Chapter 7 from The Rotten Bridge, A Gypsy Love Story

7.
I get off the phone just in time to catch the overnighter to Rome. As the train pulls out of the station I work my way along the narrow corridor, sliding my pack ahead of me. Most of the cabins are full. If there is an empty seat, it is piled high with the effects of others before I can ask.
I'm in Calabria, the south of YaYa's mother that we were to visit together. After several weeks of silence, YaYa has agreed to see me. It is now or never, she said into the phone, and in my mind, she was expecting me to correct her.
You see, she knows my time is up, and she knows I have a plane to catch and a whole other life to sort out six thousand miles away. What she doesn't know, and what I can't seem to tell her, is that I'm not sure I'll be getting on that plane - that a lot depends on her. There are always things that you think you should have said, knowing later I suppose, but I didn't want to drag her in with a dirty trick either.

I plop down in an empty cabin and spread out, giving up an entire seat to my pack. On the night trains opposite seats slide down to make a bed of sorts. I prefer this to the couchette cars where you are stacked three and three in squeaky bunks and are reluctant even to scratch your nose once you're settled since your neighbors have paid extra to sleep next to you.
I slide the cabin door shut and pull the curtains across.
I'm not surprised when the latch clicks and the atmospheric bubble I've arranged for myself is popped. It is like being walked in on in a public toilet. I mean, you might as well have been doing something because you're guilty as hell sitting there fully clothed and upright in your chair in the dark. It's obvious that you're hiding and whoever's walking in on you doesn't have to ask themselves what kind of person you are. It is written on your face when the light comes on. You are a person that requires a lot of space, and perhaps you spend a good deal of time with inanimate objects, like you're pack, just sitting there, staring at it in the dark. You feel like a spoiled child. It's not a good first impression - especially if you're going to spend the next several hours with someone.
I'm relieved to see that it's a couple. That still affords us the minimum two seats per, but every station brings that same anticipation. Sometimes the footsteps fall off, like a nightmare that has been thwarted, other times it is the boogeyman and he has brought his entire family.
But a couple, I can deal with - although they are, at the outset, a little sketchy. At least they get it, except for the light that is, and now there are three of us hidden behind that flimsy curtain anticipating the shadows of B-movie villains outside our door.
The girl is flipping through a stack of photographs and smacking on a lollipop. She is attractive in that way that men like - real men, not men who worship supermodels in magazines, but men who see a woman and can tell what she likes, can tell how far she'll go, right there on the spot. The man she is with - he is one of them - is somewhat older, graying and criminal looking; thin, furtive, clad in black leather.
He looks Balkan but I don't know. They seem like they just met. They have that playfulness between them that is the start of all such parties and it is plain that they are flying high on something better than the wine in my pack or the hash that everyone smokes on the streets.
They are train station habitues - like any I have seen in Rome or Naples who head straight for the self-serve lockers and then diffuse into the crowd of people that goes nowhere. They are ones who stand by and watch the swing of handbags, waiting for a strap to come down off the shoulder a little. The ones who notice when a fat wallet is being handled carelessly. The ones who watch tired college students file off the trains and launch into the confusion of exchange rates and lodging. These are the same ones who mingle easily with the Carabinieri, the paramilitary police, because the jig is up and everyone knows who is who.
The girl hands me a picture. She laughs. I can feel them both waiting for my reaction. They are snapshots of transvestites striking semi-naked poses. They are amateur but are quite good. I nod and concede. "Bella, I say. "Grazie. "Mi piace.
Just then the door is ripped open and the curtain pulled back in one practiced motion. The clanking night rattles wall to wall and the conductor's gray bulk dims the light in our cabin.
"Biglietti! Tickets! Per Favore!
I hand mine over and he blurts out something that starts to go past me and then stops, clarifying itself. My italian is getting better. This is a first class cabin, he is telling me.
"Ahh! Capisco, I say, "Parla Inglese?
"You pay the difference, he says flatly, and then he punches my tickets.
When he gets to my compatriots they offer up some invalid passes. They don't have one ticket between them. The conductor stands over them, looking at the top photograph on the girl's stack, while they scramble to produce the money from their pockets and suitcases. He asks the girl something I don't understand and she laughs and gives him one of the pictures.
When he leaves the atmosphere is affected. They have had to scrape up their last coins to pay for the tickets. Now their luggage is opened up everywhere and I suspect they will make use of the space. They look at each other for a moment - maybe trying to figure out who owes who - and then they laugh it off. They know better. They are old pros and they are going to Naples in a first class cabin. In a few hours she will be working the Piazza Garibaldi and in no time at all things will be back to normal.
The man is looking over at me now, as if he just remembered something.
"You're not italian - where are you from?
I answer carefully. This exchange could clear the air and we all might get a little sleep. After all, we just paid for it, and I am quite sure they agree.
"I'm from the States, I say, "Los Angeles - but I left.
In other words, I had to leave. I saw him taking me in earlier as he pretended to look at the girl's photos. I give them nothing to go on - my pack is a filthy army issue. My clothes are casual, if not a little worn. Nothing expensive, nothing shiny. No jewelry. No watches. No designer tags. I look like I have checked out - the quintessential hitchhiker and they are buying it.
The guy nods like he understands. His eyes are heavy. He wants to get this out of the way and get to sleep as much as I do.
"I'm just coming from London. I'll have to wait five or six years to go back.
At this, the girl slides down into the seat closer to him, and it's my turn to nod like I understand something too.
"Dove vai?, the girl asks.
"A Roma., I said.
"Per lavoro ?
"No. Amici., I said. Friends. Not work. I knew people. Roman people. More clout. More mystery. Criminals were vague. Tourists told their life stories to strangers.
The girl wants to know where I've been. She asks through her companion.
"Tutto giro. I make a motion with my hand. All over, I try to say.
She smiles and swings her bare leg up on the seat, brushing mine. It's not some accident that I am having certain thoughts about her as she works on a cigarette and the lollipop both. Who knows? Maybe she likes the sound of Rome, maybe Piazza Garibaldi is wearing her out. Naples is a tough city. Rome has more of the creature comforts and more tourists too, but I guess with that you get more police.
I look at the guy, to see what he thinks. He's nodding out. I look back at her and she's still smiling. She points her toes over at me and hands me some more pictures.
The next time I look up she is sleeping, and before long, I am sleeping too, albeit lightly, and with my wallet under me. Every so often I scan the room and through the semidarkness I can see one of them looking back at me.

