The Rose Café Read Free Page B

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.
    â€œOK?” he said. “Shall we begin?”
    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