The Rose Café

by John Hanson Mitchell

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Non, non, for sure,” Chrétien said. “She has the fire of the ages, not yet extinguished by the unforgiving Protestant governess who taught her English. Not at all.”

  And all the while, as Chrétien prattled on with his inventions, the troupe approached. They were carrying packs and bags with them, and since there would be no ferry for several days, it was clear that they were intending to stay at the auberge.

  They came onward, the two in the lead weighted with bags, the contessa traveling light, a small satchel slung over her left shoulder.

  Chrétien was electrified.

  “Come on,” he said. “Back into the bar and the kitchen. We must appear indifferent. We are not sure there are rooms. But of course, we will make arrangements in the end. The contessa will be grateful.”

  The threesome turned out to be Parisian, and hardly Italian nobility. The young, neatly dressed man was a cousin of the two women, who were sisters: Clotilde and Karen. They had been traveling together since late winter, hitchhiking and taking trains and ferries; they had come out here, as many did, to escape the scene on the Riviera.

  True to form, when they asked for rooms, Chrétien told them we were full. Then he called me out from the kitchen and held a long discussion with me as to the situation with the German family in Room 6. There was no German family in Room 6. In fact, there was no Room 6—there were just rooms, unnumbered and most of them empty at that point, but I caught his drift and played along.

  “The steward here says he is not sure, a family of Germans may be leaving today, but we will find out from the patron, who is off fishing at the moment. In the meantime—please. Sit. Have something to drink.”

  How he intended to get out of this lie, I did not know. Jean-Pierre and Micheline were enjoying their midafternoon rendezvous in the next room and would soon be out for their afternoon coffee.

  Chrétien brought over two glasses of beer and a citron pressé, and with uncommon flourish delivered the citron pressé to Karen, the contessa.

  “And for the belle madame …” he said as he set down the glass.

  “Thanks,” the contessa said with a slangy Parisian intonation.

  She had close-set brown eyes, a large Italianate mouth, and a fine row of white teeth but was gat-toothed, an imperfection that made her all the more interesting, I thought.

  I was busying myself with the other tables nearby.

  “Are you a Brit?” the older sister asked, speaking in English.

  “American,” I said.

  “Interesting,” she said. “Not many Americans here in the south.”

  “I know, that’s why I like it.”

  “On the run?” she asked.

  I wasn’t sure what she meant and explained innocently that I was a student in Paris, just here for the summer. Nothing about the American draft service trying to catch up with me.

  “Good place to hide if, perhaps, the military wanted you,” she said.

  We fell into conversation, and I learned that they were White Russians whose grandparents had come to Paris in the 1920s. The two sisters were now apparently making up for their lost youths in a Bohemian sort of way. They had left Paris in February and hitchhiked all through western Spain, and then they started north as the weather warmed and crossed the Pyrenees near Saint-Jean-de-Luz, hiking from time to time on mountain trails used by smugglers and shepherds. Then they descended through the villages of the foothills and began hitching across the Côte d’Azur. They picked up their younger cousin Laurent in Nice, where they had spent a few weeks, and then came out to Calvi.

  Laurent had curly, carrot-colored hair and wore heavy tortoiseshell glasses that somehow jarred with his coloring. He was about Marie’s age and very interested in clothes. He wore a clean white shirt, denim trousers, leather sandals, and had rolled the sleeves of his shirt halfway up his forearms and folded the cuffs neatly. He was forever arranging his hair. Like Marie he was a student at a lycée, but he was not at all afraid of his upcoming baccalaureate, which he would have to face the following year.

  In time Jean-Pierre and Micheline emerged from their bed, and as was their custom, shuffled, bleary-eyed, through the dining room to the kitchen to prepare coffee, paying no attention to the new troupe in the bar.

  Chrétien followed them in, and after a few minutes emerged and went over to the table where I was chatting with the new arrivals.

  “I have good news for you,” he said. “It seems that, unbeknownst to me, the German family left this morning, and the room is in fact free, and so if you would permit, the steward and I will assist you with your belongings.”

