She walks as if she were leading a victory parade. The very word echoes 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 to walk 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 newfound freedom. Walking along, parading, as if she were about to become the heroine of some medieval ballad sung by a troubadour beneath the window of a captive king. So much sun is unusual. Walking as she is, 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 Génie 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, her steps are conquering space, taking her into a wholly new dimension.
The clock on the Gare de Lyon betrays an impossible hour, which even the sun denies.
“The next train? 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 cows outside pass.
The train does not stop before Valence.
She walks out onto the platform to move her legs. A two-minute stop. Up in the sky, 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 makes her feel dreamy.
She shakes her head. I’m getting 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. She sways dizzily between the wooden seats.
The man with grey hair is not sleeping. He is watching her navigate the passage, struggling against the train’s increasing motion, as if he were looking through her. The thought that somehow between Paris and Valence, on this stolen afternoon, she has physically dematerialized amuses her. 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 that, in her imagination, she is already placing within her intimate theatre, the hands of a pianist, or perhaps 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 butt cheeks, hands capable of measuring her ass so much more than the sun outside.
She shakes her head, both amused and annoyed by her own cliché 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 turn-of-the-century scenes so familiar to the tarot. She slows down imperceptibly, still moving ahead, and turns back to look again, not quite brave enough to stand still. She’s right: the characters on the cards are mostly naked, 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 seated woman is naked, but the man lying down is also, and another man, 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 see only 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 glove-covered hand towards the imposing virile member. The man whose cock it is has grey hair, and it makes her think right away of the silent passenger in the seat a few rows back.
The black man throws the twelve down, and another of the men adds the twenty. She just has 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 had 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. 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 Rhône river flows heavily by, moving between nuclear power stations. At any rate, the stations do not affect the area’s luminosity.
She senses a movement to her left and turns. The man with grey hair is 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 has a vaguely 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 for approval, as if those two words and the unspoken answer will justify all that will follow.
The man’s right hand skims by her neck while his left hand takes hold of her knee. His skin is just as she expected: warm and dry.
He allows her just a few seconds to imagine what is about to happen. His fingers tread ever so lightly across her skin, as if he were caressing water without creating a stir across its surface.
His fragrance is both pleasant and discreet. She doesn’t know why, but his smell reminds her of Louis XV furniture, burnished wood pieces.
For a while he doesn’t move, his face just inches from hers, his hand almost motionless on her knee, his fingers delicately skimming her neck.
The dark clouds inside his grey eyes make him look like a phantom. And finally he bends slowly over towards her and kisses her. She holds on to him, slides her own hands under the fashionable grey jacket he is wearing, takes hold of his shirt, grabs his tie… The hand on her knee begins a slow and deliberate journey upward along her thigh and cups her cunt, forcing itself against the already wet silk. The man pulls the thin panties to one side of her gash, his fingers lingering against the soft and delicate lips with assurance. “With a sense of contained violence,” she thinks aloud. And the mental image of her cunt in his grasp makes her smile and hold herself even more open. She allows her hand to slip under the man’s belt, and through the thin material of his trousers grabs hold of his hardening virility, an initial contact that surprises her by its brazenness. She pulls on the zip of his fly and extricates the jutting cock now pulsing against her fingers, just as she leans her own body slightly backward so that the man’s hands might have easier access to her stomach and, she hopes, her ass.