The Rose Café

by John Hanson Mitchell

  I said this because many of the people I had been meeting on the island presumed that there were still bears, cowboys, and Indians in America. They also seemed to think I should know Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio.

  The young woman introduced herself, holding out her hand, and explained that she was here with her “stupid” parents, but that they would be leaving soon, and she would stay through the month.

  “Maybe longer,” she said. “At least I hope longer.”

  Without prompting she began to tell me all about her life in Paris and her friends there, and a new café on the Champs Elysées called “le Drugstore” that served American ice cream sodas and hamburgers, and on and on about weekends with her parents at her grandmother’s villa outside Paris and how her parents, or at least her mother, had money but worked as a journalist and spent all her time helping people like Algerians who really shouldn’t be helped at all and in fact shouldn’t be allowed to come to Paris in her opinion and how her father, who was also a journalist, had got himself into trouble for a story he had just published and how he had a mistress who, in her opinion, was more sensible than her own mother because she agreed about the Algerians and then, almost in midsentence, she asked if this was a good spot to swim.

  “Yes, I swim here every morning. I live just up there. In the stone cottage.”

  “Good,” she said. She waded into the waters and struck out for the middle of the cove.

  She had a smooth stroke and strong shoulders, and when she reached the middle of the cove she arched down into a dive, and like a gleaming porpoise, slipped beneath the waters and didn’t come up for a long time. I was wondering whether I should worry when she burst up with a great splash.

  “Be careful of the moray eels in the rocks,” I called as I went up the path back to the restaurant.

  Chrétien was in the kitchen when I came in with my basket of urchins.

  “You were in the cove, yes? You must have seen Marie. She is beautiful, no?”

  “Cute,” I said.

  “Like a little rabbit,” he said.

  I hadn’t thought that Marie looked at all like a rabbit.

  “More like a sprite …” I said, searching for the word in French.

  “A what?” Chrétien asked.

  “Une fée?” I ventured.

  “Mais non,” he shouted. “Not a fairy. Not at all. A rabbit. A beautiful little squirrel.”

  Things were getting worse as far as Marie’s appearance, I thought.

  “In the night, she transforms herself; she wears a hint of the best Molinard, just a trace you know, and you can taste the salt on her skin, and her hands, like the small busy hands of a monkey, so delicata, si tanta bella. I kiss her.”

  He cupped his left palm in his right hand and lifted it to his lips.

  “She is like the small antelope that scampers beneath the acacia of the African savannah.”

  “She has a good walk …” I said.

  Chrétien, I had come to understand by then, was fond of animal metaphors.

  Later that afternoon I saw a new couple out on the terrace, taking the sun and a glass of beer.

  “You see them?” Chrétien said quietly. “Marie’s parents. Simone and Teddy. I cannot wait until they leave.”

  Simone had blond hair cut in a pageboy and the same hazel eyes as Marie, and she wore a large, flower-patterned muumuu, which she had hoisted above her knees as she stretched herself out at the café table, her feet up on a chair, an empty beer glass perched in front of her. I noticed how tanned her legs were, and her finely shaped feet—toenails painted a bright red.

  Her husband was a small man, well formed, blue-eyed, but he had a surprised, almost frightened look as if he were unsure of whatever it was that he was saying or doing. In fact, however, he was a troublemaker, having published, according to Chrétien, a scathing article in Le Monde attacking both de Gaulle’s policies concerning Algerian independence and, with equal vehemence, the policies of the colonialists and the right-wing French generals. Both sides detested him, Chrétien said.

  “Somebody blew up his car a month ago,” Chrétien said.

  That Sunday night, after the ferry had left for the mainland, the man they called le Baron came into the dining room. He arrived early, while the dinner guests were still at their desserts and coffee, and sat at the bar. Micheline was in the kitchen at the time, and I happened to be at the bar when he came in. He settled in the front at the polished-wood counter and turned to face outward, toward the terrace, ignoring me. I think he was watching for his card partners, who had not yet arrived.

