest until Angelique became fidgety, when she would sit in the shade and knit some garment or other for the winter, using the wool they themselves had clipped off their few sheep. They were a couple locked together in simple companionship, weathered across the decades, demanding little, settling for less.
Antoine did open up to me on one of those days when I had felt unable to write constructively, and had lost the critical edge to my research. My trio of authors had eluded me and I trudged down to the taverne for a drink or two to settle my discontented mind. Antoine was in a reflective mood and seemed downhearted.
“What is wrong?” I started, as soon as he had put a bottle of red wine on the table, with a bowl of olives. “Share a glass with me.”
“The dog’s death.” It was the first time he had spoken about it for a while.
I felt guilty, but said foolishly, “It is only a small thing. He took his chance coming here and had a good life for a while, thanks to you.”
“Only to lose him.”
“Mistaken for a rabbit?”
“No. They chose to send a message.”
“Not to harm the sheep?”
“No, it was another warning, I think.”
“Chasseurs?”
“No. Those that don’t want you – I mean Nicole, or any foreigners owning the house.” I felt he was going to say more, but he didn’t on that subject. I had already learnt not to press him at such moments of silence. Antoine poured himself a second glass and gulped down a mouthful of the rough wine. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and turned to face me.
“You know very little of this island, don’t you?”
“I am willing to learn.”
“What is on the surface is not the most important.”
Again I made no reply.
“It is changing, of course. These days there are many places for tourists to enjoy. But it hasn’t always been so. In some places, the mountains, you don’t have to go far back to find yourself in the shadow of the past.”
He obviously wanted to get something off his chest. He tended to repea
t himself in these sessions, when reminiscing, but I didn’t mind.
“Angelique and I came to this area here for a reason.”
“I thought to retire?”
“No, it’s not as simple as that. We had to.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We lived in the south, in a small village near Sartène.”
“The most Corsican of Corsican towns, Prosper Merrimé said?”
“So you know something then?”
“I know of its reputation.”
“The area – the Sartènais – is close to the island’s most ancient monuments.”
“The menhirs from the stone age.” “Exactly, and even in more modern times, as late as the last war, the area was trapped
in the feudal past. Customs hadn’t changed much when we lived there.”
“As a couple?”
“No. That is the point.”
“You met Angelique there?”
“Yes, I saw her one day by chance, but the customs were such that I could not at first
show her any sign of interest or affection. To even talk to a girl openly implied you had to
marry her.”
“Or else?”
“Or be murdered. For dishonouring her. Angelique wasn’t much better placed than Giuseppe’s girlfriend.”
“Life in the countryside was years, decades behind the times. The first World War had meant many of the men went to other countries to fight and afterwards saw things differently, but they had to stay away – if they had survived the trenches – unless they were willing to go back to the old ways in the villages.”
“To work as shepherds in the fields, or in the vineyards and olive groves.”
“A life of subsistence. But those that did return brought back stories of a wider life,
open relationships, of tolerance. That happened again in the Second World War. Remember
what I told you about Guiseppe and Marianne.’
“And for you?”
“At the end of that war I was just a teenager. Up to that point I had followed the rules, the old customs, stayed within the family. Avoided clashing with other families, with
which we were in conflict, where memories lingered still of past feuds, past murders, historic vendettas.”
Antoine twitched at these memories, as if he himself had been stabbed with one of the special knives – the cursina – the shepherd’s work tool, now made as souvenirs for tourists visiting Sartène.
“My family lived in a village up in the mountains, called Gozzano. In the middle of nowhere. A few kilometres from the nearest town, but it could have been a hundred. There was no proper road at the time down the valley, just rough tracks, and we provided everything we needed to eat and to drink from the fields, the groves, the sheep, the goats.”
“You were already a shepherd?”
“We all were. That had been sufficient for generations. There was no inclination to
enter the new world. People didn’t want the pressures of the modern world. Outsiders said
we were lazy peasants, but people feared change. I could only tend our family’s land, and had
no means of moving elsewhere.”
“Which you didn’t need to do, surely?”
A small tear seemed to enter the corner of his eye. This old man still carried more
painful memories than ones of happiness.
“One of my older brothers fell for a girl in another family. The wrong family. There
was no way he would be allowed to choose a girl from an enemy.”
“Enemy?”
“Sworn enemies. The families lived close together. Their lands adjacent, but the past cast a wall between them. Everyone had guns. The place was tense all the time. The slightest excuse would have flared up into … someone losing their life.”
“The police …”
“Nothing was decided by the police. They didn’t interfere, were never present anyway in the remote villages.”
“What happened?”
“They were seen together, out on the landscape, away from the village and reported.
The girl’s father did not even ask as to the circumstances. Whether she had encouraged him, or let him touch her.”
“Which could at least have led to a negotiated marriage?”
