The Rose Café by John Hanson Mitchell Read Free Book Online Page A

for a couple of days, you’ll be happy to hear.”
    â€œOh my God but that is good. Don’t you think?” Chrétien said. He turned to me. “You hear that? Belle Marie, the beautiful antelope. I cannot wait. You will be so pleased to meet her.”
    He blathered on, using animal metaphors to praise the beauties of said Marie.
    â€œI don’t know,” Micheline said tiredly, “I think that you place too much confidence in her. I think you love her too much. She’s going to fall for someone else as soon as her parents leave. Maybe that dentist from Lyon.”
    â€œNever!” Chrétien shouted. “She loves only me. I can tell.”
    Micheline lit a cigarette. “You know her?” she asked.
    â€œWhat do you think?” he said. “She is too Catholic. She even attends Mass. She says she is a virgin.”
    Micheline snorted and blew out a dismissive cloud of smoke.
    â€œAnd anyway,” Chrétien said, catching Micheline’s joke. “The dentist?” He began to laugh. “You cannot mean the dentist.” The laughter consumed him, he slapped his thigh, repeating the word “dentist” over and over again.
    Micheline merely looked over at him blankly.
    A whisper of breeze rose up from the harbor and died of its own accord on the terrace. A gecko snapped up an insect from the stuccoed wall. Out in the harbor, the steady throb of a fishing boat engine fell silent.
    I decided it was time for bed.
    The moon was illuminating the mountains on the other side of the harbor and behind the town, just above the dark sweep of the foothills, I could see the three rounded, lower peaks that stood together in a line, like hooded, cowled figures. The locals termed them “the three nuns,” and they looked down on the town as if in judgment of the world of human affairs. Above the nuns, touching the sky, rose the higher peaks of the interior. This was spring, and they were still snow-capped and glowing, white against the black sky. They hung there as if suspended above the earth, a realm of gods, who unlike the judgmental Christian nuns, were indifferent to the follies of the mortal fools below.

chapter three
    Marie
    Around ten o’clock, on an otherwise quiet day when the heat was high enough to force anyone who was left around the place into a reclining position, I went to the kitchen and picked up an old fork, a mask and snorkel, and a fruit basket, and walked down the narrow path through the red rocks to the cove below my cottage, to collect sea urchins.
    In the interior of the island, local game such as wild boar made up the signature dish of many of the restaurants, but on the coast, seafood was the specialty of the house. One of these delicacies was the sea urchin, which would appear on the tables of the coastal restaurants in spring, sometimes already cut in half for the guests, or served with a pair of scissor-like double-bladed pliers you could use to open the shells. Inside there were strips of red, salty meat that the locals would eat with bread and cold rosé or muscat.
    The spiny, tennis ball–sized mollusks were found in large numbers in certain sections of the cove below my cottage, and one of my regular jobs at the café was to collect them. Jean-Pierre had supplied me with the mask and flippers and instructed me to swim out to the middle of the cove, dive down and pry the urchins from the rocks with the fork, carry them to the surface, and dump them in the floating fruit basket. The underwater expedition on that hot morning was when I first met Marie.
    The tide was in that morning and the sea was calm—the green waves merely rose and fell serenely at the rock edges—and I could smell the sharp mix of rosemary, thyme, and sea salt that seemed to always collect at the narrow shore of the cove. I fitted the mask to my face and, pushing the basket ahead of me, swam out to the middle of the inlet, watching the seafloor.
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