Metro Winds Read Online Free PDF Page B

seat and the other was staring into the froth of his beer. An older woman in a red dress batted at the grey ribbons of their smoke winding around her.
    The girl felt no desire to talk to anyone. She thought she could find her way back to her aunt’s apartment if she only had the river to guide her. She enquired of the waiter, who pointed the way, and set off, trying to imagine how it would be to marry one of the young men in the restaurant and let him hold her. She found it impossible to contemplate. Yet if one did not join with a man, what else was there? The sort of life her aunt led, with its overstuffed cushions, restaurants, the theatre with friends. Neither appealed, but what else was there? Her body seemed to ache, as if it understood its purpose better than she did, and yet all the uses to which it might be put felt wrong. In that moment her longing for the sound and scent of the sea returned with such intensity she felt nauseous and she wished that one could be taken as easily into the arms of the sea as the arms of a man.
    Thunder grumbled and she looked up to find the sky filled with surly cloud. A storm had been brewing overhead and she had not noticed. Oddly, the heat had grown more fierce, as though compressed by the dense cloud cover. Thunder rumbled again and even as she remembered the beggar woman’s soup, soured by the storm, she saw the open mouth of a metro station at the end of a long narrow street. As she drew closer, she could smell the black skin of the river that glimmered darkly beyond it. There was no illumination at the entrance to the metro, but a light glowed from somewhere deeper down. She entered the station and heard the hum of the escalators. She used the sound to guide her to them and descended. The light increased until she could see the advertisements in their slanted billboards. There were no other people going down or up, and the girl supposed she had chanced on a still moment between the surges of the crowd, for it was still quite early. The aunt’s warnings about going into the metro when there were too few people rose in her mind and then faded like one of the unintelligible posters.
    The escalator was longer than those she had been on before and she wondered if this particular tunnel was some sort of natural fissure that had been incorporated into the metro web. She thought of Persephone, who had made a bargain to live six months of each year beneath the earth, and wondered how she had felt as she travelled downwards, knowing she would not see the sky or the sun for another six months, and that this was the price she paid for tasting forbidden fruit. Without warning, the metro wind blew and the girl breathed in the briny coolness of it, wondering if it were possible that a dark ocean lay at the heart of the world.
    Finally she reached the bottom, and there in an archway stood the man with the greenish-gold saxophone. She was startled to see him, but no doubt he moved about between the stations. He played a long note that strove upwards at the end, then he laid his instrument in its open case, pulled a cigarette from behind his ear and a lighter from his pocket. The flame gave his features a reddish cast as he lit it and took a deep breath, eyes half closed.
    As she passed him by, some impulse made the girl fish for a coin to throw into his case. Only then did his eyes open a slit and rest momentarily on her. They were the dull sheeny colour of his saxophone. The platform beyond the arch was empty and she thought of the disused stations her aunt had mentioned. Then a man in a sleeveless singlet stepped through another of the arches. He came towards her brandishing a deformed arm that ended at the wrist and the girl wondered if he wanted money. She had a few coins in her pocket, but the man did not hold out his hand.
    â€˜What do you want?’ she asked.
    â€˜Salvation . . .’ the man said so softly she might have misheard, but he withdrew back into the shadows