casually continued on her way to Gare de Lyon. She was welcomed into the anonymous, hurried mass of commuters, whose eardrums are overwhelmed by the chaotic concert of announcements and information spewing out of loudspeakers, accompanied by the noise of shoes beating the floor in a steady rhythm. In this familiar setting, Christelle acted by instinct, walking as she usually would, head down, back slightly bent, accustomed to the mask of rush hour on exhausted faces with no smiles that kept moving past her. An interminable parade of features, colors, clothes, sizes, thousands of destinies meeting for a fraction of a second, blank stares colliding for an instant and then ignoring each other forever. Every day, Christelle heard the depressing echo of these silences. She kept walking, her pace dictated by the hustle and bustle of the crowd. Dazzled by the overpowering, blinding neon lights, she squinted and then looked up to verify the times. Always on the move, a prisoner of the rapid chaotic swell. Impossible to stop herself. The clickety clack of train stations going by at an unheard-of pace on the display panel until it suddenly stopped on a destination, a number or a letter indicating the platform. At the shrill sound of the train horn, a human tide would converge on the same escalator. Christelle participated in this merciless mad rush twice a day. It worked. Everyone just got swallowed up by cars in haphazard gulps, a chaotic ballet of automatons, exhausted from their daily work.
The crowd carried Christelle to the train that was waiting for her. Accustomed to the routine, she was among the first to enter and quickly find a seat. Discreet, never wanting to disturb anyone, she found a seat in the middle of the car, farthest away from the draft. She sat with her back to the direction in which the train was traveling. She sank all the weight of her exhausted body onto the seat, ready to savor the ever-so-slight feeling of getting away.
She was surprised when she recognized the melancholic young man she had passed on the Pont d’Austerlitz much earlier.
I was sitting in front of her, terrified, with even more pain and bitterness in my expression. She saw that I was frightened! Christelle carefully scrutinized my tormented face and my pupils, dilated from anxiety, then closed her eyes.
THE DAY ON the bridge, a broken soul, I was not dreaming. Squinting beneath the setting sun, my gaze had simply gotten lost in the river’s filth. Horrible images of war and flames were rumbling deep down inside me. At times, I was thinking of Marcelline and the rare honeymoon hours of our childhood, my lips on her shoulder, the tender taste of the first quivers that are never spoken. These treasures with her, I secretly cherished them. Her absence was making my heart bleed, constantly reminding me of what I had become, a pathetic reflection of humanity, inconsequential, a shipwrecked victim of happiness . . . An illegal alien!
An infinite silence in my soul, an abyss, beyond fear and doubt, a sharp pain in the gut, immense uncertainty, worse than a feeling of malaise. Emptiness, absolute despair.
Every day, I kept a low profile in Paris, walking with my head down and staring at my feet to avoid looking in front of me. I had forgotten all about the dream, which risked ending up in bureaucracy, a file with some numbers stamped on it. I was running away, heading nowhere, to avoid being detained, confined behind bars, with wrists and ankles handcuffed, accused of having tried everything, defied every unimaginable danger, flirted with death a thousand times, suffered everyone’s contempt, and all I wanted was simply to live! A misdemeanor of hope, a crime of dreams, of better days! The last few months, I had been living a nightmare with no future in sight. From early morning until late afternoon, I spent sleepless nights in insalubrious places, ten or more of us occupying a few square meters. The misery I was carrying around was especially noticeable in my resignation and lack of self-esteem.
I wandered for hours on foot or bicycle in the scorching July heat or during the worst November days. Unnoticed. I saw walls everywhere, even inside me! I had escaped my country in filthy clothes, there where you were dying slowly but surely, anywhere, at any given moment! In Paris, I had become yet another anonymous soul among the worst dregs of society, broken, to be swept away by any means, in an airplane or to a camp, with police vans, police officers with clear consciences, clubs, and despised by everyone. An illegal immigrant.
The day I met Christelle, I had spent the afternoon on a public bench. As usual, I was basically staying out of sight to avoid the looks that made me feel like a pariah. I was waiting it out, trying to escape by blending the unbearable images of my past with the gray sky and the concrete, with the cacophony of the deafening metallic sounds of the street. I was fighting a losing battle against the cold, this venomous, loyal daily companion, distilled by this world that never failed to close its doors to me and had nothing to offer me. Sitting on the bench, I would occasionally caress the cold change for the meal of the day, a baguette or a tin of sardines, that I held firmly in my hands, buried in my pants pockets.
That same morning, a former militia comrade had asked me to move out after having put me up for almost a month. His wife refused to keep bumping into me in the apartment during the day. She was afraid I would frighten their children. For her, I was an animal at bay, today in chains but potentially extremely dangerous. Illegal, I had neither friend nor fellow countryman. I had basically left at the crack of dawn, one foot in front of the other, my expression more somber than ever, absent, alone on the streets of Paris, excluded from happiness, wearing dirty, holey socks.
On the bridge, I gathered whatever courage I had left to confront the test of the train station, filled with patrol officers and anti-riot officers, residence permits, criminal investigation operations! I was so anxious, my stomach was knotted up and my jaw was clenched. I waited for darkness to fall so that I could sneak my way into the crowded Gare de Lyon and take a train heading to a shelter for homeless people way out in the suburbs.
Once I entered the huge concourse, my pulse was racing at my temples, literally like a furnace in my head, totally obsessed with the idea of not standing out. The mere sight of the blue of a police officer’s uniform immediately set off a terrible panic in me.
My muscles stiffened suddenly when I saw a police roadblock about ten meters in front of me. Plainclothes cops, with cold penetrating gazes, orange armbands that read police, examining the crowd suspiciously, randomly choosing candidates for an ID check.
A rush of adrenaline exploded in my chest. Completely derailed by fear, I found the courage to turn back and head in the opposite direction, away from the crowd, as discreetly as possible. I quickly took off, wandered, and got lost several times. My brain was bubbling over with anxiety, to take off, disappear into the racket of the early evening rush hour. My stomach and throat were seized with cramps. Butt in gear. Do not get caught. My knees wobbled beneath the weight of my fear, and my legs were trembling. Leave this corridor as quickly as possible, toward wherever!
In my distress, I had to hold on to the fight for life with the tenacity of a pesky insect, stand up to the law, be a nuisance, live regardless!
Overcome by a strange intuition, I instinctively got on a train. Convinced that I had become invisible by blending into the crowd, I took a seat next to a window, which would not close properly.
A cold draft gripped me once the train took off, all the more unpleasant because it was mixed in with the scalding heat rising up from beneath the seat. With my hands buried in my pockets, I tried to wedge my body into the soft spot the seat offered. I kept twisting and turning and finally gave in to the discomfort, unable to really relax. I have always been able to live peacefully with suffering.
Busy watching other passengers, on the lookout for a ticket inspector or a police officer, my attention finally zeroed in on the woman sitting in front of me.
CHRISTELLE LET HERSELF get carried by the rhythm of the moving train, in spite of the bumpy ride and the sudden violent shaking caused by trains going in the opposite direction. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth revealed