A Man and a Woman on a Train
photo Duncan Fick
A Man and a Woman On a Train
Within hours of touching down in Paris at the end of that January, Duncan and I caught the night train out of Gare de Lyon - college dropouts backpacking across Europe. Charles DeGaulle airport had scrambled our brains a little with its ultra-modern design and fast-moving walkways that we interpreted as “flat escalators,” and Paris had been a revelation of local food purchased in neighborhood markets as distant from our local Piggly-Wiggly as a baguette was from Bunny Bread. So with baguettes under our arms and cheeses that smelled like our underarms, we slept sitting up in a second-class carriage heading to Montpellier where free accommodations awaited us with our friend Jonathan. Already disposed toward the second generation of Marxist theory and its implications for comparative literature, Jonathan was doing a junior year abroad. His French had become remarkable. Soon he would master German as well. My own language skills were revealed to me on the train when I found myself flabbergasted at the fluency of a three-year-old talking with his mom.
Addled from jetlag ––-our first –– compounded by profound lack of sleep, we stumbled from the Montpellier train station armed with an address and a map. Jonathan had a cheap apartment in a narrow street that curved down toward the Mediterranean. The buildings in this neighborhood dated from before our own country was founded and could hardly have been more different from the suburban experience of High Point that we had left behind. Finding the address, we pushed through a heavy wooden door right against the street and climbed two flights of steps tiled with hexagonal terra cotta to an apartment of two small rooms.
The door was cracked open but we knocked anyway.
The short guy wearing tinted aviator glasses was not instantly recognizable, his black hair long, his beard a scraggled mess, but as he shouted, “Duncan! Buz!,” Jonathan’s face came into focus behind the beard and glasses.
In the front room a gas heater was connected to a canister of butane hissing pleasantly, blue flames licking up the front grill. There were few other pieces of furniture in the room so we sat on the floor, patchy linoleum over an elaborate parquet so scarred and dented it looked as though it may have once been used to store gravel. In the back room a double bed listed so heavily its slope mimicked the street below. The WC was in the stairwell, one step up. Despite its sparseness, the warmth of the apartment and Jonathan’s company buoyed us and we spent the next two hours laughing and eating rustic bread and rounds of camembert and drinking cheap red wine from oversized bottles with plastic stoppers. Later that evening we went out to a créperie and languished for an hour watching four young women singing and passing a guitar back and forth between them. Having come from a town that was so boring and repressed that there was actually nowhere for young people to gather, I felt as though I had glimpsed a utopian world and I longed to insinuate myself into the mix of those boisterous and buoyant women.
The next day, my college suitemate Taylor arrived from Berlin, where he was enrolled at the Frei University for the year and soon he and Duncan and I headed off through Spain on the way to Morocco. As we rumbled through Spain Taylor recounted for us his trials as an American in Berlin in 1975. Yelled at, spit upon, treated as persona-non-grata, he had made virtually no friends in five months, surviving psychologically by throwing himself into studies and hiding out in the library. Now, in the company of friends with familiar accents, his relief was palpable.
In Barcelona, we spent an entire day at the construction site of Sagrada Familia. This was not a place for tourists, but because it was Spain under the rule of Francisco Franco, no one cared. Wheelbarrows lay upturned against the only part of the cathedral completed: four spires carved with snakes and lizards and chimera in place of the expected saints and gargoyles; tools were scattered here and there, no workers to be seen and certainly no one to shoo us away. We stepped through the cold mud, nosing around, and left our tracks up the winding stairs of the spires, following them as they opened out into little chambers or crossed from one to the other with crosswalks leading to balconies that offered us splendid views of the entire city and the Mediterranean beyond.
The trains all over Europe were designed in cabin style. An extraordinarily civilized design, each cabin with a sliding door that opened onto two bench seats facing one another. This provided an immediate intimacy that allowed us to have our own hotel room for the night if the train wasn’t full. If we were forced to share a cabin with others, we could stroll down the exterior hallway glancing into the open doors to see who might be pleasant company. On the evening we headed out from Barcelona we strolled through the train looking for a good compartment and chose a cabin with only one other person, an extraordinarily attractive dark-haired young woman. The three of us bumbled in with our backpacks and sat on the bench opposite her. She was older than we were by a few years, but the divide between a twenty-one-year-old guy and a thirty-year-old woman is small if the woman is this beautiful.
The cabins of these trains are intimate in multiple ways. They cloister you together in a small group, a door between you and the rest of the world, and cramped enough that you are all in close physical proximity. The woman’s knees nearly brushed mine as the train swayed along, her face directly across from mine, the subtlest hint of something floral and erotic as I breathed in. I did my best not to stare, concentrating on writing into a small black book with a red spine. Duncan was reading Things Fall Apart, but I also noticed him sneaking glances at this brunette beauty. I could speak a little French but virtually no Spanish and we had traveled by train few enough times that I didn’t know whether it would be more polite to speak or to remain silent. For the moment, we all remained silent, but I was pleased with our evening’s companion. The opportunity to speak to her would present itself.
A few minutes later, the door of the cabin slid open with a low rumble and a man dressed in a blue suit with a fine pin-stripe glanced at us, then at the woman. He stepped into the cabin slid the door closed and wordlessly sat down beside her. Perhaps a little older than the woman, he had an air of gravitas that made me feel a bit like a rube in my jeans and flannel. After a few minutes, he spoke to her in Spanish and the woman put her finger in the book she was reading and answered him and then she went back to her reading. This happened two or three times before the woman put the book down on the seat beside her and began smiling and nodding and, finally, talking to the man. Her dark hair fell to her shoulders and drew my eye toward the cleavage visible at the first button of a tailored white shirt. The man offered a cigarette and she took it and leaned over to him for a light, putting her hand up to the back of his to steady the lighter. As she talked, she gestured in circles with the cigarette burning extravagantly squeezed between her two middle fingers, smoke pricking my eyes. Talking and gesturing all the while, the woman crossed her leg toward him in a single deft motion that seemed to bring them a little closer together.
As the light faded and the cabin filled with shadows, I noticed the woman lightly touching the man’s arm as she laughed or gestured, and then the man leaned close to her and dropped his voice to a whisper. Taylor’s head was tilted back on the seat, a whorl of beard at his neck, his eyes closed, the Herald Tribune closed in his lap. Duncan was reading his book, but he also watched with surreptitious, rapt attention, the scene unfolding across from us. As the conversation went on, the man put his hand on the woman’s knee and then to my shock he stroked it gently back and forth as he spoke. Was this how these things worked, I wondered. Could he know her? My own pulse began to rise as I watched. She smiled, he smiled, then his fingers brushed her neck and rose to her chin halting at the bottom of her chin where he tilted her mouth up toward his own. Was there a tiny movement of the woman’s mouth that could have been read as invitation? The room had become nearly dark. He put his lips to hers. She responded and her lips took control of the man, drawing his hand down into the white blouse.
My head still down in my journal, I shot a glance at Taylor. His head was still back but his eyes were open just a slit. Duncan was reading, but his eyes had become wide and a sly smile turned up the corner of his lips. Like one of only three viewers in an exquisitely intimate peep show, one in which the viewers were also participants, I felt heat rising up my neck as coursing blood warmed my body. Is this how strangers in Spain interact with each other? I kept my head down, scribbling furiously in my journal a story about a man and a woman on a train, in a foreign land.