It was a night train that left Stazione St. Lucia with me within its belly; it swallowed me up like some sea monster, and over the sea it went, into the night. The train that delivers one to the heart of Venice actually drives over the Adriatic to enter the town made up of many tiny islands. A second train removed Antonio and relieved him of our romantic, comical life glitch, and returned him to his own world of books, studying art history, and the familiar back in Milan.
Needless to say, I have never seen him again. Though still exceptionally kind— it was he who, again a gentleman as he is—helped me unravel the mystery of who owns Florian's bar in Venice when, on a cosmic impulse, I felt I must do a performance there during the biennale opening in 2019.
In the darkness and on the train, divine had mercy upon me in the form of the train captain, who realizing I, like him, am Croatian, and was young and unsheltered, and had not paid extra for the sleeping car tickets— saying he won’t be using his due to driving the train all night—I was offered to have his own sleeping cabin in the train.
This was a huge relief. There is something about the night that is able to frighten me still, when I am alone. Being alone on a train cross-country at night, and exhausted beyond the ability to describe it, despite my brave-it-all courage, did not appear entirely appetizing. Grateful to the captain, I fell sound asleep, protected and locked in the cabin.
Somewhere in the night, the Slovene army or border police entered the train. I have only ever experienced such hassle on the Slovenian border—but the Slovenes, out of some nostalgic sadistic post-socialist ’we're keeping the wall between west and east Europe,’ always take their job far more seriously than anyone else in the world—they seem to take the train apart every time it crosses the border into Slovenia, to a great amount of uncomfortable metal noises I can’t understand, looking into every bed and shelf and wheel, it’s exhausting. I have a feeling trains have a shorter lifespan because of how many times the Slovenian border control takes it apart.
Despite not being in touch generally, and with my until this year ever safe and ever welcoming base in Croatia—my grandmother, as of this spring being dead, I somehow managed to contact my aunt, jumped out of the train in Zagreb, and appeared in her house after I had a coffee in the enormous ancient train station—to wait for the dawn—as I did not want to arrive at someone's doorstep in the night.
In this particular reincarnation of my Aunt, a very large and dominating personality, at times petrifyingly frightening, at times wonderfully warm, and on the outside, a very beautiful woman, my aunt was living in Zagreb with her youngest daughter, my cousin. My cousin was studying, and my aunt was at home fretting about how her daughter has had a 37.5 fever for over a year. To me, with the general overwhelm of life content, I don’t think I had noticed my bodily temperature, but here was the aunt, not doing anything, sort of petrified into this apartment with her daughter obsessively, chokingly focused on this 0.5 raise of bodily temperature paranoia, taking her to all kinds of medical check-ups. It was unclear where her husband was at this time, but they greeted me kindly, made me go sleep—which I so gratefully accepted—for that is all I needed, and the next day being Easter, we went to pick my uncle up.
We piled into the large black Mercedes, a remnant from the era a decade ago when my aunt was one of the power women in Croatia, during the war, and in her courage and wit changing the destinies of the Croatian people, without anyone being aware of it now. For it was Dubravka who, as a mother of two little girls, and accepting she may not leave the meeting alive—negotiated with the Serb army leaders that they pull out their aggressive forces from Kaštela and vicinity, where I was living, and where the Serb attacked from the sea, and air, and land until she made a deal. Dubravka at the time was in politics and the director of the Kaštelan Riviera hotels, host to the entire populace of united army forces poured into this part of Croatia—for they all slept at her hotels.
Aunt at the wheel, and my cousin and I in the back, we drove out of Zagreb, heading south to see her older daughter and my cousin, who was married and living in Split. On the way, we made a stop at a prison and picked up my uncle and her husband, who I suddenly understood was imprisoned and released on good behavior for Easter holidays to spend it with his family. Of course, I was not told anything about why or how, but I came to understand that this piece of the puzzle was connected to the way my aunt, with the help of her husband, had run the furniture factory in Osijek after the war, which bankrupted in their hands. I may be wrong, though. But suddenly I understood how my aunt was staying in a humble rented apartment in Zagreb, while I was accustomed to see her always nested in tasteful and luxurious surroundings.
My cousin drew on the hard-boiled eggs with a pencil. - “Well, that is a way to decorate them too,” I concluded. And we ate the Easter breakfast as a family, almost as if it had all been coordinated, while in fact, as all the events of that year, there was no plan in my case, I just rode what came.
A month or so before, my grandmother had died, the mother of my mother and aunt. Having come from Rome for her funeral, after many years of estrangement, I bumped into my Father. I was sure that it was my grandmother’s ghost that had somehow made that happen, as I had suffered endlessly the vanishing of my father, who I had believed still lived in America somewhere, as he had the year war started, and when he stopped all communication with me, his 7-year-old child.
As bizarre and natural seem to go beautifully hand in hand, this Easter afternoon, I met up with my father, his girlfriend, and her little 7-year-old daughter, who really wanted me to be her sister. We roamed the closed-up and windy town of Trogir that day. They took me to a restaurant, which for the Roman living Sunci was a normal everyday event, but for them in this moment was a great feat and a treat and I was offered the best they had.
The same evening we piled into the great Mercedes and as on the way there my uncle drove, whilst my aunt and he argued something terrifying majority of the drive, and we all returned to our own realities, the uncle to prison, the aunt and cousin to their hypochondriac symbiosis over 0.5 fever, and I got onto the train to Budapest.
On the journey from Milan- to Budapest, I drew the portraits of people I encountered into a Japanese Moleskine sketchbook, with black ink, which in the following month was exhibited in New York, at the Moleskine Detour exhibition alongside some very esteemed artists and designers. And trough I did not go to this group exhibition, because I had a solo exhibition in Mexico at the same time, Raffela, who curated that show, told me that the N.Y. critics had proclaimed me “ The next Warhol” . I meanwhile was having my own Mexican adventure at the time but it would have been nice if i had gone . All that came after may have been different. It was a choice and a crossroad, and as ever - i chose to go where it was more interesting over-where it might have been more useful.
No comments:
Post a Comment