Last Train from Liguria

by Christine Dwyer Hickey

  The man guides me out to the pavement and, with a mâitre d's flourish, serves me my beer. His mother comes out with a fresh panino, a plate of pizza squares, rolls of salami, a bowl of olives, a bowl of crisps. She begins yapping away about Ireland. I smile a bit, frown a bit. Then she stops, pats my arm as if to say, It's all right, I know you don't understand a word I say, but I wanted to say it anyhow. Then she goes inside and resettles her squashy face back over the cash register.

  By now, I realize the clue that relies on the name Bella is not going to get me too far. I eat my sandwich and watch the late night traffic of flash cars skim past my nose.

  Later I find my way to the promenade and twice walk the length of it. It's past two in the morning – not that you'd notice. There's a fifties-style bar with a curved outdoor counter, another bar further along; neat rows of tables and chairs and a man with a microphone in hand, crooning through and around them. I come to a playground; children still playing. A jaded granny on a bench tries not to nod off while her hyperactive grandchild mills up and down a slide. I pass grass verges, flowerbeds, benches, palm trees, a pavilion. Stalls selling jewellery and knick-knacks, and a black man, the tallest man I've ever seen, in full yellow robes selling handbags spread out at his feet.

  I notice odd things as I walk along, like the amount of adults eating ice cream, and the amount of children who are still up and about, although a few casualties are beginning to show: a toddler flaked out over a father's shoulder, another child over the side of the buggy as if rigor mortis has just set in. And how everyone seems to stare at each other, old people on benches, younger ones perched on the railings by the sea, those in the centre walking along; everyone openly gawking at everyone else. And how nobody's drunk. I notice that too.

  I step to the right to avoid two roller bladers winging their way towards me. Then I stay with the sea. Looking down the beach back towards France; umbrellas, furled for the night, stand in troops behind their individual beach clubs. Pubs and restaurants extend into the water on stilts. A queue of people at a nightclub down the way disappear under a canopy beaded with Hollywood lights.

  I come to the end of the promenade and a few small hotels. I stop at one called Parigi. A ball has rolled from a pile of plastic toys at the top of the steps. I bring it back up and replace it. The hotel is closed for the night. Through the glass door I can see the foyer: dark wood and marble glazed with dimmed light. It's quiet down here at this end of the promenade, so quiet I can hear the sea. I study the tariff list pinned to the door but can't make sense out of the sums of lire. So I write it down to work out later, along with the hotel's name and telephone number.

  The road slants up, the beach goes down. I continue on towards a small church that has a tower like a chimney pot jutting over the sea wall. I light a cigarette, sit on the wall, look out for a while at a black luscious sea. To the east a port of boats and small yachts fidget and jiggle, beyond that a headland stuffed with the lights of another town. Across the way, solid and square, is a statue of a queen that I take to be Victoria.

  Next morning sound gets me again. Sweeter, softer, but no less intrusive than the racket from the night before. Every fifteen minutes it wakes me up, this recurrent conversation of bells. In the hour between dawn light and daylight, I lie, until my ear finally stops expecting, and allows me to go back to sleep.

  *

  It's only since I've arrived here that I realize how little I know about Nonna, how seldom I've actually considered her life. Now everywhere I go I think of her. I imagine her sitting on this bench; queuing in that shop; walking along this street in the shade of these trees. I wonder what she'd think of the constant slog of traffic moving down the main street, or the outrageously expensive boutiques and fabric shops it passes on the way. Was every second shop in town a hairdresser's or beautician's then, as it is now – the way in an Irish town every second shop is a pub? And did women go out to breakfast dolled up to the nines, as if they've already been up for hours at the mirror? And was the shop that sells nothing but seashells here in her time? Or the holy shop, staffed by pretty nuns in cream habits, which appears to sell only statues of angels?

  Was her favourite street the corso d'Italia – clean, bright, tree-lined; restaurants discreet to a woman on her own? Not that she would have been on her own.

