Joseph McElroy - Lookout Cartridge

The Italian with the hat does business with il Duce’s nephew. I say Oh sure, Boswell got Ben Franklin interested, but Boswell got the Scots excited about the plight of Corsica, now what’s that Scots lassie doing in Ajaccio with Mike?

The man in the captain’s hat passes on to a Belgian ambassador named Duprat who is also a friend of his and who has been killed in a coup along with more than ninety dinner guests of King Hassan’s. My Italian fails me so I don’t get the link with Allende’s copper coup the bad effect of which upon U.S. Anaconda the man in the captain’s hat boasts can but be to his own advantage. My Italian fails me again and all I make out a moment later is It’s just a matter of time, and then Mussolini is mentioned, and the dark-haired girl tries to put in an opinion but the skipper shut her right up saying he too was a partisan in ’43 but no Red (he shakes a finger smiling).

He lifts his hat and he’s bald. He runs his finger along a sculpted cleft where the Americans shot out a piece of bone and when he recovered he was a new man. He has stopped the conversation with his head but at the same moment the young handsome waiter has put down a big salad bowl full of shrimp. The skipper nibbles one, his full lips seem dyed purple on his burnished tan. He picks off a rib of shell, eyes the waiter, and chucks the shrimp back into the bowl. In Italian he says to the waiter, We always throw the babies back. His guests laugh, but that wasn’t what the skipper meant — he speaks to the waiter again in Italian, the others stop laughing, the waiter shakes his head with wary eyes that could mean he doesn’t get the point or is implying Fuck You.

Our langoustes have been on a diet. Dagger is gnawing thoughtfully. I get hold of the camera. Dagger raises his eyebrows, a shard of abdominal carapace and a couple of spines in front of his moustache. No doubt what’s happening. The Corsican is being told, now in French, to shell every last shrimp, and the girls are smiling.

The waiter goes away. The patron appears. The skipper is going to charm the patron , almost. The bottle of Château de Tracy ’67 is almost finished, the skipper wants another, he talks French to the patron . The patron seems to charm the skipper, who in the way he looks up at the patron seems almost to be rising. The waiter goes away, the patron and the skipper (about the same age but in very different shape) discuss the shrimp and the size of the langoustes to come. I have the Beaulieu out of its case and without noting what lens we’re on I focus quietly as the sullen garçon appears with a second misted bottle of Tracy ’67 and a wood-handled knife which sticks out of his fist in the upward or number-one stabbing position. Dagger says, For Christ sake, and I let my thumb off the button. OK, he says, to get to Aleria on the east side you have to drive up to Corte in the middle where Paoli had his capital, didn’t he?

Other tables have noticed. The waiter is shelling the shrimp. The event has lost its prankish magic. He has pulled the bowl to the edge and is using the wood-handled knife. The foursome are looking at each other but not moving. I’m shooting again. I haven’t checked the light. We’re on 50 mm., which is fine. Dagger says, I wouldn’t. He might be Mafia.

The waiter is moving his hands as if he’s trying to insert a tiny screw into a fixture at a bad angle. The blonde drinks, but the four are essentially motionless. The fruits of the sea accumulate on a plate.

I feel like a lookout looking opposite ways waiting to warn. Warn the waiter? The odious bigshot?

The bigshot has popped two babies into his mouth and has complimented the waiter, who is spilling tiny jets of rage as if from his ribs each time his elbow slightly rises or from his eyes each time he blinks. The energy is in an unstable state but feeding at a regular clip into the Beaulieu. The skipper spots me.

I switch off as he rises, and I have felt a new thing — that energy has been sent from me as well as received by me. My eye away from the viewfinder sees more. Dagger says, Watch it. The skipper asks in French what I think I’m doing. The waiter drops his knife into the bowl of unshelled shrimp. The skipper tells him he’s not finished.

I call in English, We’re doing a film on Corsica.

What about Corsica? the skipper demands, and when he turns eye-to-eye with the waiter and sees the shelling has again stopped and nods so sharply to the waiter it looks like the last OK to the executioner to go ahead, the waiter resumes performing his instructions and in spite of me is in even worse shape.

The Italian smiles with his purple lips, looks at his three guests, and says with a smug shrug, I am not exactly Onassis. He sits down and waves a hand at the waiter and says to me, Let him be the star, eh?

He is , I call.

Hello there!

Dagger’s voice revolves me on the seat of my chair to Mary and Mike just a couple of close-ups away. She’s in a pale sleeveless shift, her hair all over her shoulders.

The Italian calls: What is your film?

Revolution, I call. It’s about revolution.

I raise the camera and shoot.

The Italian with a sweep of his hand over his table, stopping shy of the shrimp bowl above which the knife picks away, calls back in French this time, But there is no revolution here.

I cut. We can dub his words.

I’m reaching the Beaulieu back onto its chair but this is where Mike wants to sit.

Revolution? he says quietly to Dagger. You didn’t tell me.

Dagger begins some tale about the passionate guitarist Prince Yusupov who assassinated the Tsar’s favorite, Rasputin, escaped to New York, and later bought two houses up in Calvi.

Mike doesn’t pursue my remark about revolution.

I post a card to Jenny: dark slender mules being loaded with cork bark, the unseen sun pumpkin orange in the inner trough of each chunk; my message: SOMETHING STRANGE GOING ON HERE.

To Will, a high stone viaduct and two neat white and red train carriages presumably moving from one dark blur of green foliage to the other while through the gray arches can be seen sky and cliffs in the distance; my message: TECHNOLOGICAL REVOLUTION COMES TO CORSICA.

To Lorna goes a postcard showing the buttercup-yellow bloom of the needle-furze, one of the hardy bushes generally called the maquis dotting the valleys and working up into the harsh slopes which are of the same granite as those unique statue-menhirs Mary described thirty miles and three millennia from where she and Mike and Dagger and I sat over our coffee, and the spiny grease of steaming fish soup and the crisp fat of fried batter and the rough local olive oil and Gauloise smoke and the acceleration of orbiting motorbikes kept out the green smell of the maquis that encroaches upon ancient menhirs and tilted dolmens, the blooms by now in July gone except on Lorna’s card; its message, FILM HAS TAKEN UNEXPECTED TURN.

In the bright morning I give the three cards to Melanie to mail. They aren’t in what Jenny typed.

Revolution: spelled the same in French to mean also revulsion , but spelled rivoluzione in that obnoxious yachtsman’s land where that other key English sense of revolution (for short, rev or plural revs ) as rotation (e.g., as of an engine cycle or a satellite in space) is giro (as in cento giri al minuto , one hundred revs a minute). I said the word to impress Mary, maybe Mike; but also because I began then suddenly to think of our film as lurking on the margins of some unstable, implicit ground that might well shiver into revolution; yet the word I think arrived on my tongue from some dumb suburban meridian.