San Dalmazzo
I can’t remember if I read this somewhere or just thought it, but it rings true nevertheless: that Europeans come to the America to encounter Space, and Americans go to Europe to encounter Time. We go there, find some well-worn fixtures or antiquities, and sigh with relief, happy to see that History can persist— or that Time is real— unlike in the States, where everything gets redecorated every ten years and Space relentlessly subjugates Time.
The train station in Cuneo, Italy, was one of those fixtures for me, those weird time-reminding topoi. Crowded with ghosts. Physically empty, but thick with the spirit of previous passengers and those old-timey odors: stained wood, ink, wool, the carbonic scents of any depot. I could easily hallucinate lumps of family waiting to board a train, or fin-de-siècle men of business, leaning on the counters with a tilted glass of beer or pastis or whatever. We— Sara Løve and I— had been dropped off by an older Rumanian who looked and dressed like Chico Marx, only with more comfortably weathered features. He thought we needed a train to France. Walking inside the station, waving, we let him believe it and just ordered some wine— this stuff called Barbera that an Italian kid named Aguirre had plied us with. It was apparently at a twenty year best. Who knows? Tasted good to a soda-swiller such as myself.
Night had already fallen. We began snooping around the station for a dark corner or secluded room to sleep in. The place had a great magnetism to it, like a world juncture or a holy topos, that somehow beckoned us. The lady behind the bar even took a liking to us and brought over a plate of cheese and prosciutto, with a wink. All frequencies were in accord. However, we both felt a little regretful— not to mention a little racist— for turning down the Rumanian’s invitation. A dinner, maybe some weird fruity aperitif, then strained conversation in front of a television set about the Olympics and recent Rumanian elections. On the other hand, his whole clan and enclave— tucked away near the Cuneo airfields— made for a pretty hyper-Rumanian scenario: cleaning street carts, joking, wariness, a bunch of families stacked on top of each other. It was definitely deep within the fold of things. We dallied at the station instead, with no clear plan and the night hours ticking by, safely and definitively outside the reach of consolidated Space. They couldn’t have found us if they tried.
Happiness is literally an odor. It comes in through the nose and just seizes you, or fills you, but it’s impossible to point to or stack up for safe keeping. You just have keep yourself in the rush of things. Got to admit: I was pretty happy at the moment— well-seized— leaving that station at midnight with the brilliant plan of walking to France. The wine was still working on us. We walked on through the half-darkness, alongside the road and into a township called San Dalmazzo, another moonbase town like Vaduz, Liechtenstein, with a confusing and defamiliarizing, dislocating design. Another non-place. Finally, across the way from a creepy statue of Orso Bianco— icon of the Italian ice cream chain— we found an abandoned villa for sale. We broke in and prepared for sleep in a dreamy Nowhere, overlooking a field and Orso Bianco. Sara and I were carving out a sneaky little pilgrimage path from Bavaria to Zaragoza, in what turned out to be the successful recovery of something unsolid and unsymbolized. Something that had made me begin to gravely doubt the charms of civilization, or civility let’s call it. This something— the unsolid, maybe unsymbolizable— I can’t really show you. Still trying to articulate it to myself. I did take some some pictures, however, if you’d like to see. Just give me a bit.
El Camino de Borja
Villa Exit
More San Dalmazzo