On arrival at the Gare de Bercy that morning, Eric smiled
conspiratorially and shook hands with him before handing down his
heavy bag to a huge man wearing a chauffeur’s cap waiting on the
platform.
Though Pierre Louis couldn’t wait to get to his computer in his
apartment in Montmartre, his curiosity prevailed. He jumped down and
followed the two men – the chauffeur, thick and peasant-looking,
carrying the suitcase like a toy, the other sleek and elegant, his
white scarf fluttering in the cold wind whipping through the nearly
empty station, which seemed to levitate the two men and convey them
out the side door and into the waiting white limousine.
Pierre Louis shook his head. Had it even happened? Or had he
dreamed it all in a night train hallucination? Yet, he sensed, the
story told by a stranger in the middle of the night under the Frejus
Tunnel could change his life. Ah, chance! he thought. Fate brought the
man to my carriage. He could have reserved in 090 or 092. But no, Lady
Chance spirited him straight into my network. Una storiella, une
petite histoire, a little story about a Sicilian on the run was
enough, he thought. What was that crazy word? Incaprettato? It
described his own life. The ramifications of his story within the Mafia
story within the story he was writing were endless.
Though tips from his deboarding charges were always somewhat
embarrassing, he was surprised that a man like Eric didn’t leave him
a big gratuity in a small envelope as did more sophisticated
travelers. In this case, he preferred it. But it was peculiar.
Nothing! A handshake, puff! and he was gone.
Yet each return to Paris every ten days
or so was a return to the metropolis. He felt transported as if
by magic from the periphery of life to its center, from the
local to the global.
Emergence from the Frejus west of the Alps was to step back into
the real world from the make-believe world of circumscribed wall towns
south of the Alps, from a world equidistant from Kabul or New York.
Equidistant from the summits and the abysses of history and time.
Rues et rues, places et places, bistrots, cafés, les marchés
– Pierre Louis loved the magnificence. The grandiosity. The luxury
of its unrestrained effusion. But for that he had never believed that
Paris was necessarily better, or that he himself was more real,
capable or dedicated here than he was in Rome.
His heart was racing as he ran out of the station and down the
stairs into the metro. Too impatient to wait for the elevator in the
depths of the Abbesses station in Montmartre, he ran up the stairs,
across the square, and along the narrow cobbled lane to his building
over the restaurant at the corner.
~
“Ciao!” he said to the deskman standing in the doorway
of the hotel on the opposite corner.
“Buon Giorno, ” he said to the concierge holding his
mail.
“Ciao, amore. Ciao, ” he said to Dominique waiting in
the door of his studio.
“Bonjour, le voyageur!” she said laconically. She was
standing with her hands on her hips, a defiant look on her pale face
framed in lush blond hair, for an instant reminding him of…. Wasn’t
his mother standing like that in the doorway when he left Trastevere?
“Back from your travels in that funny country?”
“What do you mean?” Pierre Louis said and kissed her lightly on
her beautiful puckered lips. Still in a hurry to get to his desk, he
hoped their conversation wouldn’t degenerate into recriminations
before he had a chance to transfer his notes to his computer.
He couldn’t bear to hear her say again that Rome was like a bad
French novel – to be read and then thrown out the train window.
Dominique thrived on her French clichés. He had to admit that he didn’t
understand Rome either, but how could he explain that he liked the way
he lost his sense of time there among her monuments - those eternal
monuments that could be related to almost any moment in time? He was
tenderly indulgent of Rome’s pathetic attempts to be modern like its
rival Paris - attempts that he knew were as phony as Italy’s
economic statistics, probably faked to get into the European Union.
“A country of buffoons! Mean people, and stingy too … so
careful to conceal all their wealth and possessions!” Dominique
seemed to find gratification in launching another favorite French
criticism of their Italian cousins.
“Just because they don’t show off their wealth and
magnificence!” he said, and grinned down at her. He had good
occasion to compare them, and frankly, objectively, he found Italians
more noble and sumptuous than the French, more useful and generally
much more magnificent. Therefore he was still mystified by Giacomo
Casanova’s wry sentence that, “he who cannot dissimulate would do
well to leave Rome and seek his fortune in England.”
Yet, he thought to himself, neither Pier Luigi nor Pierre Louis
knew what Rome meant - except that ROMA backwards spelled AMOR. Again
he kissed Dominique, in the knowledge that amor-amour would settle
everything between them.
He wasn’t surprised when an hour later she looked up at him from
his chest and said, “When are you going to accept the fact that you’re
French, Pierre Louis?”
Three weeks later, as the departure whistle sounded at 19:35 and
just as Pier Luigi was preparing to close the door of coach number
091, Eric appeared below him, a casual smile on his face, his scarf
waving in the Rome breeze, and holding up toward Pier Luigi his heavy
bag. Eric swung up the steps; the train lurched slightly and eased out
of Termini Station.
