Over the past few weeks I’ve been recording interviews with Substack writers who inspire me. The upcoming Substack Podcast series, Finishing the Hat, will be here soon enough, with wise words from writers like
, , and .For now, I’m still tinkering with sound design and incorporating music, but this week’s post is a reminder to myself that I also have an actual voice that has things to say, which is why you’ll find a vocal recording—let’s call it an audio essay—to accompany Eulogy for Metro Line 11, complete with sound design taken straight from the bygone rickety trains of the Parisian metro.
1
A few weeks ago, they changed the type of trains used on Metro Line 11. An integral part the Paris of my memory is no longer. Is this what it means to get older? Who will sing about the bygone trains of Line 11?
2
Picture a tree-lined boulevard. Call it Avenue Parmentier. Hear a rumbling beneath your feet and see an eight-year-old boy ascending from the depths. The dappled light shimmering through the trees on the boulevard is the second image this little boy has of Paris; the third will be the falling leaves on the avenue and the way the Parisian bustle vibrates all around him, stretching all the way from Place de La République to Rue de Belleville, and further still, out beyond Jourdain towards Metro Pyrénées.
Decades later, names like these will come to mean much more to the boy. He will have a lonely fight on Valentine’s Day with a woman who is now a mother in front of the Hotel de Ville; he will witness bug-eyed ravers exiting Le Gibus at 11 a.m. on a Sunday at République; and he will frequently return to his favorite family-owned Kurdish kebab restaurant on Rue Saint Maur, near Métro Goncourt, his singular order placed again and again: galette, salade tomate oignon, sauce samurai/blanche, s’il vous plait.
But for now, our young protagonist is just opening his eyes to Paris and the rickety train he just rode on Line 11, deep down there in the ground where singers are singing and beggars are begging, and despite the smells and the dirty gutters lining the quay, for some reason the trains of Line 11 are among the strongest senses of home this boy has ever known.
3
Dearly departed trains of Line 11: is it any wonder that one of the first Substack pieces I ever wrote was about you?1 I bid you farewell with a nostalgic heart.
I can still hear your robust carriages barreling forth in all of your twentieth century glory; the rumble resonated through the white-linoleum corridors and up into the busy streets around Hotel de Ville, Rambuteau, Goncourt, and Pyrénées. And what about the smell down in the tunnels beneath the slopes of Belleville, machine like—industrial—a concoction of subterranean heat and electricity and burnt rubber.
I used to walk through the crowded hallways of République to reach your rickety old wagons, changing from Line 5 to Line 11 at the end of a long day.
But alas, time moves on. Technology and so forth. A few weeks ago, you were replaced by sleek air-conditioned tubes with clean, spacious seating. I miss you already. Don’t go. I know; you’ve already left. But how can the silent approach of the new and improved ever possibly feel the same?
On transportation maps, the city of Paris chose to make Metro Line 11 the color brown, an amalgamation of red, yellow, and blue. I’m sorry to see your old trains go.
I remember navigating the labyrinthine passages to find you in the beating heart of the city, Châtelet, where I once met a woman for a date at Café Benjamin who wore a low-cut blue dress. Years later, on a dreary night in London I saw her again. She cried in my arms when I told her I was leaving the country. She didn’t want me to go; she remembered how we used to ride Line 11 together.
The truth is, I never thought you’d change. Maybe that’s why I never took a picture of your stuffy, hot wagons which transported me to-and-fro so many times during my formative years. How many times did you carry me up the hill to Goncourt to my home on Rue du Buisson Saint Louis? or further up the slope to the Aux Folies for a cheap round of pints of Stella in the summer, or a mug of mint tea on an autumn day? How many times did I strain my wrist to lift your heavy metallic latches or pry open your stubborn, sticky, metallic, mechanical doors after finishing a meal at my favorite Vietnamese restaurant, Tin Tin?
You transported me to places where sex workers still walk freely and can conduct business without judgment, fear, or shame; you led me to the boulevard where skinny Sri Lankan men sell roasted chestnuts and robust Senegalese women sell corn-on-the-cob. And what about that time I rode your delightfully in your derelict trains up the hills of Jourdain, where I played piano and sang songs with a writer friend who was house-sitting a magical artist studio complete with a garden. Her name was Rosa Rankin-Gee.
4
We’re getting older, too, I know it. Is that just part of life, renovating the trains? What is it about the renovation of Line 11 that’s left such a tunnel in my heart?
5
The night you said goodbye to Paris, my wife and I attended a house party near Metro Pyrénées. The conversation was cordial and the wine was pleasant, but there was something indelible missing. We didn’t stay late.
When we went home, we noticed an elderly woman shuffling along the Line 11 quay with her back bent at a 90° angle. Due to her contorted body and the shortness of her legs, she couldn’t walk more than a few feet before taking a break to breathe heavily. She resigned herself to sitting down in one of the recently renovated seats next to the quay and proceeded to drape a green cape over her head, like a turtle hiding within its shell. She hummed an old French tune to herself, and, I like to think, it was a eulogy for you, dear friend, the old trains of Line 11.
And a little prayer for Ligne 3 which will soon be on the modernisation chopping block 😔
I love this, I also feel a lot of nostalgia as the 'old lines/trains' get replaced, and my idea of what Paris has been to me - or perhaps a period of who I was - changes or becomes less tangible along with it.