Six years ago a friend of mine gave me his bicycle as a gift and he is gone forever. For three years the bike has always served me: I loaded it like a mule to do the shopping, we went a couple of times away and then around this green area, for months she and I, her bike. For months and miles, it was my car. I remember that she was waiting for me on the last sidewalk of the station when he left. When I left for London it was brought with great difficulty to Padua and when I returned from London I went to pick it up from Padua. It was raining heavily that day, rivers of water lined the streets and the Paduans found a girl in the rain who splashed water everywhere and sang the Christmas song “Jingle bells” in the middle of summer. I was very happy to be able to ride a bike. When I arrived at the station, the track for the bike was the last one, outside the station shelter and so I had to forcefully fit the bike onto the wagon and then pull it up, in the midst of a thousand curses on that last wagon before the locomotive. Unlike the one I have at home, this one was called “Little Mermaid” because during the winter rains of a cold and merciless reverse, I always emerged from the waters on her saddle and stayed afloat. I walked around in sub-zero temperatures and warm socks under my pants. Then one day I went to the library, serene as always, and when I go out I haven’t found her. You took away not only a bike of questionable economic value, and of fundamental practical value, but you also took away a dear memory and a piece of my life. The Little Mermaid was the only memory I had of my friend. Thieves assholes!
If you present yourself with a naked soul to a person, you are presenting yourself unarmed and defenseless. You are giving him all of you: hidden truths, your emotions, your soul. As you do this you need to be aware of it, you need to know that there can be an after-effect of ashes. You must know that if and when he goes away there will be nothing intact inside you because you have given him everything, but believe me when I tell you that there is nothing more beautiful than doing it totally without limits or inhibitions. Without putting a limit on your being. But while you do it you must not underestimate the consequences, the taste and the quantity of the tears of the after, of how much it could hurt the end or discover that it was only “lies of words” to enchant you and make “Strip” your soul. If you introduce yourself to a person with a naked soul, do not underestimate anything because afterwards it will be too late “to get dressed”I think it’s in our nature to want to try to the end. We are not made for lukewarm emotions: when we choose, for better or for worse, we do it with the heart and soul, and we do not give up until we have given our all, even what we did not think we had. Pain does not scare us, this is our problem, so we are willing to throw ourselves into the flames … All in a desperate attempt to keep a balance, something as abstract as love, which we women continue, despite everything, to believe that it is concrete and stable.
I like the idea of the station, of the train. If I stopped even for 5 minutes at the station, my whole life would pass from there: my life in the past and that of the future. I don’t know why but the stations have something magical about them. Sometimes I would like to go to the station and stop there for hours, just to observe the people, try to understand their gestures, their lives and their thoughts. Because only if we stop to observe can we capture the details. Also, I think it’s the only place that can give me the answers I’m looking for. For example, I could talk to a bum: after all they are nothing more than people who need someone to listen to them. I could find myself in front of scenes of children leaving their mothers to go to work or college or mothers leaving their babies to their husbands because I have to leave for work. I might meet travelers getting on and off from train to train to get around town. Or I could witness the kisses: the real kisses and the goodbyes, the real ones of two young lovers. Who knows maybe I could also find some crazy kid (like me) who has decided to escape but who in the end can’t because he knows that what he leaves is too precious for him and if anything one day he will take a train, it will be the one for eternity.Or maybe the person I really imagine I’m meeting is a woman. I don’t know what age, maybe around fifty, or maybe younger, I don’t know, I know for sure that I could share my whole life with her. I know that I would not hesitate so much to tell him all the things I have never told anyone, everything I have inside and I know that behind his silences his answers would be hidden. A person who would be able to undress me, in short. To strip myself not of the clothes, but of the masks that society obliges me to wear, that I manage to strip my soul: to dig inside myself. I love this type folks. But I don’t just love the people I can find there, I also like the objects, the sounds we find in the station. For example, his bell always reminds me of the school bell, and how at school it rang when the time changed at the station it rings when a train arrives. The benches make me reflect on how sometimes it is bad to wait for someone or something that does not arrive, and then all the tiredness that we carry with us. Then there are the time tables that remind me that everything has a time: life is based on time and it is up to us to decide how to occupy the waiting moments.Then there are the tracks … well I love those. You never know where they end up, you only see infinity in front of you and behind you, and then if you see them at dawn, what a strange effect they have on you. And then the tracks made me understand that coincidences are nothing more than a pause: you stop, parallel to something else and after a while you leave. And since for me life is made up of coincidences, because I don’t believe in destiny, I realized that every time I stop I leave with a different baggage, richer or poorer, ruined or healthy and shining, but the fact is that that coincidence has changed something. That’s why I don’t believe in destiny, we are the proponents of destiny… at every coincidence we stop and it is precisely in that waiting time that we decide our future.
We were on the train and we were approaching Venice. After Mestre I start to feel a smell in the air .. A strong smell coming through the windows. It was hot and the windows were all open. I smell better and finally smell the sea. I start crying like a desperate one. All the people turn and they all look at me with concern. But it wasn’t desperation. They did not know that it had been three very long years that I had not seen and heard the sea. So smell that well known smell it was beautiful. And then once we got to Venice I was shocked by its beauty. The very fact of not having cars around was fantastic. Then as soon as I arrived, from a side street, in front of the colored marbles of San Marco I was moved again. Because those colors, those shapes, everything was like that
THE PRODIGY OF IDEAS 