The fat man pulled on a dangling cord. Virginia’s head lifted. She smiled at Stuart. “Hello Stuart. You’ve come back to me?”
The fat man grunted, “Yes, he’s come back to you, Virginia.”
Stuart toppled off his chair. The gnome produced a pair of tailor’s shears and started to cut up the legs of Stuart’s pants. The fat man jingled a palmful of golden rings. His other hand held a pair of peculiarly shaped pliers.
TAROT by Florence Dugas
translated by Maxim Jakubowski
Noon was gently moving towards two o’clock. As it was already summer time, no one could telclass="underline" somewhere in the world it’s always noon.
It was as if the sun had given her a sign and she hadn’t returned to work.
The sound of her heels against the stone of the road and the side pavement is like a clamour of victory. She supplies a rhythm to the city, and her thin, long legs move, map and order its topography, like a defiant army marching ahead under the new found sun, celebrating the coming of spring. It is good to feel the heat spread across her skin, caressing her knees like two warm hands, even moving up between her thighs now no longer under the protection of nylon. The sun almost draws a crown of gold around her head, as if she is a chosen one. From time to time she even swings her head either way to the side, like a racehorse in heat. Saying “yes” and “no” to her invisible mount while her heavy stream of hair undulates across her back. She straightens her back, holding her stomach in and the flow of her hair swims gloriously in motion.
She walks as if leading a victory parade.
“Parade.” The very word echoes studiously across her brain, to the rhythm of her heels, and it amuses her to invent more meanings for it. To parade is more than just walking at random, no mere promenade where you never know where the next step leads. “To parade is to move like God across his garden,” Brisset used to say. It even makes her look a little drunk, dizzy from her newly found freedom. Walking along, parading, as if she were about to become the heroine of some medieval ballad sung by a troubadour below the window of a captive king. All this sun is so unusual. Walking as she does, head high, she can no longer hear Paris surrounding her, just the sound of her heels clicking along; nor can she see the cars and passers-by, just the winged Genie of the Bastille, flying high up there close to Icarus. She is on parade: she’s come out of her shell, the whole world is on offer to her, her steps are conquering space, taking her into a whole new dimension.
The clock on the Gare de Lyon betrays an impossible hour, that even the sun denies.
“The next train to leave? Well, you’ve got the Paris-Vintimille, in ten minutes. Seats? Oh, as many as you want. Non smoking? Isn’t the weather lovely? The sky is so blue. Yes, I understand.”
The railways guy sitting behind the immediate departures window is actually not bad-looking at all.
It’s true, there are few people on the train. In her compartment, just five men: four of them are playing cards while the fifth further down appears to be sleeping already, with just his neck and short greying hair visible from her vantage point.
With all those empty seats available, she chooses to sit on the right hand side, so she can enjoy the sun for the rest of the afternoon.
She feels blandly happy, sunny, watching all the stationary cows outside pass by.
The train does not stop before Valence.
She walks out onto the platform to get some movement into her legs. A two-minute stop. Up there, the sun hasn’t moved at all but the heat is now more oppressive, a sign they are further south, in the Midi. She can feel the sun rising ever so stealthily up her thighs, so much more aggressively than in Paris, and this metaphor first makes her smile, then causes her to feel dreamy.
She shakes her head. “I’m becoming delirious,” she thinks.
But on the other hand she feels ever so free.
She returns to the compartment from the other end, and walks down the rows of seats, as the train begins speeding up again, swaying dizzily between the wooden seats.
The man with grey hair is not sleeping. He is watching her navigate her passage, struggling against the train’s increasing motion, as if he were looking through her and not even seeing her. The possibility that somehow between Paris and Valence, on this stolen afternoon, she has physically dematerialized amuses her when she thinks of it. Is the man not really looking at her? He is quite handsome, in a prematurely greying way. His eyes are the same colour as his hair, pale grey veined with black – a man of marble. As she passes him, she gazes at his hands, laid out flat on the table. Quite beautiful hands which in her imagination she is already placing within her intimate theatre, the hands of a pianist, or there again a surgeon’s hands ready to sew someone’s wound up, or even a pair of warm and dry hands alighting on her knees, sliding up her skirt, moving into her underwear and grabbing her bum cheeks, hands capable of measuring her arse so much more than the sun outside.
She shakes her head, both amused and annoyed by her own clichéd fantasy.
The four men are still busy with their card game. As she passes them, she sees it is a tarot deck, the same high numbers and cards, but something catches her attention: the images on the cards aren’t the ones she knows, the end-of-century scenes so familiar to the tarot. She imperceptibly slows down, still moving ahead though and turns back to look again, not quite brave enough to stand still. She’s right: the characters on the cards are mostly undressed, unlike the images she’s familiar with. The man nearest to her, an ebony-coloured African man, still holds four cards in his hand – two small squares as well as an eleven and a twelve: on the first one, the characters are sitting around a picnic scene imitating Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, the woman sitting is naked, but the man lying down also is, as another who is leaning towards her as if to bite her breasts is getting undressed. She has difficulty seeing the other card, obscured as it is by the man’s thick black thumb, but again the woman in the boat is nude. On the twelve, she can only see the upper half of the card: a ball somewhere in the background, but on the right hand side the image of a man seemingly offering his cock deferentially to two sitting women whose clothes have been partly pulled open, one of the women is thrusting her peach-coloured glove-covered hand towards the imposing virile member. The man whose cock it is has grey hair, and it makes her think straight away of the silent passenger in the seat a few rows back.
The negro throws the twelve down, and another of the men adds the twenty. She just has the time to glimpse the image of four men sitting at a table playing cards, all in the buff, while a woman under the table is seemingly sucking off the player on the left. The illustrator has frozen the scene just as her mouth is about to devour his mushroom head and her cheeks are delicately deformed by the intrusion.
She shrugs her shoulders. Scenes from a brothel, she reckons, no doubt a Belle Époque set of cards.
She walks back to her seat, and distractedly watches the landscape roll by, sky moving between white and blue. The Rhone river flows heavily by, moving between nuclear power stations. At any rate, the stations do not affect the area’s luminosity.
She feels movement to her left and turns. The man with grey hair is already there, looking over her shoulder. And like earlier, he has the same distant and detached look, as if his eyes are fixed on a point some ten centimetres behind her.
“May I?” he says, sitting next to her.
He definitely has a vague English accent.
He calmly pulls up the arm separating their two seats, deliberately abolishing all distance between them, or any form of misunderstanding.
“May I…” These are the only words he says, and her quiet agreement, as she does not object, is all he needs as approval, as if those two words and the unspoken answer will justify all that will follow.