I check the time: My love is late today, ten minutes already. Could something have happened? If so, why didn’t she call me? I pay the bill. Light another cigarette. I smoke it with rapid, deep inhalations, eagerly scrutinizing the faces in the crowd, in search of hers. I take the last swallow of beer. I push the chair back, I get up. There she is.
TIBURTINA NOIR BLUES
BY FRANCESCA MAZZUCATO
Tiburtina Station
Translated by Ann Goldstein
A second-class station, a station to put up with, then cast off. So it seems to some: sticky with worn-out expectations, sickening with the sharp odors of sweat, unwashed skin, and rotting food. For me it was vital, I feel bound to this piece of the city, this place of shipwrecked souls, with its sudden drafts, perennial construction sites, gritty, dirty stone walls. You hear the echo of the street outside, only one sound lost among the many in this tangled skein of balustrades, platforms, asphalt, iron, stairs, sad shops, and tracks that end who knows where.
“Look at this crowd, what a mess, this station is a bordello, makes you sick, yes, let’s go sit down, let’s move away, there are Poles, Bulgarians, and Romanians lined up outside waiting for some bus or other, going back to their countries whose capital cities aren’t worth shit, cities that no one remembers, with names too crowded with consonants, they’re going home or to some other country for their deals, and I could say a few things about those deals, things you wouldn’t believe. Deals and relatives go together for the drifters of Tiburtina, but basically the whole world is home, don’t they say? Come on, sister, it’s what they say, it’s pure popular wisdom, pay attention to me, I’m well acquainted with them, these Bulgarians and Romanians, these human rejects running away from everything, who make sweet eyes at you, then become predators—they have a brutality inside, a brutality that they spew in your face, you can’t imagine the violence they inflict, I know it, I bear the marks, but you can’t imagine, sister.”
I don’t even try. I’ve never tried to put myself in someone else’s place, to think like others, and, lucky for me, life has coddled and protected me, it’s spared me the violence you’re talking about, life singled me out from birth, granted me privilege, inserted me among the elite, if it hadn’t would I be here? She’s following me, her high-heeled sandals, really hideous, are noisy and they attract the glances of some Sinhalese. One sticks out his tongue with a lascivious gesture, disgusting, and it’s better if they don’t even notice us. We should hurry. I try to camouflage myself; in the meantime we get to the bar and sit down.
“Let’s have something to drink while we wait, all right?”
“Yes, perfect, I’m thirsty, order some wine, what was I telling you? Damn, there’s gum stuck to my heel, disgusting, I paid fifteen euros for these sandals, to you, a lady, it won’t seem much, for me it was quite a sum, usually I buy shoes at a stall, from Biagio, who charges three euros a pair, four at most, one time I gave him a handjob in his van and he gave me three pairs, can you imagine what a stroke of luck? A simple, quick handjob, just a matter of holding it, not even that bad; he has a hairy stomach but he doesn’t smell, or make you do something you don’t want to. I gave him this handjob and I was all set with shoes for quite a while. Eh … certain kinds of luck don’t happen often. What were we saying? Yes, about these people here, these Bulgarians and Romanians, who now, if I understand it, can come and go without even showing their documents, Madonna, what a shithole politics is. Let them stay in their countries instead. Maybe in those countries, maybe there are even some nice things, but a person with her back to the wall, like me, doesn’t have much time or desire to think about nice things, a person like me, sister, doesn’t have the desire to feel tolerant, trying to understand is hard work, it’s a luxury, a privilege for the rich. For someone who’s alone, drifting, without ties, someone who lost her mother as a child and ended up with a goddamn drunkard of a father, nice things are a cigarette smoked with pleasure or a man who fucks you tenderly, or something like our meeting, sister, I mean it, or maybe something like Biagio and the shoes, those are the nice things, but I’m used to seeing garbage all around me, and these people are garbage. Don’t make a face, I’m not mean, but it’s easier to think of an enemy, to enjoy someone who seems worse off than you at that moment when solitude seizes you by the throat, gnaws at your guts, devours your insides. It’s been years since I’ve tried to hold onto something, to make a regular life, but I always end up skidding off track, something doesn’t work, it slips and slides away, it doesn’t go right, then I have to vent, that’s natural, and I have to unburden my mind, my thoughts. If you don’t they’re in danger of becoming a burden, you have no idea how certain thoughts can harass you, scream in your head, so I start observing those people and doing like everyone else, thinking of them as the enemy, shitty foreigners who come to steal our jobs and our opportunities, that’s how I see them … Instead I should see them as a mirror reflecting my puffy face, the dark circles under my eyes, because—you wouldn’t believe it—but I know I’m not so different, it’s only that I don’t admit it and never will, that’s all. It’s a shortcut and I take it; I hear the newspaper lady who, after pushing away a fat gypsy with a child in her hand and one at her neck, mutters, Disgusting, and if I think the same thing while I drink a glass of wine sitting on this uncomfortable chair, shooing off flies and intrusive glances, if I think the same thing I can delude myself that I’m not the totally marginalized person that I am.”
