Here’s Dagger shooting the crowd and the current singer, the brigand, and Mary and Mike; and if we ever get onto the Nagra an audible track from this cassette and then sync it in to this footage (for this isn’t even what they call wild sync), we have a curious effect: people listening, singer singing — Corsica on the wall and the footage in montage — but the sound track will have the singer little louder than the crowd-murmur, and the principal track, the queer northern yarn Mary is telling, interspersed with my solicitous queries that deepen Mike’s scowl as he glances about from time to time to see where Dagger is; perhaps that is the very reason she keeps on. Once he stares at me and says What do you care? and he stares at Mary’s sharp bones of chin and cheeks and the most distantly menacing idea of a hawk in the bridge of that receptive nose and the faint golden rose that seems to illuminate her deep matte tan from inside her. She drinks her cassis; she is missing two joints of the fourth finger of her right hand.
My questions were not absolutely sincere. I enjoyed Mike’s imitation.
The story almost bores me too.
Yet it proved to be the key development in Corsica.
Not that I care about her family per se, a nether branch of the famous Napiers. The heart of the tale which begins in 1650 though also much earlier is the magnetic Montrose, noble Scots royalist who landed on a cold March day in the Orkney Isles. Thence with a thousand unlucky local recruits and four hundred Danish troops including a dozen from the very Faeroe Isles nearby that you Mike mentioned when we were swimming — to invade the Scottish Highlands, raise support for the restoration of Charles the would-be Second, and press the practical Presbyterian government to that end toward which they were leaning in any event.
I was for Cromwell, said Mike.
But what happened was that Montrose was taken, the man MacLeod who had the stomach to turn him in got 5000 pounds of oatmeal, and Montrose for quite other reasons than the Orkney venture was put to death.
The singer tells of a reluctant fiancée. The people at the tables are grinning. The room is warm with smoke. Dagger has moved some more. He seems to be including in a shot the girl from the fortress scene; she either doesn’t feel the lens upon her profile or doesn’t care.
Montrose was hanged and then cut in pieces. Now the story starts.
Mike looks at me without pleasure and says, History can be fun; she leaves out the political position entirely.
The fortress girl is looking at me. The door with the standees is behind her. She may have said something, her swarthy escort eyes me across the room. Dagger is chatting up a tableful of locals — not shooting.
No, Michael, they didn’t sew him back together and blow him up. His head they stuck on a pin above Edinburgh Toll Booth. His legs and arms were sent to four towns and hung up there for ten years. His trunk was interred in the common marsh graveyard.
Mike is looking about for the waiter. The Sony has fifteen minutes to run. Dagger is prowling again.
Lady Napier who revered Montrose like a god had his torso exhumed and had a surgeon named Callendar remove and embalm his heart. Pay attention, Michael. The same thing happened centuries before with Robert the Bruce who asked that his heart be taken after death to Jerusalem. (Mary’s brogue thickens.)
Dagger has come almost behind the fortress girl and is photographing the standees, some of whom are less interested in this than others, for Dagger is between them and the singer who is contorting his insides up into a harsh high-pitched tragically calling climax.
That heart sealed in some unusual glue Lady Napier placed in a steel case made from Montrose’s sword. The case she put in a gold box to be spirited off to his family in Holland where her own husband was also a refugee from Cromwell. But later the heart was lost there in the Low Countries, yet much later in a Dutch collection of curiosities this same gold filigree box was recognized by chance, for long before Lady Napier had it the Doge of Venice had given it to John Napier — and you know who he was?
Maybe Mary hasn’t been boring us so much as dispersing herself in some strange irrelevance felt by Mike and passed to me.
We don’t know who Napier was.
For Dagger is having words with a standee none other than the blond man from the fortress and the scuba trailer. He’s asked Dagger to move out of the way and he stands with one truculent shoulder well ahead of the other. Dagger lifts an arm in a great shrug as if to say, How do you talk to a shmoe like this. Now Dagger crouches in the aisle between the standees and the table. And I feel his focus on me — on the singer, Mike, Mary, and me like a staggered perspective expected to smile on signal.
Mary says, The inventor of logarithms. Didn’t you know?
But the blonde with the mole turns smack into the camera’s focal path, though much too close for clarity as her back view also was before. She objects. Her dark boyfriend gets up and speaks down to big Dagger who’s still crouching.
The singer halts, and the big boss, who is a Corsican and knows what can happen if you drop the polite niceties, calls Pas ici!
Dagger elbows out the door, the burly back and black-gray hair somehow unchecked. And now as the boss picks out his intro like speedy mandolin bells lighting you into a festal and feminine harbor you’ve seen in the movies, Dagger and the Beaulieu lens appear over a modest standee shoulder, the angle is for a random moment ripe, though I am far from being close to it — the lens I’ll bet has now been switched to 50—It’s called Lassie Go Home! he shouts: the blonde at the table and the blond brown-eyed man ten feet in front of Dag automatically pivot: and in one through-shot whose depth of field is dubious, Dagger may just have caught them all, the two from the fort, the singer with a smoky swaggering deep breath, Mike, Mary, and (now for the second time at a circumference point oddly opposite to Dagger) me.
Which makes me glance behind, but there’s just the wall, and as I see above my nose the familiar poster (labeled Charmes de la Corse) Mike is saying, That’s too far, too far.
And Mary, calmly interested: That’s that Marie person.
Meaning the blonde, who’s pointing at us.
The blond man has gone out, it looks like after Dag. I imagine a smashed lens, dented magazines, stitches, discoloration, headlines — but I do not know their words because I do not know enough.
The singer tries again. A hush records my tape recorder’s click-stop.
She asks who my friend is in Edinburgh. I say she visits there; I name her; Mary sips her cassis, puts the glass down, and her palm where I touch it is cool.
Mike is looking, but not at the recorder.
Suppose I’ve got the Montrose heart, I say; what would it go for?
Oh cut it out, says Mike. Let’s go swimming, says Mary.
The song sounds Italian. Who here ever knew the chronicle behind the lyrics? When Corsica was bartered back to Genoa in 1559 Sampiero came back to Corsica with eight men, raised 12,000, fought the Genoese, was betrayed, and died. He was the son of a mountain shepherd. His wife had taken a Genoese lover.
Evviva Sampiero
E morti ai nemici
Let us cleanse our sacred honor
In the streams and in the fountains
II rumore della guerra
A riscosso valli e monti.
Sampiero your army included a squad of women with axes. You were betrayed by your best friend now known as the Corsican Judas. You were assassinated by your in-laws after you had strangled your wife.