Night Train to Florence Read online

  Night Train to Florence

  By Gabriella West

  Liz and I were both studying Italian at an Irish university in the mid-’80s, which is why we found ourselves together one late summer afternoon on the streets of Milan, hurrying toward the train station (which our guidebook told us was a monument of fascist architecture) to catch the train back to Florence. Then something unexpected caught our attention. On a sunny, deserted street, two girls in dresses were throwing a Frisbee back and forth almost dreamily. They were pretty girls with long hair who smiled at each other; they were our age, 18, 19, and seemed curiously absorbed in their game. Liz and I stood and watched them, astonished. Liz was not good at pausing—it was not natural for her to watch others with interest and without expectation—but I liked to shape stories in my head, and by the time we had reached the end of the street I'd convinced myself that what I had just seen was so strangely unreal that if I looked back, the girls would have vanished.

  Liz too seemed slightly shaken by the experience, which surprised me. I wondered if she felt the same twinges of jealousy that I did. The girls had seemed such good friends! Traveling around Northern Italy with Liz had been a mixed experience so far; there hadn't been the deepening of the friendship that I had hoped for. We had fought several times, over nothing, really: just our different rhythms. Liz was excitable and had great stamina; I was slower, more thoughtful, and tended to expect her to be the leader. Her grasp of the language, after all, was so much better. We were here because our university required us to go to Italy for two months during our three-year course. We had become wearily familiar with trains and ferries, hostels and quick snacks from railway bars. Liz required regular infusions of coffee to keep her going. I didn't, but accompanied her to cafés. Neither of us had enough money to eat properly. "You've lost so much weight!" Liz had said approvingly, after our first month, as I sat up on a bed in a Florence hotel. She was skinny, with a short mop of fuzzy, thick blond hair and glasses. I was her complete opposite: plump, long dark hair, with full breasts and wide hips. Uncomfortable with my femininity, I hid myself as best I could, though it was difficult in the Italian summer. We carried large bottles of water with us and I sweated a lot, although Liz, annoyingly, didn't.

  We had covered a lot of ground. It shocks me now to think of how many towns we visited, and for what short periods. Liz had it all mapped out in her head. We had passed through Perugia, Bologna, Parma, Ravenna, Assisi, Florence, Siena, Pisa, Lucca, Bergamo, Brescia and now Milan. I was looking forward to getting back to Florence, where I would take the train home, and Liz would stay on. She planned to go down south, to Rome and Sicily. I didn't envy her that journey. She had so little money now. We both had the kind of families where asking for more money was difficult, not even an option, really, and anyway, we were too proud. We were very much on our own.

  As we sat in the train for the long trip back to Florence, I remembered one shining moment of togetherness at the beginning of our travels. We'd taken a bus to San Miniato, on the outskirts of Florence, and had climbed the hill to the little yellow church. I had loved it the year before, when I'd come on my own, and wanted to show Liz the view of the city from that spot. We sat on a bench and sipped cheap white wine from a carton we'd bought in a shop. We only had one plastic glass, so we passed it back and forth. Quite rapidly we got drunk, since our stomachs were empty. We laughed easily. Everything suddenly seemed alive, vivid, and there was something charged in the air between us. Liz had lively blue eyes behind her glasses; both of us liked to laugh, but life had not been kind to us. One thing we had in common was our romantic inexperience. Nobody had ever asked us out. I had fallen in love with my best friend in school, but Liz did not know this. I felt like telling her, then. We were up there, outside the city, shaded by a cypress. The heat was gentle, steady, and it supported us as we gulped down our drinks. We would have a good time in Italy, I thought, and I was grateful to Liz for letting me come along. So I told her so.

  "Oh, I'm glad to have your company too," she had said, smiling. "It's going to be difficult when you leave. I'm dreading it."

  * * *

  I'd believed her. But then, on the train, as we sat across from each other in a daze, as she began to gush about what she would do after I left, how great it would be to see Sicily and Rome... I felt suddenly useless. I had in my hands a novel called The Woman of Rome, and as I tried to tune Liz out, I found myself reading something about the different levels of desire that people have for one another, how no two people, even if they love each other, ever feel the same thing at the same time. A feeling of sadness grew and grew. It was so true. Liz seemed not to notice my mood. Her face had got all pink; she was like a child, I thought scornfully. I tried hard never to get excited about things; it was safer. I closed my eyes, feeling tears prick at my eyelashes. She didn't care. I had wondered if she was attracted to me, if possibly something would happen during this long journey together, but obviously she was just interested in herself.

