The Train to Orvieto

by Novelli, Rebecca J. ;

  One morning, I was late to my first class, history. The door was always locked promptly against latecomers. I ran from the streetcar stop to the entrance to the campus, and then into the first of two large peristyle courtyards onto which the classrooms opened. Ignoring the carefully laid out walkways, I ran across the grass. I reached the classroom and pulled on the doorknob. Unlocked! Breathless, I scurried to my seat.

  “You just made it,” said the girl sitting next to me. “You’re lucky.” At the back of the room, the door shut and the lock turned. The students grew silent. The professor walked with a backward lean that belied his progress toward the podium. His loose, grey-brown coat flapped around his long, angular frame, giving him the appearance of a large bird whose feathers had been ruffled by the wind. He extracted some papers from a briefcase, oblivious to the rest of the papers that spilled at his feet. Behind his thick glasses, his dark eyes appeared abnormally large. He ran his hands through his hair and fussed in his pockets for a pencil. I saw that he wore a wedding ring. What sort of wife does he have? Is she absentminded, too? Do they have children? He cleared his throat.

  “Today, we shall discuss our ideas about what history is,” he said. “Whether history is an actual record of what happens, as many people believe, or whether it is an act of imagination as, say, a work of fiction or drama. Some people joke that history is the story told by conquerors, the recounting of the deeds of great men and a victorious people. Others describe the history of any civilization as a journey between birth and death with a limited lifespan just as our human span is limited. And still others say that it’s a record of human progress or, conversely, an oscillation between opposites. He waited for the students to stop writing in their notebooks. “Signorina, you in the front row!” I looked up. He leaned over the podium and pointed his thin index finger at me. “Tell us what your view of history is and what evidence you have assembled to defend it.”

  So many other questions hovered behind the professor’s question: What if we don’t know what our real history is? What if it has been kept from us? If our history is false, but we don’t know it’s false, is it still true? If we are deceived, do we have a history at all? Is history merely what we believe it is? If we don’t know our history, how can we know what our experience means?

  “Why couldn’t all of these views be true?” I said. “Doesn’t what we call history depend on circumstances and on who tells it, on their point of view, on what they need or want it to be?”

  The professor’s eyebrows snapped together, and his coat shook. “You’ve evaded the assignment by refusing to take a position.”

  “No,” I said. “I am taking a position: If our history is hidden from us or if we don’t know what it is, then we don’t have a past. History is only what we can remember at this moment. If we forget or if we remember something else tomorrow, then our history changes. It’s as if history is written in disappearing ink.”

  “Nonsense. History—History with a capital H—is documented and available for research and interpretation. It is susceptible to scholarship. To investigation. We can discover its truth.” He pointed at me again. “The phenomena you describe belong to the realm of personal history. Your experience, meaningful or not, is irrelevant to the great sweep of time and to the study of history. We are very small, signorina. What happens to us individually doesn’t matter.” I thought he was wrong. If the events of our individual lives aren’t affected by the larger events of our time and vice versa, why would we care about history?

  The young woman sitting next to me smiled. “I’m Francesca. Piacere. I like what you just said. Personal and societal histories are intertwined. I think we should study both.” Small and wiry with curly hair and a wide smile, Francesca’s outgoing and decisive nature made her seem bigger and more powerful than she likely was, though I didn’t know that then. She was angry: there weren’t enough professors at the school, the method of grading was unfair, and tuition increases had just been announced with more to come.

  “Students are going to take over this university very soon,” she told me after class, “and together with the workers we’ll cripple the country until things improve for all of us.” She talked excitedly about resistenza pacifica and resistenza passiva. Nonviolence and passive resistence.

  “Isn’t it dangerous?”

  “Probably. Why don’t you come see for yourself?” I felt for the corno but it wasn’t there.

  I listened as Francesca’s friends debated the best way to change a society that fails to provide an education for its students.

  “We have to take control of the educational system—curriculum, selection of professors, grading—all of it,” Marco said. He sounded certain, sophisticated. He seems even smarter than Bruno, I thought.

  “But how?” Lucia asked. I wanted to know, too.

  “By joining with the workers and bringing everything to a stop like we just did in Firenze a few weeks ago,” Marco said. “The waiters on the train joined us right away. So did the baggage handlers.” Workers? Firenze? Were they planning to bring the country to a halt with only waiters and baggage handlers and students?

  I spoke up. “How did that actually change anything? I think it just made people late and caused them trouble, including me.”

  “It didn’t change anything. Yet. It was a test,” Marco said. “Now we know that random strikes are a viable tactic.” He had a gentle way of speaking. Calm. “We learned that the workers are ready to join us and willing if we give them the opportunity. If we can bring the railroad to a halt with a small strike, then we can stop the entire country with a general strike. Now we have the will and the means to do it.”

  “We’ll begin in the north—Torino, Milano—where workers have already responded to calls for strikes, Then, we’ll move south,” Andreas said. “The police won’t be able to stop it.”

  General strike? Torino? Milano? Police? It was both exciting and frightening to listen to them. So much is happening that I know nothing about. I would have missed so much if I had stayed in Orvieto.

