December Suite II: Bollito Misto

I was compiling a list of what did help – therapy, medication, my relationship, my friends – when the train slowed down and then came to a complete halt. I looked outside the window. Still nothing but dark grey terraferma and overcast sky. The sun was still setting.

Through the loudspeakers, we were informed that there had been a bomb threat. Trenitalia were afraid that the perpetrators would blow up a part of the Padova-Venezia line, so we stopped right in the middle of nowhere while experts combed the tracks for explosives. Protests were heard, and stilled when we were told that we would be allowed to step outside to smoke. I saw some passengers get up and out into the mud, and I chose to do the same. I didn't (and don't) smoke, but I wanted to get some fresh air. I clutched the Constable book like a shield, walked down the aisle and off the train.

The air outside was cold and humid, but there was as of now no whiff of the sea. The plains in front of me were, well, plain; dark with earth against the dark blue sky. In the half-distance, there was a huddle of cypress trees and two shabby buildings.

"È un ristorante", I heard somebody next to me say. I turned to the voice and there stood this sixty-years-or-so man in a winter jacket and a wool hat. "Pardon?", I said, although I had actually understood him the first time, I don't know why I asked. "È un ristorante", he repeated, and pointed at the two somber buildings next to the trees, buildings that definitely did not look like restaurants. The man had a Slavic accent that I couldn't quite place. "È un ristorante, un buon ristorante", he said again, and smiled. I asked him how it happened that he knew a restaurant in the middle of nowhere. He explained that he worked for a company that built utility poles, and that they had done some work in the area. And that they had always had their dinners there, because the food was cheap and very good. "Andiamo a mangiare qualcosa?", he asked, with an invitational nod towards the buildings and those poor cypresses. "Non abbiamo tempo, penso", I said. He smiled knowingly. "Ma certo che abbiamo tempo", he said, "bomba - incertezza. Lunga incertezza."

I was hungry, in fact. I had gotten overstimulated at Milano Centrale and not managed to choose between all the possible take-away food options. Our train ran without dining car.

I looked for the train conductor, an impossibly lanky creature about my age who had also stepped outside and was smoking his third cigarette in a row, walked over and asked him for a rough estimate of our waiting time. He shrugged. "Due ore, forse di più." Well then, I thought.

We walked on something like a narrow path of hardened mud that led between two fields to the buildings. There were puddles in the furrows and we were very nearly reflected on their surfaces. My companion mumbled something about how practical it would be if one could walk on one's head from time to time so that the boots would not get as dirty.

It was a restaurant after all. It looked more welcoming from its other side, where the door was located with an inviting bright lamp above it, and three softly-lit windows besides. My companion, who had in the meantime introduced himself as Josip, entered the restaurant with the swagger of a regular.

Inside, there were seven wooden tables covered with paper tablecloths, and a small bar. An apparently very old person sat at the bar sipping a brownish drink; about a dozen more people sat at five of the seven tables. Nobody seemed to be less than fifty years old, but there was a friendly vibe in the air, the radio played Peter Gabriel on very low and it was warm and somewhat cozy. The waiter guided us to one of the two free tables right under a black and white photograph of Sophia Loren eating spaghetti.

Unlike Milano Centrale surplus choice assault, here, it was simple. You could choose either the Bollito misto, heavily advertised for on the menu, or the Carciofi in umido. We both ordered the Bollito and half a bottle of the house wine, and I was happy to not have to eat alone. There was a small and cold animal burrowing within me and I wanted to keep it at bay.

While we waited for our food, he told me a bit about his life. He was from Slovenia, from Maribor, to be exact, but had lived almost all his adult life in Udine and worked all over Northern Italy. He had been trained a civil engineer, mostly worked in railway construction and on a massive site in the Genova port, then switched to a company that constructed and installed state-of-the-art utility poles and wind turbines. The story of his life so far sounded as they often do, neat and continuous, like an oblong piece of wood with which to defend yourself in peril.

I wanted to ask him a number of questions, such as whether his life felt continuous to himself and where he would place the chapter breaks in it, if there were any; how he had found his mature style and whether he felt that it was now evolving, as he seemed to me to be between sixty and seventy years old, into a late style. I wanted to ask him what the equivalent of Self-Portrait with Beret and Turned-Up Collar in civil engineering was.

