The Rose Café (25 page)

“I think your friends are despicable people,” she said finally. “I am sure of it. They are spies or criminals of some sort. All those silly rumors about contraband and forgery, they're not accurate. Those people are worse…”

“What are you talking about? Did Isabelle tell you something?”

“No. She said nothing. But they are loathsome people. Low-class scum of the earth. That's how I know. That Isabelle, she is unbalanced, the things she wanted me to do with her. You too. You and I together. And they would watch. It was despicable. Vile people. Pigs. I never want to see them again.”

chapter fifteen

Le Grand Bal

On one of my afternoons off a week later, I went up into the hills by myself to see if I could find old Fabrizio and have another chat.

I walked into town, passed through the back streets on foot, and began to hike up the road into the hills. The houses were fewer here, and after a ten- or twenty-minute walk, clear from side roads and other turnings, I began to hitchhike. A few cars, driven by older men with tinted eyeglasses, passed without stopping; a couple of fully loaded trucks lumbered on, and then the traffic, such as it was, died out for a while. I entertained myself by walking slowly upward, trying to identify the profusion of wildflowers that grew along the verges.

When I was well above the town, I came upon a few loose cows grazing by the side of the road. They looked up at me and watched closely as I passed, as if recognizing a foreigner in their midst.

Every time I would hear a car coming I would turn and hold out my thumb, and eventually a talkative man with a thick island accent took me upward for a few miles before he had to turn off. I walked on, rather enjoying myself, even if I wasn't able to find the turn for the track up to Fabrizio's compound.

At the village of Sant'Antonio, after a stiff climb to the center, I stopped and had a beer and asked if anyone there knew the old man. They had heard of him, but they laughed when I mentioned his name and twisted their fingers up alongside their temples—a screw loose, in so many words.

The views from Sant'Antonio were splendid. It was perched high on a steep crag, like an eagle's nest, and provided a nearly 360-degree vista of the whole region known as the Balagne, which included the towns of Ile Rousse and Calvi to the northwest. The little hill towns in this region were said to be among the most picturesque in Corsica; in fact Sant'Antonio itself was apparently the oldest continuously settled village on the island, having been established sometime in the ninth century and occupied in the time of the Pisan rule over the island.

The many little villages perched on their hilltops were in decline in those years, the younger people having left the island in search of work. But some of them had been repopulated by people from the continent seeking solace, or refuge, or—in one case—anonymity. Southwest of Sant'Antonio in the agricultural village of Calenzana, not far from Calvi, there were said to be a few high-level members of the French underworld living out their lives in relative isolation and peace.

In spite of the loss of the local population, however, there were still a few local crafts being carried out, and there was still a certain amount of subsistence agriculture—olive groves, cheesemaking, a few vineyards, and of course, goats, cows, and feral pigs.

In Sant'Antonio I was told that Fabrizio—they thought—lived back in the direction I had come from. On the way up I had noticed what I thought was a familiar turn, but I had been too involved with the talking driver to ask him to stop. Now at a car park below the village, I hitched a ride north again, and got out at the turn.

Higher along the little spur road I saw the track to Fabrizio's and hiked up to the old man's compound.

He was there, but I had to reintroduce myself before he offered me his traditional glass of plonk. After a little small talk about Pierrot, I tried to ask him a few questions about le Baron again, but without the presence of Pierrot, he was far more polite and less talkative, and merely said yes or no to my reiteration of the various le Baron stories. It appeared that I was making him uncomfortable.

After another glass of wine, I told him I had had dinner at le Baron's house a few nights earlier.

“Big place,” he said.

“Yes, very nice gardens.”

“What did you eat?”

I described the dinner.

“And so you met his wife,” he said.

I said that I had, and he merely nodded and grunted.

It was interesting that after our first meeting he was not as talkative as he had been. I began to wonder if perhaps he had gotten word somehow that I was checking his story. Certainly it was clear to me by this time that there were tales to be told here on this part of the island, and that everyone knew more or less what those stories were, but that there was no need to expand on them—especially not certain tales.

