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The Père Lachaise cemetery is older and larger than the one at Montparnasse. Vous êtes ici: an arrow points out that you are at the entrance to the rue Ménilmontant. Carlos takes down the names of people and the coordinates to their location, Rossana turns the map around trying unsuccessfully to find herself. You watch them. The fifth day in Paris, a cloudy day, you are the only visitors within view, maybe inside there are more people lost amid corridors and crypts in search of the Lizard King. You are tired, the walk through the city made your feet blister. Even while the trip has been fascinating, you cannot help but feel alien to this culture that in theory shouldn't be far removed from yours. You don't understand French, Carlos is the only one who speaks it well. You've lost your way on the metro a number of times, that other subterranean city, labyrinth of tunnels and metal. While they finish jotting down their list, you sit in a doorway to read an essay by Julio Cortázar, "Below Level": Like in the theater and the cinema, in the metro it is always night. True, but the metro asphyxiates and once inside it, one is both spectator and protagonist . . . the metro makes us, for a moment, pliable, porous, recipients of all that the freedom available on the surface deprives us, for to be free on the surface implies danger, a necessary option, a red light, crossing the street looking to the good side. You don't pick up on this feeling of freedom on the surface or underground, much less in the cemetery. You put the book away to begin the necrological and oniric excursion

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