Underground Time

by Delphine de Vigan

  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.

  In the street parallel to the railway line, Mathilde has stopped. She turns to the light long enough to feel the sun on her face, to let its warmth bathe her eyes and hair.

  It’s gone ten when she goes through the door of the Brasserie de la Gare.

  It’s gone ten and she couldn’t give a damn.

  Bernard, with a dishcloth over his shoulder, gives her a broad smile: ‘So, young lady, we didn’t see you on Friday for the Loto . . .’

  Now she’s playing the lottery twice a week, reading her horoscope in Le Parisien and going to see clairvoyants.

  ‘I took a day off to go on my son’s school trip to the chateau of Versailles. The teacher needed volunteers.’

  ‘Was it good?’

  ‘The rain never stopped.’

  Bernard groans in sympathy and turns to the coffee machine.

  Mathilde takes a table. Today’s the twentieth of May, so she’s not going to drink it standing up. Today, on the twentieth of May, she is going to sit down, because it has taken her over an hour and a half to get here and she’s wearing three-inch heels.

  She’s going to sit down because no one’s waiting for her, because she no longer serves any purpose.

  Bernard puts the cup in front of her, pulls out the chair on the other side of the table.

  ‘Bit off-colour this morning, eh?’

  ‘Bit off-colour every morning.’

  ‘No! Last week when you came in with your light floaty dress, it was like spring was in the air! Isn’t that right, Laurent? It’s spring, Mathilde, you’ll see, and the world keeps turning like the hem of a flowery dress.’

  Nice people are the dangerous ones. They threaten the whole structure, shake the fortress. One more word from Bernard, and Mathilde might burst into tears. Bernard’s gone back behind his counter. He’s bustling about, giving her the occasional wink or smile. The café’s almost empty at this time. He’s preparing the sandwiches and croque-monsieurs for the lunchtime rush. He’s humming a song that she knows without being able to name it, one of those love songs about memories and regrets. The regulars, leaning on the co
unter and staring into space, are listening in religious silence.

  Mathilde rummages in her bag for her purse. No luck. Suddenly, in irritation, she tips its contents out on the table. Among the objects in front of her – keys, travel-sickness pills, lipstick, eyeshadow, packets of tissues, luncheon vouchers – she discovers a white envelope on which she recognises Maxime’s writing: ‘For Mum’. She tears it open. Inside she sees one of those cards that are all the rage in the playground, which her sons regard as priceless and are sold in packets of five or ten. Cards which they use in their battles throughout the day and spend their time swapping. Mathilde begins by unfolding the little note that accompanies the card. In careful handwriting, without any spelling mistakes, her son has written: ‘Mum, I want you to have my Argent Defender card, it’s very rare, but that’s OK, I’ve got two of them. You’ll see, it’s a hero card that protects you all your life.’

  The Argent Defender is wearing sumptuous shining armour. He stands out against a dark turbulent background. He’s holding a sword in his left hand and in the other he brandishes an immaculate shield at an unseen enemy. The Argent Defender is handsome and noble and brave. He’s not afraid.

  Under the picture you can read the number of points he is worth, as well as a short text summarising his vocation: ‘Our cause is to fight swiftly and mercilessly against any element of evil that surfaces in Azeroth.’

  Mathilde smiles.

  On the back, against an ochre background covered in opaque clouds, the name of the game is written in Gothic script: World of Warcraft.

  A few days ago, Théo and Maxime explained to her that Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards, which had been swallowing up their pocket money for months, were now old hat. Past it. Relegated to the cupboard. Now everybody had World of Warcraft cards and nobody played with anything but that. Not having any WoW cards, her sons were left out, nobodies, charity cases.

  Last Saturday, Mathilde bought them each two packets. They were beside themselves with joy. They did some swaps with each other, decided their attack and defence strategies and trained all day for their forthcoming combats. Virtual combats conducted on the ground in the playground, which she couldn’t make head or tail of.

  Mathilde slips the Argent Defender into her jacket pocket. The card has given her the courage to get up. She leaves the money on the table, puts her things back in her bag, gives Bernard a wave and leaves.

  A few hundred yards further on, she stumbles, catches herself, puts the other foot forward. The least breath of wind, the smallest dizzy spell, could make her collapse. She has reached the point of fragility, of disequilibrium, at which things lose their meaning, their proportion. With this degree of vulnerability, the tiniest detail is capable of engulfing her in joy or destroying her.

  A woman of about fifty in a velvet dressing gown opened the door to him. As soon as she saw Thibault, her expression brightened.

  ‘You again!’

  Neither the address, nor the place, let alone the woman’s face, were familiar to him.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You were the one who called a fortnight ago.’

  He let it go. He thought that the woman must have confused him with another doctor. He followed her in, looking around as he went. The sideboard in the living room, the porcelain knick-knacks, the thick curtains in the bedroom, didn’t look familiar either. Nor did this woman’s thin body, her pink nylon nightdress, or her long painted nails. After he listened to her chest, Thibault asked if she had kept her last prescription so that he’d know what treatment she’d been prescribed. The headed paper she showed him had his name on it. He spent a few seconds looking at the prescription, with his own writing on it and the date – 8 May – when he had indeed done a 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. shift.

