Night Station

I couldn’t tell what time it was because the station clocks do not work. Used to be the two on either side of the underpass heading toward the various tracks were set for different times, both wrong. Now the clocks have been yanked out of the plaster altogether and when one looks to see how much time one has to waste before the train arrives one finds only two crumbly, taped-up holes in the wall and is therefore left to one’s own devices. My train leaves at 8:21 and the bar and giornalaio both close at 8:00. When the bar is closed I choose the Sala Attesa or waiting room with its frescoed ceiling, partly because I love to study the two art-deco mermaid-angels, women with wings and fins, who seem to swirl around some kind of coat-of-arms I can’t identify, all swooshy in embellishments of blue, gold, lavender in intricate patterns that really don’t make sense but enchant me all the same.

When I stepped into the Sala Attesa last night there was a live naked lady dancing on one of the carved benches, dancing as though this is what one does when waiting for trains. She seemed Calypso, maybe, astonishingly beautiful, her black skin gleaming in the flickery lights behind shades, a happier woman I have never seen, surely a little drunk because she raised a paper cup at me when she saw me coming in and sang out “Cin Cin” in greeting, toasting me, as though I were welcome to the party that was now happening full blast. “Cin Cin” a man curled up in the corner not too far from where I stood also raised a cup to me, he obviously drunk, nearly passed out even, his cup sloshing a little as he pushed it toward me, his eyes not even opening. The dancing woman’s feet made a drum-like sound as she moved up and down the bench, Tom-tom, tom-tom.

A younger man in an oversized dirty coat sat on the bench across from the dancing woman and now and then would stand up and grab her wrist and try to pull her down toward him or reach up and squeeze an ample swaying breast and she seemed to love his attention even when she’d swat his hands away. Indeed, why would a woman dance naked in public if she did not want attention? What astonished me was how no one seemed to mind her nakedness, not the older man snoring obscenely on another of the benches, not yet another man reading a pink Corriere dello Sport on yet another bench, certainly not oblivious, but certainly not annoyed, not even me, though I certainly felt disoriented and not quite sure how I should behave. It surprised me that no authorities had urged her to stop, but then I began to wonder—who were the authorities? I’d once had a wallet and passport pick-pocketed in this station and, even with a police office right by the tracks, nobody seemed to know what to do about my crisis and I wondered would anyone know what to do about a dancing naked lady if anything in fact needed to be done.

At one point the young man started reaching for places that made even the woman dancing claim she was embarrassed. “Mi Vergogna,” she’d protest, whining a little, laughing a lot, as she’d topple in response to his insistent caterwauling while the half-conscious bum in the corner kept calling out to us “Cin Cin” and I made up my mind that I’d rather sit out on the marble bench alongside binario due in the rain than watch live sex acts in the waiting room of the train station.

It wasn’t too cold out, but was indeed wet, la nebbia or fog extraordinarly dense as it is this time of year in the valleys of hill towns when often one can travel miles and miles by train and see nothing but the white of what seems cotton batting tinged orange by the artificial lights that blink on at nightfall. Even on the tracks outside the station the fog was dense enough that I could hardly see who was sitting on the bench adjacent to mine, but if I looked across the track to the glass window in the door of the Sala Attesa I could see the warm light from inside and the happy face of the dancing lady appearing again and again as she moved up and down the bench inside, nearer and then farther away. She seemed to know I saw her. She seemed to look back.

When I got home, I was overcome with a need to dance naked, though I was grateful there was no one around to see what’s become of my body in recent years, not that I really did dance or even strut around naked, cold as it was, tired as I was, by the time I finally got home. Still, something like a dancer had come alive in me and I found myself inexplicably happy despite having had the worst of possible days as though the woman’s lack of inhibition were my own and I was now free to do anything at all with my life my heart bid me to do.