Italian Ways

by Tim Parks

  ‘Beeah,’ he says. ‘Sanwidge. Sohda.’

  Even an Englishman’s refreshment priorities are assumed.

  ‘No grazie,’ I tell him, keeping my words as few and my accent as perfect as possible.

  Why is the priestly pate so interested in me? He’s staring.

  With the inspectors and the hawker blocking the doorway, the Gypsy woman is having to wait her turn to come into the compartment and get her begging cards back. She doesn’t know the two inspectors or salute them, but they tolerate her. Is begging allowed on trains? I don’t know, though at a guess I’d say no. The boy buys an orange soda. The worried woman buys a coffee. Nobody gives a cent to the Gypsy woman, yet presumably people do give or she wouldn’t be doing this. Does she have a ticket? The inspectors don’t ask, but one of them comes in now to examine ours. I’m the only one who has bought my documento di viaggio online, the only one to show his ticket on the computer screen. The inspector examines the PDF, taps the ticket code in his little machine and accepts it. I’m relieved, though, yes, I did have a paper printout in my pocket this time, though it’s theoretically not required. Again the priest looks at me with brazen curiosity. Something about me has roused his interest. But I have decided not to talk to him; I’m not going to tell him whatever it is he wants to know about me.

  About fifteen minutes out of Rome we get a welcoming announcement from the capotreno listing all our stops, telling us where the dining car is, which carriages will go to Siracusa and which to Palermo, because after we have crossed to Sicily the train will split. His whole spiel is delivered in four languages and always with some panache.

  The dropped girlfriend calls the Sicilian boy again. He listens patiently for quite a while before asking, ‘Did I say something I shouldn’t have?’ On the other side of me, the girl who had a tough night has settled down to sleep. Her head lolls.

  ‘I just felt like it,’ the boy says. He’s so patient and so ruthless. ‘I felt like it and I did it and that’s that. It’s called freedom.’

  Writing those words down, one’s tempted to add a tag like ‘he said with sudden belligerence’ or ‘finality’; but he didn’t. He says everything in exactly the same tone, perhaps with just the slightest hint of the appropriate emotion, a discreet and washed-out colour.

  ‘In bocca al lupo,’ he says now. ‘Good luck with everything.’

  Now I can hear a raised voice at the other end of the line. ‘Basta,’ he says. ‘Enough. I’ve decided and that’s that.’

  He closes the call, puts the phone in his lap, and flexes his hand open and closed, open and closed, as might a boxer who has held his fist clenched too long. For a few minutes he stretches his mouth from side to side. Then he begins to hum again. Outside, the barren hills of Campania roll by. Thinking of voices and dialects and difficult conversations with girls I remember the last time I travelled this stretch of line on a train and saw these hills. It was that trip with the football supporters to see Hellas Verona play in Naples. The three boys I was with spent this stretch of the journey trying to chat up a Roman girl who was going to see her Neapolitan boyfriend for the weekend. They asked her every embarrassing and impertinent question that a group of boys ever could ask a young woman, and she dealt with it all so coolly and wryly, even taking time to say that she found their accents cute.

  ‘Evviva Verona!’ the boys yelled. ‘Home of Romeo and Juliet, city of romance.’ They tried to get her to join in cheers of Hellas, the name of Verona’s football club: ‘HEEELLLLLLAAAAS!’ They gave her a blue-and-yellow Hellas flag and asked her if she would lie on it when her boyfriend made love to her. She smiled and said she would. ‘Then you’ll be a buteleta,’ they said, a little girl (in Veronese), a Hellas girl. She’d like that, she said. She repeated the word buteleta in her Roman accent and all the boys laughed and tried to get her to repeat it in the correct Veronese accent. And the more she was game and unfazed, the harsher their dialect and requests became. She had to yell Hellaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaas when she climaxed with her boyfriend, they shouted. Very gravely she said she might. She’d have to think about it.

