The Rose Café (16 page)

I told him and we fell into conversation. He had been hanging around Monte Carlo for a few months, he told me, apparently with some success—until recently.

“Just lost a fortune,” he said.

He ordered another beer, which I brought out to him.

“So you're an American, eh?” he stated. “I'll wager you fifty francs you can't name the fifty states.”

“No deal,” I said. “I can't do it.”

I had been around small-time gamblers in Nice long enough to know that this was an old trick. Very few Americans can actually name all the states. The petty shills knew it and would exploit American pride. The blustery patriotic ones would always take the bet and invariably lose. (Although once, in Nice, I overheard a well-traveled New York woman take the bet, and when she started to run out of states begin to make them up—Texarkana, Ozark, Cayuga. The shill never knew.)

“Look here,” the blond man said, “do you know a man in town named Van Zandt, lives in a big villa somewhere around Ile Rousse?”

I told him I didn't know such a person, but there was a man named something like Von Metz who lived outside the town.

“People around here call him le Baron,” I said.

“What's he look like?”

“Tall man with white hair, a good dresser.”

“That's him. Where does he live?”

I told him he would have to ask the patron, who was at that hour involved in his midafternoon tryst with Micheline, although I didn't spell that out for him.

“Go ask the boules players in the town square,” I said. “They all know where he lives, and they'll be down there now; they're there every afternoon. Are you a friend of his?”

He dodged the question, as I figured he would, but indicated that he had had some sort of business dealings with the gentleman in the past and would like to pay his respects.

“Sometimes he comes out here late at night to play cards,” I said. “If I see him I'll tell him you were looking for him. What's your name?”

“Dushko,” he said. “What did you say they call him here?”

“Le Baron. I thought his name was Von Metz, though. Might not be the same man.”

“No, that's him,” Dushko said. “Le Baron, eh?” He laughed privately.

The last of these birds of passage was the man Micheline called Karamazov.

He was a thick-necked man with a wide head and short-cropped black hair, and he was wearing madras Bermuda shorts and a white tennis shirt and sneakers when I first saw him, an unusual costume for that time and place.

“Excuse me,” he said in French as I passed his table. “Can one rent a room here?”

“Yes, but I think they're all full,” I said. “Come back tomorrow, maybe.”

He asked how much we charged, and how much would it be if he stayed for a week or more, would the price be lower, and was there a full pension perhaps, and did I know any similarly isolated spots on this part of the coast where he might spend a week or so?

I noticed that he had an American accent, so I asked him in English where he was from.

“
Les Etats Unis
,” he said.

“Interesting. What state?” I asked.

“
Wisconsin
,” he said, pronouncing the
W
as a
V
, as in French.

“I've been there once,” I said. “The Wisconsin Dells. Beautiful. Are you just passing through here?”

“
Non, je travaille ici en France
,” he said.

“You can speak English, if you like, I'm American.”

“
Je sais
,” he said.

“
Vous parlez anglais, non
?” I asked.

“
Oui.
”

“I am American, you can speak English with me if you like.”

“
Oui, je sais
,” he said.

We chatted on in this way for a while in English and French, with the usual small talk about travels and the weather and the local customs, but I finally asked him why he didn't want to speak English to me. He said he had come to France to learn French and was therefore determined to speak only French, no matter what.

“OK,” I said, continuing in English. But I was mystified. He was, after all, a countryman, the first I had talked to in a number of months, and what new French could he possibly learn from me anyway? He was pretty fluent already, although he still had the flat A of a Midwesterner.

Micheline gave him a room, and for the next week we would see him around. He was always polite but humorless and, unlike the other guests, not very fun-loving. He would disappear for much of the day and come back for dinner, but somehow Micheline learned that he had studied Russian at Yale in the United States and seemed to know a lot about communism. She was in charge of names in the kitchen and subsequently dubbed him Karamazov. Chrétien picked it up and took to addressing him as “tovarich”—drinking companion—whenever he spotted him at the bar. He would sometimes pound Karamazov on the shoulder and invite him to take a vodka—which of course Karamazov would always refuse. Chrétien's free spirit made him nervous.

