by Tim Parks
The truth is that you can’t visit the past. Either you find a ruin, which is merely melancholy, or some new purpose has been found for the place. In Verona, too, Juliet’s tomb (yes, she of Romeo and Juliet fame) has been transformed into a marriage registry office. Why anyone would want to marry in a place of such ill omen is beyond me, but my son did. His reasoning was that if one isn’t going to marry in church, at least a fine medieval building adds a touch of solemnity. He wasn’t marrying in church because his beautiful bride was Muslim; not a marauding Turk, but of the same religion. I took comfort from the fact that it isn’t really Juliet’s tomb, of course; the designation is merest legend with crass commercial intent.
But the Castle of Otranto really is the Castle of Otranto; a once-serious military structure is now important only insofar as it completes a picturesque seaside panorama and has space to accommodate a variety of public services. Modern Italian genius is largely about inhabiting the past in a way that makes sense and money. Whole university degrees are dedicated to the subject. On the website of Ferrovie Sud Est I had noticed that they offered day trips from Bari to visit historical sites in the countryside, travelling in historical rail carriages – the present packaging itself as the past to survive in the future.
But now to find a place to swim where I wouldn’t be anxious that someone would grab my wallet and camera. It wasn’t easy, because most of the waterfront was just sand, sunshades and sea. However, at the other end of the bay the road climbs onto a low hill, then drops down again to a rocky coast of rugged black volcanic stone arranged in flat slabs with deep crevasses. I climbed down to where rocks met the sea in convenient little outcrops and lazy pools of clear water. The crevasses seemed made for hiding things. I stripped off and dived in. Swimming out beyond the rocks, it felt good to be in a place that was neither past nor future, nor commerce nor image, but just me, now, in the salty water under the hot sun.
DRYING OFF ON MY towel, I tried to get my mind around Ferrovie Sud Est. It was a railway of some one thousand miles, so its website claimed, serving the heel of Italy. There was a station as far south as Santa Maria di Leuca, on the very tip of the land. All around, the coastline was marvellous and the villages of the interior picturesque, a tourist’s dream, for the most part undeveloped, used almost exclusively in July and August, when the Italians themselves holiday, but empty for the rest of the year. Foreigners were rare. And even where there was a steady flow of people between towns or from town to coast, the rail service was underused. The European Union, it seems, had thrown money at it. It was politically correct to throw money at railways since they were understood to be an environmentally sustainable form of transport. But the money they had thrown was wasted because there hadn’t been enough of it to create a service that people would actually use. People preferred their cars, which gave them speed and freedom, even though it’s generally agreed that cars are one of the major factors behind global warming and we would all be better off if they were used a great deal less.
What would it take to get people to use these railways, or indeed any local railways?
The service would have to be such that you arrived at an easily accessible station and found regular and punctual trains heading straight for your destination at reasonable prices, with easy onward transport from that destination.
This was a lot to ask. It was an investment far beyond the funding for quaint stations and weed killing.
Then even if by some miracle this service were provided, would people use it? Some would. But not enough. To have a significant number of people use it, other forms of transport would have to be made decidedly unattractive. Cars would have to be too expensive, too hard to drive and park and keep. Of course, this is already happening. In the very week I write, petrol has just passed the €2 a litre threshold. Motorways are expensive. Parking can be difficult. In fact, car sales are falling sharply (20 per cent last year). But it’s still not enough, such is the desire for personal freedom, the desire to travel alone, to start and stop whenever and wherever you like, moving at exhilarating speed, hitting brake and accelerator, controlling every aspect of one’s journey, with an on-board navigator to eliminate anxieties about routing, your air conditioning set at exactly the temperature you desire, and your own music system playing the songs you like, not to mention the space in the boot for all the luggage you want to carry. People find this an attractive package.
So what would it take to make this railway, any local railway, viable?
