The long Train to Naples

I got to Milan at 10:00 pm dirty, tired, and sick. In other words, I blended in very well. After a few .50 euro hamburgers at a stand outside the train station- the best deal I’ve seen all trip- I got onto my 11:20 TrenItalia night train to Naples. Much like most of Italy I had seen, it was crowded, dirty, and full of angry people. As I walked down the aisle that’s ceiling was a foot too short for me I imagined being stuck next to some fat Italian man who was going to yell at the programs on his handheld black and white TV the entire night. I found my “room” and found that, in the six person compartment there was only one other person sitting there. He was probably a few years older than me, wore a camouflage shirt, and had skin as darkest skin I had ever seen. I hoped to God he wasn’t some Algerian Militant. I made a comment about how hot it was in the car, not only because it was sweltering- to the point where I was sweating profusely, but also as a test to see how much English he spoke. In a thick African accent he said to me, “Yes, it is quite hot”.
I found out his name was Sall (pronounced Saul) A’doodoo- a native of Senegal who came to Milan to work in the Fiat auto factories. He had just been laid off and was now going to Rome to visit his sister’s family. His English wasn’t great, but it wasn’t impossible to underhand him- through facial gestures and hand signals almost anything can be ascertained. As we rolled down the Tuscan coast he told me about his cousin who was a cab driver in Orlando. The kind ofperson who seems like a hindrance to most Americans, the type of guy who seems like he just got into the country and cannot speak any English at all, and the someone whom Sall and his family where limitlessly proud of. I immediately felt guilty. Not because I had directly wronged someone like his cousin, but because of how ungrateful I was to live in a place like the United States. The way Sall smiled when he talked about his cousin, when he talked about how one day he would go to America- “because America is where you go if you want to be someone", he said, "What is it called..." he paused to think, knowing what he wanted to say but unsure how to put it, until finally he said "Ah yes...The American Dream",
Is the lack of motivation that my generation is stricken with a product of our nature, or of our nurture? Poverty is miles away, something we merely read about while flipping through the glossy pages of National Geographics that line the seats in our allergists’ and doctors’ offices, but because of that have we turned into people who don’t know what it is like to face strife, and through that emerge victorious with the type of genius that can only be forged in the bowels of true adversity? I don’t think so; I just think that sometimes we live in ignorance of what disaster really is. We rode alone in the dark for while longer and said nothing. I don’t think either of us where asleep but we were too tired to talk. The seats where uncomfortable, but there was silence, something I enjoyed after hours of incessant noise. But, sadly, that changed as we came to a station somewhere several hours south of Milano.
They were a fat family. A fat father with a fat moustache, a fat mother with fat that rolled over her elbows, and a fat child, probably 13 years old, who whined and cried in a language that neither Sall or I understood but, from the way they looked, we assumed to be something middle eastern. For the next eight hours, there was no sleep, just the boy talking on his cell phone- although screeching would better describe the sounds that came from him- and then asking his mother for more cakes that she seemed to pull from an endless supply in her bag. He would hold it in front of his chubby face, his eyes glistening with desire, and then tear it apart like in an animalistic feeding frenzy. I could feel my throat swelling up as the night went on, a sign that my body desperately needed sleep to rebuild its defenses, but no number of devastating glares would stop his behavior until finally at 5 am I stood up and yelled at him “I know you don’t understand me, but you’ve got to shut up. Just stop making noise. I want you to stick one of those Twinkies in your mouth and keep it there because I’ve got to sleep. I’ve been travelling for days and I need sleep”. My throat was already inflamed, and along with not speaking for hours my already low voice was turned into a deep bellowing base that caused him to be quite for the first time. His father looked at me, I expected him to get up, to yell, but he saw that I didn’t care what he thought and stayed down. I was finally able to get to sleep, and when I awoke at my stop five hours later the family was gone.