by Tim Parks
MY PALERMO HOTEL WANTED cash in advance and didn’t give a receipt. But they did warn me that I would have to take a bus if I wanted to go to Modica, on the southern coast of Sicily, on a Sunday. ‘There are no trains on Sunday in Sicily,’ they told me. ‘You should arrive early for the bus because it might be full.’
My first thought was that this was nonsense. This hotel was on the fourth floor and run by a couple who might have been a Sicilian Norman Bates and his mamma, moving in a crepuscular, mahoganied light among dusty crucifixes and ceramic madonnas. They are big on ceramics in Sicily and never skimp on religious icons. I hurried to my room, opened Trenitalia’s ticket purchase page and typed in Palermo to Modica. The road distance is about 125 miles. Sure enough, a train came up, leaving at 8.49 a.m. and arriving at 4.11 p.m., three changes, seven hours and twenty-two minutes of travel. Damn.
Still, there was a train.
Then I noticed the little asterisk after 8.49. The asterisk – and this is something you have to watch out for because it is so small and apparently inoffensive – means that ‘la soluzione si riferisce al giorno successivo’ – this possibility refers to the next day. Rather than indicate there was no train on Sunday, they had given me the only train on Monday.
One gets so used to the idea that there are trains between cities, at least in Europe, that one rarely actually studies a rail map to see what is possible and what is not. Obviously this had been a mistake on my part. I found a rail map for Sicily on the Net and studied it. Immediately it was evident that the scant network in the interior of the island had nothing to do with modern tourist trails or indeed rapid communication between major Sicilian business centres. These lines had been built in the nineteenth century to bring sulphur and salt down from mines in the mountains. Sicily produced almost all of Europe’s sulphur in that period, and industrial Britain was the main buyer. Don Luigi Sturzo, whose street passes by Garibaldi’s railway station in Milan, had fought to reduce child slavery in the mines, the kind of awful working conditions recorded in Giovanni Verga’s story ‘Rosso Malpelo’, about a brutalised and violent young boy who simply disappears down a salt mine. Most of these mines closed in the early twentieth century; since then there seems to have been very little investment in redesigning the rail network for other uses. Sicily simply isn’t a train culture. Perhaps an efficient train system requires the presence of a strong central state determined to integrate all areas of a country into its communications network. The absence of state authority that has allowed the Mafia to flourish runs parallel with the weakness of the train service. If I wanted to travel to Modica on a Sunday I was going to have to take a bus run by the Sicilian municipal authority and hence under the attentive patronage of local politicians. As I write, the president of the region of Sicily has just been forced to resign, mainly over the grotesque overmanning in every area of public administration, something that has pushed the region to the edge of bankruptcy.
TOLD TO ARRIVE EARLY, I was at the Big Bus Bar, just a stone’s throw from the Palermo rail station, at 8 a.m. for an 8.45 bus. Yes, the Big Bus Bar. English is everywhere. Tickets are sold with coffees and arancini. But no, I couldn’t use a credit card, the man said, though he had a credit card terminal right there on the desk, wired up and winking. He took cash, gave me a ticket, and was very friendly in coming out of the bar and pointing along the street to where I could wait for the bus.
‘That bench,’ he said. ‘It stops there.’
Buses need so much less infrastructure than trains. No stations, ticket offices, platforms or dedicated rails. Just an old bench on a broken pavement.
The seat was made of wooden slats bolted onto a tubular iron frame. It was deserted. I thought I would sit and read. Underneath the bench were plastic cups, a banana peel, a blue plastic bag, a rectangular liqueur bottle. To one end of the bench, on the seat, were two broken eggshells and a little white of egg smeared over a couple of slats. The other end looked clean. I sat down, then quickly stood. Someone had pissed. The morning was already warm. King Minos, our friendly heatwave, was up early, though the bench was in the shade. Now that I’d noticed it, the smell was overpowering and I moved off and found a post to lean on ten yards away. If a crowd began to gather, I could move closer later, I thought.
