The Rose Café

	Preface
chapter one	The Libeccio
chapter two	The Nearest of the Distant Lands
chapter three	Marie
chapter four	The Donkey King
chapter five	The Professor
chapter six	Red Sails in the Sunset
chapter seven	The Barefoot Contessa
chapter eight	Migrants
chapter nine	Herr Komandante
chapter ten	War and Remembrance
chapter eleven	Le Baron According to André
chapter twelve	The Artful Dodger
chapter thirteen	Le Baron
chapter fourteen	The Dinner Party
chapter fifteen	Le Grand Bal
chapter sixteen	Le Mistral
	Epilogue

“You are astonished that I don’t feel willing to leave a country so miserable as ours; but I cannot help it. I am as much a production of this island as its green oats, and its rose-laurels; I must have my atmosphere impregnated with the perfume of the sea, and the exhalations of its mountains. I must have my torrents to cross, my rocks to climb, and my forests to explore; I want space—I want liberty.”

“Whatever shall we do in that remote spot? Well, we shall write our memoirs. Work is the scythe of time.”

The year I turned twenty I was living successfully disguised to myself as a student in Paris, not doing very much about anything to advance myself in life and not caring very much whether I did or did not. In early spring that year, suffering from the aftereffects of the interminable gray of the Parisian sky, I went down to Nice, where I had lived for a while the summer before. Here I fell in with an international group of sometime painters and students such as myself who were biding their time in the little warren of streets and squares in the old city, on the eastern side of the Baie des Anges.

One of my friends there was an aspiring writer named Armand, who was the child of a local White Russian family who had lived in Nice since the time of the Great War. Armand had a German girlfriend named Inge, and in early April, the three of us made a trip out to Corsica to have a look around.

I had been living in Europe for over a year by then, first in Spain and then in France, on the Riviera. Up in Paris, I was enrolled in an independent study program at the Sorbonne, and most of my friends were either French or part of a loosely associated international group involved in the same course. The fact is, however, we rarely went to class. Education took place in the cafés, in particular in a certain bar near the Saint-Placide Métro stop where we gathered each day to argue over literature, art, and politics as if we knew what we were talking about.

Like many young Americans in Paris in that era, I had in mind that I would somehow be miraculously transformed into a writer in Europe. My intention, such as it was, was to escape from my predictable life in the United States and leave everything I knew behind. In some ways the plan was a success. I didn’t know a single American in Paris; most of the people I associated with did not speak any English, and I had effectively disappeared into the European student community. But my notebooks remained empty.

We took the ferry to Calvi, on the north coast, and then drifted eastward along the shore to the town of Ile Rousse, where we found a small auberge known as the Rose Café, set on a tiny, red-rock island halfway out a long causeway that led to a slightly larger island called Ile de la Pietra. The place had a decent restaurant with a terrace overlooking the harbor, and a few dusty bedchambers above the dining room. We took rooms and set out on foot to explore the hills of the interior.

The Rose Café was utterly unassuming, a two-story building with a red-tiled roof and two French dormers, a wide stone terrace, a pillared verandah, and an interior dining room with a cool bar in the back. Behind the main building there was a promontory that dropped down to a narrow cove, bounded on the north by a small, rocky island, which was surmounted by a seventeenth-century Genoese watchtower, one of many that were constructed along this section of the coast to keep the multiple invaders at bay. Set in a nook on the southern side of the cove, just behind the restaurant, there was a one-room stone cottage with two small windows.

Since there were people staying in the upper rooms while we were there, I was assigned to the cottage. It had a narrow bed, a rickety table and a candle, and not much else. But it was perched high above the cove, and all night I could hear the surge of the waters below, the dark cries of seabirds, and the ominous howl of the local winds streaming over the mountains and valleys of the interior.

I came to like the setting at the Rose Café and would sometimes forgo the daily expeditions of the ever-energetic Armand and his companion. Instead, I would simply spend the day lounging on the terrace of the café, talking to the local people and walking into town in the late afternoon to take a drink at one of the three or four cafés that surrounded the dusty town square, with its pillars of old plane trees.

