Mistakes are part of the dues that one pays for a full life. — Sophia Loren

 

My wife is from Florida and is moving out of my house on the cold Canadian river, while I stay in Italy. She takes the frisky dog down to the freezing river and hits a ball into the water with a tennis racket. The moving van comes and the moving van goes. The river moves, and the faithful dog swims to retrieve the ball again and again, the dog floating in a state of grace.

Our train speeds into the side of an Italian mountain, and we have no eyesight, we knife noisily into black tunnels and then shoot out again, our new eyes viewing the patient volcano and ancient sea.

Our noisy engine halts iron wheels at seaside towns where families alight with beach towels and fashionable sunglasses and sunburns that still have hours to flare into ripeness.

We have entered the mezzogiorno, land of the midday sun, so close to Africa. The train’s exit doors have small windows, but they do not open, and the cars are furnace-hot. Tough kids from the exurbs stand near the exit doors in an alcove with no seating. They hail from the illegal neighbourhoods built up the sides of the volcano, the zona rossa. If the volcano erupts again their homes in the red zone will be wiped out. Ray-Ray and Eve are thirsty, are looking for a bar car; some trains have bars, and some do not.

The ancient train moves into light and out. In the confines of a dark tunnel, something incredibly fractious and noisy grinds against our train car and the tunnel walls that hug us. The high windows are open to roaring air, open to relieve the hellish heat, so much noise already, but this new clamour makes all the passengers flinch and panic, metal debris bouncing and crashing and wrenching our heatstroke dreams. What hammer is hitting the curved bell of our train?

In the darkened alcove, sketchy teenagers are moving shadows, and I see a lithe shadow leap to kick a window in the train’s exit door. In the heat the teens demand a breeze. When the train is in a tunnel, they attack the door’s sealed window, thinking no one sees them in the blackness.

One kid swings nimbly on a high chrome bar, a true acrobat who, with both feet, hits the window hard, a human battering ram, and more fragments of glass and metal frame break away in the dark to clatter and bounce along the outer skin of the rocketing train.

We burst out of the tunnel and they stop smashing the window to pose casually in mad light. In the next tunnel the kicking starts again.

Wives look to their husbands: will you do something? Each Italian husband shrugs. Polizia ride many trains, but not today. Where is the stoic conductor I like so much?

The Italian teens try to look cool in huge mirrored aviator shades, but their childlike faces are so thin and the aviator glasses so large — the effect is of Clownish Boy rather than Top Gun Pilot or Corrupt Saigon Major. I should wait, but I react primitively at times like this; I know they carry knives, but I’d like to trash them the way they trash their own train, our train, see how they like it. But I know we’ll all be elsewhere soon if we just sit and do nothing.

Don’t engage, my wife always said to me, and it’s good advice.

So why do I walk to the alcove and stand beside the cretins? My move was not well-thought-out. There are more of them in the hormonal antechamber than I realized, and sullen girls lean in the mix. I wish Eve and Ray-Ray were here beside me, I wish I was a more confident vigilante man with amazing eye-hand coordination and hidden weapons. Those in the group look to each other for guidance in child-thug matters, but no one steps forward to test my skill set, my tennis elbow. Uncertain moments hang, served to us like writs.

The unruly gang (am I way too ruly?) clambers off at the next stop, shoving each other out the doors with high masculine spirits.

Ah, youth; how I hate them.

The damaged doors opened for the rabble, but now the doors won’t close. Now our arthritic train cannot move. The stoic conductor examines the damaged doors, tries to heal them in the heat. He wears a dark blue uniform of thick cloth but seems unaffected by the southern climate, while sweat falls from my sleeves. Father Silas said that men in Italy do not wear shorts, that shorts are for children only. The conductor and another Italian man work to coax the doors to close.

On the station platform, I see my pretty cousin Eve and Tamika with the gang that smashed the doors. No sign of Ray-Ray, who can disappear for hours, days. Why are Eve and Tamika on the platform? For pancakes and syrup? Did they jump off at the wrong stop? Why do so many people think track suits are a good look?

