Italian Ways

by Tim Parks

  On the other side of the train, thousands of new VWs are parked in perfect symmetry across a vast area of tarmac, all covered by what looks like the same black netting they use to protect the cherry orchards. It’s because of the hailstorms we get in summer. There are factories mixed up with modern apartment blocks, the buildings all askew to each other without managing to look quaint: towering industrial silos, rusting cylinders and storage tanks, kitchen gardens with canes for runner beans, fig trees leaning on sagging fences.

  A fat man in a white vest cleans his teeth on a balcony. There are sheets hung out to air, terracotta and creosote, solar panels, corrugated iron. A tiny vineyard, just three rows of a dozen vines each, is choked between two cathedral-size warehouses of prefabricated concrete panels. A smaller warehouse is derelict beside. Ivy crawls over wooden pallets, broken masonry. It seems one doesn’t dispose of the old before getting on with the new in Italy.

  A tractor toils in the mud around what must be a pile of hay bales under a great white plastic sheet, but the thing has the shape and volume of a prehistoric burial mound. Used car tyres hold down the plastic in case the wind blows. Just here and there, like postcards stuck on a cluttered backdrop, fragments of the old picturesque Italy hang on: a baroque church facade up on the hillside, the ochre stucco of a villa glowing in the morning sunshine, an avenue of cypresses leading no doubt to cemetery gates.

  Comes a powerful whiff of burned brake fluid and the train screeches into Rovato. These are the satellite towns of Milan now. Chiari, Romano, Treviglio. Chiari has pretty vine-covered facades to the left of the train and a giant cement works on the other. More people push in. Whole office staffs have formed at different ends of the carriage. Whole university classes have assembled. People who are going to spend most of the day together nevertheless need to talk things through on the train. Somehow our red-booted prostitute is sleeping through it all. She’s used to difficult dormitory conditions. Again I wonder why she has to travel like this. Do people not want sex where she lives?

  AT ABOUT EIGHT THE phones begin to trill. The group beside me passes a mobile around, chattering and laughing. The caller is one of their company who is two carriages up the train but unable to push his way through the crowd to join them. ‘Excuses!’ a bright young woman protests. ‘Who are you with? Tell the truth!’ She’s boldly made up, dressed in pink with pink handbag, pink-and-white sweater, pink and white bracelets. The friend sends a photograph through the phone to show how blocked the corridor is. Even the capotreno can’t get through! Everybody is pleased to have found this use for the new technology.

  Here and there someone manages to unfold a newspaper, the Manifesto, Unità, Repubblica. The left-wing papers are prevalent on the Interregionali. Somebody reads out an article about the iniquities of the present government. There’s a general strike next week, so that’s one day off work. On Friday, of course.

  The train slows as it approaches Lambrate, the first station on Milan’s subway system. This is the station where the Gypsies gather, on the southbound platform of the metro, the Green Line. They take over the stone bench opposite the last carriage when it arrives. There are three or four swarthy men, unwashed and unshaven, half a dozen women, one or two with babies in their arms, and a few adolescents, girls and boys. The boys have violins or accordions. Often they have painted nails, sometimes even lipstick. The girls have an infant in tow. As each train comes and goes, one or two Gypsies get on it. They start at the back carriage and work their way forward, the men in scruffy waistcoats playing their musical instruments, the women begging in their long dresses, repeating their mournful spiel over and over in a high-pitched monotone.

  ‘SIGNORE E SIGNORI! SCUSATE IL DISTURBO! I AM A POOR IMMIGRANT FROM ALBANIA, WITH FOUR CHILDREN TO FEED, WITHOUT A HOUSE, WITHOUT A JOB, WITHOUT MONEY, WITHOUT FOOD, WITHOUT DRINK, PER FAVORE, SIGNORI, PER FAVORE.’

  The word senza, without, is given a queer emphasis, almost sung, as if in a dirge. SENZA CASA, SENZA SOLDI. But what these Gypsy women are really without is conviction. They beg bored, zombie-like, as if not expecting anyone to believe them. This sort of lament is necessary, they appear to be saying, but only insofar as it establishes a narrative that allows some people to part with their cash. The givers need have no illusions that the recipients are telling the truth.

