The Metro
By Deldelp Bernal Medina
The first time it happened I was surprised It was a hot august day. Which seemed hotter in a one room studio with just one window looking out into a empty courtyard with an even clothesline. This emptiness was due to les vacances, which properly translated doesn't mean vacation but rather evacuation. The result was abandoned boulevards, closed cafes, and vacant boulangeries. All with lively signs designed with yellow marker pen suns and the words " ferme pour les vacances." So I had no proper expresso, fresh bread, and least of all someone to lend the money to buy or share either. Ten francs rattled in my favorite sundress pocket with a crumpled up but still useful Metro ticket and some blue lint. I stood in front of my opened refrigerator hoping to cool off, but its bareness only made me hungrier. Flipping the remnants of my monthly check thanks to mom, I fiddled with what was left in my pocket.
" Metro has air conditioned cars," I said out loud, surprising myself with both the idea and my voice.
Seeing that riding the Metro could relieve me of one of problems, I decided to ride it all day. Accompanied by a light cotton jacket, a magazine, two books and my Walkman all inside my blue cotton book bag.
Blending in, I looked like everyone else going somewhere to do something, except I rode back and forth on the same line two or three. Everyone else had a set destination and a limited amount of time. As the line began to wear on me, I transferred, repeating this process a dozen times. Whizzing by signs like Odeon, Luxembourg, Place De Saint Michel, which spelled me going further and further away from my original stop. On each train a pattern was revealing itself. Frenchmen, like all Latin men, look and flirt if given a chance to. So I wasn't surprised at the longing stares or the whispered comment. On my third transfer I was complimented on my tan (which was my normal Mocha brown color), for the audacity to have bare legs (breaking with French custom of wearing pantyhose ALWAYS), and even my blue black curly, nearly kinky (thanks to the weather) hair got a few remarks. But on the fifth train a generic Frenchman complimented me on my smell, a disoriented Italian struggled to remember the word cleavage in his second language, and a string of others begged me for my phone number.
By the Gazzilion train (I lost count after a while), I had found a fervent admirer who had missed his station twice and insisted on buying me dinner. He was gawky, and if it weren't for his height he tended to remind me of a five year old. In his early twenties I thought, with hands that resembled the rest of his body, thin and wiry but baby soft. Blond tufts of hair peaked from under his Panamanian sombrero giving him a pseudo-hippie-world-beat-white-boy look. When I told him my parents where from Panama, his light blue eyes lit up. He proceeded to tell me of his recent trip there, how he had acquired the hat and all the cultural surprises I had heard before. That story is what caused him to miss his train the second time; the first was trying to guess where my accent was from.
He insisted that I come with him right away, but I gave him some excuse about having to make an international phone call and that I'd meet him in an hour at his station. By his reaction you'd think he had won the lottery. blabbering incoherently, he promised me the nicest bistro in the neighborhood, champagne and other silly romantic clichés such as red roses.
I didn't plan on going to meet him, but it had been seventy-two hours since my last decent meal and it would be an other forty-eight until my check arrived. At the very idea my stomach pleaded against my better judgment. My biological need won any argument my brain could come up with.
It was a nice neighborhood, the kind that just a couple of years earlier had gone through yuppie gentrification. A couple of blocks, beyond abandoned factory buildings reminded the neon-framed corrugated buildings of their recent past. He was there chain smoking like all his country men, waiting. He flashed a smile showing faintly nicotine stained teeth, perfectly corrected thanks to the use of orthodics. He politely asked if I had successfully made my call, reminding me of the impending strike that the Telegraph and Telecom workers would probably go through. I lied, hoping he didn't know it was just a pretext, that the call had gone through but no one was home and all I had gotten was a machine.
" Let me make up for it," he said" Let's have champagne at my house"
Or something just as obvious came out of his thin lips as he handed me a dozen roses that he had hidden behind his back. I thanked him for the flowers and had to insist, almost demand, to go eat first. I never doubted where the night would lead, but I never thought he'd be cheap enough to deny a meal. looking at the perfectly shaped roses, the thought occurred to me that probably he had spent a fortune on them. This thought was reinforced when we went to a pizza chain with such a silly name in English such as "FRESH PIZZA," known for its quick service and rock bottom prices. On the way he mumbled something about the bistro being closed, it being august and all.
It ended being the most unromantic meal in the history of encounters. Or at least it felt that way. We were promptly served by a waitress bent on taking out on her customers the fact that she too couldn't afford the customary seaside vacation. He was nervous, smoking, hardly eating, constantly tapping his fingers on the plastic mouse shaped parmesan shaped shaker, the napkin dispenser, everything. Maybe he didn't have enough for the bill, but my growling stomach erased that thought from my mind.
When he started to ramble, about his plans to explore the rest of the Caribbean the next summer, I realized his age. Sixteen maximum, seventeen, younger much younger than me. He had that nervous sexual energy that most post-pubescent boys have. It bounced off him, causing the fidgeting with one cigarette after an other, all preventing him from thinking about anything else but sex. My face must have made my discovery noticeable, for he had acquired a silly grin and a pulse to match. All of it in front of me insisting I hurry up.
In his stuttering I managed to understand that his parents were away and he had the house to himself. He felt lonely in this abandoned town(yes he was corny) and did I mind going to his place too keep him company. I sympathized and decided to do my Samaritan deed. A good lay wouldn't do me any harm. I finished my pizza, annoying my stomach that I didn't ask for more. Guiding myself on the widely quoted statistic that a man reaches his sexual prime at eighteen, I agreed to go with him.
I was mistaken; in sexual matters it was a big zero. What he lacked in experience he couldn't make up with eagerness. His nervousness didn't turn to excitement. Unbridled sexual frenzy became Wrestlemania X. When I finally asked him if he was a virgin, his almost transparent body flushed and he denied it repeatedly. His denial and those soft lanky hands that didn't seem to know where to go or what to do, lied.
A hour later he had a grin, I had a backache and a less empty stomach and a less empty stomach. One out of two wasn't bad in a situation like mine. So when he reached for his faded blue jeans, I assumed it was my clue to leave. I took in and dressed. He searched for something amongst his pile of clothes that lay on the ground and came up empty handed.
"Sorry I don't have any matches, " I murmured reaching for the rest of my things.
" Of course you don't smoke, but that's not what I am looking for," he replied with his back towards me, scavenging in the wooden brown dresser drawers that were in the corner of the room.
" Aha, here it is. Take it." Three hundred francs. He motioned me to come over to and said " Here buy something nice."
I was stunned but before I knew it my left hand reached over and took it.
"Just close the door on the way out; It will lock itself, " he murmured as we kissed good-bye.
Since then whether it is hot or cold just as long as the money is tight I go to ride the Metro all day.