Texto en una libreta (part 2)

The second part to a work ("Text from a notebook") by this Argentine man of letters.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

Curiously enough, what most worried me from the beginning was whether I would learn how they lived, without it being my impression that the reasons for such a life were of paramount importance.  Almost immediately I forsook any notion of sidings or abandoned caves; their existence was manifest and coincided with the comings and goings of the passengers between stations.  There is no doubt that one can vaguely detect between Loria and Plaza Once a Hades replete with forges, detours, warehouses of materials, and odd boxes fitted with blackened glass.  I espied this type of netherworld for a few seconds, as the train entering the station brutally shook us through its curves, a station which, in comparison to the netherworld, seemed brilliant.  For me it was enough to consider the number of workers and foremen sharing these dirty galleries with the eventual aim of abandoning them like some usable, if temporary stronghold.  They would not reveal themselves here, at least not during the initial stages.  Many trips and minute observation showed me that nowhere apart from the line itself – I mean the stations and their platforms, and the trains in almost permanent movement – were there conditions and spaces suitable for their life.  Theories involving sidings, junctions, and storehouses were dismissed until I came to a clearer understanding of the horrible truth.  A truth borne from the necessary residue here in this crepuscular kingdom where the notion of residue returns again and again.  The existence I sketch out (some would say, I propose) occurred to me out of brutal and implacable necessity: to wit, from a succession of refused possibilities there arose the only remaining possibility.  Now it was all too clear that they could not be found in some particular place: they lived in the subway, in the trains of the subway, moving continuously.  Their existence and circulation of leucocytes – so pale, so pale are they all! – so favored anonymity that I have protected them until now.

Once I reached this point in my understanding, the rest soon became evident.  Apart from dawn and very late at night, the trains of the Anglo line were never empty because Buenos Aires natives were noctambulant: there were always a few passengers coming and going before the closing of the rails.  Imagine now a last train, already serving no useful purpose and simply running in completion of the schedule, although no one was aboard.  This was something I never managed to see.  Well, actually, I did manage to see such a train a few times, but only in my opinion was the train truly empty.  Its scant passengers were a part of the train, a part that lengthened its night in order to fulfill inflexible instructions.  I could never determine the nature of their forced refuge for those three dead hours, from two to five in the morning, during which the Anglo did not run.  Either they remained in a train traveling on a siding (in that case, the conductor had to be one of them), or they regularly mixed in with the night-shift cleaning crew.  The latter is less likely, owing to the clothes and personal relations involved.  I tend to suspect they made use of the tunnel, unknown to the common passenger, connecting Once station to the port.  Why is the room with the No entry warning sign at José María Moreno filled with rolls of paper, not counting the large chest which could contain some other things?  The visible fragility of this door lends itself to the worst suspicions.  Although such an idea might not be very reasonable, my impression with everything is that, in some way, they persist in their existence as already described, without leaving the trains or the platform of the stations.  Aesthetic necessity provides me, on a fundamental level, with some certainty, perhaps even reason.  No valid residues in this permanent circulation, which takes them and carries them between the two terminals, appear to exist.

I have mentioned aesthetic necessity, yet perhaps this is merely a pragmatic reason.  The plan requires great simplicity so that each one of them can react mechanically without making any mistakes at those important moments of which their permanent life underground is composed.  For example, how would I, exercising saintly patience, be able to check that each one of them knows he should make no more than one trip in the same car to avoid attention?  In the Plaza de Mayo terminal, however, they were instructed to remain seated because congestion forced many passengers to get on at Florida, thus overtaking those waiting in the terminal.  In Primera Junta the operation is different: one only needs to get off, walk a few meters, and disappear among the passengers on the train of the opposite track.  In all these cases their advantage is that the vast majority of the passengers only travel part of the way, that is to say, not from one end of the line to another.  When these passengers take the subway much later on, thirty minutes later if simply attending to a short errand or eight hours later if they are office or manual workers, it is unlikely that they would recognize those who remained down there, especially with the continuous changing of cars and trains.  This last change, which I verified at great personal cost, is much more subtle and corresponds to an inflexible scheme destined to impede possible visual links between the security staff and the passengers who happen to frequent the same trains (two times out of five, according to the hours and the affluence of the public).  Now I know, for example, that the girl waiting in Medrano that night had gotten off the train which came before the one I took and, having traveled with me to Río de Janeiro, had boarded the next train.  Like all of them, she had been given precise instructions until the end of the week.

