He's
so timid he fears the morrow at dawn the day before tomorrow. This
timid little bird peeps in French uncertainly. So humble a creature
can only perish. L'idée de chaque démarche l'éffrayait.
He scheduled
disappointments. Those who regret are timid. It était en proie
au remords.
Simone
lives in a slum in Thionville in Lorraine. She has two sons by two
men and never married. She's 60. They live in London; mes deux fils,
she writes over and over on a page
in the phone book.
Her case
has been bounced to Luxembourg from a court in San Francisco. She
worked in San Francisco for the government of Luxembourg. She cannot
afford to live in Luxembourg. She says she is a joint citizen of France
and the United States. Poor old France is putting her up in Godawful
Thionville near smug, tough Luxembourg.
Luxembourg
has easy-to-get temporary artist visas. Girls flock there from the
east to perform in cabarets. Then their managers keep their passports
to insure repayment for transportation, hotels, clothes; and the girls
are forced into prostitution. Simone, pursuing her case, leaves him
in a square with ten cabarets.
The crazed
polyglot whores pun in five languages. They call themselves the luxenpoor.
English is big with whores and rubbies. Rubbies stagger in the same
language everywhere. He thinks he can stagger with them.
And then
Paris is Alert because of Terrorism. Soldats et flics patrol the train
stations. (Bogie in Casablanca calls the French cops 'flicks.') Before
dawn, thinking of Simone, he strolls into the Gare de Lyon: the usual
mumbling homeless.
But a
woman at the entrance boldly requests 30 francs. Then a muscular young
blond man with pierced nostrils steps up to him and asks something
in loud colloquial French.
Je suis
desolé, Monsieur, mais je ne suis pas français and je
ne vous comprehends pas.
The muscular
man moves closer and shouts these same words back at him. Three friends,
among them a whore, watch, smirking.
Je cherche
un flic, he says.
Cherches
un flic! Cherches un flic! the other screams.
There
are no soldiers and police in the Gare de Lyon after midnight. The
subways and the gendarmerie close.
