i miss italy
I imagine there is a man waiting on a platform in Genoa. He is my grandfather, but I cannot know that yet. He is twenty-three and he has a brown leather suitcase and he knows how to mend nets and he does not know how to be far from the sea.
I imagine that before the platform, there was a morning. This particular morning, my grandfather packed his suitcase. He quickly ate the last of his mother’s farinata standing up at the kitchen table. She watched him in the doorway with her arms crossed over her chest in the way Ligurian women hold themselves, as though warmth were a finite resource and November was suddenly looming, though it was only August. The air in the kitchen was thick with oil and salt and the windows open.
I imagine he was going north, which in Genoa would’ve meant something. Factories. Wages. Wages in the fixed sense, something you can press your back against, something that does not depend on the weather or tide. There was also a girl, maybe, though this part of the story he never told me, and stories that aren’t told have a way of becoming the most structuring ones of all.
I imagine he walked to Principe station through the caruggi, the narrow medieval corridors where the buildings lean so close overhead that the sky appears only as a stripe, grey and thin as a fish bone. The paving stones are slick with a hundred years of footsteps, and a little damp even in the summer. He passed old men playing cards outside the bar on Via del Campo, their thumbs black with tobacco, their laughter loud and unhurried. He passed the smell of pesto coming from somewhere above him – that particular green smell, basil and garlic and the oil of the Ligurian hillsides – a smell that would ambush him for the rest of his life in other cities without warning or mercy.
I imagine he did not say goodbye to the sea directly. But from the Via Balbi, before the road curved, he stopped. The Lanterna stood at its distance, the old lighthouse that has watched this coast since before there was a country to call it part of. White in the grey morning. Redundant, almost, in daylight, its purpose visible only to ships in the dark – but always there. I imagine he looked at it for a moment that was either very short or very long, the way such moments are, then turned and walked on.
At the platform, I imagine he set his suitcase down. Around him, others were also leaving. This was the fact of that decade – that Italy was eating itself from south to north, that its people were in motion like a tide that had only one direction. Men from Calabria, from Sicily, from Sardegna, from the Veneto. Some of them with more in their suitcases than he had, some with less. All of them with the same expression he wore, which was not grief but something adjacent to it. A collective flinch, I’ll say.
The train came. He got on. Did he look back at the platform? At the particular grey of the Genovese sky that day, the smell of the port coming off the water, the quality of light on the surface that belongs only to Liguria? (I’m still deciding on this.)
There is a Kierkegaardian idea that when you choose one path, all the paths you do not take are snuffed out like candles. At the moment of choice, each of them is the only way. Then, as soon as you’ve chosen, the doors of all the other ways close behind you. I don’t like to think he wanted to leave Genoa, but I imagine my grandfather was committed to this, the snuffing, the idea that this train could carry him somewhere the air was a different quality. Not necessarily better, but one to be negotiated with. A place where he could be a practical man among other practical men, instead of a mythological one standing on a boat.
Did the train carry him there? Or did it just slightly rearrange the distance between him and the sea?
I take the train from Glasgow to Edinburgh, twice a month. There is a woman in the seat across from me who has fallen asleep with a boarding pass tucked into the cover of a novel, and I find this rather sweet. The train is very fast and quiet. If I look at my reflection in the window instead of the fields, I can almost believe I am the first person in my family to be carried through a landscape at such a speed.
My grandfather’s train, in 1963, was neither fast nor quiet. Its noise would have been the kind that gets into your bones, shaking the saltwater crust from your forearms. The slowness would have been the sort that forces you to sit with your decision for hours, watching the coastline fall away centimetre by centimetre on a paper map in your head.
On these journeys I keep rewriting him in my head. I give him different jackets, different regrets, different generic tutto passa tattoos on different parts of his skin. Some days it’s needled onto the inside of his wrist where it can be hidden under a watch he will soon buy in Milan, other days it runs along his forearm like the name of a ship, or curls under his collarbone where only he and a lover would see it. I move the words around the way I move him around the map, testing out who he might’ve been, until the only fixed thing seems to be the phrase itself, stubbornly following us from city to city.