I leap from the carriage just as the afflicted doors finally close, and the train and stoic conductor shunt away without me. The suburban station sign and walls are crowded with Day-Glo graffiti faithfully imitating American-style tags, going for a Fort Apache, the Bronx look. A new empire paints over an old empire, and the rebels all agree on hairdos.

“Hey!” calls my cousin. “I met these Italian guys at the beach this afternoon. Really. This is Giorgio and Pepino and Santino and I don’t know all of them yet. They invited me to a party. Want to come with?”

Tamika is not sure. “Maybe I’ll go back to the hotel.” Tamika is smart and she is shy; we both try to avoid crowds. “The next train won’t be long.” Tamika has put something on her white sneakers and her feet glow like lamps as she moves away.

“Well, then you come with me.” My cousin Eve drags me by the arm. “Please!”

I have a sick feeling; I have no desire to go to this party, but I worry about her going there alone. She likes to move, likes to jog and dance, is enthused by the world, where I am reticent, hesitant.

My cousin says, “We can buy beer right here at the station.” Eve is betting that cold beer will appeal to me; she knows me well.

“You will come?” says Santino from the beach. “It’s a very nice apartment for real in a very nice freaking party. Yes, you may also enjoy it.”

. . .

In a line we pass the military base and rows of monochrome flats, a line of pedestrians in a drab herniated Italy, walking to a party and party to an Italy that has little to do with tourist brochures and silk suits and Bernini’s genius marble limbs and asses.

We walk inland, away from the sea, around a dun hill and heartbroken canal (Oh, what gummy toxic sludge dumped there?) and a cluster of Chinese factories and a military base with dark green tanks, World War II-vintage tanks like hunched guardians either side of the gate. A fat bee accompanies us for a few moments, some kind of Mother Nature fugue I enjoy, then the rotund bee rejects us for greener pastures. Odd to think of all the centuries of history here, but to a local bee it means little, does not alter its minutes.

Outside, we can hear the party before finding stairs like a ladder into a crowd, a crowd spilling into a dim hall from the main rooms. In the living room leans a pole lamp with blue light bulbs, so we all look reasonably unhealthy, and every surface crammed with glasses, ashtrays, vats of red wine, cloudy Ouzo, grappa, tins of German lager, and green bottles of Italian beer.

Past the pink sofa hides an invisible but loud stereo: Jesus and Mary Chain ply distorted fuzz-box ditties. Are Jesus and Mary Chain still churning out discs? I liked them when I was younger; funny to hear them buzzing in this other world. A circle is smoking dope, and a young woman is coughing up a lung. The fuming joint finds its way to us. Of course I feel nothing at first, and nothing will come of nothing.

A man flashes a glassine envelope of coke to the young woman. A neighbour, we are told by Pepino and Santino — Eve can tell them apart. The neighbour lives across the hall, a party crasher attracted by the crowd, the women. The neighbour is not invited, he is not welcome, he does not carry himself well.

“Come stai?” asks the person who is Pepino or Santino.

“You are from America?” asks the other.

“I’m not from America,” I say.

“Yes, you are.”

“No, Canada.”

“Ah, Canada. That’s much better culture.”

“Bene.”

“So, Mister Canada,” asks a third man, “do you like Napoli?”

“Si, Mister Italy, certo, very much, molto simpatico, it’s amazing.”

“Mister Canada calls me Mister Italy. Ha ha ha.” Eve laughs with them.

The unwelcome neighbour offers coke on his wrist to Eve and the younger woman, he says, “My coke is very fine. Just think, all the way from Ecuador to Napoli and to your pretty nose. Think of that. I bring it here in crates of bananas.”

“Don’t listen to his big talk,” says Mister Italy. “He doesn’t bring it here.”

“You should watch your fat mouth,” says the neighbour.