“You nearly missed it this time,” Pier Luigi said.
“I’ve never missed a train in my life.”
“Destiny?” Pier Luigi grinned ironically.
“Action!” Eric said. “Are you ready?”
“Ready?”
“I promised more action stories. Here I am.”
At about 2 a.m. the clickety-clacks were bombarding Pier Luigi’s
popping eardrums when Eric stepped out of his compartment and took his
place on the jump seat. “The seven ways to win the love of a woman,”
he announced, crossing his legs and lighting a cigarette in the same
elegant rite.
“Two trains traveling in opposite directions are standing on
parallel tracks in a country station. It’s a three-minute stop. A
handsome man my age is looking out the open compartment window into
the eyes of a beautiful woman at the window of the other train. He
falls in love with her on the spot. It’s the chance of a lifetime if
in those few seconds he can only convince her that fate has brought
them together.”
“The situation seems hopeless,” Pier Luigi said with a grin.
“Desperate action is needed.”
“Precisely! He smiles but she doesn’t respond. He turns to show
her his magnificent profile but she ignores him. He holds up the
sociological tome he is reading but she looks bored. He demonstrates
his cultured speech, rolling his r’s and sharpening his l’s. No
reaction. He tells her she is beautiful. She frowns. Time is slipping
away. The trains are ready to continue on their separate ways.
Hurriedly he casts caution to the winds and asks her to marry him. She
begins to laugh as their trains inch slowly apart. In a flash of
inspiration he pulls a wad of money and checks and bonds from his
breast pocket and waves it toward her. Without hesitation she responds
with a wide smile and, extending her arms toward him, she calls, ‘yes,
yes, yes’ – until her train disappears from view.”
Pier Luigi/Pierre Louis stared at Eric blankly.
“Timely action was needed,” Eric said. “Not desperation. I
often think of action that is timely like a well-cut diamond. Remember
my friend Marco Aurelio? He was desperate but ended up incaprettato
anyway. He was no real diamond.”
Every few weeks during the months between January and May, Eric
boarded the Palatino, car 091, always at the last minute, for the
night crossing from Rome to Paris. Each night he brought new stories.
Stories of action and fate. Stories that were transcribed directly
into Pierre Louis’s Montmartre files.
Eric in Kenya to photograph the animals falls ill with dysentery.
In a hospital in Nairobi he falls in love with an Indian nurse, a
Buddhist. They live for a magic year in Zanzibar until she
mysteriously drowns saving a child in a flood. He travels to Hong Kong
but soon returns to wander around South Africa, a land he depicts as
“the most beautiful place in the world.”
Eric looked at Pier Luigi, spread his hands, and said, “What can
you do when fate comes for you?” he said.
“Timely action,” Pier Luigi said.
“Useless though, if it’s really fate!”
Diamonds often came up in those nocturnal tales. Refined diamonds
and timely action. Full life and unpredictable fate. “I have always
believed that literature too is like a diamond – it never sparkles
until it is properly cut and polished like a real diamond. Until a
story is split open and its heart exposed, like the diamond it is
merely crystallized carbon. No more than a bort. Crystallized carbon
can become a real diamond … or it can be exposed as false. You only
have to put a tiny drop of water on the surface of the stone. If it
spreads, it’s a false diamond. Only if it firms up, forming a half-
spheroid, is it the real thing.”
One spring morning on the arrival platform at the Gare de Bercy,
Eric announced with a certain finality in his voice – perhaps it was
a faint trace of the nostalgia that one feels when a period is ending
- that he was traveling that afternoon to Amsterdam. When Eric then
took his hand in both his, Pierre Louis understood from the intense
pressure that Eric had made his final night trip on the Palatino. He
felt as if a phase of his own life too had ended.
‘Diamonds?’ he wondered. He hoped Eric would have bags and bags
of them, all well cut, polished, refined, and sparkling with life. And
among them, perhaps, he would find another Gran Mogol.
Eric continued squeezing his hand as if transmitting to him
another, more secret message. Pierre Louis felt something soft passing
from Eric’s palm to his, before the other, with both hands,
carefully and gently bent Pierre Louis’s fingers to form a tight
pocket for the soft warm object the size of a coin.
As the chauffeur lifted his heavy bag and the two men again began
to walk toward the lateral exit from the station, Eric said over his
shoulder, “I hope I have helped you to cut a real diamond.”
Later, Pierre Louis looked out the little window of his studio down
Rue Tholozé, smiled at Dominque reading nearby, and stroked with
fondness the brilliant diamond nestled in a triangle of purple velvet
cloth lying near his left hand. It was polished and refined.
With rapid, assured strokes he typed the title of his new novella:
THE CONDUCTOR – A Diamond In the Rough.
