The Rose Café (11 page)

I asked him how he knew all this.

“Common knowledge. Go ask any old maquisard, like Max. They knew him back then. Although, I have to say, I think Fabrizio knew him too. He hid him the first time he was here.”

I asked why no one else had told me all this.

“Anyone who?”

“Jean-Pierre, for example. Micheline…”

He laughed again. “Well, Micheline should know,” he said.

He raised his eyebrows as if he knew something more than he was willing to tell.

“But what can the two of them really know about anything? They're foreigners. They're from Paris. No one from Paris knows anything. And anyway, what do they say about him?”

“Nothing.”

“Well at least they're honest,” he said.

I took over the bar later that evening, just before the dinner push began. Giancarlo the tutor was there, sitting with Herr Komandante and chatting fluently in German. I only caught a few words in their enthusiastic mutual interest. “
Ja
, Rilke. Ah, Rilke,” Herr Komandante said, placing his hand on his heart and tilting his head to the sky. Then Giancarlo drilled in and deflated whatever enthusiasm had swept Herr Komandante away.

I noticed that in French Giancarlo had the hard
r
's of the local accent, and after Herr Komandante went off to his table, just to make conversation I made the mistake of asking him where he was from.

“Where am I from?” Giancarlo asked rhetorically. He let out a long, dramatic sigh. “This is an admirable question, my son,” he said. “In the current state of time and place as we perceive it, I am from Paris. That is to say I have traveled here to the Isle of Beauty from the city of Paris. I also happen to reside in that city. However, if you were to put the question to me in the larger context, that is to say, where was I before I was in Paris, or in what part of the European continent were my progenitors settled on the day in which I was born, and how came they to be in Europe at all, having emigrated, in all likelihood, up from the Indian subcontinent, or across the steppes of Asia, since we are all, as you know, migrants on this earth. If you were to phrase the question in this manner, then you would say I am, most recently, from Italy. From Verona.”

I nodded and busied myself behind the bar. But he carried on.

“My people lived in or near Verona for a number of centuries and before that, in the time of the Republic, in Rome. In my time, which is to say in time of war, for reasons of a political nature, I wandered from my native place.”

I made clear gestures to complete my work at the bar and move on, but he continued.

“You see,” he said, leaning forward conspiratorially and lowering his voice, “I am a descendant on my mother's side from the tribe of Judea, and therefore, under the last regime, my family was considered suspect. This, to us, was a great awakening, since we were, as far as we knew, nothing more rare than Italians of an irreligious persuasion, having rejected virtually all the opiates of comforting myths. Another glass, if you please,” he said, interrupting himself.

I brought over a bottle of local rosé and filled his glass.

“Now, with the rising waters of the deluge, and with the increasing pressure upon the Chosen People, I decided, in spite of my irreligiosity, to replay the role of the Wandering Jew. And so, to answer your question briefly, I have accepted teaching posts in various cities of the European continent. But during the last conflict, in that time in which the tribes of the dark forests of Germania emerged once again to launch an attack on civilization, I happen to have been in Paris. The grandparents of Marie, with whom I was acquainted through my work at the university, saw to my well-being, and their intervention and invention provided me with the necessary papers, proving to any suspect authorities of the occupying forces that I was a devoted member of the Church of Rome.”

He reached into his coat pocket and drew out a rosary.

“My passport,” he said. “I still carry it with me. Just in case.”

chapter six

Red Sails in the Sunset

In the late afternoon on a Friday, I came up to the kitchen from a nap to make some coffee and found Vincenzo already at work, preparing a new sauce espagnole, a base created from meat stock that had already been simmering for a few hours. He would use this off and on during the whole week in the preparation of other sauces.

“Halo,” he called over his shoulder when I came in. “More fish. Big night tonight. Some gypsy musicians have come through, and Micheline has talked them into performing here in exchange for a good dinner.”

He shifted the sauce pot, ducked down to check the flame, and then came over and showed me a heap of fish all jumbled together in the sink.

