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Southbound trains
Between Venice and C— are three trains and six hours. On June 29, 2023 I stood alone at the starting line with two small bags. I felt happily light, though nervous. Train 1 passed without incident.
Thirty minutes into Train 2, I received a WhatsApp message from Farmer Giuseppe: “I don’t have a car, I organize myself…”
This was unhappy news. There were nine miles between the C— train station and Giuseppe’s coordinates, not to mention a 3,000-foot elevation increase. I could not hike to the coordinates before dark. I would not hike to them after dark. First of all, wolves roamed the Apuan Alps. Second, I had no clue who or what awaited me at my final destination. I knew only that:
- Out of the fifteen Italian farmers I emailed, Giuseppe was the only one who replied.
- Giuseppe owns 30 goats.
- Giuseppe’s profile:
- Depicts a single man in his early 40s with two young daughters.
- Has three positive reviews.
- For due diligence, I DM’d one reviewer to ask about Giuseppe’s treatment of solo female travelers.
- She said: “Yes he is respectful.”
- Giuseppe and I exchanged 5 WhatsApp messages total, in which he sent me his coordinates, but neglected to include how I was supposed to get to them.
I started to type a message, but Giuseppe went offline. The needle on my farm vs. sex trafficking front radar moved incrementally rightward.
During Train 3, Giuseppe came back online. “You arrive 15.19? Are you on train?”
Me: “Yes.”
Giuseppe: “My friend come meat you……He has white van….his name Enzo.”
The needle departed farm completely. “Do you have a photograph of your friend?” I wrote. My heart was sinking fast. “Or his white van?”
“My friend Will bring you up,” wrote Giuseppe. “Can you buy for me Two pack of tobacco please? You can find at the train station’s bar.”
Followed by a grainy photo of American Spirit tobacco.
I texted screenshots to my boyfriend, back in Houston. He was alarmed. This alarmed me. My alarm alarmed him. The needle gave a final twitch and dove off the radar altogether. I watched the Italian landscape blur past. It was a beautiful landscape. I had come a long way to farm it. My boyfriend and I decided that my situation was alarming, but not damning. I should text him a photo updates of my movements, though.
I messaged Giuseppe: “Can you send me a photo? I want to make sure I go with the correct person.”
Giuseppe replied: “My friend have no photo”
Me: “Does he have WhatsApp?”
Giuseppe: “No”
Me:
Giuseppe: “He Is not tall he have black curly and a cap…”
Me:
Giuseppe: “wait him near the Door of the bar when you meat. You can Say my name and him TOO….Is good for you?”
I opened Google Maps. I pictured myself disembarking at the next stop, walking across the tracks, and riding Train 3, Train 2, and Train 1 all the way back up to Venice.
Me: “Good.”
Bravery vs. Avoiding cowardice
When one is brave, one thinks, and then acts.
When one avoids cowardice, one thinks, sweats, thinks, decides to act, thinks some more, and then acts at last, having sweated her dignity away two droplets at a time into the orange plastic train seat beneath her.
The other factor
“In general,” said writer and philosopher John Ruskin, “pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.”
Man in a white van
I stood in front of the train station shading my eyes. This was a small rural town. Nobody at the bar spoke English. Nobody had ever seen an Asian my age. I had run into some trouble but it was all right now. I had two packs of American Spirit tobacco in my backpack.
A white van pulled up to the curb. I stepped closer. A beefy mustachioed Italian man stared back at me. I smiled at him. He drove away.
People trickled out of the train station. An old lady, a woman with two sons. I thought about stowing away inside their trunks.
Another white van came around. The driver had curly black hair. He saw me alone at the curb. “Giuseppe?” he said.
“Giuseppe,” I said. “Enzo?”
He nodded. He had friendly wrinkles.
I memorized the license plate and walked to the van. The front seats were black with dirt and oil. In the back were two chainsaws and an ax. The issue with assessing the intentions of strange farmers is that their office supplies appear regularly in slasher films. I sniffed. Sweat, metal, gasoline. Damp wool.
“Can I take a photo?” I said.
The man who was allegedly Enzo shrugged.
“Photo?” I said.
“Non capisco l’inglese,” he said.
I wanted to be polite. But I also wanted to collect photographic evidence of my movements in case 30 goats turned out to be 30 sex traffickers. I snapped a selfie of the two of us, including the van, and texted it to my boyfriend. I opened the door. I put my bags on the seat. As I climbed in, Enzo lobbed them over his shoulder into the back, onto the chainsaws and ax.