“Bananas!” says my cousin. “Bananas have big hairy spiders! I hate spiders!”

Eve gets mad if I laugh about her spider phobia, my cousin very serious about this fear, as if spiders are hiding now in the small amount of coke. I wonder if I could get some of that man’s product. We are sweating, and I drink cold beer I bought at the train station. The party-crasher neighbour with the coke is after the women. Like me.

Mister Italy tells him he should leave the party. Mister Italy turns away, the unwelcome neighbour sucker-punches Mister Italy, and the young man drops, holding his slim face.

“Get out!” shout Santino and the others. They insult the neighbour, slap him, push him out the door to go back to his apartment. He crosses the dim hall; all the doors are wide open.

Eve looks at the table as if there might be spiders there.

“That cake,” she asks me. “Is that icing or mold? It looks like mold.”

“I’m going with icing,” I say and sample some.

“I can’t believe you ate that.”

“I’m starving. Besides, I’m more pleasant when I eat.”

In the fetal position, a bearded young man rocks in the corner, arms hugging his knees while three women look bored. They are all younger than me, the new norm; now I am always the oldest person present as music plays loudly and wild ones turn this way and that, shouting into songs and bright conversations.

I’m happy when I eat. Did I say that already? I’m losing my mind. I don’t want to be the guy with his fly open or food stains decorating a shirt front, but I see it in my future like a train approaching and not long before it arrives.

A stoned woman walks past with a half-open blouse, the curves of two breasts much revealed. Rare once to see even a lady’s bare ankle. Blouses fling open and life goes on. A startling blue vein runs down one breast to disappear into her blouse. Bright as a streak of blue paint or a cobalt serpent, and she is so happy to make public the blood pulsing in her vein.

My high school girlfriend worried about veins on her high school breasts. Your breasts are beautiful, I tried to reassure her, but she worried about a tiny vein. And this Italian girl so happy to show the bright paint of her breast, a giant vein moving blood like a map inside her omniscient breast, a scaffolding in there holding up the 3-D model. Blood is red as wine so why is a vein blue? Why am I blue? I wish to be canny, captivating: is that too much to ask?

The neighbour motors back from his apartment carrying a staple gun, the neighbour crosses the hall, crosses the room and puts the staple gun to Mister Italy’s thigh, driving in a heavy duty staple. Mister Italy leaps, tears springing out of his eyes, Mister Italy flees the room yelling and cursing.

“I’m worried about him,” says Eve.

“Is he all right?” says the stoned woman. “Does he even know his way?”

“To what?” I ask.

The stoned woman disappears down the hall of muffled echoes. Later she comes back to the sofa and says to my cousin, “Don’t worry.”

Good advice. I try to not study her sea-blue vein, though I find it fascinating and would pay money to look carefully and touch it, but I do not believe she would be interested in such an examination.

 

The neighbour wanders off to the kitchen, still wielding the staple gun; everyone in the kitchen is shouting normally. The party in the living room rages around me, roller coaster voices, the droning fuzz-tone of Jesus and Mary Chain picking up speed and slowing to a halt.

The stoned young woman with the cobalt vein on her breast dances jerkily in the living room, blouse coming completely asunder, her skin taking in the air, the last button no longer intimate with eyelet, free. I assume Cobalt Girl is aware of her blouse and breasts out there like vivid menus, though who knows. Above her neck hovers her very own brain, choreographing her dance in conjunction with our music and shouting.

My cousin pins her mouth to my ear. I enjoy Eve’s mouth at my ear.

“What?” I whisper into her warm hair.

“Have you not noticed?” My cousin directs my gaze with her eyes.

This young woman’s brown nipples are extremely thin and long, like tiny twigs, where a bird might perch. Now, would milk squirt a greater distance from such narrow nipples? A question of physics, pressure. And my cousin’s nipples so tiny and pale pink, glimpsed once in a hotel room, in repressed memory. Forget that image.