True to form, Armand and Inge grew restless after a few days and decided to move on. I stayed. The pace suited me, I enjoyed the gossip of the people from the town, who came out to the café every day to stare at the harbor and spend the night playing cards. I liked them. They seemed to have no ambition other than to live from one day to the next and enjoy whatever small pleasures happened to present themselves. I liked the view across the harbor to the maquis, the wild impenetrable scrublands of the island, which were scented with a wealth of resinous arbutus, myrtle, rock rose, and clementine. I loved to watch the bright little fishing boats set out each day to fish the nearby banks. I loved the lizards that collected around the terrace lamps at night, and the dawn song of birds from the high ground across the cove from the cottage.

In the end, I fell into a strange, perhaps unhealthy, lethargy at the Rose Café. I would rise early and take a café crème and a fresh-buttered baguette on the terrace above the harbor. Later in the morning, I would slip down to a tiny pebble beach in the cove below my cottage for a morning swim, then a morning nap, then a midday meal of local fish, another nap, another swim, a walk to town for coffee in the square, an aperitif at the bar, dinner, and then a deep dreamless sleep, lulled by the susurration of the sea in the cove below. I would sometimes awake in the mornings there and have to figure out where exactly I was, who I was, and what I was doing in this place. I was in a state of suspended animation.

It was a good place. You could easily lose yourself there if you so desired, forget that you ever had a past, or a future for that matter, and simply fall into that idyllic condition the locals called the sweet do-nothing, il dolce fa’ niente. For hours, for days, finally for weeks, I simply paced through the uneventful days: swimming and sleeping and staring across the harbor to the green slopes of the hills that rose up to the jagged, snow-covered peaks beyond.

In spite of the languorous nature of the environment, however, in spite of the bright weather and the slow and easygoing pace of the people, there seemed to be some latent story in that place: some powerful, perhaps tragic, history that was not spoken of by anyone but which seemed to manifest itself in the ironic contrast between the brooding, snow-capped mountains above the harbor and the light-filled, festive air of the coastal community. I don’t think I had ever been in such a powerful setting before.

I could not say that I was entirely conscious of any of this at the time. I was merely living day to day there, with no plans and no ambition. All I know is that, suddenly, feverishly, I began to write. Night after night in my narrow stone cell, I began to fill the notebook that had remained empty for over a year.

One evening, after I had been there for two weeks, le patron drew me aside and poured me a small glass of a local marc and began to question me about my plans for the next few months. I explained that I had nothing definitive in mind as yet.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “You want a job? Spring is coming. It’s going to be the busy season. You can cut fish for us, sweep up, do the dishes. I’ll teach you some sauces. It’s not real work in any case, so the fact that you have no papers …” He shrugged.

“We’ll pay you a little something at the end of the season, plus room and board. Nobody out here cares,” he said.

“Sounds interesting,” I said. “But are you saying that it’s not exactly legal?” (Possession of working papers was an important issue among the poverty-stricken group of international students with whom I traveled.)

He stared out into the black waters beyond the terrace and then looked back at me tiredly. “You understand, Corsica is not—how shall I say it—is not well-known for its allegiance to the laws of the continent.”

He was a sleepy, unambitious man from Paris who wore the black-rimmed glasses of a Left Bank intellectual and always needed a shave.

I didn’t know much about Corsica at that point other than the usual clichés. Inasmuch as Corsica is known at all, it is known for its vendettas and its notorious underworld connections, and also as the birthplace of Napoléon. More to the point though, I didn’t know anything about the Rose Café, or its environs, or the people who hung around the café. But it seemed to be a place where any migratory bird of passage, such as myself, any refugees from any of the world’s miseries, either personal or political, could settle briefly to rest and feed and enjoy themselves before flying onward to nowhere. I decided to take the job. Why not? I was running out of money, and in that particular year the American draft board had been sending me ominous notices requiring me to register for military service—to fight in an escalating little conflict in Vietnam in which I had no particular interest and whose origin did not seem to me entirely logical. I was young and apolitical and had perfectly pleasant friends in Europe who described themselves as communists—“enemies of the people.” Corsica seemed a fine place to wait things out.

I went back to my old haunts in Nice to pick up my things and ran into Inge. She had left Armand in some isolated mountain village after he had decided that they must—they absolutely must—hike Monte Cinto, the highest peak in Corsica, even though there were still heavy snows there.

We had dinner and went out dancing at one of the local nightclubs. Inge was about my age, nineteen or twenty, and she had black hair and wide blue eyes—and many older gentleman friends with smooth tans who wore silk cravats and houndstooth jackets. I was never sure what, exactly, she was doing in Nice since she never seemed to have any money of her own.

