My grandparents were people of walking and bus rides. They did not trust traveling underground. The few times I traveled with them on the metro, they appeared tense: a fall, a shove, a robbery. In a way, wherever the sun did not shine was always territory for the unexpected, the dangerous, and the hidden. Insects lived underground. Worms, the dead, ownerless treasures, evidence of unsolved crimes. Also purely practical aspects like the fact that it was not safe. The ceiling could collapse. What happens if you get trapped in a tunnel, if the train doors close before you get off. And not to mention the suffocating heat or the excessive convergence of unknown people, their smells.
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Perhaps the issue that was not clearly stated was the latter. The one derived from the people. Too many people, too close, too much danger and anonymity. Men grope, skillful hands steal wallets and purses, and the mob crushes against you denying the individuality that had cost so much to establish. Outside, distances were somewhat maintained and if not – as in trams, buses, or queues for anything – a shove or getting off at the next stop or leaving the line and seeing the houses and the light and the sky and the sun was enough. For my grandparents, traveling by metro had, besides some danger from the people, something sacrilegious, profane. Life continued above while you were, for a few minutes, outside of it, as if you were dead in a cemetery or a prisoner in jail: off the radar.
A metro car is the sum of as many solitudes as there are people inside
One of the requirements to be considered a non-place is that you access it through a passage ticket, an identity document, or a credit card. Traveling by metro meets this. Paying for a ticket is something that some people – before and now: sneaking in has more cunning than thievery – do not want or cannot do and jump the turnstiles or crowd excessively when someone who has paid passes. Some give this a defiant air. Those are the worst. The crime should explain itself. We only have one life: don’t make us waste time with excuses. If you sneak in, you risk – little, let’s be honest – running into employee or security checks, who have too much of a Guardians of the Galaxy vibe as if sneaking into the metro were the start of all corruption, the first outbreak of all other crimes: rapes, homicides, lootings, and genocides. Jump onto the track, go outside, don’t come back here, illegal.
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Everyone moves in the metro based on very personal strategies. Some experts know where to wait for the metro on the platform, move among bodies, locate the free seat, go for it, at any cost. Others give up any knowledge acquired from previous trips and do not guess which side the door opens on, the direction they are traveling, where it is better or worse to be. Shouting or listening to what others say. Some want to arrive on time, many, just to arrive. Others, perhaps, pretend they are coming from or going to somewhere. You are inside a tube, you cannot pretend to look outside and you look inside. A metro car is the sum of as many solitudes as there are people inside. Each of us tries to guess who and what the others are like, through faces and gestures, their way of dressing, you think you know what their life is like. Where they come from, what the next years will hold for them. Traveling by metro makes us seers, it tensions us, makes us aware of our own solitude, abyssal down there. Only outside, when we leave and arrive wherever, will we have rebuilt the mask, the manners, the character.
Everything is anonymous when traveling by metro. We can sit, lean, collide with other bodies without knowing, without knowing anything about the other, whether we like or dislike them, we are not even allowed to be indifferent. Transience, the vocation of movement, of circulating at high speed below life in the light, with space to escape, where the places we stay (our home, workplace, leisure places, others’ homes) lie, comes to our aid. Corridors and platforms, colors and numbers, all cities are the same when traveling by metro. We have been children, teenagers, young people, adults, and old underground. We have shared space, transfers, cars and breakdowns, delays and street musicians, and nothing has left us much wounded. Julio Cortázar comes to mind. And I think that perhaps the pickpockets and thieves who put their hands in others’ pockets are looking for a manuscript where through trips on the metro in Barcelona or Paris you try to find love, to meet the Maga again, to disrupt the routine of buses and walks and the slow world above us.
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