Cobalt Girl dances with Santino, dances with elbows close to her waist, hands and wrists outward as she shimmies, almost the Twist. I would like to start a new dance craze. Do the Mashed Potato. Do the Staple Gun, do the Lazy Lawyer, do the Dee-vor-cee dividing his assets and sheckels.

Santino grins at me, Santino whispers in her ear and they dance some more and then they stop.

“You must watch, my new friends,” says Santino. “In an American movie we saw a dancer do this.”

The other, is his name Pepini? Penino? My brain is not to be relied on. Where is my drink?

Santino takes one paper match and splits the middle of the match so that there is an opening. Cobalt Girl takes the match from Santino and carefully places the opening of the one match to her breast so that the match grips her long nipple. Santino hands her another such match.

She lights both matches, pointing each head up and away from her skin, then Cobalt Girl dances proudly in front of us, shifting her hips and smiling at her party trick.

She says something in Italian.

“Do you see this in Canada?” Santino translates.

“No.”

“No, I thought not. Not in Canada, eh.”

Is that an Italian “eh” or a Canadian “eh”?

The stoned woman dances and moves her head side to side, she’s seen this sultry style of dancing on videos, moves so that her hair swings about like a star on celluloid. I was worried about the small flames hurting the skin of her breasts, but instead the burning matches cause her swinging hair to catch fire, perhaps a tad too much flammable hairspray or some weird gel.

Eve points a finger like a gun, says, “That isn’t good.”

Santino looks from us to Cobalt Girl, stops grinning, and calmly throws his drink on her, so I pour the remainder of my beer over her burning hair. Others add their drinks. It is as if we are allowed to urinate on her. Cobalt Girl is crying, tears and drinks tracking down over her bare breasts and snuffed black matches, Cobalt Girl runs to the bathroom, hair smoldering like a volcano. It’s kind of sexy. Where is the volcano, I mean the washroom? Where am I?

Sometimes when travelling I must look about and remind myself where I am, what new kingdom I gaze at. I like that feeling of being momentarily lost, of a brief gap, of having different eyes, new eyes upon gnarled trees and brightest scooter. I am near Napoli on a scratchy pink couch, and I am prying open a cold beer that is warm. Sometimes I feel like that dead Roman rat I saw beneath the trees. Sometimes I feel like a chocolate bar with too many bite marks. Sometimes I feel the world is a very beautiful white T-shirt.

 

Another giant joint makes the rounds, strong and harsh behind my teeth. I feel instantly stoned or re-stoned, I’m not sure of the order, not used to this quality. Eve says that Mister Italy is back. By the door a teenager from the train is showing Santino and Mister Italy a knife with a beautiful handle the shade of dark honey, as if an ancient scorpion might be trapped there in amber. They admire the lovely knife.

The woman with hair once on fire is laughing again, though her hair looks frizzily fucked up; she moves room to room laughing, smoking up from a tiny bag of weed.

She says to me in Italian, “After that ordeal I am very thirsty, tell me, do you have birra?”

“Si. Yes. I’m happy to share.”

“That’s good you are happy with me.” Cobalt Girl smiles, puts on a porkpie hat, just a girl who likes the traditional drugs. It may simply be the fine dope, but her laughing makes me laugh, I like her.

I’m not happy, but I know I can be happy again. I know it is there, but what port of call, what passport, what bright map on my wall, what coast and sea? I know a port exists, know it is close. When I find it I will write a book called Duct Tape for the Soul, and it will sell gazillions.

“Thank you for the birra.”

“Prego. De nada.” Or is that Spanish? I get the words mixed up, think I’m in Spain. Pliny was in Spain. I wonder if Cobalt Girl was with the group kicking out the train window. She mimes tossing beer on her hair. Si, si. She mimes a moonwalk. Michael Jackson! Yes! I get it now. His hair burnt too!

 

The kitchen group fights as if one pulsating organism. Perche vendichi su di me l’offesa che ti ha fatto un altro? Why are you taking revenge on me for someone else’s offense? It sounds too Sicilian for words. Why are they all so fucking loud?

