Dacia Maraini - Train to Budapest

The train makes every reflection serpentine, humble, wise. Thought assumes the cadence of the wheels and rhythmically works through ideas as if kilometres of reflections must be traversed. Indeed, the train may carry the idea of dragging or pulling away, traîner as the French say. Is that where the word ‘train’ comes from? She immediately gets out the little etymological dictionary she always carries with her. The word is from the Late Latin ‘trenum’, a cart for transporting things. But the most astonishing thing is that ‘trenum’ derives in its turn from the Greek word ‘threnos’ meaning ‘funeral chant’. Which comes first, the cart carrying the provisions for the army or lamentation for the death of a hero? It would be logical to start with war and the impedimenta and provisions and weapons necessary for the soldiers and go on later to funeral lamentations for the deaths of so many young men. But no, the Greek word comes before the Latin one. The contradictions of a language with so many ancestors, all different. She likes to think the train recalls supplies for war but at the same time also carries an ability to console and sing songs for the dead. In the end, every train moves towards the realm of the dead, bearing ideas and meditations that feed on themselves. This is how she likes to think of it, this smoky train travelling through fields still full of land mines and through bombed cities and woods that have given refuge to desperate fugitives, as it heads slowly for Vienna.

Her father Amintore loved trains. Although he travelled very little himself, on Sundays he would set out on the floor a complicated system of rails and make miniature trains run on them, perfect copies of trains from various past periods, accurately copied from old rolling-stock and from old locomotives with fine long snouts, even with make-believe steam puffing from their chimneys.

Amintore had never liked real travel. After military service as an Alpinist in the Cadore Mountains, he had been sent to ‘civilise’ black people in Ethiopia, coming home wounded. That had been enough. No, for their honeymoon he took her mother Stefania to Venice. After that horrible act of violence she had insisted on getting married immediately. She couldn’t bear to live alone any longer. Her parents had died young. She was alone in the great house in Piazza Dalmazia. They could have lived together in her parents’ apartment, but Stefania had preferred to adapt herself to the little house in Via Alderotti, near Villa Lorenzi and the park where one day the little Amara would spend so much time running and playing with Emanuele.

How often Amintore had told her about that trip to Venice! The idea of streets of water had made a profound impression on him. ‘You wear shoes and walk on asphalt, but in fact you’re surrounded by water. You go up on a little bridge and see greenish waves forming beneath you, you go down stairs and see water following you, you get into a boat and the current of liquid goes with you. It was as if I was made of water myself too, liquefied, without a skeleton, moving like a stream.’

They had been to see a glass factory at Murano. Astonished and delighted like a child, her father Amintore, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, had witnessed the transformation of a huge drop of liquid glass into a solid bulbous vase. He had learned something from that wonderful metamorphosis: was it not the same with their own bodies that started almost liquid and then grew solid, at first shining new only to grow gradually more cracked and fragmentary, to end up broken and thrown away? Even human thoughts, at their birth, often have a miraculous transparency, a luminous liquidity that gradually becomes more opaque and worn out. This is true of religions too, and even of nations. Perhaps even his love for the lovely Stefania would undergo the same transformation; from a limpid and joyous liquid to something familiar and opaque, unrecognisable? So he sadly asked himself, carrying in his mind the image of that glass melting and running and slithering, dissolving only to coagulate like a precious memory as soon as it was held away from the fire. It was an image of the power and fragility of the universe. He had talked about this to his daughter, often, remembering that trip to Venice that had been one of the few memorable events in his humble life as a cobbler. He had discovered the consistency of water outside a bottle or bucket. He had joyfully followed things that run, that silently modify themselves in the purity of matter. And he had thought of his own spirit as having become a broken glass. He had so much longed for a strong young hand to grab it with tongs and put it back in the fire to make it liquid again, mobile and ready to take on new shapes. Why do we stay in a predictable form, always the same? he had asked his little daughter, certain she would not understand, but hoping she might remember something of his words.

The memory of all those Sundays sitting on the floor with her father Amintore, busy with his model trains, return to her memory as the train draws her towards the future. Perhaps it is from this, from the imaginary journeys her father took, that she derives her love of trains. Who knows! With a few rapid movements the young Amintore would move aside the two shabby armchairs and the bench that stood round the table. He would close the table’s gate-legs and push it against the wall, clearing a space for his trains to run. He claimed it was for her that he set out his railway, but he himself was the real enthusiast. Hurrying to buy new model engines as soon as they came out. Spending hours coupling carriages to make up trains. Learning the name of every steam or electric locomotive in the world.

How often he had dragged her when she was little to the railway museum near the station, where obsolete rolling-stock was preserved! He had hoisted her up into one of those ancient steam engines that looked like something from a Buster Keaton film, especially his most famous one, The General. A film her father told her about and which she saw many years later with Luca at the Chaplin Club. An adventurous and indomitable train hurling itself over mined bridges and racing like a maddened horse past fields and meadows and cities, staking out a road between forests and mountains.

Did these mobile toys represent journeys Amintore could have made but never did make? There would have been enough money for occasional expeditions across the border. But something always stopped him. Perhaps the ugly experience of 1935 in Ethiopia, where he discovered poverty and sickness and was forced to shoot at people for whom he felt no dislike. Sometimes Amara would find him bending over a map, busily planning a journey that would have taken them far away. He would apply for passports, set aside money for their tickets and choose what clothes to take, but at the last moment something always stopped him. Their suitcases, standing ready, would remain mysteriously empty. He preferred familiar local expeditions to Monte Morello and its peaks: Poggio dell’ Aia which reached 950 metres amid pines, oaks and silver firs; Poggio Casaccia, and Poggio della Cornachiaccia which he loved best of all, for its view of the Vaglia valley.

She sees him from a distance raising his hand. And there are the gazelles, running across his chest. This cheers her up. She had asked him to wear the same sweater as when they met on the first journey, from Vienna to Kraków. Coming near him, she meets the bergamot fragrance he has put on for her. He has a blissful smile and a little bunch of wild flowers in his hand.

‘Your husband?’

‘He’s fine.’

‘So he just wanted you back for love.’

‘I don’t know about love, but he certainly wanted attention.’

‘So he wasn’t ill at all?’