Life on a Platform

It's that time of the evening when most people finish work and head home.

I hope it’s not rush hour here because there’s only a smattering of people in the enormous train station ticket hall. The Estació de França is an anomaly in this city. It only enters conversation when a rock concert crowds the platform or someone talks about turning it into a library.

Not many trains pull in here. Only the ones that nobody I know has ever taken.

Three policemen arrive on the scene; hat’s are removed with right hands and placed delicately under left arms. They lean on the railway bar and call for late afternoon sustenance. The echo of voices is hollow and empty, church-like, goodbye-like, kiss-until-later-like. A young couple sits on the ground reading books. They make up one tenth of the crowd. A tall man with a bag is restless and paces about, back and forth, back and forth.

There’s a bag scan on the way to the train. The security guard is sorry for the trouble caused and feels like he could be convinced to give it a miss just this once.

Before he punched my order into the till, the gentlemanly waiter asked me if I was rail staff. “No”, I replied, knowing instantly that I had given the wrong answer. “That’ll be 3.50”, the till advised him, 1.60 for the coffee, 1.90 for the croissant. “I hope they pay well here”, I said, remarking on the exorbitant prices. “That’s the price around here young man” he replied, neither defending nor criticising company policy. A model employee to be sure.

The prices have had their affect in this café fitted out for a thousand. No more than fifty people sit here and wait. Over there they smoke, while over here it’s prohibited. Nothing more than a sticker on the table informs us of this ruling.

The building is all arches and marble floors, the new annex that houses the offices is minimalist and clad in that fibrous stone that Mies Van der Rohe chose for his pavilion on Montjuïc.

Descend to the toilets and such select interior design gives way to functional white glaring light. There is paper in the cubicles, but there are no seats on the pots. A group of four young men enter behind me and I hastily finish up my business. In surroundings as hard and uncompromising as these it is not wise to find oneself outnumbered.

Back upstairs at the ticket office the constant queue of five people is maintained as only one window attends customers while the other has a closed sign hung between the queue and a second ticket seller who does not deign to sell tickets. More than ten other windows lie idle, curtains pulled down and lonesome looking.

One row in front of me on my left sits a grey-haired man with glasses, cupping his chin in his hand. At the same angle to my right sits perhaps the same man in a younger guise, a dark suit and black hair. I know he’s the same man because he cups his chin in the same way, he leans back on the chair and crosses his legs, left over right down at shoe level. They are both staring out across the smoking area and on to the horizon that is the great lobby and shining marble waiting area. They will stand up in time and catch trains. They will not realise that they are living the same life, just that one is ten paces ahead of the other.

It is only in a place as empty as this that we can see ourselves. When the commotion disappears we are easier to identify.