The white doorway pours noise into the living room; young males run out and males run into the kitchen talking in tongues, raucous Italian voices producing a rapid clatter of words, like a rock beach rolling in brisk surf.

Mamma mia, che rabbia mi fai! How you enrage me!

Mi trattengo dal dire quello che penso solo per buona educazione. I refrain from saying what I think only because of my good upbringing.

Santino has a silver pen, or is it the knife? What is he saying to Mister Italy?

Hands waving. To give a lesson!

In the kitchen dozens are shoving each other, Naples’s surly suburban dancers pushing and fighting, two sides, three sides, one room of the party becoming a minor brawl. A young woman says something and is knocked over and kicked by the older neighbour, and she crawls the floor like a shouting crocodile. Maybe this is normal (the word normative pops into my head from Sociology 100, hi Professor Gee), I can’t tell as there is so much noise in Italy, so much life, so many scooter horns beeping threats and throats calling out la dolce vita, vim and vengeance, someone shouting dare una lezione, give him a lesson, a leg for a leg.

During the day, they shout at me at the grocery cashier, at the café, in the street, from the kitchen; it’s a hectoring country, it’s almost comic to be shouted at so much. Which leg do they mean? Mister Italy’s leg? Staple Gun Guy the neighbour’s leg?

I start to stand up, but the stoned woman laughs and pulls me down into her lap and smoky smell. She says her name is Maria and she’s friendly and warm, she’s Italian! From this odd perspective I have a sideways view of the crowded kitchen.

Santino bends low, his face looking sleepy as he swings his arm low in a resigned arc that ends with a knife driven into the neighbour’s thigh. Blood gushes immediately at the base of the knife, as if Santino struck an oil well, and in the room a general hiss of understanding and pity and then more voices, more shouting, more gesturing. His leg, his blood-splattered denim, blood falls from him, blood on the floor.

I stand up too fast and feel pressure in my brow; my brain is collapsing, back to the baboon, back to the apes. Maria props me up as Santino runs out of the crowd like a hunched assassin. Mister Italy and others follow him out the door in a more assured manner. Staple Gun Guy looks at his liquid leg. The knife is gone from his leg. Who removed the knife?

Maybe the assailant thought a jab to the leg was not dangerous, but how the blood wells, how it pours from the man, blood born in the kitchen, he can’t stop the blood freed from tiny culverts and tunnels. The neighbour’s blood is dark, but glistens. Blood polka-dots around the kitchen, dots the size of coins, red coins painting the canvas so quickly. Maria the stoned woman stares at Staple Gun Guy. It’s like opera. How can there be so much blood draining from one cut? The eye can’t understand the image it seizes (I smote him thus).

The neighbour looks down at his leg, nature staring back. No more chronic for you, no more nose candy. A young woman holds a tea towel to the gushing leg. “It won’t stop!”

The knife must have met an artery, severed an artery, we meet in a rented room of blood, blood so scarlet on their white floor and dark rug and a trail as he heads to the door, to another country. The neighbour wishes to go home with his staple gun. It’s my party and I’ll die if I want to.

He passes by, and my cousin stares as if a monster is walking past on a moor (amore!). The monster passes the armchair the shape and colour of an ancient tombstone and the coffee table with my bottles and the small baggy of cocaine under the blue light bulb. My cousin took a first-aid course, says he shouldn’t walk if he’s bleeding like that, he should really stay still.

The neighbour makes it to the door, but in the hall he falls like a Doric column. He has bled out. Now the kitchen empties, groups pushing and shoving, not to fight, but to exit. Party-goers nimbly leap his body blocking the doorway and flee like goats down the long hall. An older woman opens her apartment door to peer out at the raucous stampede, the mad stomping hurdle race. Spying blood and a body, the woman dials her small silver phone, whispers, Madonna save us.

