Uncle Agrippa Takes a Train: A Story

by ELIO VITTORINI

★

MY UNCLE, his face wrapped in his Bedouin scarf, cannot lookout into the night. He can only look up, at the luggage rack full of suitcases and packages dimly illumined by a bluish light, or down, at knees, legs, hands, elbows. Or he can look at the faces of those sitting across from him, some of them fallen in shadow on their breasts, others caught between darkness and the wan light, exchanging smoke and breath in the gentle undercurrent of men’s melodious night talk on trains.

My uncle, as well as being short, is a very thin man. He always was, even when we were children, and his name, Uncle Agrippa, was synonymous for us with “Uncle Stick” or “Uncle Bean Pole.”Wherever he sat down, there was always room for another person. Consequently, as now in his travels, he is always squeezed in between two others, one of whom takes up three-quarters of his seat.

He leaves Syracuse or Milan, Genoa or Rome, in a seat next to the window he has picked out hours earlier. But half an hour after the train starts, some big fat character jams himself in between my uncle and the window. Then, pushing him toward the next traveler, crushing him against the man or woman who happens to be sitting on the other side, little by little he deprives my uncle of all his space on the seat.

“Excuse me,” my uncle says.

He draws back a hand that has been crushed under a fat buttock and smiles at the usurper to show that he is not annoyed. Thus he tries to make himself comfortable between his two neighbors and keep the peace. He talks to them; he talks to everyone in the compartment, sometimes perched on the edge of his seat when his neighbors lean back, sometimes disappearing behind them when they sit forward. But he can never look out at the night, for to do that he would have to press his face against the window and wipe a little steam from the glass now and then.

Besides, someone is always standing between the seats, blocking a good part of the window. The aisle in the middle of the car, too, is always full of people sitting on their own baggage or on the floor. And my uncle, who manages to sleep only through the first hours of darkness, endures periods of paralysis during these long nights in which, while no one talks, he must sit with his little body and his little head quite erect. His face covered to the eyes by his striped scarf, he observes the others opposite and beside him with eyes that, no longer sparrowlike, have become a Bedouin’s eyes, sharp, narrow like those of an old Arab nomad, the nomadic American Indians, the Mongols of the steppes, or the muleteers of my home town.

The silence hasn’t lasted long — it must have been only fifteen minutes — and the train has stopped. A man who has been sleeping across from my uncle wakes up.

The train begins to move again. The man’s arms are crossed on his chest. My uncle is still looking at him as he did while he was asleep. But when the man looks at my uncle in turn, Uncle lowers his scarf: “Marinese,” he says to him.

The man raises himself a little, while my uncle stretches out his right hand.

“Marinese?” asks the man.

And my uncle: “That’s my name.”

“All,” the man exclaims.

He brings his large bovine face forward, and his eyes and cheeks are shadowed by the hat brim he pulled down when he went to sleep. He yawns. Did he say “Ah,” or did he just yawn? He uncrosses his arms and, as he lowers his stubby hands to his knees, my uncle catches one of them in his.

“Ah,” says the man, “pleased to meet you.”

He hastens to scratch an ear.

“We hadn’t introduced ourselves,” my uncle says to him.

And the man: “That’s true.”

“It was already night when you got on,” my uncle says.

“And I had to stand up quite a while,” the man answers.

“An hour,” my uncle tells him. “The gentleman whose place you took got off at . . .” He asks, “What’s the name of that place?”

“I don’t know,” the man answers. But he adds, “I was lucky that man got off.”

“Somebody always gets off at one station or another,” my uncle tells him. “Even at two in the morning. Even at three.”

2

AT THIS point he pulls his scarf back up above his mouth and meditates for a little. At two in the morning! At three in the morning! They get off at a little station whose name the conductor doesn’t even call out, and then good-by! The train goes on while they stay behind. Strange travelers! What will they do in a little country station at two in the morning? But there are even people who get on at that hour! My uncle looks at the man facing him, studying the shadow his bovine face casts on his chest.

“Isn’t it strange?” my uncle says to him, for he always takes the train where it’s made up and gets off only at the end of the line.

“Ah,” the man replies.

This is what my uncle wants, to be able to talk while he can’t sleep, just to have someone awake with him who will at least say “Ah” now and then when he says something.

“Oh, is that so?" the man says, as my uncle tells him of the days and nights his trips last and tells him too how each of his destinations is always, sooner or later, the place from which he must again depart.