“Mi chiamo Angela,” I said.
Enzo shrugged.
Ascending the Apuan Alps
In my pocket I kept my hand on my TSA-compliant screwdriver the entire thirty minutes up the mountain.
We did not talk to each other. We could not.
It was a one-lane dirt road, surrounded by trees. We made hairpin turns. We saw no one.
At the start, I had three bars of cell service. Ten minutes up the mountain, I had one. Soon I had nothing. Calls and texts failed instantly. Cloud syncs failed. Safari was a blank screen. My phone filled up with errors. Holding my phone was like holding a rock I fished out of the bottom of a pond.
It was like that for a long time. And then it was like that at the farm, too.
Flies and milk
Farmer Giuseppe, my host, was a thin man with a long neck. He had buzzed gray hair. He did not speak much English. The farm was located deep in the forest, a two-mile hike off the dirt road.
Giuseppe owned three Maremma sheepdogs to guard the goats. They were excited to see me, unlike their owner. Giuseppe also owned a Border Collie with electric blue eyes, who was supposed to help me herd the goats. This Border Collie did not care for my American accent. She understood about 15% of my commands. That was when she was in-office. She was mostly out, hunting for fresh kill on the neighboring mountain.
Giuseppe had a cat problem. Two cats had multiplied into twelve. They were everywhere. Kittens were constantly sneaking into the feed room, tripping, and falling headfirst into the dog-food bags.
Giuseppe’s donkey was usually tied to a post by the firewood shed. Sometimes she got to stand in the pasture with Giuseppe’s horse. Both of them looked depressed. Giuseppe had a fly problem, which was far more severe than the cat problem. He kept procrastinating the mucking of his goat pen, and by the time I arrived, it had not been mucked in months. Every week, instead of removing the collected goat shit, goat piss, and spilled goat milk, Giuseppe simply scattered a fresh layer of hay on top. So the goats behh’d and mehh’d around on two feet of compressed rotten sludge. This was like God’s blessing for flies. Be fruitful and multiply. Yes Lord, they said. If anyone opened the door to the barn, thousands of flies launched from their rotten little helipads, generating a low, ubiquitous drone. Milking the goats, my skin crawled with at least a dozen flies: face, arms, legs. The flies found their way out of the barn. The donkey and horse stood still all day and night, covered in flies. So they looked depressed to me.
The odor of the sludge was like ammonia wasabi and manure.
On top of the barn was Giuseppe’s house. The flies never had to conduct any exploratory expeditions. Anytime the rot-sabi air blew upward in the goat pen, they simply rode the current like a lazy river, directly into the kitchen. As soon as food touched the table, flies landed on it. They crawled on it with wet feet. I knew their feet were wet because they were wet and cold when they crawled on me. I could not go anywhere on the farm without at least three flies putting their wet feet on whatever skin I cared to expose.
On the window ledge was a bowl of green water with a beta fish inside. The green was so thick that flies often landed on it. Once, I saw the beta fish drag a fly underwater.
Everywhere was the smell of rot-sabi—and milk. After milking, our hands smelled like sweet goat milk. Our pant legs smelled like sweet goat milk. The smell of milk was in our skin.
My entire stay at the farm, Giuseppe did not bathe.
The other flies
Some of the flies were striped like bees. They had stingers, too. But they were not bees. I knew this because, unlike bees, they could sting again and again without dying.
Home sweet home
Giuseppe’s house was one floor. It was one room when he bought it. He built the other rooms himself.
After I met the animals, Giuseppe showed me to my bedroom. There were two beds. One had only a thin mattress with a rust-colored stain. The other was piled with a furry comforter. Giuseppe flipped open the top fold. It was filled with pebbles of goat shit.
“Not that,” he said.
He went away and came back with four sets of pink sheets. They had an old smell but no shit.
“If you are cold,” he said, “I find more tomorrow.”
I own a device which can lock any door on its own, in case I don’t trust the lock or keyholder. The device works on most doors. It does not work with a laundry line and hanging bedsheet, which was the door to this particular bedroom.
Giuseppe ducked under the bedsheet and went away. I dribbled dog shits out from under the beds. I kicked them into the hall. Beside the bed was a pink armchair. I swept hay and dead insects off that and set my bags on it. I checked the mattress for signs of bedbugs. I tore open my Clorox travel pack and swiped the mattress all over. I went over to the other bed and flipped the top fold of the comforter closed so the shit was hidden once again. Then I went to the bathroom to shower before dinner.
