Such beauty is there in youth,
and yet it runs away!
Be merry while you may:
tomorrow is no certainty.
— Lorenzo de’ Medici
For the first time in his life, Marc was riding a train instead of loading it with other people’s baggage. It was an intoxicating sensation that the boy breathed it in like the mixture of flour and eggs rising from kitchens on Sunday mornings. The first-class cabin was decorated with English watercolors and embroidered Florentine wallpaper that simmered red and gold in the sun. The boy’s nostrils dilated with pleasure as they picked up the smell of desiccated tea and wood lacquer. The steward was rolling down the aisle a tray loaded with ripe apples, Swiss chocolate, and freshly squeezed orange juice—and the train hadn’t even left the station yet.
On the platform, the beardless boys loaded heavy bags onto the train. All wore heavy white caps to shield their heads from the midday sun and loose-sleeved shirts plastered to their sweaty backs like stamps on envelopes. Marc knew their broken brown shoes hurt like a flogging. The boys lifted fat ladies’ trunks stuffed shamelessly with ugly hats, kids’ bags with broken wooden toys, and the occasional slim business case with papers and pens and a boring book.
Marc turned away from the window when Amelie touched his hand. Her pianist fingers played with his knuckles on the seat’s purple velvety armrest. His heart throbbed and ached when he looked at her angel face and auburn eyes and hair. Had he known anything about Raphael or Michelangelo, he would have thought her worthy of a fresco. Outside, the thumping and banging and shouting of the baggage boys got louder.
The station never knew a busier hour than noon. Some time in the past Marc must have loaded the very train he was now riding with the suitcases that now hosted his own few clothes, Amelie’s endless dolls and wardrobe, and the long-barreled hunting guns of Monsieur Volieur. Marc had been through a lot, but he had never even thought of leaving the seaside for downtown Paris. Since childhood he had provided for himself north and south, east and west, but this was the first time he felt like being relocated rather than moving. But how could he ever say no to the radiant Amelie, with whom he was surely in love, and her adorable parents?
Marc adjusted the collar of his ironed white shirt, not sure whether he liked the bow-tie pushing against his throat.
~*~
He had taken that train job seriously. He showed up at the station at six in the morning sharp, wore his baggy hat and the faded shirt with the railways badge, and headed for the tracks. The brisk morning air carried a pungent smell of Mediterranean seaweed mixed with burnt coal from locomotives. It was a strangely pleasant moment to relish in silence. Soon the sun would come up and trains would begin to pummel their way into the station, blowing off steam and engine grease. He would sweat like a fat man wearing a fur as he lifted weights heavier than boys his age were fit to handle, while waves of people in an unreasonable hurry pounded into him. Yet it was a good job. Shortly after noon he stopped by the railroad company’s office at the end of the station to receive a few coins. He stuffed the rusted silver in a pocket and returned the shirt with the badge, and then, as the early afternoon heat rose from the town’s one paved road, he walked away bare-chested toward the beach and Amelie. His skin, dark at birth and further darkened by the seaside sun, could not possibly bronze any more.
The Bellevieu hotel throned over the Mediterranean from atop a grassy hillock not fifty meters from the shore. The Volieurs ran the hotel, or were permanent special guests. Marc could never quite figure out. They were revered by the staff and dined in the hall with the big painting and clean silverware. Amelie’s father, an investor of sorts, always smoked his evening cigar on the hotel’s front terrace. Marc had convinced himself they owned the place because of their charm over the staff. A waiter in jacket and tie had once shooed Marc away because “this is no place for the likes of you, boy,” but Amelie’s mother had reprimanded him. The waiter had retreated with an apology and a side glance to Marc when the Volieurs weren’t looking.
It helped that Amelie’s parents liked him. Every day, on his way back from the station, he stood below the terrace and looked up, and Monsieur Volieur waved at him from behind a newspaper and called for his daughter. Amelie would rush down the stairs in such an unladylike manner that her mother scolded her, but never too harshly. Marc would hold the girl’s hand and they would leave, walking bare-footed across the white sands, looking for a silent and lonely spot where the waves could be heard. A small hut seldom used by fishermen was a favored haven. With the complicity of shade, Marc would unlatch the dress that concealed the pearly beauty of Amelie. Their bodies would dance with impossible synergy to a scripted and yet creative rhythm as sun rays penetrated the wooden planks of the hut like tongues trying to lash the youngsters’ naked backs.
