THE MAFIA MUSICIANS OF DINAN

THE MAFIA MUSICIANS OF DINAN

It would be the journey home tomorrow. The journey back to getting a proper NCT on the old car. Although the ferry owners and the port authority in Rosslare had allowed the last minute ticket holders to board the boat, the Wexford county constabulary had expressed dismay over the absent document. But their innate decency, built from scrupulous legal precision and Irish friendliness, had prevented them from stopping and spoiling the family holiday - on the promise of document renewal as soon as the return voyage to Rosslare from Roscoff was completed.

Just before returning to Roscoff to join the ferry back to Ireland, we set off one damp morning for the market in Dinan. This small medieval town exudes oldness and a hint of the past at every corner, and its market square is large and surrounded by quaint historic stone buildings. In one corner of the square is the ancient stocks with weather-worn holes for the feet, tucked under the town-wall and part of the fortified battlements, where I got a parking ticket for double-parking. The flic was very casual and matter-of-fact , eyeballing my foreign plates and simply scribbling the amount needed on a piece of paper and tucking it under the wiper blade. I was very cheerful about it because we would be on the ferry home to Ireland the next day. It would remain unpaid.

And maybe that’s why he didn’t give me a long complicated parking ticket, knowing I would never pay it. This was a place where rules were to be broken. Near this town-wall, the kids decided they were hungry so we had a small picnic in the blazing sun. I had not expected the hot sun to appear on this damp day. Hatless, I had to wear my Yasser Arafat cloth on my head for protection. Tea and sandwiches, and then pack up the cups, and we went into the market square, a cacophony of music and different languages, and a riot of smells, tastes and colours.

The market in Dinan was dramatically and hypnotically attractive. Thirteen year old Steven found the most fascination in stalls filled to overflowing with very loudly coloured clothing, or cheap wrist-watches, or bootleg CDs. Or there were polished fossils, or small plastic bags with collections of sea-shells from the Indian Ocean. Or gaudily coloured casual shoes, or delicately embroidered decorative cloth-pieces for furniture, or scary African wood-carvings. Helen, our toddler, was frightened to even look at some of the wooden masks. The variety of stuff for sale seemed endless. I had the feeling that almost anything could be bought in this market, always for a very low price, and often of questionable legality.

The warm damp air was filled with fruity fragrances, some from local farms like strawberries and raspberries, and some from much further afield, like pineapples from Brazil and bananas from Cayenne. In one part of the market, stood the medieval church with all its doorway statues headless from the after-effects of a brutal revolution. In the doorway the delicious smell of Vietnamese deep-fried food filled our nostrils, and made us hungry to try the small dishes on offer. And coffee being brewed and drunk in the surrounding cafes was an additional reason for us to sniff the breeze deeply. We lounged about the headless door statues and had several small fried rolls of fish, which I could not identify, but which were extremely tasty. All fingers had to be licked repeatedly to get the last drop of flavor. Alan, our four year old fish-o-holic, particular loved this fried fish stuff.

Noise was everywhere. People haggling over prices. African traders switching from German to English or even to Arabic, as they sensed customers with different interests and possible purchases. Chinese and Vietnamese comparing views in French, their only common language. French was the language of most people, but you could hear at least a dozen European tongues and a lot of Asian ones too. My Arafat headgear invited all languages from Parsee to Turkish, and I shrugged off all offerings, feigning comprehension and disdain. The regional language in Dinan is Breton, and is not at all like French. It contains an awful lot of words with Z in them, and it resembles other Celtic languages like the Irish language but I couldn’t make any progress in understanding any of them. The kids tried their French , with mixed success. They were shy. Music seemed to be the lingua franca of the market, and the loud conflict between Breton folk-music and American heavy-metal rock dissolved easily in the smell of pineapples and coffee.It was hard to pin down where one ended and another began. However, as we ploughed across the alleyways between stalls, another type of music came to dominate all activities.

The sound which caught our attention was the Mafia Musicians. Now I don’t really think they were Mafia, but they certainly resembled Mafia men. They were half a dozen swarthy men from Italy, and they played foot-tapping dance music with lots of clarinettes and violins, all their black music cases piled untidily against the stone wall of a café nearby. It was amusing to watch them as they switched from one tune to the next, without losing the beat. They talked in Italian to each other without really paying close attention to their music. It was all very internal and private, almost secretive. As if it was literally cosa nostra : it was our thing they seemed to imply. They were memorable characters with their black suits and black hats, and people showed their appreciation by throwing coins into the empty hats on the sidewalks nearby. They were happy to pose momentarily while people took snaps from a distance. I was keen to get a pic of these Mafiosi, and I wanted to ask about the sorts of tunes they were playing, very Italian, very foot-tapping. But when I got too close for a pic or a question, they closed ranks and played louder, and I began to wonder if all the violin cases really contained only violins.

I thought about the yet-to-be-unpaid parking ticket and recognized I had tacitly become absorbed into the somewhat shady activities in Dinan’s market place, even if only for a couple of hours. After a few more minutes the kids piled in the Yasser Arafat car and left behind the stocks and the headless statues, and we scurried back to the civilisation of the ferry port, to take us back to legality in Rosslare…..

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GEOGRAPHICAL NOTE. The ferry from Ireland to France leaves Rosslare (County Wexford) and arrives in Roscoff, about ten miles from Dinan.

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