from the valley to the sea

7/29/2019 From the Valley to the Sea

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To my daughter

Dearest Emily,

Until the day she was found dead: mutilated with an

infinite brutality, I believed that our love could surmount

anything, everything, always.

The things that haunted me back then, in the beginning,

were only feelings - vibes, as the old language goes. There were

no concrete horrors to leer menace, no guns to my head or

daggers in my heart. I wish I could admit only to the foolish

invulnerability of youth sadly, I am guilty of so very much

more.

With age - and I am a grand dame now, not long until I

reach the dementia that surely comes with the legion centenaryblessings - I can see clearly my stupidity, and blindness, for any

fool knows that feelings are the most dangerous enemies of all.

But worse, I see arrogance. His, theirs, but above all, mine, and

this is the greatest crime of all.

Had I taken heed, listened even once to the multiple

warnings issued by every power that exists, perhaps I could

have saved you, saved you both. Instead, I have blood on my

hands, in my heart, on my lips, and I shall never forget. And

neither shall you, for I shall die soon and you must know your

past.

How does a mother apologize for all that the years have

stolen? I have written to you almost every day of your life and


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still, I have not found the words. More than half a century of

mea culpa and yet I am no closer to my destination. Even as I

write, my heart seizes with terror that I will not manage to say

all that I have to say. A part of me fears the end, the knowledge

that once I have written the last word in our story, I will lose

you all over again. But I am your mother and I love you more

than it is possible to say, and while I could not be the daily

presence I so dreamed of being, I can at least consign your

beginnings and my end to paper. My last maternal duty, as it

were, so that you might know once and for all - that you were

conceived in love, and lost to honor.

I hope the years have provided you with the comfort and

joy and warmth that I could not - circumstances being as they

are - offer you. I would like to believe, and indeed I hope and

pray that you have children of your own now, my darling, and

so perhaps your mothers soul will allow you to understand so

much of that which I cannot say. Do you feel the love I have for

you, the love of which you were composed, beating in your

veins?

My prayer, not to the god so cruel as to rob me of my own

sweet flesh, my own warm blood, is that I might finish your

story as it began: with love.

These are the words I wrote last winter, when only the shadow of death hung

over me; an old acquaintance I would sporadically greet with the laconic ease of

familiarity, like the browning leaves that appear in the arbor each autumn.


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Then, although I could feel the breath fading in me, I felt strangely full of

hope, as if there could not be a god so cruel as to let me die with this as unfinished

business. But die I must and the gods I have often mocked are now dancing around

my bedside, brandishing the souls of others who have failed to heed their warnings.

At night when I lie down, I pray as I used to, as a child in the convent, faithful

in fear and trusting in ritual. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to

keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. I might die before

I wake - each night the possibility is greater still as my bones and muscles and very

organs betray me further - but my soul belongs to those I leave behind. I must pay my

debts and I must explain. Only I can do so.


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CHAPTER 1

It must seem so strange to turn back and try to imagine us as we have been, as we

once were and perhaps, in fleeting moments of levity, still are. Nature mocks the oldbut history preserves certain images and thus a trace remains to remind us that while

time might have wings and fly lightly into the blue, it leaves its feathery traces like

moth dust on a fine table. Ashes to ashes and then to dust but not into the urn without

a spill or two.

I have no photographs of those long days past in Corsica, in the village of your birth,

and I sincerely doubt that anyone has framed me in delicate filigree to be placed

beside your bedside. I know I was young and - some saybeautiful, although not in

any conventional way.

My so-called beauty would have sprung from my exoticism, a kind of far-flungelegance that dreamed up sunshine and American films, the dancing smiles of GIs

flirting with melancholic lust, teasing at the souls of those who hungered for their

bounty in a land defined by its austerity.

I am sure I reminded the local men more than once of those village girls for whom

theyd longed, those girls who had preferred to take their chances with the departing

Americani, village boys with pockets full of courage who set off after the war to earn

glory and wealth in the over the horizon continents of America north and south. Those

girls who with the folly of youth and the promise of a future - would return on

periodic pilgrimages, with their fancy skirts, fancier husbands and lipsticked mouths,

smiling down on the desire they had once engendered.

Ah yes, so very strange to look back, to discover that the memory of long ago is as

clear as that ofyesterdays breakfast. How easy it is to recall my first impressions, my

first nave ideas of the place that would come to haunt me. In another world, another

time and place, it would seem almost amusing to remember how I thought that I must

have reminded them a little of good times and not bad, because in an island famous

for its insularity, while I was not welcomed with open arms, I was, at least that first

day, offered the hospitality that comes from duty and fear, if not actual friendship.

