A Métro mystery

by David Benjamin

“It’ll be quite quiet when you first get on/ But as that tram keeps moving along/ It’ll fill with people starting on their day/ They’ll be laughing and joking as they eat/ They’ll be passing plates along the seats/ Your night of heartache will soon seem far away/ And even though you’re a stranger/ They’ll make you feel right at home…”
— Stacey Kent, “Breakfast on the Morning Tram”

PARIS—The subway system here holds few secrets. It’s easily learned and well marked. The underground passages between its fourteen train lines are clean, brightly lit, lined with big, artistic posters and undefiled by graffiti. And there are musicians—a frequent violinist at Hotel de Ville, an occasional jazz saxophonist at St.-Germain-des-Prés and an entire Russian band at Châtelet.

But I was somewhat mystified a while ago at the Sèvres-Babylone station when I boarded the No. 12 line, which crosses the whole city from Mairie d’Aubervilliers to Mairie d’Issy. I was surprised by the crowding on the car I entered because it was around eleven a.m., a usually low-traffic time of day. The squeeze I encountered might have been eased but for two girls occupying fold-down seats beside the doorway.

The unwritten ridership rule on the Métro is that when the door area reaches a certain point of congestion, anyone sitting down pays heed and stands. With that small gesture of common courtesy, the seats fold up. A little more space results. But the two young women were oblivious to both the crowd and the rule. They were hunkered in a foetal pose, absorbed solipsistically by the flickering images and text-gossip emanating from the four-inch screens on their “devices.” This is a phenomenon that I’ve come to refer to as phone-sheltering.

I watch a lot of nature shows. Among the scenes wildlife photographers love to film involves a crab—in close-up—mounted over a blot of shorebird feces. Its mandibles twitch frantically and its protuberant eyes glaze over gluttonously as its little claws poke, prod and fidget, plucking out minuscule morsels of half-digested fish. The crab is blind to anything in the world beyond the delectable turd that must be picked over before it washes away in the imminent tide.

Anyway, the two girls didn’t move, didn’t look up, didn’t give a shit.

But that wasn’t the Mystery of the No. 12 line. Which I’ll explain shortly—right after I reminisce. I was about to say that my first subway experiences were on the MBTA (the “T”) in Boston, but I remembered something earlier. When I was eleven, while my mom studied how to become a TV weathergirl, I had to billet with my cousin Barbara and her ten-foot Polish husband Merv in Milwaukee. For a month, I got to ride the city’s now-defunct electric buses, which got their juice from a spiderweb of power lines strung above the streets. Milwaukee’s rocking, rolling buses, like just about every urban transit system—and many intercity trains—in the world, were EVs. We’ve had electric vehicles almost since Tom Edison’s lightbulb!

But I digress. The Green Line on the T had the inestimable virtue of hauling me to Woodland, the last stop, from which I would hitchhike to Wellesley College, where I infiltrated one of the (all-girl) dorms to illicitly woo a rich girl who, by and by, broke my heart. Although my romance with Becky flamed out, my affection for subways and elevateds has never waned. I’d be torn if asked to choose a favorite between the Paris Métro that I’ve ridden on and off for more than thirty years and the combination of subways and els in Tokyo, where I lived for seven years.

The problem posed by the Tokyo system is its sheer immensity. There are public and private lines that split and tentacle as one travels farther from the city center. The less vigilant passenger might find himself alone and palely loitering in the mountainous boondocks of Takaosanguchi when he really wanted to be in Hashimoto, thirty-three stations and ten miles in the other direction.

So, it’s Paris, by a whisker—although the new No. 14 line has been dug so deep that it piggybacks the sewers made famous by Jean Valjean. This requires several stations to be constantly infused with a cloying air freshener that only seems to exacerbate the pong seeping from the fetid tunnels just below.

Among the transit systems I’ve ridden and often lost my way—in Japan, Germany, France and the venerable, rickety London Tube—the only one that ever scared me was New York City, largely because I had watched several times the original version (with Walter Matthau and the chillingly villainous Robert Shaw) of The Taking of Pelham 123. But when I moved to New York, I fell blithely into the groove of the Long Island Railroad and then, in Brooklyn, rode the G Train to Hoyt-Schermerhorn, where if I felt the urge I could jump to the A Train and go (with Duke and Ella) to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem. I learned swiftly that New York subways are no scarier than any other urban trains. But they’re dirtier than most and they are in dire need of more crosstown lines—which will always be true.

Which brings me back to the conundrum of the crosstown No. 12 line in Paris. After getting on at Sèvres-Babylone, I was heading roughly southwest toward a station called Convention, from which I planned to explore a little garden street called villa Santos Dumont, named for a swashbuckling aviator. My stop was close to the end of the entire line, by which point—usually—only a few doughty stragglers were left to exit the car.

But as we pulled into Convention, I had to muscle my way toward the sliding doors through a throng that had not shrunk in eight stops—not even at Montparnasse, the big intercity terminal. As I struggled to escape before the warning bell stopped and the door snapped shut, I wondered why no one—except me—was leaving. There were only three stops to the end of the line, all in neighborhoods that hold few popular attractions. Not many restaurants, not much shopping, no boutiques, no theaters, no nightclubs, not even a bookstore. The closest park was twenty blocks away. Did these people have no homes, no jobs, no groceries to buy, no school to attend, no kids to collect, no promises to keep?

Why was this train to nowheresville so full, and why was everybody staying on the train to the bitter end?

Or was there no end?

Had I escaped—by the skin of my teeth—some sort of Sartrean nightmare in which the No. 12 train just keeps shuttling forth and back and forth, from mairie to mairie, inhaling more passengers, growing ever fuller and more cramped but never allowing anyone to leave? Was this the mass-transit apotheosis of No Exit, in which Hell—as the philosopher suggested—is other people.

As I fled along the platform and climbed onto the street, breathing the cold, mildly polluted February air, I thought about Charlie, made famous by the Kingston Trio. They sang tragically of the day “Charlie handed in his dime at the Kendall Square station, and he changed for Jamaica Plain. When he got there the conductor told him, ‘One more nickel.’ Charlie couldn’t get off of that train!”

I wondered about all my fellow travelers on the No. 12 line. Were they a whole trainload of Charlies? I left them behind, so I’ll never know what has become of them, never know if they returned to their apartments, their families, their jobs, their very lives, never know if the two girls’ batteries finally died and they had to regain consciousness.

Could it be? Could all those people have been riding that same train for weeks, months, a hundred years? Could I have been trapped among them, my fate still unlearned? Could I, but for fortune, be there, riding forever ‘neath the streets of Paris…