  ‘You don’t really want to sleep with a Neapolitan,’ one of them began. ‘What about me? Can’t you fancy me?’ The Veronese were such lovers, he said. ‘Maybe, someday,’ she said. ‘Show us a nipple,’ one of the boys asked. ‘Just one, please.’ She smiled and shook her head. ‘A bra strap then, a bra strap.’ She thought about it. She was very petite, cute, well made with very small, neatly moulded features. ‘OK,’ she said, and she moved the shoulder of her T-shirt to show them a beige bra strap. There was a wild roar.

  Thus the trains bring Italians together, I reflect now, thinking back on that conversation that seemed both extremely spontaneous but absolutely scripted, and so terribly easy to remember, as if it had already happened a thousand times and would happen a thousand times again in the future, like this interminable phone call between the boy beside me and the girl he is leaving. She calls back again. He listens. After a while he says,

  ‘But it’s normal. People do this.’

  And then after another few minutes,

  ‘E vabbè comunque.’ OK all the same.

  This time the conversation was really over because he turned his phone off and in no time at all had fallen asleep. So now I had two young heads lolling, one on each side of me, in cartoon fashion, slowly sinking, suddenly dropping, then jerking up again, then sinking again. Train sleep. The monsignor’s friend smiled to show me he had noticed this too and how endearing it was. I frustrated him by opening my laptop again. When she turned a page, I was able to see that the woman beside him was reading an article titled, ‘Hate Turns Mother-in-Law into Murderer’.

  SEVEN HOURS INTO THE journey, at Villa San Giovanni, a northern suburb of Reggio Calabria, they split the train in two and put it on the ferry. I had assumed that we would get off the train, get on the ferry, get off the ferry and get on another train, as we always did as children when we crossed from Dover to Calais. I had not believed it when a student told me they really put the train on the boat; I thought she must be misinformed. But no, they do. The actual ferry crossing from the Calabrian coast to Messina, at the north-eastern corner of Sicily, takes about thirty minutes. Splitting the train and shunting the two halves back and forth to roll them into the belly of the boat takes about an hour. Then another hour to shunt them off and attach them to separate locomotives, four carriages for Palermo and four for Siracusa. During these jerky, rail-grinding procedures the air conditioning is turned off.

  We arrived at the dock in Villa San Giovanni at 6.30 p.m. The train sat under full sunshine. The temperature was about thirty-five degrees. The windows were sealed. Very soon, the woman with the gossip magazines opened a large pink fan.

  There had been some changes among the passengers. The dancing girl to my left and the gap-toothed banker priest had both got off before Naples. Opposite I now had a chubbily handsome woman in her forties who was keeping her husband constantly informed, by phone, as to her giramenti di testa – dizzy fits – and our possible arrival time in Messina. She seemed cultured, competent and entirely focused on the well-being of her large, slightly moist body.

  Beside me, on the window side, was another young woman, this time with her boyfriend facing her, in what had previously been the empty seat. No sooner did this happy couple get on than they placed a large food cooler on the floor between them, their heads meeting and nuzzling over it as they rummaged among wrapping paper and Coke bottles and started to offer around crisps, tiny pizzas, ham sandwiches and little cakes. Everyone smiled and declined, except the boy who had seen off his girlfriend; he accepted a small pizza. With the air of someone used to presiding over intimate dinner parties, the large lady observed that she had realised at once the couple must be southerners because only southerners offered their food to people, not like the mean and miserable folk of the north. She smiled complacently. A more obvious invitation for general chatter and self-congratulation one could hardly imagine
, since it was clear that the boy sprawled beside me and the permed woman with the gossip magazines had very southern physiognomies. I was the one odd man out, and she had clearly decided that wherever I was from I wasn’t likely to take offence.

  From this point on, the compartment was a salon. The young couple, she with a charmingly long neck of the kind one sees on Etruscan vases, he with a young man’s beard that he constantly combed for crumbs as he ate, began to explain the foolishness of their trip: an uncle was picking them up in Palermo to drive them to his house on the coast just below Trapani. But they only had the weekend! So on Sunday evening they would be back on the night train from Palermo, which should get them to Naples just in time to be back at work Monday morning. Exhausting!

