Our Mother, Trenitalia
We lived on the trains. Literally.
We swung from those scratchy blue curtains like Tarzans in our boxy jungle and fenced with curled up evening editions of La Corriere Della Sera swiped from napping businessmen. When we were lucky enough to land a compartment train, and double lucky enough to have a whole one to ourselves, we made forts out of the reclining chairs and went to war. Cinnamon-colored velvet slipped under our bare feet as we rushed to defend the turrets, shore up the ramparts, keep the king safe. The conduttori, opening the door to collect our tickets, played the role of the enemy’s fearsome trolls. Pelted mercilessly with old erasers and balled-up Kinder egg wrappers, they rarely succeeded in their goal.
Once, one of them tried humoring us. “What are you little ladies playing at?” he asked indulgently. We rolled our eyes at the foolish old man. Wasn’t it obvious?
I took pity on him. “Signore, we’re defending the king from Hannibal’s elephants,” I explained patiently.
He was surprised. “The king? But who is defending the queen?”
“I am the queen!” we shrieked in unison, banishing the idiot with a barrage of balled-up socks.
We never could agree on which one of us was queen.
I can still taste the sandwiches we ate then. Fresh rolls from the little bakery just outside the station, split open and filled with thick slices of gorgonzola dolce, stracchino, taleggio. After barreling through those sandwiches, a solid half kilo of prosciutto crudo, and two burstingly sweet peaches each, we slept like harbor seals — splayed over any convenient flat surface, swollen bellies pointed up, snoring.
The trains were perpetually late, hours and hours late — unless your connecting train was late, in which case they were perfectly on time. When we weren’t racing manically through the underpasses of Genova Brignole, we baked like salted fish in the merciless heat of Monterosso, smelling of seaweed and sand. We ate greasy chips and chased pigeons on the Mestre platform while the old men, sipping espresso, watched us from the tired station bar. We bought mint granite and dripped bright green syrup onto Milano Centrale’s marble tiling as we waited, hand in hand, for our train to come in.
One day she disappeared.
She wasn’t my real sister, technically, for those of you who believe in such things. For those of you who inexplicably believe that the genetic makeup of blood matters more than blood spilling together from twin scraped knees, than heartbeats pulsing in sync from bodies curled together under a single thin blanket, the fact that we weren’t real sisters will make her disappearance less worthy of grief, less real for me.
She wasn’t my sister, she was just the person I spent every heartbeat with from age seven to fifteen. She wasn’t my sister, she was just the person who left to buy me the latest issue of Topolino and never came back.
I looked everywhere, of course. I screamed my way through every corner of Torino Porta Nuova until I had no voice left to scream. When I gave up looking for her person, I started looking for her body. I checked dumpsters, out-of-service tracks, abandoned cars: nothing.
For three years I waited for her. I pushed down all the seats in the compartment cars and sat cross-legged in my castle of cinnamon-colored velvet, waiting for her to crawl out from under the seats to conquer the keep. I pushed the scratchy blue curtains into their clawlike grey holdbacks so I could scour the faces in every station, every platform I passed, looking for her to emerge from the crowd. Whenever I stopped at Torino Porta Nuova I checked every dumpster, every out-of-service-track, every abandoned car.
Finally, I gave up. I buried the hole inside of myself deep under fresh dirt. I got off the train at Milano Centrale and walked out into the city for the first time. I learned to wake up in the same place I fell asleep. I learned to wake up next to someone other than her. I learned to ride the train for the express purpose of getting from one place to another. I found some kind of happiness.
Then yesterday, on the train to Pisa, I saw her. She was thinner, face lined, hair pulled back in a tight braid. She had two small children in tow. The car was busy, packed full of summer tourists slick with sweat and sunscreen, and I could not reach her in time. She followed her children onto the platform and let the train doors wheeze asthmatically shut behind her, and she did not look back when I called. As soon as I lost sight of her, doubt flooded me. How could it be her? It couldn’t possibly be her. I was just a crazy woman broken by the death of her childhood friend, seeing ghosts.
When I reached the seats where she and the children had been sitting, I found the crumbs of a sandwich, an evening copy of La Corriere Della Sera, and the latest issue of Topolino.
Thanks to Will Beebe for taking the photo that inspired this story.
