Strangers on a train ( Barbara)
I met Garbo in the 60s on a train in what was then Yugoslavia. I was returning to my studies in Florence from a summer on the Dalmatian Coast. We stopped at some little station and that’s where Garbo must have got on. He burst into our compartment sweating and flustered and looking tan in a white Greek sailor shirt.
“Scusi, che un posto…permesso?” As he squeezed in directly across from me.
For a while the six or seven in our compartment sat quietly until he pulled out a salami and some bread and offered it around. Suddenly there was wine and smoking (not him) and a cacophony languages and translations.
I must have been smiling cause he asked right away the usual “getting to know you,” questions, and I must say he was fun to talk to from the get go. But when I mentioned that I was studying art restoration at the Academia de Belle Arte in Florence, he got real serious and we talked painting . I could tell he was a “romantic” by that I mean he was all about the passion. I liked that and I liked him right away.
We had an hour layover in Zagreb and went into a bar and had some beers.
By hour’s end we made sure our tickets would be good the next day, found a cheep hotel, fooled around, made love, drank a lot of Vodka and
Garbo told me the most amazing story about one of his Professors in College who had a crush on him, and in a rage of jealousy stabbed him in the thigh.
Garbo and I have been friends and lovers on and off for twenty years but that story of the stabbing is most vivid and memorable not so much in and of itself but what came out later…during the trial.
