Subway Car

My name is Germán Gutiérrez, and I am fifty-two years old. I am writing this because it has obsessed me for the past few years and I have no one to tell, yet I feel an overwhelming need for someone else to know. Besides, as the years go by, the events of that night are beginning to fade—not in the natural way that memories grow blurry with the passage of time, but in a mysterious way: sometimes I cannot clearly remember what happened to me that night, and in its place I have the memory of an ordinary, uneventful night. It is as though something were trying to erase that memory and replace it with a different one. The idea of losing the memory terrifies me: of letting that something deceive me, of falling into its trap. Writing down what happened in as much detail as possible will be my way of preserving the memory, of defeating whatever does not want me to remember, even though deep down I truly wish it had never happened and that I could therefore be genuinely free of that memory.

I am a solitary man. I always have been. I have no friends. There are “friends” from work whom I spend time with, occasionally outside work, but what I mean is that I have no one I can trust completely. I am not married, I have no siblings, and my mother died long ago. So you could say I am entirely alone in this world. It never really bothered me—well, not until now. I have always known how to enjoy my solitude. I tend to be absorbed in my thoughts while walking down the street, or while riding the subway, back when I still did. I like to read; I used to enjoy going to the cinema—I cannot anymore—and going out for coffee, and I have always done these things alone. But this time I truly wish I had a confidant, someone I could trust enough to tell what happened. I will probably make a copy of this account and leave it on a park bench or between the pages of a library book, simply to comfort myself with the knowledge that someone else knows my story. I have no reason to lie, and if you are reading this, you are surely the only person in the world who knows what happened to me apart from the five people who were with me in that subway car that night.

I never dared tell anyone what happened for fear they would judge me insane or, worse still, superstitious, which I have never been. I do not believe in the supernatural; I do not even believe in religion. I was raised Catholic, was baptized and received First Communion, but from my adolescence onward, and particularly after my mother's death, I had little reason to remain close to the Church. Over time, the weak beliefs instilled in me revealed themselves to be fairy tales and stories meant to frighten children with hell. I have always looked to knowledge and science for the principles by which to live my life. And now, ashamed, I confess that since the incident the thought of approaching the Church has crossed my mind many times: perhaps going to confession, perhaps speaking with a priest and seeking explanations for what happened, which to this day I cannot explain. Then the thought passes. I doubt any priest could give me answers, much less take me seriously, weary as they must be of hearing churchgoing old ladies' superstitions about souls in purgatory and tales of angels. Just as my rational beliefs have been shaken, many aspects of my life have also changed since that night. For example, I can no longer set foot in the San Rafel neighborhood, there is no way in hell I can ride the subway, and in confined places—especially dark ones—I feel terribly distressed. I am a grown man, and I am ashamed to admit that I sleep with a lamp on. Since that day, I have spent more than half my nights suffering from insomnia. Ordinary things such as a piece of furniture creaking at night or a door closing on its own in a draft make my hair stand on end. I am not the man I was, and I know I never will be again. If there is one thing I beg of you who are reading this abandoned account, it is this: please do not go looking for whatever it was I saw that night.

I have had to undertake an intense exercise of memory to gather these recollections. Every time I have managed to remember a detail of what happened that night, I have written it down, but whenever I do, it is as though the memory fades further, as though the simple act of documenting it wears it away. As I said, it is very strange. Memory, from what I have read, is merely a reconstruction of events performed by our minds. It is not a faithful reproduction like a photograph or video, but rather a collection of certain facts we register as having happened and which, when recalled, are reconstructed by our minds as they supposedly occurred. It is as though we had only the plans of a house and tried to imagine the house by reading them. That is why I have been very careful with my notes and have omitted many details about which I cannot be entirely certain. I ended up with a pile of loose notes that I put in sequence in an attempt to assemble the complete story of what happened. In the end, there were many gaps which, once identified, made it easier to try to remember. I removed many details because I have the feeling they are products of my imagination. Nevertheless, I can assure you that the important events I intend to relate did occur as I shall tell them. I will now try to describe everything in as much detail as possible and keep imagination from slipping in among the memories of what actually took place.

