Exclusive first draft: “So Long,” a short story

Lino looked down the old road toward Padova. The Italian countryside stretched out all on sides, a pale green plain dotted with patches of yellow. Silent. Still. Cold. Clear. A usual winter day in northern Italia. 

His worn shoes made a grinding sound in the gravel as he turned in the opposite direction loud in the stillness. Ahead lay the town of Vicenza—a town he had never visited, despite its proximity. The road was almost a mirror of the view behind: a shabby pavement, stretching into the distance, the same pale winter farmlands spread out on either side. An occasional clump of trees and sections of old stone walls. 

To the right, far off at the top of a slight rise was a stone farmhouse and a barn. It might be abandoned. Ruins. Or it perhaps it was full of life in the cold, clear afternoon. From this distance, Lino could not know. Death and life looked the same.

He turned to his left, breaking the silence with his shoes again. Train tracks, stretching away straight and true. Telephone poles stood next to the trees, closer to the tracks on, spaced at even intervals. Each subsequent totem seemed smaller than the previous until they disappeared in miniature. A straight line of planted trees was a windscreen between each set of poles. A neat, ordered geometry. Two straight iron rails receding until they touched. Wooden crossties at precise intervals. The spaced telephone poles and trees. Lino counted how many trees had been planted between the two poles closest to him. Thirteen. He counted the next set, and the next: as many as he could until the distance made it impossible to see. Each numbered thirteen. Order—and superstition be damned.

Lino turned a fourth time, one hundred and eighty degrees. Crunch. Once again, a mirror of the opposite direction, except, in the distance, the tracks curved around rising hills, the line of trees hiding the poles after the curve. He could only count three poles (thirty-nine trees).

Standing in the middle of the street and the middle of the tracks where the two crossed, Lino imagined what he looked like from far above. A small, insignificant dot, standing at the center of a cross made of wood, iron, and dirt. He raised his arms up from his sides. He knew that one of his arms was longer than the other, one was stronger than the other. His hair was combed to the side. The left pocket of his coat had some bread and cheese in it. An uneven geometric figure in the midst of a straight, ordered geometry. An unplanned flaw in the midst of the planned crossing. “A strange disfigurement standing at the cross,” he said aloud. His voice startled him. It was loud and rough, as if it did not belong. Unfitting.

Why do people think everything must be nice and neat and structured? Why not unordered? Why can’t disorder have meaning? Why can’t the nasty and the disheveled and the dirty and the chaotic have a function? He knew the answer: order was important because it offered sense of security? Clear boundaries. This is where one thing ends and another begins. Beginnings. Endings. Crucial to the human mind.

He turned and walked the edge of the road where the tracks left the asphalt and continued on their long straight path. He examined the iron of the left-hand rail. It was quite worn. Where one section of rail fitted to another, it was slightly uneven. The rivets were leaning outward and looked a bit loose. If someone failed to check this and repair it, there would be a derailment. How long? How long before it caused a disaster? How many trains must fly by, loosening the rivets a tiny bit each time until it crossed the line to disaster? He imagined a train, speeding along at 187 kilometers per hour. All the passengers (the lucky ones in Prima classe) on just another run, just another trip, just another day. Suddenly, a bang! and a lurch! and rending and crashing and screeching. Who would survive? Who would be killed? How many merely maimed?

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A sudden rustling sound. An animal in the brush. A bird. Or a rat. Lino stepped out onto the wooden cross-tie of the track. It was firm beneath his feet. He walked forward between the rails and stood on the next cross-tie. Then the third. And the fourth. On the seventh, he stopped and bent down to examine the gravel piled between the cross-ties. Each rock roughly the size of a large walnut. All the same grayish color. 

He picked up a handful and felt the coldness. Squeezing his palm, the edges of the stones dug into his hands and fingers. He turned his hand upside down and released his grip, allowing gravity to create a lithic drizzle. 

Where did these rocks come from? Is there a factory that turns them out by the tons, made for this function? Created for one purpose. Maybe someone checks them for quality. Another has them loaded into large containers and ships them off. Others place them between the ties. Not too many, not too few. Everything according to a plan, to the rules of train track construction. All worked out ahead of time. So nice and neat.

Lino looked to the side and saw one of the stones to the side of the rails, lying in the dirt at the bottom of the brief incline below the track mound. A rebellious rogue stone! Or perhaps a misfit! He stepped across the iron rail, down the little incline, and stood on the dirt punctuated with a few brown weeds and bits of green poking up here and there. 

