HOMECOMING TIME

( Annamaria Trevale ITA – Il tempo del ritorno )

A fast train was taking me in the night through landscapes one could only imagine as the darkness was even more indistinguishable beyond the dirty windows, nor did I wish to think anymore of the moment in which I would arrive, at least, to my destination.

To stop and leave that silent compartment in which I was the only one left and probably alone until the end of my journey - considering the night time– would mean leaving the somehow unsettled world of every transfer, a particular condition of non-existence which rules over the life we leave back while departing and the one we will find at the end of our journey.

Particularly that night I preferred not existing as long as I could, since I was afraid I could not face up in the best way the moment in which I should meet the precise and stable reality down there - that world which was waiting for me beyond the train station.

I was not so certain about what I would really find at the end of my journey and neither was I really concerned with the real reason which made me set out on it.

The official one – a good excuse to silence my family left behind at home, i.e. the recent death of a cousin to whom I was the only heir – hardly could have persuaded me to take that train, if an inexplicable inward voice did not intervene to be better pushing and persuasive, as to leading me to organize a sudden departure.

Actually, my interest in Stefano’s heritance - I knew it wasn’t considerable, most of all due to his three-generation family’s old manor house, probably quite creepy so that I did not know what to do with it – was almost non-existent, but did give me the pretext to return to Sant’Anna after at least twenty-five years of absence.

I had gone away, as I was still a very young man, welcoming with relief the calling for the military service as a good excuse to leave the village and its suffocating and narrow atmosphere, lacking in every prospect of change.

The luckiest among us, used to move from the village to the  provincial capital, about forty kilometres far away, but my family could not afford the economical support for my studies and therefore I began working as a mechanic, even though the job was not so exciting to me that much.

The military service, hated by almost anyone, had been my chance, my only way to escape from the Village, yet temporary.

So the very next day I was living in a gracious seaside Village, attended by many foreigners in Winter too, thanks to its warm climate. For one coming from Sant’Anna just to walk down the boulevard on the sea-front promenade, with people sitting at coffee tables, comings and goings in the streets, the relative neverending life in that place in which tourists even from abroad would never be missing, all that was a real change compared with the evenings I had spent in my dead village walking down the only main street where I knew everyone and anyone, and where it was impossible to meet an unknown face.

Within a few months I had known someone even among the youth of that place, and very before I finished my military service had my opportunity come over.

Thanks to Giorgio, a guy from that place whose father was the owner of a factory and who was looking for a good mechanic to replace his retiring one, I decided to stay in that place, at least for a while.

In those moments, while the train kept running its night journey, I was thinking about the fact that my initial concept of “at least for a while” had turned out to be a definitive detachment from my village much faster than I had planned at the beginning. Giorgio could find a microscopic place where to stay not far away from him, and during the first times, his family had often put me up as lovingly as one could do with a sort of step-child who is a little bit lost.

In my job I had been very successful so that I could soon become the right hand of the chief foreman.

Afterwards, after some insignificant affairs, I could even find a steady girlfriend.

I rarely happened to go back to my village to visit my family.

My mother had been waiting for a certain period so that I could get fed up with that experience taking therefore the decision to be back at home, until the very day I announced my will to merry my girlfriend who was from my new residence and therefore she could realise that I would never be back to Sant’Anna, and had to silently give in to my decision.

Moreover, a few years later, my sister got married as well, and moved elsewhere with her husband, while my father got ill and died after a short stay in hospital.

So, she decided to move from the village and live near my place, so the family had completely left the village in which there were just some uncles and cousins.

I had never be back until that day of my return, even though my mother had tried sometimes, with no success, to ask me to come along with her during one of her periodical visit to the remaining relatives, which included a visit to the local cemetery in which daddy and the grandfathers lay.

I would prefer thinking of the missing people in my way, on my own. I don’t really need to stand in front of a slab of marble.

But now I was on the way of my homecoming time.

My wife would like to have come with me, but I would rather  go by myself.

The boys were too busy with their studies so I could use this as an excuse to leave everybody home, at least for this time.

Maybe one day I would take them with me, to visit the place where their family was from but not that time, so particular.

I was not enough sure I wanted to recover my past, and I did not really need witnesses.

I got off the train while the first lights of the day were rising, but my journey was not over, as I had to find out someone willing to take me from the railway station to Sant’Anna which was some more kilometres far away.

The sleepy taxi driver, slumped in the driver seat of an old knocked-about Mercedes car, did not seem so enthusiastic to take me over there but he had make the best of a bad job and so did accept to drive me until my final destination.

“What the hell are you going to in such a place?” he asked me a little bit puzzled.

“No one ever gets off this train to go up there…”

“So what? Maybe, it might rarely happen, here too, that something odd does happen! Don’t you agree?”

“Sure, why not?”

