Lookout Cartridge (40 page)

Place Foch: we dine outside.

Back at the école they’ve finished dinner an hour ago no doubt and have grabbed their guitars.

We are near the hips and elbows of promenaders. Stiff thick old palms stand around the square; flowers in the middle and a newsstand now closed where I bought postcards of sights I won’t see. The strings of festival lights are not so fancy as the façade of lights hanging over Cour Napoléon that depict Napoleon’s hat. Beyond, high above a side street off Place Foch a line of laundry sags near the light of a bare window. I put my hand on the Beaulieu where it lies on a chah between Dagger and me. A German was shot in a bar last night. In the leg from behind, in the foot from the front, in the buttock from the side—the tale chculates. They say every other car in Corsica has a gun in the trunk. Tonight the week has gotten away from us. But my prospect of ball games (soft and steel) and malaria bombs and rings of fire and glaring chalky walls with tourists plodding single-file holds as firm as the New Orleans I visited on business a fortnight after Mardi Gras once.

We have shot footage of the seminar students sagely taking down names on mailboxes in the lower street of shops that runs parallel to Cour Napoléon, to determine the residents’ ancestry, French, Italian, Greek. We have shot festival fireworks—no telling what explosively experimental fruit-storms have lathered our celluloid skies.
Cartouche
means fireworks
and
cartridge. We’ve shot and taped the école youths feeding, drinking, singing
“Auprès de ma blonde”
and “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” and marching around the long tables but not like ’68. (Corsica is too strategic for its own independence.) I want to go diving with the camera to deepen the Bonfire in Wales and the Naval Engagement. There’s no way to take the camera down, I’ll have to go alone.

We dine in Place Foch, giving the seminar’s
bonhomie
a rest. A child is being force-fed yogurt, yogurt is good for the liver. We return the zoom tonight. I discuss the fish soup with a huge-nosed old waiter. People click by. You can see the pier. A bronzed foursome occupy a table near us. They’re speaking Italian, I may have seen the dark girl on the Genoa boat. The older man who has a blue-and-gold captain’s hat on holds the menu up to one side and talks from it to the obsequious girls and back, as if it describes them.

I ask Dagger what we have achieved here. He is putting away the rich peppery fish soup. The Italian in the hat claps his hands and calls out in French for someone higher up than the handsome waiter who stands by. Dagger says, We’ve got a lot of good stuff, the Naval Engagement, the market, the fortress. I say what about Mike and Mary playing games. I say I feel like we’ve been sleepwalking or waiting for something to happen when we should have been making it happen. Dagger is glad we ate out tonight—did I ever hear about the man who’s been in a coma since early 1957? Dagger pilots a hunk of bread around his soup, sinks it, lifts it out, and puts it in his mouth: Well, this man wakes up from his coma and learns that Eisenhower is dead and says My God, then Nixon is President.

I propose shooting the east side of the island where the Algerians settled. Mussolini comes up at the Italians’ table. Mussolini’s son. Dagger agrees we might look at the east side of the island. I suggest we interview someone there who knows about the reactionary sabotage, for some of it may be anti-American. Dagger with his mouth full says, That’s getting pretty wild.

This was not in what Jenny typed, though what she typed she said was the best I’d done. The Corsican cartridge has opened and spread, like the paper of gunpowder Dudley Allott told me of, that by joke or chance turned up instead of salt in the bread and eggs and fowl that Stephens and Catherwood had packed for a leg of their toiling trek through Guatemala seeking ruined cities. “It was,” Stephens said, “the most innocent way of tasting gunpowder, but even so it was a bitter pill.” But lucky for them they weren’t cooking that night.

Our langouste comes, long narrow crayfish with spines. Paris fixes the market price.

The man in the captain’s hat is at least sixty, and tough. The young man could be a film actor. The blonde inclines her head to our side and takes a relaxed look around.

We go to work. The wine is cool.

The Italian has sent a bottle back.

I put my hand on the Beaulieu—the business (or right-hand) side with knobs and a switch for frame-power and the two tiny windows over the footage gauges—the top with the vertical needle registering meters and feet, the bottom with horizontal needle registering frames 1 10 100. Dagger doesn’t notice. OK, he says, you tell me: what
should
we be doing here? Here I thought I was looking after your health, education, and welfare—free grub at the école, girls on the beach, and you learned that there are five towns in the U.S. named after Pasquale Paoli.

