NIGHT BUS
Trieste-Beograd, november 29th 2013
Leaving Trieste, at 9pm there are stil 14 celsius, the highest temperature I have ever experienced in Europe in this time of the year.
The bare IDEA of spending the night on a bus is a nightmare, never had such a stupid idea in my life.
Wrong, there has been two Bombay-Mapusa night busses, and Bangalore-Mysore and a Chang Mai-Bangkok, ride that started with me and my friend Ross leaving our guest house in the middle of totally unexpected and out of season monsoon walking on flooded roads with the water up to pur knees. But that was somehow so EXOTIC and we kept laughing. We stopped giggling as soon as we realized that the bus was flooded too, rain entering from the windows and from the ceiling, the bus was shaken by blasts of wind, the darkness outside was scary, the driver a madman, the stewardess probably the most sour and unfriendly Thai in the Siam History. We reached BKK short before dawn, and I had a strong impulse to fall on my knees and kiss the pavement.
A night ride to Beograd is a joke compared to that.
The stewardess is a beautiful young woman that gives me seat 69 and with a smile announce that I get number 70 as well, no one will be seated next to me. I have also seat 71 and 72 at the other side of the isle, so I can lay down and finish Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake while the rest of the passengers watch a Serbian movie from the eighties, funny haircuts and very broad shouldered jackets.
We stop at the Croatian border, stand in a line and get our passports checked, it’s been a long time since I last walked through a border, the temperatures dropped to 8celsius and the air smells like winter.
We stop in a gas station parking where I get a cappuccino in a paper cup, I roll a cigarette with freezing fingers tips that it’s colder than a few kilometers ago: 5celsius. A couple of guys apparently popped out from the ground lay a squared tiny carpet on the sidewalk and there are three wooden cubes laying on it, the Three-Card trick still exist!!!! A bit of gambling in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere on a desert highway in Croatia. I find it so wonderfully absurd and funny, but something happens while I concentrate on my cappuccino, someone is screaming, someone is running…. the crooks disappear much too fast while the victim reaction is much too slow, he’s loosing too many precious seconds trying to figure out what happened, and why him, and how he could be so stupid, and when he attempts to run after the cheaters they already turned the corner, jumped in a car and they’re gone. Those are the rules! if you want to gamble, you must be ready to loose! Nevertheless I can’t help feeling sorry for the elder gentleman that is now trying to attract the attention and empaty of other travellers. I don’t understand a word, but I know the plot…
I lay down between seats 69 70 71 and 72, the isle in the middle, cradled by the bus movement and the constant sound of the engine running at a steady speed, wheels turning, turning, turning…
One of those strange and rare moments in which I can FEEL the night as an entity, a space that I am stealing from the oblivion of sleep
There are no street lights, the bus is a fish swimming inside an ocean of darkness.
There’s just me and the driver to witness this strange miracle, everyone is asleep and he’s probably too concentrated on the road to notice that some nights are more liquid than others.
“We don’t need a melting pot in this country, folks. We need a salad bowl. In a salad bowl, you put in the different things. You want the vegetables – the lettuce, the cucumbers, the onions, the green peppers – to maintain their identity. You appreciate differences.” –Jane Elliot
DIARIES OF A NOMADIC JAZZ SINGER 