The Rose Café (24 page)

“In Paris now, you cannot go into the parks. Some dirty Arab man will come by and ask you to go to bed with him, and when you ignore him he persists, and you have to get up and find another place. And no sooner are you seated than another dirty man comes by.”

“Oh, but this is so disturbing,” Isabelle said in sympathy. “I do not think I would enjoy Paris anymore.”

Le Baron remained silent but shook his head and clucked, as if to say that this is the sad course of history but that worse things could be happening.

I tried to spot Isabelle's accent. It sounded like upper-class Parisian to me, with that high, ascending, cracked voice at the end of each phrase. Le Baron's French, which I had never heard for any length of time, since he usually spoke English with me, did not seem to me to have any particular inflection—none that I could recognize, in any case.

The partridge dish was cleared, and the maid brought out a plain green salad and a couple of bottles of sparkling water, and the conversation turned to local intrigues, mainly the noisy fights of Vincenzo and Lucretia, André and jacquis and the nightly card game, and Pierre Corsini (the man they call Moonface) and his notoriously bad family, who were always in some scrape or another. Then le Baron told a few stories of famous bandit families of Corsica who lived long ago in the mountains and who still were legendary.

“Fortunately, those days are over now,” le Baron said.

I wanted to ask if they knew of Pierrot's old father Fabrizio, but given Fabrizio's version of le Baron's history, I was afraid to bring it up.

The salad was cleared and a plate of cheeses appeared: a sheep's cheese called
bastilicacciu
, a soft goat cheese, and a hard, somewhat sharp cow's cheese.

Then the dessert was served. It was a
fiadone
, a local specialty made with pureed brocciu that had been soaked in spirits and was flamed at the table by the maid just before it was served.

Over dessert and a bottle of Cap Corse muscat, le Baron entertained us with a long, tedious story of a fishing expedition he made once with Jean-Pierre, who had tried to teach him to spearfish. They had taken a boat around to one of the coves to the east, toward Cap Corse. But while they were out the libeccio picked up, and they couldn't get back. They had to leave the boat, hike up to a small collection of houses on the hillside, and hitchhike back to town in their bathing suits and sailor's jerseys. I think the humor of the story arose from self-mockery; le Baron was not accustomed to such deshabille.

Following this, the maid brought coffee, four tiny glasses, and a bottle of Hospices de Beaune marc, which, le Baron commented, was not easy to obtain in those times and had been purchased at an auction. He offered around Gitanes, and Marie, who did not normally smoke, accepted one and coughed—I think she was fairly well lubricated at this point. In the brief interlude of Marie's coughing, le Baron said something sotto voce to his wife.

It crossed my mind that these two were plotting something and that they were both opium addicts or
hashishiens
and were going to bring out a pipe next. But maybe that was the result of too much le Baron gossip.

The marc was poured, formally, by le Baron. The air grew closer. The odor of the garden and the maquis filtered through the windows. I could smell eglantine and arbutus, roses, and the cinnamon-flavored scent of stock. The cricket calls increased and throbbed with a belling, rhythmic pulse, and far off, somewhere in the greeny tangle beyond the gardens, a nightingale poured out a single phrase.

Marie excused herself to visit the bathroom. She rose from the table and steadied herself with her left hand on the back of the chair while Isabelle gave her directions. She was still able to maintain her poise, however, and I saw le Baron watch her disappear down through the rooms, her white blouse growing dimmer and dimmer as she moved through the passageways.

I could tell she was drunk. She had relaxed her balletic grace and was moving casually, her hips swaying.

“She is very lovely, your friend,” Isabelle said in English. “I know of her parents. You must be careful if you meet them sometime up in Paris. They will draw you in. They're very political, you know. The right wing hates them, both of them. And Marie, too, she should be careful, she seems so fragile, so innocent.”

Le Baron chuckled privately, as if he knew something that Isabelle did not know, but that I probably did know. Isabelle caught his drift.

“
Mais non, Edouard
,” she said. “She is a rose. The last rose of summer.”

Le Baron leaned toward me, smiling conspiratorially. “My wife,” he said to me, “she is, you understand, a lost romantic. She lives for beauty. And a young woman such as your Marie…” He gestured in the direction of the hall she had passed through and nodded slowly.

“Who wouldn't want only roses?” Isabelle said. “You've seen what we have seen.”

“I gather,” I said, seeing an opening. “It must have been terrible in these parts during the war years. I've read about it a little. But we were so isolated from it all in America. It seems unreal, you know, unless you were a soldier.”

“Or a mother,” Isabelle said.

Marie returned, and the curtain closed again. But it opened later in the evening when Marie herself launched into another one of her requisite anticommunist lectures. Her father's car had been blown up that winter by some right-wing terrorist group, probably the OAS, but Marie was decidedly reactionary and was unafraid to offer her generally unexamined opinions. Her views, outrageous though they seemed to me, were entertaining to our hosts.

The evening slowly wound down, and at a lull in the conversation Isabelle offered to show Marie an antique pearl necklace that had belonged to someone in the Bonaparte family. Le Baron asked if I would like to take a stroll around the garden.

“Your little friend Marie,” le Baron said, once we were alone, “she really is very energetic. Older people such as Isabelle and I, we enjoy very much that energy, no matter how it is directed. Isabelle loves the flowers, the fresh cheeks of youth. She is shy, you understand. We live alone out here, and she prefers to remain here, reading and sketching flowers.”

We walked on and turned down one of the axis paths. He had a lighted cigarette, which he carried between his thumb and forefinger and smoked reflectively whenever we stopped.

“Isabelle has few friends out here. Me, she knows of course. Ten years now we have been together, and as you may know, or will perhaps learn someday, certain things wear thin after a few years.”

He drew on his cigarette.

