When I get to sobbing out “Look at me, curse you all!”, when I get all squinty about the eyes, when I get to reproaching life’s way in the grayness of the long-drawn shadows of sleepless dawns, I scratch the itch to go walking.
When I get like this, then, I get in a train at Gare d’Austerlitz and go to a town called Figeac, a formerly-hopping burg on the river Lot, in the Midi.
In the Midi, the noon-time sun hangs lovingly above you.
At Austerlitz, the Holy Roman Empire finally faded into historical night. The battle was Napoléon’s riskiest and most successful – there, the bravado of the French line put the guineas of Pitt at nought (at least, for a while) and the Russkies and Prusskies to flight.
Figeac, then. Jean-François Champollion, who translated the Rosetta stone, was from Figeac – there’s a copy of the stone in the central square. On the one side, classic Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Coptic script are set side by side. On the other, I don’t know. However, the Rosetta stone text turns around the cosmological concept of Phanes – birth, origination, recurrence, the legitimacy of Pharaoh Ptolemy V Epiphanes and so forth.
A glance around Figeac’s empty public square makes one thing apparent. The heavy, timeless ether of the place surely enabled Champollion to spend years of this all-too-short life figuring out the signifying concordances of written Copt, Greek and Egyptian.
Champollion’s achievement lends a certain air of cosmic moment to an otherwise unprepossessing destination, just as the realization that Weevil & Orville Wright found enough ether in Dayton, Ohio’s stiflingly humid air to imagine, then, by golly, to put wheels on, a flying machine, somehow changes the perceived nature of even Dayton, Ohio.
Also about Figeac.
There is a green grocer off the main square who sells absolutely every type of dried fruit a perverted sweet-hog could possibly dream up.
The full-bosomed, sweat-slick ladies who systematically shovel more than you’ve asked for into white paper bags keep the implicit promise of their smirking presences, too. If a fruit isn’t naturally sweet enough to send a body into diabetic shock at first gob-full, the ordinary sweet-hog may rest assured that there will be enough coarse sugar on it to bring it up to true terminal snuff.
Karine comes with me to Austerlitz. She’s relieved to be rid of me, but still kindly. She holds my hand and chatters amiably as we walk over a higgledy-piggedly parking area and into what seems to be a back entrance but isn’t and find ourselves in a vast, echoing hall.
Broken in two/I know that you’re on to me/
that I only come home when I am so all alone/
that I can believe
Come to me now/lay your hand over me/
even if it’s a lie/saying we’ll be all right/
And I shall believe
sings Sheryl Crow from some loudspeaker somewhere.
One thing that has always struck me about my adopted country is the number of clairvoyants, mediums, marabouts, astrologers, magnetizers and black and white magicians, among other ancient professions, that persist here.
Easily as many as the Bay Area.
Such persistence may astonish those who have heard the bold claim that France is cartesienne. This is because when one who has only been exposed to book-learning thinks of Descartes, he or she usually thinks of “reason”. But this is to rien comprendre. What people actually mean by “Cartesian” is “logical”, even when they think “reason”.
So, if you believe black magic works, it is only logical – “cartesien” – to try it out. With so much potential added-value involved, fool if you don’t at least try, too.
As Karine & I join the milling crowd of Austerlitz gare, any number of famous professors of magic are handing out flimsy little prospectuses that promise the return of the loved one and the defeat of the enemy. As a plus, effective love philters are also available.
When we reach the right platform, Karine pecks me on the cheek. I squeeze her hand. She looks into my face, says, “Adieu, mon Tracy.”
This always touches me. I don’t want to be hers, actually. Certainly, the very idea repels me; her too, I guess – what we own, we love, but we never do own what we love.
It’s her emotion that touches me. Hers is so fine it can resolve a real-life dilemma into an untrue word and make it ring right in the soul.
I wave my hand, a bit lamely, very close to my chest, say, “Mais. A bientôt, Bébé.”