  He made the pretense of a bow. “Please …” he said, extending his arm toward the narrow, dark stairwell that led up to the second floor. Knowing Chrétien, I didn’t think his ruse was working very well. They must have thought him a fool. He snatched up the contessa’s pack and, carrying it in front of his chest with two hands as if it were precious cargo, mounted the stairs and led the way through the hallway to a big room with a dormer overlooking the harbor. I followed sheepishly, playing along.

  The room was wide and airy, with a creaky double bed and a cot. It had peeling yellow wallpaper, a sink and bidet by the back wall, and a rickety armoire in one corner. I spotted an earwig struggling to climb up the sink wall and brushed it away.

  “Is it to your liking?” Chrétien asked, addressing the contessa.

  “It’s OK,” she said. “We’ll take it.”

  “But for me?” Laurent asked. “Where am I to sleep?”

  This began a discussion as to whether Laurent would be sharing the room with his cousins or would have quarters of his own, and this in turn, to keep up the ruse, required that Chrétien descend and check the books to see if a room was available, which he knew perfectly well there was.

  Karen went over and threw open the windows, allowing a blast of fresh sea air to flow in. She stood in the breeze in her light shift, shaking out her hair with both hands.

  “Beautiful, no?” she said to her sister.

  “Compared to where we’ve been, I’ll say.”

  “I don’t fancy that infested cot,” Laurent said.

  “It will do …” Clotilde said to him.

  “No, it will not do. I must have a better bed, as you know,” Laurent said.

  “We’ll see,” said Karen.

  Chrétien returned with more “good news.” The single room was available. He indicated to me through a sign that I should lead the young gentleman to his new quarters, which I did.

  A few days after the arrival of la Contessa and her family, Pierrot asked if I would like to go back into the maquis to see his father.

  “He liked meeting you,” he said. “He wants to tell you more about the Nazis.”

  It was good to get away from the coast for a change. We motored up on the winding roads and clattered through empty, stony villages. At one point, an old crone stood at a turning, and when we slowed to make the turn, she cocked her thumb and forefinger like a pistol and pretended to shoot at us.

  “Local pazza,” Pierrot shouted back at me over his shoulder. “Crazy but harmless.”

  In time we came to the track leading up to the meadow, and we began weaving through the dense vegetation and the thick-scented air of the maquis. Partly because I spent most of my time on the coast, I was more aware of the diversity of plants and birdsong in that particular little valley. We had been climbing through the various levels of maquis, first broom and myrtle, then a section dominated by arbutus and briar, and eventually an area of a mixed, shrubby understory interspersed with chestnut trees, which provided one of the staples of Corsican cuisine. Chestnuts are pounded into flour for breads; they are used in a flan; they are mixed with stews; and they are distilled into the uniquely flavored aperitif, averna.

  From time to time as we walked, lizards spirited across our path, so fast you could hardly be sure you’d seen them at all, and birds were twittering all around us in the t
hickets: Cetti’s warblers, chaffinches, thrushes, and wood pigeons. I could hear also the tapping of woodpeckers and a whole host of unidentifiable whistles, chirps, and chirrups.

  It was another typically hot day, with the sound of cicadas ringing out as a figured accompaniment to the chattering of the birds, and hardly so much as a remembered whisper of wind stirred the air. At one point, Pierrot turned off the track and followed a narrow trail to a clear spring that bubbled up from a cleft in the rocks. He knelt and drank from it, cupping the waters in his hands, and then splashed himself, sweeping his wet hands back through his hair.

  “Safe to drink?” I asked.

  He looked at me in a way that indicated that he did not understand the intent of my question. I cupped my hands and sucked up the cool, mineral-rich water, and then washed my face.

  We hiked on, Pierrot in the lead, his battered, down-at-heel espadrilles slapping the ground as he carefully picked his way through the rocks. This was the backcountry of the Corsican foothills, the short, steep valleys that led up to the higher peaks. Although it seemed hard to believe with the great white towers of the higher peaks showing themselves from time to time above the lower peaks, this was one of the least mountainous areas of Corsica. The serious heights occurred farther south, between Corte and Ajaccio.

