by Michel Bussi
‘You know what the third-largest Spanish airport is, after Madrid and Barcelona?’
Valou shook her head, unsure what Cervone was getting at.
‘Palma! Palma de Mallorca. The capital of the Balearics. The Balearics, Valentine, five thousand square kilometres, a million inhabitants and ten million tourists. Half the size of Corsica and four times as many visitors. And let me tell you, the Balearics don’t have a quarter of the advantages of our island – two beaches and three caves, a mountain no higher than one thousand five hundred metres.’ His finger went on running along the blue of the map. ‘So Valentine, can you tell me why one island in the Mediterranean attracts people, creating jobs and wealth, and another gets nothing?’
‘I … I don’t know.’
‘You’ll find out this evening. You won’t have to ask any questions. You only have to listen to your grandfather.’
‘My great-grandfather.’
‘Yes, that’s right. You know that Cassanu was one of my father’s best friends?’
He turned towards the entrance to the campsite, raised his arms, and pointed his index finger towards the horizon.
‘Look. Straight ahead of you.’
Valentine examined the Revellata Peninsula, which stretched out into the sea like another huge finger, free of any jewellery.
‘What do you see, Valentine?’
She hesitated.
‘Nothing.’
Cervone rejoiced.
‘Exactly, nothing! Corsica is a paradise, one of the most beautiful islands in the world, a gift from heaven, and what have they done with it? Nothing! Look at this magnificent peninsula. What have they done with it? Nothing. Apart from confiscating it the way some old people stuff their treasure under the mattress. They’ve lost us fifty years. You know what the biggest business is here in Corsica?’
Valentine shook her head.
‘Erm … No.’
The campsite manager excitedly grabbed her arm.
‘A supermarket! All the young people bugger off and yet we still have more than 10 per cent unemployment on the island. Because of those self-styled defenders of Corsica. All the exiles go off and work in Marseille or the region around Paris. Economic refugees who spend all year feeling depressed, pining to come back and spend a month in the summer with their family on the island, and crying all the tears of the Mediterranean when they leave again. Is that the way to help Corsica? Is that how they show their love for Corsicans?’
He looked over at the peninsula one last time, before his eyes came back to rest on the poster pinned up in reception.
‘The Roc e Mare marina,’ he explained. ‘An old, aborted project that has been taken back out of its cardboard box. It took me years to be able to buy that land. It will provide thirty permanent jobs once the work is finished. Three times that in the summer.’
Cervone stroked Valentine’s cheek.
‘This isn’t an empty promise, there’ll be a job for you. You deserve it, you’re an exile too. And not just any old exile. You’re the heiress.’ He came close to her ear, almost whispering. ‘And I promise, this time your great-grandfather won’t say anything about it.’
Valentine tried to move away, but he held her back with a slight pressure on her shoulder.
‘Everyone here is afraid of Cassanu. Even today. He’s the boss.’
At last he let her go, then blew on his hands and wiggled his fingers as if scattering magic dust before continuing.
‘Everyone here is afraid of Cassanu Idrissi. Everyone but me. Because let me tell you something: I’ve cast a spell on your Papé. My will is his command.’
~
The viscous line of eye-liner had almost disappeared down the plughole, leaving only the faintest trace, like the trail left by a slug. Clotilde tried to get a grip on herself. Supporting herself on the rim of the basin, she could see Orsu’s reflection in the mirror as he worked behind her. After cleaning the toilets further away, he resumed his ritual.
Dropping the dirty mop-head into the foaming water and taking out the one that had been soaking there for several minutes. Squeezing it out with his one good hand and pressing it between his knees. Fixing it on to the mop handle.
Clotilde closed her eyes.
The image hadn’t gone away. It was there, very familiar: a bucket, a mop, a wet floor.
Except that it wasn’t the shower block of the campsite, it was the kitchen of the house in Tourny, in Normandy, where Clotilde had spent the first fifteen years of her life.
Except that it wasn’t Orsu who was leaning on his mop-handle, it was her mother.
