by Tim Parks
‘Buon giorno,’ I said.
‘Il sole,’ she explained. The sun.
‘Già,’ I agreed.
She stretched her mouth a little and set to watch me as I returned to my Kindle and she fanned herself slowly with the same deliberate rhythm. Then the train turned another bend and the sun was on our side again. She wriggled for a moment, sighed and eventually lifted her bulk to move back across the aisle to the other side. Again I looked up at her and again she smiled. Somehow it felt like a significant and highly satisfactory encounter.
IN SIRACUSA, ON THE east coast of the island, we were already back in serious civilisation. The station architecture here is exactly the same as it is in Brescia or a thousand other places, square columns clad in slabs of cheap polished limestone holding up the concrete shelters over the platforms. But it is unusual to find a waiting room labelled Prima Classe and laid out as if for a wake in the 1920s with benches that seem to have been carved from coffins and an austerely framed mirror where travellers can check that they still have a reflection. Outside, where the taxis were parked, the facade had recently been restored in a honey-beige stucco with bright white trimmings. On this newly renovated facade I found a plaque that, translated, read:
STATE RAILWAYS
AND THE CITY OF SIRACUSA
To Sebastiano Vittorini, 1883–1972
LITERARY RAILWAYMAN WHO WAS
STATIONMASTER IN THIS BUILDING
WHERE THE WRITER ELIO
MET ROSA QUASIMODO
SIRACUSA 2007
What was charming about this was the assumption that the passer-by reading the plaque would know that ‘the writer Elio’ was the celebrated, or once celebrated, Elio Vittorini, novelist, essayist and translator (of D. H. Lawrence, Poe and Faulkner). As for Rosa Quasimodo, I myself had no idea, until I checked on the Internet that she was both the sister of the Nobel-winning poet Salvatore Quasimodo, and Elio Vittorini’s wife. So this was a plaque for the public, but for a local public and a literary public, not the uneducated, not the curious tourist who might arrive in this town and wish for an explanation. The railway opened the town to the world, but the plaque celebrated Siracusa among educated Siracusans. Later I did a little research. Rosa’s father, it seems, like Elio’s, was a railwayman. That was how they met. The two were forced to marry because their parents discovered that they had spent a night in bed together. Such was the rule in those times in Sicily: automatic wedlock. ‘One August evening,’ Rosa wrote, ‘as agreed beforehand, he waited for me at his bedroom window, and I took my shoes off, climbed onto the roof of the station and clambered across to him.’
WHY DO SOME PEOPLE have to sit facing the direction of motion while others, like myself, really don’t care which way we sit, frontways, backways, sideways? As the Intercity skirted the coast northwards towards Catania and Messina – rigorously on time, I was pleased to notice – an elderly couple came into the compartment I was so far sharing with a young man. Both were very small, the man immediately identifiable as a whiner, a miserable soul with deep down-turned lines at the corners of his mouth, a long thin face, white hair combed over a bald spot, a bird-like body, all puffed up, oversized chest, but with meagre shoulders and stick-like legs. At first he couldn’t work out which seats were his and his wife’s, and he proceeded to get angry about this, assuming that I or the other man in the compartment, who was at the window beside me, both of us facing in the direction of motion, had somehow stolen their seats. They had seats 53 and 55, he said. Why weren’t the seats clearly marked? He and his wife had specifically asked for seats facing the direction of the train.
I pointed out that the seat numbers were indicated on the glass between the compartment and the corridor. ‘There’s a little schema, as you look in from the corridor.’ He went outside to look. His wife was tiny, frightened, shrivelled.
He couldn’t work it out. He could see the numbers but he couldn’t see how the little diagram explained where those numbers were. I stood up to help.
‘Perspective, signore,’ I said. ‘The seats close to us are further apart and the window seats closer together. So 51 and 52 are the corridor seats, 55 and 56 the window. That little square between the seats is the window. Odd numbers with their backs to the locomotive, even numbers facing it.’