We ended up that night in a café where there was an old-fashioned band that played Eastern European music. There were some local White Russians there, as well as expatriate Hungarians with handlebar mustaches. The band played old waltzes and polkas, and then an older woman in an evening gown rose and sang “Dark Eyes” and a long and sad czardas, a lament for her homeland. Grown men took out their handkerchiefs and wept, and when the band played the Hungarian national anthem some of them stood up, hands on their hearts, longing for some mythic older order that had been replaced by the all-too-real disorder of the current state.

At one point, while Inge danced with a tall Hungarian with hair cut en brosse, I went outside alone and leaned over the rail above the bay. The night air was warm, and I could smell the Mediterranean and hear the pitch of the sea and the sad music from the café. I looked out at the black waters beyond the lights of the harbor and was suddenly very happy to have fixed a place for myself.

Two days later I took the night ferry back to Corsica and stood on the afterdeck watching the lights of France sink below the horizon.

I have been thinking to write about my sojourn in that singular place for nearly forty years now, and the story that has finally emerged is probably all the richer for having aged. It’s certainly more realized than it would have been had I written it when I was twenty. The only drawback is that the world has moved on since then. Characters such as those that once frequented the Rose Café hardly exist anymore in Europe. Language, social mores, attitudes, seemingly eternal fixed customs and beliefs have all changed dramatically. So has the landscape of Corsica. Thanks mainly to a huge influx of tourists in recent years, there are more restaurants and hotels, although the clifflike high-rises that have destroyed the Riviera have yet to appear. And yet, despite these changes, the mountains and hills endure, the maquis continues to exhale its scented breath, and the dream of the place that was is well remembered.

Before dawn that day, one of the older fishermen from the village puttered out of the harbor in one of the brightly painted little fishing smacks known as a pointu and headed northeast toward the continent and the fish meadows west of Cap Corse. When he failed to return in late afternoon, the others went out looking for him. Just before sundown they found him. He was dead at the tiller, his boat still motoring along, describing a wide circle in the empty green sea.

Other than that sad event it had been a normal afternoon at the Rose Café. Nikita the dog raised his head once and, without lifting himself from the terrace, issued an obligatory bark at a passing horse-drawn wagon.

At two in the afternoon the cat, Figaro, rose from his shaded haven in the corner of the verandah and sauntered across the sun-blasted desert of the terrace to a cooler oasis.

At three, Micheline and Jean-Pierre emerged from their afternoon tryst to drink a coffee.

And by late afternoon Marie returned from her daily sunbath on the flat rocks beside the cove and began to prepare for her evening entrance into the dining room.

But this also happened to be a Sunday, and by early evening everything had changed. Out in the harbor, the fishing boats were scudding home to port below the mountain wall; the ferry from Nice was just rounding the jetty; the sun was just skimming the jagged peaks that rose above the foothills; and down in the squally kitchen of the Rose Café, things were not going well.

Micheline was shouting at Jean-Pierre; Vincenzo was shifting saucepans at the stove; the waiter, Chrétien, was passing slowly from table to table still laying down settings; and Lucretia was leaning on the frame of the back door to the kitchen, smoking and shouting in dialect at her husband, Vincenzo. Within a few hours the weekly ferry would be leaving for the night crossing to France, and departing tourists and sojourners were already streaming down the quay. The residents of the upstairs rooms of the Rose Café, already familiar with the Sunday night push, were selecting the best tables for themselves and calling for service from Chrétien even before the outbound passengers began to arrive.

A Dutch family burst in, much burned by the sun and happy. Three Italian men in striped sailor jerseys seized a table for two, and then with the arrival of two women in their party, with much flourish and debate and squabble, began removing chairs from other tables and calling for service.

A party of French, probably Parisian, moved cautiously up onto the terrace, reviewed the scene, decided the place was not to their liking, and retreated. A worried English couple in sensible shoes came nodding politely forward. Swiss. A party of Germans. A swarthy couple whose language I didn’t know, and on and on, as the crush on the single road out to the quay at the head of the jetty filled with traffic and handcarts and barking dogs and little troupes of families with children prancing ahead, and all the happy holidaymakers, homebound now for all parts of Europe.