A few stay in the room; either they didn’t do it or they live here; until this second I hadn’t thought of someone living here. A home. It was just a party. One well-dressed man stops, calmly checks the body on the stained carpet.

“E morto!” he states as if saying the weather is inclement.

Maria the stoned woman takes the staple gun.

My cousin Eve says, “They called the police. Let’s go, okay?”

“What about an ambulance?”

“The polizia will handle it. We have to leave.”

“My beer.”

“Forget your fucking beer!”

I grab the tiny bag of coke and step over the body in the liminal doorway. Why did I ever walk up this narrow hall? Morto, blood flees a human so quickly and all of us drain the rooms so quickly and down the crowded stairs, slim bodies draped in black suits and pants, knees and arms moving jerkily in black-crow angles against sharp white stucco, stucco where you cut your elbow and bleed if you touch the wall.

 

On the street we run past the World War II tanks again, run like pale ghosts past the same Chinese factory and radioactive canal water and a distant figure throwing something, a tiny splash in the silver canal, perhaps a stolen phone or the knife from the neighbour’s leg.

Eve and I turn a corner, and there are two policemen standing in pretty leather boots and jodphurs.

Oh fuck, I think. We attempt to impersonate people walking calmly, but how? I have forgotten the details of calm, I should have taken notes during a calm time, knowing this would happen down the line.

One policeman hugs a middle-aged woman who is crying non-stop, she can’t stop. The policeman holds up a device for her to breathe into. Is it a puffer to help her breathe or to measure alcohol in her system? No idea. The policeman tells her to stop struggling or she can be charged. She grips the policeman’s face in her hands, chants something into his face. He asks her to stop, but she won’t remove her hands from his face.

My cousin whispers a rough translation: “I’m putting my fifty-year-old hands in your face if I feel like it. You’re half my age you little fucking dick.”

Perhaps, as I’ve told my cousin and Tamika, I’m invisible. The police don’t care about us, as they are busy loosening her hands from his face. Men in soccer shirts outside a social club watch my cousin and me come up the sidewalk. Word cannot have spread of the nearby party.

“Scusi,” says my cousin. “Train? Trena? Stazione?” Her Italian is better than mine.

They point down the boulevard toward the sea. “Giri a sinistra.”

“Left,” I say. I know that sinister means left and enjoy that word, sinistra. The left hand is unlucky.

“Si. Sinistra. Andate avanti per due minuti.”

“Grazie,” says my cousin, “grazie.”

“First you come drink with us,” the man says.

“Sorry, we must go.”

“No. One drink! To life! One drink!”

“Numero di telefono?” another asks hopefully.

“No, no,” says my pretty cousin, “in Italy I have no phone.”

“Sieta a piedi?”

“Si, we’re walking.”

“A nice walk,” says one and grabs her backside. “If that was my wife . . .”

“That’s my ass!” I yell. Why did I say that?

“Fuck off,” she yells.

“To life!” they yell. We’re way down the block; I think that’s what they yell.

 

We’re running, we run blocks to the train station and I’m gasping; I can ride a clunker bike all day, but I’m not used to running. The station ticket window is empty, no one is in charge, which is fine by me. I’ve been travelling on an expired pass that also allows one into art galleries and museums around Napoli. I’ll pay a fine, I’m just glad to be on board. Now if we will just move. I can’t sit. Move, move.

I don’t care where the train goes, I just don’t want to be around if the polizia are looking for witnesses or a scapegoat for the knifing, don’t want to be a person of interest. Father Silas’s art school is not officially recognized in Italy. Move!

“Are we supposed to carry our passports? Mine’s at the hotel.”

“Any blood on us?”

“No one knows we were there.”

We check our clothes for blood splatters anyway, our hands.

“Check the bottom of my shoes.”

Did I walk through the dead man’s blood? And that blood-sodden tea towel.

“Maybe the guy’s ok.”

“I’d say he was pretty well gone.” Gone west. We sit for what seems like humming hours, then our train betrays that buzzy feeling just before movement begins, that pre-coital imminence, and we sail forward in a silent sway of deliverance.