  I had seen the Baron off and on over the past few weeks. I saw him in the square a couple of times, once standing under one of the plane trees with another foreign-looking blond man in a gray suit and a pressed white shirt, and another time with a large group of obvious continental types at one of the cafés. He would usually come out to the Rose Café later in the night, sometimes quite late, as if perhaps he had been unable to sleep and decided to entertain himself by slumming. He was always well attired, but in contrast to his appearance, he would assume a jocular, play-along-with-the-boys style once he was settled into a game and had had a few drinks. I would always go to bed long before the game was over, so I never saw him leave, although late one night, I saw him standing alone up on the promontory above my cottage. It was one of those nights when the scirocco was up—the moist, hot wind that blows in off the Sahara—and people were restless. Le Baron was standing, leaning slightly forward into the wind, his hands in his jacket pockets, his white coattails and dark tie flapping behind him in the high wind.

  The promontory was a favorite watch post for locals and visitors; the site offered a fine view to the western horizon, and people often came out to watch the sun go down. Before I started working at the Rose Café I used to go up there myself. Sometimes after the sun had set, a lilac curtain of dusk would draw across the eastern sky, and the whole Mediterranean would shade from green to violet and then take on a deep purple cast. Watching the changing colors, I could understand the origin of Homer’s enigmatic phrase “the wine-dark sea.”

  The little outcropping was also a night watch. Periodically I would see an old woman, hooded in a kerchief and wearing the traditional long black skirts, standing there. She was a widow, I was told, who had lost her husband at sea many years before. Later in the season I would sometimes see, very late at night, the Polish-born guest called Maggs up there on one of her sleepless nights, wrapped in her terry-cloth robe, and during the early evenings Herr Komandante would often post himself there to watch the red sun sink below the green horizon.

  Lounging at the bar, le Baron watched the terrace for a while and then in due time he turned to me.

  “You’re the new man here, aren’t you?” he said in English.

  I acknowledged that I was, and he turned and went back to watching the terrace.

  “Have you seen Max?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “No,” I said. “He hasn’t come out yet. No one has. I don’t know where they are. It’s a little early, maybe.”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  Then he turned and faced me.

  “Give me a Cap Corse if you please.” This was the brand name of a local aperitif called averna, made from chestnuts, a drink favored along this coast.

  I served him, he thanked me, and then he turned again to watch the terrace. He spoke with a slight French accent and refined English inflections.

  After a few minutes he turned around again and sipped his drink, swirling it first in the glass, watching the lemon slice circle.

  “You’re in the little cottage in the back, aren’t you?” he asked indifferently. “Did you happen to see a white ketch with an odd rig come into the cove late the other night?”

  I said I had seen such a ketch a few weeks earlier but not recently.

  He nodded and contemplated his drink.

  “And where are you from?” he asked.

  “United States,” I sai
d.

  “Yes, but where?”

  I told him I was from Englewood, a suburb of New York City.

  “Really?” he said, taking a sudden interest. “But that’s surprising, I actually think I know some people from there. Are there cliffs there, above a river?” he asked.

  There were, in fact. The Palisades, which ran along the west bank of the Hudson for miles.

  He said that he thought he had known a couple from the town during the war. They had worked with a church group around the internment camps east of Perpignan.

  “They helped out with a milk-distribution network,” he said. “But at the same time they were trading in the black market. Later I heard they began escorting Jewish children over the Spanish border crossings. Working with chasseurs, you know, the local people who help refugees across borders.”

  I asked their names.

  “Pierce, I think. Mary and her husband, don’t remember his name. She was very pretty, I recall. She used to dress in rather appealing clothes and distract the guards so they wouldn’t check people’s documents so carefully. I liked her, but her husband, he was a bit of a prig. Holier than thou. That kind of chap, don’t you know. I think the Gestapo caught up with them at one point but they managed to pay somebody off and got free. I happen to know that they were very good at getting forged exit visas for people, letters of transit, that sort of thing.”

