By Walter Agnew Moore II
1 April, 2002

In the States, we have April Fool's Day. The French don't have April Fool's Day. They play jokes, sure, but they call you an "April Fish" instead. This is because, um, because...

Hey, I have no idea why they call it that. It doesn't matter, because I'm not in France anyway. No, I, we, Kitt, Little Anna and I, are in Italy.

Specifically, sitting in the sun out in front of the train station in Milan on this fine April day. This is a popular spot to sit, out here on the benches and on the grass. I have some Italian newspaper to look at because I like to befuddle the minds of people who see you in a crowd and try to figure out where you are from. I can barely read Italian, but it doesn't matter. A government official was corrupt. Palestinians and Israelis play tag. Might rain tomorrow. Same planet, different language.

We missed the early train out of town for the south. It left at some ungodly hour like 7:00 am, and two previous nights of sleep deprivation combined with beds in the four-star Hotel Andreola conspired to leave that early train roomier by three spare seats. It was for the better, we are full after our Hotel Andreola breakfast, it's a civilized hour like 11:00 am, and as the Italians might say... "Eh."

The Milan train station looms over us with carved brown stones. Lions. Wolves. A Pegasus. Heads. Blocky 1930's Public Building Style. We walk under the arched entrance and up the wide marble stairs.

——-

On the train south to Genoa the little boy is travelling with the old man, across from us in the compartment. In the corrider the big fat conductor is flirting with the little 5-year-old Somalian girl who is giving back as good as she gets while her family laughs.

The old man across from us has a ring on his hand with a picture in it, I can see it from where I sit, it is a photograph of a woman with her hair done up high. The ring looks old. The old man and the little boy talk about this and that, and I can see the old man when he was young and small. Who did he ride with on the train when he was young? And before that?

We pass through towns whose names murmer faint memories in my head.

The conductor is in our compartment, Santa Claus with a shave, Happy Lord of the Train. Stamping tickets. We bought the wrong kind of ticket, the cheap slow train ticket, and this is the fast train! I'm going to tell you what I'll do, you pay the difference, and I'll write on your ticket that you were a foreigner, you didn't know, eh? You won't have to pay the fine. We'll call it a "gentlemens' agreement", eh? You and I, Gentlemen. Ah, good. So where are you from in America, Alabama? I know Alabama... Bill Clinton! No? Haha! So, gentlemens' agreement, good trip, welcome to Italy!

He leaves. The old man and I smile and nod.

——-

In Genoa the facade of the train station is white as a bleached bone. There are palm trees. The English Girls won't believe me when I tell them this is where Columbus came from.

"Co-LUM-bus? From GEN-oa?"

"Yeah, he was really Italian."

"I-TAL-ian? Co-LUM-bus?"

"Yeah, that's his statue, right there behind you, look..."

"Well maybe that's *a* Columbus, but it's surely not *the* Columbus— are you sure you're not winding us up?"

We sit down across the street to wait for the next train. The waiter offers us menus in Russian.

——-

We trundle down the coast in our train, going through tunnels as often as not, with ventilation holes in the rock flickering past the window letting in eye-hurting blue light off the sea below.

Suddenly, in some village station, a horde of Canadian girls and women storm the train. They are wearing t-shirts in primary colors and khaki shorts that make their butts look big, and they are talking loudly in English to each other and to everyone else on this train, which includes the Italian grandmother sitting across from me.

We have entered the Five Lands.

The Five Lands, the Cinque Terre, are five villages nestled on one of the prettiest coasts in the world. Steep green mountains, painstakingly terraced, swoop down to a rocky shore where pretty much every tiny stream or inlet has a little town built by it, not so much laid out as stacked.

There are five of these villages, north to south:

Monterosso al Mare

Vernazza

Corniglia

Manarola

Riomaggiore

I put down the Lord of the Rings paperback I have been reading and draw in a breath— this is Gondor.