 

I remember a funeral for a good friend on the West Coast, a lively giant of a man, very well liked. I’ve never heard so many people say, He was my best friend. I was getting jealous. At the open-coffin funeral we sat in solemn pews waiting for the sad service to start, and instead the Steppenwolf song “Born to be Wild” roared to life, loud as hell.

Everyone in the funeral chapel laughed; he would have liked that; he laughed a lot. But I saw his big face blank in the coffin and his combed beard and thought, yes, he is spent, he is dead, he is missing from his own face. Some force that was him no longer there (Elvis has left the apartment building). Maybe that’s why we have open-casket funerals or a wake with the body right in your parlour, so you know, really feel the knowledge physically and don’t wait for him to show up at your door or expect to see your old friend for a pint in Swan’s pub. E morto. You must know.

 

Our night train will swallow us, will travel all the way to Sorrento. The swallows return. Now, is that Sorrento or Capistrano? A leg with a knife severing a major artery. No more stoned young women for the neighbour with the staple gun. Come back. The dead hand, like the men on the crowded subway in Rome leaving their hand low to grope women, mortua manus. See the wonders of the ancient world!

“Did you even see who stabbed him?”

I decide to lie. “No, no, I just saw legs and a blade swinging.” And all that blood that should stay inside.

“I just want to be back at the hotel. Be back home.”

“We’ll be back soon enough.”

She looks so forlorn, whereas I feel immense relief that the train is shunting us away. I show my cousin the stolen baggy.

“You took that from the dead guy? Why?” She looks around the train. “Are you fucking crazy?”

“I had some years ago and really liked it, but I could never afford it.”

“Fuck! What if we get stopped?”

“I’ll get rid of it.”

“They’d see you tossing it.”

My Irish cousins have an expression when something is little use: like throwing water on a dead rat. I realize it’s my birthday, and I missed it, wandering this beautiful rat’s nest on a bay. My birthday present.

“I don’t know. It was sitting there. I wanted to try some again. I’ll hide it in my sock.”

 

We’ll be okay. The familiar train will deliver us back to chapels and chipped frescoes and Fabergé eggs and our whining art group. The aged conductor always so calm in the heat and sweat of day and the ennui of night. Our conductor possesses natural dignity. He does not bring up the idea of tickets. I am glad he runs the train. His childhood bride waits at home: this I am sure of. She is plumper than when they met at the dance and the world was shot in black and white.

The calm conductor and his bride make me think about marriage. Marriage is success, marriage is failure, marriage is music, a ride, marriage is a train with windows. Every room is a train with windows, every office and every head is a train with windows, everything in the world is a train with windows.

The question is: Do you kick out the windows or do you sit politely and hope for the uniformed conductor? Does our conductor live with his wife in smoldering Napoli or far out on the flank of the famous volcano? Does Maria the stoned Cobalt Woman live on the volcano? She was nice to me and then ran.

. . .

A man very near on the train answers his phone: “Pronto!?” His voice sounds so hopeful in my ear, rising sharply at the end of the fast word: pron-TO!! But his phone will not agree to work.

“I’m on the train, I might lose you,” he shouts.

The dead man went pale as we lost him, as we watched, no more phone calls for him. In the mountain tunnels, this time, no one kicks out the glass. There is no one Italy, there is a vast collection of Italys, but this Italy tonight is somber, in black, this Italy is sixteen coaches long, our train moving beside the sea, our train on top of the rolling sea.

Dories on painters drift, reach the end of the rope, pale boats wobbling between stars under water, submerged light the shape of lost milky amphoras, yachts and white moving lights on water and light under the sea, and then I see the spotlights touching the church and city hall where I bought a handsome watch from a flea market table.

Ah, I recognize where we are now. Next stop. I’m becoming an old hand, an expert.

“Prossima fermata,” I say very slowly to my cousin, my best sing-song Italian accent, drawing out the pleasing words as I try them on. “Next stop is ours. How are you doing?”

