Every night, when I tuck my daughter Julia into bed, she asks me to tell her a story. For a while, she would call out a number between one and my age, and ask for a story from when I was that age. Noting the abundance of stories from Italy — and the energy in my voice when telling them — nowadays, she just asks for “an Italy story.”
Although I’ve exhausted many of these stories, I always come up with something, even if it’s just a list of first foods I ate, or items of clothing, or first words in Italian. One story that I happened upon recently took place when I was nineteen, and traveling from Rome to Turin to visit my mother’s distant relatives in a little mountain village where I’d first been when I was nine.
I was just starting to learn Italian, which came easily having studied Spanish in high school. Still, I was straining to understand, and when the little train that had gone from Turin to the surrounding mountain villages slowed to a stop, I was stumped into silence. Surely the train would continue, I thought, staring at my little ticket destined for Frazione Braida, the village named for my ancestors.
But everyone was getting up to leave. After a few minutes, the train conductor came and said, Signorina, devi uscire. Miss, you have to leave.
Perplexed, I looked up at him. “Train stop-ud,” he said in broken English, making a sharp hand motion that I knew was Italian sign language for È finito. It’s over.
The dusky violet light hovered over unfamiliar mountains laced with vineyards. I was lost, but at least it was in a beautiful place. And, probably without hotels.
Panicked, I showed him my ticket. “No go,” he said, shaking his head and finger at the same time. “But I have to go to my relatives there,” I told him, about to cry. When he looked as confused as I was, I tried explaining in Italian —which worked enough for him to understand that I was stuck. The dusky violet light hovered over unfamiliar mountains laced with vineyards. I was lost, but at least it was in a beautiful place. And, probably without hotels.
Venga, he said, and I followed him to a little office inside the train station. As he began packing up his things, I studied him: With ash-blonde hair, a beard, and a stocky frame, the train conductor, whose name was Carmine, looked more like a lumberjack than the Italians I’d met in Rome. Perhaps his heartiness made me trust him when he suggested I stay with him and his family that night. The next day, he proposed, he would drive me to my relative’s house, about a 20-minute drive.
At this point in the retelling of the story for Julia, to whom I always repeat the advice “don’t talk to strangers,” I feel a slight compulsion to edit out my unquestioning response: Va bene. Okay.
But instead, I tell her the real version of what happened, which is: nothing. Or nothing bad — and everything good. Within a few minutes of getting in the train conductor’s car, we were a casa, where his wife, a robust woman with long, curly black hair welcomed me. Who knows what he told her in Italian about this young, American solo-traveling girl with a backpack almost as big as she was, but whatever it was generated immediate sympathy for me.
She made a big pot of spaghetti, and a couple of other adults joined us for dinner. They served red wine, which loosened me up to try out my Italian. They wanted to know all about me: where I was from in America, why I was in Italy, who my relatives were. They sent me to bed with a cup of chamomile tea, and I slept until morning. After a breakfast of a caffè latte and cookies, the train conductor drove me straight to Angelina, who was relieved to see me. I exchanged addresses with Carmine, and when I got back to America, we wrote each other a few times.
At this point in my re-telling, Julia is fast asleep, and I am transported enough in my memory to soon follow suit. But first, the moral of the story, told only to myself — a mantra that I experienced at least a few more times after my Italian journey: Let strangers be part of your story. Sometimes they are just the people you need to meet.