Everything was normal and routine that time. Perhaps the hour was the only unusual factor, because I was late making a journey I had taken so many times before. It was almost midnight, and I would barely catch one of the last subway trains, if not the very last. I went down into Hidalgo station through the entrance in the small plaza by the monument to Manuel Buendía. There is one flight of stairs, then you turn onto another and descend to a long passageway, at the far end of which is the entrance on the other side of Avenida Hidalgo. Halfway between the two entrances, a passage to the right leads into the station. Between that passage and the entrance I had used, a man was sitting against one of the walls—a homeless man. His gaze was vacant, his hair matted, and he was muttering the ramblings of a madman under his breath. The penetrating stench of sweat, shit, and urine made me quicken my pace. I wanted to raise a hand to my nose to block the smell, but a ridiculous impulse stopped me: I did not want the man to see me and feel offended. I would take the train toward Cuatro Caminos, get off at Tacuba, and transfer to the other line toward Barranca del Muerto, getting off at San Joaquín. From there I would walk a few blocks to the house where I live on the edge of the Anzures neighborhood. It is about a fifteen-minute walk along the avenue. I did not mind; on the contrary, I liked it because as I walked I could lose myself in my thoughts and feel the cool night air. Well, I boarded the last car of the subway train, as I always do. I always seek out the last car because it is usually the emptiest, although that habit made little sense on this occasion because the station was almost deserted and the cars themselves had only a few people inside. Even during these final hours of service, it did not seem normal for the subway to be so empty, though I did not usually ride it so late and could not know whether it was normal or not. As I entered through the middle door, someone else came in with me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a few people on the right-hand side, while on the left, toward the rear of the train, there was no one. I sat in one of the first seats I came to, to the left of the door through which I had entered, on the side facing the platform, so that I was looking toward the other track. I paid no attention to how many people were in the car or who they were; I was eager to begin reading a book I had brought with me. I am one of those people who always have their head buried in a book whenever they can. I love reading, and when I was young I even read while walking. I know it sounds foolish, but it is true: on several occasions I crashed hard into posts and other people because I was reading as I walked. I always carry a book with me and take every opportunity to devour a few paragraphs: in line at the bank, sitting in the café where I usually eat, on a bench in the Alameda waiting until it is time to return to the office, and yes, on the subway too. First station: Revolución. Although I know the stations by heart, I always have the compulsion to confirm the name by looking out at the platform passage. I turned my head back to check for the image of the monument to the Revolution that identifies the station. One person got off the car and another two boarded, I think. Second stop: San Cosme. Again, I turned my head back to find the symbol representing that station, the façade of a colonial building, though for some reason it has always looked like an upside-down building to me. No one got on or off. The subway continued toward Normal station, and then it happened. Halfway there, the train stopped. Instinctively, I looked up from my book just as everyone else turned their heads this way and that, wondering what had happened. For a second we looked at one another, and the lights went out. Sometimes the subway stops in the middle of a tunnel. I have never really known why, and it never remains stopped for more than a couple of minutes, but I had never known the lights to go out. The moment it happened, there were gasps of surprise and a short cry of fright—it seemed to come from a young woman—which was stifled almost at once. The darkness was impenetrable; we were in a tomb. Surprised that there were not even emergency lights, or the tunnel lights themselves, I held a hand in front of my eyes and confirmed that the darkness was so complete I could not see it. I heard a woman's voice about two meters to my right ask, “What now?” A young man's voice answered, “It's nothing. It'll be over soon.” Whenever the subway stops, there is a certain air of concern. No one says it, but everyone's thoughts immediately go to that dark place in the mind where the worst happens. That tense atmosphere is perceptible. I attribute it to pheromones, or perhaps to some scent perceived only unconsciously, like when people say animals can smell fear. Among people there is a nonverbal form of communication that silently says danger. On this particular occasion, it was not silent; it was almost a scream. The voices I heard to my right belonged to people trying to sound calm but who were in fact terrified. All of this was very