Two women arrived, one older and one younger; they sat on the clean side of the bench, hung on perhaps two minutes, then stood and moved off. Three or four others repeated the experiment. Then a man in fluorescent lime-green trousers, blue shirt and white plastic gloves arrived carrying a witch’s broom and dustpan. He began to sweep around the bench, emptying his sweepings into a tall wheelie bin. His manner was neither lazy nor assiduous. He did his job stolidly, but seemed to feel that to be too thorough would be inappropriate. Having swept well enough around the bench and adventured his broom a little way under it – say, six inches or so – he left the other rubbish under there right where it was. Perhaps the powerful piss smell was too much for him. It was not his fault that he had no means of washing it away. If he noticed the eggs on the bench, he didn’t do anything about them. Perhaps filth on rather than under the bench was another man’s territory. In any event, he seemed satisfied with his efforts to the point that he was actually whistling as he moved off with his bin.
The sunshine intensified and the smell with it. A stately old Fiat 132 arrived bringing two nuns dressed in white. The younger of the two, in her late sixties, parked the vehicle about a yard from the pavement, a couple of yards ahead of the bench, and right on a corner. Having pulled out a heavy bag, they began to discuss whether the car could be left there. They decided it couldn’t. You can’t park a car on a corner, and certainly not so far out from the pavement. The younger nun got back in the seat, started the car, frowned, turned the motor off and got out again. They had been wrong, she said; it could be left there. There was a little more discussion about this, but in the end the decision stood, and the two white-clad nuns now took up positions right by the bench at the exact point where the bus was supposed to arrive fifteen minutes later. Even their sandals were white, I noticed. The urine smell did not deter them. Perhaps years of mortifying the flesh made them immune. The driver nun stood with her hands behind her back; her fingers were linked by the car key ring on which she moved the four or five keys back and forth, as if they formed a rosary. I couldn’t see if her lips were moving. The more the sun came up, the more the minutes passed, the more I was impressed by their fortitude. A dozen other passengers were hanging well back. But the nuns showed no sign of unease – not, that is, until a young man came and stood on the tarmac in front of them, even nearer to the eventual bus than they were. This got them hopping from one white sandal to another in agitation.
Then, very unusually, the couple to my left asked me, in Italian, with local Sicilian accents bordering on dialect, what time exactly the bus was supposed to arrive, and I replied, in my northern Italian, that it should have arrived a moment ago. Then they said thanks, they had thought as much, how typical, and I said yeah, isn’t it, but it’s early in the day to start complaining. They laughed and agreed and did not appear to notice at all that I was not Italian. Was it the now overwhelming smell of urine that had masked my foreignness? The reader will have long reached the conclusion that I am obsessed by this, but it remains a complete mystery to me how people pick up or don’t pick up whatever messages I send out. Anyway, I suddenly felt pleased. No, more than pleased, moved. Here I was in my adoptive country, in a remote part of it that I had always felt would be a bridge too far for me, Sicily, the south, danger, the Mafia, calmly chatting away to ordinary folks, understanding and understood, as if I really were Italian. Fantastic. I decided to enjoy watching developments with the nuns and the insolent queue jumper.
The bus arrived fifteen minutes late. A small crowd of about twenty held their collective breath and closed in on the urine-reeking bench. The white door of the white bus began its jerky, automatic-door-opening movement, first pushing outwards and then beginning to
slide towards the back. The bold young interloper at the head of the queue took a step forward to board and … exactly as he did so, the older of the two white-clad nuns, she who didn’t drive, she who had seemed very much under the care of her more sprightly companion, surged past him, raising her left arm in such a way as to plant an elbow against his chest and thrust him powerfully back. He was checked and stumbled. Already, white on white, the two brides of Christ were up the steps and in command of the front seat.