  The Gypsy men, too, have little conviction when they launch into the one or two tunes they know on their out-of-tune violins. ‘Alla Turca’, massacred. A little boy sways through the carriage with a collecting cap. He knows exactly how long to stand before each passenger to create the maximum pathos. Sometimes I have seen the same boy playing the violin himself, entirely on his own in the press of the metro, the din of the train occasionally drowning out his abysmal renderings. Then he passes with his cap. On occasion I get out at the first station and move up a carriage to escape the noise, but invariably the Gypsies follow me at the next station and I have to listen to their grim performance all over again. Better just to hear it the first time and be done. As a rule they work the Green Line down to its southern end, then take the train back and spill out onto the platform at Lambrate for a break. No sooner do they stop begging than they cheer up at once.

  Sometimes you’ll see the same Gypsies begging on the train. They come into your compartment, place some trinket on the seat beside you without a word, then return a few moments later, hoping you will buy it. But on the train they face stiff competition from the new wave of immigrants from Africa, and I get the impression that at least around Milan the Gypsies prefer the metro.

  At Verona station there is a local boy in his teens who will climb on the train and start selling you a story about having lost his wallet and needing money to get back to his parents in Turin. The first time I gave him some money. Later, when I pointed out to him that he had tried the same tale on me three times in less than six months and that since his accent was Veronese it was hard to believe he lived in Turin, he became quite aggressive, as if it were unreasonable of me to expect him to think of something new every day, or to pay attention to the kind of detail that might concern a novelist.

  The Indian immigrants sell roses at the traffic lights near the station. That’s in the evening, when you’re returning. They never beg, but offer a bunch of six or seven roses for only €5. It’s a bargain. Sometimes I go for it. Sometimes I wonder if there is any connection between this flower-selling and the prostitutes standing on duty nearby. Do some men buy their regular girl a rose?

  The Chinese sell a variety of cheap jewellery and pirated designer goods which they spread on sheets and rugs in the entry tunnels to the metro at Milano Centrale. Sometimes there are as many as twenty Chinese peddlers in the tunnels here as you hurry back to the station after a day at the university. They squat on their haunches quietly chatting to each other, ready to gather up their wares in the rug if the police come to bother them. They can be gone with all their clobber in seconds. Sometimes, with all the commuters and all the blankets spread on the floor, it’s hard to find your way through.

  ONCE, ABOUT TWO YEARS ago, I helped a Chinese man join this little community at Milano Centrale. My wife and I were setting off for a walk in our small village just outside Verona when we saw an Asian man looking anxiously about him in the tiny central piazza. It was the first immigrant we had ever seen in Novaglie. He was tall, in his late twenties perhaps, heavily built and clearly, to risk a pun, disorientated. He wore a smart grey suit that looked as if it had fallen on him from a great height. His shoes were too big. He carried no bag. As we walked towards him, he looked at us anxiously, undecided whether to talk, then turned and hurried away. We saw him knocking on one of the doors that open directly on the street. Then another. Then another. People were pretending not to be home.

  When we returned from our walk the man was still hanging around in what is an amorphous, depressing little piazza: no more than a bus stop, a few containers for recycling bottles and paper, and a low, prefabricated gymnasium. The one or two older an
d finer buildings are hidden, as so often in Italy, behind high walls and cypress hedges. The man looked more anxious now. He was quite dark-skinned for an Asian. I went to speak to him.

  ‘Posso aiutare?’

  He didn’t understand.

  ‘English?’ I asked. ‘Can I help?’

  ‘Mi-la-no,’ he said.

  ‘Parlez-vous français? Deutsch?’

  ‘Mi-la-no,’ he repeated.

  ‘This isn’t Milan,’ I said. ‘We’re a hundred miles from Milan.’ Then, inspired, I suggested, ‘Char. You want char?’ I had remembered that ‘char’, a word we used for tea in northern England as children, actually came from Chinese.

  He nodded eagerly.

  We drove the man into town. He moved the way I would no doubt move if someone had suddenly asked me to walk around a strange town in a turban or a kimono. In the first bar in the suburbs I bought him tea and a hamburger. I remember being struck by the practised way he shook the sugar packet before opening it. It was the first gesture he had made with ease. Packets rather. He must have taken four. He ate his hamburger and drank his sickly tea without a word, making no attempt to discover what my plans for him might be, trusting entirely to my good intentions.

