Monday

It was 01.30 p.m. and there I stood in the street, with my suitcase next to me, waiting for my friend V. that was already half a hour late to drive me to the station. As she arrived ( 01.35 p.m.) she claims: ” Trains in Bari always leave in late. Trust me, it will never leave at 01.42, you’ll see”. What I saw, as soon as I flew to the platform and almost died for a heart attack, was a regional train that had no intention to bring me to Rome, as its destination was Enziteto Catino ( that sounds funny also for an Italian). Slowly, I walked back to the car parking where I found V., who was supposed to wait for my ok to leave, was stuck in her beautiful, whipped-cream white, brand new car, as a dozen unauthorized valets surrounded her screaming loudly gesticulating ( an unauthorized valet is a man you pay to look after your car even if he hasn’t an official authorization from the municipality. Of course you can also choose not to pay him, but you wouldn’t be sure that your car will be there when you’ll back).

I hesitated couple of minutes, wondering if it could be safer just running away and leave her to her destiny, but then friendship prevailed so I reached the car and jumped in, holding the suitcase in my arms like a baby. After having locked the car, we had an amazing conversation with all those  nice guys that, as I could understand only after V. translated for me, were trying to explain us that some homeless guy that lives in the train station had gone nuts and decided to chill out kicking my friend’s car. In fact, as we decided that the Car Parking Gang didn’t want to kill us and slowly got off the car, we could se the footprint of the above mentioned nutty guy on the crushed body of the car.

Couple of minutes later, a man that looked ( and smelled) like a bandit asked my friend her documents, and she was about to ask him to go screw himself when we suddenly realized he was a desguised policeman, who made her park her injured car in the police parking and asked her to follow him to the POLFER ( railway police) to inform on what had happened.

Half a hour later, as we drove out the parking, a traffic officer asked us to pull up and started to explain us he had to sanction us because we came from a street whose access was denied to civils. Weird thing, in the beginning, was that he didn’t look very impressed when V. told him we just got off the UNIPOL office and that it had been his UNIPOL colleague to tell us to park over there (we realized only later why he didn’t look very much sympathetic : the thing was V kept mistaking between POLFER and UNIPOL, which is the name of an insurance company).    

In the end, I reserved a seat in the 18.30 train that of course left with a 45 minutes late and arrived 1h and a half in late, so I missed the last metro and I had to call a cab, I didn’t have the money to pay, so I had to phonecall M. ( who bravely was waiting for me even if it was o1.30 a.m. ) to lend me some money. As she was already wearing her pijamas, seh put the money in a small, chinese-like wallet, and threw it out of the window. The wallet fell on the floor, rolled and rolled and rolled until it reached a small hole in the wall and fell in it as I stared at it incredulous. Sometimes life really surprises you. Sometimes bad luck is just too strong. Some days you’d just stay in bed till the day after.