Few foreigners ever made it as far as the village. In ten centuries of invasions and

wars - Greeks, Romans, Moors, Saracens and Turks all came and went by the sea - theinvaders would stop at the beach to pillage the fields of white gold. They might take a

wandering maiden for the pleasure or hang the salt field workers as the just

recompense of a conqueror but never did they climb the treacherous maquis-clad hills

to descend to the valley. And who could blame them?

After the oft-violent seas of the Mediterranean had deposited them on the stony

beaches of this gilded isle, after they had staved off disaster along the dramatic

coastline facing the islands of Capri and Elbe, even the hardiest sailor would not

willingly forsake his sea legs for battles with impenetrable bush, only to arrive,

scarred and exhausted before a couple of tumbling stone houses, a few scrawny goats

and half a dozen chestnut trees.


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The salt fields and their oru biancu were long extinct when I arrived, and barely

remembered in village memory, although the desolation remained the same. History

and politics played to a limited audience in a place whose major entry into modern

society was the Bakelite radio tended with loving care at the local bar. News of the

world was one thing but news of local and national soccer matches was another, and

so most eves would find the village men clustered around their tinny voice box,exhorting invisible men to feint, head, cutback or mark.

Discussion would last long into the night and the bar would take on the ambience of a

smoky forum where the worlds problems might be solved in an instant, were the

worlds problems to revolve around a leather-paneled ball, and many a village

vendetta was nourished with alcohol and testosterone.

The village I met and, for a time, embraced, was indeed a place apart. Years of

desecration: poverty, illness, and the loss of fathers and sons to great wars and

incestuous revenge had conspired to strengthen that which was both the best and the

worst of the populace. Even the mountains surrounding the valley and the sea to thefront acted as a defensive fortress from the larger continent, and so the village

remained in spiritual and ideological isolation, until the events that would destroy us

all. The irony does not escape me, that a place so well-versed in self-protection, so

walled in by its fiercely maintained traditions, could be the theatre of the perverse

corruption of the new worlds burgeoning currency. Perhaps I should not be surprised,

because history proves a thousand times over that greed, money and power are the

ever constant and unshifting rock on which we all build. And yes, I still tremble

knowing that I lost your father to pure and faithful idealism tainted with the bad blood

of desire for that most unholy of trinities.

Before I met Antoine, I knew little of Corsica beyond vague notions of wartimebravado it had been said that Corsica was the first French department to liberate

itself from the Fascist and Nazi occupying forcesand some of the more newsworthy

tales that had made the press just after the war, mostly involving the heroin trade

between Europe and the United States. The French Connection, they called it, making

the transmutation of poppies from Turkey and Indochina into the narcotic that sold for

small fortunes on the streets of New York sound almost glamorous. How is it that,

given what I know now, the transportation of that poisonous merchandise could have

seemed so chic, so exotic? The drug voyaged at least on two occasions on French

cruise ships, the St. Tropez and the Batista, those same liners that transported worldly

matrons to afternoon tea at the Colony Club, to dancing in the Starlight Room and the

other, sundry glories of Fifth Avenue. How mindless we were of the cost of thatcargo; how content were we to imagine such a trade as a Bogart and Bacall type

adventure, a lurid tale in the morning press to enchant us as we dunked our croissants

in milky coffee, while every single measure would come to cost me all that I valued,

all that I held dear. How was I to imagine that those dashing Corsican brigands behind

the contraband would be the very same men who would steal my salvation?

Once, at the very end of the war, I had interviewed an elderly white Russian, a count

and a distant cousin of the Tzar, who had left the rusty old hulk that was destined to

transport him and a few thousand others on a desperate and often fruitless search for a

home far from the threat of the Bolsheviks. This man had sung praises of the brave

folk in Ajaccio who had welcomed the refugee that he was with open arms and hearts;

indeed, he had married a local girl from Ucciani, thus making the daughter of a goat-


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herd a countess. But these were only fragments of information in my mind; for me,

Corsica was little more than smugglers and the occasional note of local political

discord, and of no more interest.

Despite my lack of knowledge concerning the island they referred to as Beauty, I was

hardly the inexperienced young girl you might imagine me to have been, when I methim. On my own since I was a child, I had learned taught myself, really - to

appreciate the independent life. I worked as a journalist, traveling far and wide for the

perfect story. It was 1949 in Paris, and the world was reveling in the nascent freedoms

of a new age. Hats and gloves were no longer the obligatory sign of good social

standing that they once were, and a certain voluptuous flair, a shapely calf, a dcollet

that revealed the curve of a breast were all signs of the good times to come. We

soaked up the New Look and made it our own as quickly as we adopted our other,

new-found freedoms.