An effort of collective will. A decision, a draconian decision, made together, as a society, that rail travel was the thing, that car travel must be penalised. This is the only way that an efficient, perhaps even solvent rail service could be introduced.
But would such a decision be right?
I had been following the debate on rail travel in England, where prices are so high that those who have to commute by rail find themselves paying season tickets costing thousands of pounds. On the radio I had heard the anti-rail lobby questioning whether those who don’t use the railways should be asked to subsidise them, as if it were a matter of paying for someone else’s cinema tickets; and the prorail lobby saying in timid response that road users should be happy because the railways kept further car users off the road, making road travel easier for them.
What pious nonsense. As if there was ever a question of a level playing field in the competition among modern transportation systems. As if the roads hadn’t received vast amounts of state subsidy. As if the principle that one should only pay for what one uses could ever make sense in a society, or indeed allow for the existence of a society at all; one’s reminded of those Americans who object to paying a school tax because they don’t have children, as if we didn’t all have an interest in an educated younger generation. Could the users of a metro system pay for it before it was there? They could not.
So, I concluded, the underlying issue is this: do we make decisions about transportation on the basis of what is most comfortable for each individual now, or can we plan for what is collectively most efficient and sustainable, even if not always and in each moment the most desirable? Clearly a train line whisking everyone from Lecce to all points along the coast is a much more efficient use of resources than the present reliance on cars. It would mean less pollution in the air, and less in the mind, too, since I’m sure the mind is dangerously polluted and agitated by the driving experience.
But again, to get to that situation where people used trains, one would have to penalise cars. Seriously. And if they seriously penalised cars in this area, people would go elsewhere – to Calabria, say, or Sicily. And the trains would remain empty.
So any measures must be national, not local.
But if they penalised cars all over Italy (this is unimaginable) – and not internal domestic flights, too, since planes pollute three times as much as trains – then non-Italians would go elsewhere, perhaps to France or Spain. The government that introduced the measures would lose the next elections.
So any measures must be international, not national. A change like this would have to be Europe-wide, perhaps worldwide.
So, I reflected – and it was definitely time to put my T-shirt back on, because the sun was blistering – to get people to use Ferrovie Sud Est from Lecce to Otranto there would have to be a massive swing in world opinion away from the present individualism that prefers cars and in general favours individual destiny over the fate of the collective and our contemporary life now over the inheritance of future generations.
And even if there were that swing in opinion across the world, there would remain the thorny question of governance. How could massive decisions penalising car travel be made worldwide when the world is composed of hundreds of separate and competing nations, some democracies and some not, all at different stages of development?
So, I realised, stepping into a bar to order a lemon granita before the return trip, the problem of how to make Ferrovie Sud Est viable was exactly the same increasingly
urgent problem that now faces the whole damn human race: how to govern the planet when there are unpleasant decisions that sooner or later will have to be made and that no one nation wants to make or has the power to make alone. Until that problem is solved, we will never have a transportation system, or much else, that makes sense. There’ll just be this pious half-arsed funding that keeps alive the idea of a train service and that makes sure there are well-designed logos and stair lifts for the handicapped, but in a general context that feels unviable and with levels of efficiency and hygiene that only second-class citizens can accept.
The granita was good. I was sitting outside a small kiosk on a low hill looking down over the beach and the Bay of Otranto, with the castle looking squat and forbidding in the distance, but, as I had already observed, very far from the Gothic pile evoked in Horace Walpole’s celebrated novel. They say that Gothic novels came into being because science and eighteenth-century rationalism were threatening to empty the world of any romance, spirituality or caprice. Two hundred years later the planet is full of technology but utterly irrational. And I don’t feel any need for Gothic excitement.
NOR, FORTUNATELY, WOULD I be getting any during the night to come. In Lecce I retrieved my bag from two men in orange jumpsuits playing cards. They showed only mild irritation at the interruption. Everything was intact. Ninety euros purchased me an upper berth in a so-called Cabina Comfort on the 19.10 night train to Milano. No lower berths were available.
