Skinny Diving

I grew up without dreams. Perhaps this is a cruel way to forget my unfulfilled hopes. But to cultivate future dreams one has to imagine oneself engaged with others, and I have never done so. Today it is almost a virtue because I can tolerate the silence even in company. I am never embarrassed by the liberty to be lost in my own thoughts. It was only during my first train journey on my own that the possibility of dreaming, that the urge to make 'something of myself', sneaked into my soul. And instantly followed the vague recollection of my Grandmother's famous dictum. In one of the many long afternoons in my grandmother's kitchen, chatting over milky tea and airy torte, she announced, finally finding the words after years of brooding: 'your Grandfather wanted to make something of himself but just did not know how!'

It was with such gentle sense of failure that I departed onto life; I have never really grown to resent it. My Grandfather's dreamlike retirement from life remained an imperative relict of life founded on false illusions and imagined love. I do not mean it to sound unsympathetic but often in family matters the sooner the truth is out, the better. It was a three hours train trip from my new home, yet unable to fulfill the emotional expectations of a 'home', to my newer home, at the University. I took the noon train on purpose. It is often populated with talkative old men who like to share their pearls of wisdom with young lovely things like me. In my mind those strange encounters had about them a romantic and old-fashioned air, quite remote from life as we live it, dreamless and detached.

The hot October sun glazed the countryside with sparks of gold. The green infinite fields were spotted with lovely villas, often reduced to rubble and abandoned by their inhabitants for dislike of the annoying railway bustle. The real beauty of a landscape can never be fully appreciated from a passing train since its velocity undermines the need of attention to details. The traveler is satisfied with the smears of vivid green and the typical yellow of the Tuscan palazzo, and demands no more. I was alone in my wagon. A young man pushed open the sliding door and came in. After sitting down near the door, at the farthest corner away from me, he asked if the seat was free. I reply it is. He wore gold-rimmed round glasses that made him look older. His yellow hair was rough like strands of coarse hay just as the ones neatly piled in the fields out of the window. I took out a little notebook and started writing.

'Cos'è che scrivi?'

'I miei appunti'.

'Ah, i tuoi preziosi pensierini sulla vita e sull'amore?'

'Esattamente. E ti sei dimenticato dei sogni persi.'

'Giusto, giusto. Le sofferenze del mondo.' A thin wide smile like a horizontal line divides his face in two.

'Come è il tuo nome?' he asked nonchalantly as if it just slipped his mind.

'Ella.' I often have to repeat it because my L is too soft, but now I decided not to.

'Piacere. Carmine.' He smoothly slips to the next seat, just one away from me.

'E cos'è che fai nella vita? Scrivi storielle?'

'No, sono pasticiera. Tu?'

'Vendo fiori. Non sembri una pasticiera, nemmeno una pasticiera trozkista!' He was smirking with joy, glancing to see if I got the joke. I conceded him a little smile, which he took as an invitation to the seat in front of me. His phone rangs quite loudly. He lifted a slender finger, signaling that 'it will only take a moment', and dove into a long conversation. It is essential to keep my eyes on the quaint rural view.

'eccomi,' he turned back to me and leaned forward swiftly, his elbows resting on his knees, his breath almost in my face.

'E quindi, dove eravamo?' If this phony conversation persisted he might cease to be a stranger and would dissolve into the undistinguishable continuum of insignificant encounters that fill everyday life. I silently stared at his pale blue eyes, hidden behind those horrible glasses. This was the last glimpse before the train hurried into a tunnel. Under the hum of the train there was our tense breathing. No respectable young man would promptly move forward, take my hands in his, and kiss me. How banal and commonplace could that be? The kiss, like a flow of fresh water on a drought dried field, soon was absorbed and disappeared in a dizzyingly deep abyss on memories. His tender lips and thin, dry fingers were well accustomed to facilitating his ways to a girl. 'It was all that you wanted,' his eyes sneered at me, 'and now that you got it you pretend to be better.' Mea Culpa. And I stepped out of the show down to the busy platform at the station of Bologna, finding my way out of the crowd, overwhelmed with a sickening sense of defeat to an unpronounced dream of mindless temptation.

Skinny diving can be attempted only once and never again. It is the breathtaking excitement of taking one's clothes off on the shore by a very dark lake in the heart of night. The tremendous mind-clearing shock when the naked body encounters the freezing water. Then comes the rediscovery of the silent freedom of movement, swimming in the black shiny water. And the expected torturing walk on the pointy, slippery rocks back to shore, to the fake redemption of dressing up and hiding away until the morning comes up again.