The Midnight Train to Lisbon

The Sud-Express left Hendaye just as the sun began to set over the Atlantic. It is one of the last great sleeper trains in Europe, a slow, rumbling beast that drags itself across the Iberian Peninsula while its passengers sleep.

My compartment was small, paneled in dark wood that smelled faintly of polish and old dust. As the train moved southward into Spain, I sat by the window and watched the landscape turn to shadows. There is a specific kind of intimacy that develops among strangers on a night train. You share the quiet, the rocking motion, the fleeting glimpses of small-town platforms bathed in orange sodium light.

Sometime around 3 AM, I woke to find the train stopped in a station. I lifted the blind. A single sign read Vilar Formoso. The border of Portugal. A guard walked down the platform, his boots crunching loudly on the gravel. He paused, lit a cigarette, and exhaled a plume of smoke that caught the station light before dissipating into the dark.

I fell back asleep to the rhythm of the wheels over the jointed track, waking only when the bright morning sun hit the white tiles of Lisbon's Santa Apolónia station. The journey had erased the geography between where I started and where I arrived; it felt less like travel and more like teleportation through the medium of dreams.