He was furious. Furious he hadn’t understood, furious a foreigner had explained it, and most of all furious about the seats they had been given.
‘My wife needs to be facing the locomotive! We especially asked for seats facing the locomotive.’
The young man to my right remarked that the train would be turned round twice on the journey, so no seat would be facing the locomotive the whole trip.
‘Since no one is sitting next to me,’ I said, indicating the seat to my left, ‘perhaps la signora could sit here.’
They were uncertain about this. They apparently had an investment in sitting in the seats allotted to them. What if someone came and sat in their seats while they were sitting elsewhere? On the other hand, his wife could not sit with her back to the train. She just couldn’t.
‘We were supposed to sit together.’ The man had perfected a tone of voice that was both belligerent and plaintive.
‘I’m happy to move,’ I said.
But the man did not want this. I was sitting in the seat I was supposed to be in, and I should stay there. He couldn’t be responsible for moving me.
As yet the tiny wife had said not a word. He had done all the talking for her. Eventually she sat down next to me while her husband brought in two gigantic, brand-new green leather suitcases, and proceeded to look at them and then to look up at the luggage racks above our heads. Next to me, the young man had gone back to his laptop. A glance at his screen showed he was poring over some highly technical documents.
I offered to help the man put his cases up, but he refused. Watching him struggle, lift the bag, stagger, let it fall again, I’m suddenly reminded of the way, when boarding a plane, the whole overhead locker routine brings out the worst in people. The hostess checks your boarding card and you start towards your seat, only to find the passage blocked for minutes at a time by people trying to fit oversized bags into lockers that the early comers have already stuffed full with coats and packages and guitars and umbrellas. People push, voices are raised. The pilot warns you that we will miss our departure slot if the boarding process is not completed sufficiently quickly. What ought to be the simple matter of getting onto a vehicle and sitting down is protracted into a tetchy trial of nerves.
This doesn’t happen on the train, which will depart anyway even if your luggage is all over the floor. But there are times when I fear that someone heaving up a heavy bag will drop it on me or my laptop. This was one of those moments.
‘Please let me help you.’
Mr Misery again said no. He now had the huge suitcase at shoulder height but couldn’t find the extra push to get it above his head and began to totter backwards, then forwards again about the compartment, which was now in motion. Suddenly he let it fall on his feet.
The young man beside me offered to put it up for him.
‘No.’ He was grimly determined.
At this moment the ticket inspector came in. He saw that the newly arrived couple still had to put their cases up and said he would come back later.
‘No!’ the man cried. He began feeling through his pockets. His jacket pockets, his trouser pockets.
‘I want my tickets punched,’ he said.
‘I’ll come back later,’ the inspector assured him.
‘Please punch my tickets,’ he demanded.
This was new to me. I thought in thirty years of Italian train travel I had seen it all, but apparently not. Here was a man insisting he have his tickets not just seen but also punched.
While he was fussing in his pockets and the inspector watched him, bemused, the young man sitting next to me put aside his laptop, stood, grabbed the first of the two green bags, and with no apparent effort, swung it up onto th
e rack. The man glared at him but was now worried that he had lost his ticket.
‘Grazie,’ the wife found her voice. Then she said, ‘Perhaps they’re in my handbag.’
They were. The inspector punched them.
As soon as he was gone, Mr Misery announced angrily, ‘This is a long trip. If we don’t have our tickets punched in the first section, when they check them in the second and see they weren’t punched, they might think we have been trying to avoid inspection. That has happened to me before.’
However fascinated I am by all the things that can go wrong between ticket bearer and ticket inspector, a relationship that has come to take on almost a metaphysical significance for me, I decided not to accept this invitation to converse. Nor did my young computerised neighbour.
But after a few minutes the young man did speak to me. Was I English? he asked. He had seen I was writing in English on my laptop. And he began to explain that in a month’s time he would be heading to Australia, to emigrate. His uncle had gone thirty years ago, to Melbourne, and now he was going to join him. He was from Ragusa, he said, graduated in architecture in Rome with a thesis on green buildings that left no carbon footprint.