In the evenings, Amelie would retreat to prepare for dinner. She had to wear a fine lacy dress, that Madame Volieur recommended be white as it was most adequate for girls her age, before joining her parents at the dining hall. Marc was never included in these six-course, two-hour long banquets—until a day in late July when Monsieur Volieur insisted he stopped by for dinner, seeing the “good influence” he was having on Amelie... whatever that meant. He also mentioned school, which sounded odd to Marc as he had not been to one in a long time. And so Marc and Amelie spent the afternoon not at the hut but in town, fighting nerves and trying to find a decent suit for Marc. How were they to interpret this? Was it merely a friendly invitation? An unscrupulous gesture of charity for a poorer boy who couldn’t afford a hot meal? Or perhaps an ambush, so that they kids could be scrutinized by the leering eyes of parents and miscellaneous relatives and classy friends searching for signs of immorality on their immature bodies clumsily clad in adult attires?
At seven, Marc stood by the large dining salon’s doors, pretending to take interest in a ficus plant. Amelie stood at his side, her arm under his, looking at the hall full of adults smoking cigars or fanning themselves with feathers. The youngsters dared not move until called in. Amelie’s father eventually seemed to take pity on them, and he gestured to his daughter. Amelie put on her best smile, the one that never failed to give Marc a good headache, and walked in, her lacy white dress flowing behind her like a swan’s tail. Marc swallowed his heart out of his throat and just followed like a thirsty dog. In the following twenty minutes he was introduced to more people than he had ever met before. He was surprised that Amelie could remember all those names. The elderly colonel with the stiff uniform and a million medals. The loquacious old family friend. The teacher from that good school in Paris, bless his heart for teaching rambunctious preteen Amelie to read and write and count on her plump fingertips. The inquisitive aunt. The attractive male cousin. The whorish niece with her lesbian-in-disguise guest. Marc let himself be guided in a stupor down a hallway of human specimen that spoke to him, distant echoes, from behind their glass alcoves.
Not one of those perfectly trained circus carnivores even remotely hinted to Marc and Amelie as being a couple, but what their mouths did not speak, their eyes shot out fiercely yet subtly. They looked not at them, but inside them. Marc felt stripped, hung on the wall like a portrait, and prodded by hot rods. When finally he sat down at the long table, he became thirsty, hungry, and cold. Four forks on his left, four knives on his right, three spoons, so many shiny little glasses, and the sparkles from the overhead chandelier that very nearly blinded him. Amelie held his hand below the table.
The guests talked about things that were familiar to Marc, but they used long and big words. They talked about town and country, school and work, and about all those poor boys in the countryside and at the seaside who could never afford a true education. Thankfully, a few fine ladies from some circle or church were willing to take these boys and girls in their homes and raise them as members of the future gentry. Marc had not the faintest idea of what it was all about, but the words they all used sounded too nice to debate. And before he knew it, Monsieur Volieur was asking him to come to Paris. Amelie had a beaming look on her face, so radiant and so thoroughly intimidating that Marc just said yes, of course, he would like that very much Madame and Monsieur Volieur you are such wonderful people.
~*~
The baggage boys lifted bags and dumped them on the train, cursed, wiped their glistening puerile foreheads, and lifted and dumped some more, beautiful childlike flesh automatons. Marc squirmed on the velvety seat as the khaki shorts strangled his skinny thighs. Then the train moved—or, rather, the station did, and the hills, and the baggage boys—lifting, lifting. All moved out of focus and then out of sight.
Marc adjusted his collar, not liking the bow-tie pushing against his throat. Madame and Monsieur Volieur sat in silence, reading books with yellow pages and no titles on the covers. Amelie still held his hand, but now a quizzical look darkened her angel face, perhaps wondering why her new boy from the seaside looked so grim and so stiff in such handsome clothes.
Marc felt like choking. He kept looking out of the window, wishing he could let in the sea breeze, but the sea was nowhere to be seen. The grassy hillsides were replaced by smoky soot and bulky white rocks that hurt his eyes. He looked on in a daze as the train rolled toward Paris, decelerating to infinity.