  Or did she, like I do, prefer the old town, dusted in dirty-apricot light, a cut of clean blue from sky or sea when least expected, at the end of an archway or a gap between buildings. And houses that browbeat each other in shadow where unseen families throw down to the passer-by the small symphonies of their everyday lives: the clearing of dishes, the slapping of a child, the argument that could easily end in sex.

  I wonder how my private little Nonna coped with being looked at all the time, and being greeted by kisses and all the touching that the Italians seem to do – after five years she would have earned her share of that! And the food – how did she put up with so much food? The presence of it everywhere: shop windows, restaurant terraces – the smells of cooking arriving out of nowhere on this and that breeze. And I wonder if Italy spoiled her, like Dolores said it did to some, or if it gave her the sustenance she may have needed for the rest of her quietly turbulent days.

  But most of all I wonder what she would think of me, wandering around staring at everything, like an amnesiac searching for memories that belong to somebody else.

  One day I go to the old town and see perfectly respectable men hanging around in groups talking. And I remember a day in North Great George's street when she had been unfazed by the gurriers hanging around at the corner and had told me off for fussing. Another time I'm surrounded by German accents in a café, and a day from my childhood comes back to me, when, on a bus on the way out to Dún Laoghaire, a group of German tourists got on and Nonna, becoming more and more agitated, finally had to get off. Later I had pestered her to tell me why. 'Ah nothing,' she said, 'I'd a headache listening to them. They give me a headache, that's all.'

  I walk on the promenade on a navy-blue night, with the stars sharp as new screws, and I think about how many times her feet went this way and if it was at this hour, on a night such as this, and who walked with her then, or if she walked alone.

  *

  The girl in the library tells me that many villas changed their name after the war. Some were converted into apartments, others were locked up and never returned to. Often they were left to crumble.

  'A war, you know?' She shrugs and smiles.

  She speaks English and is glad of a chance to practise, or a chance to work at all. The library is quiet at this time of the year, she says. Nobody comes now. Not even students. Her name is Maddalena. 'Like the church in the old town,' she says and asks if I've seen it. I tell her yes, but haven't gone in yet. She smiles and says she's never been inside herself, that she's not from Bordighera anyway, not even from Liguria but another region, a small town in Piemonte. She only came here because she thought everyone would speak English, but they don't. It is her dream to some day work in London.

  Maddalena thinks Lami must be the name of the family who owned the villa. In those days, she says, villas were often named for their owners, although she knows no one by that name herself. She goes off to check in the telephone book and some sort of register, also to make one or two phone calls.

  While I wait I pace about. It's a small enough library, made entirely of wood; floors, mezzanine, shelves, railing, steps. I can hear Maddalena talking on the telephone in the background and the name Lami which she spells out – 'Elleh. Ah. Emmeh. Ee – sì, Lami.'

  She comes back shaking her head. 'Sorry.' Then she tells me I should walk up and down via Romana as most of the villas in Bordighera are here. I should also check the pillars because even if the house is called something else now, there may still be a trace of the original name.

  'If the stone is strong enough,' she says, 'the name never fades absolutely.'

  And so I put in an afternoon of searching pillars, villa by
villa, up and down a very long via Romana, like someone not right in the head. There are hotels and guest houses with bright seaside names on signs over doors, but a different name clearly carved into their pillars. There are large houses transformed into apartment blocks with electric gates and intercom buttons, but pillars nonetheless bearing a name that once had meant something to someone. There are no end of beautiful private houses with gardens of Eden behind high ornate gates held up by scrubbed pillars that sparkle in the sunlight. There is an old soldier's home that once was the residence of a Queen Margherita. I pull a fringe of ivy back from a forehead of ancient stone and find Villa Torino cut into it. I find derelict villas named for long-ago brides: Cora, Paulina, Cordelia. I even find one for lorn edifice on the edge of what has become a small building site, its head knocked off and brackets of a gate still wedged, like thorns, into its side.

  Late afternoon and I stop and sit on a bench under the trees for a rest and a smoke. There's an old man on another bench up the road, and two old ladies yakking on a corner, and I think how easy it would be if I could speak Italian or if this was an Irish town where I could say, 'Did you ever hear tell of a family called Lami living along here?' and would probably be told what they had for their tea of a Tuesday. Then I finish my smoke, pull myself back into the heat and start over.