  The wild interior of Corsica supports some of Europe’s last endemic species, the Corsican nuthatch, for example, which lived higher up in the forest of Corsican pines—themselves a unique subspecies. The Tyrrhenian wall lizard could be found in these parts, and in some of the lower levels there were still remnant populations of Hermann’s tortoise, which was extinct on the European mainland. Best known of all, in the peaks around us there were mouflon, a native Corsican sheep with great, curling horns.

  Just as the track began to shrink down to a mere trail, Pierrot bent quickly and snatched up a wildflower with many bright yellow petals, like an aster. Suddenly the close air was filled with the smell of camphor.

  “Smell this,” he said.

  The odor was so strong you could feel it on your tongue.

  “If you get bitten by a mosquito, you rub this on the bite. No more itch. Good for cuts and scratches, too.”

  When we finally got to the ruins, Fabrizio was off someplace, maybe chasing after a stray donkey. We sat in his chairs for a while and drank some of his bad wine and ate a few figatelli and hunks of bread from the baguettes that Pierrot had brought along. In time the old man came lumbering up the track, leading a younger donkey. Pierrot cut him some bread and sausage while the two of them chatted in dialect.

  “How do you like your work?” Fabrizio asked after a few minutes.

  I told him it was OK. Not too hard, and I had enough time to take off and poke around during the day.

  “I don’t know what it’s like now,” Fabrizio said. “But that place used to have a bad reputation. Set off like that from the village, men used to take womens out there. Did you know that, Pierrot? Did you know that that used to be a place to pick up loose womens?”

  “No Papé, I didn’t know that. But I heard that. But now it is different. Jean-Pierre and Micheline. They’re from Paris.”

  The old man snorted and drank off his glass.

  I saw a hawk slip out into the clearing and suddenly bank and dive down into the brush at the edge of the thickets. It came up with a small mammal in its claws.

  “Good catch,” Fabrizio said.

  Pierrot grunted.

  For some reason neither of them seemed inclined to talk much. By that time I had been hearing so many stories about the old man that I was anxious to ask him to verify some of the rumors, but I didn’t know how to begin.

  When I first met Fabrizio, I took him for another old countryman with a briarwood pipe and a traditional wide-brimmed, battered fedora. But now I noticed that he did seem to have a knowing, wise fatigue in his eyes. All the tales of the resistance and his role as a go-between could have been true. Finally, just to make conversation, I think, he asked me again if I was getting along at Jean-Pierre’s.

  I said again that I was getting on quite well, only this time I added a long story about Maggs and the war and the Jewish resistance in Warsaw, and how I had met le Baron and how he had told me he knew some people from my town back in America who had worked smuggling Jewish children across the border near Perpignan.

  “Le Baron met them, you say?” he asked.

  I said yes, somewhere in one of the villages or camps north of Marseille.

  He grunted. “I didn’t think he was over that way,” he said to himself.

  “Did you know le Baron during the war?” I asked.

  “He used to come up here,” Fabrizio said. “Someone over by Monticello was hiding him. They took him up into the mountains from there, and we didn’t see him for a few months. Then after the Germans pulled out, he lived down there behind Ile Rousse somewhere. He went back to France after that, but returned here after the war. That’s when I got to know him. He used to hunt boar up here, him and some other rich people. Big parties, all dressed up. There was two kinds of resistance, you see. One in Nice and Marseille and Bordeaux. And then here. Here it was different. Back there, in France, everybody is fighting everybody else, communists, Gaullists, British. Out here, single-minded. All grudges forgotten. Only one big vendetta to carry out.”

  “What was that?”

  “Kill fascists.”

  He grunted again and nodded to himself. “Wait here,” he said. He got up slowly and hobbled off to his little stone house and was gone for a while. When he came back he was carrying a bundle of cloth tied with old twine. He set it down at his feet, untied a knot, and spread out a uniform jacket in front of me. It was a Nazi jacket, complete with epaulets, and a collection of various emblems and badges, none of which had any real meaning for me. Folded into the jacket was a small, leather-bound sketchbook. Fabrizio opened it reverently and showed it to me. Inside were refined little ink sketches of plants, birds, and butterflies of the maquis, clearly labeled in German, with the species names in Latin.

