Underground Time (6 page)

The woman stops wailing. She’s breathing loudly, her face twisted in fear.

‘Aren’t you feeling well?’

As soon as she asks the question Mathilde realises how stupid it is. The woman doesn’t answer. She’s making a superhuman effort not to scream. She’s breathing more and more loudly. She begins to wail again and then this time she screams. Comments start up on all sides, at first in low voices and then more audibly. What’s she thinking of, taking the metro on a day when there are technical problems, if she’s claustrophobic? Make her get off. Oh no, for God’s sake, don’t pull the emergency cord. We’re not out of the woods.

The woman is a disruptive element, a human failure capable of holding up the trains.

Mathilde’s hand is still on the woman’s arm. She’s trying to smile.

‘I’ll get off with you at the next station. It’ll only be a few seconds. See, the train’s slowing down.’

The train stops, the doors open and Mathilde goes ahead of the woman to clear a passage. Please. Push. Let her through. She’s holding on to the woman’s sleeve.

She looks to see which station they’re at. On the platform, below the sign that says Charonne, she makes her sit down. The woman seems to be calming down and Mathilde offers to go and get some water or something to eat from the vending machine. The woman starts to get agitated again. She’s going to be late, she mustn’t be, she can’t get back on the train, she’s only just found a job through a temp agency. Yes, she’s claustrophobic but she usually copes. She thought she was going to manage it.

And then the woman starts breathing more loudly, gasping quicker and quicker. She’s trying to get air, her limbs seem shaken by tremors, her hands are clutching each other in a manner she can’t control.

Mathilde asked for help and someone went up to the ticket office. A man from the transport authority in a blue-green suit has come down. He’s rung the fire brigade. The woman can’t stand up. Her whole body is tensed up and being shaken by jolts. She’s still breathing noisily.

They wait.

The platform is packed. The transport officials have created a security cordon. There are now three or four of them. All around, people form little groups, craning their necks.

Mathilde wants to scream. She sees herself in the woman’s place, their images superimposed; for a brief moment they are one and the same person, swallowed by the neon signs, huddled up by the snack machines.

And then Mathilde looks around her. And she thinks that all these people, every last one of them, one day or another will be sitting here, or somewhere like it, unable to move. The day they collapse.

He'd gone down to the metro to respond to a panic attack at Charonne station. The fire brigade had passed on the call to his base; they were swamped because of a big fire in the area. Rose put out a general call. Thibault was a few streets away, so he stopped off there.

A woman of around thirty was sitting on the platform hyperventilating. By the time he got there, she was starting to calm down. A crowd had gathered around her, giving curious glances, peering to see better. The crowd didn't miss any of the performance. Two people managed to help her to the office behind the ticket counter where Thibault was able to administer a sedative. The woman's breathing returned to normal, her hands unclasped. He was double-parked so he couldn't stay. A metro official promised he would get her to a taxi when she felt better.

 

At a red light he looks around: people walking quickly, coming out of the metro in groups, running across the street; people queuing at ATMs, smoking outside buildings or cafés. So many people he cannot count, all subject to the city's flow, its speed; unaware they're being watched, seen from a distance, at street corners, an infinite number of fragile identities which he cannot grasp as a whole. From behind the windscreen, Thibault watches women; they've started wearing light clothes: floaty dresses, short skirts, sheer tights. Bare legs sometimes. The way they carry their bags by the handle or with the strap over their shoulder, the way they walk without noticing anyone or wait for the bus with a faraway look.

 

Suddenly the girl who joined his school in his last year comes into his mind. He had carved her name on a desk. She was from Caen. Or was it Alençon? He's thinking about that girl now. Her fine hair. Her riding boots and her boyish appearance. It's odd, thinking of that girl now. He was in love with her. Or with her reflection in other people's eyes. They didn't talk to each other. They had different circles of friends. Thinking of that girl, more than twenty years on . . . saying to yourself: that was twenty years ago. And then counting up to twenty-five. It was twenty-five years ago. Back when his left hand still had five fingers.

It was twenty-five years ago. That sounded like a typing error, a bad joke. Can you say that without falling off your chair: ‘It was twenty-five years ago'?

 

He's left Lila. He's done it. And that statement contains something that sounds like an achievement, a feat.

And yet the wound of love contains within it all silences, abandonments, regrets, all of which in the course of the years adds up to a generic sort of pain. And a confused one. Yet the wound of love promises nothing; not after, not elsewhere.

 

His life is diffracted. From a distance it seems to possess unity and direction. You can recount it, describe his days, the division of his hours and weeks, follow his movements. His address is known, so are the habits he's trying to break, the days he goes to the supermarket, the evenings when all he can do is listen to music. But close up, his life looks confused, it splits into fragments, there are pieces missing.

From close up, he's just a Playmobil figure slotted into his car, his hands clutching the steering wheel, a little plastic character who has lost his dream.

The station manager had said that a doctor would be there any minute. Another train was rumbling in from the left. Mathilde didn’t wait. She was late enough as it was. She left the woman on her seat; other people were looking after her. She seemed a bit less tensed-up but she still couldn’t stand. The woman said thank you. Mathilde got on the metro. She forced her way and wedged her back against a flip-up seat. She was in a good position. At Nation she got off and made her way through the impatient crowd. She took the passage that led to line 1. Here trains seemed to be running normally. She waited less than a minute for the next train, then she got off at the gare de Lyon.