  Just before sunset I stand at a huge shell of a burnt-out hotel. The sun in its last forceful moments is pushing a blast of light onto the hotel's decaying façade. The windows are sockets of darkness, the ironwork rusted, the temporary yellow on the walls almost blinding. Below all this, the gardens, dense and black with overgrowth. Yet even this desolate place has something written on its pillars – the aptly named Hotel Angst.

  I come back into town taking a short cut down a leafy laneway between two villas. At the end of the slope the wall on my left turns on the corner. A faded narrow pathway runs alongside it, and I can see about halfway down what appears to be a bricked-up door, over it a ring of rusted barbed wire. I stand for a moment and consider taking the pathway, but then a young couple appear from the opposite direction. They are pushing a bicycle between them, now and then leaning over the crossbar to kiss or touch. They would have to separate and stand aside to let me pass, and so I remain on the straight path back into town.

  *

  The next morning I go back to Maddalena, as she told me to do, in case she managed to find anything of interest. I tell her about my failed venture on via Romana and she laughs when she hears how I checked every single pillar on the road, then says, 'Ahh, what a pity but here are other suggestions.' She hands me a list. 'And we have found something in a newspaper that could be interesting for you. My colleague, he bring it now.'

  While we wait I glance at her list: tennis club, bridge club, Anglican church, old people's home.

  'Thanks, Maddalena, these are good ideas.'

  'Yes,' she agrees then asks me if I am staying long in Bordighera. I tell her I don't know. That I'm moving to the Hotel Parigi today for a week or so and then I'll make up my mind.

  'You don't have to be back?'

  'No. Not in the least.'

  'Not for work?'

  'No.'

  'Not for nobody?'

  'No.'

  'Oh. Well, if you decide to stay, perhaps for a month or two anyway, tell me. I know a very nice apartment near the tennis club. I think you will like it. It's better than the hotel, I think. And less money.'

  'Yes. I'll keep that in mind.'

  'You can invite people for coffee.'

  'People?'

  'Me!' she laughs. 'And whoever else, of course, you make into friends. We can teach each other, English, Italian. We can help each other – no?'

  'Oh,' I say, a little surprised by this unexpected friendliness. 'Yes, why not?'

  'Why not!' Maddalena says. 'Perché non!' she adds, her finger raised like a teacher, as if the lessons have already begun.

  A man comes out carrying a large leather-bound book in his arms. One leg moves a little heavily and his head leans slightly to one side. I think he may be disabled. When he reaches the table he holds on to the book and behind his glasses his eyes blink nervously. He begins to speak to Maddalena, and although I can't understand a word I can sense his awkwardness. Absurdly I feel as if I'm eavesdropping and so look away, down at my list, or over the walls of the library.

  After a while Maddalena stops to introduce us. 'This is my colleague, Emilio,' and he turns to me for a second and nods before looking away. Maddalena begins to explain, 'Emilio heard us talk yesterday about the family Lami and when he goes home last night he asks his mamma if she have heard of them. He say that she can remember her mamma telling her something.'

  'Really?' I wait, while Emilio gives another few sentences to Maddalena.

  'His grandmother told to his mother that there was a family living here once called Lami, but his mother she can't remember where they live exactly. And now his grandmother, she is dead so we cannot ask.'

  Maddalena looks back up at Emilio, who has removed his glasses to wipe them clean. He is getting into his stride now, speeding up his little story, and going at it with more confidence.

  'He say that the story is the signora of the family was very beautiful and that she was a Jew and that they…' She turns back and asks Emilio a question. I cannot believe it takes so many Italian sentences to make up so few English words.

  Maddalena comes back to me. 'They say she die in the concentration camp of Buchenwald like the granddaughter of our Queen Margherita, Princess Mafalda, who also died there, although obviously she was not a Jew. That is all he know but can try to find out more for you.' Emilio is looking at me now, nodding morosely.