The Italian with the hat does business with il Duce’s nephew. I say Oh sure, Boswell got Ben Franklin interested, but Boswell got the Scots excited about the plight of Corsica, now what’s that Scots lassie doing in Ajaccio with Mike?

The man in the captain’s hat passes on to a Belgian ambassador named Duprat who is also a friend of his and who has been killed in a coup along with more than ninety dinner guests of King Hassan’s. My Italian fails me so I don’t get the link with Allende’s copper coup the bad effect of which upon U.S. Anaconda the man in the captain’s hat boasts can but be to his own advantage. My Italian fails me again and all I make out a moment later is It’s just a matter of time, and then Mussolini is mentioned, and the dark-haired girl tries to put in an opinion but the skipper shut her right up saying he too was a partisan in ’43 but no Red (he shakes a finger smiling).

He lifts his hat and he’s bald. He runs his finger along a sculpted cleft where the Americans shot out a piece of bone and when he recovered he was a new man. He has stopped the conversation with his head but at the same moment the young handsome waiter has put down a big salad bowl full of shrimp. The skipper nibbles one, his full lips seem dyed purple on his burnished tan. He picks off a rib of shell, eyes the waiter, and chucks the shrimp back into the bowl. In Italian he says to the waiter, We always throw the babies back. His guests laugh, but that wasn’t what the skipper meant—he speaks to the waiter again in Italian, the others stop laughing, the waiter shakes his head with wary eyes that could mean he doesn’t get the point or is implying Fuck You.

Our langoustes have been on a diet. Dagger is gnawing thoughtfully. I get hold of the camera. Dagger raises his eyebrows, a shard of abdominal carapace and a couple of spines in front of his moustache. No doubt what’s happening. The Corsican is being told, now in French, to shell every last shrimp, and the girls are smiling.

The waiter goes away. The
patron
appears. The skipper is going to charm the
patron
, almost. The bottle of Château de Tracy ’67 is almost finished, the skipper wants another, he talks French to the
patron
. The
patron
seems to charm the skipper, who in the way he looks up at the
patron
seems almost to be rising. The waiter goes away, the
patron
and the skipper (about the same age but in very different shape) discuss the shrimp and the size of the langoustes to come. I have the Beaulieu out of its case and without noting what lens we’re on I focus quietly as the sullen
garçon
appears with a second misted bottle of Tracy ’67 and a wood-handled knife which sticks out of his fist in the upward or number-one stabbing position. Dagger says, For Christ sake, and I let my thumb off the button. OK, he says, to get to Aleria on the east side you have to drive up to Corte in the middle where Paoli had his capital, didn’t he?

Other tables have noticed. The waiter is shelling the shrimp. The event has lost its prankish magic. He has pulled the bowl to the edge and is using the wood-handled knife. The foursome are looking at each other but not moving. I’m shooting again. I haven’t checked the light. We’re on 50 mm., which is fine. Dagger says, I wouldn’t. He might be Mafia.

The waiter is moving his hands as if he’s trying to insert a tiny screw into a fixture at a bad angle. The blonde drinks, but the four are essentially motionless. The fruits of the sea accumulate on a plate.

I feel like a lookout looking opposite ways waiting to warn. Warn the waiter? The odious bigshot?

The bigshot has popped two babies into his mouth and has complimented the waiter, who is spilling tiny jets of rage as if from his ribs each time his elbow slightly rises or from his eyes each time he blinks. The energy is in an unstable state but feeding at a regular clip into the Beaulieu. The skipper spots me.

I switch off as he rises, and I have felt a new thing—that energy has been sent from me as well as received by me. My eye away from the viewfinder sees more. Dagger says, Watch it. The skipper asks in French what I think I’m doing. The waiter drops his knife into the bowl of unshelled shrimp. The skipper tells him he’s not finished.

I call in English, We’re doing a film on Corsica.

What
about
Corsica? the skipper demands, and when he turns eye-to-eye with the waiter and sees the shelling has again stopped and nods so sharply to the waiter it looks like the last OK to the executioner to go ahead, the waiter resumes performing his instructions and in spite of me is in even worse shape.

