The Rose Café by John Hanson Mitchell

The Rose Café by John Hanson Mitchell

Author:John Hanson Mitchell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497682115
Publisher: Open Road Distribution


chapter eight

Migrants

Migratory birds begin to arrive on the western slopes and headlands of Corsica as early as February, flying north from their wintering grounds in Africa. By March their numbers swell, and by April the maquis is alive with the chirrups and chips and songs of the local nesting birds, including the fluted bell of the blackbird, the explosive little call of the Cetti’s warbler, and the various trills, churrs, squeaks, whistles, and buzzes of the linnets and the pipits, and the bee-eaters and buntings.

A pair of house martins began building a nest over a wall lamp earlier in the spring. We saw them first darting through the verandah like half-seen shadows and hovering around the wall lamp where the geckos used to collect at night. Then after a few days, they started to bring in nest materials. You would be lounging in one of the chairs on the verandah with a book and a drink, half-asleep from the heat, and imagine, or perhaps dream, that something just flew past your ear, and then, awake, you would see the bird fly out again in search of more twigs. The work went on for a week or so and then, after much scrambling and aerial display, the female laid her eggs and began incubating.

I brought a chair over one afternoon while the birds were off feeding and felt the warm little rounded shells and then quickly retreated before the mother returned.

Figaro, Micheline’s overweight tabby cat, expressed a passing interest in these two birds and would sometimes lie stretched out under the lamp, but he was too lazy to bother to try to catch one.

By late June the martins had hatched one brood of nestlings and were working on another. The parents were swooping in under the beamed roof at regular intervals with beaks full of insects that they would feed to their young. We could hear their cheeping as soon as the parents would arrive and see their gaping mouths just above the edge of the nest.

Another species of migrant began passing through about this time. A rude couple of pieds-noirs, as the European Algerians were called, booked a room in late June, but they so offended Micheline with their abrupt demands that she became curiously inactive whenever they would ask for something.

“Bring us two demis,” they would command.

“Straightaway,” she would say and rush off to the kitchen behind the bar, where she would sit in a chair just behind the back door of the scullery and smoke a cigarette. After five minutes or so, she would bring out one beer.

“We wanted two,” they demanded.

And off she’d go for another five minutes.

Dinners were equally slow, and soon they stopped eating at the restaurant, and then one day, they left.

The same thing happened—unintentionally this time—with two gentlemen from London who were traveling together and checked in, intending to stay for a few days. They were perfectly civilized types who dressed in collared shirts with cravats, stuck to themselves, and were always polite, albeit aloof from the locals.



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