How I met them - Original tale

Here is another tale from the collection of short stories I am writing. I wrote it in English, with surely some mistakes. The version in Italian will be a little longer, I guess.

More tales from the collection are here and in my older posts.

This kind of travellers, the ones I interviewed for my collection of reportages, are loney men. They are friendly, polite, nice to the neighbours, but they are not social. They stay on their own.

So you might wonder how I could find them and interview them. I'm explaining it now.

We travellers use to wander in the suburbs, looking for little known - and possibly desert - areas of the cities. We walk without a real direction, trying to stay unnoticed. But that behaviour looks suspect to every Police and Public Security. The men with uniform, when they check the people in the cities, always stop us. Our walking around with erratic faces means for them that we are irregular people, dangerously staying on the border of their police society. They are probably right, except for the danger.

So every time we walk near a police checkpoint, we are stopped, questioned and taken in some building to be checked again. I have been stopped so many times! When this happens, we usually try to look dummy, goofy and docile. That doesn't save us to be taken away though.

When the Police takes us away, we are led into a room and we have to wait there. It is there that I met other travellers. We all wait quietly there, in those sleazy and dark rooms. One at the time, we are called in another room where we are questioned about what we were doing in the street, where we were going, from where and so on. Usually we are released after some hours.

Travellers barely talk each other, during those waits. Just some informations about the policemen there, if anyone has met them before. Someone just sit on simple benches, someone stand still against the wall. The policemen there look tired and bored, not so aggressive like the ones out in the street. It's bureaucracy, nothing more, but the restraining one.

I met there mister Battuta, a tall man with an elegant but threadbare suit, unshaved and smiling, that told me later about his many trips. I met Mrs Berma, a fat middle-aged woman looking like a gipsy fortune teller. I met Peter, a man thirtysomething years old that you could peg as a clerk who lost his desk. So many other travellers I met in those rooms. We couldn't talk there, so I managed to meet them later. Travellers are usually friendly and nice people, so most of them accepted to talk to me. Well, someone accepted but then never showed up.

I listened to their stories, to the description of their weird journeys in place no one can find otherwise.

Ironically, it is just thanks to the police repression that I could met other travellers and listen to their stories about the places they were been.