The road had been recently asphalted and even though it was still narrow and winding, its worst curves had been mitigated and the black surface appeared smooth and with no potholes.

The village showed itself suddenly in the steady daylight bigger than I could remember.

New buildings had grown around the historical centre in which two main towers rose: the ancient bell tower of the main church and the creepy tower belonging to a previous temple which had never been restored after an earthquake.

“Shall I leave you in the main square?”

“Yes, thank you.”

As I got out and while the car run away as fast as the driver could I started walking down the almost empty square searching for some landmarks not to get lost.

It would have been silly of me to hope to discover the same old shops after so many years, yet while slowly hanging around the buildings, I realized that although the renewed shop signs – similar to those in big cities- the location of the bakery, the butcher and the big emporium in which you could buy almost everything – fruit, vegetables and washing powders – was quasi-unchanged. The newspaper kiosk had grown, the electrical household appliance shop had occupied the space of a store of  old farm tools, but it was still easy to me to be back to the atmosphere of that place.

People all around were curiously interested in me, and they somehow stared at me, but not in that sick way, that special attention they showed foreigners as I remembered.

I entered the main bar of the square and had a cup of coffee, the same bar in which my father used to play cards with his fellows. Hanging on the walls old stuff and pictures, which I could still recognize, were mixed to new advertisements of soft drinks, lately put on the market.

The young woman at the coffee machine seemed not to be curious about the fact that I was none of her usual bar goers, and after she had served me my cup of coffee, she got back to her work by the bar the same way she was doing when I entered.

I observed here a little bit better and I realized that, after all, she might not be born the very same day I had left that place and therefore my idea of Sant’Anna and hers might not coincide.

Nor really did I need to go out of the bar, walk down the route I could never forget – yet the external appearance of the surrounding buildings had changed – hit the old house of my family to feel better.

The building had been re-painted, almost completely restored, one-floor-raised and decorated with new shutters, with the balcony at first floor fully adorned with flowers windowbox, and actually it was unrecognizable compared with my memories of a young boy.

An old, bent and limping man, got out of the front building while I was standing on the road side, looking around for some fragments still recognizable of my memories.

He stopped and asked me:

“May I help you in finding someone?”

“No…”

“Are you maybe Luigi’s son? Antonio?”

“Yes! that’s me!

“Oh, my God, this is gorgeous! Don’t you remember me? I am Ernesto, the grocer ..when you were a child you often came to my shop with your mother, and I always gave you the sugar sweet.. to you and to your sister, too”

As for flashback in movies, I was for a while in the small shop, where thirthy-five years before my mother bought almost everything, when supermarkets did not exist yet and the grocer’s shop was a early-stage of it.

“Of course I do remember, Mr Ernesto…I am so happy to see you, still very healthy after so many years!”

“Well I can’t complain, you know… I am eighty-six years old.. what about your mother? Is she still alive?”

“Sure, she lives nearby my place and she’s well enough too.”

“Happy to hear! Say hallo to her! But what about you? What are you doing here after so many years? I’ve never seen you again nearby”

“Family matters. Did you know that my cousin Stefano died, didn’t you?

“Ah Nuccia’s son? Yep.. poorest, he was very ill, for months. It was really a pleasure meeting you. Would you like some coffee?”

I said no, explaining that I had just had one and that I had an appointment with the Notary, otherwise Ernesto would have made me come and visit him. 

I walked to the address where I was due to arrive.

I still could find the way in my home village, but many changes had been done compared to my remembrances.

My old primary school, with the ancient – but very gracious building – made of red bricks had been demolished. An anonymous modern building had replaced it with its metallic and glass made parts, of the same style as the city hall.

Some of the faces I had met while walking down the streets of my home village should certainly belong to someone I had known in my youth, as I felt like I remembered some resemblance and maybe some of them, could even recognize me.

But no one stopped me or tried to say hallo to me, except for Ernesto and that was a good thing to me. The more the time was going by, the more I realized that I only wished I could meet the notary, agree the procedures with him, and leave Sant’Anna as soon as possible.

There was nothing down there, which could even touch me. Not anymore.

Where was I? In a place I had never loved when I was young, and never missed when I was far away from it, which seemed so strange to me now that I had come back after so many years..

Thinking over it, the main events in my whole life, which made me a man, a husband and a father had happened elsewhere, and my store of memories was hardly full of some fragments belonging to Sant’Anna.

I recalled for a while of the time spent in the train, to the uncertain and conflicting thoughts during my journey.

What did I come for? Myself? My origins?

Maybe I vaguely had thought something about it the day on which I had decided to come back to Sant’Anna, but no sooner my steps of forty-five-year-old man walked down once again the streets of my village, than I started realizing that everyone is free to decide where to have his roots in, not necessarily in his birth place.

My roots, could have been in no other place but where my beloved people, my best memories and the fundamental things of my existence were still living and not where nothing more than some faded traces of my past lasted.