  I had heard of this couple and had even seen them once or twice at a restaurant called the Rathskeller where my parents would sometimes eat. I remember my mother pointing them out and telling me some stories about them.

  “Did this woman have gray hair that she would tie back in a bun?” I asked. This was an unusual hairstyle for the period.

  “Yes, although she had black hair back then. Very attractive, with straight dark eyebrows and haunting blue eyes. But how did you know them?”

  “I didn’t. I would just see them around the town,” I said.

  In fact this couple was active in leftist causes in the town and was somehow associated with my father, who was also a political animal and later had been caught up in the McCarthy scandals, as had the Pierces.

  All this made me wonder why le Baron knew them—of all people—so I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I was around that area at the time. One accumulates people as one ages,” he said. “People. Things. Sometimes wives. They used to talk about their home a lot. I think the man, whatever his name was, missed his home. He used to talk about those cliffs.”

  “I think they were in some kind of trouble in our town,” I said. “They were accused of being communists.”

  “Really?” he said. “They were such a likable couple. So you are a student here in France, I take it?” he asked in a friendly manner, clearly indicating that we were to change the subject.

  I told him I was, and he asked me why I had chosen to go to school in Europe rather than America.

  “There are perfectly good colleges there, are there not?” he said.

  When he spoke to you he looked directly at you, with a fixed-from-under stare. It was a gaze that was clearly intended just for you, as if he had forgotten altogether that he was there to play cards with the locals and had come solely to talk to me in particular.

  I tried to answer, but in fact I wasn’t sure I had an answer.

  He carried on, though, and began to ask me about student life both in Paris and back in the United States, and the more I told him the more he asked. He seemed to grow increasingly interested in my life, and even began to veer into personal matters. Did I have a girlfriend. What was I doing in the neighborhood in Nice where I had lived (not a particularly savory area, I gathered, although I’m not sure I knew that then) and on and on, and all the while I was growing more and more interested in his life but was unable to ask.

  Other than his wings of silvery hair and tanned good looks, the most characteristic thing about le Baron was his eyes. They reminded me of the sea beyond the harbor: bright with sun, ultramarine, with an interior light that gleamed even in the half-light of the bar. Whenever he asked a question he lowered his head slightly and fixed your eye confidentially. It was a little solicitous, and slightly disconcerting.

  “What time is it?” he asked suddenly.

  “Sorry, don’t know,” I said. “I don’t have a watch, actually. The only clock is in Jean-Pierre’s bedroom.”

  “Odd, isn’t it? I have a watch. After I came here I put it in a drawer. I don’t use it. Who needs it, I suppose.”

  “When did you move here?” I asked, turning the tables.

  Before he could answer (if indeed he intended to answer) I saw his eyes light up, and Micheline appeared.

  “Monsieur le Baron,” she said with mock grandeur. “And how is it with you?”

  “Oh, you know,” he said, smiling sheepishly now. “The same, always the same. Living day to day. Dawn. Midday. Dusk. The year round. And you, Madame Green Eyes, how are you?”

  “Busy busy,” she said.

  “Always busy. Give me another drink, please,” he said to Micheline.

  The weather had changed decidedly with le Baron, and the sexual repartee began to dart back and forth across the bar. I thought it time to retreat to my lowly scullery and the dessert dishes, and I said goodbye.

  He lifted his glass to me as I departed.

  Later, after the card game commenced, I joined Micheline while she sat smoking at a remove from the players. She would commonly sit in a lighted corner of the verandah after hours, reading novels and cutting the pages with a long kitchen knife.

  “What about him?” I asked, lifting my head toward le Baron, who sat with his back to us, eyeing his deck through a drift of cigarette smoke.