irrational, since up to that moment there was no particular reason for alarm and no imminent threat against us. But in darkness, perhaps because of some evolutionary instinct, the mind goes on alert. The woman I had just heard said, “My phone won't turn on.” The young woman who had cried out replied, “Mine won't either. I'm trying to turn it on.” I checked, and my phone would not turn on either. I tend to be reserved, but I could not remain silent and asked aloud, “What's happening? Why won't the phones turn on?” “I don't know. Mine won't either,” said the young man. “Neither will mine,” an older man answered. What is happening? we wondered. Suddenly a thought crossed my mind: what if this was the last train and the employees had already gone home and left us here? That was impossible; the train's own driver would have had to reach the final station. As my sight adjusted to the darkness, the impenetrable black began to turn into gloom. I could barely make out the figures from which the voices came, and from those voices and figures I had already determined that the passengers in the car were a young woman and an older woman, a young man, an elderly man, and me. The young woman was becoming very nervous, and the young man tried to reassure her. The older man kept saying it was impossible that none of the phones would turn on, that it was not normal, that something had to be happening. “But what?” the woman asked, and received no reply. Taking charge of the situation, the young man tried to calm us all and said, “OK, let's calm down. Maybe there's nothing to worry about. There must be an explanation. Is everyone all right? Ma'am, are you all right?” Adrenaline struck me as it does after a sudden fright. An electric shock ran through my limbs, my heartbeat grew so loud that I could hear it as though blood were being pumped into my ears, and a cold sweat covered my body. What frightened me was that the young man was speaking to someone behind me—that is, on the left side of the car, which was now at my back because I had turned to the right to speak to the others. If there was one thing I was certain of, it was that no one could be behind me. When I boarded the car, the left side had been empty, and during the journey I had noticed the movements of the people with my peripheral vision, without paying attention. They had all been on the right side of the car, and I knew there had never been anyone on the left. I stood up at once, steadying myself on one of the vertical poles beside the door, and turned around. Indeed, almost at the far end of the car, I could make out in the gloom a figure seated on one of the benches. At the time I assumed it was a woman because the young man had called it ma'am. I have tried to remember, and each time I find it more difficult to understand why we thought it was a woman. Perhaps I was the only one who thought so, but the young man called it ma'am; that much I do remember. Perhaps his eyes, less wearied by age than mine, could see something I could not distinguish. What I do know for certain is that it was not a person; it was more like an apparition. I mean that although I do not believe—or did not believe?—in ghosts, it would be easy to arrive at the simple conclusion that it was a ghost or something like one. Yet although I cannot explain it, I could feel its presence, and it was not a human presence. At least that is what I believe. I know that in the presence of the apparition I felt great hatred, but the hatred was not mine. It was hatred that the apparition felt toward us. I do not know how to reason that out, but that is how I would describe what I felt, as though its mere presence were harming us. I do not know about the others, but in addition to a terrible anguish—which I can only describe as the loss of any desire to exist—I felt ill all over, a combination of aching limbs and nausea. Straining to remember, I sometimes have a vision of its extremely thin, bony figure, perhaps a decaying body like a decomposing corpse. But I think that is my imagination. At other times I would swear I saw a spectral woman completely drenched in blood, but that too must be imagined, since in such gloom it would have been impossible to see the color of blood or distinguish the features that would identify the apparition as a woman. The only word I can use for that thing is apparition. Instinctively, I stepped backward and clumsily trod on the woman who, until a second earlier, had been sitting in the same row of seats as I, but to the right of the car door. She too had stood up and was now moving toward the left side of the car, saying, “There was no one there.” “No,” I answered in a breaking voice that sounded like an adolescent's and embarrassed me—foolish vanity, now that I think of it. “Oh no, no, no,” came the young woman's voice, almost sobbing, perhaps terrified by what she heard us saying, but more likely because she too could see the apparition. “Ma'am,” the young man said again, waiting for an answer. “I know there was no one there,” I said. At that moment, we could hear our breathing like silent wails. The tension in the air was at its peak, and for the first time I became aware that even with my jacket