Paris was the center of the world and there was more than enough champagne to go

around, and men too. Tall men, short men, rich men who had made their fortunesduring the war and who were now buying all that they could of peace, poor men who

played the artist card with debonair ease.

Every night was something else, back then: a card game where a fellow might lose his

shirt or make it big, cocktails that segued into a house party for a week. Sometimes

we would take a car to the casino in Deauville, carelessly throwing down our money

as if there would be no tomorrow and winding our tipsy way back to a favorite caf

near the Eiffel Tower just before dawn. I spent my salary on the new Mister Diors

hourglass robes and drenched myself in the high jasmine notes of Balenciagas

Fleeting Moment, so aptly named. I was completely oblivious to the notion of the

future, nonchalant and safe in the knowledge that tomorrow has no use for the young.We had survived the war and knew only too well the cost of time.

Your father bewitched me that first night. Although we had not addressed a word to

one another, I had noticed him enter the restaurant, followed him with my eyes when

he came to greet mutual acquaintances, and even though we were yet to be presented,

something about him called to me. I can recall, in my skin, his quiet presence at our

table, an oak amongst the willowy Parisian boys that night. He was the friend of a

friend werent we all? and if he seemed different from the others, those callous

chaps jostling for my favors, it was surely because he was like no man I had ever

known before.

The dinner passed swiftly and only as we were taking our coffee and brandies onto

the terrace did he approach me, so silently that I jumped when the flame from his

lighter flickered before me. I remember leaning in to smell him as much to light my

cigarette.

Why do you smoke?

He flipped the lid on his lighter and slid it into a pocket. When he looked at me,

waiting for an answer, I studied his face. Something about him reminded me of a lion.

Golden haired, a muscular leanness that evoked raw and brutal power, and yet regal,

proud, strong, unyielding. He stood patiently, waiting for my response.


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Perhaps because I enjoy the taste. And the idea.

He reached over and carefully picked up my pocket book from the table next to me. I

watched as he opened my bag, took out my silver cigarette case and threw it into a

nearby ice bucket.

You wont need these anymore. I dont like the taste.

I wanted to be amused by his macho attitude, to remind him of the decade in which

we lived, but something about his manner of holding himself made me realize he was

serious. Every move he made was deliberate, calm, as if hed planned each gesture his

whole life. He leaned forward and placed a hand on the back of my neck, firmly

enough that I had to lean slightly towards him.

He kissed me then, that first night, as Lady Eiffel draped her shadow about us. He

kissed me slowly, surely and with enough expertise to make my spine jump. It was

more than a kiss; he was marking me, making me his own.

When I drew back, he smiled, a cheeky grin that left nothing to the imagination and I

had to smile back even though I was shaking with a kind of nervous energy Id never

before known.

Its time to go. Tell the others youre leaving. With me.

He stood up and held out a hand but I stopped him. Although desperate to follow

where he led, I wanted to show him that I wasnt some floozy to be hustled around.

Not so fast. You just took something of mine. Now I want something of yours.

I waited for a pithy rejoinder, the sort of thing any of the charming men I dated would

have brought out with dandified coquetry, something that would save me, but instead

his blue eyes, deeper than the Mediterranean sea, searched mine. Slowly, he reached

inside his jacket and pulled out a compact revolver. He flicked the safety catch off

and on, then turned it around and handed it to me by the canon, the silver steel of the

grip glinting in the shadowed light of the terrace.

Are you insane? You could get arrested for that.

I grabbed the gun and shoved it into my bag. He shrugged, imperturbable.

No one is looking. And you wanted something of mine. Now you have something

and you can always shoot me if the evening ends badly.

He got up and began walking toward the door. I waited a beat or two and then

followed him. He held the door for me and then took my arm as we made our way

across the Place Trocadero.

Should I ask where we are going?

I spoke breezily but every nerve I had was on high alert and all I wanted was for him

to kiss me again. The Parisian night was luminous, still surprising after years ofblackout, and there was music everywhere, a testimonial to the first night of summer.


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He stuck out his hand and hailed a taxi. As he opened the door for me, he smiled and I

saw a look of tenderness in his regard.

Were going to your place.

He touched my cheek gently, as one might touch a child.

And my name is Antoine. Antoine Paoli.