  “Oh him,” she said, indifferently. “He’s just another dog in the pack, although he believes himself to be from some old line of counts. He’s from some industrial nouveau riche family up in Belgium. They made a huge lot of money selling coal, exploiting the miners and so on. They had a big villa and a title—so he says—but they probably purchased it from some defunct noble family. Then the Nazis came along. The story is that they took over his family compound as a command center and kicked them all out. They went down to Paris where they had a big apartment. After that le Baron came south, to Nice, I think. But who knows? Now he’s just another crook.”

  “A crook?” I exclaimed. “Him? That classy old man?”

  She shrugged. Blew out a cloud of smoke.

  “Maybe not. I don’t know. But he lost all his money in the war, and now he’s rich? Never works? Lives in Corsica. So what do you think? He’s generous, though. He privately funded a medical clinic near here,” she said. “He has also paid off the debts of a few doltish peasants from the interior. He has even helped us out from time to time.”

  “The barber told me he came out here during the war. He didn’t say why, though.”

  “He did come out here. Twice. But we don’t ask why. Better not to ask, sometimes.”

  I wanted to ask, of course. I never did like unanswered questions; they only served to sharpen my curiosity, and I never had been able to leave things alone when told to. But so be it, I thought, and went to bed.

  There was a light cloud cover that night; you could just see the silvery pale moon to the east, riding through the cloud breaks. The high peaks were obscured, but the three nuns were throwing off a dull, sandy-colored light and seemed to have drawn closer. You could see them hunched there above the town with its little glittering lights winking along the harbor shore. Silent. Ever present. Reproachful.

  Somewhere up there in the hills, beyond the nuns, in the twisted little valleys of the mountains, the old Corsican ghosts must still have lingered. Here roamed the restless spirit of the old liberator Sampiero Corso, who strangled his wife, believing—wrongly—that she had betrayed him to his enemies. Here was the bombastic self-proclaimed German nobleman, King Theodor, who, on the run from marriages, gambling debts, and political intrigues, came out to Corsi
ca and led an uprising against the Genoese, declared himself king of the island, failed in that little venture, and died in debtors’ prison. Here too was Gian Pietro Gaffori, who stormed the bastion at Corte in spite of the fact that the Genoese commander held Gaffori’s kidnapped son over the fortress walls in an attempt to stop the charge. And perhaps, somewhere up there in the clouds, you could find the most restless spirit of all, the humanist and revolutionary Pasquale Paoli, who for the first time in its history came closest to liberating the island and, had he succeeded, would have set up a constitutional government two decades before the American colonists got the idea.

  chapter four

  The Donkey King

  News of the outside world did not regularly trouble this part of Corsica. But someone left a copy of Le Figaro at the bar one morning and I read it while waiting for Pierrot, the bread man. There was a front-page story with a banner headline.

  Algeria had finally been given independence.

  This was big news. The Algerian struggle for independence, which had begun in 1954, had by 1960 effectively split France into several disparate factions. On one side were the pro-independence Algerians of the National Liberation Front, who had started the movement and were supported by the French left. On the other side were the so-called pieds-noirs, the European Algerians; and the harkis, the pro-French Arabs supported by the French right wing and the army. The French had sent in the military to root out the insurgent independence fighters shortly after the first uprising in November of 1954, but the struggle escalated into war, and by 1960 the reverberations reached France, with street bombings and demonstrations and even attempts on de Gaulle’s life.

  There were, of course, other events in the world at large in that year. Patrice Lumumba had been murdered in Africa—with the help of the CIA, according to my student friends. Kennedy had sent “advisors” (trained fighting forces, according to Chrétien and company) to Vietnam. Salazar had a repressive hold on the citizens of Portugal; Franco maintained an iron glove in Spain with Guardia Civil soldiers posted at rural crossroads throughout the country. Plastique bombs were going off regularly in the streets of Paris, and the OAS, the secret army organization, consisting of procolonialist generals, was still gunning for de Gaulle. Corsica sat in the middle of this maelstrom, at once indifferent and mired in its own problems.