Nicole, who had on arrival, gone straight up to the house, missed all this commotion. The gendarme finished with me after an hour of fruitless interrogation and turned his attention to Antoine, in the hope he could provide some background clues to others, who might have a grudge against Giuseppe, but he too found it difficult to point a finger in any direction.
“The gang, whose man on the buoy was murdered? An eye for an eye?” the gendarme suggested. Antoine and I could provide no answer.
I was allowed to go back up to the house later and present Nicole with the terrible fact of Giuseppe’s murder. She could not believe it, nor that I had been the murderer. She knew better than any that I had few possessions with me, just my reference books, notepads and pens. I realised one thing. Whoever had done this had had time to put distance between the crime and themselves. It seemed hopeless. They must have been on the boat that night and come ashore as I lay in my stupor, rather than hike their way overland, fighting the density of the maquis undergrowth. By sea would have been the quick, easy way to come and go.
I was exhausted by this disaster, which had broken the spell of my blissful existence, and went to my room to lie down. I wasn’t sure I could add anything further if questioned again in the morning.
Nicole did her best to calm me down, but she was equally distressed. “I can’t believe anyone had a grudge against him. It seems so unreal. Here of all places.”
I had only one secret way out of my despair. That the day before I had taken Giuseppe’s notebook and hidden it in my room, amongst my literary effects. I vowed to make a personal investigation into its content and see if, through their translation, I could identify any cause for Giuseppe’s death. For who would have the motivation to strike him out of the blue at this late stage of his life? The man on the buoy? Or rather that man’s killers? Was there a connection? It hadn’t seemed so.
Next morning my thoughts were interrupted by the arrival at the house of the gendarme, who belatedly realised he should have searched it first and accompanied me lest I threw away any weapon I might have used to hit Giuseppe on the head. But such had been the conviction of my expressed innocence that he had continued challenging Antoine and Angelique in pursuit of other motives.
His first rummage through the house and our effects produced nothing, most particularly since he took no notice of my scattered papers, within which lay Giuseppe’s notebook. He assumed all these documents were simply part of my researches. The gendarme searched the loft, the study with Nicole’s pile of botanical specimens, bottles and potions, the kitchen and bedrooms. Everything was in sight and the few cupboards stocked only clothes or food. He checked the old useless shotgun and saw it could not be fired.
Obliged nevertheless to build a case of any sort – against me – the gendarme insisted on a lengthy interrogation, which rapidly became a bizarre manifestation of police presumption fighting my innocent responses. I could not elaborate on why Giuseppe had been murdered, nor could I explain to his satisfaction why I had not noticed the bullet hole in the chest. Surely I must have seen that immediately? I explained once more I had found him slumped in the chair, in his fishing oilskins, and that there was no pulse. There was no sign of any disturbance. From his ashen face I had known at once that he was dead. The rigor had added to my assessment, and a heart attack seemed the obvious cause, given his age and his hard life.
“But you did not question that? You said he went out fishing almost every day. It sounds as if he was fit and strong.”
“But can you tell when the heart is going to give out. It can happen to anyone.”
“You definitely did not see the wound under his oilskin?”
“The top was buttoned up over his shoulder. It looked normal, the way he wore it in the boat.”
“But he wasn’t in the boat. He was in his … the grotte.”
“He often mended his nets inside, when the weather was bad. It rained during the
night the gale started. As it wasn’t right for fishing – and Antoine and Angelique were away – there was no need to fish anyway, I assumed he had stayed in.”
“You say you didn’t go down to the cove on either of those two days?”
“The gale made it dangerous.”
“Very convenient.”
“I was in the house all the time.”
“And you didn’t think he might need something, might be in danger with the high seas?”
“No. He was a sea-dog. I never felt he needed me to support him.”
“He obviously did this time.”
“I can’t explain it.”
So the gendarme and I went round in unrewarding circles until he gave up on his line of questioning. Perhaps he had enough to fill the demands of his report, however useless. He couldn’t establish a motive.
“The only thing I can think,” I said finally, “is that there was someone on that boat, who came ashore that evening and took his life. That’s the only possibility.”
“As far as you are concerned.”
I stuck to my guns. To what I believed. From what other direction could anyone have come? Fighting their way through the maquis in a storm? At night? Past the house, without me hearing? No one ever came that way.
The gendarme shrugged his shoulders. He turned to Nicole, who had come into the room to offer coffee, but he refused the suggestion. To her he said, “You weren’t here, so cannot be a suspect, but I may want to talk to you another time to see if you can think of any motives, as to who might have done this.”
“I understand.” She left us alone.