The bathroom
The door to the bathroom was also a bedsheet on a line. The bedsheet was not wide. If I pulled it to close the gap on the left, a gap opened on the right, and vice versa. I went between the toilet and bedsheet 3x to adjust the bedsheet so I could pee in privacy.
Before stripping for my shower, I went between the tub and the bedsheet 3x. It proved, however, impossible to conceal the tub entirely. To shower in privacy, one had to crouch at either end of the tub.
I picked one end and crouched there and took off my clothes. The water was ice-cold—I could heat it if I lit a fire in the kitchen stove, but that would take an hour. The house was cold. The fireplace had not been lit since winter, and the altitude, and lack of sunlight, made the July air feel like November. I washed only my arms and legs. I was shivering like crazy. I decided enough was enough and stopped the shower and put on pants and three shirts and a puffer jacket.
The sink was scattered with somebody’s longish black hairs. The wooden counter was covered in dust, dried toothpaste, and pools of sticky shampoo. The whole bathroom was cluttered with dusty pink toothbrushes and dusty sparkly hairbrushes. There were unicorns, Barbies. Alone in the house with Giuseppe, who was chain-smoking his fresh delivery of American Spirit tobacco, I felt cheered by the reminder that he had two young daughters. In the photo on his profile all three were smiling. His daughters seemed to love him very much.
Great news
At dinner I learned that Giuseppe’s wife left him last year. She took their daughters with her. Once in a while, like the week before, he brought them here for a visit.
“I have the problem,” said Giuseppe. “With the alcohol.”
“Oh, no,” I said.
“So I don’t have car,” he said. “My license, they take it. I have three glass wine and the police, they pull me over. Then I give car to friend. He break it.”
“Oh,” I said. “No.”
Giuseppe was an alcoholic until his DUI, when his wife ran off with his daughters. That year, he drank only in the evenings. For the seven years prior, he drank a few bottles of wine each day. At this point, Giuseppe was clean for 10 months. It was not so hard, he told me, because now he used marijuana.
“Marijuana is better,” he said, sprinkling some marijuana into his American Spirit tobacco. “You can drive, you can do the work.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“Alcohol makes you crazy,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“You want wine?” he said.
“No thank you,” I said.
All the people on the farm besides Giuseppe
Didn’t exist. I was alone with Giuseppe on a mountain, in a forest, with no service and no Internet for a radius of five miles.
How I felt about all the people on the farm besides Giuseppe
The sun had set three hours ago. The forest was pitch-black. The whole mountain was pitch-black.
In summary, I did not feel super excellent.
Buona notte
“Good night,” I said. I lifted the hanging bedsheet and entered my room.
“Buona notte,” said Giuseppe from the other side of the bedsheet.
A door slammed across the hall.
I calculated. Giuseppe’s attitude toward me was one of complete disinterest. He just didn’t care. Odds were in my favor that he harbored no bad intentions. The reviewer I DM’d had called him a “great guy.”
It was 10:00 P.M. I switched off the lightbulb stapled to the ceiling. I put my phone under my pillow with my screwdriver. I lay down. I could feel them under my skull; the pillow was so ancient, it was flat. I halfway re-inflated my airplane neck pillow. I folded Giuseppe’s pillow. I lay my head on both of them. Due to jetlag I had not slept the night before. I was exhausted. I fell asleep.
I woke up intermittently to short bursts of rain on the roof. Each time, I verified that Giuseppe’s snores were still blaring from behind the door across the hall.
At 1:00 A.M. I woke up. Out of nowhere I experienced a flashback to the longish black hairs in the sink. Suddenly, I was wide-awake.
If Giuseppe’s daughters visited last week, as he claimed, why were all their toiletries thick with dust? Some were glued by dried spills to the wood counter. And what was the rust-colored stain on my mattress? And why did the cheese processing room smell like dead bodies? Either fermenting milk smells like dead bodies, or…
I checked my phone. No service, no Internet.
I worked to keep my logic on its leash. It was yanking pretty hard. I knew that the second it got loose it would become panic, and panic is The End.
I heard another burst of rain on the roof. Beside me was a window. I pulled open the wooden hatch and looked outside. There was no rain. The ground was dry.
At that time I experienced true fear. Ice-cold, it punched down from the top of my head to the pit of my stomach. Waves of it pushed through me, slow, dreadful, thick as wet concrete. It throbbed behind the skin on my face. I lay there under my sheets, totally still, while my heart pounded at 100 bpm. I opened my eyes wide as hell. There was nothing to see in the darkness, except a nearly divine pinprick of white light on floor. I shone my phone flashlight on it. It was the back of a dead fly. I turned off my flashlight.