***

Habit has taught them to sleep in their seats, but only for periods of no more than a quarter of an hour.  Even those of us who travel now and then on the Anglo end up having a tactile memory of the itinerary; the entry into the line's few curves is an infallible indicator if we depart Congreso towards Sáenz Peña, or if go back up towards Loria.  They are so habituated to such schemes that they wake up at precisely the right moment to get off and change cars or trains.  They sleep with dignity, seated upright, their heads hardly resting on their chests.  Twenty fifteen-minute periods is enough to be rested; as an additional advantage, they also have those three hours about which I am fated not to know anything, those three hours when the Anglo is closed to the public.  Once I found out that they possessed at least one train, which perhaps confirmed my hypothesis about the siding during closing hours, I told myself that their life could have been imbued with an almost pleasant sense of community had they happened to ride this train all together.  Quick but delicious group meals between one station and another, an uninterrupted dream in a trip from terminal to terminal, even the happiness of conversation and contact between friends and, why not, even relatives.  Yet it soon became clear that they sedulously avoided gathering all together in their train (if they have only one; provided that, doubtless, their number grows in tiny, gradual amounts); they know all too well that any identification would be fatal to them.  They also know that memory is better at remembering three sad tigers seen together, as the tongue-twister goes, than individual, isolated beasts.

Their train allowed them to hold brief secret meetings whenever they needed to receive and pass along the new weekly tabulation which the First One would prepare on block notepads and distribute every Sunday to the heads of the group.  They would also receive a weekly allowance for their food, and an emissary of the First One (undoubtedly, the train conductor) listened to what each one of them had to say regarding clothes, messages to the outside, and their overall health.  The program entailed a sufficiently drastic alternation of trains and cars so that running into one another would become practically impossible, and their lives would keep distancing themselves from one another until the end of the week.  I presume (I have come to understand all this through tense mental images in which I felt that I and they were one, in which I suffered and rejoiced just like they suffered and rejoiced) that they waited every Sunday just like we above awaited our own peace.  That the First One was chosen on that day does not correspond with a tradition that I would have been surprised to find in them.  One simply knows that on Sunday a different type of passenger rides the subway.  For that reason any Sunday train is more anonymous than one on Monday or Friday.

Delicately joining all these different elements of the mosaic, I was able to understand the initial phase of the operation and the capture of the train.  The first four of them, as the figures from the checks prove, descended into the metro one Tuesday.  That evening, on the platform of Sáenz Peña, they studied the caged faces of the conductors passing by.  The First One gave a signal and they boarded a train.  They had to wait for the departure from the Plaza de Mayo, make use of three stations on their path, and make sure the guard was in another car.  The most difficult part was getting to the point when they would be alone.  They were aided by a gallant provision on the part of the Transportation Association of the City of Buenos Aires, which authorized use of the first car for elderly women and children, coupled with a Buenos Aires tendency towards the sensible disdain of this car.  In Peru two old female passengers were talking about the liquidation of the Casa Lamota (where you saw Carlota) as a boy sat amidst an unsuitable reading of Rojo y Negro (the magazine, not Stendhal). The guard was near the middle of the train when the First One entered the car for elderly women and children and tapped discreetly on the train conductor's cabin door.  The latter opened it a bit surprised but still not suspecting anything; the train was already heading up to Piedras.  They passed Lima, Sáenz Peña, and Congreso without incident.  In Pasco there was some delay in getting out, but the guard was at the other end of the train and did not notice anything.  Before reaching Río de Janeiro, the First One had returned to the car where the other three were waiting.  Forty-eight hours later a conductor dressed in civilian clothes a bit big for him mixed in with the people who got off at Medrano, and caused chief inspector Montesano the great displeasure of increasing his figures by one on Friday.  The First One was already in command of his train, with the other three trying furtively to stand in for him when the moment arrived.  I omit the fact that, little by little, they did the same thing with other guards, depending on the trains they captured.