Now Mathilde is heading for the RER. She doesn’t look at the time. She knows by heart the corridors, the stairs, the shortcuts of this underground world, woven like a web in the bowels of the city. For eight years Mathilde has been using the same long tunnel that goes under the station to get to line D; here every day several thousand people’s paths criss-cross: two columns of insects, disgorged in waves on to the slippery tiled floor, a rapid two-way street whose rhythms and cadences have to be respected. Bodies brush against one another, or avoid contact or sometimes collide in a strange sort of choreography. Here a vast exchange between the inside and the outside takes place, and between the city and its suburbs. Here people are in a hurry, they walk quickly: ‘We’re going to work, madam.’

Mathilde used to be one of the fastest; she’d pull out on the left with a confident, conquering stride. She used to get annoyed when the flow slowed. She’d curse the slowcoaches. Today she’s one of them; she’s well aware that she can’t keep up the pace any more, she drags herself along, no longer has the energy. She sags.

At the other end of the tunnel, at the foot of the escalators, the automatic gates mark the entrance to the RER. You have to get your ticket or travelcard out and cross the border. In this even lower indeterminate zone you can buy a croissant or a newspaper, drink a coffee standing up.

To reach platforms 1 and 3 you have to go lower still, sink into the bowels of the city. Here the local and national railway companies share the territory. The traveller on line D doesn’t know what belongs to whom. He slips through this common perimeter zone as best he can. At this point of intersection, interconnection, he feels his way, like a hostage left to his own devices between two worlds.

Like everyone else, Mathilde has learnt over the years the rudiments of another language, she has acquired new reflexes for the sake of her health, accepted the elementary rules necessary for survival. The trains have names consisting of four capital letters displayed on the front of the engine. The name of the train is known as its ‘code’.

To get to work, Mathilde always catches the RIVA, which goes to Melun. This is not some sleek mahogany boat or the promise of a further shore. Just a noisy rain-smeared train. If she misses that, she takes the ROVO or the ROPO. But if she gets on a BIPE, RIPE or ZIPE by mistake, it’s a disaster: those trains go non-stop all the way to Villeneuve-Saint-George. And the NOVO doesn’t stop before Maisons-Alfort. The problem stems from the fact that they all use the same track.

Blue screens, suspended overhead like televisions in hospital, show a list of the next trains, their final destination, the time they’re expected and how late they’re running. The delay can be measured in minutes case by case or else by the message ‘train delayed’ flashing on all the lines. That’s a very bad sign. Electronic signs, which are older, are situated in different parts of the platform. They content themselves with announcing the destination of the next departure and its stops, indicated by a white square. To these different sources of information are added a certain number of random announcements, delivered by a computerised voice. Which generally contradicts the screens and the signs. If the loudspeakers announce a ROPO, it’s not unusual for the platform signs to be predicting the arrival of a RIPE.

The traveller on line D consequently receives a number of contradictory injunctions. With a little experience, he learns to sort through them, to seek confirmation, to consider different eventualities in order to come to a decision. The novice, the one-off traveller who finds himself there by chance, looks around, panics and asks for help.

Mathilde looks like the kind of person who gets asked for information. People have always stopped her in the street, rolled down their windows when she passes, come up to her looking embarrassed.

It’s half past nine. The doors of a ROVO shut in her face so she’ll have to wait for the next train, in a quarter of an hour. At the end of the platform the predominant smell is urine, but it’s the only place you can sit down. She’s tired. Some days when she’s listening for the sound of the train, her buttocks stuck to the orange plastic, she wonders deep down whether it wouldn’t be better to spend the whole day in the bowels of the earth, let the useless hours flow by, and around lunchtime go up a level to buy a sandwich, then go back down and resume her place. Remove herself from the flow, the movement.

Give in.

The ROPO arrived. She hesitated for a second and then went into the carriage. Once seated she closed her eyes and didn’t open them again till the train came back up to ground level. The weather was bright.

Eight minutes later, at Vert-de-Maisons, she got out of the carriage and went towards the main exit, a bottleneck where a line of travellers soon built up, like at the supermarket checkout. She waited her turn, then filled her lungs with the outside air.

Mathilde takes the stairs, goes into the tunnel under the tracks and comes out again at street level.

She’s been making the same journey for eight years, the same steps every day, the same turnstiles, the same underground passages, the same glances at clocks; each day her hand reaches out in the same place to hold or push the same doors, touches the same rails.

Exactly the same.

Just as she’s leaving the station, it seems that she’s reached her own limit, her saturation point beyond which it’s impossible to go. It feels as though each of her actions, each of her movements, because they have been repeated three thousand times, threatens her balance.

Though she has lived for years without thinking about it, today this repetition seems to her like a sort of violence being done to her body, a silent sort of violence capable of destroying her.

Mathilde is over an hour late. She doesn’t hurry, doesn’t quicken her step. She doesn’t phone ahead to say she’s almost there. No one could care less anyway. Little by little, Jacques has managed to take away from her all the important projects she was working on, to distance her from any issues, to reduce her involvement with the team to a minimum. Through a lot of reorganisation and redefinition of assignments and responsibilities, he has managed in the space of a few months to strip her of everything that constituted her job. Under increasingly obscure pretexts, he has succeeded in excluding her from meetings that would have kept her in the loop or enabled her to get involved in other projects. In early December, Jacques sent her an email to tell her that she absolutely had to take the two days’ holiday that she hadn’t used that year. The day before she went, he arranged an impromptu drinks party for the whole floor the next day. He postponed the date of her annual appraisal ten times and eventually announced that it would not be happening, without offering any explanation.