Once the diners were seated and launched into their entrées, a young woman with a pixie haircut and hazel eyes appeared at the door to the interior dining room where the bar was located. She poised briefly in the doorframe, backlit by the lights on the terrace, glanced around the room to see who was there and who was watching, and then, with a light balletic stride, she approached the bar.

She had dark hair and full lips and was dressed that evening in tight blue capris, a white blouse with a plunging neckline, and silver hoop earrings. Just above her cleavage she had suspended a tiny silver crucifix. It hung there like a talisman, as if to warn off ill-intentioned suitors.

Chrétien rushed to the bar as she settled and, before she even asked, prepared a citron pressé in a tall glass with a china saucer and placed it in front of her, waving his hand with a flourish. This was, after all, Marie, the current love of his life, the reigning belle of the Rose Café.

Marie had arrived with her parents a few weeks earlier and although she had many admirers, she had selected Chrétien as her consort. At the time, he happened to be the only one around the café who was about her age. He was a lanky young man with crinkly black hair and long-lashed, somewhat effeminate blue eyes who was a distant cousin of the patron, Jean-Pierre.

Just before the dinner push, I walked down the narrow path to my room behind the restaurant to get a clean shirt. I saw the German guest they called Herr Komandante standing on a promontory above the cottage where I lived, his arms folded over his chest and one leg cocked forward. He was a portly man, dressed now in a blue-striped bathrobe and white espadrilles. His thinning, sandy-colored hair was wet and slicked back from his high, smooth forehead.

“The usual,” I said. “But Vincenzo has just come in with a big grouper.”

“Good,” said Herr Komandante. “I will take that grouper. Grilled. And I shall begin with a plate of urchins, or perhaps the fish soup, and also a green salad,” he added. “You will tell Micheline, please. I will have one salad. Chestnut flan for the dessert.”

“And I will take my digestif on the terrace this night,” he said as an afterthought.

People at the Rose Café used to mock Herr Komandante behind his back. It was said, among other unfounded rumors, that along with his love for food and sun he had an eye for young boys. But I suddenly felt a wave of compassion for him, here alone on a French island, a German in the midst of a people with long memories, isolated by language and culture, and seeking only to enjoy a few sensual pleasures. Who could blame him?

Back in the kitchen, the evening meal was in full swing. Chrétien and Micheline were rushing in and out, shouting for plates. Jean-Pierre was sweating and smoking, the ash salting his standard dish of grilled rascasse, a spiny red fish that he would season with myrtle, bay, rosemary, and other herbs brought in from the countryside. Micheline had started to spout her Sunday litany of complaints about the idiosyncrasies of certain diners; Vincenzo shifted his pans at the stove like a timpanist; and his wife, Lucretia, who helped on busy weekends, wandered in and out, talking loudly in patois and contributing little more than gossip about the diners.

I filled a copper tub with boiling water from the stove and prepared for the evening onslaught, and soon the dishes were coming in, one load after another like wounded soldiers from the front: first a table setting of soup bowls, then a few smaller plates, then some dinner plates, and forever, like foot soldiers, the silverware.

There was a perennial shortage of settings at the restaurant; it was not the cooking of Jean-Pierre and Vincenzo that slowed the service, it was the lack of plates and silverware. I had to wash, dry, and return settings as soon as they came in or there would be nothing for the guests to eat from. It was not so bad on ordinary nights, but sometimes on weekends, in the rush, the flood of plates and the swirl of dirty water and the outcry from Chrétien and Micheline for more plates came on relentlessly. No one was proud at the Rose Café. When a backlog built up and the main courses were served, Jean-Pierre himself would wander back and wash a few of his pots; so would Vincenzo.

In due time, as the departure hour for the ferry grew nearer, the incoming stream dwindled, as it always did. Chrétien sat in the corner for a few minutes, drinking a coffee and gossiping about the diners, his long legs stretched halfway across the narrow kitchen. Micheline brushed back her hair and goosed Jean-Pierre as she slipped by him with a tray of desserts, and then Vincenzo loomed behind me in the scullery door with a small glass of marc, which he set on the stone sink.

Now, in the quiet darkness of the terrace, the geckos emerged and waited in the little pools of lamplight on the white stucco walls, snapping at insects. The few lingering guests sat with their chairs pushed back, enjoying a coffee or a glass of marc and the night air coming in off the harbor. Herr Komandante stepped out from the warm interior of the dining room and stood at the edge of the terrace, gazing outward at the black wall of the mountains beyond the harbor, his hands jammed into the side pockets of his blazer. A fishing boat came in, its lights fragile against the vast darkness of the water, and slowly, one by one, the guests disappeared, and we were alone with the sharp perfume of salt air and the high black screen of the night.