  ‘The fact is, I can’t fly,’ the girl confided, and she smiled at her boyfriend with such seductive apology for wasting his weekend on the train that he leaned across and put both hands around that long neck to forgive her. To my right the tall, sprawling, now single young man turned his phone over and over in his hand.

  Then everyone felt the need to declare why they would do something so eccentric as to take a train, of all things, to Sicily. The permed woman, who appeared to be studying her magazines as if for an exam, explained that she lived only a couple of hundred yards from the small station at Castroreale, so that it really was the easiest thing for her, even though the bus would be cheaper and quicker, and the plane much quicker. The chubby woman said her blood pressure problems didn’t allow her to fly and she found the bus uncomfortable, the seats weren’t big enough, the movements too jerky. The boy told us he was training to be a soldier. He only had three days off. He would normally have gone by bus, but his parents had bought him the train ticket. The other listeners were so pleased to hear that they had a young soldier among them, and a handsome one at that, that they forgot to ask me, or were spared from asking me, what I was doing on this train, which was fine by me, since wherever possible I avoid the dull discussion about my foreignness and my writing habit. The boy described, with an animation he had not shown throughout the long call with his girlfriend, all the ordeals of his boot camp, in particular the marches in high temperatures carrying some eighty-odd pounds of equipment.

  ‘Would you be happy to be selected for Afghanistan?’ the woman with giramenti di testa asked with obvious concern.

  ‘Yes,’ the boy said. He spoke with some solemnity now. But it was more likely that he’d be fighting closer to home, he thought. ‘The revolution isn’t far away now,’ he told us. ‘With this economic crisis and everything. It’s already begun in Greece and Spain.’

  It wasn’t clear from the way he spoke which side of the revolution he thought he would be on, if ever the fighting began, only that he was looking forward to this chance, as he saw it, to become adult. There was a curious curl to his upper lip, almost a sneer; he was eager to feel superior but knew it was something he had to work on, he had to train to become a good soldier, then he would have earned that sense of elevated detachment that had allowed him to blow away his girlfriend so calmly. He had just turned twenty, he said.

  ‘After a while, you could get yourself transferred home to Palermo,’ the chubby woman advised. ‘They have a large barracks there.’

  He’d already had a chance to move back, the boy said, and added proudly, ‘Lots of my compagni would have said yes, but I’m not the kind. I want to live in new places.’

  ‘But you’re coming home for your leave, even if it’s only three days.’

  ‘My mother paid for my ticket,’ he said with a shrug. Everybody laughed.

  IN THE LONG HOURS rattling down the coast – Salerno, Sapri, Paola – the dusty hills to our left and the dazzling sea to our right – Dipiù and Zero are passed around. The sixty-six-year-old actor and director Michele Placido was marrying a woman of twenty-eight. The model Raffaella Fico had announced that she was pregnant by the mad and maverick Mario Balotelli, the first truly black Italian to play for the national football team. Coal black and always in trouble, Balotelli was demanding a DNA test.

  ‘Furbe, queste ragazze,’ remarks the hefty woman, who is presiding over the conversation.

  The soldier boy nods knowingly. ‘You bet.’ The young couple lean across to each other and nuzzle noses. Her eyebrows are plucked to pencil-line arches. Wearing shorts, his legs straddling hers are shaggy with hair.

  ‘If they wait and see when it’s born, it’ll be pretty obvious if it’s his,’ remarks the woman in the corner.

  ‘He’s not the only black in the world.’

  ‘The only one Fico has ever been seen with.’

  ‘You’re well informed,’ remarks the tubby woman, who throughout has shown a certain disdain for the gossip magazine, as if the publication interfered with her self-appointed role as hostess.

  Finally the paper ends up in my hands. My laptop battery ran out long ago. To my surprise I find that there’s an interview with former prime minister Romano Prodi and an editorial criticising the present government’s emergency measures to cut pensions and other spending. Then there are articles you feel must be dusted off and reprinted every year: ‘Mediterranean Diet Improves Your Humour’; ‘I Want a Girlfriend Like My Mum’. I glance through and hand it back to its owner with a smile.