Then, having given him my passport, and thinking he was about to go back down the hill, I remembered my other secret – Giuseppe’s pistol. A look must have come over my pale face, a flicker that he noticed. Hesitating, he looked around more carefully and went back into my room and worked his way through my clothes once again. But not my papers. Fortunately I had hidden the pistol and ammunition in the wall behind the house. Not even Nicole knew I had them in my possession.
iv
Datura stramonium. Thorn Apple. I could not work out why Nicole had left this plant on the table so casually. Maybe it was just part of her general classification of the good and bad plants. The beneficial and the dangerous. From the records I found notes to suggest it was a very poisonous and narcotic plant, full of alkaloids. Theophrasus in ancient times had written: a small dose makes the patient sportive, twice the dose he goes mad; three times brings permanent insanity, and four times he is killed.
Was there somehow a riddle for me in all this? If so, I could not see the temptation or any route to passion. Was she trying to tell me to hold off for a while? Or was it nothing to do with me and her line of enchantment? I hoped so. It worried me this danger was on our landscape at all, hidden in the undergrowth of the maquis.
The plant was gone the next day. I was glad to forget it. Nicole had probably already crushed the seeds and distilled them in some way to create a low strength narcotic or stimulant that in very small doses might serve to alleviate depression. It was one area of her investigations.
v
He has scribbled on the cover ‘Narrativo di Giuseppe.’ I have been looking through and translating his notebook. My translations are smoother than the rough sentences of this personal document. It seems a history that he had kept over the years. It told me more than Giuseppe had passed on in our casual chats at the grotte. I knew already he had not revealed the whole truth as to his past. And why should he? We all have secrets that cannot be told. In his case perhaps because it would put him at risk, and he had had enough of that in the war, and its aftermath as a prisoner. But why keep the pistol if his past was no longer a threat to him?
His notebook noted new details to the little he had already told me. Confirming that Giuseppe had been conscripted into the Italian army in 1942, when Mussolini still suffered from outrageous ambition to bring empires to Italy on the coat-tails of Hitler. The reluctant soldier had foun
d himself within a year in the relatively calm fortress of Corsica, at that time only a future target for Allied interest. But in September 1943, with the Allies successful landing near Naples and starting to drive north up the backbone of his country, Giuseppe found himself with quite different prospects, and under an increasingly dominant German command over the island, in what was seen as ‘a lull before the storm’.
It confirmed also that the Allied progress soon brought Corsica into the active war-zone. The Germans forces billeted there retreated to the mainland in October 1943, just before American forces landed. The result was an inevitable surrender of Italian forces on the island, and Giuseppe was lucky to be taken prisoner without injury. He managed to hide his pistol before being marched away. He did not suffer the catastrophes of others in the mainland battles, and was still held in the camp when hostilities ended in Spring 1945.
His notes record that Giuseppe and others were eventually given their freedom and most returned to their war-worn landscape, but, as he had told me, he chose to stay and make a life in Corsica. He found work in Bastia and names the builder who got him started. Then more precise information on Marianne as she comes into the picture. From a small hamlet near Sartène in the remote southern mountains, she too was escaping, but in her case from a near-medieval life. Claustrophobic and focused on traditional hillside farming and flocks of sheep and goats, her chances of finding any sort of decent life had been constrained by the obligations on the daughters of the house. ‘She was at the mercy of ancient rituals and attitudes to women, which sought to protect, but actually enslaved them,’ he wrote. ‘She had little chance of escape from the drudgery and the feuding families, who retained some of the historic laws of revenge, should any member stray out of line. I knew banditry inland had nearly vanished but the mindset of the locals had never lost the entitlements to vendettas if they felt injured.’ (I took this to be a euphemism for killing).
‘Marianne wanted a better life’. Giuseppe had met her at this moment of bravery, and knew they both were vulnerable to fate, if he befriended her. ‘She looked so helpless, I just wanted to support her’. He had said: “Between us, we’ll manage somehow.”
Marianne was taking a big risk of being caught by her family (or enemies) and not least for associating with a foreigner – indeed a hostile invader – and so they both had to conceal their whereabouts and yet scratch a living of some sort. One of the houses Giuseppe was repairing he used as a shelter for them both. ‘We made a home within its battered walls and lived there for six months.’ When the house was finished they found a farmer in a village north of Bastia, who let them use an ancient bergerie for a small sum. It had been abandoned for some time and its slate roof was in dire need of repair. As long as Guiseppe did the work, the owner did not mind. It was a hardship, but nothing they could not cope with.
Giuseppe always managed to find work of some sort and in places where no questions were asked. Like many he lived in the post-war ‘grey’ economy. This way of life provided the means for them to survive and their closeness turned to a deep love as they clung together against all odds. Then their peace was interrupted by news that her family were looking for her and had discovered that she was somewhere in the north-eastern corner of the island, which had Bastia as its centre. The smell of danger invaded their lives.
‘I had recovered my pistol.’
They managed to move first to the spur of land that forms the Cap Corse peninsular, stretching some 30 kilometres northwards from Bastia to the Cap itself. A central spine of mountains separated the two coasts and provided for small towns and villages in which it was easier to hide. Further work in restoring old buildings kept an income going for Giuseppe. Then they took the step of marrying, done in the most discreet town they could risk, Romero, and for a while felt secure in both their relationship and life. Giuseppe records that this was done, inevitably, without her family’s knowledge. A fact that they knew only increased the danger of a final confrontation, if they were ever discovered. They knew they were on a one-way ticket, but felt they had no option.