“Familiarity, I suppose. But you, you must have a good time with Marie. She favors you, I can tell.”

I could see where we were headed and tried to cut him off.

“Actually no,” I said to le Baron. “Did you know that Marie is a devout Catholic? It's probably a reaction to her parents; she says they're atheists. She gives me speeches. She's a virgin and she says that she intends to remain that way until she is married.”

Le Baron sighed. “Are you sure about that?” he asked.

He glanced over at me with those blue-flame eyes and paused briefly. In the pause, I changed the subject.

“One of the things I have been doing in Paris is following the stories of the war,” I said (only partly true). “It must have been dangerous here in the south as well.”

“It was the jungle,” he said bitterly.

“Let's take another drink,” he said, and guided me back to the garden table.

He fetched the marc and poured two glasses and offered me a cigarette.

“Listen, I happen to know you are very curious about my livelihood and background,” he said.

I must have reddened and he must have spotted it even in the shadowy light. He chuckled.

“
C'est normal
,” he said. “But you and your journalistic doggedness. I knew journalists in Paris. As you may know, in all stories there may be some truth,” he said. “But there are often some very great lies.”

Le Baron said he knew what I had been hearing, and that there was an element of truth to some of it. He said he thought when he had a beer with me down in the town that day that he should really just have set me straight, but decided to wait for a time when he could explain more fully. That's when he thought to have me out to dinner.

The money, “what is left of it,” he said, was his family's money. They had a big estate outside of Charles le Roi in Belgium, even though he lived mostly in Paris and spent much of his youth there. He had been to school in England and still had friends in London when the war came. He was fluent in English by that time and was thinking of fleeing to England, but was contacted in Paris by the security service and was encouraged to stay on in France. Early on, his family estate had been taken over as a Nazi command center, as Micheline had said, and his parents and two sisters fled to Paris where they had an apartment. He remained in Paris, ostensibly working at a banking firm, but collecting information on money transactions and verifying who was being watched by the Gestapo and who was not being watched. He would then convey the news to other operatives, who would somehow radio the information to the British. Or so he thought. He claimed that he really didn't know what happened once he transferred the information.

He said he was basically a peaceable man and did not want to get any more deeply involved in the underground. “It could only lead to killing,” he said, and he didn't think he could live with that. So he quit the service, after some negotiation managed to get a pass to Nice, where he melted into the background. He moved up to Vence, behind Nice, but with the known world falling apart around him, he grew restless and contacted the underground networks again to see if there was anything he could do to help without getting deeply involved. The network head—or one of them, “you never knew who was who, in that world,” he said—asked him to help arrange documents for people. The Vichy government, at Berlin's request, was deporting Jews by this time.

“We all know this now. But back then it was less clear, unless you were a Jew, of course, although even then some of the richer Jewish families refused to believe it. You could easily pretend that you didn't know what was going on, you see. Don't ask, don't pry. It's why I like your questions. You are not afraid to ask questions. So many of us preferred not to ask.”

He finished off his glass, stared at it for a minute, and then looked out at the black garden. I could see one of the white rose trees glowing in the sultry night. The crickets were pulsing in the shrubbery. A dog barked from one of the neighboring farms. I kept my mouth shut.

“It can be dangerous, though, too many questions. Even now, there is a certain danger,” he said.

After another short silence, he resumed.

In Nice he joined an underground forgery ring and learned to fake documents, and in time was able to arrange papers for families. He knew some Jewish families with big villas up behind the city and was able to help them. Then he began to help people who were living in the loosely guarded internment camps and still had family members on the outside—children, wives, and old grandmothers. He arranged false exit visas and letters of passage out through the Pyrenees into Spain, or outbound on ships from Marseille. Then he began to do it for families he didn't know. And then, he said, he got caught.

He knocked back what was left of his marc and poured another.

“I don't like involvement. I don't like what I had to do during the war. I don't like choices, but in order to survive in some situations, you have to choose. And then you're stuck and you keep on doing what you know how to do.”

That was, in effect, the end of le Baron's version of his personal story. All he told me was that later, after the war was over, he came out to Corsica to rest.

“I have to live with this past,” he said. “We all do. It is like some chronic disease that flares up from time to time. And so I came out here with Isabelle, and we live in the country, in isolation, trying to stay healthy. I want nothing more to do with the world, you understand. I learned this from Isabelle.”

He had married late in life, he said. He had met her at a friend's villa in Nice at a dinner party.

“She was the shy one you see at such events, bright-eyed and seemingly interested in the chatter, but also preoccupied and silent. Later we talked privately. She had all the usual traumas of war, don't you know. We all did, I suppose. But she was determined to avoid any remembrance. She loved silence and flowers, and she was the opposite of most of the other women I had known. I found refuge in her silences. We married. And then I remembered Corsica. The peace of nature.

“And so I read. I clip hedges like a peasant, tend the roses. It is my pleasure. But on some nights I am restless, the old animal past rises up on its haunches. It is then that you see me at the café.”

Marie and Isabelle came down the path from the house at this point, moving speedily, I thought, for such an unhurried entertaining evening.

Marie said bluntly that she was tired and had a headache, and that we really should be going. Le Baron glanced at Isabelle, I noticed, but otherwise seemed only slightly surprised, and so with much thanks and a few cool kisses, we were ushered out the wide front door to the car. We stood on the front steps for a few minutes, with a little more polite small talk, and then Marie and I crossed the gravel drive to the car. The two of them stood in the doorway, bathed in the light from a wrought-iron lamp beside the entrance, watching us go.

I steered the Citroën down the gravel drive and out onto the road back through the town.

Marie was uncharacteristically subdued during the drive, cool even, and when we got back to the café we sat in the car in the parking area and talked for a while. She was stiff and strangely formal.

“What did you think?” I asked.