It was at these times, just as the quiet little village on the other side of the harbor was putting itself to bed and the lights began winking out in the bedrooms, that the life of the Rose Café would begin to stir. Now the night crowd began to collect.

Max was the first to come in. He mounted the steps to the terrace slowly, favoring his right leg—an old war wound, they said. He extended his hand to me, limply.

He was an amiable sort who always asked after my well-being and spoke English, although he tended to translate literally and had such a thick accent it was necessary to know French to understand him. Max had a pencil-thin mustache and always dressed in loose gabardine slacks and sandals with socks and a white shirt, open at the neck. He was from Ajaccio and, like many on the island, claimed to be a descendant of Corsica’s most famous son, Napoléon. The rumor around the café was that Max had played an important role in one of the local resistance networks in the south and had been in charge of surreptitious arms shipments from North Africa. But maybe that was just another story.

Max walked over and shook Vincenzo’s hand and then sat down heavily at a table at the edge of the terrace and stared out at the harbor.

Two more figures materialized at the far end of the causeway, walking slowly, one with a coat draped over his shoulders. This was André, who was accompanied that evening by a man with a long, sad face named François, who sometimes joined the nightly card game. The two of them shook hands all around and took their places.

André was fair, with blond hair and blue eyes and a slow, somewhat studied gait. In the hot light of the day he always wore sun-faded blue shorts and a sailor jersey. He was soft-spoken and smoked lazily, and would often sit at the edge of the verandah in the shade, nursing a coffee, his eyes ranging among the guests in search of newly arrived pretty women. I had heard that when he was young, at the insistence of his grandmothers, he had studied to be a priest and had worn short wool pants and little schoolboy caps. But he left the church altogether as soon as his grandmothers died.

The night drew closer; something splashed in the darkness of the outer bay, and then we heard the whine of an engine on the road to the town. A speeding motorbike darted out onto the causeway and streaked toward the café, its headlight bouncing on the rough road. It pulled up abruptly, and a small man with high cheekbones and narrow blue eyes bounded up the stairs to the terrace. This was the sometime glassmaker, Jacquis. He was a wiry type with extravagant gestures and fiery delivery, and whenever he won at cards, which was often (I suspect the others let him win), he would slap the table and shout victoriously, even if it was two in the morning and the guests were sound asleep overhead. Jacquis had many stories of criminal families who had devised ingenious revenges, cruel police, and hideous atrocities committed by the Nazis against the maquisards, the local resistance fighters.

Jean-Pierre ambled out from the interior of the kitchen. He had removed his stained apron and toque, and he wore faded blue trousers, a short-sleeved shirt, and worn-down espadrilles that slapped on the terrace when he walked. He took his place at the table.

André passed the deck to Jacquis, who snatched it up and dealt with practiced speed. The players fanned out their cards, eyeing them through their cigarette smoke.

Every night this same troupe would come out to the restaurant to play a card game known as brisca, a local variation of the Italian game briscola, which is played with a forty-card deck with suits marked with coins, cups, batons, or swords. Sometimes the troupe came out early, just before dinner, and would wander back into the kitchen sampling Jean-Pierre’s sauces with hunks of fresh bread, brought in that morning by Pierrot, the little walleyed bread man. Sometimes they arrived with obscure women from the hill towns, and from time to time one of them would show up with a new consort from the continent. With the women present, they would play the courtier, holding out the chairs, bowing and scraping, making introductions proudly, and fetching glasses of cold rosé from the bar. On some weekend nights a band would appear, and the regulars would dance on the terrace, holding their partners cheek to cheek and bending forward in the apache two-step dance style that used to be popular with Parisian lowlifes in the old days.

But the constant there was the card game. It was a nightly ceremony that held their world together. Elsewhere, in the interior of the island in those times, there were still vendettas. Elsewhere there were smugglers and crooked politicians who conveniently disregarded the shipment of illegal goods from the continent. And somewhere out there in the real world beyond the red-rock shores and the green, flat seas, there were strikes and demonstrations, street bombings, wars, and revolutions. And always and everywhere, there was the aftermath of the big war, the war that shook the foundations of Europe.

