On the way to Florence

The train from Bologna to Florence cuts through the Italian countryside, leaving Bologna behind in a hurry, taking us through large fields of waist high grass, past brooks and streams, and individual houses set in the valley, with Italian clothes blowing on Italian clothes lines. My partner says that we can’t sleep at the same time or our packs might be stolen. She tells me that we’ll sleep in shifts and is asleep herself minutes afterward. I do not want our packs to be stolen, but I was also deeply, deeply, sleepy. By nature I’m more trusting than she is, less worried about the many things that can go wrong. Often, she’s right, and I’m wrong, and things do go wrong, but sometimes they don’t, and I feel very superior and justified in my position because humans are like that.

          I doze in and out of sleep as we pass through mountains, lumbering through dark tunnels like a dragon, only to arrive out in the dazzling mid-afternoon light ,the grass, the houses on the hillsides like snowflakes. Every time she wakes up she asks me if I’ve been sleeping. I tell her no, then smile, and she asks me where I got the drool on my shoulder. “Someone put it there,” I assure her. “He just spilled some water on it after he borrowed our packs. He said he’d bring it right back.” This gentle ribbing does nothing, or maybe it does. Maybe it keeps me sane. Maybe it keeps us both sane. Who knows? We just get this one brief blink of an eye.

          We move through a variety of other stations, places I don’t remember that seemed to be in the middle of nowhere. The train stations out on the edge of some small town as if it were the American west and tumbleweeds were about to blow through. Finally, we get off the train in Florence and lug our bags, which I’ve been told weigh only forty-seven pounds, but which feel as if they carry the weight of the world in them. “I’m Atlas,” I say, but no one ever gets Ayn Rand jokes because she’s mercilessly not funny. (The referent, of course, is not originally from Rand). Our packs are so heavy that it’s hard to imagine carrying them from the train station to our hotel. It’s hard to imagine carrying them anywhere. Not for the first time I reflected on what a shame it was that I hadn’t been born independently wealthy. Wouldn’t it be nice if a porter had been doing all those things for us? A fellow we could befriend to make it okay, but still, someone who could carry our bags? We’re a frugal American couple though, scouring the internet for cheap flights for months in advance and we carry our elephant sized packs on our backs as punishment.

          We walked from the train station towards our accommodations, referring frequently to a map in our guide books, so people would be sure to know that we weren’t from Italy. “Is there a McDonald’s here or what?” I asked everyone that I could, using exaggerated Italian pronunciation that my sister told me was really only true for Mafioso southern Italians. I’m certain that we’ll have to walk for miles, but it’s only a few blocks. The streets are serpentine and cobble stoned. We round a corner and come upon the Duomo, built by Michelangelo or some other Italian asshole, depending on who you ask. Something about Italian sculpture makes you feel as if you have wasted most of your life on frivolous things. He built the Duomo, and all I’ve got is this shitty poem about pigeons.