In the Sea There Are Crocodiles - Fabio Geda [52]
On the seat facing me was a fat gentleman who immediately opened his laptop to work. Every time we stopped at a station, or even if the train only slowed down, I leaned forward and said, Please Rome, please Rome. But there must have been a serious problem of communication between us, because whenever I said, Please Rome, please Rome, he would reply, No rum, no rum, because I pronounced Rome as rum.
After a while, after all this asking Please Rome, please Rome, the fat man started shouting angrily, No rum. No. Enough. He was really furious. He got up and walked away. I was afraid he was going to call the police. Instead of which he came back a few minutes later with a can of Coca-Cola and slammed it down in front of me and said, No rum. Coca-Cola. No rum. Drink. Drink.
I wasn’t sure what had just happened, but you should never refuse a Coca-Cola, so I opened the can and drank and it struck me that the guy was really strange, first getting angry and then treating me to a Coke. Don’t you agree? So, when we came to the next station—I was still sipping my Coca-Cola—I leaned over, innocently, and said, Please Rome, please Rome. At last, he understood. He said, Rome. Not rum. Rome.
I nodded.
Using hand gestures, he told me he was going to Rome, too, and that the central station—Termini, he called it—was his stop, and that I didn’t have to worry, because it was the last stop. So at Rome we got off together. On the platform he shook my hand and said, Bye bye, and I replied, Bye bye, and we parted.
The square in front of the station was packed with cars, people and buses. I went around all the yellow bus stops until I found number 175. I knew I had to get off at the last stop.
It was dark by the time I got to Ostiense. There were lots of people there, the kind you call tramps and I call poor people, but no Afghans. Then I saw a long line of people against a wall, and there were Afghans among them. I joined the queue. They told me they were waiting to eat, and that the food was distributed by the monks from a monastery, and that if you asked them they also gave you blankets and cardboard boxes to bed down in.
Are you hungry? one of the monks asked when it was my turn.
I guessed what he was asking me, and I nodded. They gave me two rolls and two apples, nothing else.
How do you choose a place to settle, Enaiat? How can you tell one from another?
You recognize it because you don’t feel like leaving. Not because it’s perfect, obviously. There aren’t any perfect places. But there are places where at least no one tries to hurt you.
If you hadn’t stayed in Italy, where would you have gone?
I don’t know. Paris, maybe.
And is there a place like Ostiense in Paris?
Yes, I think there’s a bridge where you can go. I can’t remember which bridge, but I know you get there by bus. I even used to know the number of the bus. Now, fortunately, I’ve forgotten it.
I had two hundred euros in my pocket, my savings from Greece. I had to decide in a hurry what to do, because if I needed to buy a ticket or something like that, I couldn’t expect that money to grow in my pocket like a plant, could I? There are moments when you give the future a strange name, and at that moment the name of my future was Payam.
As I mentioned before, I knew Payam was in Italy, but not exactly where, and as a lot of people live in Italy, I had to get cracking if I wanted to find him. So I started looking for him, mentioning his name to everyone, and after all that mentioning of his name, one day I met someone who told me he had a friend who was in England now and who might have talked to him about a boy called Payam who he’d met in a reception center in Crotone, in Calabria. Of course, it could have been another Payam. There’s no copyright on names.
We went to a call shop and phoned this friend in London, who had found work in a bar.
I have a mobile number if you want it,