THE JOY OF TRAINS is that you can read while you travel. In his book Le ferrovie, Stefano Maggi claims that the spread of railways in the late nineteenth century went hand in hand with a marked increase in reading as newsagents opened new outlets in all the stations, offering books and magazines for the journey. Alas, you can’t read on a bus. Or I can’t. If I try, I soon start to feel sick. I also start to feel trapped in my seat. It’s not that I really want to move around, but I’d like to feel I could, the way you usually can move about on a train. On the Italo, for example, I had very much enjoyed walking right to the front of the train and back.
Having arrived late, the driver was in a hurry. It was a four-and-a-half-hour ride. With no conversations to overhear, since almost everyone was sitting alone, and buses are anyway noisier than trains, I was reduced to staring at the landscape. Low hills, burned brown-green grass, bleached white tracks, small prickly trees and dusty vines. I was reminded of the only other time I had travelled deep into Sicily. Benetton’s promotional department was going to photograph young people in Corleone, in the heart of the heart of the country, to improve the image of a town that had unjustly been presented, they said, as nothing but Mafia, crime and tax evasion, this thanks or no thanks to the Godfather films. Would I come along and write about it? They offered more money than I was used to. I said I would, on the condition that I was free to write anything I wanted, and I told them straight that I had a gut dislike of Benetton’s opportunist mix of piety and promotion. They said I was absolutely free to say what I liked; they were modern people in favour of honesty and free speech. In a suffocatingly hot Corleone, the kids chosen (very carefully) to be photographed were only too eager to feature on Benetton publicity; they hoped this might prove a passport to leaving the place. Over lunch the new mayor, a brave young man who had been elected on an anti-corruption ticket, described how a severed goat’s head had recently been left on his doorstep. As the troupe moved around the small town’s central streets and piazza, old people sitting against the walls on old wooden kitchen chairs did not want to talk to us. At the end of a restaurant meal that seemed interminable thanks to the proprietor’s insistence that we try every dish on the menu, we were first given the bill and then asked what sum we would like to appear on the official receipt; if we were claiming expenses they were quite happy to jack up the figure by 50 per cent. Of course, such generosity could only mean that many customers were getting no receipt at all; otherwise there wouldn’t have been the cash to cover this. ‘We did tell them,’ one of the promo girls said to me, ‘that we were trying to change the image of the place.’
‘I guess they don’t associate a little cooking of the books with crime,’ I said with a laugh.
About an hour into the journey the bus attacked a series of hairpins, climbing up to a plateau. After a while we began the descent, at speeds that had to be unwise. At the third or fourth bend, the driver braked fiercely, and my head swayed forward to touch the seat in front. I thought nothing of it. He must know the road like the back of his hand. A couple of bends later the bus braked, skidded, then slammed to a stop at the elbow of the hairpin, sending all kinds of luggage, phones, wallets and books onto the floor. We were inches from a guardrail protecting us from a steep drop into a rocky gully. The hefty woman sitting on the other side of the aisle from me crossed herself. The woman behind me, a serious, professional-looking lady who had been trying to use her computer to do some work, asked me if I was OK. She had seen my head bang forward. I asked her if it was always like this, why was he in such a hurry.
‘He’s with his wife,’ she said.
I must have looked puzzled because she added, ‘The woman in the seat behind him.’
‘And so?’
‘He’s eager to arrive and settle down to Sunday lunch.’
This seemed to me a very generous explanation of why a man might respond to his wife’s presence by driving with mad haste. In any event, the superiority of the train was evident. Modern signalling systems discourage speeding, and there is no place for a wife to sit behind a husband driver in a train cab. Or a husband behind a wife driver, for that matter, for there is one woman who has qualified to drive Trenitalia’s frecce. I have been unable to find the statistics for women train drivers in general, but they do exist and there are even a couple of eccentric websites dedicated to sightings of them. What is certain is that there are more women driving the trains than black people of either sex.
Occasionally as the bus rumbles on I notice old train lines half hidden in the dirt, overgrown, broken. Here and there disused rail viaducts are crumbling into the stony gulleys. Perched on hilltops, their houses huddled together in protective isolation, the towns here were clearly not built with railways in mind, or indeed rapid communication of any kind. Tormented by the sun, thirsty, craggy and prickling with cactuses, the landscape does not encourage movement.