  The large woman asks point-blank, ‘And where are you from?’

  I was wondering when this was going to happen. The train compartment really is a unique environment to travel in. It will be a sad day when it is truly extinct. Arranging passengers face to face, three on three, with barely enough space for legs between, it militates against all those gadgets we use to isolate ourselves, the phones, the MP3s, the computer screens. Sooner or later, in a compartment, you just have to acknowledge each other’s presence, it’s so blindingly obvious that you’re a group, in the here and now, for the duration of this journey.

  ‘I live in Milan,’ I say, smiling her straight in the eyes.

  Everybody listens. They all appreciate that the formula I’ve chosen has avoided saying where I’m from. It’s interesting how curious we all become when we spend a little time together, even though it’s completely irrelevant to us where the others are from. But then we hardly need to know that Raffaella is pregnant by Balotelli either.

  ‘Are you going to Sicily for business or pleasure?’

  I’d like to answer generously, but the last thing a writer should do is say that he is a writer.

  ‘Pleasurable business.’

  The woman twists her lips into a pout of wry frustration.

  ‘OK, OK,’ she says. ‘He doesn’t want to say.’

  ‘But where are you actually from?’ the young lover asks. I could hug him because he really seems perplexed. He hasn’t assumed I’m English.

  ‘London.’

  We’re racing beside the sea. You can see people bathing less than a hundred yards away. There are sailing boats. To our left the hills are climbing into a blue heat haze. Distant villages glitter. In the compartment the two dull syllables London sound like distant gunshots.

  ‘Thought so,’ the chubby woman says with a smile.

  AFTER HALF AN HOUR’S wait at Villa San Giovanni, the same woman observes, ‘It’s always the same. As far as Naples, announcements, politeness, ticket inspectors, more information than you’d want. After Naples, silence.’

  This is true. Since they turned the train round at Naples, there hasn’t been a single announcement.

  ‘Why is that?’ I ask, since I’m now part of the conversation. ‘After all, it’s the same organisation. Trenitalia.’

  ‘We are abandoned,’ she says dramatically.

  The woman beside her agrees. ‘The state has abandoned the south.’

  ‘It’s like they’re serving a different customer, who isn’t so important.’

  All the women are fanning themselves now. The woman in the corner has her proper pink fan; the tubby woman has finally found some reason to appreciate Dipiù – its pages make a soft flapping noise; the long-n
ecked girl simply invites the air towards herself with beckoning hands.

  And our carriage is reversing now. It stops and starts. And stops again. By the time we are trundled into the boat’s dark hold the air is unbreathable. Fortunately, you can go up on deck. Everybody stands, apart from the older Sicilian woman in the corner. ‘I’ll look after everyone’s bags,’ she volunteers. She and the fat woman have huge suitcases. Something might be stolen.

  ‘But you won’t get to see the sea,’ I protest. I offer to change places with her for a while.

  ‘I live by the sea.’

  To get off the train one has to walk down a couple of carriages, to where a train door coincides with steps leading up into the ship. Without a platform it’s quite a jump down. The air is full of fumes. The steps are narrow and steep. The space is not well lit. The twists and turns and galleyways and passages are disorientating. On deck the ship is half deserted. There are train passengers, a few people travelling by car, and a group of bus travellers who left one bus in Villa San Giovanni and will get on another in Messina. Strange that they put the train on the ferry, but not the bus. ‘It’s much faster this way,’ one of the bus passengers assures me. ‘We walk down the gangplank and it’s there waiting to go.’

  The bar is a dismal affair, two young men utterly uninterested in their jobs selling coffee in plastic cups. The food display is entirely composed of arancini, the ball of fried rice with ragout inside that is a Sicilian speciality. I pass.

  WATCHING THE COAST OF Calabria recede, or rather the uninspiring facades of the San Giovanni’s waterfront, and the coast of Sicily approach, a dark silhouette under a low but ferocious sun, I keep wondering why on earth they put the train on the boat. Perhaps some time ago when passenger carriages were mixed with freight wagons it had made sense to put the freight, which couldn’t get off and walk, on board.