  The thump of the train dulled me into a stupor. I was aware of the Italian families chattering to each other; at least they seemed warm and expressive. I had never sat in a train carriage with my family, and if we had, we wouldn't be speaking to each other, except to utter sarcasms or reprimands. Liz had a harshness, too, I thought; she was utterly pragmatic. And yet a year ago on her eighteenth birthday she had seemed so vulnerable when she confessed to me that she thought she might be a lesbian. "Oh, I'm sure you're not," I had responded numbly. I wanted to add, "I think I am," but I had been afraid to. We had sat together in the cold hallway of her flat while other people danced and chattered and drank in the other room. She had wanted to be with me, not them; I recognized this, but felt threatened by it somehow. I wasn't ready. Earlier she had left the party to cry in her bedroom, and I had wanted to go in and comfort her but something had stopped me.

  Would it always be like this with us? Would we never be able to comfort each other, connect in any deep way? It looked like it, I thought grimly, and I didn't see much hope of someone else coming along either.

  "What did you think of those girls?" Liz said suddenly. She had a rather sharp way of looking across at me sometimes.

  "What do you mean?" I muttered. I didn't maintain eye contact for very long. I felt like a sulky child.

  "Oh, you know... the ones on the street. Do you think they were tourists?"

  "They must have been. They had backpacks."

  "There was something hippyish about them," Liz said thoughtfully.

  It was 1986, and nobody wanted to look like hippies. The sixties had not yet come back into vogue. But Liz and I shared a fondness for that time.

  "It was like an old film," I said. That was the way I had experienced it, and I was surprised when she agreed.

  "I know," she said. "Like a silent movie."

  We smiled at each other. Film was another great love that we shared. Liz kept a list of all the films that she saw, and graded each one on a scale of one to ten. That was one of our first conversations, I remembered, at the university accommodations where we met. I'd been fascinated by this attention to detail. It was so English (which she was).

  "I'm dead tired," I said helplessly. I was afraid I sounded pathetic, like a baby, but Liz nodded and rubbed her eyes.

  "I wish they'd shut up," she said in a low voice. The other inhabitants of the carriage were blithely unresponsive to our presence. It was like this always. If you were visiting a country you were somehow unreal to its inhabitants. Liz and I moved through Italy in some kind of limbo. We had very little contact with outsiders. This satisfied me, though I sensed that it made Liz anxious. The men we encountered seemed to regard us as a couple. That was ironic, I thought. We were far fro
m that.

  But I didn't know what it was like to be in a couple anyway, and certainly not with a woman, though I was even more clueless about men, never having felt any desire for them. It reassured me a little that Liz's attraction to men seemed so shallow and of such recent origin.

  The train rolled on. It was funny in a way to be returning to the beginning of our trip, like the source of a river. At each stop, the train emptied. We would reach Florence in the early morning.

  * * *

  I was still feeling a little clutch of sadness. Liz moved over to sit next to me. I was surprised, but felt so numb that it didn't matter. She had moved because an elderly man sitting close to her was smoking a particularly foul pipe. He pulled his hat down over his eyes and appeared to be falling asleep.

  "He's got the right idea," I whispered to her. We began to giggle over what we could throw into the bowl of his pipe to snuff it out, and to try to figure out how to say in Italian, "Put that in your pipe and smoke it." Then we laughed about the German man in the train to Pisa who had slapped his wife proprietorily on the thigh and asked inanely, "Pisa?" even though we had just set out from Florence. All our good memories seemed to be in Florence, I thought dreamily. We were resting against each other now and the warmth somehow helped. Yes, we'd both agreed he was a sexist pig. Liz got very offended if men behaved like chauvinists. Her father was an insensitive boor, she'd told me, who liked to pick the hairs out of his nose while he sat in his armchair at night. She'd always sided with her mother against him.

  Liz pulled a little bottle of wine out of her rucksack, which was always stuffed to bursting and which she had affectionately named il vecchio gobbo, the old hunchback. Sometimes she referred to it with relish as il vecchio gobshite, a coarse Dublin term of abuse that cracked me up. I was thrilled at the wine and we began to drink it greedily.

  It was almost completely dark in the carriage. I could sense Liz's nice clean English smell, and wondered if my sweatiness bothered her. She rested her head on my shoulder, and I marveled once again at how coarse her hair was. "It's like a boy's," I thought affectionately. I was the one who always wore men's clothes, though, jeans and shirts. Liz preferred a more crisp and feminine look—white blouses, skirts. I envied her hairless legs.

  "I'm getting maudlin," Liz confessed. "I'm so scared of you going... what am I going to do?"

  "You don't need me," I replied. There was no bitterness in my voice. I just knew it was true. "You'll do fine without me. You'll be able to chat up men."

  There was a pause. "I don't really want to," Liz said. She sounded quite subdued. "I mean, even if I do, I'm not sure that's what I really want."

  I didn't know what to say, and cursed myself for not having the right words. But somehow it didn't matter. I was tipsy, and so was she, and we were in a night train careening through the Italian countryside, and the old man's pipe had gone out, and nobody could see us. So as she looked at me plaintively and rather shyly I reached out and touched her face. Just quickly. It was almost involuntary.

