The Confession of the Stranger on the Night Train

The midnight train crossed the plain with that monotonous rattling that invites sleep or madness. I was in a window seat, watching the black fields slide by outside like a film without a plot. We had left Las Lomas station after midnight, and there were still hours to go before we reached the capital.

Beside me, an old man dozed with his mouth slightly open, snoring softly like a tired motor. But what kept me awake was the woman in the seat opposite. She must have been in her fifties, with dyed blond hair that was already starting to fade and a dark dress that had ridden up above her knees. She sat with her legs crossed, and every time the carriage jolted, the fabric gave way a little more.

She wasn’t a magazine beauty. She was something else: a woman who had lived a great deal and who wore that life written on her face, in her crooked smile, in the way she looked at me without a trace of shame. She had lipstick on in a red that had bled slightly at the corners of her mouth, and eyes that, when they settled on me, asked nothing. They only confirmed.

The carriage was almost empty. A couple of passengers slept farther ahead and no one else was around. She knew it. So when she realized I was staring at her, she didn’t look away. On the contrary: she slowly uncrossed her legs, crossed them the other way, and let her skirt ride even higher.

She’s not teasing me by accident.

She leaned forward, as if she had dropped something on the floor. The neckline of her dress fell open, and I saw the weight of her breasts hanging free, without a bra. When she straightened up, she had a new smile.

—It’s hot in here, isn’t it? —she said in a husky smoker’s voice.

—Pretty much —I answered, and that was all I could manage.

She got up with a clumsy movement from the train’s sway, took two steps, and sat down beside me, pressing her thigh against mine. The old man didn’t stir. She glanced at me from the side, amused, and lowered her voice until it became a murmur.

—You’re the kind who looks and does nothing, aren’t you?

—Depends —I said.

—On what?

—On whether the other person wants me to do something.

She gave a low, guttural laugh and put her hand on my knee. She moved it slowly, without trying to hide it, until her fingers found the bulge already pressing against the fabric of my pants. She squeezed me calmly, like someone checking something she already knew.

—Well, well —she whispered, licking her lips—. And here I thought you were going to just sit there, nice and still, for the whole trip.

I said nothing. I took her hand and pressed it against me, and she understood that the game of looks was over. She glanced at the old man, then at the empty aisle, and leaned over my lap.

***

The man’s snoring covered us like a blanket. She opened my pants with quick, expert fingers, the fingers of a woman who had done this many times, and lowered her head. I felt the wet heat of her mouth, the tongue moving with a patience I hadn’t expected. She was in no hurry at all. She sucked as if we had all night, stopping when she sensed I was close, starting again.

I closed my eyes. The train’s rattling set the rhythm, and for a moment I lost all sense of where we were. I had to tug gently at her hair to make her stop.

—Not here —I told her in her ear—. Come on.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and smiled. She stood up, swaying with the carriage’s movement, and walked ahead of me toward the back, her hips moving in a way that was anything but innocent. We went into the train bathroom, a narrow cubicle that smelled of disinfectant and cold metal. I locked the bolt.

Before she could say anything, I turned her against the sink. In the spotted mirror I saw her face, her half-lidded eyes, her mouth open and waiting. I lifted her dress. She was ready, hot, and when I touched her she arched her back and let out a moan she had to smother by biting her forearm.

—Go on —she panted—. Don’t make me wait. I waited enough in my life.

I took her by the hips and entered her slowly, feeling her yield centimeter by centimeter. She pushed back, impatient, seeking me. The train jolted at every rail joint and every shake did the work for us, deepening the movement without either of us having to do anything. I covered her mouth with one hand and held a breast with the other, and she dug her nails into my thigh, trembling.

She came first, biting my fingers, her whole body shaken by a long spasm. I held on a little longer, watching her in the mirror, until I couldn’t. I pulled out at the last second and finished over the curve of her back, marking her skin with a heat that quickly cooled in the air of the cubicle.

We stayed like that for a moment, catching our breath amid the smell of sex and the screech of the rails. Then she smoothed her dress, ran a hand through her hair in the mirror, and looked at me over her shoulder.

—It had been a long time since someone fucked me on a train —she said, and she said it almost tenderly.

***

We went back to the carriage as if nothing had happened. The old man was still asleep. She sat down opposite me again, but closer now, with her legs apart and that serenity of someone who no longer has anything to hide. The train had left behind the last lights of the intermediate towns and was now moving through pure darkness, lit only by the dim ceiling lights and the intermittent glow of the posts rushing past like lightning.

