All Of Monday’s Reasons - 5
5. And Eastward
Map
The train left Barcelona on time and arrived in Cerbere, just over the French border at eleven o’clock, or twenty three hundred in “train time”, which I was growing used to using. I changed to a French train which left for Nice an hour later. I thought I would drop in on my mother on the way through and grab a large meal and some fresh clothes.
I found an empty compartment but was chased out by an Italian woman who I think said she had reserved the seats for her family, so I went to the next compartment, where I heard people speaking English. I was getting tired.
“These seats taken?” I asked them, pointing to some empty seats.
“Go ahead,” said a male voice apparently belonging to a New Yorker my age.
It was pitch dark because there was no power, as the train had not started moving and the lights on the platform were off. I rolled my rucksack off my shoulder and took a seat.
“You try to reserve too?” It was a Brooklyn accent.
“Couldn’t face the line. How about you?” I said to the other dark figure.
“Yeah, waited for an hour and a half.” South African. Male, possibly early twenties.
“You English?” asked the Brooklyner.
I gave a simplified account of my origins. He told me he was from Brooklyn and he enjoyed us talking about New York for a while.
The South African was actually born in Staffordshire but had lived in Pretoria for most of his life. He had just done his military service there and told us he needed visa for a lot of European countries. He was Jason and the New Yorker was Pino.
“So where you headed?” asked Pino.
“East, but I’ll stop over in Nice maybe. And yourself?”
“I’m doing a non-stop trip from Morocco to Greece. I left there at seven this morning.”
They were both headed to Rome, where the train terminated. Jason was spending a couple of days there and Pino was changing at Rome for Brindisi to catch a boat to Corfu.
“I’m staying at this place by the beach where they do water sports and shit like that. They’ve got showers and clean rooms and breakfast for twenty-five dollars a night. It’s called the Pink Palace. You guys ever heard of that?”
We shook our heads.
“Apparently they got washer-dryers there, too. So many girls go there and you’re guarantied to get laid. They call it the Pussy Palace, so I thought I’d go down there and check it out for myself.”
Jason and Pino fantasized for a while about taking a showers and getting into some clean clothes. They had both been on the road for about two weeks.
Yes - I know how distasteful the phrase “Pussy Palace” sounds now, but I was dumb and thoughtless and the priviledges of youth included letting others live however and say whatever they wanted. For the record, neither me nor Jason would have said that, but not an eyelid batted between us when he did.
“What’s New York like, anyway? I mean, are all those stories you hear true?” asked Jason.
He sounded strangely incredulous from someone who earlier had said he had spent time in the South African army during the 1980’s.
Pino looked at me and I shrugged my shoulders and nodded.
“Well,” he laughed, “yes, but I defy you to put eleven million people together without there being some conflict of a sort, because there’s going to be. Especially with so many races, because there’s so many different races living together. But there’s a good and bad thing to everything, you know what I’m saying? It’s just you only hear about the bad things.”
“I know that one,” Jason nodded in agreement. He said actually pronounced it “thet wun”, but it’s annoying when writers do that.
We said we were getting hungry. I asked what they had been eating.
“Bread.” said Pino.
“Bread and anything you can find to put in. Ham, cheese, I know that diet,” I said.
“No - bread. Just fucking bread. Bread and water; it’s like being in fucking prison.”
“You should eat well in Corfu.”
“I’m having a meal in Sicily on the way back with everything. It’ll be amazing.” Pino was of Sicilian descent and had family there who lived in a small mountain village he had last visited when he was seven.
“How far away is this that?”
“Six days.”
We eventually went to sleep and could stretch out, since the compartment we had to ourselves actually seated six. We slept until about four in the morning when I woke to find three French teenagers standing in our compartment. I was woken up by the sound of Jason struggling to talk to them in French. They looked at me.
“Sit down?” said one, in French.
“A seat,” said another.
“A seat!” said the third, aggressively
“Shit, do you speak Spanish?” one said to the other.
It wasn’t that I didn’t understand, it’s just that I’m not the most talkative person generally, and I don’t reach my conversational zenith at four in the morning.
Without talking, I moved over to the seat by the window, offering one of them the place, and Pino did the same. Not content with the offer, one of them motioned for us to move back and they sat by the door.
They made a poor attempt to look asleep. One opened the privacy curtain of the compartment so he could see into the corridor outside and leaned his head against the window. It was obvious he was keeping watch. When you’re trying to sleep in a train seat, you learn fast that a drawn curtain not only shuts out the sudden burst of light from a passing train as it speeds by, but also deadens the vibration of your head hitting the glass as the car shakes.
The other two sat in a cinema seat slouch, not a night train flop, and it seemed unlikely that they would sleep, although not quite as unlikely as the passenger bouncing his head against a pane of glass with his eyes wide open. It was also unusual that they kept their jackets and shoes on as they settled down for the night.
Convinced that we were Spanish and understood no French, they started talking.
“How long do we give it?” said the sadistic insomniac at the window.
“Just wait,” said another.
There was a ten minute pause, then Jason sat up and got some Tic-Tacs from his rucksack and started eating them. Also trying to look awake, I sat up, pulled out a side table from the wall, and started drumming out a rhythm with my fingers.
“Oh, fuck this,” said one of the French guys.
“Give it five minutes,” said another.
“Fifteen at least,” said the one next to me, sharply.
I started whistling to my drum beat and stopped to turn to Jason.
“Hey Jason,” I said at an unsuitable volume, “got any more of those Tic-Tacs?”
He passed me the box and I took one and handed it back and returned to my drumming.
“I saw another carriage. Three ladies asleep, five bags,” said the window man.
The train slowed down. “Arles,” he said.
Considering these people travelled without luggage and knew not only every stop on the line, but also that the train’s passengers had come from Barcelona, I was glad to see them leave. I stretched out again and went to sleep. Looking back on it, I should have followed them, but like I said, I was looking out for myself.
I woke up as the train pulled into Nice early the next morning. I was well rested enough to decide quickly whether or not to get off and stop over at home. The pros seemed mightily to outweigh the cons: a good night’s sleep, clean clothes and a large cooked meal. I thought it over, and I considered that I was in good company and the train was going my way if I was going to take the boat from Brindisi towards Turkey.
Pino and Jason were far from home, and there I was me rushing back to my mother’s house up the road when my companions were at least three thousand miles away from any familiarity for a month.
I had been looking forward to this trip and I knew I would feel regret cutting it short for even a day. Besides, taking the boat would save me doing the Yugoslavia-Turkey rail journey twice and this way I would get to see Italy and Greece and enjoy the sea, so I decided to push on with Pino and Jason.
I read a little Hemingway and I didn’t look out the window much as I was going over my old tracks, if you’ll forgive the pun.
The north Italian coastline was as I remembered it from day trips from Nice. It was heavily industrialised and where it wasn’t, it was packed with tourists. The buildings were square and dirty and even those which were remotely elegant looked neglected, like the ladies who were doing their best to look rich.
January 26th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
Id’ have not been bright enough to pick up on what the French were doing, they’d have tried to rob me, I’d have put up a big fight, people would have gotten hurt, and that would have been the end of that trip. I’d probably still be in a European jail cell somewhere, fantasizing about how this same cell could have held the Man In The Iron Mask or Don Juan or Quixote or Leo diCaprio at least.