Paris 1909
710 Words
Paris 1909
Mario savored another bite from the slow-cooked in Burgundy wine filet of his just as he did of the view of the table opposite him at the ‘Grand Colbert’ hotel.
‘Those green eyes could send you to heaven or to hell…or to both…’
‘Are you following me?’
‘Absolutely…’
‘So, what do you have to say?’
‘No revolution even waited for the masses to mature…It imposed itself on them…’
‘That’s not what we’re talking about’.
‘Really…? What then…’
He lifted his glass in a barely discernible greeting to the young woman, before bringing it to his lips.
‘Your life’.
‘I agree…’
He reciprocated with a faint smile to the ethereal creature.
‘And where do we end up?’ Enzo insisted.
‘Enjoy your wine…Your sanctified proletariats did not yet meet with their class conscience and they are not about to during this meal…’
‘You were offered a position at the university’.
Mario turned at last to look at his friend.
‘Enzo, can you stop busting my balls? If you remember, that was just for one day and then they reconsidered. But even if they hadn’t, I would have left myself. Why don’t you give credit to the enlightened brains of our place that they have saved me a great trouble and the world from yet another authority?
‘That’s what we’re talking about. That you would leave by yourself. And the next available option would be a military career?
‘A career…it sounds like a funereal eulogy…
‘Then, what business of yours is in the army?
‘I’ve always been interested to see how the system works on the inside. When I bored, I’ll leave.
‘It’s not a game, Mario’.
‘Who says I’m playing…?’
‘The war is inescapable’.
‘I know…’
‘So, what do you have to say?’
‘Smile, Enzo. We’re in Paris.
‘Paris has been preparing for a decade now for the bloodiest war in his history. The fabricated Dreyfuss case has fomented the latent anti-Germanism. Honest voices are drowned in the air vacuum between the silence of the apsinthe-filled French intelligentsia and the social-chauvinistic cries of the French left’.
‘How come I was under the impression we were at war? Can you see anything else happening? Another reality perhaps that I fail to see?’
‘The coming reality we cannot even imagine. We are going through the wildest economic antagonisms.
‘Possibly…’
‘Alea jacta est, Mario. The results of the extended geological surveys ordered by Deutsche Bank on the Osmanli Padisahlari fields have been definitive. There are seas of oil under there. Hamit’s turn towards the German capital was the glove thrown at the face of London. The advance of German monopolies on the oil of the East is completed with the Young Turks’ policy. British Empire will not swallow the union of Berlin with the Persian Gulf.
‘Expected…’
‘And what do you have to say about it?’
‘There is ghost hovering over my life. Renata. She put you up to this’.
Mario got up, put some paper notes in Enzo’s hand and said to his ear.
‘Don’t worry if I don’t come back to the hotel tonight’.
‘Where are you going?’
‘At the table, right behind you…’
‘May I?’
He pulled up the chair and sat without waiting for an answer.
‘I didn’t give you my permission’.
‘Neither did I’.
The young woman laid her pencils on the pages she was drawing. Correspondence sheets from those luxury hotels made available to their customers. Those sheets at the Ritz, in particular. She looked at him.
‘Art asks no one for permission’.
‘Neither does love’.
She laughed. Mario picked up a pencil drawing and looked at it.
‘May I keep it…Oguille?
‘Of course’.
‘Do you bring luck to what you touch?’
‘Perhaps…but then again, perhaps not…’
‘I’ll risk it…’
Petrichor-filled rain aftermath. They walked in the autumnal Paris. She took him to the alleys of Montmartre. The wandering painters were placing their easels with the cheap canvas on the wet flagstones of the square. They talked about art. She talked. He listened. He pretended to. The first chance he got, he pulled her into an isolated threshold and kissed her. They spent six days and six nights together in a room of a cheap inn. They made love, ate in bed and made love again. She painted him. She introduced him to her friends. Bohemians who frequented Cabaret Lapin Agile. Art was a cheap price to pay to survive in the swamp of lasciviousness of Plaza Pigal. The night she left, she asked him not to see her again. She set the rules. He only had a name. Oguille…
- Writer