Inside the back cover of the notebook is a marriage certificate glued onto the spine. This faded document shows the coming together of Giuseppe Bonetti, born in Genoa and Marianne Orsi, born in Propriano. The nearest hospital to her village?
They kept moving from time to time, instinct telling them this was the safest course to follow. He lists the coastal villages where he found work, and records that he ended up working in the asbestos mines of Canari on the west coast of Cap Corse. They were beyond the mountain ridge of the Cap from Bastia and thought themselves safe.
‘We were wrong’. This simple statement (underlined in red crayon) jumps off the page.
‘It was no accident.’ Here lay the truth that Giuseppe had kept from me, and the tears he had shed whenever I had brought the subject round to Marianne, were now shown to be only a shadow of the inner turmoil he must have felt when my clumsy questioning intruded on his grief.
‘We had never been complacent, even in five years of escape together. Each time we had a sense of danger, of someone being able to find us, or even when some instinct told us to move on for safety’s sake, we left no trace of our presence. People whom we befriended and knew a little of our situation, warned us that those feudal families from the mountains never forgot or forgave. We accepted this was true, but as our lives became easier – and normal (to a degree), we began to hope that the old ways would stay where they belonged – in the past. Rather than letting the risk to our happiness overshadow everything, we came to believe that we were rewarded for our efforts to move on, and felt we had earned this right.’
‘We were wrong.’ These last words finish this first notebook here. (There are watermarks on this faded document. I imagine them to be the tears shed at the time of his writing.) Putting it to one side I assumed he had been unable to record sadder events.
vi
The Gendarmerie Maritime, calling in the Calvi police, have stuck to the view that I was most likely to be responsible for Giuseppe’s murder, and have dismissed my vague memory of the motorboat sheltering in the cove. Apparently there were no reports of any such craft being on the coast at the time of the storm. ‘Only large ships were still at sea in that weather. We would have heard something if not.’ Thus I can have been the only person who could have done the deed. Two gendarmes have come to the cove to shake me down up at the house.
“There was no one else here but you,” their opening remark.
“Only you had the time to kill him and return to the house and cover your tracks,” the second man suggested.
“I had no motive,” I answered meekly.
“We don’t know what it was, but we will find out soon enough. We’ll hold on to your passport, and keep you here for as long as it takes.”
“I couldn’t have a motive,” I protested. “He was a friend and took me out in the boat fishing with him. We got on well. He was a lonesome character. I was happy to share time with him, after all he had been through.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know the full story.” I wasn’t going to mention his notebook. I felt I needed to keep my secrets as close to my chest as I could, if the police were going to keep me in the frame.
“What do you know?”
“He was an Italian conscript towards the end of the war, here on Corsica. He was only a teenager, forced into the army by Mussolini’s mad regime. He surrendered soon after the Germans left. I don’t think he harmed anybody.”
“Then?”
“He stayed on the island because there was no chance of real work in Italy. The whole country was poverty-stricken. No jobs. Not enough food. So he stayed, kept out of trouble, found some work on building sites.”
“How did he come to be here?”
“He met a girl, in Bastia, fell in love with her. She was escaping too, from her family in the mountains in the south. It was very primitive there. They both wanted a fresh s
tart, a completely new life.”
“But why did he end up here?”
“I don’t know.” It was the truth as at that moment. I knew I might find more clues if I went to Guiseppe’s caverne de sécurité, but for now it was easy to be economical with any truth.
“We can’t find any record of him being on the island.”
“He didn’t earn any money. I don’t suppose he would be in the tax records.”
“I don’t like your answers,” the first gendarme retorted. I would need to be careful.
“We’ll have the full autopsy results in a few days. We’ll be back. By then you had better have a real explanation for us. On your movements those three days. When you last saw Giuseppe. What you were doing down there. Why you were there.”
“I’ve said I don’t know why he was killed. I can’t think who would want to do it. He had no enemies here.”
“Except for you?”
“No.”
“You fell out with him about something, that’s clear.”
“Never. We had no arguments.”
“We’ll find out. We’re posting a gendarme here for the moment. Report to him twice a day. Do what he says.”
He waved me out of the room and indicated I should wait outside in full view, whilst he spoke with Nicole. Their conversation lasted half-an-hour, and when they left she had tears in her eyes. When they had gone back down to the shore, she called me in.
“Tell me what happened, really happened,” she insisted.
“It was as I told them. The storm was terrible, rain and gale force winds. Up here the doors were shaking and the windows rattling. I thought they might burst open and let the driving rain in. I haven’t seen it that bad before at this time of year.”
“What happened?”
“I stayed in the house until it blew itself out at the end of the second night. There seemed no sense in going anywhere. That’s the truth. I didn’t see anything. Until I went down the next day to see if the taverne and Giuseppe were all right.”
The Dark Side of the Sun Page 12