  “Now you’re a co-conspirator,” Francesca whispered to me, laughing. “Will you help us? We need people who can be runners and messengers. People who won’t be noticed.” I remembered what papà had said about how dimostranti recruited people. Was this what he meant? I didn’t want Francesca, Marco and the others to think I was a paesanotta. A bumpkin. I smiled and nodded, pleased to think of myself as a participant in something important, something much larger than who I was or where I came from, something mentioned in the newspapers. “You can’t tell anyone,” Francesca said, “but it will happen soon.”

  22

  One afternoon—it was in early November—Joey and I went to the Parco Sempione after my classes. The leaves had already fallen, and the wind whirled them around us in a dance of color. Joey pointed to a bare tree. “That linden tree could almost support our whole life,” he said, “We could make tea from the leaves and chairs and a table from the wood, so we’d have a place to sit and drink it.” We sat down together on a nearby bench that overlooked a pond. “Won’t happen, though.”

  “Why?”

  “My C.O. application was denied. Not enough evidence, they said.”

  “I know you’ll be a good soldier.” It was difficult to say it, and to think of Joey’s leaving. I liked my new “family.”

  “And you’ll be a good history teacher.” He seemed proud of me. “I want to do things, too…when I come back…if I come back.”

  “Maybe Losine can arrange for you to stay here.”

  “I’m going to see if I can appeal.”

  “You’ll be okay. I know you will.”

  “Look, those swans are nesting.” We moved nearer until the birds objected. “Once I was preparing a piece about a swan for a concert. I wanted my interpretation to be true to what swans are really like, so I used to go and watch them. They’re very competent parents. The males sit on the nest and care for the babies if something happens to the mother, and the
mothers raise the babies alone if something happens to the father. Did you know that a single swan won’t look for another mate until the babies grow up?”

  When another tuition increase was announced the following week, Marco said it was time to act. “We need your help,” he told me. Of course, I agreed. I wanted to help.

  It was at about that same time that I began to feel ill. I tried to ignore my symptoms. I thought they were temporary. At one point, I scarcely ate or drank anything for several days. Losine was away and no one noticed. I was afraid that if Francesca and Marco found out, I might have to give up my duties, so I didn’t tell anyone. Then, one morning, just after Losine returned and just as I was leaving for Cattolicà, I fainted.

  When I opened my eyes, Losine’s face swirled above me. He touched my forehead. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know. I felt a little bit sick.” I sat up quickly. The room tipped and then righted itself. I blinked to clear my vision. “It’s nothing. I’m fine now.”

  “Is your period late?”

  How could he ask me about such an intimate matter? Papà would never do such a thing. Was that because he wasn’t my real father?

  “I need to go to Cattolicà. Someone is expecting me.”

  “The campus has closed. Are you sure you’re not late?” he said. Is this what real fathers do or only Milanese fathers?

  “Not if I hurry.”

  “That’s not what I asked you.” What he’s suggesting can’t be true.

  “A little, maybe.” I had heard women talk about being “late” after an upsetting or stressful time. It was just temporary.

  “How little?”

  I felt like a criminal. “A week or two.”

  “Only a week or two? Are you sure?”

  “Maybe a month.”

  “You need to have a test,” he said. He tells me what to do just like papà, I thought.

  “I’m not pregnant like Silvana, if that’s what you think. She sleeps with men she’s not married to, men she doesn’t know. I didn’t do that.” Losine looked at me closely. “I’m fine now. Even a little hungry.”

  “I’ll get you some tea and toast.”

  I drank the entire pot of tea and ate six slices of toast. I was still a little dizzy and slightly nauseated, but I was determined not to faint again. “I’m fine. I need to go. I’m late.”

  “The test is more important.” Losine wrote an address on a piece of paper and gave it to me. “Here’s where to go. I want you to go right now. Tell them you’re married because if you’re pregnant and unmarried, they may try to send you away.” I put the paper in my purse and picked up my notebook. “It’s very important that you make certain.”

  “Just because I fainted?”

  “If you don’t get a test, I’ll worry.” I knew he would check when I got home. I’ll get the test and then go to the university. Francesca and Marco will be annoyed that I’m late, but if Losine finds out I’m helping them…well, better to satisfy his questions so he doesn’t make some of his arrangements. “Stay away from Cattolicà,” Losine said as I left. “The police are there.” Too many fathers, I thought. One is enough.

  Outside, it was foggy, every surface misted. People hurried by me seemingly enclosed within themselves. As I waited for the streetcar, a blind beggar took up a position a few feet away. He leaned against an iron fence in the only protected area and rattled his cup. I dropped some coins into it.

  “Grazie, signorina.” He got up, put his blind man’s cane under his arm, and counted the money as he walked away. I moved into the spot he had vacated and warmed myself with thoughts of how Grazia always made dolce, sweets, for us the way her grandmother had taught her. We ate them with hot chocolate or caffè latte. I helped, and often when we were alone together, she told me stories about her life.