The last of the summer sojourners to arrive was Marie. One morning I came up from my morning dip, and there she was on the terrace with her parents, having a café crème and a croissant.

“You're back,” I said as I walked by.

She had that contained little angry pout she sometimes assumed when her parents were around.

“Yes, but so is he,” she said, glancing back at the dining room. Inside, just selecting his corner table, I could see the old tutor Giancarlo.

Her parents regarded her solicitously.

As the new arrivals began to come in there were also a few departures, some of them poignant.

Eugène, the dentist, left one Sunday on the night ferry. He and I were standing on a little rise behind the kitchen, looking out to the north as the white ferry hove into view. We watched as it slowly materialized out of the green sea, a bright, shimmering, formless thing at first, then something with an apparent structure, and finally, after twenty minutes or so, the details—rounded flared topsides, row upon row of dark ports, upper decks, and pilot house.

Eugène and I had been talking about the life he was about to resume, and at a lull in the conversation, in what must have been for him a brave and intimate statement, he revealed that he spoke a little English.

He stared out at the ferry, started to say something, hesitated, and then decided to make his one and only attempt.

“The big fish comes,” he said, smiling proudly.

I didn't bother to correct him.

Mendoza left with Conchita and went around kissing all the women goodbye—first Micheline, then Lucretia, then Maggs, and then a pretty young married woman who had been there for her honeymoon, off and on, since June. The sad part of his departure had come a few nights before though, long after most of the guests had gone to bed and there remained only the cardplayers, Jean-Pierre and Micheline, and, interestingly enough, Pierrot, who I think had come out because he was infatuated with young Conchita. Herr Komandante was still up having a nightcap, and there was another couple from the village whom I did not know, a sad-eyed older man and a short, stocky woman with bobbed hair, too plain to be anyone other than his wife, as Vincenzo pointed out.

Mendoza had been playing folk tunes and flamenco dances most of the evening, but as the night wore on he had retreated to a corner on the verandah to play for himself. No one was paying much attention to the music; they were all lost in their own dreams or the machinations of the card game. But suddenly in the midst of the dull silence, Mendoza hit a discordant, ancient chord, then another, louder, and then he began to sing a
cante jondo
, the “deep song” of gypsy tradition—slow and sad and all in a minor key.

Something happened then. The cardplayers put down their hands and looked over at him as if he had just arrived. What little conversation there had been at the tables died altogether. Micheline halted on her way to the kitchen and leaned in the door frame. Herr Komandante looked up from his drink and rested his cheek on his right hand.

Mendoza's singing circled the terrace. It snaked into the interior dining room. It moved out across the road and down to the shore. It flowed out over the harbor and then began to climb into the hills and ran up into the maquis, sending the goats and sheep into flight, and then it moved on to the wild mountains, where nothing endured but the snow and the mouflon. And it went on and on. He was pouring into his singing something we had not heard before from him; you seemed to be able to perceive all of history in his tragic minor chants, a lament for the end of time: dark, hopeless, inevitable. The world was immobilized, and when—finally—the singing ended, there was an uncharacteristic, heavy silence. No one applauded, no one breathed, there was only the lap of waters at the shore, the chirrup of a cricket in the rosemary.

For the rest of that evening no one seemed happy anymore. Some dark dream out of the European sleep had been remembered.

chapter nine

Herr Komandante

Up until the late 1960s, Corsican society was a structured hierarchy with an old patriarch at the head of the family or clan. Below him there was a related familial pack of male wolves, one or two of whom would be in line to take over the old king's role. Below them were young unmarried men, and then—living side by side in the same households—women.