‘So we were on the same train all the way,’ I said, and explained that I had come from Modica.
He laughed. He wasn’t that much of a masochist. He had had his parents drive him to Siracusa. It took half the time.
‘Half for you, but not for them.’
‘True,’ he agreed.
‘Not to mention the carbon footprint.’
‘Già.’ He confessed that the work experience he was doing in an architect’s office in Velletri had left him rather sceptical as to the possibility of the zero carbon footprint. A building that really achieved that would be far too expensive to build.
The train from Modica to Siracusa cost €7.
I asked him if there was no work in Ragusa. Was that why he was leaving? But he said, no, there was work, there was even an architect’s office in Ragusa that would take him on, a good one. He hesitated. It was just that, once you had left a place like Ragusa, it became impossible to go back. If he wanted to stay he should have studied nearby, in Catania or Siracusa.
‘You can’t return to Sicily,’ he said. ‘Once you’ve gone, you’ve gone.’
At Catania, a man got on and claimed the seat next to me, occupied by the timorous wife. She went out into the corridor. I had forgotten her train problem and thought nothing of it for a while, then realised she was standing there, long-suffering and a little uncertain on her feet. Her husband was frowning over his crossword puzzle.
I went out and told her, please, to take my seat.
She hesitated. ‘But you were talking to the nice young man. I don’t want to interrupt you.’
‘Take it,’ I told her. ‘Please.’
I STAYED IN THE corridor for a while. I had forgotten how these old Intercities have a bar running along the bottom of the corridor windows about four feet from the floor. This is just right for gripping with both hands as, your back to the compartments and face to the window, you gaze out over the countryside as it flies by.
We were passing Etna. Its perfect volcano shape looked very beautiful in the bright sunshine behind the lava stone city of Catania. ‘And you feel you can touch it with your hand,’ Giovanni Verga’s short story ‘Malaria’ begins, ‘as if it smoked up from the fat earth, there, everywhere, around about the mountains that shut it in, from Agnone to Mount Etna.’ He was born near here, malaria country. It was the disease that smoked up from the bowels of the earth. I use that passage with my students sometimes. Likewise the opening paragraphs of Verga’s ‘Black Bread’, which talk about how an old man’s greed led him to go on working on fertile slopes below Etna, despite the fact that everyone knew you inevitably caught the disease and died if you worked there for any length of time.
I love Verga. In ‘Malaria’, the local inkeeper, whose five wives have all died of malaria, becomes obsessed with the railway when he realises that the people passing by on the trains don’t suffer from the disease. He associates the malaria with the smoke of the volcano, while the railways become synonymous with wealth and health. But he was wrong there. One of the first studies investigating the link between malaria and mosquitoes was carried out with the help of Italian state railways. They had a problem with workers living in cheap railwaymen’s housing north of Rome; these men were constantly falling ill. Someone had the bright idea of installing nets in the bedroom windows so that when they slept with the windows open in summer the mosquitoes wouldn’t get to them. At the time it was just a hypothesis, a hunch. The improvement in the railwaymen’s health was immediate.
Trains were also useful during the 1908 earthquake, which reduced Catania to a heap of rubble. We were sliding through the suburbs right now, a prosaic clutter of concrete and palm trees. Survivors of the quake were housed in hundreds of railway carriages that the newly nationalised railways had rushed to the scene. Seven years old at the time, Quasimodo later wrote a poem about it, recalling nights in freight wagons where herds of children chew almonds and dried apples while dreaming of corpses and rubble.