  “Tell me again about when you ran away with il tuo ragazzo, Grazia.” It was my favorite story. At this Grazia seemed to return to the place of her childhood, though her descriptions of Palermo, her father, and her family often changed.

  “First, we stowed away on a big ferry that was leaving Palermo.” She made a well in the flour and broke the eggs into it, then added the sugar and mixed with her fingers. “I was fifteen and Amedeo, il mio ragazzo, was seventeen. We wanted to get married, but my father refused us his blessing. We didn’t care. In our hearts we were already married. We were so happy.” She poured the milk into the well and mixed it in. “We had fortuna: No one discovered us. No one asked where we were from or how old we were. When we reach Roma, we found work right away.” Grazia always looked away at this point in the story, as if she could only bear to tell it indirectly, as if it might have happened to someone else. Sometimes, she stopped, unable to bear what had happened.

  “Tell me the rest, Grazia.”

  “Sfortunatamente, our happiness was short.” Grazia would roll out the dough and then cut it in wide strips. Then she put the filling on top. “My Amedeo was murdered just before we could marry with a priest.” At other times she said that Amadeo had “died mysteriously” or “disappeared” or “left” or was “executed by the government.” She let me wrap the dough up around the sweet filling. I worked slowly so that she had time to finish the story.

  Occasionally, Grazia told the version of the story that I thought was true, the one in which her father had pursued the couple and slashed her beloved Amedeo’s throat for dishonoring his daughter and their family. “I had to run away again,” she said, “before my father could take me back to Sicily. Where I was born, girls who are dishonored…no one wants them. Not even their families. Sometimes girls are killed by their own families.” I pinched the dough together. “Worse than puttane. A puttana makes a living. A dishonored girl begs for mercy.”

  Grazia always ran her hands through her grey hair and sighed. “When my father fell asleep, I escaped from him. I ran to the station and bought a ticket. I had so little money—only enough to come as far as Orvieto. An hour. When I got off the train, it was cold and raining. I had no coat. Nothing. It was already dark, and I didn’t know where I was. An old mezzadro brought me in the cart to your grandfather. These men never touched me. Never. They were buonisignori. So honorable.”

  I thought Grazia’s story one of great personal courage, but Grazia always concluded by saying, “I had fortuna. The Marcheschis have always been good to me. I’ve always been safe here. Thanks be to God that my father never found me.”

  “But don’t you want to see your family?”

  Grazia’s answer was always the same. She waved her arm around the kitchen and smiled at me. “Where I am, that is my family. You, tesoro, are my family, now.”

  “But didn’t you want to get married?”

  “Always, in my heart I am married to my Amedeo. In heaven we’ll be together forever. The angels will be our children. We will be completely happy.”

  At last, the streetcar came clattering along the tracks, stopped, and swallowed me up into its stuffy interior. It smelled of damp clothes. It was very late. I knew Francesa and Marco were waiting. I showed the driver the address.

  “Sixth stop,” he said. “Many girls go there.” Inside the crowded streetcar the warmth of the other bodies, their human smells, made me queasy. I began to perspire. I wiped my forehead and then held onto a pole near to the front while the streetcar followed the circular streets that girded the city center, streets that seemed to end where they had begun, buildings repeating like beads on a necklace in dizzying conformity.

  Sometimes, I tried to imagine what Bruno and papà were doing. I could still recall the shapes of their bodies, but not all of the details of their faces. Was this how Grazia forgot her family? Had Bruno and papà forgotten me, too? I had already become una straniera in what was once my home. I felt mocked by my aspirations and my ignorance. The other passengers looked distorted to me, grotesque. Their faces melted together in a delerious swirl, and my own existence seemed mutable and contingent. I took out the directions again and checked the stre
et names outside.

  “Two more stops, signorina,” the driver said. I folded the paper and put it back in my purse. Passengers got off, leaving room for me to sit down. A newspaper on the seat next to me caught my attention. It was two days old. An article on the front page said soldiers had been needed to quell large and violent antiwar demonstrations in America. These traditori, traitors, refused to become soldiers. Some had gone to other countries to escape, including Italy, where they had become troublemakers. Soon there would be a new law: any traditori found in Italy would be sent back to America and to prison. Not Joey. He isn’t a traitor. Another article talked about the threat of the protests by Italian students and workers. Marco’s name was mentioned and so was Francesca’s. They were described as “organizers of illegal acts against the state.” The article said that they would be arrested. I must tell them they’re in danger before the police find them. The streetcar stopped and the driver got up. He laughed when he saw me. “Do you prefer to walk in the rain, signorina?”

  Inside the health service office a single radiator covered in a deep layer of dust gurgled in a listless attempt to warm the room. I found an empty chair that wasn’t broken and sat down. On the table next to me, a worn women’s magazine featured the Roman police attacking female protesters. Someone had drawn mustaches on the women’s faces with a pen and written lesbiche, lesbians, underneath. I opened to the article. Some of the women had been injured while men stood by calling them puttane and shouting obscenities. Could I do what those women had done? I said a prayer to St. Lucy asking for courage.