Domodossola; read the big, dilapidated sign -precariously hung over a similarly decrepit bench at the train station. I sat below it, basking in the knowledge that I had a long, good hour before my next train with limitless options: go to the café, read a novel I was carrying with me, go to one of those kiosks to buy postcards, an indulgence I entertained, or sat down at the benches by the main railway track, watching others in transit.
Instead, I settled on something else, something that I did most nights, in the stillness of the darkness when I was falling asleep: put a song on, begin from a memory and rush through that memory and many more before the song ends. On a forlorn bench covered with rust and paint that must have once been green, by tracks where trains did not seem to run anymore, where the platform’s roof was sporadically dotted with white spots and subjacent lay one forlorn I sat and plugged my earphones in and with Einaudi on, gently taking off into that world where everything is as you imagine it.
***
Nuvole Bianche[1]
00:00
The music starts; that harsh grainy sound like the tender rubbing of dry palms against each other pervades my ears and slowly, in brave hesitation, a note starts and another follows in and my eyes register the sky above me, a deep azure striped white by cirrus cottons, as I shut them to see my past. That sky, the same blue my cousin and I had frolicked under so many years ago when we went to the river. It was a warm afternoon, and the sun warmed my skin as lovingly then as it does now. Then a succession of notes, and a tumble and a fall into the freezing waters of the Gondo[2] and me gasping for air, for life and holding up my hands to that blue expanse far above.
00:45
Or the time, as the music crescendos into a sonorous swell, when I had an altercation with my mother. She relentlessly goading me to explain how I’d spent 100.Ksh I’d received from my generous aunt and I mulishly refusing to confess that I had spent the money on one of those cool, ostentatious watches that I had a penchant for in those days, but I had also broken it when I fell running back home, just minutes after buying it. It was between admitting I had broken a watch I had just broke or letting her believe that I’d spent the money on cigarettes like many boys my age were. Maybe I should have admitted to us both how terrible I am at keeping things unbroken, even relationships.
01:54
The music is now fast paced, and my memories match it, moving so swiftly in a blur that it becomes an arduous task to snare one of them and revel or shudder in it. But I am soon successful, and I trap the time I had my first kiss, so distasteful and bereft of any genuine affection, at least on my part. It’s crazy, I realize, how there are so many things in the world that we do that we’d rather didn’t – in the name of things. She was someone I’d known for a while, and pretty, and nice, but still…
03:37
The music softly fades and with it my early memories wane and are replaced eagerly by fresher memories. Like when I first masturbated and the burning compunction that followed that act of immorality, as I’d been raised to view it in my inveterate Christian community. Yet, even with that inexplicable dread, how often afterwards I’d done it, perhaps in resignation to the fact that I was eternally condemned to hell. How hard would it burn, this incendiary pit?
04:49
The aim of this game is to try and rush through all my memories until I am through, but you find, after multitudinous attempts, that even hours wouldn’t be enough. I resign to the fact that once again, I have failed in this goal. The raucous screech of a breaking train slightly interrupts this nostalgic meditation, but only slightly, and soon the passionate cadences of the piano take me back to the eighteen months ago when I first saw her and was blindly enamored of her smile, her face, her infinite grace. Falling in love is like gambling hopelessly, and she proved me right that snowy, freezing November afternoon. How I held my countenance till I reached the privacy of my room is a mystery, because immediately afterwards, with an abysmal grief, I cried myself to hate.
05:58
The music ends and I hearken the birds chirping, the speaker announcing something in a typical heavy Italian burr and I open my eyes, to the hopeful, endless sky with bright, white clouds. As the song ends, I realize that the world has all along been at peace with me and that for a fleeting six minutes, I was at peace with the world.
Lentu lassame ‘mpaccire[3]
I was soon boarding my next train, headed for Genova. I smiled at the kind-eyed woman across me as I took my seat by the window and I wondered for a moment if she saw the blue wide skies in my smile, or the great white clouds in the novel she was reading. I did not linger on it, but instead gazed out as the train lurched into motion to the shifting vista of waving trees, busy towns, lucid lakes, and people who, like me, were under that great big sky speckled with white clouds.
[1] A piano instrument solo by Ludovico Einaudi. The title in English means, “White Clouds.”
[2] A river in Gacharage-ini, Murang’a County, Kenya.
[3] Corsican lyric to the song loosely translated as “Wind, let me lose my mind.”