Last Friday I took an 8 hour train from Florence to Paris.
The journey only really started in Milan. I’d been lucky enough to get a small compartment to myself and was hoping I’d get to just watch the scenery alone when a young Russian girl, no more than 16 and wearing what appeared to be solely a napkin, dragged her mother onboard.
“You speak English? Da? Going to Paris?”
“Da. Si,” I said. “Uh, yes.”
“Good. You look at my mother until Paris, okay? She not speak English.”
I was almost certain she meant “after” but I took a look at her mother anyway: an ageing, bemused woman wearing the kind of low-cut leopardskin dress that would just look trashy on a younger woman but, with her obvious excitement at being on a train, somehow gave her a slight carnival atmosphere. Her boobs moved oddly and seemingly with their own momentum, threatening to spill out like overripe fruit.
“Uh, okay.”
“Look at her until Paris.”
“Da, okay,” I said, mentally promising to keep to the spirit of the agreement but not the letter.
She did make compelling viewing though. As the train embarked, she made noises like a spaceship, mimicking one with her hand.
“Pagliari!” she said. “Yuri Gargarin? Cosmonaut!”
“Da,” I said. “Take-off.”
She grinned, happy, before spotting my guitar. “Ah! Classic? Folk?”
“Uh, rock, blues…” I said. She laughed, delighted, before launching into a full 3 minute rendition of “Summer In The City.” I smiled weakly. My embarrassment complete, she then proceeded to interrogate people as they joined us in the cabin.
They were an interesting bunch too. One spent the entire journey engaged in some industrial-strength crotch adjustment, all the while concentrating fiercely on the phone he was furiously SMSing on. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was locked in some kind of crotch-chess match, such was his concentration - that he was broadcasting each complex, strategic move to his opponent, who was then adjusting his own crotch and responding.
I never got to see ‘check-mate.’
Another man, balding and wearing sunglasses he never removed, seemed to have somehow undone another button on his mustard yellow shirt each time I stole a glance in his direction. I get the feeling he spent the entire journey watching the Russian boobs moving in their leopard-skin cage.
I escaped to the buffet car just as our little carriage became full. I drank a coffee there and stood and watched the mountains move by. A scraggily-looking traveller was doing the same, his patchy goatee and faded denim jacket giving him the look of someone who’d been on the road for years. I considered starting up a conversation but decided we were both enjoying the silence too much to ruin it.
The train slowed abruptly and the traveller quickly downed the rest of his coffee before pulling a shiny gold badge out of his pocket and pinning it to his coat. He was a undercover police officer!
He began moving rapidly toward the front of the train and I quickly finished my coffee and followed him, all the while muttering a theme song I’d made up for him in my head (“Un. Der. Cov. Er. TRAINPOLICE!” was the gist of it.)
In the end he met up with two French border guards who climbed onboard the train and, in a slightly disappointing climax, they proceeded to very politely just check passports and make small-talk with passengers. No-one was even shot or anything.
Disappointed, I returned to my cabin to find the Russian mom had pulled out a small map and was asking everyone there to point out where they were from. It had sparked some conversations. Crotch-adjuster and button-undoer, seemingly both from the same area of Pakistan, were engaged in a heated cricket debate. A French mom was exchanging baby photos with Russian mom, and an Italian engineer was trying to work out where in South Africa I was from.
The temperature dropped as we entered France over the mountains, and Russian mom, a little cold, pulled out a thick, leopard-skin vest to wear over her leopard-skin dress. I wondered if it was the same leopard.
Button-undoer looked a little disappointed, before returning to his conversation about cricket.
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I had never realised quite how invisible you could be when walking next to a beautiful woman.
Men and women stare at her, the men sometimes too awestruck to mask their open admiration, the women trying to hide either admiration or contempt.
“So far out of your league it ain’t even the same sport” as a friend would say.
I walk, invisible, alongside her, free to watch them, ignored except for the odd guilty look when someone notices me.
She knows, I am sure, that the world is watching but it doesn’t seem to bother or affect her.
Perhaps this is simply how the world is to her - it has always and will always be there, a puppy lying at her feet. Perhaps she simply doesn’t know any other way for it to be.
We were waiting in a queue somewhere yesterday, the minutes ticking over, when an old man, neatly dressed and lively, walked up to us, smiling. He talked at her in Italian for a minute or so, punctuating his fervent monologue with “Bella!” every few sentences and gesturing at her. She just smiled, said thank you, didn’t bother to remove her sunglasses. He turned, smiled and nodded at me, then took one last look at her before walking off.
I wondered briefly if I could use this invisibility somehow. Commit crimes, perhaps. Steal art and jewellery while everyone watched her walking. But I think it would not be thrilling or exciting after a while. I get the feeling I’d be left standing somewhere, arms full of diamonds, watching the whole world watching her, and seeing her just smiling back.
“
Who does a guy have to blow to get some service in this town?