Palma had taught them her technique as if it were an old family secret. She’d taught her son Nicolas, her husband, even though he wasn’t very concerned with household tasks, and her daughter, Clotilde. Her.
Using two mop-heads to clean, always leaving one to soak while you were making the other one dirty. And then swapping them, to avoid having to squeeze the mop until the black liquid turned pale grey. An old technique inherited from who knows where which had become a family habit, the natural way of doing things, almost a ritual.
Orsu knew that ritual; he practised it. Clotilde opened her eyes and forced herself to think rationally.
Orsu was using this technique like the hundreds of thousands of other men and women in the world who did the housework and also knew the same trick. She had to be careful not to lose her head, not to be sucked in by ludicrous coincidences. She had to control herself, leave as little room as possible for emotion, as she did when she had to conduct an investigation into a case that moved her, securing alimony for a woman who had been left alone with her children, persuading the husband to sell the house that he had built with his own busy little hands in order to divide the sum into two decent households, and then negotiating joint custody.
She had to concentrate.
That evening, over dinner with her grandparents at Arcanu Farm. She had to suppress her emotions and ask the right questions.
Tomorrow, when she met Cesareu Garcia. Clotilde had spoken to the retired policeman on the phone a few hours ago, but he had refused to say anything more. ‘Tomorrow, Clotilde, tomorrow. Not over the phone. Come here tomorrow, whenever you like. My house is in Calenzana. I’m not going anywhere. I never go anywhere.’
Orsu limped out of the shower block with his bucket and mop. Clotilde still couldn’t calm herself down, try as she might. Apart from the alarming coincidence of those two mops (the incident would have made all her friends explode with laughter, she told herself in an attempt to play it down), she still felt the insults that the boys had hurled at Orsu as if they were dagger-blows. The mere fact that they had called him Hagrid made her see red. Perhaps it was just down to his disability, the fact that Cervone was exploiting him, here in this setting, on this island, among these people that she had once idolised.
Clotilde looked at her watch.
They were expected at the farm in less than an hour.
Someone was waiting there for her. Someone who hoped to recognise her.
Pulling a face in the mirror which she hoped was that of a sulky and slightly rebellious teenager, she ran through the lines of the message in her mind. Like a prayer. Like instructions that you would give to a spy, something she had to learn by heart because it was a matter of life and death.
I ask nothing else of you. Nothing at all.
Or perhaps just that you raise your eyes to the sky and look at Betelgeuse. If you only knew, my Clo, how many nights I have looked at it and thought of you.
The timer switch in the shower block had just gone out, plunging the room into a faint gloom.
My whole life is a dark room.
Franck appeared in the doorway.
‘Shall we go, Clo?’
Kisses,
P.
13
Monday, 14 August 1989, eighth day of the holidays
Pinky-blue sky
It’s me!
You remember, I dumped you with my teenagers
, dancing to the lambada.
You’re not cross with me?
I say my teenagers because I include myself in the tribe, even if I haven’t given myself a letter.
M, N, A, C, H. Maria-Chjara and Nicolas, Aurélia, the cyclops, Cervone, and all the others. The great business of love stories. I assure you, you haven’t missed a thing, nothing new has happened, only timid attempts to approach one another. I’ll keep you posted if anything happens.
But perhaps you don’t think my bouquet of flirtations is very serious? Small fantasies that even those concerned will have forgotten as soon as they become adults.
So I’ve been thinking about you, and I’m going to tell you a complicated, unhappy, twisted love story, the kind you like.
A story about adults.
A man and a woman.
My father and my mother.
In fact, they’d been getting on quite well since the start of the holidays, which isn’t to say that things are usually bad between them, but they aren’t all that good either. Let’s just say they’re a bit nothing. Papa comes home late, Maman waits for him, they talk about the things that need to be done in the house, the next day’s shopping, or the fact that the bins need to be put out; sometimes they go out together, and they probably make love when that happens. But since the beginning of the holidays things have been going better, as far as I can tell: a little kiss on the neck, a little ‘You’re looking lovely, darling’, a little bit of harmless laughter. If I had to choose, I would say that Papa’s the one who’s making the most effort to recharge the batteries of their libido. And then BAM!