Owners of more than one train, they had at their disposal a mobile territory in which they could operate with a certain amount of security.  I will probably never know why the conductors of the Anglo gave in to the extortion or bribes of the First One, nor how the latter avoids possible identification when he is confronted by other members of the staff, or how he pays his salaries or signs payroll.  I could only proceed peripherally, discovering one by one the immediate mechanisms of this vegetative life in its outward behavior.  It was hard for me to admit that they fed almost exclusively on the victuals sold in station kiosks, until I grew convinced that the most extreme rigor presided over this praiseless existence.  They bought chocolates and local pastries, sweet bars of milk and cocoa, nougat candy and nutritious caramels.  They ate them as if they were indifferent to being offered candy; yet when they traveled in one of their trains, paired-off colleagues dared to buy one of the biggest local pastries with plenty of caramel spread and chocolate drops and, with the joy of a genuine meal, shamefully devour them into crumbs.  Never has a peaceful solution to the recurring problem of food been found.  Again and again they became wickedly hungry; sweets now repulsed them; and the memory of salt crashed into their mouths like a wave of horrible delight.  And with salt came the taste of roasted meat, now unattainable, and of a soup of parsley and celery.  It was at this time that a steak house opened in the Once station, and sometimes the smoky smell of the sausages and pork sandwiches even reached the platform.  But they could not take advantage of the steak house because it was on the other side of the turnstiles, on the platform of the train to Moreno.

Texto en una libreta (part 1)

The first part to a work ("Text from a notebook") by this Argentine man of letters.  You can read the original as part of this collection.

Checks on the passengers increased – this is the moment to mention it – while we were talking about indetermination and analytic residue.  Jorge García Bouza had made several allusions to the Montreal subway before referring specifically to the Anglo line in Buenos Aires.  He didn't tell me, but I suspect this had something to do with the technical studies conducted by the firm – if it had been, in fact, the firm who had carried out these checks.  With some special procedures, which my ignorance will simply qualify as such, García Bouza insisted on their effective simplicity: an exact count had been taken of the passengers who made daily use of the subway during the course of a certain week.  As he was interested in knowing the percentage of affluence both at the line's different stations, as well as for the trips from one end to another and those trips between intermediary stations, checks were performed with maximum severity at all the entries and exits from Primera Junta to the Plaza de Mayo.  At that time – I am talking about the 1940s – the Anglo line was not yet connected to the new underground networks, which of course facilitated these checks.

On the Monday of the chosen week a basic number was obtained; it was approximately the same on Tuesday; on Wednesday, in addition to a similar total, the unexpected occurred: 113,987 persons entered the metro as opposed to the number of people who had returned to the surface, which came to 113,983.  Common sense imputed this to four errors in calculation, and those responsible for the operation resurveyed the checkpoints looking for possible negligence.  Even the chief inspector Montesano (I speak now with information that García Bouza did not know and which I obtained later) arrived to reinforce the personnel assigned to the checks.  Exceeding normal scruples, he had them sweep the metro from one end to the other; construction workers and train crew alike were obliged to show their identification cards upon leaving.  From all this I came to see that chief inspector Montesano vaguely suspected the onset of what now is certain to both of us.  I add unnecessarily that no one hit on the supposed error I just proposed (and at once eliminated) regarding four unfindable passengers.

