Antoine tells me things as we walk the tracks and I swing my flashlight around, catching explosions of dense, bright hip hop tags painted by actual artists and crappier, punk rock Anarchy symbols in gusty trails of spray paint. He tells me that sometimes trains come down these tracks, which is a lie. You’re Lying, I say, and he smiles. I believed him! Judy smacks her head. I’m such a gullible girl! I Just Think I Would Have Been Warned Before Now, I shrugged.
Things that are true that Antoine tells me include a story of being menaced by Nazis as he was leaving the catacombs one night. Two thugs with chains and sticks jumped out from a minor hallway, blocking the path to the exit. Antoine, who was stoned of course, on what he can’t remember, just started laughing and asked if he could take their picture. The hooligans had already beaten up an earlier party and stolen their victims’ lamps and wallets, but Antoine managed to talk his way out of it and crawl back to the world above unscathed. Another time he met a girl, a junkie who lives here on the tracks. There are wide niches cut into the tunnel, heaped with random junk that might actually be someone’s belongings; random pallets cast onto the tracks are possible hobo beds. She’s really nice, Antoine said of the girl. She’s young. I think it’s better for her to be here than on the streets. Safer. It makes me think of the mole people who live in the abandoned subway tunnels of New York City, or the thousands of people in Manila who have turned the North Cemetery into a functioning city of dead and undead. Antoine tells me how he has slept in the catacombs, once in an bunker from the resistance, another time in a sleeping bag on the stone floor, a bad idea because the rock gets so cold he was frozen to the bone and his chilled chattering kept him awake. The best way to sleep in the catacombs is to bring a hammock and stretch it out in one of the grottos that have iron work jutting from the walls; many do. Then you sleep a perfect sleep, as the catacombs are so deeply dark and so fantastically quiet.
Are you tired? Antoine asks hesitantly. Last time I was in Paris the one phrase I mastered was Je suis fatigue, and I say it now. Antoine bursts with delight and approval when I managed to say something French. He and Judy also cackle with glee when I ruin certain words, like parapluie, or grenouille. I love making my new friends happy. I am so tired, Antoine says, No sex party in the catacombs tonight. Oh, well. I shouldn’t be so greedy. The French are moderate with their decadence, which is how so many dine on fatty cheese and abused goose livers and gâteaux and buttery croissants and remain scrawny as runway models. Everything is indulged, but you take a night off. Unlike the American tradition of diving headlong into your vice until it almost kills you, then going into recovery and writing a memoir about it.
We exit the train tunnel and the earth is damp and carpeted with wet leaves and lichen. Above us on the sidewalk are trees, and everything smells lush and wet and clean and pretty. We are passing through a park, Antoine tells me the English name for it would be My Mouse Park. Incidentally, there will be no mice making appearances in this story, or rats or spiders or cockroaches or any other creatures you might associate with life underground. The catacombs are vermin-free. We pass into a second tunnel and stop at what looks like a crack in the wall. A wide, jagged crack that leads down, the ground sloped from so many feet, the air around it stinking of piss and littered with shards of glass. This is our portal. People tell me to watch my hand as I grip the chunky ground for balance and slide through the busted bricks and voila. I am in the catacombs.
The smell leaves immediately, it belongs the tracks, probably cataphiles taking one last chance to urinate before entering. The odor of the catacombs is cool, basement-y, wet, like certain water rides at amusement parks, actually. When everyone has climbed inside, Antoine leads us down a long hallway. The hall is stone, a honey color, and the ceiling is high enough to stand in, maybe six feet. It will get much lower as we walk, and a system is devised of people at the front of the procession hollering Ciel!, which means Sky, and is the word for the parts of the ceiling that jut down and could smash your head in if you don’t watch out. Antoine said it’s the most dangerous part of being in the catacombs, unless you’re claustrophobic and prone to panic attacks, which Antoine asked about before agreeing to take me down here. I like hollering Ciel! to my comrades in the back, because I like to be helpful, but I guess my timing is bad, and my pronunciation is bad as well, and as I’m not being very helpful, I stop.
Antoine pauses to show me things—years carved elegantly into the stone, dates from the 17 and 1800s. The same blue-tiled street signs that are fixed to the sides of buildings above ground in Paris mark the names of streets down here. This is a famous writer, Antoine tells me, pointing at the name of a guy I’ve never heard of. The walls down here are marked with graffiti, but sporadic, and it becomes less and less as we trudge deeper into the heart of the place. We pass a giant rusted hulk of machinery and Antoine brings points to a thick, chopped-off cable; the stump glitters with bits of copper wire. Apparently it used to run the phone system of Paris. The hall becomes smaller and I take off my backpack, which is scraping the roof as I walk my hunchbacked walk. It is like Alice in Wonderland, says Judy. One passage becomes so small we crawl on our knees. It’s very sandy here—according to Antoine, because it used to be the ocean, though that sounds impossible—and the sand coats my jeans and I suppose this is the beginning of the end of my outfit. Soon comes the water. Little puddles, then splashing around my ankles and then it is rising up my legs, slowing my pace, and when I hear Judy, a few steps ahead, scream a ricocheting slasher-film scream I know the water has risen above her boots. In two paces it rises above mine, pouring down into the rubber. My legs are completely soaked. I scream, too. It’s fun to scream in the catacombs. It’s fun to be so filthy, to have no choice but to submit to the mud caking your thighs, to splash and kick up sprays of the subterranean current. The water isn’t as cold as I’d imagined, and it isn’t dirty. It’s swirling with clay we’ve stirred, but the smaller hallways branching off this main one have stone floors, and the water there is crystalline, the cobblestones visible beneath the gentle shimmers of our lamps. Occasionally a beer bottle bobs there, looking ancient.
