The Rose Café Read Online Free PDF Page A

in their Corsican stories.
    There was, unfortunately, a great deal of historical truth behind the legend. In one short thirty-year period in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, more than thirty thousand people were killed for revenge. The cycle of murder often began with an insignificant, minor event such as the theft of a pig or a hen, and then escalated over the generations as one male after another was knifed or shot in the back in payment for an earlier murder. The great eighteenth-century Corsican liberator Pasquale Paoli had managed to slow and almost halt the killings through the establishment of an effective and just local court system. But after the French government got back into power, the courts no longer seemed to be able to legislate what the islanders considered sufficient punishment, and the vendetta returned.
    By the mid-twentieth century the practice of revenge killing had almost died out, and the last vendetta (or at least the last reported vendetta) occurred the year after I was there. There was still violence in the mountain villages, however—café brawls over women, underworld conflicts such as the little event that had just taken place on the Calvi road, and political differences. Two newly elected mayors had been shot at in the month before I arrived, for example.
    Slowly, the excitement over Moonface began to wind down, eased by brandy and a bowl of fish soup. Moonface relaxed and became voluble. I could see him relating the story expansively again and again to anyone who stopped by the table who had not yet heard the adventures of the night. Eventually, he was persuaded to join the card game.
    The next morning I saw a strange little freighter lying at anchor in the harbor. It was a known type, a single-stacked Mediterranean tramp steamer with a low, rusted, somewhat battered hull, a once-white superstructure, and a pilot house just forward of midships. It had arrived in the night like some otherworldly sea creature, and it lay grazing there at anchor, peaceful, unpeopled, and unexpected. From my vantage point, I squinted out into the sun, and was able to read the name: Bagheera .
    As I was watching, I heard the spluttering pop of a motorbike engine, and Pierrot, the local bread deliveryman, arrived. Every morning Pierrot puttered out from the town on his motorbike with the bread for the restaurant. He had fashioned an oblong, insulated box on the back of his machine where he kept the hot baguettes for delivery, and as soon as I would hear his engine I would make some coffee and carry it out to the terrace. He and I would sit on the terrace every morning eating his fresh-baked bread with butter and confiture, watching the life of the harbor unfold below us.
    He was a small, shy man of about thirty with one walleye, and he dressed always in faded blue coveralls and espadrilles with no socks. He had been brought up in the maquis in one of those isolated stone villages where people raised sheep or goats, cut bruyère roots for briarwood pipes from time to time, slaughtered a pig or two in winter, and never asked very much of life. In fact, however, Micheline told me that Pierrot came from an old, landed Corsican family that had slowly declined over the last century, leaving behind only a proud name, a sizable tract of remote land in the hills, and a few feeble-minded shepherds. The last of the line, Micheline said, was the half-mad father of Pierrot, who lived alone with a herd of donkeys and imagined himself to be a squire.
    I asked him about the new vessel in the harbor.
    â€œJust le Bagheera ,” he said. “It comes. It goes out again.”
    â€œWhat does it carry?” I asked.
    â€œWho knows?” he said.
    All this was in April, and the heat was rising. There were days in that season that were preludes to summer, days that laid the dogs out flat in the town square and set the hens panting in the little gardens behind the houses on the back side of town. The