What first caught my attention about her was the incongruency of her dishevelled hair and shabby clothes with a bright pink designer handbag that she was clutching as though hanging on for dear life. She couldn't have been over forty but there was an almost eery, ghostlike element to her as though she had died and come back to life unwillingly.
A tired, slightly crazed look in her eyes, she grinned at the passengers on the other side of the aisle. "Yo tambien tengo hijas," she said to the two middle-aged women to whose conversation she had trespassed. She also had daughters, like the ones the ladies were talking about: daughters with active social lives, daughters with good-looking, successful boyfriends, daughters with good jobs and manicured hands. Only she hadn't seen them for a while. But she had them all the same, and she wanted the women to know.
The next stop was Fontana. The woman got up, said something unintelligeable to the rest of us passengers, and kept grinning, holding tight to her designer bag and trying to keep her balance on the braking metro. A few stifled, pitiful laughs circulated around the carriage.
She got off in Fontana, a pair of skinny legs an extension of the scrawny body she was hiding under her big winter coat. I saw her push the Help button at the information point in a frail attempt to get some conversation before disappearing into the mass of commuters.
Another stifled chuckle in the carriage.
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