Thinking of Verga, I suddenly wanted to read him. I went back into the compartment and googled ‘Malaria’. This is the first time I’ve made a trip with the chance to be online on the move. I hadn’t realised how much fun it would be tapping in instantly to books I knew describing landscape and places. Moments later I was reading D. H. Lawrence’s translation:
twice a day he saw the long line of carriages crowded with people pass by … sometimes a peasant lad playing the accordion with his head bent, bunched up on the seat of a third-class compartment; the beautiful ladies who looked out of the windows with their heads swathed in a veil; the silver and the tarnished steel of the bags and valises which shone under the polished lamps; the high stuffed seat-backs with their crochet-work covers. Ah, how lovely it must be travelling in there, snatching a wink of sleep! It was as if a piece of a city were sliding past, with the lit-up streets and the glittering shops. Then the train lost itself in the vast mist of the evening, and the poor fellow, taking off his shoes for a moment, and sitting on the bench, muttered, ‘Ah! for that lot there isn’t any malaria.’
Crochet-work covers! Beautiful ladies with veiled faces. There was none of that today on Intercity 724, Siracusa to Rome. The frightened wife was snatching a wink of sleep in my seat. Her husband was huffing and puffing over his crossword. I smiled. It seemed the train not only served to unite Italy but now also constituted a kind of catalyst that brought all my thoughts of the country together, all my reading and travelling over thirty years. As we drew into Messina I remembered that I had once watched Hellas Verona play in the town, and the Verona fans I was with, no more than a handful, caused outrage chanting Forza Etna! – Go for it – Etna! – meaning, bury them in hot lava. The result was that at the end of the game they had to beg for police protection to save them from hordes of Sicilians determined to beat the living daylights out of these barbarous northerners. In the end we had to wait in the stadium for almost two hours before their rage cooled to boredom and it was safe to go.
BOARDING THE FERRY, MY bet with the sceptical Sicilians was definitely on; we were only a dozen minutes late. Nothing. Likewise when the train pulled into the absolutely nondescript station of Lamezia Terme. Now came the tricky bit. A bus connection. Between Lamezia Terme on the west coast of Calabria and Catanzaro close to the east coast, the Gulf of Taranto, a bridge had come down only seconds after a train passed a few months before. In fact, the train derailed as the bridge came down, a lucky escape for the passengers who found themselves in one of those movie situations with the train just safe, though off the line, and the bridge behind them crumbling away. The official cause was heavy rain that had swollen a mountain torrent and shifted its usual bed so that it ate away the foundation of one of the bridge supports. Perhaps maintenance was also an issue. The bridge was a pre-war structure. In any event, almost a
year later the line was still closed and a bus connection was operating. On a blistering July afternoon about a hundred people tried to squeeze into a bus for seventy. Buses are not as big as trains.
Fearing that when all the seats were taken they would close the doors and force the rest to wait for the next bus, thus blowing my next and final connection and the bet, which I was rather foolishly determined to win, I made dishonourable efforts to be on board, and indeed I secured one of the last seats. As it turned out, the driver was not at all worried about people standing. Cripples, ancient ladies, pregnant women, everybody was accepted, everybody crushed into the stifling aisle. The journey was made more uncomfortable by a group of wild young Albanians spread out among the seats around me and yelling to each other over people’s heads. They seemed vaguely threatening and extremely restless, standing up to shout and sitting down hard again, bouncing and swaying to whatever music each was wired up to. The road was not of the best. Hugely overweight, the man standing in the aisle beside me rocked from side to side, grabbing at this or that, depending on the direction of the bend. This bus wasn’t made for people to stand in, and there were no handles. After a while I realised he was speaking English to two younger men beside him, with an Australian accent. It turned out he had come with his sons from Melbourne to see his father’s birthplace at Catanzaro. It seemed odd that on the same day I had met one Italian planning to emigrate to Melbourne, and then the descendants of another emigrant returning out of curiosity. Remembering a week I once spent in Melbourne, I feared the boys might find Catanzaro a disappointment.
At Catanzaro Lido, the outside of the station had been completely restyled to look like a swimming pool or leisure centre. Everything had a polished glass and cool, air-conditioned look, but alas without the air conditioning. Exposed to a day of ferocious Mediterranean sunshine, the ticket hall was truly suffocating. It was 5.45 p.m. My last train of the day was waiting on the platform. I began to wish that bet had been for money.