Everything went well on Thursday: one hundred seven thousand three hundred twenty-eight residents of Buenos Aires obediently reappeared after their episodic immersion in the subway.  On Friday (now, on the heels of the preceding operations, the checks could be considered perfect) the number of those who came out again exceeded by one those checked at the entrances.  On Saturday the same figures were obtained, and the firm considered its task finished.  The anomalous results were not revealed to the public, and apart from chief inspector Montesano and the technicians in charge of the totalizator machines at the Once station, I think very few people paid any attention to what happened.  I also believe that these few people (excluding again the chief inspector) reasoned that it should all be forgotten, with the simple assumption that it was owing to an error on the part of either the machines or their operators.     

This took place in 1946 or at the beginning of 1947.  In the months that followed I happened to travel quite a bit on the Anglo line.  From time to time, because the commute was a long one, I would recall that talk with García Bouza, and was ironically surprised looking at the people in the seats around me or clinging to the bars like slabs of meat to their hooks.  Twice at the José María Moreno station it seemed unreasonable to me that certain people (a man, later two old women) were not just passengers like everyone else.  One Thursday night in the Medrano station, after having attended a boxing match and witnessed Jacinto Llanes win on points, I had the impression that the girl nearly asleep on the second bench on the platform was not there to wait for the ascending train.  In reality she got into the same car as I did, but only to get off at Río de Janeiro and remain on the platform as if she were dubious about something, as if she were very tired or annoyed.

All this I say now when there is nothing more for me to know; very much like when, after a robbery, people agree that some ill-mannered boys simply rounded the block.  Nevertheless, from the beginning, something of these apparent fantasies which weave themselves into distraction was going further than that and lingering like the very sediment of suspicion.  For that reason, the night that García Bouza mentioned as a curious detail the results of the checks, the two things were instantaneously associated and I felt that something was coagulating into oddness, strangeness, almost into fear.  Perhaps of those on the outside, I was the first to know.

After this ensues a confused period in which a growing desire to verify these suspicions is mixed with a dinner at El Pescadito which brought me nearer to Montesano and his memories, and progressive and cautious descent into the subway was understood as something else, as a slow and different breathing, a pulse which in some almost unthinkable way did not throb through the city, which was not merely one means of transportation in the city.  But before actually going down (I am not referring to the trivial feat of flowing into the subway with everyone else), he spent a while in reflection and analysis.  In the course of three months in which I preferred to take streetcar 86 so as to avoid verifications or deceptive chance happenings, a theory by Luis M. Baudizzone worthy of attention kept me on the surface.  As García Bouza's report mentioned, almost in jest, he believed it was possible to explain the phenomenon by virtue of expected atomic erosion in large masses.  No one had ever counted the people exiting the River Plate station one traditional Sunday; no one had ever compared this figure with the box office receipts.  A herd of five thousand buffaloes running through a narrow pass, does it contain the same number of entering and exiting units?  The friction of all those persons on Florida street subtly corrodes coat sleeves and the backs of gloves.  This friction, this chafing of 113,987 travelers in crammed trains which shake and rub them at every curve and every halt, this may have as a result (owing to the annulment of the individual and the action of erosion on the crowd's being) the annulment of four units at the end of twenty hours.  As for the second anomaly, I mean the Friday in which there was an extra passenger, Baudizzone managed merely to concur with Montesano and impute it to an error in calculation.  At the end of these rather literary conjectures, I again felt very alone.  I didn't even have my own conjectures; instead I merely had a slow cramp in my stomach every time I approached a subway entrance.  For that reason I followed on my own a spiral path that brought me nearer little by little; for that reason I spent so much time in the streetcar before I felt myself capable of returning to the Anglo line, of actually going down and not only taking the metro. 