  "I've never kissed a woman. Have you?" Liz said. She looked at me with great intensity, but her curiosity seemed more cerebral than sensual.

  "Yes...," I said hesitantly. My memories of kissing my school friend were so precious to me, yet they seemed very far away. I had resigned myself to never being with anyone else again, since it seemed that I had lost the part of me that would take the risk of reaching out to a friend.

  Her eyes gleamed. "I thought you had," she murmured. She appeared to admire this. I almost smiled.

  She reached into her rucksack and pulled out another bottle. "Let's go the whole hog," she suggested. Then we laughed, because the English phrase sounded so funny. "Where are we?" I said wildly. "Isn't it strange, we could be anywhere." The train did indeed lurch to a halt on occasion, but no one ever came in. We had already had our rail passes stamped, so we were pretty much going to have privacy for the rest of the trip.

  "You could stretch out," I suggested. "Except there's only really room for one of us to do that." The old man was still huddled in the corner. Now he was snoring faintly.

  "But... not if we stretch out together!" Liz was giddy now. She got up, pushed me down and then climbed on top of me. We entwined our legs around each other.

  "How does this feel?" she asked.

  I didn't know. Maybe it was the wine, but my skin was burning. We looked at each other for a long time. Then she took off her glasses. She put them down on the floor. I lay there waiting. She seemed to know what she wanted to do. I was grateful for that.

  She kissed me on the lips, first tentatively and then using her tongue. I had never had anyone's tongue in my mouth. I pressed back against the seat, pulling her down hard on top of me. Her skin felt so silky and soft; she was very pale despite weeks in the Italian sun.

  We kissed for a while. I found myself undoing her bra and running my hands over her breasts. It was weird. I sort of knew what to do even though I had always assumed that I would freeze up in this situation. Liz seemed quite determined to make the most of our opportunity. Before I knew it she had unbuttoned my shirt, pulled my breast out of my bra, and began sucking on my nipple. She used her teeth.

  I gasped. She was so enthusiastic in her movements. I felt myself drowning in a sea of wetness. I pulled her other hand down into my jeans. Again, she seemed to know what to do.

  Her fingers brought out waves of pleasure. I began moaning gently. The old gentleman's snores were louder if anything, more explosive. Her fingers worked hard against my groin, flickering against my clit, penetrating me. My breasts were so sweaty now, my nipples huge and erect.

  "I want to go down on you," she whispered in my ear. Her voice was low and throaty. She seemed possessed.

  "No, no... he'll see," I muttered.

  "Nobody will see," she said impatiently. "Don't you want to?"

  My face was burning red, partly from embarrassment, partly from arousal. She propped the rucksack up by my head at the side of the seat so that my view of the old man was blocked. then I felt cool air on my legs. She pushed them apart.

  It was strange to have something happen which was so outside my usual fantasies. Oral sex had been something I'd always dreaded. I'd felt the shame about my body that most young women feel. I didn't want that level of intimacy. It seemed terrifying. But I couldn't say no.

  At first I felt nothing, and the roughness of her tongue just seemed pleasant. I worried about having to fake it. Then she seemed to find a rhythm, for I noticed that my body was responding, my thighs were tightening. Then there was a point where I realized I didn't want it to stop. My breathing was rough and ragged. I began to beg. Suddenly I felt her fingers going inside me and I almost screamed.

  She pushed up on top of me, still fucking me with her hand. Sweat was dripping off her face and onto my breasts. I felt myself rising off the seat, desperate to get more of her inside me. Suddenly she was on the seat, I was on top of her, and I stopped moving. A shudder rose up from the depths of me; I held my breath, trying to keep the sensation, and then, pushing down against her, I came. My face was wet with sweat, my ears burning, and as I relaxed against her, I felt her idly stroking my cheek.

  "What about you?" I managed to say. I felt too tired to do anything more. I hoped she wouldn't be disappointed.

  "I'm OK," she said. I realized that she was still fully clothed, more or less. I wrapped my arms about her.

  "I think I like doing it more than it being done to me," she continued.

  I didn't understand this, but let it go. I still couldn't really move. I had no clue how to process what had happened.

  "Well, you'll remember that, won't you?" she said gently. She reached down to fumble around for her glasses. I looked at her face. She was so relaxed and calm that it made me realize how overwrought and tense she usually was.

  "I'll try," I said with a smile. There didn't seem much more to say. I pulled on my clothes, and we rested together. Soon we fell asleep. We awoke as the train was pu
lling into Florence. The old man had left the compartment, but on the seat across from us—a perfect, surrealistic vision—lay his pipe.

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  Gabriella West, Night Train to Florence

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