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

the surface here, the water was crystal clear and the combination of light and distorted colors and shadowy forms created a dreamy, surreal environment. Vast, dark cliffs dropped from the surrounding shores into obscure chasms and crevices where bright-eyed moray eels lurked. Spreading out from these dark mountain scarps was a veritable sub-marine Serengeti, a long, rolling plain covered with waving sea grass, dappled with shimmering, refracted light and great, smoke-like shafts of filtered sun. Moving over this undersea veldt were herds of brightly colored fish, with flights of smaller fish above and, in the shaded valleys, the ominous, silvery forms of larger fish.
    The spiny black urchins, with their toxic stings, were common in the cove. I could see a few below me, nestled in the sea grass, and I dove down and loosed them from their holds with the fork, and carefully lifted them to the surface and placed them in the floating fruit basket.
    When I rose from the third dive with my handful of urchins I saw a young woman in a tiny bikini carefully weaving her way down through the rocks, tentatively, her eyes fixed on the treacherous path. She was small, with a mop of short hair, square shoulders, and very feminine, dancelike moves. As she descended through the rocks step by step, she balanced herself with a canvas bag, her free arm stretched out, palm turned upward. Curious, I sank behind the fruit basket and watched as she selected a sheltered, flat rock, laid out a towel, and then stripped off her top and lay back to sunbathe.
    So as not to embarrass her by my presence, I made a noisy dive for more urchins, with a loud splashing kick just before I descended. When I came up with my handful of captured mollusks she was sitting up cross-legged and staring out at me, shading her eyes with her right hand.
    â€œWhat are you doing out there?” she called.
    â€œSea urchins,” I called back, holding a handful aloft. “I’m collecting them for dinner tonight.”
    â€œGood,” she said, and lay back indifferently.
    Once the basket was full I pushed it ashore and hauled it out on the stony little beach. The black mound of spines was gleaming in the late morning sun, and I stood there dumbly watching the reflected water drops on the moving spines as they waved slowly in the alien air. I did not feel at all sorry for these devils, having been spiked by one a few years earlier, one of the worst stings I had ever felt, worse than any hornet.
    The girl on the rocks put on her top and came down to look at my catch.
    â€œWhy they don’t sting you?” she asked.
    â€œThey’re light under water, once you pry them off the rocks. You have to step on them, or brush hard against them to get stung.”
    â€œAre you Italian?” she asked. “You have an accent.”
    â€œNo, American.”
    â€œ Oh là là, le cowboy ,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “I like very much le cowboy. ”
    â€œNot a cowboy. I’m from the East. No horses, no red Indians, no wild bears.”
    I said this because many of the people I had been meeting on the island presumed that there were still bears, cowboys, and Indians in America. They also seemed to think I should know Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio.
    The young woman introduced herself, holding out her hand, and explained that she was here with her “stupid” parents, but that they would be leaving soon, and she would stay through the month.
    â€œMaybe longer,” she said. “At least I hope longer.”
    Without prompting she began to tell me all about her life in Paris and her friends there, and a new café on the Champs Elysées called “le Drugstore” that served American ice cream sodas and hamburgers, and on and on about weekends with her parents at her grandmother’s villa outside Paris and how her parents, or at least her mother, had money but worked as a journalist and spent all her time helping