Our place while we are here is the youth hostel in the fourth one down, in Manarola. The hostel is easy to find: You leave the train siding by the one path available and walk into the side of the cliff where there is a tunnel. You follow this tunnel for a few minutes then you are at the bottom of the main street in Manarola, facing the main restaurant. If you go down to your left, in one minute you will be at the water's edge amongst the fishing boats. Take a right, and you will climb a steep hill with several switchbacks until you come to a square with a church above most of the houses. There will be cats everywhere lounging on flat rooftops. You see that big square yellow building a little to the side, through the walkway where the fat calico cat is sleeping? That is the hostel.

We chuck our bags and go for a hike up through the terraces, some are overgrown, the old stone stairs are narrow with a black iron rail.

Perched up on the hill, we can look back at the town. It hits me, how rough life must have been once. 45 degree slopes here, nowhere to grow food unless you made the flat spots yourself. And that implies that it would be worse if you tried to leave, or they would have.

Manarola is a purple goblin labyrinth as we walk back down.

——-

Funny thing about this Youth Hostel: Lots of old people, and nobody talks much. A polite silence in the common room where I am sleeping, no one intruding in anyone else's world. A young man is methodically tearing pages out of a "Let's Go" guide. A grandfather and grandson are hanging towels to dry on the heater. Monks.

——-

2 April 2002— Breakfast in the Manarola Youth Hostel is an exercise in Clean Living, with good wholesome food served to good wholesome people who are all living in harmony while still respecting each other's differences, and if we would all just follow the rules in life the way we do here at the hostel then there would be more peace, and understanding, and peace. I find the whole scene vaguely nauseating and wonder how much they'd charge me for a shot of whiskey in my coffee.

Enormous Pajama Woman is shuffling about in her great calloused bare feet, smiling vaguely and harmoniously and peacefully at us all in a way that says, "I go to more youth hostels than you do." She is filling and refilling a bowl of grape nuts. She is in line in front of me, and then when I sit down and am eating, Little Anna comes down and gets in the food line, and Enormous Pajama Woman is right there in line for a second bowl of grape nuts. Kitt and Nell come down next, and EPW is going at the grape nuts a third time. With that much fiber in her, I bow my head in a little prayer of thanks that the men and women have segregated bathrooms here.

Nell sits down across from me, you remember her, the American who joined up with us yesterday? I forgot, must have been the Grapenuts. Nell has blonde braids, a sharp smile, and electric blue eyes, all somewhat marred by a disappointing habit of occasionally talking about her boyfriend. She met us here yesterday afternoon, and the four of us fled the Wholesome Zone to go buy a bag full of cheap Italian beer in cans and sit in the sun on a hiking path facing the sea, swilling our Mediterranean version of "Milwaukee's Finest" and nodding to the bemused wholesome hikers clomping past.

Back to today: after breakfast, I go up to my room and discover that someone has chucked an "Eastern European Phrase Book" in the trash can, probably the young tearing-out-pages guy who is now gone, doubtless on some lightened-up walking tour of Western Europe. I snatch up the unwanted little book quick as a monkey and run downstairs.

We are going on a boat-ride.

For pure efficiency and savings, you take the train up and down between the Cinque Terre. It comes as often as a city bus and costs about the same to ride. But at least once you want to spring for a boat ride.

We clamber off of the wet concrete pier onto the blue and white vessel, along with 20 other tourists. I am a pirate, with my green doo-rag and my limp from slipping on a wet rock when I was bored waiting for the boat and went to jump around out on the wave-break. Arr.

Our boat takes us up the coast all the way to the northernmost village, Monterosso, a veritable metropolis compared to the others, stuffed with loot and lovely lasses, arr. Along the way we pass Corniglia on its hill to our right, and then Vernazza, where smoke rises from a watchtower, they'll be alertin' the townfolk to our presence, arr.

"Wal-ter, why are you talking that way?"

"Sorry, Little Anna, I'm a pirate now, I am."

Beachfall in Monterosso relieves the girls of any more of my dialect-mutilation.

——-

Sitting on the beach, on the north end of Monterosso, we all start to sunburn like Brits on holiday. Kitt and Little Emma are Brits on holiday. Nell and I are imitation Brits, all our American melanin washed away by the winter rains of northern France.