He stopped before the lone rock. How did it get here? Did an animal pick it up and drop it? Maybe, when they were laying the gravel, it had slipped off the pile and rolled here. Or perhaps a worker tossed it for fun. Or it had some defect that only a well-trained track-laying expert would know. 

Now, it was just a plain rock. 

Lino wondered what difference it made that it was here and not there. It no longer performed its function. It was just a rock. Not even a real rock. A manufactured rock, a pseudo-rock. It didn’t belong here with genuine rocks and pebbles.

He raised his eyes once more and looked down the track. About fifteen or twenty meters ahead, on the left, was a low concrete wall. He had not noticed it before. How did it fit into the order universe of the locomotive industry? He walked to it, curious. He wondered why he was curious. What difference did it make?

He observed that the wall, about ten meters long, had been built because a small stream ran under the tracks through a corrugated culvert. The wall held back the piles of dirt and gravel which made up the bed for the tracks. How nice and neat. Just a long, large pipe, buried under the rails, with a wall to keep the bank steady. When the rains come, when the snows melted, the drainage could flow as if tracks had never bisected the land. The trains would speed across the plain and the passengers need never know of the stream. 

He looked at his watch. He took a deep breath. It was warmer now, but it still had that cool crisp characteristic that hurt his lungs. He turned his head and listened. So silent. But not for long. The stillness would soon be broken by a deep and steady whooshing and a clacking of metal on metal that would build in volume. The EC 86 EuroCity. He had ridden that same train many times. No smoking was allowed—there was not a smoking car like on most trains. Some passengers would complain about that, but Italians were getting more used to it. There was a Bordrestaurant where one could buy pricey snacks, drinks, beer, and wine. The train made many stops between the old, rustic, stone Venezia Santa Lucia train station on the Grand Canal and the modern, clean, metal-edged München station—its terminal destination.

He stepped up onto the top of the wall with some effort—it was over a meter high, and Lino was tired and hungry. He almost lost his balance, but caught himself by waving his arms. Balanced, he turned and looked across the tracks. This point of view offered no new perspective, though he could now see where the culvert exited, about ten meters past the far side of the tracks.

He still had the rock in his hand. The poor, misfit rock. He looked at the tracks below. If he tossed it down, right there, it could land right between the ties. If he then looked away and back, he probably wouldn’t be able to find it. Returned to its world, it would live among its brothers and sisters, one among many, performing its duty without drawing any attention. A nice, neat, ordered existence. Just what is expected of rail line gravel.

Of course, his aim might be off. Maybe a funny bounce would cause it to careen off the tracks again. Ha! thought Lino, what an irony.

Or maybe it would bounce onto a cross-tie. Sitting on the wood. So improper. Naked to the world. Maybe the train would come and the incredible speed would expel the rock. Maybe this time it would break up into unrecognizable pieces, scattered about. Having begun with purpose in some factory, ended as small pebbles strewn about with no purpose. Beginnings and endings. Vital.

He balanced the stone. What would happen? Once again, his curiosity surprised him. Why did he care? It was a rock, one among thousands—millions! 

A sound caught his attention. The train was approaching. He could already see the top of the engine. It was a long way off, but he knew how fast it was moving. The sound grew loud, a terrible dragon, destroying everything in its path.

He threw the rock as hard as he could over the tracks. He felt the concrete tremble beneath his feet, and he lost sight of the rock. It must have travelled quite a distance. It was unlikely that any human would ever see it again. He would be last to give it a thought.

The change in the roaring of the train indicated that it was at the road he had crossed. He imagined he could feel the heat and wind as it approached. A beast of enormous power bearing down. It would arrive within seconds.

He closed his eyes. Beginnings and endings. So important.

*

The controllore inserted his key into the lock of the communications panel, smooth and swift. He opened the thin metal door and swung it open. He lifted the phone off the hook, and, with a well-practiced gesture, used the top of the receiver to flip the switch labeled “all cars.” He pulled a notebook out from under his arm with his left hand and glanced at the page. Pressing the button on the phone, he knew that, at that moment, all the passengers on every car would stop whatever they were doing and listen.

“Buon giorno, may I have your attention? We stopped because the train has struck an object. There is no damage to the train, but we must wait the arrival Polizei. Once they have made their report, in about an hour, we will be on our way to Vicenza. The Bordrestaurant is open for your enjoyment. We are sorry for this interruption in your travels. Grazie.

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Photo by Gabriel on Unsplash