The next time I heard rain, I confirmed my realization: it was not rain. In my sleep, I had interpreted it as rain. In reality, it was the sound of floorboards creaking directly over my head. Specifically, it was the sound of a person shifting their weight.
I waited. After several minutes, the person moved again.
Across the hall, Giuseppe snored fitfully. He had given me a tour of the house. Why had he acted like there was only one floor? Why not mention an attic?
Maybe it was a guest—but why wouldn’t Giuseppe let me know?
Maybe it was his wife, chained to the wall—if so, what had he done with his daughters?
What did he mean, “Alcohol makes you crazy?”
I lay there. I developed an emergency exit strategy. The window was too small to climb through. I would have to leave through the door in the kitchen. If Giuseppe came in through the hanging bedsheet, I would deliver a throat jab with the screwdriver—element of surprise—and sprint up the hall. After that was the kitchen. I could take the knife as I passed it. If so, I would have to go around the table. That was worth the trouble. Once outside, I should move down the mountain, in the direction of cell service. I should remember about the ravines. I should feel before I stepped. I traced my route ten times in the darkness. It was now 2:00 A.M. Daylight in four hours.
The person upstairs moved, haltingly. So the reviewer had called Giuseppe a “great guy.” People change. Alcoholics change.
By 2:30 A.M. I determined I could not pass one more minute lying awake in the dark, stricken with fear, straining to listen for any human movement. I got dressed. I zipped my phone into a pants pocket. I put on my jacket and shrank my hands into the sleeves. I held the screwdriver inside there. I kept the blade against my wrist.
In my socks I walked one floorboard at a time up the hall. The kitchen was dark, empty. I doubled back. I found an alcove filled with broken furniture and a bicycle with no tires. In the corner was a staircase.
I used my phone screen on a dim brightness setting for light—the flashlight was too bright. Behind me, Giuseppe was still snoring. I let my foot down on the first step. Carefully I transferred my weight. It took one minute to ascend the short staircase.
Indeed, the house had a hidden second floor. A hall with four openings ran along before me. I put my back on the wall. I edged toward the first doorway.
I aimed the glow of my screen at the floor. Slowly, I slid it into the room. A pile of dirty clothes on the floor. A bare mattress—my heart dropped—and a large lump on the mattress.
Instantly I extinguished my light. I stayed there, unmoving. I watched. The lump was motionless. I brought the glow back. It was a lump of furry comforters, like the one filled with goat shit in my bedroom downstairs.
I moved to the next room. Same thing: junk scattered on the floor, blankets lumped together on a bare mattress.
I moved with extreme caution. In the (high) likelihood that Giuseppe was a sane, normal person, I did not wish to be discovered stalking through his home at 2:45 A.M., on my tiptoes, in my socks, holding a screwdriver in my sleeve.
I was standing in the middle of the second-floor hall when a cellphone chimed nearby. I flew down the stairs, down the hall, and into my room.
I sat in the bed. At 3:30 A.M., I lay down. Now I was homesick too. It was like a shovel digging in my chest. Meanwhile, I continued to seep in a cold-water bath of fear. I was beginning to feel numb in it. Once in a while the ceiling creaked.
At some point I slept for thirty minutes.
At 5:15 A.M., an alarm clock rang. There was a particularly intense creak upstairs, followed by the bounce of springs. Feet hit the floor. Boots along the hall; down the stairs. The rush of gas on the stove. Flame.
The person over my head was Giuseppe.
I never found out what was in the room across the hall, where I originally thought he was sleeping—and where his snores had seemed to emerge from. Somehow, after we said buona notte, he had slammed that door and gone upstairs so that I didn’t hear him.
I got out of bed and put on my boots, on the edge of nausea. I was not tired but I had the sensation of missing a vital organ. Which organ, I could not say.
I think it would have been nice if he had mentioned the house had a second floor. Among other things.
Farmwork
In a week or two, I will publish Fleeing Tuscany (Part 2): A Cursed Goatherd. It will discuss the actual work at Giuseppe’s farm, organized into the following segments:
- Some goats want to be milked
- Other goats hate being milked
- One goat wants to kill you
- The Horrific Goat Ordeal
- Another Horrific Goat Ordeal
- Seriously, fuck goats
- Goats are the fucking worst
- Ticks
- If you ever work on a farm don’t let it be a goat farm
- Goat cheese
For now, you have some idea of my feelings toward the farm based on the segment titles.
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Angela Ma 
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