It had taken me a while to sort out all the different species of fish and other marine life that I had to deal with at the Rose Café. They would eat anything from the sea—eels and tiny snails, all manner of crustaceans including baby crabs, which they would consume whole, whelks and limpets and periwinkles, and all sizes of octopus and squid, and oysters and clams, urchins of course, and finfish ranging from glittering sardine-like things all the way up to groupers and huge tunas that Jean-Pierre himself would sometimes spear. All these I had to clean in one manner or another, and I dealt with such a huge variety that I never did learn the English names for many of the species I commonly had to scale and gut.

Jean-Pierre's standard cooking method was either to grill or bake these species, although Vincenzo had a specialty called
grondin aux olives
, an oven-baked gurnard, which he served with a spicy sauce that he would make with egg, olive oil, tomatoes, vinegar, and olives. He and Jean-Pierre also had a standard baked mullet made with an onion sauce spiced with fennel, a plant that grew right outside the back door of the kitchen. When they were short on freshly collected bunches, they would dash out the back door and grab a handful. The same was true for fresh fish. Vincenzo kept a fishing rod by the back door, and whenever he had a few minutes free in the kitchen, he would dash down to the rocks and make a cast into the cove. If he didn't catch anything, he would come back in through the kitchen door. But if he was successful, he would return by way of the terrace and the dining room, the fish still flopping on the hook.

One of the regular species that I had to clean was the red-scaled rascasse. Mistakenly termed scorpion fish in English, it is in fact a different species altogether and a standard ingredient of bouillabaisse, although it is also grilled and sometimes baked separately. The rascasse has a nasty ridge of toxic spines on its dorsal fins. I had been warned by Vincenzo when I first began cutting fish not to get pricked by them, but no matter how careful I was, at some point every time I cleaned fish, I would get stuck. My fingers would swell and ache for a day or so, and then, as soon as I recovered, I would get stung again.

That Friday afternoon I carried the mess of fish to the rocks at the harbor in a fruit basket and began scaling and gutting them, tipping the offal into the clear waters. Within a minute I began to see dark forms coming in to feed on the remains.

Just as I was finishing up and cleaning the knives, Marie joined me, and we sat watching the underwater life crawl, dart, or float out from the obscure crevices and depths to feed on the fish innards.

As we watched the marine life, she leaned closer to me and at one point hooked her arm over my knee to hold herself up. Where I had come from, this would have been a subtly intimate gesture on her part, but knowing Marie, I was not sure it meant anything. The fact is, though, I also knew—from the source—that there was trouble between Chrétien and Marie. He had accused her of too much flirtation and knew he was in stiff competition with the older serious womanizers lurking every evening around the card table, including André.

But Marie herself was not without guile or her own defenses.

The dentist named Eugène, who was still in residence, seemed to have developed an infatuation with Marie. He was much older, perhaps thirty-five or forty to her mere eighteen years, but he was clearly taken; you could see his eyes following her when she tripped across the terrace to select her table in the shade. He would watch as she arranged herself to wait for the delivery of her citron pressé. He watched as she exited with her bathing apparel, headed for her place on the rocks. Once or twice, I noticed that when she was sunbathing, he would find an excuse to stroll out the path beyond the restaurant with his little dog, Piti, his hands clasped behind his back. He would circle the cove and select a spot under the Genoese watchtower. I realized later that he could probably see her from across the cove stretched out topless in the hot light.

Eugène liked me, too, and would sometimes corner me and tell me about his life in Lyon. He would describe in loving detail the antics of his companion, Piti, his custom of rising early, and his happy weekends with her in the parks and how much she loved to chase balls. He was fond of eating, and like Herr Komandante, would arrive early and sit with an aperitif, waiting for his soup, watching for the grand entrance of Marie. Sometimes he would manage to have a few words with her at the bar, although she was often surrounded at these times by other adoring males.