Crash bang wallop. Disaster.
Let me explain. Papa and Maman met in Corsica a lifetime ago. Maman was travelling around the island on a motorbike with her friends. Papa lived there with his parents at Arcanu Farm, overlooking the peninsula. I don’t know any of the details of their romance, I just know that they met here, on the Revellata, on 23 August 1968, Saint Rose’s day.
So every 23 August is the anniversary of the day they first met. That day Papa dutifully goes off and buys a bouquet of flowers – depending on the year, red roses that symbolise passionate love, white roses symbolising pure love, orange roses symbolising desire. But none of them, according to family legend, is as lovely as the bunch he collected for Maman that first summer, a bouquet of eglantine, the free, wild rose that Maman loves so much. Rosa canina.
Every year, on 23 August, for as long as I can remember, Papa and Maman have given themselves a break and have spent the evening at the Casa di Stella, the best restaurant between Calvi and Porto, with a romantic terrace set under olive trees, a charcoal grill, braised Corsican veal, grilled fillet of grouper, free-flowing Casanova muscat. You can get there on foot via a steep path above Arcanu Farm. They sleep there, in the gîte, I assume they book a double room, with a roughly carved wooden bed, a marble basin on the table, an old-style bath in the middle of the room, and a huge bay window that gives you a view of the Great Bear. At least that’s how I imagine it. To tell you the truth, I think I’d love a lover of mine to take me up there, to the Casa di Stella, the house of stars … Please let that happen, tell me that will happen to me one day?
End of parenthesis.
My parents’ marital bliss on the balcony overlooking the Milky Way, that was before.
This year, KA-BOOM.
It started with the posters that were stuck all over the campsite and along the road. A concert of Corsican polyphonic music. 23 August, at 9 p.m. The group is called A Filetta, apparently they’re very well known. They tour all over the world, and here they were, performing close by, at the chapel of Santa Lucia, in an almost abandoned village – Prezzuna, above Galéria.
Papa’s approach was rather heavy-handed.
Uno: I slow down as we pass the posters.
Deuzio: I tell you they’re the best group on the planet, and play their cassettes on a loop.
Tertio: I hint, I outline, I suggest in passing to Mama Palma that we could celebrate our anniversary on a different day, the day before Saint Rose’s day, or the day after. Saint Fabrice or Saint Bartholomew’s day.
As I said, Ka-BOOM.
Mama Palma didn’t even say no, she just said, ‘If you want.’
The worst possible answer! Since then you should see her face. She’s like the rose in the jar in The Little Prince. Straight, proud, annoyed. All thorns sticking out.
My mother is a terribly proud flower.
So ever since that moment, we’ve been in a state of great suspense. Broadly speaking, I see can two options.
The first is that Mama Palma will make Papa feel guilty enough to give up his concert. I’d never tell him, even under torture, but I’m actually on Maman’s side on this one. Female solidarity carries its obligations.
The second option: Papa doesn’t give in and we find ourselves in a cold war, at least until we get to the ferry, and maybe even after that.
Two options, and as I’m writing this I can also glimpse a third possibility, even worse than the other two, which is that they involve me and Nicolas in their row. Papa getting really annoyed in turn, going on and on about the family, about getting in touch with our roots, about opening ourselves up to Corsican culture and raging against the bubblegum nonsense on the radio, and singing that chorus he likes so much, turning up the sound of a guitar and the voices of A Filetta.
This may seem like a pointless story, almost comical in its obsession.
But do not laugh, my future reader.
We Idrissis are a stubborn bunch.
The fate of our family will be decided on the evening of the twenty-third of August … and all for something so stupid.
* * *
Something so stupid, he said again.
Four people dead.
Three men and a woman.
Over something stupid.
