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101 f r o m t e n t m a k i n g n i g h t t r a i n , s o u t h e r n f r a n c e Stacks of couchettes sliding sideways to Toulouse. We two lying awake on top bunks across from each other, writing in journals with penlights, washed in dream-drumming, absurdly happy, splendidly silent. A love-ache guides this school of narrow beds arcing like strands of sound through a longhouse silver flute. Your full eyes looking at me and now in the dark asleep, little stations. Between us before dawn, the face of a thief intent, fingers probing our baggage for wallets and cameras. My eyes open into his. But now it must be explained how we are on the way to meet Jean-Louis Stahl, museum curator in Toulouse who will get us into caves that are normally forbidden. I love the Magdalenian. Pretending then, this dark Portuguese dock worker, cruel and quick and young, arm gone to the bicep in our luggage, to have mistaken this compartment for another, says to me,“Jean-Louis?” From a dim unraveling I reply,“Stahl?” Which can mean • • • 102 f r o m t e n t m a k i n g in European languages,“a pretext for clandestine activity” or “Stealing?” It throws him off script. Hermes gives a material glance, peek at the cooking, catch you later, money quarrels in the morning. The light and jagged laughs of our four German masseuse suitemates understand the incident in ways concealed from us. Man and woman, reclining nudes on continuous loan, slipping toward a sanctuary of overlapping animals, as the other we are runs thieving through the train, misidentifying occupants, footprints opposite and barely above the gradually slowing, long-expectant clatter. ...

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