on I was extremely cold. My hands were icy, and I brought one to my nose to confirm that it too was freezing. It was as though, from the moment the apparition appeared at the end of the car, something had drawn all the warmth from inside it. There were a few seconds of silence. I do not know how many; it could have been two or ten. It was like a moment in which each of us was trying to find an explanation for this new phenomenon, stranger still than the phones that would not turn on. “Who are you?” the woman asked in a strong voice that combined aggression and fear, like a wild animal when it finds itself cornered. I do not know how to describe what followed. I do not know how to reason it out, so I can find even fewer words with which to tell it. The apparition, the figure that had been seated before, was now standing in the middle of the aisle, but it had not moved. That is, we had not seen it move. It had simply been seated and was now standing, but it was not that it had disappeared from one place and reappeared in another, as happens in films. It was very strange—more as though it had always been standing in the aisle and we were only just realizing it. The woman passed beside me, moving toward the figure and demanding in the same fierce voice, “Who are you? What do you want?” She continued advancing as she spoke until she was beside me and heading toward the apparition, while I realized that the young woman and the young man were backing away from the mysterious figure. I too wanted to get away, but a foolish instinct of chivalry kept me motionless, as if I might protect the woman if necessary, although I confess I would not have been capable of confronting the dark figure standing in the aisle. I surely would have looked out for my own life before that of this woman, whose face I did not even know and who was bravely challenging the apparition that had invaded our car. The closer the woman moved toward the shadow, or silhouette, or whatever I might call it, the more she raised her voice. The apparition is difficult to describe because it seemed to be a flat figure, like a shadow, but darker than the gloom in the car. It was as though it were made of darkness, the darkness of a bottomless abyss. The woman was now very close to the apparition when the young man, in a voice more broken and childlike than mine, cried out almost breathlessly, “Look out!” The woman advanced steadily, defying the apparition, and then the lights came on. In an instant, the freezing air returned to its normal temperature. All our eyes were fixed on the part of the car where, a fraction of a second before, the spectral figure had been standing in the aisle, and now there was nothing. We looked at one another. Our glances met without a word, yet our eyes said so much: thank you; we did it; thank God; we are alive; nothing happened to us; it is gone. The subway began to move and almost immediately gathered speed. “We all saw it, didn't we?” the woman asked, but no one answered. We all remained silent, with more questions than answers in our minds. I saw that the woman who had in some way defended us from the apparition was not so old after all, perhaps about forty. She was dressed like an office worker, formally, in high heels, and had a large handbag over one shoulder. Her forehead was covered in beads of sweat. I touched my own and found that, despite the cold of a few moments before, I was sweating profusely. I touched my chest and felt that my shirt was damp and my heart was still racing. We sat down, and during the brief couple of minutes before we reached Normal, I was now able to see my companions from that horrible encounter in detail as we all sat in stunned silence. The young woman must have been about twenty, with brown skin and dark hair, and was slender. She wore black jeans, ripped at the knees as young people wear them, a black T-shirt, and an open hoodie. She carried a black backpack with a purple stuffed toy hanging from it. She was still terrified. The young man looked like a tradesman, perhaps an installation technician or something of the sort, with steel-toed boots, rather dirty jeans, and a polo shirt bearing the embroidered logo of a company which, however hard I have tried, I cannot remember. The older man was older than I, about sixty, wearing trousers and shoes spattered with paint and a blue sweatshirt, and carrying a backpack that was possibly older than he was. To my surprise, there was one more passenger: a young man in his twenties, with a flannel shirt, long curly hair, and headphones on, who stared at us wide-eyed without saying a word. I could swear he had worn the headphones the whole time and perhaps had not fully realized what had happened, but he had sensed it, for his face did bear an expression that combined fear with a question. The doors opened at Normal station, and we all got out immediately through the door on the right, the one farthest from the rear of the car where the apparition had appeared. We did not say a word. Everyone hurried to leave the station. I stopped for a moment and looked back to make sure the car was empty. The subway continued on its way. I left the station and never saw any of them again.