14
14 August 2016, 7 p.m.
Franck drove slowly. Not because he was afraid of getting lost, given that there was only one road that climbed through the mountains towards the Arcanu farm, but because with each new bend the chasm gnawing at the side of the tarmac became a little deeper.
Clotilde, sitting in the passenger seat, head against the glass, saw neither asphalt nor barrier, just the void. The car door was like a window on to nothingness, a cabin floating in the sky, connected from one peak to the next by an invisible cable. A cable that could break at any moment.
Arcanu Farm was even further up. It could be reached directly by a path, in less than five hundred metres, but the road twisted and turned for almost three kilometres.
‘Keep going,’ Clotilde whispered to Franck. ‘You can’t miss it, it’s the only house.’
Franck drove the car straight on, along the narrow asphalted road, passing the only signpost: Casa di Stella, 800 metres. The wooden sign stood in the middle of a small unpaved car park with several hiking paths leading off it. Valentine had lowered the back window: the car was filled with the scent of pine and the changing smells of the maquis. Thyme, rosemary, wild mint.
Images flooded into Clotilde’s mind, each new bend in the road revealing a new landscape, and yet each one was so familiar: a huge Corsican pine standing almost the height of a man above the other trees, the ruins of an old chestnut mill overlooking a pebbly riverbed, a solitary donkey grazing the grass of an unfenced meadow. Nothing had changed here in thirty years, as if the inhabitants had made a special effort to keep things as they always were. Or had abandoned the place once and for all.
Apart from the Idrissi family.
Three bends further up they saw their first human being. An old woman was walking along the side of the road, on the side of the mountain, bent over and dressed in black, as if she bore the mourning of a whole village that had toppled into the void, leaving her as sole survivor. Franck slowed down and pulled over towards the edge of the chasm. Probably not enough. The woman initially gave them a dark look, as if amazed that any strange car should venture all the way up here.
When they had overtaken her, Clotilde looked in the rear-view mirror and saw the old woman pointing at them and muttering insults under her breath. Unless she was delivering some kind of evil incantation. In that moment, Clotilde suddenly felt sure that the witch hadn’t mistaken them for lost tourists venturing on to her territory; she knew them, she had recognised them, and her gestures and curses were directed at them.
At her.
The witch disappeared from sight as they rounded the next bend.
A few hundred metres further on, after a slight ledge, a gravel track on the left led to the vast yard of the farm. New images emerged from Clotilde’s album of memories and floated in front of her eyes. Arcanu Farm, which everyone referred to only as ‘the farm’, or sometimes ‘the sheepfold’, consisted of three grey stone buildings forming an open U above the slopes of la Balange: a farmhouse where the Idrissis lived, a barn and a huge shed where the animals slept. All the windows on the north side gave people, goats and sheep a panoramic view over La Revellata and the Mediterranean. In the middle of the farm, the huge stone yard was coloured only by a few wild rose hedges and beds of wild orchids, Mamy’s favourite flowers, giving the impression that nothing else could grow in the shade of the three-hundred-year-old oak tree planted at the heart of the property.
Clotilde turned to look towards the barn. The bench was still there. The severed tree trunk where she had listened to music on the evening of 23 August 1989, La Mano Negra wailing in her ears, the notebook open on her knees, before Nicolas had called her.
Clo, everyone’s waiting for you. Papa’s not going to …
Strangely, amongst all the bubbles that rose up from the past it was the memory of her notebook abandoned on that bench that had taken the longest to burst. Who had picked it up? Who had opened it? She hardly remembered the words, the phrases, anything that she had written at the time; she just remembered her intentions, which were often mean, cynical, cruel. Before she met Natale, at least. If anyone had found that notebook, they would have thought she was the most awful bitch! She would have loved to read it again now. Her worst fear, that summer of ’89, was that her father or her mother would find it. That they would read it. At least she had escaped that embarrassment. Anyone could have violated her intimacy by diving into the lines of her private notebook, after the accident, after she went back to the mainland – anyone but her parents.
