Leaving Gare do Oriente or Home from Home

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMIonLOmylY&NR=1>

Captured on home video productions uploaded to youtube by someone known ominously as “gunman 37,” the 18.56 leaves Lisbon’s Gare de Oriente. All so ordinarily real, so ordinarily routine, on schedule, departed from platform 1 on a cool March evening.

The platform retreats, passengers diminish as of special Wonderland potions they have drunk. The fanfare of winged arches, mercurial white, fade into a distant blur of night time gold and electric blue. Moscavide and Póvoa slip by on the margins, warehouses, dark, gloomy spaces beyond the tracks fading into the past. As the train picks up speed, things outside appear static, held in their own time and space, traffic lights on red, office blocks like illuminated specters with silent darkness holding their ordinariness.

On the inside, departure safely secured, passengers now sit tired and slumped in the blue plush carriage, heads leaning against cold window, lolling in gentle rhythm to the sound of the track, unwholesome coughs and blaring background noise of some mp3 player on excessively high volume – the football – the football, clackety clack, clackety clack, clackety clack. A yawn carries foul air across the aisle; so intimate these shared spaces, home from home, travelling the night time home.

Windows reflect images back and forth, catching surreptitious glances in triplicate and bouncing them back to catch the eye unawares, the darkness lending frame to the person sitting opposite or across the aisle. Clackety clack, clackety clack, clackety clack, the football is back, the laptop’s whirring and the mp3 player is fighting with the ears of its listener, trailing white coils of wire around his neck. Clackety clack, clackety clack, give me some silence! No darkness inside to remove the trails and trials of travellers on their way home from a hard day’s work. No soft lighting, just the rocking rhythm and the clackety clack.

The same faces on the same train to the same place from the same station, every day, or so it seems. I am a transient traveller, though whenever I catch this train, they are always there. They recognise me, I know. They talk football, they talk work, they joke, but not for long. They soon nod off. This time he is sitting alone, watching the football on his laptop, watching Benfica. How do I know? His wife called him. How do I know who it was? The way he spoke to her, the way he exploded in rage at his mobile phone and then wrapped his hand around his mouth and mobile, in vain attempt to smother the dialogue. I saw him reflected in the window, in the window, in the window, clackety clack. He is probably red in the face. In the reflection he just looks dark and bent, with head bobbing in fury, emphatically pumping out each angry word in Portuguese.

The phone rings again and it goes something like…

I’m on the train.

No, I said I am not in the café.

What?

It’s Benfica.

No, it’s on the laptop.

I said I’m on the train.

What?

And then he explodes again and I can’t hear what he’s saying. Something to do with someone’s mother, and time, and not enough time and “I’ve got things to do” and such words.

She’s suspicious. She must have reason to be suspicious on such an ordinary night as this, clackety clack. Arriving at the truth may not be a reality he wants to face. He may prefer his point of departure. The reconciliation in his tone of voice, as the phone rings a third time smothers his racing heart as he decides in a split second what to say this time, knowing that no clocks can be turned back, no film rewound and deleted, no other train to catch in another direction. He’s on his way home from the station which offered such promise, such fantasy and suggestion.

The phone call ceases and shoulders around drop in obvious relief at dissipated tension. The laptop is put away. I forget to look into my window to catch his mood, now caught in my own inner world. No more lights outside, just the blackness of night. The conflict is temporarily resolved, and just perhaps, the journey should never end.