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CORDERITA
He calls out her name but there is no answer, save for the startled looks of the passengers in the wagon—two burly men, they both shift irritably to stare at the intruder and then go back to their newspapers, one of them resembles a coarser version of Lino Ventura, and across the aisle from him a mother who is rocking her infant to sleep—he calls out Cordelia’s name again without a reply, so maybe she is in the upper deck of this first-class compartment. No time to lose, in any case, no time to make sure she’s aboard the train—of course Cordelia is aboard, where else could she be?
Rafael steps back onto the platform, looks up and down the arches of the Gare d’Austerlitz, how the light filters from the hazy Paris sky as it had more than a century ago for the impressionist Paul-Louis Delance—how can he be making this painterly connection or remembering French noir gangster films at this moment of crisis?, but that’s how his eccentric, overeducated mind has always worked, his eyes sweep the voie 1 again, but no Cordelia, only their bulky piece of baggage and his carry-on forlornly next to it. A shrill whistle slices the air like knife into flesh and he can hesitate no longer, starts to roll his possessions laboriously toward the train, laments the heaviness when, as he braces himself for a superhuman effort, a pair of sturdy hands grabs the heavy piece of luggage, and lifts it onto the wagon, followed by a swing of the carry-on. Rafael recognizes the Good Samaritan as that handsome young man with a bluebird tattooed on the muscled bulge of his forearm, accompanied by a gracious gazelle of a jeune fille with an identical tattoo on her ankle, the couple Rafael had smiled upon in the salle d’attente that harbors anxious, delayed passengers at this gare, and both had smiled back under that basilica-like light, so much in love, him and her, like Rafael and Cordelia now but more like back when, back before, back in . . .
Do you want it deposited here?
Oh, yes, si ça ne vous importune pas.
Was it a mistake? To suppose Cordelia was somewhere on the train? That he was not going to end up in Bourges without her? But a worse mistake would be to ask the young man to lug the bags off the luggage rack and watch the doors slide shut on his astonished face up there as the train slowly jerks away, away, she had to be on board, she was expected—as he was, reluctantly—in that judge’s chambers in the Palais de Justice in Bourges, Cordelia wouldn’t let Lucien down. As the TER 3911 lurches sluggishly forward, he heads for the upper deck.
“Cordelia? Cordelia?”
Only an elderly couple, a wizened woman into her eighties and her older, balding husband with a scruffy white beard—they hark back to characters from a Beckett play or novel, though not as desperate or outlandish. She doesn’t look up, intent on unraveling some sort of package, while her husband hardly lifts his eyes, but enough for a flicker of acknowledgment, the old man is familiar with a distress like Rafael’s at some point in the past, at many points and bridges in the past, he sympathizes though not for long, his attention turning to his wife’s efforts, greedily observing her as she manages to pull back a plastic strip on a bowl of food, the smell wafts toward Rafael, accentuating his panic, why wasn’t it Cordelia opening some food for him or he for her, in convivial peace? That was all he needed: to be reminded of what he and Cordelia had not quite achieved, a future they had believed was within reach when they had first met and that now mocks him in that old man drooling with eagerness at his wife’s preparations for what promises to be a tasty Gallic meal, their affable camaraderie making even clearer and more dire the absence of Cordelia, where was she?
The suburbs of Paris are speeding by, soon there will ensue the rolling countryside, on every one of their many trips to Bourges he had been impressed by the lush green of the Monet landscape, but always Cordelia by his side, look at that little church in that hamlet, look, Rafa, its steeple must date from the seventeenth century at least, her architectural expertise always a delight, was there anything she did not know about buildings and their history?, her recent lecture at the European Parliament in Strasbourg on how Chile and Brazil had repurposed old colonial mansions to house homeless people had been brilliant, but the mere memory of her up on the podium stabbed him now, he was the one who was homeless now without her, he . . .