She ain’t my baby, either, but that’s all right. It’s the emotion. I believe.
The train to Figeac is an old beat up inter-cities job and it’s a mostly hot six or seven-hour trip. I turn abruptly away from Karine to walk up the platform, to find a likely-looking car and a seat.
And no sooner do I feel that she has also walked off than a short, skinny, impossibly wrinkled African man springs up at my side.
He’s form-molded into a long yellow boubou and wearing one of those Muslim-style kippas, white, with a little lacework around the edges. Just for the deviltry of it, I think.
It’s a Marabout, a saint, a magician – what I call the characters who hang around here trying to cadge money by traditional means. In fact, some of his flimsy prospectuses have fallen and scatter beneath our feet.
I try to read them: Professeur Ssss… Somebobombuko? Msuboko? Ngumkoko? – I can’t make out the name.
Somebobbuko grabs my arm, growls:
Les trompettes claironnent/Le moment est venu/Celui qui y montera/ descendra dans la douleur – “The trump sounds/the moment is come/who goes arrives in pain.”
– Quoi?
I try to pull the guy’s hand off my arm and can’t.
He’s strong. His fingers are long and fierce, experienced in clinging tight, like raven claws.
– “What is it? What do you want?”
I want to check my wallet but am afraid to. It may mean allowing myself to fall into the magician’s embrace.
He smells old, foreign.
I turn towards the man, catch Karine out of the corner of my eye.
She is passing in front of the Relais news kiosk. She is just now turning to look back at me.
She sees the scene and promptly swivels around, fixes on me and the sticky Marabout, who is repeating, “The trump sounds/the moment is come/who goes arrives in pain.” – Squeezing my arm hard, harder.
– “Putain! Lâchez-moi!” I cry.
I manage to pry his claw off. I stumble back into some travelers stalking up the platform.
Quick as lightning, the magician seizes my hand, keeps me from falling. Steadies me.
“Sir,” he whispers in my ear in soft, sweet West African English. “How now then? Do not go, Sir.” He backs away, never letting my hand free, however. He smiles broadly. “The Great Wheel shall turn if ye do.”
– “What?” I say, “Who are you? What do you want?”
“O! I am a great friend, Sir. A great friend. Do not board this train, Sir. Or, if you do, Sir, the Great Wheel shall turn. Things will never then be the same again, Friend.”
– “And won’t the Great Wheel turn if I don’t get on this train?”
The Marabout cocks his head, as if listening to another voice.
He takes my hand in both of his, gentle now. He studies the question in my eyes.
Says he, “If the right hand turns what to the left is destined, then the turning shall not be the same, in time or in space, indeed, in life, Friend.”
Something makes me look away from him: there is Karine, coming towards us.
– “I don’t know if one way or another way will – shall? – go for me or against me,” I tell the man. “I don’t know and you can’t tell me. Let your Great Wheel turn. I’ll turn with it.”
He smiles broadly again, shows his long yellow teeth.
– “Go away.”
The Marabout is turning on his heel just as Karine fills my sight. When I turn back to him, the he is gone.
More and more people are flooding onto the narrow platform; I am a lone snag in a strong current. Karine steps in front of me. She spreads out her fingers and lays the whole of her hand on my beating heart, leans to me, looking up sidelong into my face, trying to see me.
– “You don’t have to go, you know.”
“O, but I want to,” I say, “I want the Great Wheel to turn.”
– “It won’t turn the way you want it to. I want it to.”
“Does it ever turn the way somebody wants it to? Does it ever, Bébé? What do you want, Karine? Can you even know, mon amie?”
– “No. It doesn’t. Dunno. Non.”
“The more risk, the more life, then.”
I touch her cheek, that I love.
The imminent departure announcement.
Without ado, I swing up on the high step of the car behind me. I jump inside. The heavy door crashes shut – thunk.
The train jerks down the quai and out of Austerlitz.
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