The Children's Train

by Viola Ardone

  I rest my head on the back of the seat in the taxi and close my eyes. My suit is clinging to my sweaty body, and the blisters on my heels throb painfully.

  “Are you a musician?” the taxi driver asks.

  “No,” I lie. “I’m an actor.” Then I remember the violin and tell him I’m playing the part of a violinist and carry it with me to get into character.

  The taxi drops me off in the piazza, and I start walking along the road, which looks yellow in the sunlight. At the turning to go up to your street, I stop and wait. I’m not ready yet. Perhaps I never will be. I take a handkerchief out of my pocket. There are no tears, so I wipe my brow and set off.

  37

  AS I MAKE MY WAY UP THROUGH THE GRID OF narrow streets, I find that, rather than becoming more intense, the heat is mitigated by a cool breeze, emanating from the ground-floor tenement apartments that open onto the street. The shade reaches out from the buildings that face one another like mirror images on both sides of the street, crisscrossed with washing lines and clothes hanging out to dry, like a welcomingly cool cover. People stare at me as they would an outsider, with a suspicious air. I start walking faster, even though the street is rising steeply, and my shoes are rubbing against my heels. I avoid the gaze of all those people you used to meet every day, people you would greet and who would greet you back. I don’t want to hear their voices. Sounds, voices, noises; ever since I was a boy, they would get stuck in my ears and never leave me in peace. People on my street were always singing, even when they were speaking. It was always the same music. It’s never changed. I put my hands in my pocket to avoid any contact with their bodies and pat my wallet and driver’s license to make sure they are still there. People have told me about being beaten up and robbed by gangs of kids here. Every time, I thought it could have been me; I could have been one of those kids in this city who grew up too fast but never became an adult.

  When I reach the door of your house, my heart is in my throat. It’s not only the emotion of being here after so many years away, or the pain of knowing you’re there in that room, lying on the bed that we used to share, your loose hair still almost completely black. No, it’s fear. Fear of dirt, of poverty, of need, of being an imposter, of living a life that’s not mine and taking a name that doesn’t belong to me. Over the years, my fear has learned to curl up into a corner of my mind, but it hasn’t gone altogether; it’s lurking at the margins of my conscience. Like now, standing in front of the closed door of your apartment. You weren’t afraid of anything. You never lowered your gaze. Fear doesn’t exist, you would say. It’s your imagination. I’ve been telling myself the same thing all my life, but I’ve never convinced myself.

  A big gray cat rubs against my legs and sniffs at my leather shoes. It must be Ciccio Cheese, our alley cat. I used to give it dry bread and a little milk, and you would shoo it away rudely. My memories deceive me, though. The cat arches its back, fluffs out its fur, and hisses at me. I rest my hand on the doorknob, but I’m no longer sure what I came here to do. It might be best to leave and be done with it.

  An orange soccer ball bounces down the street on the loosely fitting cobbles, hits my knee, and rolls farther down, ending up behind the wheels of a scooter parked in front of the apartment building opposite yours. A kid comes running after it, and I point to where the ball is hiding. His jeans are fashionably ripped at the knees, he has one shoelace undone, and a faded T-shirt. He smiles, with the ball in his hand, and runs on down the street. He looks happy. Maybe I was happy once, but it was a long time ago. As I watch him disappear, the ancient, worn-out fabric of my memories that I’d always stretched to keep pace with the present all of a sudden becomes the right size, fitting my eyes with millimetric precision. I look back and see myself running down the street with my red hair, one missing milk tooth that the “tooth mouse” had taken in exchange for a piece of cheese, and my knees full of bruises and grazes.

  38

  I KNOCK QUIETLY, BUT NOBODY COMES TO THE door. I try pushing, and the door opens. There is very little light filtering through the half-closed shutters. The table and chairs, the kitchen nook, the bathroom at the end, the bed in a dark corner. It takes a second to take in the whole apartment. Everything is almost exactly as it used to be. The rush-bottomed chairs, the hexagonal tiles on the floor, the same ancient brown table we had back then. The television set, with the lace doily you made with your own hands on top, the radio I gave you once for your birthday. Your flowery day-coat hanging on the coat rack, the white bedspread crocheted by your mother, Filomena, bless her soul. You are the only thing missing.