  During a shift it’s not unusual for him to see two or three patients he knows. But normally he can remember them.

  The woman had all the symptoms of a secondary bronchial infection. He wrote out a new prescription with his right hand, as he has done for years, although he is left-handed. He looked around one last time. Hand on heart – what was left of it – he could have sworn that he had never before set foot in this apartment. Yet he’d been there twelve days previously.

  He has only eight fingers. Five on one hand and three on the other. That is part of him, the missing part, a thing defined by its absence. It’s a moment of his life, a date, an approximate time. A moment inscribed on his body. Or rather subtracted from it. It happened one Saturday night at the end of his second year as a medical student.

  Thibault was studying at Caen. He went home to his parents one weekend a month. He used to meet his old school friends for a drink and then they’d go to the Marechalerie, a disco about twenty miles from home. Four or five of them would pile into Pierre’s van. They’d drink spirits at the bar, dance a bit, look at the girls. That evening he and Pierre had had an argument about nothing, and then things had escalated, something that went back a long way had come up out of nowhere. He was studying medicine and Pierre had failed his bac. He was living in Caen and Pierre was working in his father’s garage. Girls liked him; they noticed his fine hands. Pierre was well over six foot and weighed about nineteen stone. Pierre was dead drunk. He had pushed Thibault several times. He was shouting above the music: ‘I don’t give a fuck about your pretty-boy face and your nice family.’ People cleared a space around them. They were asked to leave. Around three in the morning, they got into the van. Thibault sat in the passenger seat, the two others were in the back. Pierre was still outside, furious and refusing to get behind the wheel until Thibault got out. Till he beat it. Till he pissed off. He’d just have to walk home. The door on Thibault’s side was open. Pierre stood there and demanded that he get out. They argued back and forth for a few more minutes, the voices of the two others protesting above theirs. At exactly the same moment they both gave in. Thibault put his hand on the door frame to get out just as Pierre slammed the door shut with incredible force. The van shook. Thibault cried out. His hand was trapped and the door was jammed. Each of them in turn pulled, rattled and kicked it. Inside, Thibault was struggling not to lose consciousness. He didn’t know how long they stayed like that, panicky and confused, their movements slowed by alcohol, insults being fired off on all sides, and him, alone in the cab, his hand held fast by the metal. Half an hour, an hour, maybe more. Perhaps he fainted. When they managed to get it open, Thibault’s hand was literally crushed flat and two of his fingers were hanging loose at the point where they joined his hand. They drove to the nearest town. In the hospital they waited for the duty surgeon.

  The two fingers no longer had any blood-flow and were too badly damaged for an operation to repair or reattach them. A few days later, the ring finger and pinkie on his left hand had to be amputated. Two dead and swollen things of which there would remain no trace but a smooth white surface above the palm.

  His dream had been cut short. Cleanly. His dream lay at the bottom of a bin in a provincial hospital whose name he had never forgotten. He would never be a surgeon.

  After his time as a house officer, Thibault began as a locum for the doctor in the village where he had grown up, one week per month and two months in the summer. The rest of the time he worked for a home-help network. When Dr M. died, Thibault took over his practice.

  He did consultations in the morning in his consulting room and devoted the afternoons to house calls. He covered an area with a fifteen-mile radius, paid off his student loan and went to lunch at his parents’ on a Sunday. In the village of Rai in the Orne region, he became a respectable man whom people greeted at the market and invited to join the Rotary Club, a man who was addressed as Doctor and to whom girls from good families were introduced.

  Things could have gone on like that, followed their course along the dotted line. He could have married Isabelle, the lawyer’s daughter, or Élodie, the daughter of the Groupama insurance agent in the neighbouring town. They would have had three children. They would have extended his waiting room, re
painted, bought a people carrier and found a locum so they could go away for the summer.

  Things would probably have been nicer.

  After four years, Thibault sold the practice. He put some belongings in a case and caught the train.

  He wanted the city, its movement, the heavy air at the day’s end. He wanted the bustle and the noise.

  He began working for Paris Medical Emergencies, at first doing relief cover, then as a temp, then as a partner. He continued to come and go, here and there, according to the patients’ calls and his shifts. He never left.

  Perhaps he has nothing else to give but a prescription written in blue pen on the corner of a table. Perhaps all he will ever be is someone who passes through and leaves.

  His life is here. Even though none of it fools him. Not the music that comes through windows, nor the illuminated signs, nor the bursts of voices around television sets on evenings when there’s football on. Even if he has known for a long time that the singular trumps the plural and how fragile conjunctions are.

  His life is in his crappy Renault Clio, with its empty plastic bottles and crumpled Bounty wrappers on the floor.

  His life is in this incessant toing and froing, these exhausted days, these stairways, these lifts, these doors which close behind him.

  His life is at the heart of the city. And the city, with its noise, covers the complaints and the murmurs, hides its poverty, displays its dustbins and its wealth, and ceaselessly increases its speed.

  The glittering tower rose up before her in the spring light, a strip of cloud reflected in its glass sides. The sun seems filtered from below, diffracted.