I have a little obsession. I go to the station to watch the trains pass by. Trains attract me, they evoke memories, the scent of freedom; I’ve had this passion since I was a boy. The train was my means of escape and travel as a teenager. My mother, arguing with her husband, would run away to the station with us three children to return to her mother. Or so I thought, all excited at the thought of seeing my grandmother again.

But her intentions stopped there, at the central station where she’d meet someone and then, once her anger had cooled, she’d take us home. One of these fake escapes became the opportunity to reveal a terrible secret to me, a half-secret one, to be precise. I got off at the station and walked to the end of the platform shelter, away from my brothers who had been left in the waiting room; and there she told me, to justify herself, that they were arguing because of me.

I was the child of a previous relationship, before she married my father, and he had recognized me by giving me his last name. She threw it in her face every time they argued, sometimes using defamatory terms, and she, humiliated and desperate, attempted an impossible return to her hometown and her mother. But she couldn’t, because her family had judged her irresponsible life poorly. At the bus stop, she omitted to mention that not only had I been born before this marriage, but also my sister. She avoided mentioning this fact for fear of my judgment.

The trains arrived, stopped with screeching brakes, and then started again. So many passed, as many as her sins. She was experiencing a tragedy, and I was experiencing a small revenge; my rebellions had found a justification, and from that moment on, my attitude changed. The revelation offered me a very valid argument that I would often use to explain the constant conflicts with my parents. Because I wanted to go back to live with my maternal grandmother, with whom I had lived for a long time, but they wouldn’t let me because it would have meant the shotgun marriage failed. Above all, my mother couldn’t afford it; To give that satisfaction to her sisters, who had had her excluded from her paternal inheritance because of her behavior.

She had succeeded in the difficult task of finding a man who would marry her and recognize her children. She had given us a father, one with a better social standing than her brothers-in-law, and woe betide me if I tried to destroy all of this with my demands.
. My mother had revealed her weakness to me and hoped she had miscalculated and won me over to her side. I should have understood, justified her, and laid down my arms. My demand to return to my grandmother, according to her plans, was out of the question. I vaguely remember, but it happened, that she had a conversation, out of sight of us, with an acquaintance who worked at the central station.

Many years later, I found letters that demonstrated how important this person had been during that time, not only for the financial help he had offered her but also revealed a long-standing friendship with emotional implications.
The ride ended that day because we returned home, much to my regret. But I learned where to catch the train, how much the ticket cost, and how much money it took to escape and return to my grandmother. In reality, several years passed before we took that train journey, and there were two of us, my sister and I, both minors. When I ran away from home the first time, months had passed since my mother’s futile escape, I had found refuge with a maternal aunt. Through her, I finally reached my grandmother for a period of reflection that had been granted to me.

It lasted a year, and at the end there was supposed to be an attempt at family reconciliation. I had experienced how wonderful it was to be away from family, so, shortly thereafter, we ran away again during the Christmas holidays. I felt I could face the train journey with peace of mind, while my sister was scared and feared the police would stop us. To undertake that journey, we took a bus from home to the station and, after the train, a bus; all in all, almost a day of travel. At a certain point, I too began to feel anxious because no one in town had been notified of our arrival.
In fact, as soon as they saw us, they called the police to declare that they hadn’t known about7 my sister’s presence and didn’t want any more clashes with my parents, which had already happened enough after my first escape. I remember that my sister returned to her family, and I stayed in town for a few more days.

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