  On the stove, the pan with the genovese sauce is “resting.” The smell of steeped onion fills the minuscule apartment, proof that you were planning to be alive today, that you should be here in your place to eat it.

  I circuit the whole place in a few steps. It takes so little to sum up your life. Anybody’s life, perhaps. I can’t bring myself to touch anything. Your slippers worn out at the toes, your hairpins, the mirror that has received your image for so many years, watching it age day by day, in minimal increments. It feels sacrilegious to leave your few possessions unguarded. The damp circle under the basil pot on the windowsill, your stockings, the right leg darned repeatedly over the big toe, hanging over the shower curtain, the liquor bottles on the dresser filled with pink, yellow, and blue colored water because they “look nice that way.” I’d like to carry everything out to safety as if you and the whole house were about to drown. On the dresser, next to your nail scissors and hairpins, there’s a little ivory comb. I stroke it, pick it up, weigh it in my hand, and slip it into my pocket. Then I take it out again and put it back where it was. The place you had given it. I feel like a thief, like a Peeping Tom, like somebody who has wormed his way into your intimacy and sees things that have not been laid out for him. I open the front door wide and let the sun come in to light up the dark room. Before locking up, though, I go back into the kitchen. I trace your footsteps as far as the pan left on the stove. The butcher, opposite, for the meat, “make sure it’s a nice tender cut”; the vegetable man on the corner, at the end of the alleyway, for the onions, carrots, and celery; you breaking the ziti by hand into an earthenware casserole. The onion sizzling in olive oil until it goes transparent, simmering with a sprinkle of wine to balance the acidity, time and heat disintegrating the meat, as with all flesh, the water boiling and the pasta gradually softening until it reaches its perfect starchy consistency.

  I look at my watch. It’s lunchtime, and it feels like you’ve been cooking for me, for when I get home. I lift the lid, grab a fork, and grant you your dying wish.

  I finish the pasta, wash the pan, and leave it to dry. Then I shut the door behind me and take the same way back, all the way down to the main road. The sound of my footsteps on the black paving stones, hanging laundry dripping from above, Vespas parked in the alleyways, like sleeping horses outside the apartments, wide-open doors and windows giving out onto the street, making it hard to preserve decency and not to peer inside and spy on the crowded lives inside.

  A woman I don’t know comes out of her ground-floor apartment. Her face is still young, but it has been aged by fatigue. Her black hair is hanging loose over her shoulders. She stares at me, squinting in the dazzling light, shading her eyes with one hand.

  “You’re Donna Antonietta’s grown-up son, bless her soul. The violinist . . .”

  “No, I’m a nephew,” I say and walk on. I don’t want to be a part of this neighborhood, with all its voracious meddling. I don’t like this woman I don’t even know talking about you as if you were dead. She follows me, a few steps behind.

  “They took her away this morning. It’s the heat, you know. They couldn’t keep her here, the house is too small and the temperature is going up, they said it on TV. Can you hear me, or not?”

  I stop and turn around, touching my temple.

  “I’m deaf in one ear,” I lie.

  “Ah, sorry,” the woman says, glaring at me s
uspiciously.

  “Tomorrow morning, there’s the funeral mass, at eight thirty, in the church of the saint, you know the one,” she says. She stares at me diffidently a little longer and then goes back into her house, shouting after me, “You tell her son, then.”

  She’s telling me out of respect for you, I know. Because you spent your whole life, and even your death, in this alleyway. She’s not doing it for me. I’m the son who ran away. The one who never came to see you.