***

Here it must be said that from them I have not received the slightest help, quite the contrary, in fact.  Waiting for or seeking their help would have been senseless.  They are here and do not even know that their written history begins in this very paragraph.  For my part I would not have wanted to denounce them and, in any case, I shall not mention the few names that became known to me during the weeks in which I entered their world.  If I have indeed done all this so as to write this report, I am of the belief that my reasons were good, and that I wanted to help those Buenos Aires natives persistently afflicted with transportation problems.  Now not even this counts any more; now I am afraid; now I have no will to go down there again.  And yet it is unfair to have to travel slowly and uncomfortably by streetcar when one is but two steps away from the metro which everyone rides because they are not afraid.  I am sufficiently honest to acknowledge that if they have been expelled – without any scandal, of course, without anyone finding out too much – I will feel much calmer.  Neither because my life seemed threatened while I was down there, nor because I felt safe, which I didn't at any single moment, as I advanced in my investigation of many nights (here everything occurs at night; nothing is more false or theatrical than the gushes of sun interrupting the fanlights between two stations or rolling to the middle of the station access stairs).  It is quite possible that I may have stopped so as to give myself away, and that they know why I spend so many hours in the subway, just like I can distinguish them immediately among the crushing throng of the stations.  They are pale; they proceed with manifest efficiency; they are so pale and so sad, almost all of them are so sad. 

Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, A Dying Cat, A Traded Car

It seemed to me for this sunset hour that the world is our bride, given to us to love, and the terror and joy of the marriage is that we bring to it a nature not our bride's.

                                                                                                                          David Kern

We ask ourselves countless questions as we slip into sleep – whether we are alone in the universe, whether we are loved, whether our dreams shall be fulfilled, whether there is any redemption for those who suffer, as well as far more banal inquiries – but there is really only one question.  It has been phrased in myriad ways, and cannot be made any simpler than this formula: Is the truth good?  If the truth is good, then many different things can be explained, and many different understandings of the world can coalesce into a single understanding, one ultimately benevolent and conciliatory which opens its wings as widely and warmly as the our galaxies' blackest night is suffocating and cold.  If the truth is good, then we can be both true and good, because we can embrace the best of news (news, after all, is supposed to impart the truth and little else).  We can become the ideal world we have always imagined – yes, even the most gnarled cynics among us R.E.M. cycle into greener pastures – and therewith make the most of our current earthbound dilemmas.  We also note that we have defined neither truth nor good.  Such entries, you see, are best left to each of us to determine, because some purportedly brave souls – I might prefix a far less flattering modifier – claim that eternal darkness does not scare them in any way.  Who's afraid of nothingness and extinction?  Perhaps the narrator of the unusual foursome of tales found in this fine collection.

Our protagonist is David Kern, an important name for an allegedly unimportant writer.  A likely member of the Pennsylvania Dutch, Kern is a German core or nucleus, the center of it all.  When he travels he misses his "wife's body, that weight of pure emotion" beside him, and is "enough of a father to feel lost out of [his] nest of little rustling souls."  From his first observations, on the "bare earth that has been smoothed and packed firm by the passage of human feet," we learn nothing except perhaps the most important fact of someone's life: namely, that he is a God-fearing man, a fact he will later deny, if indirectly.  His faith, or what he has come to understand as his faith – faith being the most personalized experience someone can have – occupies our second tale, which brandishes its gerundial title with some skepticism.  Yet the whole process of attending to one's faith, literally and figuratively, offers some distinct advantages:

It is the most available democratic experience.  We vote less than once a year.  Only in church and at the polls are we actually given our supposed value, the soul-unit of one, with its noumenal arithmetic of equality: one equals one equals one.