‘Let me apologise in advance,’ I tell the couple already under the sheets below me as I climb the ladder to my bunk, ‘if I wake you during the night to head for the toilet.’
‘Oh, please, that’s no problem.’
This is an old Intercity carriage, beautifully refurbished and impeccably clean. There are freshly laundered sheets and blankets in polythene bags. I spread them out, remove my trousers in the half-light and get under the covers in my underwear. I lie there, listening. The couple below me are speaking in soft whispers. Outside, the familiar station noises are muffled and pleasant: a bustle of passengers in the corridor, an urgent coincidenza ringing around the platforms. I’m in the midst of life here, but protected, too. It feels good. Then, with a lurch, the train begins to move, the station lights flash across the cabin walls, the rails begin to tick as the train gathers speed, and I know that despite the early hour, sleep will soon be irresistible.
Sometime later the train has stopped and I’m aware of a young man climbing up to the bunk opposite mine. Is this Bari? Foggia? He’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt but carries a smart office worker’s briefcase. He knows how things work, has his ladder up quietly enough, and is soon in bed. ‘Buona notte,’ he murmurs. ‘Buona notte,’ the couple reply. ‘Buona notte,’ I say, so softly I’m not sure if they heard.
Then at 3 a.m., there I am of course having to creep down the ladder to go to the toilet. Can I go in my underwear? No. I wriggle into my trousers on the bed. The first step on the ladder makes it creak. Damn. Have I woken them? I don’t think so. There’s a night-light that gives just the visibility you need to move while allowing people to sleep. There’s air conditioning at exactly the right temperature. The knob turns and the door opens without a sound. Thank you, Trenitalia. It seems they’ve got this one just right.
We’re racing up the Adriatic. On my way back from the toilet I stand in the corridor, holding the bar across the windows, looking out. The rails are running right by the sea, on a raised dyke. On the beach you can see the dark spears of rows upon rows of closed sunshades, then the luminous surf beyond. I watch it for a while, the mystery of the sea at night and the throb of the train under my feet, then hurry back to bed. When I wake again, it’s to hear an announcement warning me that we will shortly be arriving in Milano Centrale. I can’t believe it. It’s only 6.50. Twenty minutes early. Faith rewarded. Opposite me, the young man from Foggia is pulling smart office clothes from his briefcase. He is turning into a businessman. Likewise the couple beneath me. They are already dressed for work. I wait discreetly until they’ve finished, then get going myself.
Why is it so exciting to pull into Milan this morning, a city I’ve arrived in literally thousands of times before: the slow leftward bend of the rails as the train rumbles through Lambrate, turning south towards Centrale, the streets already busy below us, a woman on an upper floor opening a shutter to greet the morning, then the great glass arch of the station itself. Stepping down from the carriage, I have a feeling I have returned from furthest margins to the throbbing heart, the centre whose commercial energy keeps the whole body alive and breathing. On the platform people are streaming towards the ticket hall.
Then I realise that I have two problems. I’m too early, and I don’t have a clean shirt. I keep a decent jacket in my cupboard at the faculty, but not a shirt. Taking time for a cappuccino, I see the obvious. The moment has come, the moment when I shall have to confess that the shopping centre in Milano Centrale does have its uses. Instead of the stairs, I head for the tapis roulant. I stand patiently behind the others as it slides slowly downward. And, yes, the shops are already open at 7 a.m. I gaze at their glossy windows. Books, sports gear, menswear. Professor Parks may not have showered, but he will have a fresh white shirt when he passes judgement from the dais.
EPILOGUE
‘WHERE ARE YOU,’ a voice asked. ‘Why aren’t you here?’