Eventually we arrived at Ragusa, a spectacular town toppling over a high ridge, a sort of baroque lava stream tumbling into an arid canyon of dead grass and cactuses towards Modica, then the coast far below. I was puzzled. I knew Ragusa had a railway station connecting with Modica, but how? This territory was just too arduous. I turned to the woman behind me, still amazingly busy with her computer, despite all the bends, not to mention three hours and more of battery time. Had she ever taken the train from Ragusa to Modica? I asked.
‘Years ago,’ she said. ‘As a little girl with my parents.’ But it was too inconvenient, too slow, ran too rarely to use now.
‘And it doesn’t run on Sundays.’
‘No.’
The bus was now zigzagging fiercely again, plunging down the hillside to the plain. To our left the houses of Ragusa seemed to have been built one on top of another, so sharp was the descent.
‘Where does the line run?’ I asked. ‘I love trains. It must be quite a ride.’
She frowned as if remembering and said, ‘Yes, it’s famous. It goes under the hill in a spiral tunnel.’
I didn’t understand.
She closed her laptop; the journey was nearly over. The bus was zipping back and forth down the last hairpins in a sort of bagatelle movement. The driver must be smelling his Sunday lunch.
‘The tunnel spirals up from Modica and climbs over itself before coming out just before Ragusa. There’s a story about it, if I can remember.’
I was looking at the hillside. The rough whitish rock was so uneven and rugged, the facades so higgledy-piggledy, it seemed a miracle they had built the place at all, never mind a train tunnel spiralling up to it. In the nineteenth century.
Zipping away her computer, this busy woman in her forties was evidently someone who had escaped the provinces for a professional life in the city and was paying a visit to family on a Sunday. She gave the impression of making the trip on a regular basis, as a duty.
‘That’s it,’ she said with a smile. ‘The tunnel was dug from both ends simultaneously, from the top in Ragusa and the bottom in Modica. On the day the workers were supposed to break through and meet up, the engineer invited all the local dignitaries to see it. Except the ends didn’t meet and he was so upset he’d got his calculations wrong that he killed himself that night. That’s the story, anyway.’ She seemed puzzled herself as to whether it could be true. ‘Then the next day the tunnels did meet. People like unhappy stories around here.’
What Latin passion, I thought. What pride in expertise, what a foolish sense of personal honour to kill yourself over a mistake. Without even taking the time to check out ho
w big the mistake was.
Another very unhappy story was recalled by the name of the square where the bus reached its terminus on the outskirts of Modica: Piazzale Falcone e Borsellino. Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were two investigating magistrates killed by the Mafia in 1992, and any number of squares, streets, buildings and schools in Sicily and indeed on the Italian mainland are now named after them. The intention is to honour their extraordinary courage and dedication, but I sometimes wonder if the effect might not be to discourage others from following in their footsteps.
Unlike the train to Palermo, the bus to Modica had arrived at its destination a full half-hour early. At some risk to our lives. The driver chased us off his vehicle and roared away with his wife. The light was blinding. There was no shade, such as might be provided by the waiting room or ticket hall in even the smallest of stations. I was to be picked up here by a hotel proprietor related to a colleague of mine at the university in Milan. In the meantime, shading my eyes, I was able to gaze at a baroque church facade looking down from a commanding hilltop. All is baroque here because the older towns of Ragusa and Modica were largely destroyed in an earthquake in 1693 and then rebuilt in the style of the time. Waiting, I tried to throw together a few feelings about this Sicilian baroque: a confusion of the ornamental and the devotional, self-satisfied, sentimental, glorying in the pathos of Christ’s suffering but ostentatiously rich, flamboyantly affluent. Somewhere or other there was a connection between this style – the bleeding hearts, the weeping madonnas, the money – and the complacency of the person who announces, ‘The state has abandoned us, the railways have abandoned us,’ knowing full well that she is returning to a nice home and a husband waiting in a new car.