She points, raising herself slightly from the chair; her body gives off a fetid odor. I look at them through the window, lined up on one of the platforms, in groups, holding tight to suitcases like the ones people used in the ’70s. Some women are leaning against the wall at one of the side entrances to Tiburtina.
“With those packages, those old suitcases piled on top of each other, those boxes tied with string, they make me sick, and the ragged children, little tramps ready to stick their hands in your pocket or your purse. You get to hate them, it’s not out of meanness, sister, you agree? You know, you know better than me that to say a thing is good or bad is difficult, sometimes certain situations impose choices that go back and forth between good and bad, and then what the fuck are good and bad? Sometimes there’s not a big difference, right?”
When she speaks like that she scares me, but I know it won’t last long, luckily; sometimes I listen, sometimes I pretend because her speech is more like a disconnected muttering, anyone would think she’s a poor lunatic with heels that are too high and a confused mind, she eats her words or they’re incomprehensible because of the spaces between her teeth and her pale, cracked lips. Every so often she spits and a tiny drop of saliva lands near my motionless, clasped hands, or on the table; she notices, and dries it with her sleeve, then continues her monologue, which is repetitive, like a litany or maybe a prayer, an invocation, a lamentation. Something indefinable and strange, I would like to shut her up but I can’t. The truth is, she doesn’t want to talk to me but to everyone and no one, and anyone who can pretend to pay attention will do. Outside, the platform areas are blue, a blue lacerated by the colors and noises of the city buses and the long-distance buses that sometimes sit for a while, sometimes arrive quickly, pick up passengers, and leave. Evening is coming, a pink and blue sunset, dotted with the lights of the streetlamps and some advertising billboards. I don’t know if she’s noticed. She asks if she can have another drink, I nod to the waitress, who wipes her hands on her apron, brings a carafe of wine with two glasses, and rolls her eyes as if to say, When are you leaving? But it’s just 7:00 and the bar closes at 9:00, so she has to be patient. I know perfectly well that she’s irritating, her body and her manner are irritating, especially when she raises her voice and speeds up the rhythm of the litany, speaking like a psycho and making the other (very few) customers in the bar turn. I’m sure, in fact, that the waitress is disgusted, and since I’m with her I have the same effect, because that waitress can’t understand what in the world I’m doing in
the company of this woman. She shouldn’t speculate, or feel irritation, or ask us why we’re together, all she has to do is bring the wine. All she has to do is take the money and bring back a handful of coins in change. That’s all.
“It’s a while since I felt so relaxed. I’ve had so many bad times and never anyone to give me a hand. I’ve always had clowns instead of men around me, good-for-nothings with no balls who ruined my life, and now their ghosts chase me, their voices echo in that shithole where I live, have you ever seen ghosts? Have you ever been pursued by irritating voices? No, eh, no, right? You’re respectable, you’ve got money and an education, why would you ever be persecuted, you’re a person who’s got a nice life. I’m just unlucky, and, shit, now my nose is running, this damn allergy.”