  “This was Hansi’s,” he said. “Too bad about old Hansi, right, Pierrot? He wasn’t a bad sort.”

  Pierrot blew out a dismissive sigh.

  “That’s enough, Papé.”

  There arose then an energetic stream of curses in dialect from the old man. Then he looked up at me.

  “Pierrot here, he is young. He doesn’t know what it was like.”

  “Neither do I,” I said.

  “You don’t want to.”

  On the way back down the track with Pierrot I asked what his father had done during the war, and who was this Hansi. He told me that Hansi was a German officer and that he was a friend of his father’s. He talked about Hansi often, Pierrot said. His father had told him that Hansi was an odd man out, a solitary type who liked nature but was stuck in an unfortunate war. He had no real interest in being a soldier and used to use his free time to wander over the maquis, looking for flowers and birds. He carried a box over his shoulder and would collect plants. He would sketch them and make little notes, and then press the plants between the pages of his notebook. One day while he was out on one of his forays, he accidentally happened upon Fabrizio’s compound with its square of ruined buildings. Pierrot said that even though his father could have killed him on the spot and buried him and no one would have known, the two of them fell into conversation and became friends. They shared a general interest in, among other things, the local natural history, about which Fabrizio knew a great deal. Hansi would stop in from time to time and talk about the plants and animals of the countryside. He was especially amused by Fabrizio’s collection of donkeys. One day, late in the afternoon, Hansi came walking into the compound. Fabrizio was there with a group of maquisards, and as soon as Hansi appeared in the clearing, they shot him.

  “Papé was very upset,” Pierrot said. “But he didn’t show it, or the others would have suspected him as a collaborator. ‘Leave him here,’ Papé said. ‘I’ll bury th
e bastard.’ So after they left, he gave Hansi a proper burial and said some prayers. He hid his emblems and badges and kept his jacket and his notebook.”

  Down in the square in the town, Pierrot and I shared a beer. The old boules players had gathered—dark lines on either side of the pitch. Hawklike eyes following the flight of the cochonnet, explosive outbursts when the boules landed, jocular sparring and familiar banter.

  Gulls and terns skimmed the sand-colored buildings and the red-tiled roofs north of the square, white sails against the searing Mediterranean blue, flights of sparrows in the dust at our feet, women with carriages, young children spinning on the carousel at the west end, shouts and laughter, dog barks, the clank of glasses on china plates, the smell of old beer and cigarettes and dry plane-tree leaves. I was suddenly conscious of a comfortable familiarity here. I felt that I had landed in a place that had a sense of itself, a community forged by deep history rather than intentional town planning.

  “Why didn’t you get called to go fight in Algeria?” I asked Pierrot. He was about the right age for the army.

  He looked over at me sadly. Then he tapped his cheek just below his walleye.

  “Maybe you’re lucky,” I said.

  Someone made a good throw on the boule pitch. There was an outburst from the players. Pierrot looked over dully and drank some of his beer. A gull barked. A truck engine fired up in the market stalls. A door slammed.

  Knowing how the tide of gossip washed over the Rose Café, I was pretty certain that Pierrot knew I had been hearing stories about his father, but he never offered any information himself. He was a very good island guide when it came to plants and animals and unfounded local rumors, but he never talked much about himself. His mother died when he was young, and he was raised by a maiden aunt who lived in the village of Monticello, just behind Ile Rousse. When he was old enough to make the trip on his own, he started going up into the maquis to stay with his father, and for a while helped him out with his donkey herd and the half-wild cows and pigs that Fabrizio laid claim to. (All the seemingly feral livestock that you would see in the middle of nowhere in the maquis actually belonged to someone.) Pierrot soon grew bored with this way of life and moved down to Ile Rousse, where he managed to get the delivery job for the local baker. People around the café claimed that he was dull-witted and slow and knew very little about his father’s activities during the war, save what the old man told him, which he accepted as truth. He accepted everything as truth, they said, still believed in the power of the signadore and was scared of mazzeri, the evil eye, and other occult forces that lingered on in Corsican folklore.