“Yes, but the father was so enraged he simply shot my brother in the street. In front of
everyone.”
“And?”
“It meant I had to wait of course, be very careful. It was family against family. The same death could await me. It was agony. Three years passed with Angelique close but still untouchable. I kept in work, but earning little, everything was bartered then. There seemed no way to be together. The old customs remained and she was stuck in her village, within the family, doing what the women did, what the daughters had to do, housework, scrubbing and cleaning the dirt their men left on their boots, washing, sewing rough clothes together, the occasional lacework. They were hardly allowed out of the house, let alone out of sight. It was very primitive.”
“What changed? I mean how did you come to get away?”
“Angelique was to be given to a local man. She was just seventeen. He was a horrible man, violent. She knew he would beat her without thought if she did the slightest thing wrong.”
“Wrong in his eyes.”
“Vraiment. He could choose to do anything he wanted. There would be no one to stop him, once she was in his house.”
Antoine paused again, needing another swig of wine before he could continue. His worn features scrunched into a forlorn look. I didn’t need to put any questions to him, the answers would come.
“Angelique couldn’t face the feudal life that she was faced with. To be a chattel, a donkey. This man became her enemy. She could see what had happened to her mother, to other girls. By custom they were looked after, but in a brutal way. She remembered the men that had gone to war and not chosen to return. She knew there must be greater freedom somewhere. By that time I had found better work in Propriano nearby.”
“You went and stole her from the family?”
“No. I’ve told you of two options under the old traditions, if one had an enemy. In fact there were three. Schioppetto, stileto, strada – gun, dagger or flight. She chose the latter and came one night to Propriano and told me she had run away. I think she had set out at dusk the evening before and walked through the night. It was dawn when she found me and I was already at work.”
“You were not far enough away to escape the threats of her family?”
“Life was run at the point of a gun. I realised they could be there very quickly. We had to leave at once. There was a fishing boat that went to Ajaccio twice a week to sell the best of its catch. There was no other possibility. I persuaded the skipper to take us, pretending we were going to see family relatives. I am not sure he believed us, but I had enough money to convince him to let us aboard. We got away.”
“Without anything?”
“With a little money, and what we stood up in.”
“Were you followed?”
“We never stopped to see. It was a one way ticket.”
“Did her family start a vendetta?”
“We never found out. We couldn’t let them know of our situation. That’s how it started. We have been together ever since, finding work where we could, managing somehow, until enough years had passed and we hoped we were forgotten.”
“Because she left on her own accord, would any vendetta pass away?”
“Possibly. It might have made a difference, for we were not tracked down, and her parents would be long dead by now. I may be the subject of a vendetta transversal, where the vengeance falls on a distant relative or culprit, but I think it is too late for that.”
Antoine got up quickly and went indoors for a moment. I could hear him rummaging around in the old chest he kept in a corner. He returned and sat down b
eside me. In his hand he held a small scabbard. He drew out the dagger from inside it and laid it on his hand in front of me.
“Cursina.” The blade was stout and long but in some perverse way it had the innocent appearance of a paper-knife for opening letters. Antoine put me immediately to rights.
“The shepherds’ all purpose knife. I was never without it. Also a weapon of choice for vendetta. Easy to conceal until the last moment, and silent unlike a gun. A contest between two shooters always draws a crowd. With the cursina one can be beside the enemy in a bar, in the street and take him unawares.” He gripped the curved handle and suddenly made an upwards thrust with it almost into my face. I shrank back in alarm. “You must always
deliver the blow by thrusting upwards into the body. That way it severs many arteries and organs at once. If you stab downwards your enemy has the chance to stab back before he expires.” Stileto, cursina – weapons of death.
“What if Angelique’s family has vowed to avenge what she did, what you did?”
“After so long it is rare nowadays for the vendetta to be executed.”
“Rare, but not impossible?”
“We are too old to care. We have managed and had our freedom. If they find us now
we will die together. So be it.”
xxvii
The next time the outside world blew in to the cove and upset our peace was when a rowdy yacht crew came ashore and foisted themselves on Antoine and Angelique. Whether they had had a few drinks before they arrived was not immediately evident. But by the time they had drunk a dozen bottles of wine with their meal they had lost their reason. Some of them spent the afternoon asleep on the straw mattresses in the back, but two decided to clamber up the hill to Nicole’s house.
She and I faced an aggressive pair, who wanted to know everything about the house, and in the face of our reluctance to tell them anything (it was not their business) started making extravagant offers for the place.
“We can afford to buy your house and the place down on the beach. Bring our friends, make something of the whole mess. Could be a fantastic site for a naturist camp.”
Beside ourselves with anger, we somehow managed to restrain our physical actions - they were evidently sozzled and incapable of defending themselves - and told them to go away.
The Dark Side of the Sun Page 8