I have decided that my grandfather was getting the train to Turin. I see him stepping down onto a platform that smells of diesel and metal rather than salt and fish. He worked in a plant that made car parts. The plant was a new kind of sea: noisy, dangerous, governed by shifts and production targets instead of meal times and daylight. He met my grandmother on a Sunday, outside a church, which is not where my grandmother, at twenty-one, had expected to meet anyone, as she never liked church and debated going that day. He had a photograph of the Ligurian coast in his wallet, which he showed to almost no one. The edges became curled over time. He raised three children in an apartment block in a suburb of a city that was not his city, and he raised them well, or adequately, or with whatever is available to a man whose hands were made for nets rather than tools. The windows on his walls looked out over other windows. In the evenings he leaned on the balcony rail and smoked, staring at a horizon that is made of rooftops instead of water. He learned to make pesto in the apartment’s small kitchen, though the basil was wrong and the oil was wrong and the mortar was too small, and the smell that rose was close enough to cause a subtle kind of pain.
What this cost him I never could figure out. I imagine he understood the particular tax levied on people who make a practical choice against a mythological one, paid not all at once but in small instalments. A new set of routines slowly accreting over the old, the way silt settles over the seafloor in Genoa. In October, when the light changed angle, you could sometimes see him go briefly somewhere else. After all, there is a theory that the cities of the industrial north of Italy are full of people whose bodies remember the south. My body, in this story, remembers nothing of Genoa. I was not there. When I finally moved to Italy myself, it was not to the coast but to Bologna.
Bologna is red and enclosed, a place where the sky appears in rationed rectangles between terracotta roofs and the long, brick ribs of the portici. I lived there for a year. I learned the rhythm of the bus that drove past my door on Via Barberia, the way its breaks screeched at the same zebra crossing every morning. I learned the smell of coffee under the portico, as shutters roll up and someone mops up yesterday’s dirt from the marble pavement. In every corner the heat from the day sat like something waiting you out, so that walking home at midnight your ankles were still warmed from below. Still, when I walked along Via dell’Indipendenza to catch a regional train, some part of me behaved as though I were approaching a shoreline. You see, I used to live near the sea.
I have a recurring dream. In it, I am on a train, and the train is going in two directions simultaneously. This is not distressing, in fact in the dream it seems reasonable. I am sitting very still and the landscape outside the window is moving in both directions at once, receding and approaching, the same field appearing on both sides of the glass. The signs flicker between languages, and I am both very hot and very cold at the same time.
I wake up and the feeling persists for approximately thirty seconds. In those thirty seconds, my invented grandfather and the trains and Bologna all sit on top of one another like transparent slides, the colours bleeding together before they pull apart. For a moment I am not sure which language my mouth should be ready for, which currency is in my wallet, which coastline could be out the window. I open my laptop and try to connect to the Wi-Fi, as if a working signal might pin me to one place more firmly.
My grandfather’s train went north. Away from Genoa, which did not best suit his character and would’ve deeply upset his mother. I like to think he did not board it because he was brave, or certain, but because staying still for too long did not appeal to him. He still had a habit of holding onto where he’s been: a folded picture of the sea tucked close to his body, pressed against receipts and a library card and the faces of his children, which taught those who came after him (like me) what to do with the places you have inhabited and loved. To carry them until they become interior. Until the sea or a city or a landscape is not a place you are from but a room you live in, permanently, the walls of which you happen to be standing.
I am on the train again, a real one this time. The woman across from me is still asleep, her boarding pass in her novel, going somewhere. The train is still very fast and quiet and the light through the window is the flat Scottish light of spring, which is not the light of Liguria, nor Emilia, but another home of mine. I have finally connected to the Wi‑Fi, and an album of photographs from Italy opens. The lit up streets of Rome I’ve ran down at night; the Palermo backstreets where I’ve giggled until my stomach hurts; the tabaccheria in Bologna where the owner would reach behind him the moment he saw me in the doorway; a Milanese afternoon where I once walked through the fashion capital as an awkward pre-teen in the wrong shoes and the wrong jacket; the waves I jumped over in the Rimini sun; a café high up in the Italian Alps where I made snow angels and couldn’t feel my toes; the tiled floor of my flat where Genovese pesto was eaten twice a day…
Absolutely wonderful story! (as someone whose nonno was from Genova and being an immigrant myself, it landed straight into my heart! 🥹 grazie)