How soon after this communion does David Kern, a believer who outwardly plays the lapsed Christian, "hasten home ... to assume the disguise – sweaters and suntans – of a non-churchgoer"?  Later events, in the fourth and vastly superior part of this uneven quartet about one soul, suggest that David Kern is entrenched in what we may term nostalgic faith.  Nostalgic faith is the crutch of the romantic doubter, a belief in the past, a belief in all the love we have given and received in our time on earth, a belief that we cope with being a worthless link on an eternal chain of death by loving what we have as intensely and honestly as we can.  Yet a profound defeatism shadows such sentiments.  When he tells his wife that after a few centuries their "names would be forgotten," their "nation would be a myth," and their "continent [would be] an ocean," we wonder why we even bother to love.  When, much later on, he drives his beloved titular vehicle essentially into hyperspace, losing all sense and sensation, we pity a soul that has replaced an awe for what our world is with an awe for what our world is not.  Never is it implied, however, that Kern might have resigned himself to being merely a conduit, to living life so as to report it, in a beautified and much-manipulated form, on the typed page.  Something of his faith persists, even if it has devolved into an adoration of nature's vicissitudes and a tepid acceptance of our own.

Updike is twentieth-century America's greatest literary genius, and there really shouldn't be a debate (we will excuse those who name this author instead, but he was not, strictly speaking, "made in America").  Those who tell you otherwise are either envious – Updike's easy and prolific output leads the average, bloated mind to recur blubberingly to its own platitudes – or simply swine before his purling streams.  Not all his works make our "scalp freeze" (a description he bestows, unfortunately, upon a jazz piece), and the winsome if somewhat trite narrative about a road-killed feline is impaired by the same pathos common to all works which try to pawn off animal misery as a metaphor for our own.  It is better simply to list the passages that really do run up our spine: "There was a strong sepia flavor of early Christianity"; "There was not that swishing company of headlights that along an American road throws us into repeated relief"; "They served me with that swift grace that comes in a country where food is still one of the pleasures"; "I was patriotically thrilled by Alton's straight broad streets and superb equipment of institutions"; "the new doctor's office ... was furnished with a certain raw sophistication [as] rippling music leaked from the walls, which were hung with semi-professional oils"; "The grinning girl was lost in this onslaught of praise and clung to the shreds of her routine."  Many other pleasures obtain, especially when David goes to visit his terminally ill father and is told by his mother, before anything more than niceties are exchanged, that the old man has lost his faith.  The few minutes they have together, interrupted only by a well-meaning young woman from a Lutheran congregation, are supposed to be allotted either to the transmission of final secrets or wisdoms or to a prolonged and miserable farewell.  Neither one takes place because David, a believer by disposition, has thought too much about the one thing in life that, in its totality, exceeds human reason, even if a very religious person will assure you (and be correct) that there is nothing more reasonable than faith.  That is why at one point he sees a "catastrophe" hidden behind "each face," and why at another, he perceives the appropriateness of being a "stranger in church."  And what about the truth and the good?  Let's just say David has gone through enough of one to recognize the other.

Baudelaire, "L'homme et la mer"

A work ("Man and the sea") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

O freest man, you'll always love the sea! 
The mirror where your soul seems to appear 
On its thin spline, unwinding endlessly,
Your mind still an abyss no less severe.   

Into this image will you then have dived, 
Embracing it with eyes and arms; your heart 
At times distracted from its throbbing chart,
By windy savage moans of life deprived.

You both remain discreet and shadow-swept:
O man, your deepest chasms gape unprobed;
O sea, your inmost riches still not unrobed;
In greatest zeal your every secret kept!

For countless centuries in glee you've fought
Bereft of mildest pity or remorse,
Eternal foes in death and carnage caught,
Desist, O brothers, in your luckless course!