One day I saw them walking together out toward the tower. Piti was prancing ahead of them, tail on high. Eugène was carrying himself stiffly and formally, and Marie was stepping along with her deerlike, balletic walk, shoulders back, her hips swaying subtly. They were gone for two hours or more, and when they came back she had her hand crooked in his arm. He held himself uncomfortably, his left arm half-raised across his lower chest and repressing a proud smile, as if he had just won an important athletic victory and was approaching an adoring public.

Marie was free with her hands and body; she would often reach out and touch you while she prattled on, she was not averse to squeezing past you in a doorway, and she would sometimes lean close and press her breasts against your arm if she was looking at something over your shoulder. But none of this meant that she was particularly attracted to you, she just liked to be appreciated—she liked to be liked. This was the behavior that enraged Chrétien, who would fly into fits of jealousy and sometimes corner me in the kitchen and hold forth confidentially about her loose behavior, not to mention her stiff defenses against his passionate advances.

Out on the island below the tower, she had probably laughed at something Eugène said and leaned her moplike head against his shoulder; maybe she had tousled his hair or grabbed his knee to make a point. She would often take the arm of men and women when she walked, but in his mind, this freedom must have been layered with great meaning. He actually believed she favored him, and he must have invited her to join him at dinner that evening, and she must have accepted, because we were instructed to lay two settings at the dentist's table in the corner.

Eugène arrived early, as was his custom, and instructed Piti to lie down under the table. He had washed and put on a fresh shirt, one of his new ones—barely out of the box, I would say. He wore pressed slacks and leather sandals over neat brown socks, and he sat down complacently for once, with an almost self-satisfied look. Chrétien brought him his usual kir, not suspecting that Monsieur le Dentiste was to dine that evening with his own girlfriend. Eugène was ever so gracious with Chrétien that evening, joking and free, and not quite understanding, or perhaps unconsciously suppressing the fact, that Chrétien and Marie were a couple (more or less).

A group had gathered at the bar: Maggs, a man from the town named Pierre, and a young woman named Circe, who had worked as a waitress at the café the season before. They were collected in a loose circle, laughing and throwing back their heads like barking dogs. And then, in the doorway, Marie made her entrance.

As she often would do, she moved in out of the light and stood framed by the door for a second, waiting for everyone to look up and notice. She wore her green capri pants, a tight black blouse with deep décolletage, silver earrings, and many silver necklaces and bracelets. As if in surprise, she spotted the troupe of her friends, and made for them, light-footed. Halfway across the room, she saw the dentist.

“
Oh là
,” she said, “
Eugène, mon ami, comment vas tu
?” and detoured toward his table.

He rose to greet her, but before he had even straightened himself, she reached the table, leaned across, kissed him on each cheek, and carried on to the bar.

I saw the sunbeam fade from his face. He sat down, busied himself with his drink, broke a morsel of bread from the basket and fed it to Piti, and then spent the next few minutes pretending not to notice the happy throng at the bar.

Chrétien served him his dinner not ever suspecting the assignation so closely missed.

Along with many of the other men around the café, I had also seen le Baron eyeing Marie. One night he dropped out of the card game and joined her at the bar. Chrétien was still serving the last diners, but he seemed to make a point of finding odd jobs for himself around the counter, glancing over frequently at their little tête-à-tête. Le Baron's searchlight eyes were shining more brightly that evening, I thought, and he was fixing Marie with that lowered-head stare he assumed whenever he spoke with anyone who interested him.

Out on the rocks that Friday afternoon I asked Marie if she knew le Baron. “I saw him talking to you the other night,” I said.

“You think he is a big criminal, don't you? Chrétien told me that.”

“I don't know,” I said. “I've heard that from one source, but Micheline says he's from a rich coal mining family in Belgium. An industrialist or something. Lots of money.”

“I do not trust him either,” she said. “I caught him looking me over. He makes me nervous.”

“I think he just likes younger people,” I said. “He engaged me in conversation one evening, asked me all about New York. He looked at me the same way.”