  There is a small monastery on this side of town known for its charity. ‘Don’t go to the police,’ the monks said. They will send him straight back to wherever he came from. He had probably been pushed out of a container truck, they thought, driving into Italy from Croatia. ‘They cross the border in the middle of the night,’ a monk explained, ‘drive for a few hours, then push their passengers out one by one in the most deserted places. He’s probably walked quite a long way.’

  ‘He wants to go to Milan,’ I said. They shook their heads. They couldn’t help. Then my wife said, ‘Take him to a Chinese restaurant.’

  There are only two or three Chinese restaurants in Verona. I’m not a fan of Chinese food. I drove him to the nearest, a garish place at the bottom of an amorphous block of flats. The manager was young, smartly dressed in a light grey suit quite similar to that of the new arrival but worn with panache. Immediately the anxious face of my young man became animated and adult. The two spoke together very rapidly in businesslike tones. They shared a language. Suddenly the restaurant owner pulled a €100 note from his pocket and handed it to the man.

  Take him to the station, he told me, and put him on a train to Milan.

  ‘But does he know where to go when he gets there?’

  ‘He is to meet some people in the station. They are expecting him. In return, if you take him, I will give you and your family a free meal.’

  I had no desire to eat Chinese, and the station was twenty minutes’ drive away. Nevertheless, I took the new arrival, stood in the queue with him at the ticket window, paid for an Intercity ticket to Milan, had it stamped for him (the last thing he needed was a brush with the inspector) and took him to the right platform. I wondered if he had any idea how much his €100 note was worth. The generosity of the restaurant owner had surprised and rather humbled me.

  As the train came into the station, the man started saying something in his language. He was smiling now from a very round, slightly pockmarked face. He seemed excited. I shook my head. He mimed a person speaking on the phone, and then writing something. I wrote down my phone number for him. He never got in touch. It seems there are scores of Chinese people living in the old service tunnels under Milano Centrale. Everybody complains: these people are stealing our work, our culture. Yet faced with the plight of the individual immigrant, Italians are far more likely to help than to report the man to the police and have him deported. However reluctant Italians are to embrace a multiracial society, the old antipathy to government and authority works in favour of the illegal alien.

  IT’S CURIOUS; YOU SEE so much of Italy’s new immigrant life revolving around the railways, you see Indian families on the move with all their belongings, you see the prostitutes and their pimps with their colourful shirts, you see Arabs and Turks opening kebab joints in station car parks, but you never see an immigrant working for Trenitalia.

  As you drive your car along the riverside, the Adige, hurrying to the station for the train of the living dead, you can’t help but notice, even as early as six in the morning, a long queue of black, brown, yellow and, yes, white faces standing by a tall iron gate. It is the Questura, the police headquarters. They are immigrants looking for permits. Enjoying almost full employment, Veronese businesses need immigrants, they need cheap labour. But why do these people have to wait in a queue so early, even on the coldest of winter mornings? And why do we never see them driving buses, or checking tickets on trains?

  The answer to the first question can only be the usual indifference of any branch of the Italian bureaucracy to those they supposedly serve. It’s quite normal for public offices to open for only a few hours on only two or three days a week. You are always a supplicant, never a customer.

  As to why the immigrants are not working for public transport, the truth is that all state and public sector jobs require an end-of-school certificate, il certificato scolastico. From an Italian school, of course. Whenever one admires the homogeneity and apparent dignity of a society like Italy’s, a society that has retained a cohesion and identity largely lost in England or the metropolitan United States, one must always remember that it is constructed around such mechanisms of exclusion as the school certificate. Those immigrants who have not studied in Italian schools will not be permitted to collect Italian rubbish, or drive Italian buses, or sell tickets for the train of the living dead. The unions, so ready to strike and raise their voices about everything else, do not seem to make a fuss about this. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next few years as the immigrants’ children complete their studies. It will be a great day when a black capotreno tries to fine me for not having had my ticket punched.

  THE RAILS AROUND US multiply and switch over each other as lines from all directions are gathered together for the final mile to Milano Centrale. For perhaps five minutes the train plays at going as slowly as a train can without actually stopping. All around us there are overpasses, gritty playgrounds, tenements. Graffiti everywhere. ‘Evviva la figa!’ someone has written. Long live pussy.

