Few trains have had as much symbolic charge as the express which Linked Madrid and Paris in the 1970s. It took 14 hours to travel the route which started at Chamartín station and ended at Austerlitz station, a rococo building next to … towards the Seine. Getting off the wagon under its enormous steel and glass roof, one could have the sensation, at that time, of entering another world.
“Tonight, freedom,” a classmate told me before moving to Paris during Franco’s lifetime. Freedom was what those of us who traveled there to study, watch banned films, and wander the Latin Quarter were looking for. It was a mixture of euphoria and anxiety that I felt when I settled into one of the bunk beds from the “Puerta del Sol”, who left at seven in the afternoon.
I remember a uniformed waiter asking for passports when boarding the train, which were returned a few minutes before arrival in Paris. A bell invited travelers to have breakfast in the restaurant car, where a café au lait and a croissant were served. The walk seems to accelerate in the last kilometers of the journey as the express passes through the suburbs of the capital. The houses passed by quickly and we barely had time to read the names of the stations. AND then the rain, the smell of the Seine, the sound of another language.
Traveling to the “Puerta del Sol” was a real adventure in this isolated Spain
The “Puerta del Sol” It began circulating in 1969 and he made his last trip in 1996. Nearly 1,400 kilometers of travel during which friendships were made and bonds were born. There I met a Basque who guarded the Venezuelan embassy at night. The speed was slower from Chamartín to the French border, reached at midnight. Then it accelerated. The train stopped in Burgos, Miranda, Vitoria and San Sebastián. And then to Bordeaux, where practically no travelers boarded.
At its inauguration, the Spanish press described it as an important step the possibility of going to Paris in one night without changing trains, constrained by the different track gauges. The engineers had designed a platform in Hendaye on which the trains were lifted above the track by hydraulic cylinders. The wagons being suspended, the bogies (the wheels and their axles) were modified to adapt them to the width of the other country. The operation lasted about 40 minutes while the passengers slept in their sleeping cars or on the berths. It was like a rite of passage to a territory where one could feel as free as they were anonymous.
Traveling to the “Puerta del Sol” was a kind of adventure in this Spain isolated by the Pyrenees and with a censorship regime. But it was also a meeting point for the opposition to Franco. There was a good chance of coming across characters like Tuñón de Lara, García Calvo and certain characters who frequented “La Boule d’Or”, although I may be mixing up memories and this happened after the general’s death.
“El Puerta del Sol” is today a kind of secret key for those of us who fled to a Paris where it was possible to meet Sartre and Beauvoir, listen to Juliette Greco in a wine cellar, spend hours leafing through books at the FNAC on rue de Rennes or let a witch read your future on the Pont des Arts.
If I had imagination, which I don’t, I would write a novel about the conversations on that express, the loves dreamed of and lost, and the vain hopes for a future that then turned into disappointment. Paris was a partywe were young and we demanded the impossible. They told us: “Under the cobblestones, there is a beach”. And this train took us to the beach.
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