“Rock and roll,” she says weakly.

“Pronto!” calls the man. He is having such problems with the tunnels. Can you hear me now? Now can you hear me?

We stop and start with the train’s moves, lean into each other, her head fitting under my jaw. I like my cousin’s warm form against me.

 

The room is warm, and Eve lies on my hotel bed stripped down to a T-shirt and small white panties. She says, “You don’t need to sleep on the floor because of me. But I’m afraid to be in my room alone. You still have the dead guy’s dope?”

“You don’t want that now.”

Her clean leg by my eye. She says we can share the bed. The unstabbed skin of my cousin’s fine thigh leading my eye up to her hips and her secrets, where I want to touch, tension vibrating in the air like silver wires, I will explode if I don’t touch, but I don’t touch her. Mortua manus, the dead hand. She is worried, jittery, but there is no knife in her leg. The night air is sweet and light golden on cobbles below.

“At the topless beach today I was so happy,” Eve whispers as she moves into sleep. “I met those Italian boys. We’ll pray for him. In a real church. Promise? That one with the amazing Caravaggio that just pops. The other paintings, no. That Caravaggio is the one. Promise?”

Yes, I promise. She is drifting off in my bed, and I stay on the sea-coloured tiles the Croatian woman cleans every morning. In my head for some reason an old Blondie tune, “Fade Away and Radiate.” Those NYC junkies, how did they hang on through all the shit like this? Does Eve mean the Caravaggio with the boy bitten by the lizard, or the crucifixion (someone else noteworthy, but not Christ), or the man on the horse, or the daughter breastfeeding her father who is starving behind bars? My cousin’s face looked so pale reflected in the train window, inside tunnels, our train inside a dark mountain, something pushed into a body. Tomorrow we’ll pray for everyone. I promise.

 

Later that week, I discover that my party souvenir is gone, my baggy with the dead guy’s cocaine is gone. Maybe Naples is also gone, buried once again by the volcano.

Could Eve have taken the baggy? She is a person of interest. Certainly not clean-living Tamika with her white shoes or the train conductor who loves his wife so. The pretty Croatian woman who cleans my room? Or did I consume all the stolen cocaine during a deranged night and also consume the memory? That has happened before.

Around this same time, our director Father Silas misplaces his fat envelope full of so many Euro notes (cash is king at Italian hotel desks), and now our group is bereft, now we are bankrupt. Is our Dauphin getting dotty or were the Euros nicked by the rooftop cat burglar who plucked an American’s Rolex and Nikon camera from an open third-floor window? Knaves and harridans and coal burners and a slim hand coming in the liminal space.

Our director wears a houndstooth jacket draped upon his shoulders like a cape, hoping for that continental La Dolce Vita matador look. How will we survive, when he has lost all our money? How to pay for meals at Bernardo’s cafe, for so many nights at the hotel? How will we get home? Perhaps our future holds a giant dine & dash with luggage. Can we sneak our backpacks past the vigilant French woman who never leaves the front desk?

And what happens after you feel the sly knife penetrate your thigh and you expire in a kitchen across the hall from your home? Can you bring a staple gun to heaven? His daughter was there at the party, saw her father die. I don’t know how I missed that, but my cousin insists this is true. In the hall the weeping daughter held her father in her arms as we left the party, as he left the country, as the father vanished into the afterlife.

The stoned girl with the cobalt vein and volcanic hair: I threw my drink on her to help her, I feel we had some link, some strange chemistry. Maria! What can you do with a girl named Maria? So many things you will never know, so many naked legs you will never touch. But if any of us do make it to heaven, I hope these matters will seem less important.

Some nights Eve can’t sleep and takes tiny blue pills; my pretty cousin says she remembers the knife and can’t sleep. Like me, she remembers waiting on a train and willing the monster to move. But time passes and we forget. I love time. Time gives me everything, time cracks me up, time kills me.