That was when the old man stirred. He opened his bleary eyes, adjusted his crooked glasses, and looked at her with a mixture of habit and resignation.

—And? Did you have fun? —he muttered thickly.

She let out a hoarse laugh, one of those that come from the bottom of a throat full of years.

—More than you have in a long time —she replied, and gave his knee a gentle pat—. But don’t go acting offended. You know how I am.

The old man sighed. There was no anger on his face, only the weariness of someone who had already heard the same story a thousand times.

—Tell me, go on —he said—. You always tell the same thing when you get like this.

The woman leaned forward, rested her elbows on her knees, and looked at me, not at him. As if the confession were for the stranger and not for her husband.

—All my life they’ve called me every name in the book —she began, in a low voice, knowing the train’s noise would cover her—. And at first it hurt. Then it stopped hurting. And in the end I even started to like it, because it was true and I wasn’t going to apologize for that.

She paused, ran her tongue over her lips, and went on.

—When I was young, I used to sneak out at night. I’d go off with the first man I liked, without asking his name. Once it was the boy who delivered the bread; he took me behind the shed and we didn’t come back until dawn. Another time it was a traveling salesman who stopped in the village for just one night. I got into his car, we did it on an empty road with the lights off, and in the morning he left and I never saw him again. I never wanted them to come back. I liked it that way: the desire, the moment, and then each of us back to our own life.

The old man nodded slowly, as if recognizing every chapter.

—Then came the truck years —she went on, smiling now—. I’d climb aboard at the gas station off the highway and ride with them for miles. Some only wanted company. Others asked for more, and I gave it to them in the cab, with the fields flashing past the window at full speed. One of them dropped me off at dawn in a town I don’t even know the name of, and I walked to the station feeling like the freest woman in the world. Free, do you understand? That’s the word the people who insult you never use.

She fell silent for a while, staring out at the black fields through the window. When she spoke again, her voice was lower.

—And you know how I kept going —she said to the old man—. Husbands, boyfriends, lovers. Some good, some not so good. But I never stopped being the same. I never stopped wanting what I wanted. People think a woman like that is broken. It’s the other way around. I chose every single thing I did. Every one.

She looked at the man with bright, almost defiant eyes.

—And today, on this train, with this boy, the same thing. I wanted to. I went looking for it. And I’d do it again.

The old man looked at her for a long time, without reproach, with that resignation of someone who accepted everything decades ago. He put a wrinkled hand on her thigh.

—You’re impossible —he said at last.

She smiled and squeezed his hand against her leg.

—And you’re still with me. Despite everything.

***

Silence fell among the three of us. The train kept heading toward the capital, carrying that raw confession that floated in the air like the smell still clinging to our clothes. The woman closed her eyes, satisfied. The old man went back to snoring softly. And I, from my seat, realized that I had heard every word, and that something still didn’t quite add up.

Because she had spoken to the old man about me. She had told him about the bathroom, the train, this boy. But not once, not a single time, had she looked at me while saying it. As if I weren’t there. As if she were talking about a memory, not something that had just happened.

I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the air conditioning. I turned to the window, searching for my face in the glass, that reflection night always gives back when it’s pitch-dark outside.

There was no one there.

The glass gave me back the empty seat, the sleeping old man, the woman with her eyes closed. But in the place where I was sitting there was no reflection. No man. Nothing.

Something broke inside me, like a certainty that arrives too late. I looked down at my own hands on my knees. I could see them. I could feel them. And yet the glass insisted: there was no one there. An old man and a woman sleeping, black fields, posts flashing by like lightning. But nothing, absolutely nothing else.

***

As we approached the terminal, after ten in the morning, the tracks multiplied beneath the train like the lines of an open hand. Another story had been woven, unraveled, and woven again in an ordinary carriage, between two strangers who may never have existed in quite the same way.

The woman woke up, straightened her dress, and got off on the old man’s arm without looking back. I stayed seated, watching them walk away along the platform through the crowd, getting smaller and smaller until they disappeared. I wanted to stand up and I didn’t know whether I did. Shadows, what weighs and what relieves, blurred into another morning, among the specters and purgatories of a railway station.

And then the carriage was completely empty, and for the first time in a long while I understood that the confession she had made to the old man was really, without knowing it, made to me.