How Did I Lose My Wits and Set Off Like This? Neno on the Road to Italy
The journey began, Neno says, as a joke. Her son fell ill. Her daughters told her to go and see the world herself. She was persuaded. What began as a joke came true. She had thought of death at sixty — but that she would go to Italy at this age, no.
AUTHOR & LITERARY HISTORYTRANSLATION
Albanika Press
8/11/20263 min read
The journey began, Neno says, as a joke. Her son fell ill. Her daughters told her to go and see the world herself. She was persuaded. What began as a joke came true. She had thought of death at sixty — but that she would go to Italy at this age, no.
On the Road is the story of that journey, told by Neno to a room full of women who have come to hear about it. It is one of the most purely comic stories in Old Neno’s Stories, and one of the most alive: a woman who has never gone anywhere before, narrating her first encounter with ships, foreign cities, incomprehensible languages, and pasta she does not know how to eat — all in a voice that is by turns bewildered, indignant, and wholly herself.
A Voice That Does Not Stop Moving
The story opens not with the journey but with the household. Neno has barely settled back in from “Home” — the previous story — when visitors arrive. She is mid-complaint about the butter tin scraped clean in her absence, mid-instruction about the bread and the communal oven, when Aunt Shano and two other women sit down on the upper divan and ask to hear everything.
What they get is a narration that never quite arrives in a straight line. Neno interrupts herself to call for coffee. She is interrupted by her daughter asking about the pantry keys. She circles back after each digression with a small, slightly flustered correction —
“Wait, where was I? I said I’d go deaf.”
This is the texture of oral storytelling as Kokalari renders it throughout the collection: not a polished narrative delivered from beginning to end, but a recollection that thinks aloud, reacts to interruptions, and carries its listeners through digressions as naturally as through the main thread. The women listening are participants, not audience — they chime in, sympathize, and prompt her onward.
The Journey in Pieces
The journey itself arrives in vivid, physical fragments. The dress worn for the first time in Tirana — she felt as if she were doing something shameful, then as if she were naked, and kept pulling the hem down again and again. The ship from Durrës — if they hadn’t held her on the stairs she would have ended up like the anchor at the bottom of the sea. The crossing — she emptied her guts so badly she thought she would give up her soul by the time they reached Bari.
The arrival at Bari — dizzy and unsteady, Hasan on one side holding the luggage and on the other holding her, a crush of people speaking a language she cannot understand, darkness, the fear of being trampled. The hotel, where she dropped like a log and fell asleep, only to be terrified by the din when she opened her eyes. The train, where pasta was placed before her in portions she could not account for, where a woman across from her read a newspaper and then talked nonstop —
“Gerr-gerr, like a mill without grain, she churned our stomachs all the time — more talk from her than from the men.”
Each episode is rendered in the same compressed, expressive language: sound effects intact, the body’s reactions precise, Neno’s running commentary on what she is seeing delivered simultaneously with the seeing. The journey is not reconstructed from a distance. It is relived.
What She Noticed from the Window
In the middle of the train’s noise and the woman’s talking, there is one moment of quiet:
“Now and then I would turn my head toward the window. Such beauty… those fields, tended with such care. You could feast your eyes on them. And the weather was wonderful too — like summer.”
The observation is brief, unprompted, and entirely genuine. Neno is not a woman who withholds admiration when something deserves it. The cultivated fields seen through the train window are one of the story’s few moments of unguarded wonder — no moral judgment attached, no comparison to home, just beauty acknowledged for what it is.
Then someone speaks, the talking resumes, and at dusk she leans back and nods off. Near the city, the train slows. She rises and stands in the corridor. And there, on the platform, is her granddaughter — head turning fer-fer, this way and that, not yet able to see them. Neno feels like throwing herself at her from where she stands.
When the granddaughter sees them —
“ver — she rushed inside and threw her arms around me.”
The story ends there, with the embrace, and with the coffee that has finally arrived. Come now, let’s drink it while it’s still hot. The journey — its discomforts, its bewilderments, its one window of quiet beauty — has delivered her to exactly this: the face she came all this way to see.
Old Neno’s Stories — the first English translation of Musine Kokalari’s work — is available now:
📖 Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/old-nenos-stories-musine-kokalari/1149899284
📖 Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Old-Nenos-Stories-Selected-Literature/dp/B0GYGKL94G
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