At Naples I have to wake them. It is a scene of panic while they scramble to pull their luggage together. I help them down off the train and watch them disappear into the haloed darkness of the platform, ill-fit for whatever lay ahead but guaranteed a couple of hours more or less together.
I shutter myself away in the cabin. In another four or five hours I will be in Rome, negotiating another all night dawn at the central train station. Today I was on a deserted beach with new friends. And in less than two days I'm due back in Los Angeles, which from where I sit now, is difficult if not impossible to imagine. And then, I ask, what about her? Are there a couple of hours guaranteed my way at least?
As the train idles at the station, passengers are on the move. I lay there listening to the footsteps of the newly boarded, and to those dispossessed souls whose car has been re-routed at Naples. Cabin doors slide open followed by sleep-contested murmurs. The scraping of luggage wheels closes in on the clacking jaws of the conductor's ticket punch. Pause. Feet shuffle. Curtain rings settle. The waiting platform buzzes against my window and it is that same feeling you get standing before an x-ray, that whatever is holding you together is also keeping the rest of the world separate from you.
The train pulls out and up to speed and I hang my face on the window as we tunnel through the dense Campanian night, a purple darkness broken only by the carelessly lit cigarette fires that feed along the track bed. Through an endless pop-up landscape of vine trellis and leaning canebrake, past silhouetted villages and farms with their worked over tongues hanging out, I lean there cradled in the darkness, caressed by the convex motion of the tracks on the earth.
In my weariness I feel myself being scraped off this broad Vesuvial plain and lifted to the rim of that great crater for one last magnificent look. And there I see the shining blue coasts of Sorrento and Capri. I see their sea-walled fortifications of the Middle Ages, their castles and colonnades and temples and jaw-line parapets. I see the metropolitan haze of Naples, the surging disorder of streets choked with cars and people. I see strange gray ports with metal ladders and outgoing vessels creaking in the harbor. I see the dusty remains of Pompeii, the ashes of two thousand years still searing under a familiar sun. I see the dehydrated mongrel dogs descendent from the original caveat: beware. I see Priapus hanging his sack of rocks against a bag of gold and smiling down at you as you enter his master's house, for he, like all gods, is a slave for eternity.
And when I walk around the rim of the crater I notice that it has been filled with all manner of things. We have thrown in our walking sticks by the truck load. We have tossed in the faithful and the unfaithful alike. Above all, we have tossed in all the politicians and war hawks and we have drowned them with tanker after tanker of Coca Cola.
Over the lip we have sent everything usable and unusable, even basalt-carved likenesses of the volcano itself and we have prayed, by God, if it is ever to blow again to please shower us with the secret of your greatness this time. Show us something reasonable. Show us how to build our cities with fire, show us how to live in the center of the earth as one.