The Italian smiles with his purple lips, looks at his three guests, and says with a smug shrug, I am not exactly Onassis. He sits down and waves a hand at the waiter and says to me, Let him be the star, eh?

He
is
, I call.

Hello
there!

Dagger’s voice revolves me on the seat of my chair to Mary and Mike just a couple of close-ups away. She’s in a pale sleeveless shift, her hair all over her shoulders.

The Italian calls: What is your film?

Revolution, I call. It’s about revolution.

I raise the camera and shoot.

The Italian with a sweep of his hand over his table, stopping shy of the shrimp bowl above which the knife picks away, calls back in French this time, But there is no revolution here.

I cut. We can dub his words.

I’m reaching the Beaulieu back onto its chair but this is where Mike wants to sit.

Revolution?
he says quietly to Dagger. You didn’t
tell
me.

Dagger begins some tale about the passionate guitarist Prince Yusupov who assassinated the Tsar’s favorite, Rasputin, escaped to New York, and later bought two houses up in Calvi.

Mike doesn’t pursue my remark about revolution.

I post a card to Jenny: dark slender mules being loaded with cork bark, the unseen sun pumpkin orange in the inner trough of each chunk; my message:
SOMETHING STRANGE GOING ON HERE
.

To Will, a high stone viaduct and two neat white and red train carriages presumably moving from one dark blur of green foliage to the other while through the gray arches can be seen sky and cliffs in the distance; my message:
TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION COMES TO CORSICA
.

To Lorna goes a postcard showing the buttercup-yellow bloom of the needle-furze, one of the hardy bushes generally called the maquis dotting the valleys and working up into the harsh slopes which are of the same granite as those unique statue-menhirs Mary described thirty miles and three millennia from where she and Mike and Dagger and I sat over our coffee, and the spiny grease of steaming fish soup and the crisp fat of fried batter and the rough local olive oil and Gauloise smoke and the acceleration of orbiting motorbikes kept out the green smell of the maquis that encroaches upon ancient menhirs and tilted dolmens, the blooms by now in July gone except on Lorna’s card; its message,
FILM HAS TAKEN UNEXPECTED TURN
.

In the bright morning I give the three cards to Melanie to mail. They aren’t in what Jenny typed.

Revolution:
spelled the same in French to mean also
revulsion
, but spelled
rivoluzione
in that obnoxious yachtsman’s land where that other key English sense of
revolution
(for short,
rev
or plural
revs
) as
rotation
(e.g., as of an engine cycle or a satellite in space) is
giro
(as in
cento giri al minuto
, one hundred revs a minute). I said the word to impress Mary, maybe Mike; but also because I began then suddenly to think of our film as lurking on the margins of some unstable, implicit ground that might well shiver into revolution; yet the word I think arrived on my tongue from some dumb suburban meridian.

The girl’s yellow tank through the bluing agency of the water is well below me like an insect torso, giant against her black rubber jacket. And as if we’re starting the dive all over again and have just set our mouthpieces and ducked under the choppy sea of the gulf, I am once again inhaling the beat of my own breath.

Do not fill your lungs too full when you first put in your mouthpiece or you’ll be overballasted and it will be harder getting down.

Michel is slowly showing me his wrist, and through the glass of my mask and the glass of what I don’t see is his timer, it seems to say we are down thirty-five meters. The girl has gone below us to the floor of the gulf and from under a three-foot bivalve she is unearthing what looks like a piece of pottery. Now, if we’ve come down thirty-five meters I don’t know where all that space has gone to. I figured us a while back for ten or twelve meters at the cleft where we leveled to cut brown-spined sea urchins off the rock and carve them open for the tiny orange meat at the center which we fed to the little light blue fish that hang around and dart at your palm. But from there, past the fifteen wheeling almost inter-cogged arms of three brick-red starfish stuck to a slanting ledge, we’ve angled down through the cleft to no more I would think than twenty meters; and I’m just headed off, hands at my sides, toward something pale thinking it may be the primrose-yellow coral called parazoanthus which you find at twenty meters in the Mediterranean but I’ve seen only in a book in a close-up stuck to a sponge at one end of the polyps’ vegetal stalklet whose free end has opened into sharp, fragile feelers—when Michel taps my heel and pulls my fin, and when I turn back, cool and with my tank and my belt of weights weightless so I’m forgetting which is up and which is down, Michel extends his wrist for me to see.