A stocky man climbs on board with his stocky wife; they are healthy and solid and sunburned. He asks why I’m taking pictures of the stations. The graffiti, I tell him. He’s Albanian, he says. He’s been in Italy fifteen years. Drives a lorry, in Taranto. There is no work now with the economic crisis. In particular there is no work for an Albanian. After fifteen years here he’s still not treated as an equal. It doesn’t bother him now. He came illegally on a rubber dinghy but managed to get his papers in the end. It’s harder these days. He was lucky. His wife nods and smiles at everything he says. They speak Italian to me and Albanian to each other. Now he wants to see my camera. It’s a cheap digital Olympus. He turns it over in hairy hands, his forearm tattooed with a blurry Cupid. He asks me what the camera’s memory is. I’ve no idea. I never enquire about such things. They have been holidaying with their son, he says. In Catanzaro. He has four sons. Ten grandchildren. Three great-grandchildren. Ah. This is what he wanted to tell me. He’s proud of his family.
‘Guess how old I am,’ he challenges.
His wife is smiling complacently. I have no idea. I’m rather taken aback that he claims to have great-grandchildren. He doesn’t look that old. What’s the youngest you can be to have great-grandchildren?
‘I’d say you’re sixty-five.’
‘Fifty-seven,’ he says, grinning triumphantly.
He’s my age! I calculate average childbearing age between eighteen and nineteen.
‘My first at seventeen,’ the wife says.
‘Can’t stop it,’ he says with a laugh. ‘It’s life!’
He seems blissfully happy with his lot.
‘People try,’ I said. ‘To stop it, I mean.’
‘You can’t.’ He shakes his head. ‘Fools. It’s life.’ — Tim Parks, in his book Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo (read for free)
