Close, as we stroll beside the dark glimmering gulf, the reptile bark and tough fronds seem fragrant, but the smell is not the palms but the bougainvillaeas. Lights stand here and there against the dark shore across the gulf like bright thumb prints. There are corals there at forty meters, or so the scuba man promises if I dive another day.
I include our stroll because Dagger brought the Beaulieu after all. We thought we would not intrude into the famous café the Nagra unit — whose quarter-inch sync tapes are nonetheless (I learn only now from an école student) hell to match with the optical print when you come to editing. But unbeknownst to Dagger — why my secrecy? — I’ve begged a small Sony from the same student. In my hand now it’s like a book, and its strap is discreetly wound about the black leather.
OK. Cut to famous café.
No, cut not yet.
A word more, first. Mike and Mary are again in our group. Dagger says to me OK we drive to the east side of the island tomorrow. Mike is interested why. I mention some possibilities — the American past dropping TNT in neat bombs on the mosquitoes over there in the malaria swamps, then the colonists settling there after leaving revolutionary Algeria, then l’esprit de Corse denied so many avenues of action, so they try a little home-grown sabotage more reactionary than revolutionary, opposed to change or just to les colons and secretly to their prosperous reclamation of that part of the island.
Mike doesn’t say anything. Dagger says that nothing can take the place of the old cherry bombs they used to set off behind the Freehold Presbyterian Church on July 4.
I add, Of course it’ll fit in with other footage.
Did he hear me depress the record button? Instead of an intro to him, I have as yet only myself faking a bit to draw him out.
But then Mike says, Would you kill?
Ah well, I say (thinking to see what the remarkable Mary sees in him, with her elegant legs — can she see with her legs? — and the wild-hawk turn in the bridge of her nose), you know we’re just filmmakers, traveling eyes. But since you ask, would you kill?
Mike chuckles in the dusk.
Cut to famous café. We push in through sidewalk standees whom Dagger didn’t have light enough to shoot, nor the darkening façades with a bright casement here and there, the isolated glare of a fish restaurant, two old women in black leaning toward each other in a doorway, adolescents near a corner ice cream shop, music down the street, but here is the music.
Dagger’s American friend booked us what’s now the last table in a far but public corner. Family people double up. We are watched across the packed room to our table. Dagger will use the 15-mm. lens, our widest angle now we’ve given back the zoom, and when he sits down he opens the aperture right up for maximum light.
His American friend is explaining a song. He says, Shepherds, lots of shepherds. Or used to be. But no artisan culture. Against the music I miss some words between Mary and Mike. I wish the American would stop explaining the song.
I do not know what Dagger is interested in. He asks Mary about her family because that’s where she gets her archaeology and she’s been telling him about the statue-menhirs. The great male faces are awesome, there are swords, the eyes are cavernous shadows carved back under plain eyebrow ridges, there’s a head and not much more, the figure seems standing in the earth able to rise but only if there’s a reason to rise, they’re very dark and marvelous. Mary has been here before but this time she’s on her way to Sardinia and stopped by to see this surly Mike who is a friend of her brother’s. When she left Oxford she lost her passion for classical archaeology and is still torn, she says, between megalithic and Egyptian.
But your brother, says Dagger, and lets the sentence hang.
I reach toward Dagger: Hey isn’t that the girl at the fortress?
Dagger says he doubts it, and I add. The one with the two guys who tried to get away from us.
My brother is changing, says Mary. She smiles and it’s clear how much she cares about her brother.
Is Burns such a great hero where you come from?
Among the honnie winding banks
Where Doon rins wimplin clear,
Where Bruce once ruled the martial ranks
An shook his Carrick spear.
The Scots still hold out, I said.
Now menhir, she says, as a song ends and there’s desultory clapping that declines oddly to a collective clap in near unison because the singers are about to take a break. Do you know what menhir means? Dagger is rising with the camera: just what it says: men here. Nonsense, says Mary, men (and you may learn from this, Michael) men means stone in Middle Breton, hir means long.
What could I learn? says Mike watching Dagger pan and cut and then get on up past the singer who because of the corner we’re in has been standing with his back to us.
Now Dagger is moving. The singer doesn’t mind. The big boss sits against the wall wringing his fingers over the steel strings of his guitar which lies snug between his belly and the table. Mike and Mary are between me and the singers. You get four or five. Mary has been here before and says the proprietor has to replace the singers because in the local style, furious, hard, and shrill, they kill their voices. Dagger is popping shots all over the room. The girl who looks like the midriff maiden at the fortress is with a dark-haired man. She is aware of Dagger but not watching him.
I have my elbow on the Sony and switch it on. Mary is talking to Mike, who is between her and the singers. Dagger’s American friend is on the other side and Dagger is on the move.
That is surely the girl from the fortress. She had dark glasses on then. A mole above her upper lip moves when she smiles. Without looking at him she handles the dark-haired man’s forearm. There is a cross-ways aisle behind them, then the door filled with standees.
I’m at the rear end of our table, facing the whole room. Dagger’s American friend, whom I can’t recall describing, is at my left, Mary and Mike in that order on my right. Mary talks despite the music, and Mike leans half around to be polite, then he gives up and turns in his chair to see her as she talks. Dagger’s focus passes us and it occurs to me that he is filming the sound source — my recorder — though he doesn’t know it, and in the developed print with, if possible, this tape integrated and synced, you’ll see the singer and (until he suddenly moves to block us) our table with Mary facing the camera talking words which may well be salvageable on the final track.
In one song a dead dog tells a heavy tale. It’s like one of Dagger’s, tedious yet droll.
Then comes the shepherd. The lyrics are hard. I am listening to Mary as if I did not trust my machine.
Then a third singer: a bandit’s lament sung by a wiry man who with his long slit of a moustache and passionate catlike indifference could have been a brigand. But there are no brigands in the mountains any more, Mary tells us.
Dagger roves.
You and your history, says Mike. Yet he is interested. Perhaps because she is interested in him. He looks like a long-haired quarterback from New Jersey. But I have never discounted him. You know, I say, that’s precisely what I came to Corsica for.
I thought so, says Mary, and Mike looks at my glass and then up at me as if he’s uncertain if I’m a dumb, horny over-the-hill flirt, or genuinely sinister.
Dagger bends near the portly guitarist, then straightens and turns, shooting (I think) Mary and Mike for a second, and Mike follows my eye, sees Dagger, and turns back to Mary hunching his shoulders. I’m not in the line of focus.