Down in the dusty town square, every day at three in the afternoon, you could see old members of the Corsican underground with their long-distance eyes. They would gather there to roll boules and smoke and sit in the cafés and attempt to either recapitulate or obliterate their pasts. Sometimes at the local concerts, when the band played the old sentimental melodies from the time before the deluge, you might see a tear well up in the corners of the eyes of the older men. But out here at the Rose Café, on the little islet known as les Roches Rouges, the framework that sustained the universe was a deck of cards bearing the iconic images: the coin, the cup, the baton, and the sword.

Twenty minutes into the second round of cards, we heard a scraping at the steps to the terrace, and a figure in a white suit emerged out of the moist, warm night. Slowly, with a studied grace, a tall man climbed the steps and stood for a moment in the little stage of light at the edge of the terrace, his hand resting on the rail. He was dressed in a Belgian linen suit and a light blue shirt with a purple tie, and he had a deeply tanned face and silvery hair that he combed back over his ears like wings. Even in the half-light I could see the bright glitter of intense blue eyes.

Spotting the table of regulars, he walked toward them. Wordlessly, the players moved over to make space for him. Jean-Pierre spun over a chair from an adjacent table.

This was the man they called “le Baron,” a gentleman of uncertain origins with a slight Belgian accent, who lived in a large villa at the end of a cypress-lined drive on the edge of the maquis. Le Baron did not often descend to play cards with the regulars at the Rose Café, but whenever he did I noticed that a subdued formality would settle over the table. Jacquis did not win as often when he was there. The regulars did not let him.

From my first glimpse of this man earlier in the season in the town square, I had a sense that there was something different about him, some odd mix of authority and benevolence, or maybe malice that set him apart from everyone else in the town. I had seen his type from time to time in Nice and in some sections of Paris, but never here, never in Corsica. He seemed to me an emblem of an old, dying culture, some player in an elemental European drama that had once held the stage and whose retired actors were still wandering amid the ruins of the postwar continent. I watched as he fanned out his cards and glanced around the table. Every motion, even the slightest gesture, seemed to have an elegant grace, a phrasing of manners accumulated over the centuries.

Once I had finished the last of the pots I went out and joined Micheline and Chrétien, who were sitting apart from the players at a table near the verandah.

“They found the fisherman,” Micheline said. “He was dead at the tiller. They brought him in at dusk. Apparent heart attack.”

Micheline, who was probably in her midthirties, was originally from Paris. She had olive skin and a fall of curly chestnut hair, and she always wore striped Moroccan slacks and hooped gold earrings. People told me she had been a painter before she met Jean-Pierre, and I would sometimes see her sketching at a table on the terrace on idle afternoons. Once, when no one was around, I surreptitiously looked through her sketchbook. The images were all wild, heavily inked abstractions that bore absolutely no resemblance to the landscape that she would refer to as she worked. She might have found a name for herself in Paris, I suppose, but now she mostly concerned herself with account books and dealings with local deliverymen, carpenters, and plumbers.

The card game forged on, a slow, shifting drama of obscure events complete with incident and resolution, climax and denouement. The world was contained in cards: An explosion of matchlight against the black wall of night. The slap of a card on the table. The occasional exclamation of victory or loss.

Later that night, while I was asleep, the wind came up. I could hear it first ranging over the red-tiled rooftop of the little auberge with its emptied café and its papered upstairs rooms. The sound woke me, and I went to the east window and looked back at the harbor. In the light of the moon, I could see a strange white ketch with a wishbone rig just dropping anchor. Then I heard the surge of waves in the cove below my cottage, and then the wind took on a deeper growl. The libeccio was beginning to blow, the warm, moist wind that would swirl off North Africa, cross Gibraltar, and sweep over the Mediterranean to the east coast of Italy, hammering all the islands in its path.

The wind undid people, it was said. On such nights there were vendettas and dark assignations. On such nights, the Corsican zombies known as mazzeri awoke to roam the wildlands, wantonly tearing apart any wayward sheep or goat or dog they happened to encounter.

The wind unsettled me, too. On certain nights there, when it howled across the mountains and made ominous moans and whispers as it swirled through the rocks above my cottage, I would wake, light a candle, and write until it burned out.