  'Oh no,' I say. 'The poor woman. That's terrible.'

  Maddalena frowns. 'Yes, there are many such terrible stories from the time of the war.'

  Emilio begins to speak again as he lays the book down on the table. Maddalena puts her hand on the cover of the book and then pauses. 'He says, his mother remembers talk of a man. He came after the war, and stayed in the Lami house because he used to work for the family. But the funny thing is he didn't live in the house, even though it was empty, but in the garage at the end of the garden.'

  'What happened to him?' I ask.

  'Nobody knows. Maybe went away. Maybe died. His mother only remember that he was a very sick man.'

  Maddalena goes back to the book and carefully lifts the cover. 'Old newspapers,' she says. 'This one we find is interesting for you. She lifts and settles the flimsy pages and stops at a newspaper dated August 1936. A photograph.

  It's a group picture of well-dressed people standing in two rows at what seems to be the port. I squint in and attempt to read the caption beneath it. Maddalena helps me. 'Here a couple, just back out of honeymoon,' she says. 'This woman and this man beside her. She is very beautiful – yes?' Carefully she points with the tip of her little finger as if her index finger might bruise the face.

  'Yes,' I say. 'She is.'

  'Do you see what her name is?' Maddalena goes to a drawer at the side of the table and takes out a magnifying glass. 'Look.' She draws the glass along the caption. 'This woman is Signora Lami and she has married in France, this man Signor Tassi.' Maddalena moves the magnifying glass in and out and the woman's face grows and shrinks. 'It is the second marriage for her, I think.'

  'Why?'

  'Because it say here that she is celebrating with her son, family and friends at Villa Lami. This has to be the son here. This boy.'

  'Does it give his name?'

  'No. And there are no other names written down, only the bride and groom. I don't know why.'

  I take the glass in my hand and look at the boy standing to the left of the bride. I watch his face, slightly turned towards his right shoulder, expand in the glass. Like his mother he is good-looking although he doesn't really resemble her. One by one I go over the rest of the party. Another beautiful woman stands beside the boy; next to her is an older, distinguished-lookin
g man. On the far side of the groom there are three men, one fattish and middle-aged, the others could be his sons. These are all dark, like the groom. On the back row a middle-aged man and a woman smile out like Cheshire cats. Behind the bride is another man and woman although their faces are a little blurred. There is a gap of a few feet in the back row until the last woman who is standing right behind the boy. She is wearing a half-brimmed hat but her face shows well enough beneath it. Her hand is on the boy's shoulder. It is as if she had moved over and left the gap in the back row so she could place her hand on him. They are the only two in the picture to make any contact. Even the bride and groom stand separate to each other.

  'Does she look familiar?' Maddalena asks.

  'Who?' I say.

  'Signora Lami – does she look familiar?'

  'No.'

  I put down the magnifying glass and stand up. 'Maddalena, I'd like to go outside for a few minutes.'

  'You are OK?'

  'Yes, yes. I just want to have a cigarette. Can you leave this here?'

  'Certo,' she says, frowning at the brown flakes that have fallen away from the old newspaper pages, then brushing them under the table.

  I go outside into the shaded arcade with its pelmet of thick mauve flowers. I light a cigarette and sit on a stone bench. It is almost lunchtime and the street outside gives few sounds. There is only the occasional drone of a Vespa or the murmur of a passing car. I can hear insects close by, but can't see any, and I can taste the heavy scent of flowers on the edge of my cigarette smoke.

  I think about the group in the picture. The man, slightly blurred, standing behind the bride – could easily be the same man in the picture found in Nonna's old handbag. The boy could easily be the mis sing boy: Alfredo or Alberto or John. I think about the hand on his shoulder and who it belongs to. I need a few moments' absence before going back in. But I am almost certain, it has to be Nonna. Her hand stretched out to comfort. It is the only thing that makes sense to me now. Finding her like this, trapped in a moment from the past. A moment that fits perfectly with the rest of her life. A woman with a half-hidden face. A woman in the back of a photograph.