“Do you know why?” he asks.

Since the man with the bovine face doesn’t pick up the question, he himself does. “Why?” It is extremely important that the question be asked because the answer is the long story my uncle has been telling about himself ever since he made his first trip. He loves to tell this story, he wants to tell it. And if each new person he meets on the trains does not ask him the question, my uncle asks it of himself.

“I’ll tell you why,” Uncle says.

“I suppose it must be on some kind of business,” Cow Face says.

My old uncle hesitates a few seconds as if it really were, in some sense, on business. Then, tilting his head to one side, he says, “Not exactly.”

“Ah, no?” the man says.

And my uncle: “No, sir. I have nephews and grandnephews and my working years are past. I live on a pension.”

“ Lots of people go into some kind of business after they’ve been pensioned,” observes Cow Face.

“I, instead, had to get away from work altogether,” my uncle says. “I had the kind of job that tires a man. I was a railway road worker. I had forty years of shoveling on my back, and was I happy to be given a chance to rest!”

“But if you travel, you can’t be resting. You must hope to get something out of it.”

At this, my uncle stops holding his scarf. It’s down under his chin now, and his little old face is snuggled into it from his sharp jaws around to his ears. He meditates without covering his mouth.

He smiles.

“Maybe I’ll get something out of it in the end. But it’s business of another kind,” he says. “I had only nephews and nieces, all children of my sister’s, and everyone called me Uncle. But what ‘s an uncle? No man in the world can be satisfied to be just an uncle. You see a beautiful girl and you’re nothing to her, you’re only her uncle. You can be sure she doesn’t care a fig for you. On the contrary, she likes to make fun of you; whereas she fears and respects her father and pays him all kinds of attention. So I thought sadly about my old age, when I would be just an uncle.”

“Lots of uncles are respected,” the other man says. He speaks this way, always a little vaguely, as if he were hoping to drop out of the conversation as soon as my uncle left him in peace. “While,” he adds, “many fathers are not!”

“Yes,” says my uncle.

He’s well able to agree with anyone who has judgments to make about life. Any philosophy can be his, too. But he goes on at once: “Finally, after ten years, my wife died. She’d been barren, but I thought perhaps I still had time to remedy the situation. I was forty, but I remarried, and three years later my daughter was born and began to grow.”

Cow Face yawns. His broad jaws gape open, and he tries to cover the sound of the yawn with words. “ It’s better to have children when you’re younger.”

“That’s right,” says my uncle.

Hadn’t he thought just this all his life? But he was happy at forty-five to have a child who was going to grow into a beautiful girl and he no longer thought sadly of his approaching old age. I can swear to this; I used to see him in our home town where I lived until I was drafted. And I knew him as a sprightly man, always joking and whistling, always good company. And when his second wife died, it seemed as if his life’s dream had been to live alone at sixty-five with his young daughter.

“Men are egotists,” observes Cow Face.

My uncle doesn’t go on right away. Egotist? It’s not a word with much meaning for him. He looks attentively at the man who said it. He might be inclined to agree with him.

“Sure, we are,” he says. “ I was like a bridegroom with my daughter, and, as I’d always imagined, it was a happy old age. I had my supper prepared by my daughter. I had my white collars ironed by my daughter.”

Cow Face begins to get interested.

“You see?” he exclaims. “Men are so egotistical that you probably wouldn’t have liked it if she’d gotten married.”

He lowers his voice toward the end of his sentence. He still hasn’t made up his mind to stay awake the whole trip. But my uncle’s answer rouses him.

“Never,” my uncle answers. “I would never have permitted it.”

“You see?” the man exclaims. He is roused by this answer and irritated at being roused. He clenches his hands on his knees. “By God!” He beats his fists on his broad knees. “At least you’re honest!”

“Always have been,” my uncle answers him.

Now he is speaking pensively; his striped scarf has slipped up again and covers his mouth, but he goes on talking without pulling it down, in a voice smothered by the wool and still gentle as, in his absorption, he himself is gentle.

“Why should she have left me?" he says. “She was so young. She was twenty-two in 1943. She could have waited until I was dead before making a new home.”

He talks without looking at the man; now it’s another passenger, the big foreman who is looking at my uncle.

“Certainly, I don’t deny,” the foreman observes, “that every man would enjoy having a daughter at his side until the end. . .”