To change the subject, I began to talk about my work at the Rose Café and Vincenzo and Max, whom he said he knew, and also Jean-Pierre, whom he said he had heard of.

“Is he the one who is married to that artist woman they call Micheline?” he asked.

I told him he was, and he merely nodded and said no more, although he obviously knew more.

I had my notebook with me, and I had tucked a few wildflowers into the pages, so I took them out and asked if he knew what they were.

At this he became more animated. He knew each one, and he also knew their uses, and along with their names he offered a long string of remedies, flavorings, potions, and other folkloric qualities. Much of this was lost on me, even though he was speaking in French. But I did manage to note the names. (Not that that did any good either; I never could find the English equivalent for most of them.)

I was intrigued by a thyme-scented plant he called
sarriette
, which he said he would cook with his goat stews. He also named some of the plants I was already familiar with, such as pimpernel, goat's beard, and myrtle, a common pot herb in Corsica, for which he named a few uses other than culinary. I think he said, among other benefits, it was good for the prostate.

In this same vein he snatched up a ranunculus-like sprig of leaves that he called
cuglione di prete
, which, if I understood the local term from my knowledge of Italian, meant “priest's balls.” He identified another flower called
puncicula
, which he said was good for your fingernails and your hair. And he also identified a plant he called
herbe des moines
—monk's plant—which he said could help men resist temptations of the flesh. Also snakebites.

Like most older country people, Fabrizio spoke with his hands and was not shy about demonstrating, bodily, the uses for certain herbs, so it was easier to understand some of his plant identifications than his abstracted gossip about le Baron and others.

At one point he asked to see my book, with its scrawled notes and sketches.

He looked them over, turning the pages with his stubby thumb and nodding. “
Momento
,” he said, and went back into the cascading heap of stones he used as his retreat.

When he came back, he had the notebook created by the German soldier who used to come up to his compound to talk about nature. Fabrizio had apparently forgotten that he had showed this to me on an earlier visit.

I flipped through pages—sadly, I should say—and found there a couple of sketches of wildflowers I either knew or had collected. There was something poignant in the old yellowed pages and Hansi's spidery ink sketches, browned-out now with age. Inscribed there was some element of the absurdity of human conflict that contrasted with the endurance of nature.

Fabrizio explained again the story behind the notebook, leaving out the fact that Hansi had been killed by his compatriots, I noticed.

I handed the book back to him and he looked through it himself, reviewing it.

“He was my friend,” he said reflectively. “German. But not a bad sort.”

Given the rumors about the old man as a mazzero, his knowledge of local uses of herbs allowed me to swing the questions around and ask him about witches and signadore and local voceratrice, the women who sing poetic laments over the body of a vendetta victim.

He tried to explain. I think he said that up here in the villages, when he was younger, many of these old traditions endured, but since the war the old world was passing.

“How about mazzeri?” I asked finally. “Are there any mazzeri left up here?”

“Any what?” he asked.

“Mazzeri!” I said, emphasizing the Italianate pronunciation.

“Mazzeri?” he said with finality, raising his voice.

“
Si, mazzeri
, are there any around here?” I asked in Italian.

He spouted a very long animated sentence in dialect, not one word of which I was able to catch.

“I see,” I said, to be polite.

There followed another explanation, even longer. He waved his hand up toward the villages higher up in the hills, and swept his palms together and poked his thumb backward over his shoulder—no more left, in other words. At one point, though, he also drew his finger across his throat, indicating a foretold death, maybe, or perhaps a vendetta. I began to wish I had Pierrot with me to translate.

Whatever his explanations, the fact that he himself was rumored to be a mazzero did not seem to affect his answers to my questions, at least not as far as I could read it. As Vincenzo had said, probably the stories about him were just gossip from the women who lived high in the stone villages, cloistered in their kitchens and narrow winding streets with nothing to get excited about but newly settled Sardinians and Arabs, and the life of local eccentrics. Micheline told me that some of those older women had never left their tiny towns.

