The Girl Who Reads on the Métro

by Christine Féret-Fleury

The days when you feel as though you’re a cog in a well-oiled machine, a huge mechanical body in which each person has their place and their part to play, willingly or not.

she would sit wondering whether her existence in this world was any more precious than that of the spider she’d drowned that morning in her shower.

A man. Or rather, a reader.

‘What do you read on the Métro?’

‘fireflies are fallen stars.

that moment when the sun sinks into the sea, when it becomes like wine, or like blood.

She must get out of the habit of forging straight ahead, her eyes fixed on the goal. Nothing exciting awaited her there, nothing:

always loved the smell of books, especially when she bought them second-hand. New books had different smells too, depending on the paper and glue used, but they said nothing of the hands that had held them, the houses that had been their home; they had no story of their own yet, separate from the one they told – a parallel story, hazy, secret.

the shop was the palace out of One Thousand and One Nights;

The little room seemed to have shrunk even more, as if the walls of books had taken a step forward into the room.

‘On page 247, all seems lost. It’s the best moment, you know.’

‘I’m making generalizations. That’s why I screw up every time.’

She had been in love – or thought she had, which boiled down to the same thing – with each of them.

So many words. So many stories, characters, landscapes, laughter, tears, sudden decisions, hopes and fears.

‘Yes, everything. Everything that people tell me. The history of the books. The way they live, the people they touch – each book is a portrait and it has at least two faces.’ ‘Two …’ ‘Yes. The face of the person who gives it, and the face of the person who receives it.’

When the world shrinks As if it were barely a filament Our clumsy hands Can no longer grasp anything We have not been taught The only practice that could save us: learning to sustain ourselves on a shadow.

Yes, thousands and thousands of strangers existed out there, while she sat here, unmoving, surrounded by this constant tide.

He was talking to himself, Juliette realized, evoking a particular memory. A memory she couldn’t share, even though the scene seemed almost alive, more real than her own presence in that office.

it was a perfect refuge in the centre of Paris – a refuge or an isolated, protected lair.

When you’re drowning you don’t choose your lifeline.

She experienced a strange inner calm which spread as the hot liquid trickled down her throat.

‘you’re not the only person who looks to see what people are reading on the Métro.’

I read a book in which he was the main character – but that’s a good way of getting to know people, isn’t it?

Some books were frisky horses, not yet broken in, that whisked you off on a mad gallop, breathless, clinging to their manes. Others, boats drifting peacefully on a lake under a full moon. Others still, prisons.

Tomorrow you may see things in a completely different light.’

It’s up to us to find encouragement wherever our eye, or our enthusiasm, our passion, our … whatever you call it, is able to find it.’

She had never been aware that she was afraid, that she feared the world’s vastness and diversity, its violence too.

Virginia Woolf’s England had vanished as surely as the Orient of One Thousand and One Nights or the Norway of Sigrid Undset.

He had chosen to hide away in a fortress built of books, fragments of which he regularly sent out into the world,

‘It is inside you that all these books must find their place. Inside you. Nowhere else.’

The books had become a friendly presence, a sort of soft eiderdown in which she liked to snuggle.

had chosen one day to ingest her own death, to swallow it, to let herself be carried off by it as if by the surprise of an unknown taste.

The tiniest departure from routine, if you were open to it, was indeed an adventure.

They thought he was a paper man, do you understand? He didn’t really exist.

They tell each other about themselves with passion, they think they know everything, understand everything, accept everything, and then the first crack appears, the first blow, not necessarily dealt out of spite, but dealt, and everything is shattered … and you find yourself naked and alone, next to a stranger who is also naked and alone. It’s unbearable.’

‘He used to say that one room can contain an entire world.’

‘Normal. I’ve never understood the meaning of the word. Have you?’

Look on me and be renewed.

finding your soulmate in the middle of an African novel or a Korean tale helped you realize the extent to which human beings suffer from the same ills, the extent to which we are alike, and that it is perhaps possible to talk to one another – to smile, caress one another, exchange signs of recognition, any signs – to try and harm others less from day to day?

Isn’t it better to give away a book one loves?’

She wanted to preserve her freedom, that precious freedom which she was only just beginning to learn how to handle.

‘It takes a little of everything to create a world,’ he said placidly. ‘Even a world of books.’

with books, there were always surprises.

She was just like her father when her eyes lit up with that special radiance, that of a magician who is about to transform illusion into a wonder and make you think about the reality you are witnessing.

‘The world’s tiny … it’s a pity we can’t keep droplets for all the beautiful things we see.

The world seemed to me like a Russian doll:

I had the feeling, for my part, of having gone beyond page 247 – not by much. Just a little. Just enough to savour the radiant smile of the girl who had a fat novel wedged under her arm, four hundred and fifty pages by the look of it.