She sneezes three or four times, opens her purse and rummages for something, with the back of her right hand she wipes her nose, with the left she’s still rummaging around, then, exasperated, she empties the purse on the table. The waitress turns for a second, hearing the sound of objects falling on Formica, but fortunately some customers come in. Two Tampaxes, a glass bead necklace, and two rings that seem like a child’s toys or old prizes from an Easter egg tossed out who knows when, a crumpled package of Winston blues, a red pen with a chewed cap, a felt-tip pen, a bunch of receipts, cards for masseuses, fortune tellers, and cleaning agencies, a wallet and plastic document holder, three matches, supermarket makeup, spilled and half-empty, and a tiny cracked mirror. I think of my expensive foundation in its precious case, tiny grains that make the skin opaque and smooth. I think of my wallet with all the slots for credit cards. I make a rapid mental comparison to reassure myself. I keep my hands away from all that stuff. Finally she finds the package of Kleenex and dumps everything else back into the purse that’s leaning against her feet. I feel a sensation of retching after seeing her worthless things, horror that stinks of rot and sweat, of age and negligence, the traces of her devastated life, the weave of small useless things that mark her desperation. I breathe in and out and it passes. I can’t let myself go, not now. I order another carafe of wine and two slices of pizza.
“Yes, good idea, I wanted to tell you I was hungry, you could have asked me before, when the allergy attacks I get all puffy, my eyes tear, I sneeze, I can’t taste flavors anymore, but now it’s better and I’m really hungry. What, are you eating too? You’re really eating too, keeping me company, you won’t leave me to eat alone like a dog, like the maid who eats in the kitchen? You’re not showing how you despise me, the way everyone always does?”
I nod.
“Good, pizza, then maybe a sandwich. Look there. You see that woman over there? She’s Bulgarian, from a town in the countryside, I don’t know the name. I met her here once, she’s a prostitute, and a client brought her back to the station, she’d been beaten, her face was swollen, she had a black eye, her head bleeding, she was staggering, it was also lovely, the tracks in the early morning, with all the wires, the gray sky, the trains standing there, and only a few souls waiting, it was lovely, and I must have been there watching and smoking a cigarette, waiting for the train to Termini to go home; but, not even thinking about it, I helped that Bulgarian shit whore who was screaming in pain, I got her a pizza, I helped clean her wounds, she told me she needed something strong to drink and I ordered a brandy for her. I paid, goes without saying. You should have seen her, she was indecent, in a miniskirt with orange sequins stuck to her thighs, no underpants, and black boots with very high heels, threatening, like her expression, well, I didn’t think about it, I took care of her and fed her and she, that shit whore who should go back to her disgusting country, she cheated me out of the little money I had when I went to the bathroom. Then they say … they say so many things, that you shouldn’t be a racist, that we need solidarity, but what solidarity are we talking about?”
I order a bottle of water and another carafe of wine, still so long to wait, hours that pile up on one another, in the midst of this construction, it’s already started, that’s going to make this hideous station something difficult to imagine, for the future, glass everywhere. I let my mind wander, trying to picture commercial areas, a radical cleaning, police everywhere insuring the safety of middle-class people, luminous spaces for shopping—it will be beautiful someday. Now it’s depressing, the way her words are depressing, the way even her tone of voice is somehow depressing, a melancholy that enters the bones and chills you. Luckily I just need a little patience, just a little patience and this agony will be over.
“I come here the same hours she does, the Bulgarian whore, not that I do the same work, let me be clear, my dear—I’ve given it away for money only three times in my life and it was a question of real desperation, but I defy anyone to say that Maria Grazia is a whore, I defy anyone to even think it. I come from a town in the south, it’s true, my town is a dead town, all the young people have given up, thrown in the towel. My father’s still there, that slobbering drunk, and four of my six brothers and sisters, but I haven’t seen them for years, that’s my past, I fled as a child. I’ve had two husbands, three, no, five children, given up first to foster care, then adoption, eh, my dear, some people are born with the maternal instinct and some aren’t, and now I’m alone, I’m not hiding these things, but I don’t want anyone to associate me with those people there, those dirty tramps who come to steal bread from us Italians.”
I nod again, I don’t know why but I do. I have the illusion, agreeing with her, that time is passing more quickly. Time has a strange rhythm in this place, it’s like the flow of time in a hospital. The squalor is suffocating, choking, a squalor that, strangely, you soon get used to, it tames you, drugs you, bringing you back to an almost animal stage.