“Who can deny it,” my uncle says to him.

“But today young people have their own ideas, too,” the foreman continues, “and the first thing many men look for in a wife is a girl who has an independent attitude toward her parents.”

“I don’t know,” says my uncle, “but in any case my daughter was quite independent with me. . .

Here Cow Face interrupts him. “You mean to say she’s dead?” he asks point-blank.

“Oh, no,” my uncle answers.

“You spoke of her as if she were no more.”

“Yes,” says my uncle, “for now she isn’t with me any more.”

Cow Face doesn’t let this go with only such a simple explanation.

“Yes, he mutters. “It was bound to happen.” And he looks at my poor uncle, studies him, is at last curious about this little person.

“Disappeared,” says my uncle. He doesn’t look at his questioner now, but he himself knows that he is being looked at, that he is an object of curiosity; he is embarrassed, he lowers his eyes. Yet he wants it this way. He could easily have avoided telling anyone his business.

Or does he talk about it to see what he can find out? He certainly can’t ask after his daughter if he doesn’t tell the story first.

“Are you looking for her now?” Cow Face asks, genuinely interested. “And you’re a railroad pensioner?”

He looks my uncle up and down, studies him in detail. There is a look of sat isfied amazement in his no-longer-sleepy eyes.

“I think you’re the man I’ve heard about,” he says. “Haven’t you been traveling back and forth since '43 looking for your daughter? Haven’t you been to Milan fifteen times this year?”

3

Now the young man who is standing against the middle window, bracing himself by holding onto the wooden railing above my uncle’s head, lifts his face which had been buried in his arms. His eyes, dark with weariness, can be seen searching about desperately in the feeble light. He sees the big man in front of my uncle and mutters; he sees my uncle and mutters. Then he buries his face in his arms again, dragging on the railing, while his body, limp with fatigue, twists against the rack into a new and therefore somehow comfortable position.

“What’s the matter with him?” the man asks. He is at ease now, awake and delighted to be awake, a lively traveler.

“Him?” answers my uncle. “He’s been sleeping on his feet since before you got on. If he hadn’t been asleep, he could have taken the place where you’re now sitting.”

Cow Face laughs heartily, though his laughter sounds choked.

So that’s how it is. A bond of confidence is sealed between him and my uncle. And with his short hands, he squeezes my uncle’s knee through his baggy trousers. “So?” he says.

But my uncle needs no encouragement to go on talking. He’s ready to repeat what he’s been repeating ever since the first trips he made in November and December of 1943 between Syracuse and Messina, Syracuse and Palermo, Syracuse and Salerno, Syracuse and Bari, Syracuse and Naples.

“Do you think she was kidnaped?”

“I’ve never considered such a thing. Why should anyone have kidnaped her?”

“I imagine she was a beautiful girl.”

“She certainly was. Rather on the order of my sisters, who don’t look at all like me. They’re tall and full-blown. They took after our father. I’m like our mother, who was a bit like an old broomstick, and a little like the bristles, too!”

“Tall and full-blown! That’s saying quite a bit. At twenty-two she could easily have caught the eye of some passing soldiers. You had the Moroccans in these parts. You had the Poles, too.”

“Not in our part of the country. We only had the Americans. And in any event, my daughter wasn’t the type to give people ideas like that.”

“Oh, well, for soldiers it’s enough to watch a girl walking from behind! If she’s well upholstered, they get ideas, all right. Didn’t she have something . . . underneath?”

“She had more than that to attract their attention — her eyes, for instance. And whoever looked into them — good-by! Even if he’d had the kind of ideas you’re talking about, he would have forgotten them.”

“That doesn’t mean . . .”

“Yes, it does. You know something? Any man would have wanted her as I had her: as a daughter, or else as a wife or mother, whatever you like, but not in order to make a stupid wreck of her in some gang. For that matter, my daughter had fingernails and knew how to use them. No one in the world would have been able to touch her if she hadn’t wanted him to.”

“ So you think,”asks Cow Face, “that she wanted to?” He sounds a little afraid but he asks the question just the same.

“What?” my uncle exclaims.

The young man holding onto the baggage rack moves slightly again. And another sleeper stirs; a woman moves.