On my way back down to the main road, I started to think about the German officer again and felt a wave of sympathy for the man, even though he had lived at a remove from my world and was a Nazi. He was probably just a shy student type who never fit in, even in his own community, a member of the international company of naturalists who seem to spring up in all industrialized cultures.

Later, farther down the track but in this same reflective mood, the logical answer to all this obfuscation of le Baron's story came to me.

It should have been obvious from the first day.

Why should an island people with their own culture, their own histories, their own demons, and perhaps most importantly, a nasty reputation on the continent, share anything with a fresh young American (via Paris, no less) who comes rooting around in their personal affairs to uncover events that are best left unexplained? It occurred to me that I could have learned a thing or two from Prosper Mérimée, who, it was said, had the ability to come into a strange country, pick up the language quickly, and gain trust with the people and record their folklore.

Had I known at the time, I could also perhaps have learned a lot more about the culture of the interior from the Englishwoman Dorothy Carrington, who was living down in Ajaccio at that time and was perhaps the best English-speaking authority on the old traditions of Corsica. She set down her observations in her 1971 book,
Corsica
:
Portrait of a Granite Island
. Unfortunately I didn't know she even existed until her book appeared.

Every year in September, the town would sponsor a big costume ball in honor of nothing in particular, as far as I could determine. We out at the Rose Café were invited, of course, as were our current guests, and as the weekend of the festival approached, people set to work making costumes.

Marie determined she would go as Medora, the Greek slave girl from the ballet
Le Corsaire
. Chrétien, who was fond of all things Spanish, intended to be a Sevillian caballero, and Vincenzo said he wanted to be a pirate.

Maggs, who was generally enthusiastic about local events, was less interested in costuming herself and sat around the terrace in the afternoons, drinking beer and walking out to the Ile de la Pietra all alone. I think there had been some manner of showdown with Peter. She was spending more time with him, and once or twice even went out spearfishing with him and spent the time swimming and sunbathing while he cast to and fro among the rocks below the surface, looking to kill fish. André was not coming out to the café as often, I noticed, and when he did he seemed to avoid Maggs.

We had a more or less normal Saturday at the restaurant, but we posted a notice that we would be serving only a light, early dinner that evening so that we could all take off for the big event.

The morning was clear, but in midafternoon ominous yellow clouds began breaking over the mountain peaks, and the wind picked up. The scirocco, the hot, sandy wind off the Sahara, was preparing to blow in.

After we cleaned up from the light dinner, we all assembled and walked into town as a group. Jean-Pierre and Micheline led the loosely formed procession of our staff and guests. Jean-Pierre came as himself—more or less—dressed in a clean, white high-button tunic and a toque. Micheline wore Turkish harem pants tied at the waist with a red sash and a multitude of colorful scarves wrapped around her head. Chrétien was walking with Karen in his Spanish costume, and Karen—somewhat daringly given the fact that she was to be mixing with Corsican males from the interior—came as a streetwalker, wearing a short red skirt, net stockings, and a low-cut blouse that revealed her ample bosom.

Marie had fashioned for herself a light-spangled bra and a gauzy, transparent green skirt that rode low on her hips and was held up by a flamboyant cloth belt, onto which she had sewn cheap baubles that she had purchased in town. She wore a silk-scarf headdress that was held in place with a twisted, brightly colored headband, and she had made up her face garishly with red rouge, lipstick, and an overload of mascara. In a burst of enthusiasm, she had painted a starburst of arrows above and below her eyes.

Marie had wanted me to go as a cowboy but although we tried, we could not find any cowboy boots, chaps, or ten-gallon hats. In the end I borrowed one of Pierrot's blue jumpsuits and an old paint-stained beret and came as a laborer. Hardly much of a disguise.