My trip back is stuttered and indirect. It takes a long coach ride, a short plane trip, a train ride, a flight and another flight to get back to Milan. Each fragment represents the kind of trip which is most often considered an opportunity for a sleepy interlude to the day, nothing more: good for nothing but dozing in and out of thoughts, usually the rush of a never-ending series of professional ambitions or micro-improvements, ‘have to send that mail when I get in, have to prepare list of objectives for the trip, what am I doing here? What can we intuit that kids might desire next? Which mood will style move into within the next 6 months?’
About half-way through I suddenly become conscious of the fact that I’m sick of that kind of dosing loss of time, sick of the extreme exhaustion which one awakes into after forty minutes of head-slipping on a train, the momentary paranoia as you feel your empty stomach and dry mouth and wonder how long you’ve been asleep and how long to go still, then the profound boredom which resides in the answer.
In the airport before catching my last flight I see an Italian-style bar ‘Il Bellissimo Coffee’ or something similar, and walk over to it. As I get closer I recognise all the international signs of a good coffee, a shiny chrome vintage style machine, a brand name that used to sponsor cycling teams in a different era, a particularly special grinder, it’s 70s orange plastic put on the metaphorical altar of aspirational consumer minimalism.
The young bartender is an immigrant from India or Pakistan, the precise climate control of the air conditioning gives me the sensation of seeing somebody entirely sealed off from the path that brought them there, like an ant in an enormous field of untouched white snow. Her eagerness to serve customers well (she smiles and over-explains every answer to questions) feels terrifying.
I look at her face then down to a free newspaper left on the counter, an airport-only newspaper published in English which talks exclusively of football.
I wonder what football must mean to her.
She asks me what I want and I contemplate quickly the problem of what to drink. I want an espresso but I want the sensation of drinking it to last longer, I think of a double, a triple, a cappuccino.
But I admit defeat at the hands of the problem almost immediately and simply order the espresso.
She goes to the coffee machine and begins to prepare my drink as well as another two orders which have arrived in the meantime, seemingly silently – I hadn’t heard anybody else arrive at the bar which had been empty when I arrived - but when I turn around there they are, two businessmen, travelling together, in their suits, having a conversation which is obviously a necessary routine for the both of them, propping each other up and away from some emotional hellhole. When I turn back to look towards the bar the young girl has begun to prepare our coffees, I stare at her and examine how she does the job, with particular attention to her hands. I want to see how practised each motion is, how comfortable and precise she is with the required elements. What order she decides to follow for all the different steps in the process. When she turns and faces the counter momentarily I guiltily drop my gaze, I don’t want her to catch me observing her, I don’t what to shatter the surface of her good will.
She moves to the machine and puts the group with the coffee into the machine and presses the button for the hot water. My gaze returns to her and I silently plead with her to show more authority around the machine, more anonymous speed rather than this slow, minute and earnest precision. It’s far too silent around the machine.
I think of the clatter of Italy to which I will soon return.
As if in contrast a bar I visited only once comes to mind. A bar attached to a service station that I visited one afternoon, parking the company car behind the petrol pumps. It had been around 5 or so in the afternoon and the commuter traffic was just starting to make its presence felt, to begin to murmur its frustrations. Looking across the flat fields of yellowed (like bad teeth) crops which surrounded the roads on the left (to the right there were occasional industrial complexes potting the land) I saw the light of the day dimming from very white to cool blue, a change which was completely unattended to by the surrounding commuter traffic; nobody was watching it happen.
The bar itself was incredibly vulgar in its conception, black marble, tinted blue glass and pink neon signs, a vulgarity which thankfully fast and anonymous use had calmed; its vulgarity included a quiet familiarity (a combination which had previously only existed on the tip of my tongue) thanks to the constant smash of coffees placed on the counter in a technique that treated them like discs, to be hurled out in parades accompanied by shouts ‘Te? Cappuccino? Con cacao? Caffé? Come lo vuoi? Liscio? E te? Caffé? Corretto come? Machhiato? Due Macchiati’ – the bartender smashed the group into the machine as if the way he was doing it was irrelevant but at the same time betrayed a practiced economy (who gives a fuck about good coffee, this ALL tastes so perfect).
‘A barman who can’t make his machine make a lot of noise might as well serve the coffee cold.’ I’d though in excited realization that murmuring afternoon at the bar.
But when the girl at the airport finally serves me the coffee it is fine, strangely identical to what it should be, dark, hot and thick enough to distinguish it from what they give you in France. I sip it, ‘yes it really is fine’. I want to open a novel or a notebook while I sip, to draw out my emotions, but I can’t, I feel obliged to be true to the form of the coffee, the small amount of black liquid, I look down at it, I get ready to drink it, all of a sudden its limits exhilarate me, I feel entirely alone. I drink it in tiny sips and look out across the enormous glass windows which reach from floor to ceiling and look at the planes and the small men beneath, working on various jobs which always remain mysterious and little unreal. The light outside is ambiguous and for a moment I have no idea what time it is – I know my connecting flight starts boarding soon but as my thoughts drift through my head they don’t find the time, and I don’t disrupt the drifting for a more efficient way of moving, I allow my thoughts to remain like that, brushing past a series of broad almost abstracted walls with nothing to cling to, and thus time of day, as I look outside, remains similarly abstracted to me, shorn of its referents.
-
When I finally land in Milan it’s dusk. I don’t know what weather to expect, whether it has become cold or not in my absence and I miss what the pilot says when we land so I keep my jumper on just in case as we exit.
The plane is not directly connected to the terminal so we leave via a staircase which takes us to the ground. About 50 metres away two buses wait for us.
As I walk down the stairs I look around at the mountains and hills that surround the airport. I’m not at all tired, I’m as clear and sharply aware as I’ve been all flight after having the coffee. The dusk surrounds me, there is a pink and purple glow which seemingly moves across more than 180 degrees of the horizon – everything within my field of vision seems to contain a setting sun, some parts more full, some less.
I’m a alert but everything around me, in this dusk, seems incredibly quiet, two fashion ladies behind me murmur, one laughs very quietly, in front a young middle class couple are looking at each other’s faces happily, with some kind of relief to be home I guess, but they do not make any noise, they just look at each other.
I wonder how long this dusk glow will last – is it just starting? Is it about to end? Will it last the ten minutes it will take for all of us to get on the bus and then drive to the terminal?
Even though I know it’s impossible it feels as though the airport is closing down for the evening, that we are the last flight of the day for them, that everybody around us, the landscape included, has kindly waited, stayed a few extra minutes to help us get home before being on there way.
As I look around me walking for those ten seconds it takes from the staircase to the bus the clarity of my feelings, their objective crystalline calm, plainly encounters this beauty of the scene and doesn’t do anything. I don’t feel as though the scene is mine. I look around at the extraordinary hills and dusk and feel as though I’m returning to a chosen land. I look at the faces of all the clearly Italian passengers, some are probably back from a rushed day trip, returning to this they must feel that this chosen land is theirs, that some unexplainable fate ties them to it. They must think this is the land for them, that, in contrast to where they have been that day, or anywhere else they have ever been, that this is their natural destiny, to follow this place and its rhythms to the death. It seems a chosen land but I don’t know what to do with it, I don’t feel like one of the chosen, I’m just a witness, I calmly take this in, without much emotion. I try to think what I’m going to do as the bus rides to the terminal and I hold onto the rail, moving ever so lightly with the curves of the bus and, trying not to interrupt my calm (since it seems like a new frontier) I grasp at the last moments of observation offered by such a strange return. The calm blankness remains.