But I didn't know where to start, and my active Italian was shaky as ever and struggled to put my thoughts into intelligible words, and then the Bollito came and he asked me who I was and where I was from. He did not ask what I did, he asked who I was, but the only answer I knew to the latter was the one to the former, so I said that I was an art historian (lazily pointing at the book on Constable that I had brought with me), which was true, on my way to Venice to do research for a paper on Rosalba Carriera, which was a lie. And I said that I was from the Università di Zurigo, and his face lit up. "Tedesco!", he exclaimed, "Deutsch!" Not completely wrong, I thought. With a sunny expression on his wrinkly face, he begain pointing at various objects and saying their name in a German even more heavily infused with his Slovenian accent. Weinglas, Teller, Tisch, Aschenbacher. "Aschenbecher", I corrected him, and he smiled happily. He explained that his eldest daughter had worked there for a time, with an insurance company, and he had visited her often. Schöne Stadt, he said. Aber teuer, and he rubbed two fingers of his right hand against the thumb. I nodded the way I always nod in that situation.

It transpired that the Zurich insurance company daughter was his favorite, because she was from his first marriage. He preferred his second wife over his first one, he explained, but the child from the first marriage over those from the second, because the daughter from the first marriage had been a respite from his stressful relationship with her mother, whereas the second daughter and the son from the second marriage had been a burden on his happy relationship with their mother. This seemed to me the idiocy of serial heterosexual monogamy in concentrated form, but I swallowed down what I knew to be an unasked-for and not really thought-out blowup in front of somebody I had only just met. Josip asked me whether I had any children. I said no and he said that I should. Ok, boomer, I thought.

Why, I asked. To leave a mark, he said. A mark of you. A lasting expression. I channelled a bit of that swallowed-down anger attack and somewhat snappily said that I was annoyed at how people always tell you how to express yourself. Is it an expression of yourself it someone else told you how to?, I said, I think not, I said.

Also, I added stupidly, in my field of work, we tend to think of our books rather than of children as our mark on the world. Especially scholars from my generation. Have you published any books, Josip asked. No, I said. Do you know scholars from your generation who have, he asked. Yes, I said. Are they happy, he asked. No, I said, and asked him whether he was happy. Yes, he said, except I need a cigarette now, because it is after dinner.

Josip got up, nodded and smiled, and went out to smoke. I drank the bit of house wine still in my glass and watched how the photograph of Sophia Loren eating spaghetti slowly turned into Cenotaph for Joshua Reynolds.

The waiter came and asked if we wanted anything else. I said no, and became abruptly aware of the time, and ordered the bill. I did not want to press our luck; two hours at least, the conductor had said, but I was unsure how ready I was to fully trust him.

So I made the mistake of getting out my phone to check the time. For some reason, this godforsaken restaurant (the Bollito was excellent, though!) had free wifi, my phone had connected itself to it and now its screen greeted me with a bombardment of messages asking for this or that document, asking for a reply because they had been waiting for five days already (this from a person who regularly took two weeks to reply to my messages), invoices, and insults.

Luckily enough, Josip came back and gave me a reason to simply put my phone back into my pocket. He was smiling again or still as he sat back down. I have ordered the bill, I said, we should get back. "Ma devo ringraziarti. È stata un'ottima idea venire qui. Il cibo era fantastico", I said, and I meant it. It had been a good idea to come here and eat.

Josip made a gesture towards my book. "Se stai facendo ricerche su Rosalba Carriera, perché hai con te un libro su Constable?" Touché, old man, I thought. This is just a hobby, I said. For fun. And the voyage to Venice was not for fun. I said that, to be honest, I found myself in a bit of a crisis.

Josip nodded. It is good to move when you are in a crisis, he said. When you are in a crisis, you should move, he said, awkwardly rephrasing what he had already said. I nodded, too, although really just to spend the time rather than out of conviction. We should go back to the train, I said again.

You go, he said. I stay, he said.

"Stai scherzando?", I asked.

No, he said. He said, I am not in a crisis, and therefore I don't need to move.

I looked at him in disbelief. He had smiled virtually all evening, varying from 'happy uncle' to 'tired court jester', but smiling. Now he had a very serious look on his face. I will have another bollito, he said, it is excellent. He said, you move.

"La trena partirà senza te", I said, vaguely thinking that there was some fault with my phrasing.

There will be another, he said. Just as there will be another plate of bollito, he said, and then he waved to the waiter and I gave up, grabbed my book on Constable, got up and awkwardly wished him a good evening. He was smiling again. "Anche a te", he said.

The sun was still setting as I walked back to the long line of the train, dormant like an illuminated reptile in the midst of the plains, walked back on the narrow path between the fields and thought about how if you could walk on your head your shoes would get less dirty. The sky was dark blue and the earth was dark grey and the conductor was still outside and smoking his n-th cigarette; and when I turned and looked back before boarding the train, the restaurant was again just a haphazard square against the huddle of the cypress trees, and I had a feeling like rainfall on another planet. –