Seen scrawled in black pen on a restaurant wall in Florence.
Florence again. I have mixed feelings about the city. It’s beautiful, with its sandstone coloured walls and the wide, shallow Arno winding its way through its edge, but there are tourists everywhere and I have been too drunk here too many times with too many people in hostels in an attempt to socialise.
Swallows dart through the air in the hottest part of the afternoon. Their flight doesn’t seem stable unless their wings are moving, and when they glide they dip and tilt in the air like it is unevenly formed. But when they flap their wings they speed and dart.
I am here again because I met a girl when I was waiting for the train from Florence to Venice. She approached me asking for help in a babble of Italian, switching to English when she saw my confusion. I pointed out her train, which was also mine, and we talked until it arrived, and then as we travelled. When we reached her stop, she kissed me on the edge of my mouth and told me to come back to Florence after Venice. And so I did.
It is not as I’d expected. The language barrier, cute when we were sat in a train station, makes long conversations frustrating, and since she is Brazilian and is studying Italian in a class made largely of Japanese students, her whole day is spent grappling with foreigners in 4 different languages. She is too young too, and more vain than I had thought. I think I, too, am not as into sports or Lady Gaga as she’d want.
A meeting at a train station, then, but not like in the movies. No ‘Brief Encounter’.
And so we wander the city for the few hours a day when she doesn’t have class, mostly in silence. We sit and drink coffee and stare out at the other tourists. It is a strange thing, two strangers somewhere together, though we kiss, sometimes, and I get to make her laugh. And she goes back to the student dorm and I go back to the hostel. I don’t question it. So much of my life has no discernible form right now.
My grandfather taught me how to tell the difference a swift and a swallow. It’s the shape of the tail. The greatest compliment I’ve ever received was being told I thought like him.
There is a man who sleeps in the same ATM vestibule on my hostel’s street every night. He spreads a neat, red sweater on the ground, the arms pointing out, puts his shoes next to one another, and lies there with his back to the street. I wonder if he thinks of that corner as home.
Venice seems to be a city built solely on the precept that novelty transport is awesome. Someone, at some point in the past, decided that the only way that garbage trucks could be more amazing would be if they were, in fact, garbage boats.
“Stick a crane on the boat,” they said, probably a little drunk. “And then, like, hoist over some kind of… dessert trolley thing. But, you know, with a bottom that, like, drops out. Fill it with your garbage and then you can just crane that shit up into the air, over the boat, then empty that beautiful son-of-a-bitch, BAM. Then, like, next house, man. Move the fuck on. Move on in your garbage boat.“
It probably sounded more beautiful in Italian, but it blows my mind that this is just how people in Venice get rid of their empty milk bottles.
And now there’s this whole city just kinda… floating. Filled with police boats, garbage boats and ambulance boats. (I wonder if they put lifejackets on accident victims when the ambulance boat picks them up. I like the idea that there might be some kind of crash involving two ambulance boats, spilling unconscious people out into the canals, all of whom end up bobbing along until they come to be in a corner in someone’s personal waterway. Just floating there, asleep, occasionally softly bumping into one another like toys in a bath)
On a Friday night the young men of Venice do as many young men do in any small town - they get in their personal vehicle (or borrow their parents’), stick on some bumpin’ tunes and cool sunglasses, and go cruising for women. Only, in Venice, it’s in boats. The women I’ve spoken to in the hostels complain that they’re tired of catcalls from Italian men (even from men in boats) but honestly all I want to do every time I see one of these guys cruise by is high-five them. I love the idea that, even in so watery a place, amorous douchery prevails. Nature finds a way.
The Grand Canal seems, especially at night, like a beautiful water-highway.
I find the joggers in the city fascinating. While I love running for its freedom - for the idea that I could just set out in one direction and run until I get tired - when I see them running here, on a small island filled with maze-like streets, it seems to me that they’re more like lycra-clad rats pacing back and forth in a cage. Surely they see each other constantly, too, as they circle the city? Maybe they see each other 3 or 4 times on each run. Wouldn’t you feel ridiculous? I would, I think.
I lost the elastic band I had to keep my pen tied to my notebook. It was from our postman in London. Every day he’d deliver post and, as our house was the first on a block, he’d remove the faded, pink elastic bands surrounding the letters for the whole block, inevitably dropping them outside our door. I’d pick them up from our doorstep when I got home and keep them, usually wearing one around my left wrist. It was useful, and now I’ve lost the last of them.
The sparrows here are cheeky little bastards. I actually saw one try to take a whole croissant out of a drunk German lady’s hand. She seemed delighted.
There is nothing that says quite how ridiculous tourism is than when a water-bus rounds a corner in Venice bearing 30 serious, well-dressed Japanese men, all of whom are wearing captain’s hats with the word ‘Venice’ inscribed on them in gold thread.
I wonder how they deliver furniture here. I think I will order a piano and find out.
