Dans le Métro Parisien
Agnès Madrigal
Agnès Madrigal writes works of fiction. This short “vignette” was inspired by a ride on the Paris Métro. A woman, remembering a trip on the Métro years ago, becomes preoccupied with two fellow passengers.
In a train car, a woman notices two fallen angels—have we all fallen? “Dans le Métro Parisien” is a short story by Agnès Madrigal. Photograph by Madrigalit
She loves the Paris Métro—has she ever said that to anyone? She loves the sound of the trains, the noises as they rumble into the stations, the atonal horns, the clatter of the doors opening with the little metal handles one must push up. She sees that in some of the newer trains the old knobs are being replaced with plastic buttons; they make more sense, admittedly, but she is sad to see the old ones go, she assumes that one day they’ll all be gone, and passengers of the future will not know that sound of the click before one opens the door, the quick thrust of the wrist needed to open these doors. She loves also the rounded tunnels—one where the girls in a Jean-Claude Brisseau film hide in an opening to the side and arouse one another. She loves the big subway posters in their ornate gold frames that stretch and curve with the tops of the white-tiled walls. She loves the slightly sweet scent of the trains’ oil, or is it the rubber of the wheels that creates this fragrance? It’s not the same in other cities, in other train stations.
“She loves the Paris Métro—has she ever said that to anyone?. . . It’s these sensorial things, and other things—these characters, perhaps, these lives.”
—Agnès Madrigal, “Dans le Métro Parisien”
It’s only here, here in Paris, and now she is confessing it, this feeling she has held for many years, a perception she could only voice now somehow, though she had loved the Métro since the start, since she was an adolescent visiting the city for the first time. Then, more of the original Art Nouveau entrances were still intact—she took photographs of one with all of its rounded glass panels with her cheap Kodak camera. Now she sees the red signs and the classic lettering and she is reminded of those photos, her old blurry pictures, faded and badly cropped, still pasted into a scrapbook somewhere. It’s easy to love the art of those old signs, she thinks now, but it’s not that which she loves about the Métro still, it’s these other elements, these sensorial things, and other things—these characters, perhaps, these lives. Years ago, maybe on that first trip, there was a man on the Métro. He wore tall black boots and a white poet’s blouse with a ruffled collar and cuffs under a long velvet coat—was it purple? He looked like a man from another century. His silhouette was antique, too, majestic. She still saw people like that in that city, even in the present, persons seemingly foisted from the past upon the dirty urban droll. She saw people sleeping in the subways at night, watched them carefully prepare their beds, sometimes in little nooks in the stairwells between the platforms. Once she dreamt that she was sleeping in one of the stations. She was not sure how it had come to that.
She loves the Paris Métro, she confesses. Photograph of the Bastille station by Madrigalit
It is on this last trip that she sees them, the two youth; they are, like the man, like extractions from another world, one she cannot describe, cannot really know, for it is lost to time, lost to something else, too, and that is the mystery—maybe it is why she stares at them, writes about them now. They are poor, she can tell this by their clothes. The girl wears a stiff leather coat that is too big for her frail body, though it does nothing to dampen her beauty, her strange beauty that should not be placed as it is here, in the greasy underground, a beauty that suffuses everything in the bland train car, it seems, but no one is noticing. Not a single person, except the boy next to her, seems to be paying any attention to this girl. They have not noticed her face with its delicate features, with her dark skin pressed so tightly against the bones of her skull that it seems as clay, dabbed on by a master sculptor; they have not noticed her long wavy hair, like hair undone from tidy wet braids, that now spills over the dense jacket onto the little phone she holds in her hands, the phone they both look at, running their fingers across its lit screen to scroll down to see something or touch a word or a button to change a page. The pages change, the colors and the lights change, they reflect upon their faces as they watch them, as she watches them.
“They are . . . like extractions from another world, one she cannot describe, cannot really know, for it is lost to time, lost to something else, too, and that is the mystery—maybe it is why she stares at them, writes about them now.”
—Agnès Madrigal, “Dans le Métro Parisien”
The boy is much taller than she is, heavier boned but not large, and his skin is pale, it is as pale as hers is dark. He wears dirty vinyl sneakers and bright blue cotton culottes that expose his white legs and the blond hair on his shins that matches to the tousle on his head—it has not been cut in a while, but she’s certain it looks better like this, hanging in his eyes a bit, sticking to the nape of his neck. His features are strong, chiseled as though in Parian marble, and in profile he looks like a hero, a hero or an actor; his mouth is wide and raw and purple, his teeth uneven. She can imagine him kissing this girl with this mouth. She can see them embracing, interlocked in lovemaking even, and she finds it beautiful to imagine them this way. Then they have shed their shabby clothes, the strange secondhand clothes that make no sense on them, garments that only seek to shape them into what society will have of them—the impoverished—in spite of their grace. When left to their skin and bones they are glorious, illuminated—like statues liberated from the edifices of the great municipal buildings of this city or escaped from the galleries of the grand museums—beyond the apparitions of any others in that car, in their suits, with their shoes somewhat polished or their attaché cases clamped in their fists or neatly lain upon their laps. She thinks no one else has seen them, no one else has seen their diaphanous wings that she is imagining now, as they gently scrape the ceiling of the car. She wonders, even, if they are real, the wings, the humans. She hesitates to leave the car when it arrives at her station, pauses to tug on the metal door handle that she ordinarily loves to move. She never wants to leave them, yet she must, and she wonders where they go, where they’ll end up one day, these artful representations of all of the passengers around her, these exquisite fallen angels.