This was a Thursday evening in Verona; the car had just emerged from a tunnel, in heavy traffic, when the phone rang. Or rather when I noticed that the phone was ringing, perhaps had been for some time. One shouldn’t answer the phone when driving, of course, but of course I did. And why is it so hard to get the phone from one’s pocket while at the wheel? I wriggled and pulled and tried to be careful not to push the button that would cancel the call and give the wrong impression to whomever it was, all the while hanging on to my place in a double line of cars now pushing towards an intersection. It’s the low position of the seat, I suppose, or the cut of the trousers. I had the impression that my caller must be about to hang up, so I didn’t take the time to look at the display before pressing the green button. I was expecting a call from my daughter.
‘Tim. Where are you? You weren’t on the train.’
Train? Who was this? What train? I had no idea. Now there was a traffic light.
‘Who is this?’ These days I reckon I’m old enough for people to forgive me a lapse of memory.
‘Edoardo. We’re all waiting.’
Damn. Edoardo who? I would have to ask.
‘Edoardo who?’
Now the voice hesitated – irritated perhaps, perhaps concerned for my health.
‘I know a lot of Edoardos,’ I said. Which wasn’t true.
‘Edoardo Parisi.’
It dawned.
‘Edoardo! But it’s tomorrow!’
‘Today,’ he said. ‘Don’t you remember I sent you the email with the change of date? You even acknowledged it.’
I was due to spend five days on a meditation retreat in the mountain home of Edoardo Parisi, a Vipassana teacher, in Maroggia high in the mountains of the Valtellina, north-east of Lake Como. The hope, of course, is always that one might calm oneself at some very deep level, become a paragon of serenity. And here I was so wired up I’d got the dates wrong and would lose a day. It was too late to make it out there this evening unless I used the car, and using the car for all that autostrada and then mountain road that I didn’t know, late in the evening, seemed unwise. It would have to be the train, tomorrow, as early as possible.
My plan had been first to return to Milan for a few duties at the university, then take the small train that runs up Lake Como in time for what I had thought would be an evening start. Instead, I now decided to go via Brescia, then north to Bergamo, then through the foothills of the Alps to Lecco, then up Lake Como to the station of Morbegno, where Edoardo’s wife would pick me up while the meditators were eating lunch. That way I hoped to gain a couple of hours.
I left Verona at 6.4
0 a.m. and arrived at Morbegno at 12.01 p.m. Five hours and three changes to go 120 miles. Seedy, run-down stations, miserable, poky trains where your knees all touched, rather worse actually than anything I had encountered in the south. Evidently there had been no European money here to brighten things up. The cash goes to the poorer regions. And whereas the coastal trains in the south had been mostly empty, these were packed.
At Calolziocorte, between Bergamo and Lecco, an ancient man climbed on in peasant work clothes and sat opposite me, his watery eyes at once anxious and vacant, his skin hanging loosely from his skull. Some ten minutes later it became evident that he had had some kind of accident. The carriage began to stink. We were all packed in, with people standing. There was nowhere to move. The man frowned and closed his eyes. In his early seventies, I reckoned. Probably he had decided there was nothing he could do but wait for his stop and get off. So for about twenty minutes we all savoured together, in mute general awareness, the ordinary human smell of shit.
There is no first class on this line. There is no way of isolating yourself from unpleasantness. To take a train like this is to open yourself to humanity as it is. I was reminded of a British minister for transport under the Thatcher government who confessed that he never took public transport because he never knew what riff-raff you might meet there. I was also reminded of all the people who tell me they would never go to a meditation retreat where you have to share your room with whoever happens to turn up, where you sit quite close to other people, sometimes scores of them, who may have irritating tics, or sneeze and cough constantly, or even, yes, it does happen, fart. They would rather pay for a single room, they tell me, and a private guru. They could not concentrate on their meditation in a crowd. But for me the first lesson of Vipassana, as I have always experienced it, is just that: you accept whatever comes your way, good or bad, you don’t attach to it, in pleasure or in aversion. ‘Just observe,’ the teacher tells you, ‘just observe life as it is, not as you would wish it to be, as it is.’