Wives and mothers held sway within the household and were responsible for provisioning, cooking, serving, cleaning, childbearing, hen-keeping, and tending the dooryard gardens. Within her sphere, the female head of household was the one in control, even though she might have been the one who stood by the kitchen door, spoon in hand, while the males fed and slurped their plonk at a long table. But even beyond the hearth and home, women traditionally maintained a certain amount of power and respect. As with the archetypal character, Colomba, they were often the driving force behind a vendetta, and Corsican women often fought side by side with their men when it came to defense or liberation. During one battle against the French, they poured boiling pitch down onto the struggling soldiers below the walls. There was even a local term for the traditional powerful woman—
tintinajo
—which was also the word for the belled ram that leads a flock of sheep.

Along with mazzeri and signadore, the other group found in varying numbers in the villages of the interior were homosexuals. Ironically, given the strict male mores, they were more or less tolerated, although most overtly gay people would leave the island for the demimonde of Paris or Marseille. But by the 1960s, with the increase in tourism, gay relationships were accepted and were generally met with the classic French laissez-faire, provided the couples did not flaunt themselves publicly. This was especially true in the more cosmopolitan coastal towns and cities, such as Ajaccio, Calvi, and Ile Rousse, all of which had their share of resident continentals.

I had a little glimpse into this world toward the middle of August. I came up from the cove after a swim one afternoon and saw a group of village men huddled around one of the indoor dining-room tables with Jean-Pierre. They were sitting close together, their dark eyes fixed intently on Jean-Pierre, and they were speaking in low, inaudible voices. I couldn't hear a word even though I made excuses to sweep the floors nearby. In due time they rose, and all four of them walked down the terrace steps with Jean-Pierre and stood by a little Deux Chevaux, much battered, with mud and dents from the maquis. They shook hands ceremoniously and departed.

In spite of the apparent weight of the conversation, Jean-Pierre was smiling when he came back up the steps.

Micheline, who had also witnessed the palaver, asked him what it was all about.

“It's Herr Komandante. He was seen with a fifteen-year-old boy at Giulio's. The boy's mother is upset and has called his uncles. So now word is out in the town. They are just telling me the news.”

Micheline snickered when she heard the news of Herr Komandante. “Just a question of time, wasn't it?” she said.

“But what can you do?” Jean-Pierre said. He poured himself a pastis and drank a little. “The poor man,” he said.

Later that afternoon, I saw a pile of baggage on the terrace. Herr Komandante was sitting inside at the bar with a citron pressé. Jean-Pierre and Micheline were standing next to him, deep in another discussion. Chrétien was behind the bar, making a coffee, eavesdropping.

“What's going on?” I asked when he came back into the kitchen.

“He's leaving,” Chrétien said. “He's paid in full for the month, but he's leaving, and he insists on paying the full amount. Jean-Pierre is trying to convince him to stay.”

“Good for him,” I said. “Poor Komandante.”

“What's the difference?” Chrétien said. “The boy is known around town. The uncles just want Herr Komandante to stay away from the village. It's a question of honor on both sides. Herr Komandante, he is ashamed. The villagers know. But they don't want him around, either.”

I went out to straighten some of the café chairs and wipe the tables, and watch the talk as I passed to and from the kitchen. Herr Komandante was staring down blankly at the polished-wood bar, elbows spread, his nose buried in his drink. Jean-Pierre was patting his back, talking. The Komandante was nodding his head sadly.

In the end they persuaded him to stay, and at sundown I saw him back at his post on the promontory, his hands deep in the pockets of his striped bathrobe, staring out at the orange sun as it descended into the green sea.

This time I slipped past him without notice.

Herr Komandante was not the same after that. Rather than retreat further into the cover of normalcy that he usually assumed, quarantined as he was at the Rose Café, he became more himself, perhaps freed at last by the obvious indifference and tolerance of Jean-Pierre and Micheline. He became more the sensualist and bon vivant, eating more greedily and drinking heavily, and more overt in his sexual orientation. He stopped going into town, as he normally would do on some evenings, and he took to calling me
hübscher Jungen
—“Pretty Boy.” He would eye handsome young men who came to the café with their parents, although he had the good sense to pull this off surreptitiously. He had realized that as long as he was here in the immediate environment of the Rose Café, he was free.