It's hot on the beach but the water is still as cold as Vanilla Ice's comeback chances. There are lots of round pebbles in the water, grinding together for a few million years. Kitt brings me a round translucent emerald— it is a fragment of a beer-bottle, polished into a wet green gem stone.

I finish the second Lord of the Rings book, sitting on my large cheap blue towel. Dang. That girl back in France said she wouldn't lend me the third one until I shave.

Nell and I start looking at the East European Phrase Book. It has at least a dozen languages in it and some bizarre phrases, especially when you take them out of context and juxtapose them in new, interesting ways. This is the conversation we have, shouting back and forth:

"I am Buddhist!"

"I like eggs!"

"Oh no! My legs hurt! Are you married?"

We yell these sentences out in Albanian, then in Polish, and then in Rumanian. Serious voices. Laughing voices. Screeching rapid falsetto voices. We are going to move on to Ukrainian, but Nell said she has to pee too badly.

——-

Sitting on the tiny upstairs balcony in the cube-shaped bar above the sea, drinking Wieninger beers as the tourists walk past on the path below, I think this must be how beautiful California looked to a mustered-out GI in 1945.

Kitt and Little Anna are agreeing: "— no McDonalds for days now, and no bloody Irish pub either, it's nice for a change."

They mean My Goodness Irish Pub in Amiens. A good place, but lately we were all starting to become part of the furniture. I stare at a sign on the rock outcropping across the way: "vietato...accesso...ai cani.., that's uh, forbidden, uh..."

"No dogs allowed," says Little Anna.

"No dogs or Irish!" snorts Kitt.

"Hey! I'm part Irish!" says Nell as she leans in, braid brushing the table.

"Look at that path," I say. "I bet that is the path to Vernazza. It's only 2 miles down the coast."

It is. Two miles horizontally and about four more vertically.

We climb until we are beet-red in the face. Entertainment comes from guessing the nationality of the hikers we meet on the narrow goat-trail through the pines, who thank us as we step aside to let them pass. It's "danke danke merci grazie danke". I don't think we ever got thanked in English.

We finally descend into Vernazza with its hidden harbor. Little Anna's hip is shot, and we have a beer while we rest at a cafe by the water. Chess players are at the next table.

We are outside the ice cream place on a bench when I first see the funeral cortege come through the arch. Up front is a tiny van decked out in flowers and wreathes. The girls giggle at it until suddenly it hits what it is. The priest walks behind at a slow pace. Behind him are two long lines of local people, old, short, white haired. People who worked. They look at us from time to time as if we are tropical birds who flew in from somewhere, then they lower their eyes to the ground again. I take off my silly doo-rag and clutch it in my hand. The girls have put their ice-cream spoons back in the dishes, and look off to the side, quiet.

The procession stretches off all the way across the little square, headed out another arch on the other side. A long-legged family of blonde nordic tourists comes striding by past the mourners, looking at houses, barely focusing on the funeral procession. The tall boy is talking to his mother in Dutch or Danish or somesuch and not watching where he is going and almost collides with the old men and women before his father snatches him back. They keep talking loudly and lope off in another direction.

Nearby, a carved stone head is still spitting water into a horse trough.

——-

We decide to take the 1:10 train back to Manarola. There is a small scene in the station when we go to buy our tickets, and Kitt unknowingly breaks in line in front of the only Italians I have ever seen actually waiting in line themselves, and one of the guys makes some smart comment, but the station master snaps back at him that if you are a cute woman like Kitt then you get special treatment, and the aggrieved parties suddenly laugh and say that is obviously true. Shrugs and smiles all around. Eh.

Since there are tunnels on both sides of the station, you know your train is coming long before you can hear it because all the leaves on the trees start rustling. Kitt leans forward for a look, and her hair blows back from her face.

——-

We have muscles of lead when we get back to the hostel. Showers, gnocchi, salads and beer. Our usual Spades game, then Nell tries to turn us into Euchre fanatics. We remain infidels in that respect.

Looking out my window that night, I see the stations of the cross, large white sculptures, lit up on the hill overhead.