“This pizza is good”—chewing, she drips tomato on her shirt, she doesn’t notice, and I wipe it off with a napkin—“really, they warmed it up, hey, what are you doing? Oh, sorry, oh, oh, okay, no problem, sister, happens to me all the time. I spill things on myself, I know it’s because I’m greedy, I’m hungry, and I don’t always have something to eat, I’ve struggled sometimes to get a meal, my life is a mess, my mother died when I was eight, shit, order something else to eat, look at that slutty Bulgarian, her lipstick is smeared, it’s making me lose my appetite.”
She won’t lose her appetite; at my grandfather’s house she cleaned out the refrigerator after she killed him with that sort of modern statue that he bought at auction in London, the old fool. He was so pleased when he came back from that auction with those horrible, expensive pieces. He was especially proud of that statue—to me it was repulsive the moment I saw it, but I pretended to appreciate it with him. I make a great effort to maintain a certain style of life: I knew that the will was all in my favor, I knew roughly the amount, I mentally calculated what I would soon get my hands on, but I felt an uncontrollable rage for all that money thrown away on a stupid statue. Grazia grabbed it and bashed his head in. She could’ve used whatever she wanted, that wasn’t a problem, all she had to do was kill that disgusting old man who had stopped supporting me, and then plant her fingerprints everywhere. Besides, she didn’t like interference. She urged me not to get involved, and I didn’t, she said that she knew her business. I can’t say she was wrong.
“Look at the tracks when evening comes, this station seems different, there are souls walking on the platforms, dragging themselves, look at them, fragments that have survived, lives torn to pieces and then put back together, like mine, look at the scene, it’s changed suddenly, what a strange effect, the platform must be very slippery, an intercity train just came through, some others should be arriving soon and then your cousin’s.”
“More wine?”
“Sure, sister, let’s have more wine, basically you’re set and so am I. I should be fine, no? And there’s no risk, right? I’ll listen to you, I’ll lie low, hole up in my house and put those things in a safe place, and they’ll say it was a robbery by those disgusting Romanians … Those disgusting Romanians … People like
when they make headlines in the TV news, the talk about the safety of the citizens in the balance, about the dangers of immigration. Aaah ahhaha! I mean, immigration is a horror and it’s dangerous too, and those people, look, right there”—she points like a lunatic at a group of women and children getting on a bus—“are criminals, but let’s say that in this case they’ve got nothing to do with it, but who cares, no? One more, one less … Heavens, I’m only forty-two, maybe with the jewelry, the gold coins I took—oh, your grandfather cared about them, they were carefully hidden—maybe with all those things I can reconstruct a scrap of a decent life for myself, get out of this wretched poverty.”
She’s wearing a low-cut gray sweater. Under it you can see a dirty, threadbare flesh-colored bra. A thickset man with a mustache enters the bar, in a horrible brown-checked shirt, a type of man you never see even by mistake in the places I usually frequent, art openings, sushi bars, exclusive parties—a man who must have short, dirty nails and bread crumbs in his mustache, I don’t see them but I’m sure they’re there—passes by, looks at her, ONLY at her, and this causes me, in spite of my horror at this man, a strange pang of jealousy; he stops a moment, casting his eyes on her décolleté, they linger there, bovine eyes the color of eggs fried too long, observing her abundant flesh; I can read in his expression a pleasant excitement, but how is it possible to be excited looking at this wreck? This human refuse that thinks about rebuilding a life when she’ll never have a life, when her life will be so brief she can’t imagine it. Here’s some more wine, she must be drunk, or at least tipsy.
“You want some, dear? It’s good, this wine, I like sparkling white wine, one of my two husbands—wait, ever since they beat me up outside Tiburtina, trying to steal a necklace, I’ve lost my memory. I was three months recovering, you know, I didn’t lose my memory completely, but I have trouble remembering—one, maybe it wasn’t even one of my husbands but a man I was with for a while, told me I didn’t know shit about wine and had a typical woman’s tastes, stupid tastes. Well, I don’t give a fuck and I’ve always, and only, drunk sparkling white wine like this—it’s very good. I was telling you. I could clean myself up, find a job, eh, what do you say, maybe with all those things it might be time for life to smile on me, to start going well, it never has, I’ve always been so unlucky. So unlucky.”
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