He lumbers to the end of the compartment, past the old couple, to see if he can search the rest of the train, maybe his silly Corderita unaccountably mounted some other part and is waiting for him with a pout, ready to scold him for almost missing their connection when she had told him not to tarry as he always does, but he will not have the pleasure of being sweetly scolded, he bumps up against the bulk of a door that refuses to open no matter how strenuously he turns the handle. On his desultory way back, the aging wife peeks at him briefly and comments more to herself than to him, “There’s no communication with the rest of the train, for some reason nobody understands. I had my sons complain, such good boys, but oh, la bureaucratie, the SNCF has decided to isolate each first-class coach, from in front and behind, maybe so passengers in second class can’t molest those of us who have paid more,” this last stated with considerable satisfaction as she focuses on getting her husband’s victuals ready.
Rafael does not move. He imagines Cordelia on the other side of that steel door, grasping a handle similar to the one he is holding, rotating it with the same futile frustration. And the same anguish. Fretting that he had been left behind, that he had suffered an accident. Or maybe she assumed he was on board and had fucked up. Or fucked up even worse by missing the train and would be arriving by the next connection, five hours later, five hours late to accompany her when she confronts Mickey, or perhaps even relieved that he would not have to be present, caring for him more than he cared for her, Rafael thinks, but that is not true, they are both equally invested in each other, this was not a competition to determine who was most uncomfortable having to revisit Mickey’s feral, lifeless eyes. He feels like howling her name out, see if that sound can traverse the bulwark separating them, scream really loud because the trictrac of the train will drown out any lesser, shrunken sound. But a stupid idea, anyway, because the coincidence would have to be too great, that she should be a few inches from him, with this wall, yet another wall between them, too surreal, he and she like Pyramus and Thisbe split from each other in ancient times by their own wall, why bring them up when their attempt to love each other across that division had ended in blood and suicide? Unlike Rafael and Cordelia, who had managed to keep their love alive despite all the barriers history had erected for them, but he nonetheless envied that pair of paramours in Babylon because that salacious Ovid gave them a crevice, however slight, to communicate through, whereas on this demonic train there was no crack in its steel partition, there was no way to signal to Cordelia if she happened to be there, so close and yet so far, that they were journeying in the same direction, that this divergence was merely an accident, but hey, if those mythical lovers of antiquity had a crack through which to speak to each other, well, modernity had graced Cordelia and Rafael with cell phones, so, of course, that was the response, that was it . . . One wall, at least, rifting him from Cordelia that he could circumvent and outflank.
Rafael returns to his unwelcoming seat and fishes out his mobile, dials Cordelia, gets a robot answering in French that this line is not in service, corresponds to no registered number, he tries again and then again and again as the same idiotic, intolerable response repeats its ridiculous message, of course her phone was registered, he has called her dozens of times during this European trip, Berlin, Saint-Malo, Paris, Strasbourg, especially when she wandered off and did not remember to arrive at the agreed hour at a restaurant or back at their hotel in whatever city they had been visiting, she had always answered or at least the number was registered, how could her damn phone break down precisely now, precisely in an emergency? Or had she turned it off, didn’t want to be bothered to explain the inexplicable, that she was not on this train heading for Bourges, heading for Lucien, heading for fucking Mickey. Maybe if Rafael called Lucien there would be some sort of message for him, but Lucien would, quite logically, wonder why he would have any notion where Cordelia was rather than her husband who was traveling with her. And why upset him, anyway, if there was nothing Lucien, no matter how efficient and affectionate he was, could do to allay Rafael’s apprehension? Maybe someone else’s phone, in the bottom compartment? The nice young man or his lady love? Importune the mother nursing the child? But not the two rough-looking men, the one who looks like a degraded version of Lino Ventura and the other one who looks like Ventura’s unsightly junior brother, every pore in Rafael’s skin tells him to be wary of them, maybe they are hit men, part of a family of gangsters. Maybe here to keep an eye on him, like in The Lady Vanishes, do something before he gets to Bourges, but that was illogical, it’s Cordelia who’s going to testify, her words crucial if that toxic bastard Mickey was ever to be put on trial, she is the one in danger, she is the one who . . . maybe that’s why she hadn’t boarded the train? She’d been jostled away by men like those two down there, sent to stop her, they’d cornered her before she could clamber into the first-class compartment, there was no other explanation . . .