But the face of the standing youth is different from the one he had revealed before; it is no longer dark with a tortured need for sleep, only troubled, as if he hadn’t been able to close his eyes since he last stirred. Nor is his body soft any longer like that of a man tied to a knot of weariness. It is soft in a more self-aware way. And looking down, he murmurs with great coherence. It’s a sting coming from the obscurity of his mouth, while he leans against the rack, thrusting his head back and grasping the other railing, too.

“To disappear,” answers Cow Face.

“Oh, of course,” my uncle says. “She wasn’t the kind to disappear unless she wanted to.”

“So you put all the blame on your daughter?”

“I blame her for having wanted to leave me.”

“And you don’t blame her for all the rest?”

“ What all-the-rest ?”

“Why, everything a girl’s likely to do when she runs away from home.”

“What could she have done? Go first to one place, then to another. . . .”

“Surely, you don’t think she travels alone. . . . She must certainly go with someone.”

“It doesn’t matter whether she goes about alone or with other people. I think she left with a truckload of them.”

“Soldiers?”

“ Soldiers.”

“Then she must be with a soldier. She must go around from place to place with him. Maybe even one place with one of them and another place with another. That’s how these things go.”

“Sure thing, she’ll go now first with one, then with another. If she doesn’t like the place she happens to be, she’s the kind of girl to find somebody right away who’ll take her somewhere else.”

“Then you know the kind of life she must be leading. . . .”

“ I know, I know. Not a suitable life for a girl of twenty-two.”

“Twenty-five by now. She might easily get sick.”

“She was healthy and strong. But I don’t deny that she might have taken sick.”

“Of course. It goes without saying! ” Cow Face shakes his head in commiseration. His face is quite dark by now, shaded by the overhang of hat and nose, broad lips, and chin. “You’re looking for her all up and down the whole country! And you want to find her! What would you do with her if you did find her? What if you found her in a hospital? What would you do with her then? Would you take her home, even if she were rotten with some disease?”

My uncle, though small and thin, is not a nervous man. He never gesture’s when he speaks; whatever he says, he remains quite still.

“Of course,” he says. “ Why shouldn’t I take her home if she were sick?”

Cow Face looks at him attentively. “You’re the first man I’ve met who’d be willing to take back a daughter with a shameful disease.”

My uncle asks: “What shameful disease?”

“Those . . . ,”answers Cow Face. “What would you like to call them? There are those diseases, after all, which tell the shame of every girl who goes to bed with men.”

“But my daughter,” says my uncle slowly, “doesn’t go to bed with men.”

“Ah, no?” says Cow Face. “Extraordinary!” And he looks at my uncle intently. “She runs away from home after men; she goes around the country with men, yet she doesn’t go to bed with men!”

“ Why should she?”

“ But did she run away or didn’t, she?”

“She wanted to do that!”

“Isn’t she running around with one after another?”

“She might like that, too. She’d be seeing the world.”

“Then she must go to bed with men.”

“You shouldn’t talk like that,”my uncle says mildly. “Do you know her? No, you don’t. She wasn’t the kind who’d want to do that. And she’s never done what she doesn’t want to do.”

“But,” says Cow Face, “excuse me if I insist. One can learn to want something, too.”

“No,” says my uncle. “ My daughter was against that. She didn’t know anything about it, and she didn’t want to.”

“You must admit,” says Cow Face, “that the men she found herself going around the country with knew about it and wanted to continue to know more about it.”

“I admit that.”

“But this means they must have wanted to with her, too.”

“What could they have done with someone like her? They couldn’t help seeing that she was an innocent baby, and then they would certainly have changed their ideas about her. And they would have lost their taste for it, too.” My uncle, at this point, has t he look of one who considers himself profoundly wise. “Things of that sort are pleasant to do only with people who like to do them.” And he draws his striped scarf that makes him look like a Bedouin up close under his eyes which have suddenly gone hard.

But the big foreman can’t agree with him. He pays no more attention to him.

The foreman looks up at the young man. He hears him mutter again and sees that now he has thrust his hands into his pockets inside his bundledup person. And he sees that the others have awakened in that dismayed silence of those who wake on trains. He sees the woman wake up too, the one who had turned in her sleep. As he observes them in turn, he says: “Extraordinary! This little man has a daughter twenty-five years old who spends a little time here, a little there, in the company of men, yet he pretends to believe she doesn’t go to bed with them. . .”

“ Who?” shrieks the woman. But then she thinks it over, “Oh, yes, of course,” she says. “Uncle Agrippa!”

Translated by Frances Keene