  Rather than heading straight for Via Toledo, I decide to take a shortcut through the narrow streets to escape the heat. I lose myself in the shrines, with their candles and flowers, in the dark faces, the crooked teeth, the hoarse voices, and, without meaning to, I end up in front of the church where that evening the miracle-working nun fed me pasta, bread and tomato, and an apple, and where tomorrow morning the neighbor said my mother’s funeral mass will be held. I stand in front of the church for a few minutes without going in. I move my lips pretending to say my prayers, but what I’m really thinking is that this is where I ran away from, and this is where I have returned. Except this time, you are the one who has run away without saying goodbye. And you won’t be coming back.

  39

  I GO BY THE MAIN SQUARE AGAIN AND WALK DOWN to the seafront where the best hotels are; I’ve stayed in a couple. You used to tease me. “So, you’ve made money,” you would say. “Weeds grow so fast.” I wanted to buy you a house, a normal house with stairs, a balcony, and an intercom. You always said no. You didn’t want to move.

  “You’re the one that travels; I stay in one place. Your brother Agostino has been trying to persuade me to move in with him and his wife up in the Vomero quarter. He’s so generous, you know . . . you should see their house, the furniture . . . and what a view!”

  You never wanted to see my house in Milan. Not even Derna’s house in Modena, all those years I was there, nor after that, when I was studying at the Conservatory. Maybe you were scared of the train. I never asked you, and now I can’t ask you. We loved each other from a distance. That’s what I think. I wonder whether that’s what you thought.

  I stop in front of one of the most expensive hotels. I push the glass door open and I’m struck by a wall of cold air that makes my sweat go clammy. I ask at the reception for a room.

  “Have you made a reservation?”

  “No.”

  The receptionist looks askance at me.

  “I’m afraid we’re fully booked, sir.”

  He’s wearing gold-rimmed glasses, what little hair he has left combed and gelled back, and he has an air of importance about him, as if he had the keys to paradise in his pockets, rather than the keys to a hotel suite. I suppose for him they’re the same thing, ultimately.

  “My daughter had a baby last night, and I’ve come to see my new grandchild,” I say, handing him a generous tip in the hope a room will suddenly become available.

  “I see, sir. I’ll see what I can do.”

  He asks a liveried bellboy to take my bag and violin.

  “Not the violin,” I say. “This stays with me.”

  He leans imperceptibly across the reception desk and eyes me over the rim of his glasses, creasing his forehead and eyebrows into a frown.

  “How many nights are you planning to stay?” he asks in a whisper.

  I spread my arms, my palms facing up, as if to say “Who knows?” and he nods sympathetically.

  “I’ve found a well-appointed room for you, sir, with a seafront view,” he says, handing me the key. “Congratulations!” he adds, as I hand him my ID. “I’ll have you accompanied to your room right away, Mr. Benvenuti.”

  The bellboy takes me up a few floors, unlocks the door, and asks whether the room is to my satisfaction. I nod and give him a tip. I rest the violin case on the bed, take a tour of the room, and open the door onto the balcony. I stand there in the current created by two qualities of air: the refrigerated air in the room and the sweltering air rising from the sidewalk two floors down. I’m exhausted. A fatigue borne of distance, as if I’d walked all the way here from Milan. As if all the years that have gone by, since I ran away and stole onto that train, were weighing down on me. I take my jacket off, roll my shirtsleeves up, and take my violin out of its case. I look out from the little balcony and stand there gazing at the sea, a blue line drawn like a border along one side of the city only. The gulf embraces the whole city in its arms, curving so gently that I’m almost sorry I’ve never been able to reciprocate and embrace you, Mamma. It feels as though everything has been a misunderstanding, a mutual betrayal, since that evening I called you a liar and ran to the station.

  That night I slept in the arms of another mother. I can’t even remember her name, or perhaps I never knew it. I told her you had died, and I was on my own. When the conductor came in at dawn, she said we were all her children, me and the other two, and he left. She bought me a bus ticket to Modena and waited until she’d seen me waving out the back window.