  As the train pulls into Lambrate, the prostitute sleeps. I put my book in my bag. There’s an extraordinary tension for me in these last moments of the journey as the Interregionale grinds to a stop on another ordinary day of my life. The world appears to be suspended; for a few awful seconds you can’t help but be aware of the horror of routine, the days and years bleeding into a past as cluttered and unstructured as this railway landscape. Nobody else seems concerned. Two girls are teasing a third over a new tattoo she has, a little rose just above her bare hip. They touch it with manicured fingertips. The flesh is firm and brown. ‘Let me see,’ red tie demands, but now the train jolts to a stop and everybody is piling off. Nothing could be slower than the Interregionale on that last half-mile into Centrale. Better take the metro at Lambrate.

  fn1 All the information in this first part of the book refers to 2005. Prepare for surprises in the second part, where everything changes so that much can remain the same.

  Chapter 2

  MILANO–VERONA

  IF COMING TO Milan I get off my interregionale at lambrate, returning I board whatever train I take at Centrale. Because it’s convenient, and because I love going through Centrale. In particular, I love entering it, being outside it and moving inside, for this is surely the most monumental railway station in Western Europe. More than anywhere I know, Milano Centrale gives the traveller the impression that he really must be setting out on a very serious journey. This is a trifle comic when you hurry through the colossal central portal and across the majestic ticket hall as a matter of routine. You should be setting off to Berlin, or Paris, or even some other world or dimension, and instead here you are worrying about whether the ticket lines are too long to pick up a few supplementi Intercity for Verona
Porta Nuova.

  Contrary to popular belief, the station was not dreamed up by the Fascists. The design, by a certain Ulisse Stacchini, dates back to 1912, ten years before the March on Rome. But the project was interrupted by the First World War, and by the time the funds were there to resume it, the Fascists were in power and the look of the thing was somewhat altered. It’s the massive volumes of the stone spaces combined with the highly stylised ornamentation that create the special Centrale effect. As you approach the main entrance from the piazza, two solemn horses bow their necks to greet you from forty feet above. Inside the ticket hall, and again high, high above your head, dozens of statues and friezes of classical warriors, their swords, shields and lances in action, alternate with Liberty-like bas-reliefs of trains and planes and buses. It’s Fascism’s double gesture of looking back to the glory that was Rome and forward to some unimaginably efficient, technological Italy of the future. Aesthetically, at least in this space of greyish-white stone with coloured marble and granite inserts, it works wonderfully.

  But you see all this beauty only if you lift your eye. And it’s amazing how rarely the eye lifts when you are commuting. ‘Each man fixed his eyes before his feet,’ T. S. Eliot said of the crowd flowing over London Bridge. It’s no different in Milano Centrale. It was years before I noticed the zodiac signs in bas-relief all up one wall of the ticket hall. To make it even less likely that you will really see the building, its grand spaces are being invaded and broken up by aggressive advertising campaigns involving huge poster panels suspended from the high ceiling to swing only a little way above eye level.

  At the moment Coca-Cola has taken over the entrance to the station with a score of towering images so brightly coloured that the delicate greys and browns of the stone facade seem as invisible as wet asphalt in twilight. Inside the ticket hall, Naomi Campbell mirrors herself everywhere; twenty feet high in various glossily aggressive poses she shows just how long a girl’s legs can be when she wears a short, tight skirt. I forget the manufacturer’s name. So the archetypal images that were to establish a sense of Italian nationhood, of continuity from past to present and from present to future, are eclipsed by fizzy drinks and fashion goods. A sticky film of postmodern parody wraps around everything that was supposed to be uplifting, majestic. It’s curious to think that Mussolini, who was so enthusiastic about this station, was a sworn enemy of international capitalism, and that when the Americans occupied Rome what distressed him most was the thought that black-skinned soldiers should have captured and, as he saw it, defiled the monuments of ancient empire. I imagine Il Duce, after his summary execution, passing through that portal over which is written ‘Abandon all hope ye who enter here’ – perhaps the design (for even the gates of hell must have an architect) is not so different from that of Milano Centrale – only to find an advertising campaign for canned soda featuring the gorgeously dark Naomi Campbell.