I didnt stop to ask why my place and not hisin truth I was relieved, for surely my

own space would provide me with at least the illusion of control. That I had left

without even knowing his name was one thing; that he already knew mine was

another.

When we arrived at my door, he paid the driver and waved him away. At that instant

in time, we stood, gazing at each other, not touching but aching with the need to do

so.

Its not too late. I can leave now but if I come in, Im not ever leaving you again.

His words, whispered into my ear, half confession, half threat, terrified me, for I knew

with every fiber of my being that he spoke the truth. I was no innocent but until now,

it had always been me who led the game.

Men courted me with words, with flowers and gifts and fancy restaurants and clever

books. Rare was the bird who left me wanting more and often I mused that the chase

was more interesting than the thrill. I looked at the man before me and realized that

for once, I was the hunted and that the chase, at last, was over. I opened the door and

stepped though, never looking back, for I knew without a doubt that he was there,

right next to me, and that he always would be.

Would it be uncouth, inappropriate, to tell you that we spent that first week in bed? I

know that the fashion now is to share every last detail of ones life, from birth to

death and beyond but I come from a time when discretion reigned, all the better to

escape with our small crimes. If I cede to detail now, it is because I would have you

understand the strength of our love, and of our passion for each other from that very

first instant.

In our early days, your father used to joke that he had chosen me, and that I had no

choice but to go along. I would laugh and remind him of the gun, telling him that I

had at least six chances to leave, one for each of the bullets in the guns chamber; in

fact, he was right. He chose me. But I also chose him. I chose him the moment he

kissed me on the terrace of the restaurant. I chose him when he told the taxi driver to

take us home. And I chose him again and again, every time we made love.

The truth was that I had never known a man like him.

He was not soft, which made a nice change after all the pretty boys of Paris. He made

love and I heard the heavens sing, and I truly believe he might have sold his soul to

make me happy. Perhaps his only vice was that he could not forget his past, deny it

from his present, or banish it from his future.


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Even during that first week, when our were bodies obsessed with the mystery of each

other, we began to open our hearts, to share ourselves, this new us we had created

from each other, with the world at large. Nothing so social as friends; indeed, we fled

the social inanities we both so well enjoyed, preferring only our own company.

Instead, we undertook to reveal to each other the parts that lay as yet undiscovered.

I showed him my work, my book of articles sold here and there as I tried to make a

career as a journalist. I watched, my arm languid and draped about the corded muscle

of his shoulders as he read my stories, asking questions and providing insights that

made me feel as if he knew the corners of my soul, those dark corners that I hid so

well with glib rejoinders and dazzling smiles.

We talked about our upbringings, our teenage years, and of the places and people that

composed them. Our lives could not have been more different and yet there were

strange parallels: his parents had died when he was just a baby, and I had lost mine as

a young child, too. With each moment that we shared together, with each breath or

simple touch, it seemed as iffinally - we had found in each other the family we hadnever had.

We spoke of the future, of how we would raise our children oh yes, even in those

early days it seemed an evidence, a fact. He spoke with fire and longing of the island

to which he belonged his words, not mine and painted a picture of a Corsican

utopia that rivaled any tropical paradise.

Of course, all of this was the delightful babble of those drunk with the heady

possibilities of love, but every time we made love, every time his body entered mine,

I knew with all the force of a thousand blazing suns that we would make a child, and

so we did.

On that first Saturday morning when I rose before him and saw my bleached face and

bilious air in the bathroom mirror, I knew without a doubt that our future was not only

sealed but truly blessed. After I had freshened up and made coffee, I went back to sit

on the edge of the bed and watch my beautiful there was no other word for him

man sleep. The weight of the bed shifted and he pulled me down on top of him, my

newly swollen breasts pressing painfully against his chest.

Tell me. Tell me what it is.

His eyes remained closed and his arm lay solidly across my shoulders. For adiaphanous moment, I wanted to run, as far and as fast as I could but the rhythm of

his heart against my burgeoning chest pulled me back to his embrace.

Im pregnant. Were going to have a baby.

He smiled at me then, opening his eyes, so desperately blue against the white of the

Egyptian cotton bolster.

Then we will be married tomorrow.

Laughing and crying, I pushed up against his embrace and straddled him so that I

could look down at him.


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Im glad to know that you are going to do the right thing but it might take a while to

organize. There are bans to post and

He rolled me over.

I told you Id never leave you. I love you. You belong to me. You always have andyou always will. We will be married tomorrow and then we will go to Corsica, to my

village, so that you can meet my family. Our family.

from the valley to the sea

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