The Queen of Spades

Those who know me will attest that I am not a gambling man; in any case, not in the conventional sense.  Games of chance, while thrilling and often very complex, lack the profundity of other topics that have absorbed my hours, and their payoff is far less rich because games can be learned by practically anyone of sufficient volition.  They are ultimately apiary tasks writ large, the calculations of a grandmaster or master hustler made perfect through excessive practice but little thought or consideration.  Stories about gamblers and daredevils have enthralled generations for that same reason: anyone can do it, yet only few wish to risk everything for, in the end, nothing better than fifty-fifty odds.  Should we applaud these achievements or lament their pervasiveness?  In competitive societies which promote success through material acquisition, gambling is an easy way for the underprivileged to get a toe in the door (lotteries are the most egregious of these milkings).  Many win, but we all lose.  We lose because those who have less should not be cajoled into spending a portion of their earnings to buck the system; we lose because once a winner is announced he most often feels liberated from society, or liberated enough to pursue the same hollow activities that he has watched the moneyed perform hitherto; we lose because the only entity that consistently profits from these games is the government itself.  Once upon a time, however, the whole practice of gambling among the wealthy and frivolous exuded a certain gallantry and adventure that thankfully has since been shed.  Which brings us to this masterpiece on the mad chase of destiny, one of the great treasures of Western literature.

Our narrator is a certain Tomskii, a man without scruples or hobbies, but with everything that a simple money-loving mind might desire.  He welcomes us to the St. Petersburg social scene and then directs our attention to one quiet character, Germann.  Germann is the "son of a russified German" and content to watch the usual slew of dares and bankruptcies that this stratum of society thinks of as grand entertainment.  The tables fascinate the young engineer but he cannot bring himself to participate.  When asked about his curious restraint, Germann answers as we expect he might:

The game surely interests me; but I am not in a position to sacrifice the necessary in hope of acquiring the superfluous.

Tomskii’s platitudinous conclusion that Germann is "frugal" owing to his German provenance could be dismissed as a rather unfortunate national stereotype along the lines of Russians' being vodka-swilling bear hunters.  The reader is thus presented with the option of accepting Tomskii's assertion as the omniscient truth or as "idle gossip."  And the repetition of Germann's credo of "not sacrificing the necessary in hope of acquiring the superfluous" is somewhat belied by the narrator's observation that Germann is "in his soul a gambler."  Tomskii's generalization might now be interpreted as a selfish method to divert attention from Germann, who is far more complex and uncategorizable than his shallow mentor.  And here is where, in stories of this ilk, a woman must enter the picture.

The woman in question is Lizaveta Ivanovna, a plain name for a plain girl.  She has no suitors and few perspectives from escaping her dreary existence as the lady-in-waiting to a Countess who also happens to be Tomskii's grandmother.  Tomskii lets it slip that his grandmother, an despotic old bat, possesses a secret that will coax the gambler out of Germann.  From her youth in Paris, she knows of an unbeatable card combination that will ever remain as one of the classic lines in Russian literature.  Germann is hooked, and begins correspondence with Lizaveta, culling sweet nothings from the frothy, overwritten German romances on which he was raised.  He tells her everything a woman of her upbringing and ingenuousness has always dreamed of hearing, and given Germann's innate lack of charm, the effects are both predictable and amusing.  From what we know of him from the first two parts of the tale, we might be surprised that Germann would give in to greed; we are even less inclined to do so taking into consideration the judgment of a worthless cad like Tomskii.  Yet it is often the simpletons among us who see through to our very essence.  So Tomskii needn't be right or wrong when he observes early on:

That Germann is a true Romantic; he has the profile of Napoleon and the soul of Mephistopheles.  He has, I fear, at least three crimes on his conscience.

This old chestnut about how many crimes are committed in thought but not in deed is collated with the first line from the sixth and final part of the story: "two unmoving ideas cannot exist within the same moral nature just like two bodies cannot occupy the same space."  Those ideas are our two concepts of Germann.  He may be an engineer, a calculator, and a stingy bore, or he may have been until now, but is his soul indeed that of a rebel, one that obeys few rules and is devoid of sympathy for those who get in his way?  Or has a great calculator finally found a perfectly calculated risk?  Is it coincidence then that the number of his alleged misdeeds matches the number of cards he was promised by a dying Countess?  We may be moving, I fear, into the superfluous.