A “flâneur,” by trade, is a person who goes walking. A “flâneur” is someone who wanders the streets. When it is too far to walk, a “flâneur” rides the trains. In 1960, Louis Malle directed a film called “Zazie in the Metro,” the story of a young girl who is sent to Paris for two days while her mother spends the weekend with her lover. All the child wants is to ride the Metro, but as is often the case in Paris, the trains are on strike, and Zazie is forced to travel by foot, embarking on a series of adventures in cross dressing and dangling from the tops of monuments, amorous street sweepers and café brawls, empty carousals and car chases through town—a portrait of late surrealist Paris à la mode des anneés 1960s.
True enough, the first great force to be reckoned with when you come to a new city, is to learn its geography, to know the streets. But before the map exists in your mind, you rely on the way that has already been carved out for you. You ride the train—the act of speeding through the darkness beneath an unknown world, packed intimately into intestine shaped spaces with crowds of people you know nothing about. You glance at a blank window that gives you no clues, forget yourself in the passage of a book, cling to a pole, get caught in a stranger’s eyes, all while being rocked into the trance of getting somewhere, and being nowhere in the mean time. Between the hours of 5am and midnight, half of Paris is doing this at any given moment.
In New York, a black and white city ruled by a structured chaos of lines, one might say the subway is the only place people truly mix. Train cars aren’t populated the way neighborhoods are. It’s not as if all the Jamaicans sit in the middle of the train, while all the Puerto Ricans sit in the front, or all the Hassids sit in the back. But the social and physical geography of the city, though more fleeting, does remain in some form. It shows itself in the stops that people get on and off at. In other words, not only are you defined by where you go, but you can tell what part of town you are in by the kind of people that enter and exit. The trains never stop running in New York, as it is indeed the city that never sleeps, but should you counter that rhythm by trying to go home late at night, all wheels certainly do slow to an unbearable pace. It’s almost inconceivable to think of how much time we spend underground, waiting for something to come out of the darkness. We stare across the tracks at an advertisement for an exotic island vandalized with lewd scribblings, watch some ghastly creature run across the rails, stand half asleep against a pillar covered in filth, and look back into the tunnel for what could be an hour, imagining lights that aren’t there, seeing things approach that are miles away and may never come.
Some people say, that in LA, there is nothing in the getting there. Prone to earthquakes and a confounding topography based on dream logic, Los Angeles is a curious city which not only exists as a major metropolis, but glitters with legend at the edge of the sea, managing to do so with no center of town or sufficient means of public transportation. The collective experience takes place on the freeways, where the whole city traverses in millions utterly encapsulated, each person glassed in to their own private vehicle. The only shared sense of center speeds away from us on barren concrete. The waiting occurs at stop lights and on highways, which at almost any time of day now are jammed still to the point of being parking lots. But in all these hours of moving without moving, of covering ground you can’t see, something is gained in the imagination. There is a melding of landscapes, real and imagined, from one point to another.
I’m new in town, but as a former New Yorker and Angeleno by birth, I will say that even in my humble beginnings here, Paris has proved far more civilized than either of those places. In Paris, the working man gets two hours for lunch and school children go on vacation every few weeks. The seats on the Metro are comfortable, the cars are clean, the tracks breed nothing bigger than mice, the trains stop running after midnight, but at least they come on time. While the movement of the city and the speed of business holds no comparison to the New York minute, nor the merciless sense of self invention in Los Angeles, when you get stuck somewhere in Paris, more often than not, the somewhere is beautiful. But sordid or civilized, the strange anonymous intimacy of riding the train exists here too. At rush hour we still pack ourselves in to the point of spooning standing up with a perfect stranger, and yet when our hands touch by accident as we grasp for the rail, our faces suddenly flash with alarm. “ Oh, excuse me, so sorry,” we stutter urgently. The Metro, like the street, is one of the best places to experience the population, if through nothing more than it’s daily rationing of momentary encounters, epic or ordinary.
Of late, the fates have asked me to take up the habits of the flâneur. I spend my days flitting through town with no real place to return to, wandering the streets, riding the train. It is in this way, that the city itself becomes one’s home. Thus unfold the adventures of Kiki in the Metro (a childhood nickname that finds me again here). As I learn to map the “types” of Paris, I find the urge to share my notes. I’ll begin with a portrait of one of the city’s greatest archetypes, a creature of mammoth gentility: the woman in the fur coat…
She sat by the window, touching her gloved finger to her tongue, biting it occasionally. Unmoved by the traffic of the sliding doors, the woman in the fur coat simply stared into the space before her, seeing and not seeing, present and not present, as is the general state of being on a train.
A strand of blond hair blew across her face, over dusty white skin, and eyes a blur of water and glass, the blue of a pond frozen over for winter. She was not yet old and no longer young, but at that vague point of departure that comes for every woman, of fading visibly from wheat to straw. Everything about her was new, and there was something cold to her newness—not a scratch on her shoes, or a wrinkle in her skirt, as though she’d never walked or rummaged or paid for anything—strange to find such a one riding the trains.
There were only a few inches between her and the next passenger, but the look on her face was miles in the distance. It was likely a face that had never left Paris, yet the woman behind it was not on this train.
She yawned blankly, a fatigue that grew from a particular ennui–the sweet melodic boredom of tapping fingers on shop windows, of eating pastries, and waiting for husbands, of wearing fur coats. Clearly her children were all grown up and out of the house, clearly her husband was named Bertrand or Jean Pierre, clearly he was standing in a smoking jacket somewhere, waiting for his nightly aperitif before dinner. Perhaps beneath the glamorous coat she was only an old idle woman, from an old idle neighborhood, maddened by the woes of the Boulangerie and the simple errands of idle life: buying a new pair of shoes, visiting the coiffure, promenading the dog. Perhaps she sat on this train now, only trying to look like a woman who does none of these things, wandering onto the platform in a moment of insanity.
Pieces of fur shed from her coat onto her lap, as though the garment itself knew it was only a dead skin, anxious beyond the grave by the listless afterlife of once being a wild creature. Ah the furs of Paris, hanging uninhabited in the windows of shops, prowling the streets after war time women, or draped barbarically from white virgin shoulders. She touched her finger to her tongue again. To feel which way the wind blows? To taste the powdered sugar on her fingertips? A toothache? A day dream? A murderous thought?
The train stopped at Rue Jasmin in the 16th arrondissement, a district full of elderly women moving about their salons and kitchens, turning on faucets, knocking lightly at doors. You can see them on the sides of buildings, fluttering mutely in boxes of light, dollhouse women, lost in the diorama of French domesticity. The doors opened. In a frantic moment they would close again. The woman in the fur coat stood up and stepped off the train. All of the elegance fled from her as she flipped up her collar and disappeared down the tunnel, limping like a badger back to her hole.
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Image: John Currin “Rachel in Fur”, 2002, oil on canvas, 50.8 x 40.6 cm