  When Rosa saw me at the door, tears came to her eyes. She couldn’t believe I had gotten back on my own, without telling anyone anything. Then Derna arrived and immediately called Maddalena. She said you must be looking for me all around the neighborhood, and that you must be dying of fright. I remembered the photo on your bedside table of my big brother, Luigi, whom I’d never met. I’d never met my father, or your parents. I was the only thing you had left, but I was no better than fast-growing weeds to you. A few days later, a letter came. It was hard to tell whether you were angry or not. All you said was that if they were able to keep me, fine; otherwise, I was to come back home immediately. I stayed.

  40

  I STAY IN THE HOTEL ROOM, THE AIR-CONdiTIONING on at full blast. I do nothing. I’m simply waiting for time to pass until tomorrow morning. A scream from two floors down on the street pierces the silence of the early afternoon.

  “Carminiè!”

  I go out onto the balcony and look down. There’s a group of five kids pacing in front of the hotel. They stop and turn back again. The oldest looks about twelve, while the youngest can’t be any older than seven. I observe them for a while. They look like a gang. They are tailing tourists, aiming for a small payoff or perhaps a little scam. The youngest, with jet-black hair, looks up at me. I look away and close the balcony door quickly to lock the voices speaking Neapolitan dialect out of the room, but it is too late. They have already insinuated their way into my head.

  I pick up my violin from the bed and start playing an aria to chase the voices away, but it’s no use. However muffled, the voices keep coming, bringing with them the sounds of my childhood that snap synapses in the back of my memory.

  First, in the background, high-pitched children’s voices, which are the violins, violas, and cellos, according to their age. Then the women’s double bass, whose almost masculine throaty, gravelly voices play the bass line, beating the tempo of everyday life. And then there is the woodwind section, the stupidly chirpy, almost feminine sound of the men played by clarinets, flutes, and piccolos. Voices at the market, the endless gossip of housewives at the front doors of their tenement apartments, children chasing one another through the alleyways. Until I reach a voice that is buried in the innermost kernel of my recollection.

  “Amerigo, Amerì! Come down here, quick. Go and get two lire from Pachiochia . . .”

  It’s your voice, Mamma.

  41

  I SPEND THE WHOLE AFTERNOON IN THE HOTEL room, waiting for the heat to dissipate. I haven’t called Derna. I haven’t called anyone. This way, it feels like I am keeping you alive, away from the finality of death, at least in other people’s thoughts.

  After sundown, I put my shoes on again and went out onto the seafront. I wasn’t sure I was hungry. I walked back to your neighborhood, looking for a modest little trattoria, surrounded by smells of dinner on the stove, wafting from open windows. Four tables inside, in a windowless basement, and three outside, tables and chairs in the middle of the street. I stop just as the owner c
omes out in a T-shirt and white shorts, covered by a stained apron. He greets me as if he knows me, as if he’s been expecting me, and sits me down at one of the unofficial tables, laid with a paper tablecloth and a chipped glass. The waiter brings me a greasy piece of paper with the menu of the day written on it. I gaze at it, amazed. I feel sure he has recognized me after all these years, though it doesn’t seem possible. I soon realize the same scene is repeated with every customer. Everyone who walks past the place is welcomed with the same over-the-top shenanigans, which are part and parcel of the menu of the day. I look through the list and order a plate of pasta with potatoes and provola cheese, just like you used to make it, with the rind softened inside to give the dish extra flavor. My order comes almost at once. I take a sip of the red house wine and put the first spoonful in my mouth. The macaroni dissolves under my palate, the melted provola gluey. You always used to warn me to take small mouthfuls, otherwise I might choke, and then who would take me to the hospital? But I used to love cramming my mouth full of pasta, with its ambiguous flavor that united the sweetness of the potato and the saltiness of the cheese and continued to burn my lips after I’d finished the meal.

  I eat with a hunger ill-suited to grief. Hunger is mean-spirited, though. It doesn’t give a shit about good manners or loved ones. I wipe my mouth and ask for the check. The owner with the stained apron comes to the table and writes a few numbers in a column right on the paper tablecloth. He draws a line under them and tots up the total: nothing, a couple of thousand lire. I pull the notes out of my wallet and add a good tip.

  “Do you have an apple?” I ask the host, who is already going back into the basement.