In the old days there was a saying that if Corsica were a woman she would suffer great temptations, for she is very poor and very beautiful. They also used to say—still do in fact—that when you approach from the sea and the wind is right, you can smell the island before you actually see it. I don’t know whether the first axiom is true. But I can attest to the second.

On my way back to the island from Nice, I went out onto the foredeck of the ferry and caught the scent of something—the sharp resinous smell of laurel rose and thyme, of arbutus, broom, and eglantine. It was the smell of maquis, the scrubby thickets of small trees and shrubs that characterize the vegetation of the foothills below the higher peaks.

Corsica was out there somewhere, still lost in the luminous emerald-green mist where the sea met the sky.

It was warm; the sea was calm; a spaceless green spread out before us, and astern the wake trailed off in two long white furrows. No wind. No gulls. And, except for the steady throb of the engines, no sound. It was as if at some point after the last of France sank beneath the horizon, we had become unhinged from time and had entered into an unbounded blue-green atmosphere where past and future ceased to exist.

Corsica is nestled in the northeast corner of the Mediterranean, a fist-shaped island of approximately 3,352 square miles, with a single forefinger—Cap Corse—pointed northward to the border with Italy and France. For three thousand years, the island served mainly as a stopover for the civilized world beyond, a harbor of refuge or at most a defensive outpost or staging area for raids on the mainland for the various cultures—Greek, Roman, Carthaginian, and Phoenician—that stopped off here en route to someplace else. The indigenous islanders were said to be savage and somber and not given to warm welcomes.

Odysseus landed on Corsica, Homer says, on his way back to Ithaca. He and his fleet put into a narrow island harbor surrounded by high cliffs and anchored there, hoping for welcome. Odysseus climbed to a rocky promontory and surveyed the land but could see no trace of cattle or any signs of habitation other than a few columns of smoke rising from the forested interior. He sent three scouts ashore to find out what manner of man lived in this desolate place. On shore, the scouts encountered a young woman drawing water from a well. The men asked who was the king of her people, and she pointed to a high-roofed house on a rise, the castle of her father, Antiphates, the king of this mountain-backed fastness. The sailors entered the house and beheld an enormous woman there, as large as a mountain peak, Homer says. She summoned her husband, Antiphates, who instantly snatched up one of Odysseus’s men and prepared him for dinner. The other two barely managed to escape and fled to the ships, but the king raised an alarm and from all points, a huge race of giants, the dreaded Laestrygones, came swarming down to the harbor. They stood on the cliffs and rained down immense boulders on the fleet, sinking the ships and spearing the men who were left struggling in the waters like fish. These they retrieved and carried off for dinner.

The wily Odysseus had left his black ship at the outer edge of the harbor, and seeing the hopeless carnage, he cut the anchor cable. His men threw their weight into the oars and they sped out from under the overhanging cliffs and the rain of boulders to open water, leaving a wake as they raced away. The rest of Odysseus’s fleet was destroyed, and, glad to have escaped death but grieving for their lost companions, the small company sailed on to the island of Aeaea, where the lovely-haired witch, Circe, resided.

Because of its isolation, its wild interior, its independent-minded, sometimes violent native people, Corsica became a haven for corsairs, contrabandists, and anyone else who preferred to live outside the law. In the late eighteenth century, after the publication of James Boswell’s popular 1768 book An Account of Corsica, the island became a holiday stop for English gentry on the grand tour. Because of its uncultivated exoticism it was said to be the nearest of the distant lands. Trade and shipping of a milder sort continued into our time, and by the late 1950s, some of its more accessible ports, such as Ile Rousse, Calvi, and Ajaccio, became popular stopovers for yachtsmen from Italy and France. Nevertheless, even into the late twentieth century, the island still had a reputation as a harbor for underworld types and also a certain amount of maritime trade—some of it, as in earlier times, of questionable legality.

A minor incident during my first week at work gave me my first hint of all this. We were all sitting on the terrace late one evening after the dinners and the coffees had been served, when the local man they called Faccia di Luna—Moonface—appeared on the terrace, pale and sweating. He walked directly to the table of cardplayers and said something. Chairs were pushed back abruptly, Jean-Pierre went into the bar—moving quickly, I thought, for Jean-Pierre—and came back with a glass of brandy, which he placed before Moonface. They quit the game and made a circle of chairs around him, leaning toward him, asking questions, and then Jean-Pierre headed back for the bar. Micheline stopped him en route.